Category: Podcast

(00:26):
Welcome back. And I'm saying that more to myself than I'm saying it to you. This is the first podcast I've recorded in quite some time. I fell off my rhythms because the world fell apart. Literally everything that's come in the past few months was recorded back in February. And then the coronavirus everything that has happened since then. So here we are in may. It's been a crazy, crazy time. Fascinating time. Absolutely. And of course, people are dying. People's lives are being ruined. So don't mean fascinating in a good way, but fascinating. None the less in the world falling apart in how that disrupted me. Yes, it did disrupt me. Fell apart in certain habits, got depressed different things going on, bouncing back, but also kicking into high gear as far as investigative journalism, all these things going on. So I went in to record an episode here where I talk about some of my thoughts around this.
(01:28):
What's going on with the Corona virus. Really obviously this has so much to do about health and health sovereignty and that is not what our governments, not what our worldwide bodies are preaching at all. They are saying health by everything outside of sovereignty is the case where to start with this. This is really just going to be somewhat of a ramble, a rant covering a few different topics, models, statistics and lies. I think that's a good place to start. Well, we've, we've learned something about models have we not every model about this Corona virus has proven to be wrong. I don't think there's been a single model that accurate progressive, even though there's ranges of least to most like everything that's happened has not fallen within those. I can fully understand people in the early on in this back in March, we didn't really know so much and we couldn't trust the data that came out of China.
(02:37):
The like the leaked footage that came from people of showing some crazy stuff going on, had this not started in China, I really wonder what would have gone on with the rest of the world. But we saw that response. We didn't trust this statistics, so there was a lot of fear and uncertainty and unknowns. But now here towards the end of may, we know quite a more about what is going on. Every model failed miserably. And something we can take from that is that models very often are wrong. And if we can't see the data that is put into the model, if we can't see how the model works, then should we trust that model at all? I don't think so. Neil Ferguson, the guy that was one of the main guys behind the Imperial college model that was used to shut down the UK, that basically here in the U S we used that data as well in order to look at our models, that has been shown to be completely wrong.
(03:45):
And not only that, Neil Ferguson is a hypocrite breaking the own, the quarantine rules to go have sex with his married girlfriend craziness. Right? And that's a thing about a lot of these people that taught seemingly hypocrites, right? If someone is a hypocrite, if they're not following their own rules, should we, the rest of the people be following them. So here's the thing to understand. As I've been diving deeper into learning about pharmaceutical medicine, specifically, how the science is manipulated and faked, in many cases, most of the studies that are done for a new drug, for instance, the data is not publicly disclosed. Did you know that in many cases the data is a company's proprietary secret? So can we really trust the data if it's not out there in the public? I mean, this allows for manipulation easily, right? We can get rid of outliers, we can reclassify things.
(04:49):
And you can just look at our paper one. Perhaps we had ghostwritten believe this. That's, that's what they want us to do. So we have to be very careful about data. The thing that would answer so many problems in the world today, not all of them. You know, obviously we live in a complex world, but transparency, if we don't have transparency, then that is where corruption can take hold. That is where people can be misled and lied to because of a lack of transparency. So I think we should once again learn this lesson. Don't trust a model just because an expert quote unquote says that this is my model, this is what it says. We need to listen to this if, and I'm not saying you have to be a statistician as this stuff gets complex, but look at if the data is not publicly available and other people came up, look at such a thing, should you trust it? And I would say no, the default should be no. Do not trust something that is not publicly disclosed.
(05:53):
So as I mentioned earlier, I have gone, I guess deeper down the investigative journalism rabbit hole, this seeing what was happening in the world and actually understanding how this plays into various agendas out there. Had me writing more about a wide range of topics from this, I started exploring different things. One of the things that I did was deep dive on the world health organization because this organization is held up as a worldwide authority on health as the name implies, and even such places as YouTube saying, if you say anything that goes against the guidelines of the who, then we are going to get rid of your video or demonetize it all the different factors that they have in play there. So should we really be trusting the world health organization? Well, I did some research and what I'm probably going to do in upcoming episodes on the podcast, I'm going to read that here.
(06:54):
If you want access to that, that [email protected] slash who who that is available there. You can grab the PDF, no opt in, no nothing necessary. Just go and read that. It's about 50 pages, although big type, there's pictures in there and whatnot. So it's not that detailed, but it kind of looked over the span of time, you know, not just what's going on right now. That's of course important. What is the whose relationship to China? Pedro's the guy that is head of the who, how did he get in that position, but what has happened also in the past that gives us clues to whether we should be trusting this organization? Short answer, I don't believe they are very trustworthy based on many of the things I see going on and once again, simple stuff. This is as simple as I can make it.
(07:46):
Why is none of our government bodies, why is the world health organization? Why is the best they can tell us to do is to avoid sick people? Wash hands, wear a mask or don't wear masks. That there's craziness that can't even decide on a coherent answer regarding that. Why is there not a single bit of information that, Hey, make sure your vitamin D levels up. More and more researchers coming up showing that those people that have ideal levels of vitamin D, they're not dying from this. While the people that are dying of very low levels of vitamin D is vitamin D just about the coronavirus and covert 19 no, absolutely not. This is so necessary for so many bits, different aspects of health that it's crazy not to just be recommending this kind of as a blanket thing, like most things do not fit as a blanket.
(08:41):
Vitamin D is one of those instead of fluoride in the water. Why don't we put vitamin D in the water? That would be so much better for all of our health, including bone health, which means the teeth, right, but this isn't really about health to them. That's my opinion. More about power and control and being able to milk people like they milk cows for profits. I mean that is what our medical system is actually about. If you understand it, so yes, I will be probably reading that aloud and giving additional thoughts in coming up episodes here, but once again, you can go check that out. Logan, christopher.com/who and please do not take my word for it. What I'm doing with all of this, it's much easier to do in written form. Then here on the podcast is I have links to every single one of my references.
(09:40):
Challenge me. I would love to believe that the world health organization is a great organization, but when I look at the data, when I look and see what's there and make it transparently, publicly available, I do not see that. When I look at pharmaceutical companies and what they do, yes, of course there are some lifesaving drugs. Yes, drugs do have their place, but I look at the bad things they do and there's so much there that is not public knowledge or it is, but little bits and pieces of it that people, it takes time to do this. You know, I have a, I'm in a very good place. I'm grateful that I've worked hard to build my businesses, to put my life in a place where honestly, the Corona virus is not impacting me that much personally. Like my home life, like I work from home, so not that much has changed for me. Yes, there has been business disruptions and things like that, but compared to many other people out there, I'm a very solid place. I also have freed up my time in a way that allows me to dig deep into pharmaceutical corruption into what is going really going on with the world government corruption. And I understand most people do not have that luxury except many people do have much more free time now you can spend it just Bingy now on Netflix and eating crappy food or perhaps now is a good time to educate yourself.
(11:14):
I'm getting fired up here. Can you tell, so I do want to say this because this is such a big issue involved in everything we see going on is conflicts of interest. Now just being transparent about a conflict of interest does not necessarily make it go away. And it's really stupid naive to think that that is the case. As I've shown in some of my medical monopoly musing, my writings about that, oftentimes with the science, with doctors, physicians, researchers and whatnot, these conflicts of interests are not disclosed. We see that even at the world health organization as well, there are rampant conflicts of interest and oftentimes they are hidden away and conflicts between companies and organizations and philanthropies even. Can be hidden just by the sheer complexity of it all. That does not mean that these conflicts of interests are not very much a conflict of interest in having bad effects because of that.
(12:19):
So we are certainly seeing that go on and to be truthful, to be transparent, I in a sense have conflicts of interest to, the reason I am talking about this stuff is because I see a better way to health. I am trying to get people to take their health into their own hands because it must start there. It can't be, granted health can not come from a government. Health cannot come from a world wide organization. Health certainly cannot come from a pharmaceutical company. All of those will have a place. But without an individual person having the sovereignty, the choice to be healthy, the education from which to realize what should and should not be done and to be able to figure things out for themselves, then you can't truly be healthy. So I teach a different way of looking at health then is that public perception and my businesses support that.
(13:22):
Obviously fitness, not necessarily the conventional fitness of going to a gym, running on a treadmill like a hamster, but fitness where you actually learn to move. Well, you become strong. That is an important piece of health. Herbalism is, in my opinion, it is a necessary piece of health. There are many different ways of, obviously food is super important, but herbs before the last century or so have always been a part of our diet. Every single indigenous people, every culture across the world used herbs as medicine. It's only us modern people that have forgotten how to do that. So these are pieces of the puzzle of what it takes to actually really be healthy. In today's world, they're not the only thing. And there's so much else out there from energy medicine to psychology, tons and tons of things. We've covered that in some past episodes. So what I'm trying to sell you on is this different worldview of health and of course my businesses fit into that. So I am conflicted in that sense. But to be honest, I would love for everyone to, even if they didn't patronize my businesses at all, just for people to adopt this viewpoint, we would all be so much better off because of it.
(14:48):
And one of the big pieces of this is a worldview of health. As we've been talking about. A big part of this is the germ theory versus terrain theory. Germ theory really being, it's all about the germ. It's about the virus. It's about the bacteria. Oh, when we initially found these things, Louie pastor is like, Oh, these bugs are everywhere. We need to get rid of them. Pasteurization, heating, things up, sterilizing. And of course, that has its place too. I'm not saying that this stuff is not important at all. Obviously sterilization is huge. I mean, Samwise the doctor who was talking about, Oh, you know, if you work on a dead body and then you go and deliver a baby a lot of women and babies are dying. Well, if we wash our hands, that doesn't seem to happen. And other doctors and scientists of the time laughed at this man because they didn't understand how that could possibly be a thing.
(15:46):
So obviously hygiene is important, but being overly hygienic is also problematic as well for different reasons. Anytime you do an intervention, there are trade offs from that. So if we close people in their houses that can be good, it will stop exposure to germs. However, you know they're not getting vitamin D from the sun. Most people not getting it from their food. Either they're going to be indoors and only exposed to certain things that it may be taking their immunity down. Then when they go back out into the world, are we surprised that they are less effective at doing things? So that is really the germ theory. Just avoid the germs, get rid of the germs as much as possible. We've learned a lot since that theory came forth. It was a time and a place to kind of look at that theory, even though there was the bait back then.
(16:37):
But we have learned, Oh, we have viruses within us, we have bacteria within us, we even have fun guy within us. And these are important part of our microbiome. It's not just gut health, it's really across our entire body. We are a symbiotic organism. And if we just tried to kill it all off, we would do so in a detrimental way to ourselves. So it is much more so about the terrain. If I could just avoid a germ was one option, or I could have the best terrain possible, I would pick the terrain. And by terrain I mean that internal body, which has to do with your internal systems, your internal health, your immune system. So the white blood cells, killer, natural killer cells, everything involved there, but also the microbiome, although symbiotic organisms with us. So a germ where we're being assaulted by germs all the time, they're always present.
(17:31):
We've had Corona viruses forever. Is this one really so much worse? Yeah, it does seem to be more infectious and yeah, it's seems to be on par with a bad flu or even a little bit worse than that. That's according to the statistics we have even from the CDC, which there's problems with those statistics. You know, when a Papa a fruit in Tanzania test positive for the Corona virus, we knows there's some problems going on with our testing, right? So yes, there's false positives, false negatives. There's under counting of death, there's over counting of death. It is a mess. So we go back to ourselves, can we be as healthy as possible? And yeah, of course. If you are grossly overweight, that is going to take some time to handle that and chances are that is going to become much harder because of our chemicalized overly ultra processed food supply and chemicals in the water, all kinds of stuff like that that's going to take some time to rectify. But going out to nature, which has now been made illegal in certain places, is good for your health. A single dose of nature can be effective for increasing your immunity, for lowering stress, for having cascading effects across your body,
(18:58):
And they're making this illegal. It's happened like back and forth here in California. Limited hours. You're allowed to go to the beach. And I, I can understand the viewpoint that we don't want overcrowding and people can be spreading it, but why? It makes no sense that a single person cannot step foot in nature where they're alone. Right. And it's crazy to me to see people wearing masks in nature, you know, at the times when it's not illegal or when I'm going there otherwise, because that's actually gonna block the benefits of nature. Yeah. So we got some crazy times. It's because people are not properly educated on health. Our government bodies, our world health organization are not properly educating people on health. They are pigeonholed. They're stuck into this germ theory of disease because conflicts of interest, because they're incentivized prophetize in order to be here. Instead, we need people to understand this train theory, that first and foremost, it is about your own immune system. And we're seeing that with the disease. Who's dying? Well, one very old people, 80 plus in many cases cormobidities whether this is high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, all kinds of different factors.
(20:22):
So the healthier you are, which is not just about being young, and once again, it's not just, Hey, I should have been exercising all this time in order to be better right now. Simple things you do today can improve your immunity. What you eat right now changes your immune system for the better or for the worse. Your ability to handle stress right now changes your immune system for better or worse. So are we mandating the wearing masks or mandating meditation, which would actually be better for immunity? Why do we have choice on just some of these things but not others? Why are all the choices restricted to certain things? And what we're seeing coming here certain pharmaceutical drugs, in many cases it looks like they're going to be mandating these. I have a problem with that because I'm a health sovereign. I went to be a sovereign individual and to say that I have to do a pharmaceutical intervention in order to protect another person.
(21:37):
Yeah, I have problems with that line of thinking because well what about the company that is pumping out chemicals into the environment that gets into the groundwater that gets into food? Why do they have a choice to degrade the health of tons and tons of people and I don't have a choice to have completely clean food. You know, even at the top of Everest there's DDT which is bad for your health in case you didn't know. So why do these in many cases, evil corporations, you know sometimes it is because there are corrupted individuals involved. But other times or just in general, the profit motive that chasing of the quarterly earnings for the stock market incentivizes certain behavior, short term thinking behavior, not longterm thinking behavior. So why do they have the choice to do such things? They're not looking at longterm ramifications. The tragedy of the comments, they have the rights of a corporation to be a personhood but not the responsibilities involved. And yet here I am with less rights. I can't choose to do certain things, but I'm responsible for other people in this way. It just doesn't make sense. And I'm feeling positive because you're listening to this. A lot of people are thinking along the same lines.
(23:16):
So go out to nature. Even if it is breaking the law because I think time is now is a good time for public, civil disobedience. You can do it peacefully. I'm not saying to be violent or destroy property, anything like that, be civilly disobedient. Go out to nature because it's good for your health. I mean, let me count the ways I go out to a park at the wrong hours. I am breaking the law. I'm not wearing a mask. I'm not sure if that's mandated here or not. And then I go in some herbs and of course they're farming a state park. Picking anything is illegal as well. I understand. Yes, we do need rules and regulations. But if those rules and regulations are idiotic illogical and harmful than it is, you're right, it is your responsibility to break him. That is my opinion. Do things for your health and the better you support your health, the better you can help support other people's health as well. You know, we, we all do make our choices. Why do some get mandated and others do not? That's a good question.
(24:34):
So we're back in action here at the health sovereign podcast. I got fun stuff coming up, going to be trying some new things moving forward here. Like I said, got that world health organization going to be reading that whole report. I'm also planning on reading aloud my medical monopoly musings. This stuff is important. One last thing I want to mention here is with these crazy times are going on, it is easy to get off kilter. I mean people's lives, people's routines are completely disrupted. One thing I've found very useful to me is rooting into routine, getting into making sure I didn't fall away from my routines. In some cases, yes, I got thrown off a little bit, but I, I knew I needed to get back to those things that really take care of myself, take care of my health, take care of my sanity.
(25:28):
Very important to do that and this concept of rooting into the routine like a tree roots into the ground that gives you that grounding from which to thrive from rich, to be your best self, from which to make good decisions for yourself and for others you care about. So if you have allowed yourself to get out of routines that are very helpful for you, what can you do to get back to them? And not only that, what new routines or tweaks to your routine can be made that further set you up in a good way. Some good questions to be asking yourself. It's going to wrap it up for today. I look forward to continuing this podcast for you, continuing to speak. You like this. Thanks for listening. As always, if you want to share this podcast to other people and much appreciated reviews wherever you can review it, that is great as well. Thank you so much.

(00:19): Welcome back. I'm loading Christopher and in this episode we continue the conversation with Russell Jones, strong man, author, rehabilitative specialist. And that last topic is what we get into specifically here talking about old injuries, overcoming them, the healing response, using electrical modalities and much more. So let's dive in right now. Okay. Let's Talk injuries as they were saying before, such a massive area. It seems to me the thing that stops people from fitness of any sort, whether doing the conventional separate things out or even like strong men's stuff is people get injured like more so than being even lazy or all that stuff. Injuries tend to stop people. So it's a big thing and people do not seem very great at handling injuries. So one of the things you mentioned in your book and I had a similar experience, was low back pain. That's a very huge area. And you talk about, I believe it was the book from Dr Sarno, the name of it, but just reading that book somehow switched things mentally and the pain lesson, it went away. Yeah. So that mental emotional component is so huge. Obviously the physical is a big part of it, but in our culture we're tied into the physical and don't think outside of that. Where do you, if someone comes to you for an injury, where do you start with them?

(01:39): when I dealt with my back issue, it was before I actually started working with athletes and their injuries. I'm not a medical person, but I came upon this a direct current modality. And that's another story maybe for a little bit later. But with my back issues, I think it was a, it had started

(01:59): Years before I started having neck issues.

(02:02): And you know, Cairo gave me some exercises to do, which I did religiously in that past. And then a few years later I started having gut issues, hiatal hernia and went to the doctor. As soon as I got a diagnosis, I looked up stuff to do for it in that past. And then all of a sudden I started having back problems. So you know, I'm a tall guy, I'm six one and you know, different injuries over the years, sports and everything else. Big motorcycle crash in 79 but this back thing, I mean it just kept, it really got bad at the time. I'm a personal trainer, you know, I started training people in 1984 and I'm a personal trainer. I'm supposed to be in shape, but I'm going to people's homes. I had about 18 people, like two or three times a week.

(02:47): And I literally driving with a, a lifting belt to hold or corset first and a lifting belt to hold an ice pack in place on my back as I'm going from driving from client to client. And then when I went in to see there was a, Hey, how you doing today? And can I use your freezer? And I put my ice pack in their freezer until we finished our session and take my ice pack. You can drive off. So, yeah, and everybody was talking about T you should get, you know, I had injections, I had all kinds of stuff that I tried for it, nothing worked. So, you know, people were saying, look, I just had this surgery and back surgery and everything else. Maybe you're a candidate for that. And I was, I had gone for the test and yeah, there was definitely herniations in my back.

(03:29): And then this little lady told me about that book you just referred to it. Dr Sarno, his book. I read the book, I got to the punchline and like you said, I mean the mental and emotional component of it, understanding the natural way that injuries occur, you know, like, I mean if you cut yourself, you bleed, you scale over, you know, and the scab gradually goes away. But injuries that keep coming and going, coming back and back and forth, you know, that makes no sense in terms of the regular course of things. So anyway, you know, I read the book and I just believed, you know, you talk about the power of believing in the mental thing. And I took the, literally, I read the book driving on the New Jersey turnpike and you know, my next stop, I took it to corset off I took, I threw everything in the back seat.

(04:17): And by the next day or the day after I was, you know, a squat and 300 pound breathing squats. And over the years I've had twinges that reminded me that avoid the pain used to be, you know, usually I'll get a twinge and then I'd freeze up and a tannic and I'd lay down and whatever. And I had to learn how to deal with that. It's a crippling thing. The enemy, I don't know what you want to call it, you know, some people would call it even spiritual, you know, stuff that comes at you, but your mind remembers things. It remembers these events that were really, really painful for you. And I would freeze up. But then I had learned to relax. I learned how to breathe, you know, and I had to learn how to move and it was just amazing going through that whole process.

(05:00): But it's I think all of us, I think more, some people are more prone to it than others holding it, emotional things. There's all this, we always talk about holistic, holistic, holistic. But yeah, it's like real that way. You know, people walk around and they'll shake tight. Yeah, I understand. Holistic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And yet they're crippled, you know, their back, their neck or whatever park. So when I see somebody now, it's like a puzzle. You know, I learned this technique, AK muscle testing, you know, we're, I'm just seeing neurologically if things are turning on and off and you can tell, like when you get everybody's so muscles turned on, then you realized that, you know, what if they have that capacity that only have to do is get inflammation out and get them moving in the right positions. But I think, you know, so many people have the wrong movement patterns.

(05:47): They have compensated so many times, you know, like a dunk footed person starts out mildly duck footed and then they compensate them till a certain point where they're like feet are facing straight out on a pigeon toed person's going the other way at once. This, you know, it's just positional things that we need to learn about that we don't learn about an exercise. I don't know why Ben, when we train where we have to be aware, you know, it's not just moving weights from point a to point B, the body's going to be into position. Your whole structure has to be turned on. If I'm doing a bicep curl, my lower body is stabilizing me. You know, my glutes are slyly contracted, my feet are grabbing the floor. I mean all these different cues that I never, you know, I was totally unaware of growing up with exercise. Yeah.

(06:33): What is your theory on how the mind and the emotions kind of play into these injuries? Cause most people are under the misconception that pain is all physical, right? It's just like nervous wiring something. I mean honestly, like our most advanced science doesn't really understand paying that well. So what is your theory on how this stuff kind of works? Like how does reading a book make it so your back pain goes away? How does that work in your mind?

(06:59): Whoa. Yeah. So once I've tried things, I mean I've gone through a series of all these different things with injections and everything else and somebody's testimony that one of my old lady clients said I had this back pain and I went to this guy in New York city and he's got a book, you know, that was kind of a stamp of credibility. Somebody that I knew testified that this guy at least helped her. So I guess I was just ripe. I was hungry to learn something. And it was, it was like a mantra. I don't know if you remember the book, but it was like a, he called it a, it was kinda, I forget the term you, I think it was like mild oxygen deprivation or something like that, that when you get to this place of recurring pain in your back, so you kind of like repeat this mantra to yourself.

(07:49): You got to get, you know, you have to get a deep into yourself where you're like, okay, you know, I understand the source of this. I understand. You know, where this pain is coming from. I'm changing my mindset. I'm going to move, I'm going to be fine. You know, I'm talking to myself, I'm doing affirmations right. Which kind of fit into my wheelhouse anyway. Cause that's a big thing for me. It's like reprogramming, you know, and again, fear, you know the acronym, you're right. A false evidence appearing real. I mean, we live in a culture, I'm sure you know Logan, you talk to people all the time. I mean that is huge. I mean, people are afraid, you know, whether they're just afraid of everything, you know? I mean, no matter how much more like in our culture that how much more people curse and act bad-ass they are, they're just a wimpy like that.

(08:38): How this generation would hold up to like the world war II generation or something like that. Like I don't know. But anyway, but yeah, I think fear is the big thing. I mean, fear of pain, fear of whatever, all these imagined things. So our minds, I think we, you know, we have to capture our thoughts. That's a biblical thing too, right? I mean so we got to keep those all lined up. So, you know, that's a step by step thing we do all the time. We have this thing on goal setting and affirmations and things that I've been doing and talking about and teaching for years. But the interesting thing now is I was out in Kentucky a couple of months back with my daughter. My oldest daughter does Mary Kay. And so this was my, she was my super athlete and everything.

(09:21): So I think she likes a competitive environment. So this is [inaudible] very rich woman that's given a seminar for a small group like 15 of us. I was the only guy on some of her principles of success and my daughter thought it would be a good father daughter thing to go and everything else. So I went for this trip. So she's talking about a lot of things that I'm very familiar with, but I'm, you know, I'm just not in agreement. She's not a kid. She's probably 55 years old or something like that. And at one point she's talking about your goals, your affirmations and things like that. She said, but yeah, we all get tired of hearing of reading a piece of paper every day. Hey. And things like that. She said, what I found is key is that music opens up your heart and your mind to a lot of things.

(10:04): So she said, what I recommend doing, and she had been doing it for a couple of years, is she takes or affirmations what she wants to really get inside of her. She records it with music in the background, her own voice, right? Her own voice. So it's her talking to her, which I think is important because if, I mean, you know, I always talked about, I've been talking about this for years and years. It was, I can say all kinds of great things about Logan, Christopher, right? I can compliment you on every aspect of your life, everything you're doing, but the most important program or for you, for your brain, your computer is your voice, your voice going into your ears. So every morning now, this woman that said every morning and every evening you have your own personalized set of things that you want to, you're working on your, you know, you redo it every few months and you play your voice with the music.

(10:59): And it's been really awesome. I've been doing it for a few months now. It's a really awesome technique. But again, that techniques like that I think help us become more confident and less than fear. I think we all have it, but I think we're better prepared to fight fear in our lives. But I think it all comes, all this stuff you're talking, you know, we're talking about today, injury things. I mean, you know, we're afraid to let go, you know, I mean, sometimes you just gotta let go. You know, what am I, that guy was talking about before Jay Schroeder, he always said, you know, when we're rehabbing or helping athletes get ready to go back to play, it's never half speed. It's never like, Oh, protect yourself. It's never taped up. It's always, if you can't mentally go all out when you come back from an injury, you're going to get hurt again. You know? You have to be able to go all out. Okay. So anyway, I don't know if that answered the question or not.

(11:56): Yeah. that was a good talk regardless. Yeah. In my mind, the healing response, right? That's something the body naturally does. And for it to not happen, there has to be something that blocks it, which as you were saying, very often is fear though. There can be some other issues surrounding that. So it's just one of the things I like to think about is that our human cells are constantly being replaced, right? I mean blood cells every couple of days, but even bones every seven years. Yet sometimes a chronic injury can last for a decade. It's like every cell has been removed. What is keeping that in place and it, it has to be something beyond the physical, right. At that point it has to be a mental, emotional, even spiritual thing that is really focusing on that. So as you're saying there, if we can remove that and there's a bunch of techniques, goal setting, affirmations, belief, change processes, all kinds of stuff that can really help people too, break through that and begin to see a different way of doing it, allow the body to do its job that it would automatically do once the blocks are lifted.

(12:58): That's the way I like to think about it.

(13:00): Yeah. I think too, the one other thing that I heard recently which was encouraging, especially as you talk about the aging athlete or just the aging person. Are you familiar with dr Carolyn leaf? Yeah. I want to call her a brain doctor, but she's done a ton of research on the brain and the structure and that then drives and all these areas that I'm totally, it sounds good when I'm reading it, but for me to tell you about it right now. But the cool thing that she talked about, you know, when I was a kid, I remember 'em they always said, you know, drinking alcohol would kill brain cells. You know, and I remember, you know, we're a bunch of wise guys and you're drinking shots of tequila, whatever. And you know, I used to say only the weak ones will go though. So it's okay.

(13:45): Yeah, right. Something like that. But then as you get older and you're talking to, you know, your peers, you know, I'm 66 know, it's kinda, they're not remembering things, the conversation or even older yet. And you kind of flash on that. You know, when people worry about dementia, they worry about Alzheimer's, all these different things. Well, Dr Lee's research has uncovered that every day when you were talking about the body healing and the natural course of replacement of cells, every day there's new brain cells that are released. So now they grew overnight during your sleep. Why sleep is so important, everything. But she said they die off almost immediately if they're not given something to do, they're not given something. So that's why you know this one woman out in Kentucky was talking about, she's saying that's why it's so important to feed your brain first thing in the morning with something that is something powerful or a positive that it could work with. You know, whether it's your time, you know, time with the Lord, whatever it is. But it has to kind of force your brain to go to work. So I might even be getting smarter as I'm getting older. I'm not sure about it. Awesome.

(14:57): I always like to challenge conventions, right? I mean the science is so often wrong about stuff. They used to think, Oh the brain, you know, there's no new cells or that the brain stops developing. Then we keep finding out new stuff that just more and more happens. So yeah, it, it may very well be possible to get smarter as you get older despite what everyone may think. So I say go for it. It's good. It's good. Yeah. You mentioned the direct current modality. So one of the things as I'm further exploring health and just really kind of framing my mind, getting the bigger picture is so much like all of our modern medicine is focused on the chemical and really even all of our biology really focused on the chemical, at least 90% of it. And while that certainly has its place, we have completely gotten rid of understanding that the human body is electrical as well. And there's all these different modalities that can really work with that. So can you talk a little bit about this modality that you use and the results you've seen with it?

(15:57): So again, it goes back to my son might've been, I guess he was freshmen in high school or maybe eighth grade and the kids were already getting injuries and somebody hurts themselves and they went to see a guy who had this machine called an AARP. So AARP is an acronym for accelerated recovery performance. And so I don't know anything about anything at the time. And the guy would say, okay, where does it hurt? And it stick the electrical pads where it hurts, wrap it up, turn the thing up. And you know, for young people, they heal pretty quick no matter what you do. So I got, you know, I got kind of curious about it. I found out that the guy was doing it completely wrong, but he had a machine, it was a $15,000 machine, so he was like the local guy.

(16:44): So I started doing some research. It took me up to Minnesota, two guys, Dennis Thompson and Jay Schroeder. It comes out of I guess the original Russian STEM. So it is direct, current versus alternating current. So when most people's experience has been with electric STEM or tens units, so that's AC current. So AC current is not harmonious with the body. We're direct current as humans or direct parent. So if we put a, an AC current on our bicep and you know, turn it up, it's going to contract actually hard and at that point you really can't do anything with it because it's going to cause a concentric contraction. The AARP on the other hand is actually going to cause an Essenture contraction or the lengthening of the muscle. So I was kind of like, huh, okay. So well that means that if there is inflammation in an area, we can actually draw a lot of healing to that area.

(17:40): A lot of blood, a lot of circulation to the area. But at the same time, we're not causing the muscle to concentrically tip tighten up, which would probably push deeper into any kind of compensations or protect modes that we have. It would actually allow us to relax and to actually, so we use a high, when we're trying to get athletes back, I mean, you know, ankle sprains. I mean I can get people back in like three or four days, you know, maybe five for a high ankle sprain. But it's intense. It's not for the faint of cause when I first learned about somebody, what was the whole world on direct? Current? Well, I mean it's a lot more civilized. And when the Russian started doing it years back in the forties or fifties I mean they used to have magnets that held the electric, the electrodes in place.

(18:26): I mean there would be burn marks. They even experimented with probes going straight into the muscle. So I mean, yeah, we're not as barbaric, but it's still not the most comfortable process when you want to get somebody back quickly from injury anyway. So because it was drug-free and because of it. Yeah. Sounded like it was something that the body, you know, it could except and, and when you put the current, the interesting thing. So if somebody comes in with a knee or something like that, instead of just sandwiching the knee with the current, well we try to find the origin. All right. So first we put somebody neurologically imbalanced. So first we would see that all the muscles are firing and then, though we start applying the electrode and we find we call the hotspots, which a lot of times are not where you're feeling the pain.

(19:12): It might not even be where the swelling is and we address those spots, but it's very active. So if you come in like on crutches, you know, you can't move your knee. Like we're going to have you doing squats, assisted squats, like within 10 minutes. You know, I mean with the current going through you, because we're going to take your brain out of the equation cause you're not going to feel it. And then we're going to do some things at the end to drain the swelling and get the swelling down and stuff. So it's a really interesting process. We, I use it too for a, we call it loosening where we actually loosen the entire body. So in our world we don't like to talk about stretching because from my understanding, muscles can do two things. They can either contract where they can relax.

(20:01): So there's no nothing called stretching in there. It's only like two things. It's turned on or turned off. So if a muscle is really tight, that's usually a sign that there's something else going on that's causing that extreme tightness. If you say, Oh my back is always tight, or my hamstrings are always tight, well that's usually a sign that your body's protecting something that's not allowing you to move freely. So we would, we would find out what that something was. And then when we give somebody exercises to do, we have therapeutic exercise, we give people afters, you know, it's a full range of motion type activities, but we're training people to turn their muscles on and turn them off. So, you know, when I'm turning on my bicep, I'm learning how to totally turn off my tricep. There's never any, I'm not fighting against myself, hamstrings and quads, whatever it is, abs and back, whatever it is.

(20:56): So it's pretty interesting. A way of looking at it. You get some amazing results, but a lot of people don't like it but being injured. Right, exactly. What I liked about it was the focus was they don't believe in braces, you know, so there's no, you know, when you're healed, you know, you're done. You know, like, let's go for it. And I've learned a lot from those folks up in Minnesota. Oh well Jason, couple of guys are in Arizona now too, but learned a lot of love from them. But yeah, it's an interesting modality. It's drug free. I don't want to scare people, but if you come in and you gotta get back in the game though, you can get back in the game. I mean, we can take it a slower pace for older people and stuff at all, but, or non-athletes. Some people don't want to push themselves. So you know, this is not, that wouldn't be for them.

(21:49): Well, it's very interesting what you're saying with the hotspots and working in areas, not necessarily where the, the pain, the swelling, the injury happens to be a, it comes down to that kind of reductionist mindset that we were talking about earlier too, where you, you know, we got to split up our strength in our cardio and flexibility. We have to isolate individual muscles in order to train them. It's the same kind of mindset going into pains like Oh, it's painful there. Therefore the problem must be there when probably more often than not. Like yeah, if you get acute trauma, you get hit with a baseball bat in the shoulder. Yeah. That's an area to work on. But so many of these chronic injuries, you have back pain because of something with the ankle or leg or really it can be pretty much anywhere else in the body. So that's an important thing for people to be aware of and kind of, regardless of the modality, a lot of the different healing arts are going to focus on these different areas.

(22:40): Yeah. We had my first trip up to Minnesota to learn about it. You obviously they're going to put the AARP on me. So you know, I'm like, I got so many scars per square inch from, you know, basketball, you know, a motorcycle crash that wiped out three limbs and all these different, you know, I got scar tissue on top of scar tissue. So they're talking about body mapping and so they're moving the modality around. So when you're on a spot where there's no inflammation, the current just runs right through you. You know, no big deal. Sometimes you don't even feel it. But when you hit a spot where there's a lot of inflammation, it's like, Whoa, get that thing off of me. So you can imagine, you know, I mean at the time I'm in my fifties so I've got like this whole lifetime of inflammation everywhere in my body.

(23:24): And so they were doing it. My wife was very concerned and those guys are laughing because they said, Oh, this strong man from Jerry say, yeah, let's see. You know, and they're moving the thing around and turning it up. And everything. And I'm like, you know, cry like a baby. But I think part of it too was, and that goes to my own personal physiology is that I fought it as well. Like I was, that fear thing would always kick in for me. So I fought the current coming into my body, I guess I didn't believe that it wasn't going to hurt me or it brought up old sensations that really were painful and stuff at all. So it literally took me months to be able to, you know, use the machine properly to say, okay, you know, this is an inflamed area. It's going to be uncomfortable, but it's only for a short period of time. And I know that at the other end I'm going to come out way better than I am right now. So there's always that. For me, it's, there's always that fighting, you know, to protect myself, you know, especially when, you know, when we've been injured, when we've been hurt, you know, so no matter how tough we say we are, whatever, I don't think anybody really wants to put ourselves into any more pain than you know, necessary, you know? So

(24:39): Yeah, it's interesting that that protective mechanism, obviously that starts for a reason and a legit reason. But oftentimes that can become the problem. And we can see this like physically with pain but also even like emotionally and psychologically, all these different areas where we start doing something that's going to protect us in some way, but then it holds us back later on. So I guess that's part of life, right? Learning to protect yourself is obviously good, but also learning to let go and being able to have the awareness of when to do what thing properly.

(25:10): Totally. Yeah. And again, you know, and out of that, I think too, you can train the AARP can be used to train your body. I use it for workouts as well. I don't like doing it all the time. I mean, some guys do, but I'll use it periodically for workouts. It's interesting the way that your body responds to that and everything as well. I still think polling and grabbing and doing like real things is important, but it's kind of interesting to see how the body responds to a workout with direct, current, you know, in place and everything. But positionally it helps you I think too. I mean, you know, we always talk about position, position, position, position. It's always like the thing, you know, and I know like in a lot of our activities, it's hard to maintain proper position in the strong man stuff.

(25:56): But in our training we can be really focused on position. So I always think of people just being too safe. But no, it's really training in the most efficient, efficient way and stuff and all. And especially as we're getting older now, you know, this all this forward bending stuff, you know, it was always, you know, doing crunches and doing all this kind of shortening, shortening, shortening. And I'll tell you, I mean you're still a kid, but you know, when you get older, I mean this is so natural getting pulled forward. You really want to know how to lengthen your front and how to have that rear chain just doing its job, you know? But I know that's something that is not popular cause you can't see in the mirror, you know?

(26:43): Right. And especially also environmentally, like most people working at desks, you have the hands forward or technique or various things like that. So things like a gymnastic bridge Rose become even more important as the counterbalancing of that. And then of course, having a strong position as you're working through those. Well Russell, this is, do you work? I just curious, do you work on the glute ham machine at all? I have a little bit. I don't have one of those, so not regularly. Great exercise. So my friend has one, so every once in a while when I'm at his gym. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just, I think if I ever had to do it again, that would probably be the first piece of equipment I bought. I mean, especially getting older for sure there was a lot of things you can do on it, but anyway, I was just curious if that was part of your repertoire.

(27:31): Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Well, Russell, this has been a very fun conversation. I hope people have enjoyed the wide ranging, you know, strength feats, the injuries and so much more. What would you like people to check out where to go to find out more about you? Oh yeah. So I mean, Russell Jones speaks.com is the website. Russell Jones speaks hashtag is the Instagram, you know, somewhere in there as Russell Jones speaks on Facebook. I mean, the book is on Amazon, sick and tired of being sick and tired solutions for a better, healthier life. And we're going to get this conversation going to a higher level, I think with a lot of people because I think that when we leave out any component, I don't think Americas got to heal itself. I think, you know, all these different, there are so many people with so many interests that are not.

(28:22): Yeah. Right. And so I think even like the, you know, we talk about the mind, body and spirit. Hmm. It just seems like the spirit is kind of a fuzzy thing, you know? I think at some point we gotta have to bring that up to the same level that we talk about the physical and the mental, you know? But anyway, yeah. So you can find me hopefully if you can't, I'm doing a really bad job. Well of course include the links to your websites and social media and all that on the show notes here. I mean that's why we're doing this podcast is to open people's mind. The health is where it's at in America and growing across the world because of, as you were saying, these interest and whatnot and all the kind of antiquated things that are still around. We really do have a much better understanding. And it's, it's not that complex. It's not hard to grasp. You just need to be open to it and experiment and learn a few things, and you too can be pain free and healthy. Well and old age. I think that's really, it's actually quite achievable. It may not be easy, not in the beginning, but it is actually quite simple,

(29:24): So thank you, Russell. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

(00:20): Welcome. I'm Logan Christopher and this is the health sovereign podcast. Joining me today is Russel Jones. Russell is co-owner of my back in my body clinic in New Jersey, master level rehability trainer, strength athlete and motivational speaker. And he's delivered over 1000 presentations since 1992. That's quite a lot. He got in contact with me, we knew each other through Peter Ragnar. The first interviewee on this podcast sent me his book, sick and tired of being sick and tired of solutions for better, healthier life. And we're pretty much kindred spirits in a lot of the ideas we have here. So we'll be discussing that and strong men's stuff and health and all the topics. Thank you for joining me today, Russell.

(01:03): Oh, thanks Logan. Thanks for having me.

(01:05): So 1000 performances. That's quite a lot. You got into the song and stuff through Dennis Rogers who just I believe the previous podcast of this one was David Whitley who else had got started in the art because of that man, as did I, one of the topics that I've been thinking about lately is just how important strength is to health and wellbeing. Like the stronger you become really the healthier it's, it's like building a reservoir of strength. What are your thoughts on that topic?

(01:32): Oh yeah, I totally agree. I mean, and I talk about it in the book, the great American fitness and exercise paradigm is always a strength flexibility in cardio and it's, everything's separated out. But I think in my experience over time, I would definitely put way, way, way bigger emphasis on the strength aspect. I think the cardio, I cracked up when I hear about these people, you know, on the treadmill, you know, and on the ellipticals and doing all these things and they're gasping for air. But to me, I mean, I can do risk roles and get my heart rate elevated, but I'm working my strength. You know, I'm not just plodding along on a device that has, it looks like it's a human action, but it's really not because the earth doesn't spin at that fast beneath our feet. And so all these issues come up I think from not developing strength properly.

(02:32): And I have, you know, pretty strong opinions on strength as well because that has to be very intelligent because I think when it's not done intelligently, injuries come up and we're not able to resolve those injuries because of the compensations we develop. Yeah. So strength is definitely where it's at. But again, you know, at every workout is a whole body workout because even if I'm working my, you know, my arms, I still have to be engaged. My whole body has to be engaged. If not, you know, that's why machines and things like that are great about you. I was like in my world, so some machines have a place, but overall most of them you could throw away 99% of them and be better off. I definitely agree. The division, we humans are very good about cutting things apart and there's obviously utility in doing that, but oftentimes in doing so, we lose the bigger picture.

(03:29): We lose the holistic picture. So in training, you know, separating strength and cardio and flexibility, all these components are important. But if you treat them as components, you're not doing them together at all. Like the ideal workout should be working your strength or cardio and flexibility all at the same time, at least to some degree. That should be part of the training methodology. There are times to you like a wrist roller, you can make it a whole body. You can be breathing, but it is mostly a strength exercise. Right? Totally. Yes. So we wanted to bring you the best example that just kind of got me going. I do help athletes heal quickly from injuries and we can talk about that at some point if you'd like to. But I ran into a guy, his name is Jay Schroeder, years ago. He kind of took a liking to me for some reason.

(04:13): I have no idea why, but this is probably maybe 15 years ago now. And he was espousing a way of training that I had never, I would just totally not familiar with. And so we use my son as the experiment. My son at the time was a sophomore in high school. He was a tall, skinny dude. He had probably, he had good hand eye coordination, but he was not overall, he wasn't fast. He was not. And he wasn't strong like me in high school. Right. He was a, he was a very good wrestler because of his length and because he was very smart and you is pretty good baseball hitter. But once he got the hit, you never knew when he was going to get to first base. And it was like, not for lack of effort, but it was just inefficient athletically.

(05:06): So anyways, so this guy showed us this to me. He says, well, let's do an experiment with your son. And so I said great. You know, cause he was already, he was getting injuries and everything else that he was my baby. So all my other kids had suffered through high school sports, college sports, all the injuries that go with it and everything else. He challenged my son, he said, all right, we're going to go three months and all you're going to do exactly what I tell you. And so they tested them at school in may, presidents' tests, how fast you can run the mile. So he ran a mile, not dogging it or anything like that, six minutes and 48 second mile all out for him. Then we started the program. The program was working out four days a week. There was four exercises. Each exercise was done for five minutes continuous.

(05:57): Right.

(05:58): And the rule was he wasn't allowed to do anything else cause it was an experiment for the whole summer. So 25 minutes of work, four days a week. Two of those days involved me, applied a little bit of pressure in the different positions. But other than that, that's all he did. He didn't run to the mailbox. He played a little bit of baseball during the summer and so, and it was torturous mentally torture us to do it. It doesn't sound like that long a period of time, but it was, yeah. And so anyways, so it comes September, new high school. He's going to be the new captain of the wrestling team. They get the wrestlers out on the track in September, Iran, six minutes flat. He runs around the track and he calls me dad. I could have went faster, but I never went that fast in my life before it cut 48 seconds off his all time.

(06:47): Best not running. Now that's so counterintuitive to way we think. Right? I mean, how do you become a faster runner? Run more. Right. And then he ran sprints and he would always be, I mean, you know, he was tall. He wrestled it. I feel a weight. He wrestled at one 89 even though we never weighed one 89 in high school. And he was always last. He run every sprint except for the one guy that was coming out for the team for the first time. It was actually a track guy and he said his recovery was like so quick and I was like, you know, I was stunned at what was going on, but what we figured out was is that instead of worrying about working as heart and lungs directly and you know, getting that whole gasping thing going, we worked where his muscles got so efficient to utilizing oxygen that and we worked in perfect athletic position. He became so much more efficient as an athlete and it was just a, it was amazing to me. It was just amazing to me. So it changed my whole idea of exercise and strength cause it was strength, it was strength in the right position, you know?

(07:52): Yeah, yeah. I feel like if you can get cardio, quote unquote, and flexibility to a certain base level, but then just pushing up strength higher and higher, that's really going to have, and I'm not saying like you got to compete as a powerlifter or anything like that. I think the diversity of movement can be a really good thing. Although as you were just saying with your son, they're in that program, limited movements and everything. Just working on the foundations and really building those had big impacts. So

(08:19): Yeah, he wasn't moving, there was no movement. He was hauling. The four exercises were just holding in a perfect athletic position. I mean, he was in an elevated lunge, but it was, his feet were going forward. His upper body was in proper position. Everything was in alignment and it was, I mean, it was really tough, but Oh my goodness. The difference. I mean, you know, we all have this thing where we think we're going to be the next great athlete. You know? I mean, you've had enough experience. The gray, you know, they were born that way. They were born with such genetic superiority to the average person. But we have, yeah, we can go the average person, we have a big range go. I mean, we're not going to get to that place without driving ourselves crazy. But yeah, it was a pretty awesome time. It was. And the residual of it was, it was just tremendous. But anyway,

(09:16): Yeah, genetics is interesting and most people think about the few sports that are out there and the more popular they are, but the people that are actually built to be able to perform at the highest levels on that. It's a very, very small percentage. But the average person, you know, you and me, we can get into some of this off the wall stuff where there's not as much competition and perform very well in doing that. Right. And one of your quotes is genetics load. The gun lifestyle pulls the trigger. I don't know if that was that your quote or you heard it from someone else, but I thought that was good. So genetics is an a, it's an important piece, but it's important is over floated in our society. I mean even now, like we've made big promises with the human genome project and that yielded basically nothing, but it still is an important piece to get. But our lifestyle is so much more important than after all. It's the only thing we can control. So let's put our focus there.

(10:09): Exactly. Yeah. I'm totally with you on that. You know, I think too, I mean the genetically gifted, no, they have their own challenges because a lot of them don't follow a healthy lifestyle because they don't need it when they're younger. Right. So you know, that cuts back on their longevity. But the person that's willing to put the time in and put the effort in and build that really solid foundational base strength base, that's always the conversation too in our culture. I mean instead of it starting this with a strength based for young people right away we got them into sports and skills. You know, the stronger the human, I think the skills will come. I mean the skills will come a lot easier if you have strength, if you have your coordination and everything going in one direction. Well now it's like, you know, let's work those skills. I mean there's a lot of money and skill training, you know, but then the injuries, it's just, I, you know, I don't know if you follow school sports and all that. I mean it's such a young age. I mean, you know, the ankles and knees, the shoulders, the elbows, it's just, it's just sad, you know? I mean that's where our culture is.

(11:20): Yeah. We'll be talking about injuries, but when I cover a little bit more on strength first you mentioned, and this is something I've come across before, is that grip strength. It's actually one of the best predictors for death. So basically you get stronger hands, you're going to die less of anything, which is a pretty good trade off in my mind. When did you first come across this information and how did that kind of tweak your thinking? I mean, you were probably already doing the strong man stuff, right?

(11:46): Yeah. I think it was during the frustration of you know, when the seeds of this latest books are and tired was coming about, I think you know, I just started looking at predictors and things like that and you know, people would exercise and they wouldn't exercise. They'd have a diet that they follow. They wouldn't have a diet that they followed and you know, and they're getting sick younger. And it was, somebody actually sent me one of the articles and I started digging about it, about grip and hand strength. And I mean I got to give, you know, Dennis Rogers to credit for that. I, I stumbled into the strong man thing a year before I met Dennis. And that's a whole other story we can talk about. The first time I broke a stack of bricks, but Dennis from the elbow down to the fingertips, I mean I don't know that there's ever been anyone at any size in weight.

(12:36): It was more efficiently built with tendons and ligaments. And you know, Dennis always talked about tendons and ligaments and is the only thing he really never talked about each muscles or anything like that. You know, so yeah. So, and the variety of exercises that Dennis gave me cause I was, I don't know about you, but I didn't, I'm not like the natural at any of this stuff. Basically when I entered this whole thing, I was an old basketball player, you know, like 39 years old. So the keyword was like fold, you know, but I was a basketball player and so to do this stuff, I remember the first time Dennis was and John Brookfield. Do you ever meet John Brookfield person, but have talked? Yeah. So at the downtown athletic club in New York city, the home of the Heisman trophy before nine 11, we're in the lobby of this hotel.

(13:21): And I had met Dennis the night before and John Brookfield and Dennis are teaching me how to bend a 40 penny nail, you know, in the lobby and with these tiny little rags. All right? Not these big luscious wraps that everybody seems to use today. These are these tiny little washcloths. That's what they were like sections of them. And I was there and I remember whimpering with the pain and the palms of my hand, and they're going, nah, you got to get stronger now. And then the next day I was taking Dennis to the airport and he said, ah. He said, well, you gotta start on cards till you might as well start with a deck of cards. So we pulled out a deck of cards and the most I was able to rip with 17 cards without my hands. I was just whimpering it just a blubbering fool, you know, dead is, come on man, this is killing me.

(14:09): Now remember I'm Dennis, this first student, I'm not saying it's the number one student, but I'm his first student, you know, so he must've been, you know, I guess he figured if he had success with me, he could have success with anybody. Yeah. So, and the variety of exercises he gave me, you know, we're doing all kinds of risks, rolls, pinch grips, every variety of things. Rolling newspapers, goose snacks, you know, all these different things that he came up with and Oh my goodness, you know, 39 years old and you're not supposed to be getting stronger at 30 now you're supposed to be hanging on for dear life at 39 you know, and all of a sudden my strength is going through the roof. You know, like what happened here. So, and I think too that the grip strength too, I mean that's one of the great ways to improve. A testosterone production as as was arm wrestling. Well that was one of the most, cause it's super intense and everything. Obviously if you get somebody if equal to your equal. So the grip strength stuff, it was just, I guess it was ironic that the, the research backed up what I was feeling about developing that.

(15:08): Yeah. Well it's interesting to think about that, not just physically how it's going to correlate to a whole bunch of stuff, but even neurologically, you know, a lot of people are worried about and justly so Alzheimer's, dementia, that sort of thing in our hands. I don't know if you've ever seen the homunculus, I believe they call it, but they'd look at the amount of the brain that is dedicated to moving the hands in different areas of the body. And the hands are used much more of it than anything else. So just being able to move your hands and because there are so many ways we can move them, whether that's ripping next the cards or squeezing the gripper, all kinds of different things that a lot of movement here is going to correlate to not only bodily strength but neurological health as well. At least that's my theory. I haven't seen something back that up. But seeing that, yeah, there's less deaths from all causes. That would be one cause at least in there.

(15:57): Oh yeah, for sure. It's just interesting to see too. Again, if we come back to our culture and you know, you join a gym and you have all the great intentions and everything and you go into the gymnasium in America and it's, you know, there's the cardio section over there with your mindless movement. Okay. And then there's the machine section for all, you know, we said pretty boys worked on all that stuff. You know, where you don't have to balance or coordinate anything. You just go from point a to point B and back again and then you know, then they have the real manly or actually now women, some of the women are lifting some unbelievable stuff, you know, the real weightlifting section. But most gyms don't even let you use chalk anymore because you know, or things like that. It's too messy. And then you have this room now that you know, they'll might have some ropes and some, a heavy bag or something and then they have the yoga classes room and everything like that.

(16:52): But there's no place, there's no section, there's no, even most places don't have even one piece of equipment for hand and grip strikes. Right? No, I mean, how crazy is that when you think about, you know, how powerful an indicator it is? Like you said too, I totally agree. If you don't have hand in grip strength, like when we're treating people, a lot of the issues with it, it comes from your cervical spine. And so, you know, in today's world, I mean, I guess the modern term is called technic. You know, we're so people are not getting the strong signals go into their, their hands and fingers. They don't have strong grip strength, so no. Yeah, it's a definite sign. It's a definite warning, like Holy crap, if I don't have grip strength, I mean sometimes I can do things with people's necks when I'm working with them that it'll just free up the nerve sensation go in there. So yeah. So it's pretty cool thing to think about. Okay.

(17:46): Yeah, I definitely think fitness as a whole come a long way. Even though we still see those conventional gyms. I like to pick on CrossFit because that's everyone's favorite target and definitely some great stuff there. But we see, even though it's like cross training fitness, there's no grip training in there. Do you have some grip involved in some of the exercises, but it's an afterthought? Not a forethought, but yeah, just a little bit of grip training can go a long way.

(18:09): I think that'd be, I don't want to, I don't want to pile on CrossFit. I've only been to two CrossFit gyms. One was a place where I was going to set up an office there with working with injuries and stuff and I went to one class. Of course the day I picked it was today on how to do the clean and jerk and I saw all these people there all different shapes and sizes, but most of them look like it never really. It worked out in a gym before with weights and I watched like a two minute instruction time and then I saw them practicing doing a clean and jerk and yeah, I mean and they are cheering each other on to go higher and higher and the form, I mean

(18:59): That was one of the most critical lifts out there. Two minutes of instruction isn't sufficient. Like I've been training a long time and I do not clean jerks. Not a main thing, but that is not something, because it's so technical, it's something I'm not really focused on.

(19:14): Oh Lord have mercy. But I remember fleshing back when my daughter was a, I think she was eighth grade and you know we're going to the old time strong men banquets in the, the last president of his name was already Dressler and he wrote the Bible on Olympic lifting. He's on all the committees and stuff. He runs a place out in Queens, New York teaching Olympic style lifting. He's got, you know, he's on whatever Olympic committees and everything else and ours is a great guy. And actually I quoted something on his book but that was about steroid use and stuff. But anyway, my daughter and I go over to this place in Queens, New York, I can't remember the name of it, the loss, but not the loss battalion. Something about the battalion or something. And so there's these really, you could tell they were like European Eastern European men that were there probably four or five guys that were waiting to get Ortiz instruction and everything.

(20:06): But these guys were like, you could see they were checked guys. I mean they had hips and hamstrings and I mean they were in shape guys. And they're there with a broomstick practicing their poles, right. With a broomstick. I mean the whole time we're there, that's all they're using was improve stick. And so I said to RDS, so when did these guys get to like lift the weights? He says, he says, I gotta be honest. Most people are using the stick for the first six months before we even introduce weights. So of course with that in my head, you know, I'm like I don't, I'm watching the CrossFit class. I got up man. But anyway, you know, my, my oldest sister is a big cross fit person. I got some friends that are dig into it, but you know, they're a little bit older, a little bit more mature I say. I think they know when to, when they're form breaks, that really depends on Jim as well and the coaches there and all that.

(21:00): Yeah, I'm sure it's individual thing. But anyway, so speaking of

(21:04): Predictors of death and another one I've been going into recently is lung capacity is another one. Those good predictors and this ties into the end. This is a bit more of a personal question. By knowing your performance as you've blown up the hot water bottle, that's one of your feets you've done. And that's not something I've ever tried. So I'd be curious your thoughts around breathing exercises, but also how'd you get started with blowing up the hot water bottle?

(21:29): Yeah, so the first thing I ever did in the strings feet world was breaking a stack of bricks. And the night that I did, and I can tell you that story if, if you like how that happened, but the night I did it, the hot water bottle, somebody was doing a hot word, somebody else was doing it. And after that night I felt that I wanted to put a presentation together that would involve feature strength because I saw the effect it had on the audience. My thing was always getting to people, be an uplifting whatever it was going to be, right? I didn't really have to be the best of the world at any particular thing. And so I got myself a hot water bottle and I called the guy up. He was from, from California actually. And gave me some basic instruction and warnings back then.

(22:15): The standard, a hot water bottle was out of the carrier corporation out of Rhode Island. It was pretty stout but it was pretty consistent over the years. People have handed me out water bottles, you know, some of them are like blowing up a party balloon and some of them are pretty stout. So the consistency and things like that. So it's two facets, right? Number one, you have to get strong enough to blow the thing up. You have to remember above all that you cannot let air go back in. So you have to figure out, you know, how to have your mouth cause I never used, you know, a lot of people use the plugs and different things so that the air doesn't come back in. Like if you, you know, we would call that cheating, but a lot of people do it, you know, they holding it up to their mouth and I'm wanting cheese.

(23:00): I don't even have it held tight to their mouth. How are they doing this? Then I said, Oh, they have these things that they have made up, these little plugs so that the air goes in but the air doesn't come back out. But part of the real challenge is to hold it from blowing back in. And so I had to figure out a way to increase my ability in that area. What I came up with was breathing squats. I remember the book super squats, you come across it, right? So I would religiously do that. I would do a set of no once a week and then I do the deep breathing pullovers where you hold your breath, then you, you know, you're reached back right? Immediately following the, the real heavy squats, you know, 20 rep breathing squats. That seemed to really help as well as practicing with the hot water bottle.

(23:47): But then I was getting strong enough to inflate the thing, but then fear became a big factor because now it's Holy crap, this freaking thing that allegedly it's 500 to 700 pounds of pressure into this thick, heavy rubber thing is going to explode in my face, you know? And so, you know, how do I know which way it's going to go? You know? So that took me a couple of months, like once, I think I was strong enough to actually blow it up to actually just let it go. So yeah. So it was a twofold process. But yeah, that was a mainstay for years. I stopped doing it. My supplier's supplier ran out and it was so sketchy. And I don't know, I kind of got away from doing it. But I think too, as you get older, I think the elasticity of your lungs, my big signature one on, I don't know if you saw that in the book, it was probably not well done, but it was in 2000, I don't know, it was about 10 years ago at the strong man's banquet where I was trying to figure out something to do when, you know, when you're performing in front of strong men, you know, it's kinda like you can't do,

(24:51): They've seen it all. You got to do something a bit creative, right?

(24:55): Yes. So I talked to Dennis Rogers about it and he said, I don't know, man, that sounds a little too dangerous. He said, and I don't even know if you could do it, but we do a lot of of strength lying across two chairs face up. And you know, so sometimes you know, somebody standing on our stomach and we'll bend a spike or tear a deck of cards, whatever. So I thought, well, gee, why don't I have somebody stand on my stomach and I'll blow up a hot water bottle. But you know, your diaphragm fatigues. That's part of the thing when you're doing a real hot water bottle, your diaphragm fatigue. So you know, your first number of breasts are very powerful. And if it takes, sometimes it takes 2025 breasts, you know, and you've got to pause in between each one. So anyway, that was my big signature one, which almost killed me, but my wife's standing on my stomach and I did it at the banquet, but I had a headache for it two days. I don't get headaches. I was I didn't even want to talk about it. I did it. It's in the books, but yeah.

(25:50): Yeah. I can just imagine because you don't have the Ford flection, which I imagine helps doing. Your abs have to stay tight so you're actually able to breathe less into the balloon. Yeah, that's

(26:00): Right. And your glutes and hamstrings have to be engaged as well just to hold you in position. Yeah, it was, yeah, that was nightmarish. But like that's that like that's probably the only thing, but I haven't seen anybody else try it. There's probably a reason, you know, let smarter people out there

(26:19): If you're going to be stupid, be smart about it. As I always say. That's true.

(26:23): Right? Well that doctor Bob was there, dr Robert, dr Bob Goldman. No, he's everywhere with know and Stallone and he's a medical doctor as well. And I mean he was literally right outside where there he was taking pictures of himself and I mean he quoted, I put his quote everywhere, you know, when that thing comes up I, he said came

(26:43): Up to me really concerned afterwards and he goes, listen, he said, you can't do this man, the color you turn, you're like a half a breath away from a stroke. I, you know, he's going crazy. And I was like, okay, okay. I won't do that anymore. Right. That's the world we live in though, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you for listening. My guest has been Russell Jones, and we'll be back next time to continue the conversation, especially talking about old injuries, what to do about them and how to fast track the healing response. So stay tuned.

(00:19): Welcome back. We continue our conversation with strong men, speaker and author David Whitley. In the first step of sewed, we talked about the strong men's journey and why that is important for health, how strength is tied into vitality, and also begin diving into the methods of Wim Hoff. From here we talk a lot about listening to the body and multiple facets around that. So let's rejoin the conversation now.

(00:45): So you brought up a subject I want to go into, but first I want to address that and it was good how you talked about seeing Dennis bend the wrench that extended your perceptions of what was even possible as far as strength. And then here with whom you saw him plunge under the ice and swim and that extended your perceptions of what was possible. How much for, I guess, I'm trying to think of how to word this question. The average person out there, we all can find in kind of an illusion of what reality actually is when as you and I will know, the limitations are less than we think. Yeah, there are some limitations, but we can be superhuman in the sense of going outside, just the average bubble. What do you think keeps people locked there? Because there are so many examples of this. If you just kind of go out there and look, but beyond just the perceptions, what keeps people kind of locked into just being average? I guess? I believe that

(01:44): From a very early age we are programmed to be afraid of things that really don't present any actual danger. I think that, and that's seeps so deeply into our subconscious from the time we're born until we're about seven years old, we are perpetually in fatal wave, which is an, as you know, far better than I do is how you download information without having to go through the steps of learning. It really, you know, you just absorb it. And since my son was born a year and a half ago, I have seen firsthand in a way that I had never anticipated how very, very true that is because he just absorbed everything like a sponge. I mean that's the way we all were. Just like we could all do a full perfect deep squat at one point in our lives, you know, so we all come through that. But what we wind up inheriting from people who mean very well for us, but they're missing both in terms of the actual danger of the world around us and misinformed in terms of what our actual potential is.

(02:49): We pick up missions that they've carried that they've no doubt inherited from their parents and so forth and certain, and not parents, but like from their environment. And it goes back generations to generations like I understand, but cold can kill you, right? It's absolutely possible to get so cold that you die. But the flip side of that is if you live in a house and it's 30 degrees Fahrenheit outside and you're going to go get in your car and drive to go see the movie, you don't really need to bundle up in a hat and boots and gloves and a scarf and another coat and a sweatshirt to walk 45 steps to your car to drive to the movie theater to get out to walk 45 steps into the movie theater. You know? But it's such a primal fear of the cold and you know, you go back for tunes, I would, I would say that there would be a whole lot more people that each one of us would know that died from cold exposure than there is now.

(03:55): I mean, I've never met anyone who knows anyone that died from cold exposure. I'm just using the cold as an example. I think that we are a social animal and so we don't want to Rupt the social expectation. And so over the generations of information being passed from one person to the next, what is actually possible has kind of gotten squelched or muted or tearing down and it takes a specific kind of inquisitive mind to think, wait a minute, in order to understand anything, I've got to start questioning everything. And so it's like, well, you know, they say this, well who the hell are they? And what they know about me is really the attitude that we wind up having to take in. And that winds up with us doing things like, you know, Ben and wrenches or pulling trucks with their hair or whatever. Right.

(04:44): And now when the major fruits I'm working on is hanging myself and I'm actually enjoying the fact that a lot of people do not like me even going for that one. Sure. Yeah. A few people, like you mentioned Mike machine, Bruce, he's done a few other strong men in the past. And so I was like, yeah, I think I can handle that one. Let's go after it in a smart way. Of course.

(05:06): Yeah. Well, absolutely. In an intelligent way. What does the body actually capable of? You don't really know until it's too late, but if you're smart going into it then, then you know, way before you get there, if you can keep everything as comfortable as possible. And I'm about to go on a tangent with that, but I do want to say something about Mike. The machine I helped Mike the machine set his world records when it was probably 2011 2012 something like that. Five eight inch diameter steel bars bent across his throat. I think we did seven of them in just under a minute. And there's video of that and yes, like in any other world except the one you and I open where we're talking about these stuff that's attempted murder, you know, but he called me up and I had done the feet with him sometimes.

(05:52): We had done two shows on the same day and I'd done it twice in one day. And he's like, listen, I want give to this world record thing is shot. And you're the one that I trust the most to bend these bars. Will you do it with me? And I of course, absolutely agreed. And I still to this day chastise him and said, I don't know why you got the world record. I bent seven bars. All you did was not the videos on YouTube. It's not on YouTube. But if you search for Mike Bruce world record, you'll see and it's hard to watch. Yeah, they'll try to find the link to that and put it in the show notes though. People listening can go down silvern.com and check that out. But as far as the idea of what's actually possible and limitations and stuff like that, one of the biggest, and if what I said earlier about you, sometimes you don't know until you've crossed the line whether you should have done something or not.

(06:39): Right. And I almost never go that far into, into any feed or any physical expression of power on particularly the cold because you know, the gold can kill it. And I know that both of us have an influence and have Frankie Ferriss we're with. And I'm Adam Glass of course being one of the guys who is a phenomenal coach and example of how that kind of training works. And you know, there's this pervasive thing that, and I think that the RKC was a huge proponent of this back in the days that you and I met. And then I believe CrossFit has a huge component of this. And I believe that the whole like tough Mudders, Spartan race kind of thing, appeals and all of those things, this aspect of humans wanting to test what they can actually do. But the operative word there is testing it because sometimes you take a test and you fail.

(07:35): And so I believe there's this in the fitness world that you really have to go all out, balls the wall and kill yourself and not be able to walk and throw up and all that kind of stuff in order to be able to make any meaningful progress or to achieve these superhuman level of anything. And the fact is that is absolutely not true. And I know you know it and, and I know it too that the best way to ex your current limits is to never go near them. It's to keep everything and make everything as easy as you can. Qual. It still provides a dose of whatever stimulus you need that moves you in the direction that you want to go. When that clicked for me, that was huge. A big concept and you brought it up but I was definitely going to go there cause this is something a wanted to discuss and it is, I'd say it's like 99% of the fitness world is all about this give 110% all about the physical and mental toughness and there is a time and a place for those.

(08:33): But your standard workout should not really be that place in my picture. Sure. I mean if you're trying to, you know, get a little bit stronger, move a little bit better and maybe a few pounds of, why are you pretending that you're a Navy seal? You know, it doesn't make sense to train with that method or to approach it with that attitude. I believe the attitude is more important than the method because once you get the attitude figured out that like, Hey, I can work up to being able to, I use myself as an example. I can work up to being able to pull a note in one hand, hit it with the other hand and break it open without ever putting myself in any physical harm without ever getting injured, without any jeopardy to them. If I approach it intelligently. Same thing as you with the hanging yourself, right? I know that you know your body and you understand how progression works and how overload works and how adaptation works and I have no doubt that you're going to safely hang yourself and then get down and then 10 minutes later you're going to be, you know, sipping a cup of coffee and having a conversation.

(09:36): Yeah. I like to say if you're going to be stupid, be smart and the reason you'll do that is because, exactly, yeah. Absolutely. One of the, I've been thinking about this for a number of years. So many people as you were saying, there is an idea people want to push themselves, but it also seems like there is an addiction to pain or something. They deserve to be into the ground, but really it goes kind of like treating the body like an enemy versus what I like to go for is treating the body as an ally. Once you understand like yeah, you need to, everyone should get to a point where they realize their mind can override something. You can just by will alone push yourself to thing. But that comes with the downside is that you can do that and end up hurting yourself because you've overwritten those signals of the body so much more. So if we can use the body as an ally, it's sending signals, it's biofeedback all the time. If we can only learn to learn the language, which unfortunately almost no one out there knows how to interpret these signals, but they're there and then we can really treat the body like an ally. And in that way, progress forward, move forward. Whether it is in cold exposure or strength training or a variety of other things as well.

(10:52): Yeah, yeah, definitely. And to go back to Neville again, there's a quote from him to attempt to change circumstances before we change our internal conversations is to struggle against the very nature of things. Right. And so when you said what you just said there about people being addicted to, I don't want to say they're addicted to pain, I think they avoid pain, but I think they're addicted to punishment. And so that sets up a conflict within themselves, which is evidenced by the way some, you know, some of the phrases, I only compete against myself, you know, that kind of thing. Well, if you think about that, someone has to lose. If you're, you are competing against you 100% of the time, you're going to lose even if you win. You know, that kind of internal conversation, I believe, has ramifications that most of us don't think about because we just, it just doesn't occur to us.

(11:48): Right. I remember a few years ago I was having a Facebook messenger conversation with the girl who had reached out to me to potentially talk about online coaching and you know, was asking her what she had been doing and she had been doing, she had gone to someone like generic personal trainer kind of thing and in the conversation she said how much I really, really hated her arms over and over again. Like like probably five or six times in this conversation. She said that she hated her arms and she wanted them to be different. I guess she had like, you know, the just the look of them was something that wasn't pleasing to her and she wound up not signing on as a client with me. But I did check back in with her to kind of follow up and see how she was doing about a week later and she had gone to a workout after she had gone on a, to use her words, a bad eating day cause she be to her food, which is a hour long conversation.

(12:45): We could have some of my opinions, but she had gone basically to have this trainer, a Terry transplants. That's what it involves, sprinting and a tire. And she had no business doing it because she was probably close to a hundred pounds overweight and she fell and broke her arm. And I'm like, couple of weeks ago you were telling me how much you hate your arms and now you've literally broken one of them. And I could not get to her that she had brought that about herself, you know? And they got me thinking about how, how we talk to ourselves and how we will say things about ourselves to ourselves that we would never say to another person ever. And that for a lot of us it is minute by minute conversations about how we're attempting to shame ourselves into getting better and focusing only on the things about ourselves that we do not like rather than being grateful. And I don't know why I wound up going off on this tangent.

(13:42): No, it's interesting because there's a strong parallel. You were saying, and I think you did choose the better word, that people are addicted to punishment, right? So if you hit your arms or you hate that you're fat, then often you're going to not just have issues with working out, but with eating, right. It's so many people are emotionally eating. They're doing it to numb the pain or the punishment, but it may be feeding into that loops. Like, I hate myself, so you know, I don't even deserve to look good or feel good or have energy or any of these things. I think, yeah, it is a deep psychological hole, we can go down, but I'm really looking at that self-talk of the beliefs people have for good or ill. Right? Like you believe I'm a flat slab and I can't do anything or I believe I can bend a wrench and hang myself and do it unscathed. And the results by this.

(14:32): Yeah. And either way, you're right. Yeah. Paraphrase Henry Ford on that one. You know, I had a thought and it just escaped me. Oh, I know what it was. The whole idea that you somehow have to go out and beat yourself into submission physically is just ridiculous. If you logically stop and think about, and again is ideas that I picked up from Adnan and Frankie. If we take someone who has been sedentary all their lives and there's, let's say they're in their fifties and they've worked a desk job for 20 years or 30 years and they've never done any sort of physical training and they've gotten a little overweight or they are in some pain or they don't feel like they move as well as they want to and they come to a fitness professional to get that sorted out in the way that they want it to be.

(15:19): If you're in the fitness world, you can identify the desk jockeys the moment they walk in the door because they had this kind of rounded back kyphotic posture and shoulders story internally rotated forward. And what we're looking at here is someone who's been sitting at a desk in this slumped over posture for eight to 10 hours a day for years and they sit that way in their car. They sit that way. When they eat, they sit that way when they are hanging out, relaxing, watching TV or whatever, and then I lay down and go to sleep, they most likely wind up in some semblance of a fetal position. Right? So they've been perpetually in this forward flexed curve, their spine. So much so that their spine takes on that shape. Question there, we're talking about literally changing how bone structure is. It went from a normal spine to this kyphotic curve in the spine.

(16:07): In this example. The question there is how much actual hard effort did this person put into that? And the answer is none. They just did it consistently for decades. Right. Because adaptation is something that occurs whether we want to or not. You know, you hear some of the hardcore guys talking about I'm going to do this program and force my body to adapt. Well you don't have to force your body to adapt. You can't stop it from adapt. You know, it's like you're not going to walk out into the bright sunshine and be like tan dammit.

(16:40): I like to use the word Cokes for that. Right? Cause it's, you can intentionally coax adaption in a certain direction you want. So we don't have to wait decades for our body to adapt to just posture. Right. So having a little bit more effort because it's not that you have to do no effort, but you also don't have to do 110% effort. Somewhere in that middle range is actually like perfectly fine for coaxing your body to adapt in ways you may choose to want it to.

(17:07): Absolutely. And you said something earlier that sparked that whole thought in my mind and you were talking about speaking the language, the body speaks that to interpret those signals and the idea that if you learn to listen to your body Swisspers, you never have to hear it extreme.

(17:27): Ooh, I like that.

(17:29): That's one of the few original soundbites that I've come up with, but I'm proud of it, you know?

(17:34): Yeah, I'm definitely writing that one down and I'll give you credit. Sure.

(17:41): I appreciate that. And that goes back to the whole no pain, no gain. Right. And that phrase is correct, but it's spelled wrong most of the time. Usually it's an O pain, K, N O w game.

(17:53): Yup, so one of the things, and this is kind of dialing down into the techniques there, I haven't trained with Adam and Frankie. I no longer do the range of motion testing that they advocate, but I've found that it really didn't even take more than a year or so, but the signals that you could get from that method of testing, of course there are other methods became internalized and now I can't do any sort of movement without knowing whether it's a good movement for me to be doing at that time in place. I'm curious if you have had a similar sort of experience.

(18:24): Yes. Yeah. There's certain, it's sort of intangible to be able to describe it. There's a certain physical slash emotional response that I'll have that if I get my conscious mind to just be quiet and observe and go into what is known it in term is in Japanese is motion. No mind if I can go into no mind and then do the movement. Then without having to test range of motion, like you say, I get a message back and the important thing then becomes not allowing my conscious mind to rationalize one way or the other. Whether that message is true, it is a matter of just like the window is the sunshine. No question. Oh well it's cloudy. So it's not as broad. It was last Tuesday, but you know, it's not getting as dark as early now because it's Springs shut the hell up with all that stuff.

(19:17): It's the sunshine, is it? Is it daylight or not? You know? Then once we establish that we can move on to whatever other thing. But to give you the short answer your question, yes, I've had that same experience. I will still do range of motion testing, but I also honor the fact that if I roll out of bed and I was planning on doing say double underhand steel banding today, and I start thinking about kind of picture in my mind what that would be like and kind of have a response of like, eh, that feels kind of icky, what would feel kind of good? Hmm. Oh yeah, the idea of deadlift in something that feels good to me, you know? And then I go that test and use range of motion testing to see if those things line up the same way with an actual physical response to the body. Then I've never had it be different.

(20:06): Yeah, no, that's good feedback. Like I've dialed in on like the physical sensations, like does it feel fast versus slow or fluid versus clunky? You can kind of look at the qualities of the movement within itself to do it. I never really thought about, I mean there's feels good versus feels bad, but I haven't really kind of gone deeper into the emotional response, so I'm gonna reflect on that a bit. But I like that. That's really good. Yeah, don't feel there's definitely not enough people doing it in this way and many people that have been in fitness in one fashion or another over time, they build some sort of intuition about it. But the problem with intuition, when it's just years and years of collective experiences, most people have not determined how to actually teach that in a quick manner. To other people. And I feel we definitely need more of this along the game. These internal signals, the whispers, as you said, in our body that can help people to not getting pain in the first place, get out of pain, and to really get the body they want to have and hopefully love.

(21:05): And the hardest sell on that is getting past, being addicted to the effort and the punishment. If I go do a training session and I feel better after I finished and I did when I started, then I must not have pushed myself hard enough. Right. But the fact is that's exactly what I needed. Right, right. One of the funniest things that I ever saw in relation to that was someone who had taken on a Facebook, a bunch of like fitness mains like that about what does it passing out susceptible throwing up susceptible falling down, susceptible, but quitting is not acceptable. That kind of stuff. And they replaced the photos of people lifting with photos of people drinking alcohol.

(21:47): That's great. Yeah. Yeah. That just kind of clearly points that it's a little odd way of thinking about things. It really is. Yeah. And once again there is a time and place to be able to push yourself to those limits, but that place is far less than just the average fitness person is led to believe. We'll leave it out there.

(22:08): Okay. I was talking about this very subject at a strength matters summit a few years ago and it was San Diego and here like February or March. And it was, we were riding on the the wave of new year's resolutions and the memes and the soundbites that accompany that and everyone was in beast mode. And I'm like, I'm not going to the gym as for like lions and tigers and bears and stuff, you know, but I got to thinking about that and I knew my subject matter for the presentation I was going to do and I started looking up these different means. And it was like overwhelmingly the mains were some big Jack Dorian, the AIX looking guy with a dumbbell that had been Photoshopped to be 300 pounds with like a lion's head on, right. And you know, beast mode initiated and all that kind of stuff. And I'm like, well, let's think about this for a second. Since it was in San Diego and the zoo was there, I was actually able to go to the zoo and see this firsthand. If we're going to go into beast mode, who is the King of beast? It's always the lion, right? Well, what does a lion actually do on the day to day

(23:08): Lay down for 23 hours or so? Yep.

(23:12): And stuff. So I'm like, he sleeps 22 hours a day and he wakes up and he's hungry and someone actually interrupted me. He says, no, he doesn't go hunt. He sends the females out to do that. And I'm like, I'm not going down that road. So the King of beast wakes up and he goes out because he's hungry and there's this herd of Willdabeast and he's like, okay, where's the biggest, baddest, sharpest horn, strongest, just most bad-ass Willdabeast in this entire herd. He's over there. Okay. I'm going exactly the opposite direction over here to where this broke leg, old

(23:46): One. It's already kinda elderly because I am a lion. I'm the King of beast and I have no, none of my self worth is tied up in setting a PR in Willdabeast. I just don't want to eat this so I can go back to my nap. Oh, that's wonderful. What is the natural order of things? Yeah, yeah. Definitely puts a new spin on beast mode. Yeah. More an accurate one. Yeah. And Paul McElroy actually coined the term leased mode. Lease mode. Yeah. What's the little, the least amount of stuff I can get away with. It's still gonna make me be the best that I can be. Yeah. Well, maybe we can get Facebook to stop spreading that misinformation about what beast mode, but we won't go there right now. This has been a absolute pleasure tell people where they can go to find out more from you and a bit more about your book.

(24:35): Okay. My main website is iron tamar.com but it is geared toward the public speaking and performance aspect of my stuff. So there's not like a whole lot of informative content there, but there are some cool videos and if you're looking for someone that will be offering you a gone corporate public speaking, go to iron tango.com and check it out. I have a few different sites that I can send you links to. The main one that I want to tell everybody about today is I wrote this book superhuman you, which sort of Chronicles my journey as a strong man and adding those similarities between what I was learning as a strong man versus what I'm learning from personal development like Napoleon Hill and Bob Proctor and Joe Vitale and all those guys and the books called superhuman new and is available or free as superhuman, you book.com you go there and all I ask you to do is pay for shipping and handling and I will send that book out to anyone who wants it for free just so I can get this message out because it is, I realized recently that this is actually the legacy to create for myself of being helping everyday people realize that they're not everyday people, that they have inherent superhuman talents and abilities that are just waiting to be discovered and developed an unleashed on the world.

(25:53): So superhuman, you book.com I'll send you a free book. All I'm asking you to do is pay for shipping.

(25:58): Excellent. Well thank you so much Dave and everyone listening. Understand the, we kind of talked about a bunch of different subjects here, but super strength really for me, for Dave, for many other people, even if you don't want to be a strong minute and completely get that. But it is a great crucible for testing these things out. And strength is at the base of vitality. So you want to be a healthy, sovereign human being. Like you gotta be strong and really important that this strength is also not just about the physical strength, but the emotional strength, the mental strength, the strength of character, all that can be built from these steps, these ideas, and using them in, you said you didn't want to use the word holistic, but I like that word. It really is a holistic sense we're going for. So it was in the context. I didn't want

(26:44): To use all of that. And as far as, as far, yeah, I get it. Everybody doesn't want to be in steel or be a strong man. Never like that. But I guarantee you, I have never heard anyone in my life come up and say, you know what? I'm pretty normal. But God, I wish I was weak. Yeah. So even if you don't want to, you know, hang yourself or bend ranches or break coconuts or whatever, everyone could benefit from improving their strength, not just physically, but in all the areas that you just mentioned. So yeah, be strong.

(27:12): Yes. Now our McFadden, the father of physical culture, said weakness is a crime. Don't be a naturalistic, still lose. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Thank you for listening. As always, your reviews are much appreciated and telling your friends about this podcast. If you enjoy it, spread it around. And you can also go to health sovereign.com leave me a comment. Let me know how you're liking these episodes. Any episode in particular or just in general. Do you want to take this mind and apply it to your health one-on-one? Learn how to activate your super power level of health with a systems approach. And finally understand why your health may not be where you want it to be despite, or perhaps because of living in the information age. I've got limited spots available in my coaching program. Find out more and apply at virtuousvitality.com

(00:19): Hello and welcome Logan Christopher here. And I'm pleased to have with me on the call strong man, coach, speaker, and author Dave Whitley. Dave Whitley and I go back, I think 2005 was it? Yeah. So wow. 15 years, crazy journeys. So welcome to the true Dave. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. You weren't even old enough to drive back then were you? Drive yes. Drink, maybe not.

(00:48): I do think that's true. Now is that an RKC event in st Paul, if I remember right?

(00:53): Yes, correct. You were an assistant instructor and me and my friend Tyler were there. We've been using kettlebells for a year or so. Yeah. Went through the instructor course and that's kind of interesting that as I was reflecting on this, you and I have not same paths but somewhat parallel paths in the fitness realm. And actually even beyond that, like you used to be a musician and I never was a musician, but I wrote it for my friend's band. And then from that, it's like that's a hard life. That traveling life then. Yeah, the kettlebells, the strong man, biofeedback training, Wim Hoff. Some of the stuff we'll be talking about today, like we've definitely touched on a lot of the same things through our, yes, most definitely. So one of the main topics, and I definitely want to focus on the strong man thing. So many people are not familiar with the old-time strongman concept or what goes into that. It's really, although there's people doing it like you and I, it's for the most part, a lot lost art. Yeah. I feel an important thing. This being the health sovereign podcast is talking about strength as a route and one of the best routes in my opinion of building vitality. Oh, definitely. So yeah. What led you to doing the old-time strongman thing in the first place?

(02:03): Well, when I was a kid, I wanted to be the Hulk. Basically. I was a chubby, overweight kid and I had a bad stutter and the teacher would call me and I would start stuttering. The kids would make fun of me and that would make me mad. And, but I was also very extroverted and my personality. So I figured out that if I caused the trouble and control the laughter, then I can control the attention that I got. And so I think that bled over into various aspects of my adult life and making me be comfortable in front of groups of people. Like as you know, teaching at workshops or as a musician or they're the very brief stint that I was a pro wrestler or now as a speaker, former but fascinated with strengths and had done the same stuff that everybody did, reading bodybuilding magazines and all of that up until I was probably 31 or 32 years old and got turned on to kettlebell training back then on a VHS, just stand for a minute and did the kettlebell certification thing and met a mutual acquaintance of ours.

(03:07): But Jeffery's at a kettlebell competition I believe in 2004 and I think back in that period of time had a website going that this predates podcasts. This is probably a few years before YouTube and podcasts and all that sort of stuff. Started taking over the internet. But I met bud and interviewed him for a website that I have where I was recording interviews like you could do on a podcast, but then I was actually mailing out physical CDs every month. It was like a monthly subscription based thing and when I interviewed bud at that thank you actually were part of the part of the list back then I was a customer and secrets revealed something like that, straight cigarettes or bills.com is what it would have figured out pretty quickly that that was not a viable thing to do because there was a whole lot of work involved in not a lot of margin there to work with, so it wasn't very profitable.

(04:03): But I met bud and interviewed him for that and whenever I would interview someone, I would always ask them, Hey, do you have anybody that you think would be a good fit for what we're doing here? And he recommended that I get Dennis Rogers. So email Dennis Rogers talked to him on the phone. He sent me some DVDs of him, both teaching feeds and also performing. And I saw this little dude, this little bald dude that looked like some regular guy that you would see anywhere bend a 10 inch Chris and ranch. And I had to stop and back up and like my mind couldn't process what I was seeing. And so I'm like, okay, this guy, I've just been a wrench. And it tied in perfectly with all the old school lifting stuff that I had been exploring. And I was like, Arthur Saxon and Thompson and Herman garner, all of those guys.

(04:49): And so Dennis started teaching me some feats of strength back the second ever old time strongman university in, I believe it's 2008 and if I'm not mistaken, you were at the first one. So you predated me on that. If you go back and look at the photo from that first and then who's who of performing strongmen now you're on there. Tim Fox was there, Chris rider was there, Mike Gillette, Aaron McKinsey, Mike Bruce, a lot of the guys that are doing something today. And so I got involved in doing feats of strength. Then I'm through, have started using it in my trend primarily for many, many years. And then in 2013 at my gym in Nashville, I brought business in to do the old time strongman university, like 10 Panama or 50 year anniversary or whatever it was. And I got to talking to him and I'm like, I should just pursue this seriously.

(05:41): And so I actually started studying public speaking at that point, that combined with the feats of strength combined with the thing that was very very much on my mind at the time and still is. And that's the expansion of the mind and how the mind controls the body and our imagination creates the reality around us. And I started seeing all these common patterns between those two disciplines. Punch strong man in what I call a mind man, rather than look for the differences. I started really, really hone in on the similarities and that wound up becoming the topic of the talks that I give to corporate events and schools and colleges and stuff. And it's also the central theme of a book that I wrote called superhuman Newt.

(06:29): Yeah, definitely want to dive deeper into that concept. But it's interesting you're just bringing back some old connections, like talking about getting into public speaking. I remember Dennis talking about going to Toastmasters where he could like bend things, but he was scared to speak in front of people. And I think the first time I ever went to a Toastmasters, I bent a nail up there as well because that was, yeah, a skill that needed to be learned in addition to the strengths though.

(06:54): Yeah. And, and I actually somehow managed to become a professional speaker without ever attending the Toastmasters. Yeah.

(07:00): There's other routes, but that is a tried and proven one that I certainly went through. And Dennis did as well. Then another important piece to that where in that story, cause I know the book about the mighty Adam, Joseph Greenstein was hugely influential on you as it was for me, like I was doing bodyweight exercises. I think I'd gotten into kettlebells by that point. I'd probably played around with some grip stuff but not really much on the feats, but then I read this book about the mighty Adam and for whatever reason I was like strong men. That's something I want to do, like I want to learn how to do this stuff and I do think it had more to do with that mind over matter type of concept more so than the physical strength. Although that of course was important as well.

(07:43): I don't remember that I got exposed to that book specifically, but it was definitely around the same time that I met Dennis and blood had told me to check it out, I think, and another book called super athletes, which is a perennial favorite among strength performers. And I think I got a copy of the [inaudible] book from Dennis, but I'm not 100% sure, but I got it and read it and read it. I'll probably read it, not exaggerating. Over the past 12 or 13 years, I've probably read it cover to cover at least two dozen times. You read it and you see things that you've noticed before, which is an indication to me that something in me has changed and at the time I read it before, I wasn't ready to receive the information in the same way as I am now. So I keep going back to that wellspring.

(08:31): You know, there's other books like that too, like think and grow rich is one like that that I read almost perpetually as a man. Think of, you know, a bunch of those kinds of personal development books, but that mighty Adam book is definitely the one that bridges the gap between the physical and the mental-spiritual aspect of those things for the exact same reasons that you just said. There's, it's an amazing story but it's also everyone's story that whatever thing is going on that you pass through and it is definitely central to the human experience.

(09:06): Yeah, you got me beat. I think I've only read it five times so I'll have to, but I did just finish going through to get it. It's really interesting going through that cause I read it the first time. I think I had borrowed it from a friend's, I didn't actually own a copy. Unfortunately. It's out of print. You can usually find it on Amazon, but it's a little bit more expensive than most books. Sure. Yes. 50 bucks snatch it up. Yeah. Yeah. How going through that books like it leaves seats that I didn't remember. And as when reviewing it, like his whole thing about healthy living and herbs and whatnot. Like, I definitely read through that part but didn't realize how much it impacted me when starting herbal supplement company and then seeing the picture of him pulling a fire truck by his hair. Like I knew he had pulled vehicles, stopped the planes from taking off, but then it's like, Oh I went to that event and ended up pulling the antique fire truck by my hair. Like I didn't even know that connection was not there until I got the material once again. Right, right. So with that, let's dial in on this. These strengths work like this strong men work. Most people, the average person out there has no desire to bend a wrench or even like lift a heavyweight. And I get that people are different, but the benefits of doing this stuff as we've been talking about, they go way beyond the physical. Why this kind of route for really tapping into the mental power for you.

(10:27): For me, it's a very I don't want to use the word holistic cause that's not exactly the right word, but it's a very complete circle of how to look at things, right? If the body is performing well, then the mind tends to perform well and if the mind performs, the body tends to follow suit. So there's a balance there that wants, understood, can be trained from both aspects of it or from multiple aspects of both of those areas that can create sort of an upward spa rule to where you get better at one aspect of it or one piece of it and everything else improves along with it. And so it just, it just picks up steam and this upward spiral, I like to call it one of the mind masters, I call it one of the people whose philosophical teachings I've studies getting Neville Goddard and I don't know if you're in if you're familiar with him or not.

(11:23): He's one of the kind of little bit, yeah, seems like he's a little lesser known than like, you know, James Allen, Napoleon Hill, and those guys probably because he didn't speak at, and I think that people get drawn to Napoleon Hill and Wallace Wattles and stuff because of the wealth aspect of it. They speak on. But Neville said that imagination creates reality and like you were talking about with pulling the fire truck with the hair earlier, there's a section in the mighty Adam book where he's gone through this and he's decided that he's going to bend this piece of steel and he's like looking at it and he realizes that he because he is filled with life, it's actually stronger than steel. The steel is just an inanimate object and it has no will have its own and it was at that moment when he made that connection that he was able to finally bend that steel spike after years of not being able to bend it and that that whole aspect really spoke to me.

(12:21): Like you were saying with the firetruck thing earlier. I didn't really put it together as fully at the moment that I was absorbing that information until I had set a goal for myself in 2013 that I wanted to certify on the R red nail, which I'm assuming that most people listening to this will know what that is, but if you don't, it's a piece of five 16th inch diameter cold rolled steel that's seven inches long that has to be bent under certain conditions and then you get your name put on this roster that you've officially done it. It's a steel bender thing and it's a brick sport thing and it's, you know, you're on a list of people who are respected at that point. So I decided to start training for that and a huge part of the training that I did was visualization and mental rehearsal.

(13:04): And I had this scene that I had constructed in my mind where I was bending this piece of steel and there was a group of people sitting in chairs and they were very nondescript as well, almost like silhouettes of people who were watching me. And I've been this this red nail and pulled it out and held it in my referees, said it's a good band and the people started clapping and I got so involved in repeating that scene over and over again to practice without actually putting my hands on it. That a couple of times, not once, but actually twice during this like really deep meditative bordering on sleep state, a way of kind of state I was going over the rehearsal is, and I snapped myself out of my relaxation state because I sneezed from inhaling chalk dust that existed only in my imagination.

(14:03): And I didn't realize that at the time, but I I looking back on it now, knowing what I know about how the mind works, I believe that that exact moment I can pinpoint the success of the physical bending of the nail was absolutely guaranteed and there was no way to get out of it at that point. Like there's imagining and the n*****s kind of rehearsing and hoping that you do well and then it plays out okay. But if you get to a certain depth of understanding or depth of experience in your imagination, I believe it becomes absolutely irreversible. So probably what happened with you, I'm speculating on this, is you were reading about the Adam pulling that fire truck and you looked like kind of let your mind drift off for a moment and you know more about hypnosis and NLP stuff than I do.

(14:50): You probably let your mind drift off into the same where you were doing it and planted that seed and then just you dropped it and walked away from it and then it wound up happening. There's that point that it becomes guaranteed and I think that that particular thing is a theme that runs through the mighty Adam book. It runs through tons and tons of older development texts and books and lectures and all that, but I believe that that thing is something that a lot of us will experience accidentally or incidentally, but the real power in it is that if, if you can incidentally an accidentally experienced something like that, then you can replicate it purposefully and directed it. Any objective to accomplish any goal you want to achieve or any experience that you want to have. And so for me, that is the true magic of all of this stuff.

(15:46): Absolutely. I have a question about that experience. When you actually did go to certify on the red nail, I'm curious, did you have a strong sense of deja VU in doing that based on the visualization?

(15:59): Yes. Yes I did. It was, it was like people started clapping and yes, I was excited about it and I was happy about it. But it was, it was almost like if you have a favorite movie and you're flipping through TV channels and Oh my favorite movies on, you know, I'm just going to sit here and watch it. And you just get to go through it again and you know what's coming, but you still enjoy it. But it's not the same like you star Wars for example, right? If you didn't know the big pivotal scene in empire strikes back where there's the revelation of Darth Vader being Luke's father. If you didn't know that,

(16:32): Hey, you didn't give a spoiler alert. Just kidding.

(16:36): Well, 40 years ago, but if you didn't know that was coming, certain emotional impact on you. If you do know what's coming and you're watching again for the Panther hundredth time, there's still an entertaining emotional response that happened, but it doesn't carry that same gravity. And that's how it was after being in that red. And I'm like, yep, this is exactly the way it was last time.

(16:59): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was, I haven't talked to a lot of people about that, which is why I was asking you, Oh, this was years ago, but I repeat it in a strongman competition and this was the modern strong man zone moving competitive farmers walked in all that and I'd done a lot of visualization leading up to that for winning it and there was a really strong sense of deja when that had actually happened because I had imagined it quite a few times in my mind. I do think that's a clue for you and there's many different ways to visualize, but a clue on doing it right is that if you get a sense of data off of that it has happened before, after you've physically done the thing, then that is a key that you have been visualizing properly. Yes, absolutely. Again, to go back and paraphrase phrase

(17:47): Neville a little bit, he talks about how the fulfillment of the desire is directly related to the feeling of naturalness of the imaginal act and self. It feels very natural, almost commonplace like tying your shoes right or brushing your teeth. It's just something you do. Then at that point it's almost, it's guaranteed and irreversible that you'll be able to experience whatever the thing is you're imagining

(18:14): Absolutely. Yeah. If one of the metaphors I'd like to use with the gym is kind of like the crucible of not only obviously like forging the body and that's how most people think of fitness, but it was the place to really test out things like visualization, like goal setting, like figuring out a plan and then applying it. So and in the gym it's a place where you get quick feedback. I mean you bend the nail or you don't bend it, you're able to do more reps or less reps lift a heavier weight in a way. It gives faster feedback. Then many other areas of life like let's say compared to starting a business like get going on that, but the Jim's a little bit faster in that. So for me, I think part of my draw in to fitness and strength training and even the strong men's stuff was that it was this crucible was this testing ground for all these other techniques and methods out there. Definitely, definitely. There's an interplay there that cannot be understated or overstated for sure. Yeah. Let me ask you recently, or I guess probably years ago now, you went pretty deep with the Wim Hoff material as well, and for people not familiar with that. Wim Hoff Iceman has done some pretty insane feats, a little bit different than the ones we've been talking about. But running through that, the Antarctic or Arctic a hundred kilometers

(19:40): North of the Arctic circle, somewhere in Europe, I think, I'm not even gonna try to guess, but somewhere in Northern Europe, North of the Arctic circle, a hundred kilometers in January, he ran a marathon in nothing but sure.

(19:54): Yeah. So that, once again, this is that superhero ability. And you were mentioning earlier wanting to be the Hulk. For me, I like superheroes too. And my name being Logan when the ones I identified with was Wolverine from the X-men. And now you're on it. You run a company that has to do with health. Yup. Regeneration. Regeneration. That's it. Yeah. So the Wim Hoff, the main things he teaches is around breathing and cold exposure. And definitely how the mindset plays into all of that. Yeah. What was your experience? What kind of drew you deeper into that work? Like you had already been doing the strong men's stuff and everything else, but what specifically got you deeper there?

(20:35): Yeah. Like I said, I had been doing the strongman thing for a while. I had been training with Dennis Rogers, I believe at the, by the time I found out about Wim, Dennis and I had already gotten to the point, we'd done a few old times jobs together and he decided that I would be the vice president. So like I had, I understood the strong man thing pretty well at that point and through people that I met during the RKC years, specifically Steve Maxwell, and to a lesser degree, there was a thing that I used to do whenever I thought about it when it would get a little bit cold because I'm in Tennessee, it doesn't ever get cold here like it does in say, Chicago or Minneapolis. Right. But it'll get single-digit cold for a few days in the wintertime and I would do what's known as Dallas.

(21:26): And cold water dowsing and so we could call a couple of five-gallon buckets of water, let them sit out in the cold until they started to freeze up a little bit and then go out and swim trunks or if it was at night, go out in my backyard naked because I still lived around other humans at that time and dumped as this water over my head and do some qigong breathing from, you know, I had been, I mentioned this but I've been studying and practicing qigong since about 95 as part of martial art adjunct type stuff, so some breathing exercises along with that, some and some yoga, pranayama breath of fire or some of that kind of stuff specifically designed to help generate more body heat. I would do that and I would do it for two or three days while it was while it was chilly or if I was really, really into it.

(22:10): I might do it for a couple of weeks and then I would just kind of move on to whatever the next interesting thing was mostly because it was difficult to get cold enough that way. And then in 2013 a couple of interesting things or significant things happened. My mother passed away in December, early December of 2013 and at Christmas, my wife and I were visiting her family for Christmas. And so I was in my late forties. And just going through the grieving and trying to go through that process and understanding, processing what it was like, that this is the first Christmas in my life that my mom isn't here and dealing with grief aspect of that and the strangeness of it all. And I was up watching television, maybe everyone else was in bed. I was just flipping channels and there was a television show that was on about superhumans.

(23:07): And so that caught my attention immediately and I clicked on it and they've done this entire episode on Wim Hoff and this predates the vice documentary that everyone's familiar with. I want to say it was like national geographic or maybe Stanley, superhuman sounds, something like that. One of those shows. And I watched him and it was the same big holes in the ice on the frozen Lake that was like over a meter thick and he swam from one hole to another hole underwater for like 80 or a hundred meters. And it really put my little dump in a bucket of water over my head into a completely different perspective. It's like the first time I saw somebody been to wrench, you know, it's like I didn't even, I didn't entertain the thought that this was something that a human could do. And so in the interview process and biographical information about women talked about how part of his story is that his wife was paranoid and gets phrenic or maybe she's bipolar, I don't know.

(24:08): She had a mental illness. I don't want to attach the wrong label to it, but she has some form of mental illness that led her to just wake up one day and kill herself or no without warning and left him alone with like four children. And you know, it was just this horrific, horrific thing and breathing and the cold got him through that and I'm like, okay, you have my attention now. You have my interest now. So by the time that that episode was over, I had gone on Amazon and ordered the book becoming the iceman. And then when we got back home from our trip to visit my wife's parents, I had looked upon the internet that he had a website and the online course. And so I dove full-on into that in 2013 and practiced it and practiced it and practiced it and was completely enamored of the results that I would get from the breathing exercises and the, as much as I could do the cold exposure here in the South, I did it and continue to up until 2016 and then wound up, because I'm on is, you know, on the membership site and the internet being what it is, he was doing a workshop in Los Angeles.

(25:17):
So I went out and did a couple of days workshop with, there's probably two people at this thing. It was very small compared to what is going on with him now because this is right around the time he really blew up. And so the two days of that in, I want to say it was like April or May, and then went back to train with him again in November of 2016 we did a week in Colorado and it was at the time of the last presidential election. And so we're told up in this cabin, there was probably, I think there were 27 or 28 of us and that was the instructor certification stuff. So we got to hang out with whim and people that had been training with him for years in the mountains in Colorado, we would go out every morning and do some cold exposure stuff, go out and get in these lakes.

(26:02): We climbed a mountain and I got to the top of the mountain and climb the mountain in hiking boots and it killed. Got to the top of it up in a horseshoe. So that kind of just summed up everything there for bringing all those worlds together, you know? And it was a profound experience to be immersed into that and to just, I've never hugged so many nearly naked men in my life, but it was just like everybody was there. It was just, it was the whole event just radiated love and I kept part of that with me and brought it home and, and you know, F first glance, it looks like this and endure the elements. Push yourself past your limitations, which I am not a fan of that whole idea, but it looks like that. But really what it comes down to is love and compassion and getting yourself in harmony with nature.

(26:56): Thank you for listening. We'll be back in the next episode to conclude this conversation with David Whitley, where we'll be discussing how toughness is overrated, how you can listen to your body's whispers and much, much more at lost empire herbs. We guarantee our herbs will change your life or your money back, more energy, mental focus, better sleep, sex hormones, workouts, and more. Unlike the vast majority of supplements out there with us, you can notice a fillable difference to perform at your peak or you don't have to pay for it. That's what performance herbalism is all about. Get started by going to lost empire herbs.com and take our new quiz to find the right herbs for you.

00:19 Welcome back. We continue the conversation with former economic Hit Man and also shaman, John Perkins. In the first episode, we dove deep into a lot of the problems going on across the world in medicine and beyond that. Now let's start to focus in on what we can do about it and one of the examples in there with Monsanto, which has mentioned a couple of times in your book is in the African country of Mali that Monsanto was working to write their constitution the language so that they could propagate their GMO crops there and make a profit off of doing so. And Monsanto's kind of unanimously known as one of the most evil corporations out there for what they've done across many different things, which is part of the reason why Bayer recently bought them in the Monsanto name is going away. But we can see that once again, it's the same sort of Imperial test sticks that are used in the health field. Is there any difference there between what you've seen and what you experienced in your previous role and what is going on in health?

01:21 Well, I think the analogy is very strong. You know the power that the big pharmaceutical companies like Bayer for example, have is enormous in that field. We know that, but I think the book I just finished writing, which will be out later this year and people can preorder my website or anywhere Amazon or indie books or whatever, touching the Jaguar. I really get into this idea that our reality as human beings is molded by our perceptions. Totally. There is no, the United States, there's no China except as lead proceeded and when enough people except a perception on codified into a lie, it becomes a reality. The same could be said for religion and culture and corporations. In the United Nations, the perception that the world health organization, the perception, the pharmaceutical companies, what's that perception? But you have a bunch of investors that expect their pharmaceutical companies to make big rates of return for them.

02:21 And pharmaceuticals have a reputation for doing that. And so the pharmaceuticals could do that. They're not selling better health, they're selling short term suppression of symptoms because if they were really just selling better health, they'd eventually lose their rates of return and go out of business if they could really make the population more healthy. What they want to do is keep these diseases out there but have a way to alleviate or lessen them to a certain degree. And so there's this perception again that maximizing short term profits, that's only a perception, but that's what drives business today and it's created a reality of a very dangerous world or the world for healthcare is not really healthcare, it's symptom suppression and where the industry is basically consuming itself. And dictation, as I said earlier, but that's all based on this perception of short term profits.

03:16 And I think we're actually moving in a new perception. I feel it very strongly as I travel around the world a lot. As you know Logan speaking at places like it just this last year, the Czech Republic, The Bahamas will follow a lot in America and a couple of years ago Russia tried to all of the United States, many, many different places to many different types of audiences and everywhere I go I find that people are waking up including CEO to the fact that we are creating a monster. There is a death economy, it can't last. It's got to change. And the real question is how do you make it change? And I think the answer is you would get to change our perception of what it means to be successful as a business and as individuals. So it's all about perception and it is changing. You know we've got the whole conscious capital movement, the B corporation benefit corporation movement, the green new deal.

04:10 The top executives from 192 companies came together last August at the business round table and produced a statement saying that they no longer should their goal be to maximize short term profits. It should include taking care of their employees, taking care of their customers, or taking care of the communities where the businesses are located. That's very, very big. They've got to act on that now are we the consumers and investors and workers for the need to force them to commit to doing those things. But they did make the statement, they are creating a new perception and that's very important.

04:43 Yeah. Pachamama Alliance talks about changing the dream of the modern world and recognizing a piece of that is the dream of modern medicine. And in one of your, you kind of have two flavors of both. You have the stuff on the economic Hit Man and the shamanism and in the book shapeshifting talk about shape-shifting institutions and corporations going from the death economy to the life economy or this predatory capitalism to a more democratic capitalism. And I do definitely see that shift going on in there. And you and I both were capitalists, we believe in capitalism. It's just, it can't be this crony capitalism that is going on.

05:24 Yeah. Well, we don't really have capitalism today. We have oligarchies corporate monopolies and oligarchies and we, this is not when people say we're going to get rid of capitalism, what they mean is we get rid of the predatory form of capitalism, which really, in my opinion, is not true capitalism at all. Cause true capitalism is based on the idea that there's a lot of very healthy competition and the system we have now you, you buy out or you somehow you get rid of your competitors

05:54 so when the reason they started this podcast was like the system is very big, I obviously am not going to change it on my own. There's just so much power there. But I can help people that any individual can become sovereign in their own health by making the decision to do so. Then it's a similar sort of thing. A business can choose to maximize long term profits which will actually end up helping people and their customers and all that rather than short term profits. What are some other steps that people can make that will help this shift happen? Not just individually but on a larger scale.

06:31 And that's a large part of the book that touched Jaguar where you, I get into this and it's a fairly complex story and that all of us are different, but each one of us is driven by certain passions that we have and certain skills that we have. I have a passion for writing and hopefully some skills at it. So that's where I really focus my efforts. You have a passion for the health business and for this podcast, so you're focusing on that. Let's say I have a good friend who is a carpenter and he has the passion for building things with his hands, Cochran trait and the way he can move forward with this is to make sure that he uses sustainable materials as possible and lets his customers know that he's doing that and if the price is a little bit more, he can let them know that that's not a cost, it's an investment.

07:19 They're investing in the future. Each one of us needs to really look at what it is we want to do with the rest of our lives. Beginning this afternoon, beginning of tomorrow, what do we want to do? What would make us happiest? Because if we're not doing what makes us happiness, brings us satisfaction, well then we're never going to be prosperous. No matter how much money we have. And we can all contribute in our own way. And I think one of the questions to ask is, okay, I want to do what makes me happiest, but how do I also contribute to this idea of a long term life economy? So yes, I love to write, but now I devote all my writing to writing about things that will lead us toward life, economy, a long term life economy. The carpenter I mentioned can do his carpentry. With that in mind, how does he make these more and more sustainable in using local materials, teachers, parents, whatever you are, it's really important to ask yourself, what is it that I most want to do that will bring me the greatest satisfaction?

08:15 And then you ask what's stopping me? And that's where the idea of touching the Jaguar, which comes out of the Amazon, comes in and we say there's a Jaguar that stands on our path that stops us. So let's just use my example as a writer that may have a Jaguar that stands there and says, I just don't have time to write or I don't have anything to write about. And if I let that Jaguar stop me, then I'm going to be unhappy. But if I go ahead and touch that Jaguar, so the indigenous people say when you have something that stops, shoot, don't run from it. Don't deny it, don't turn your back on it cause it'll follow you. Go to it, touch it and take its energy. So if I go and touch that and say, well actually I do something to write about.

08:56 I have a really interesting story in my background. Everybody has an interesting story. Their background, if they think about it in the right way, and I'll make time, I'll get up half an hour earlier every morning and write for half an hour. If I write for half an hour every day and by the end of the year I've got a lot of pages written and a competent could say, well my client's just not interested in being sustainable. And you could say, well, carpenter is all about building for the future. So I'm going to convince them that building for the future means building for the future, not just the house, you know, next month and next year, but for the future of the children are going to inherit that house or whatever. So we touch that Jaguar, we look at what's stopping us from doing what we most want to do. And then we go to it and we touch it and we accept its energy and we mold our actions in such a way that we create a new reality for ourselves. Again, our perceptions, mold our realities. And so we moved from a reality that I can't do this. There's something holding me back to a reality that, well, yeah, I can do this. I just gotta change my perceptions about how to go about doing it. And then we take the actions necessary to make that happen. So I get up earlier every morning and write, for example

10:08 yup. Definitely done my fair share of that as well.

10:11 Yeah. Or the carpenter, you know, just start by saying, Hey, you know, I'm building this house for you guys and look, you know, look, I love you. I'm using this great wood that doesn’t come from using any old growth trees I'm using. I'm using woods that are very, very sustainably produced, and I just want you to know that the price, it may be a little bit higher, but think of what you're investing in your kids in the future. And just to start talking about that in a very sweet way, not being dogmatic and maybe even telling a story behind the tree and how that all happened.

10:44 I've been reflecting on the word materialism because that word is, speaks to this idea of, especially in the West here, we're just trying to gobble up goods and have five different cars and all that sort of thing. That's like one type of materialism, but it's also the philosophy that we're just our physical bodies and even consciousness is only an epiphenomenon of the brain. That's like philosophy and how these in a way seem to go hand in hand and that this is part of that perception, that dream that is beginning to break are beginning to fall apart. But I think it's interesting is we really need to look at kind of like deep light paradigms of how we think about the world, that if there's no shift there, then overall any small changes we make isn't going to be enough.

11:34 Yeah, well the small changes help, but ultimately what's really gonna matter is that we convince the businesses that we work for or buy from or invest in or even run our own. There has to be a new way of looking at what means and it means long term benefits, not necessarily long longterm profit because it depends on how we define profits, but long term benefits. And so we define people who are successful, that people who appear on the cover of Forbes, let's say, or the Wall Street Journal even are not the people who are making the most profits. They're the people who are making a better world and that better world includes a lot of nonmaterial things like how do we encourage more music and poetry and spirituality and people getting together and enjoying each other and enjoying life and enjoying nature and making nature more available to inner-city children.

12:34 And so there's so many different things. Regenerating, destroyed environments cleaning up pollution, paying people to actually clean up pollution, even paying a company like general dynamics instead of making missiles, make equipment that will mine all the plastic in the oceans and recycle it. So recycling, regenerating, destroying the environment, coming up with whole new technologies that don't use up resources. Yeah, solar and wind are a current example of that, but they're very primitive stages right now I think I'd like to say is 10 years from now that the technologies we have today, we'll look back at and say, how could we have been so stupid? Those are such analog types of technologies. Let's come up with, we'll hopefully we'll come up with much more and better ways to turn a or into energy and there's no reason why we can't do that and so on is, so Logan, I, I'm, I'm tongue-tied that it's, I guess we're excited that the future here is phenomenal.

13:37 The life economy offers us opportunities to do amazing things and we're not talking about going back and living in caves that could happen if we don't move in this direction. But if we do move in this direction, it means that we can enhance our lifestyles tremendously and become much more oriented toward the arts. Spirituality as you put it in that sometimes there's a word that turns certain people off. And by it I don't mean necessarily being more religious, it would be religious for some people, but it could just be a deeper feeling of connection with our families and with the places where we live. That's a deep type of spirituality also. So just feeling more connected. That connection that we've been losing and particularly losing through a lot of modern technology to get it back, to use that technology to bring us into this life economy.

14:31 Another quote or you're talking about in the book is, as you were saying right there, reminded me of it. We're not going back to the case. Well, there are big changes coming in one way. We might go that another way. Hopefully, things get a bit better, but it's not that we're going backward in time, but we quote, we can, in fact, return to the principles upon which pneumonic cultures are based. So some of those principles would be the connection. You're talking about connection to other humans, but connection to nature as well. Kind of sustainability that goes with living that way. What are some of the other principles that kind of, I guess to speak to that, the overall perceptions of people that pneumonic cultures have that we've really lost here in the West?

15:14 Yeah, and I want to start by saying I don't idealize individual people at all. There are very some ones in there are very crazy ones. They're compassionate ones. And there are brutal ones. There are well-balanced ones and there are psychotic ones. They're human like everybody else. What I do respect is in general, the traditional indigenous cultures placed a huge priority and I'm making a better future for the children or at least keeping the same future, not hurting the future. Looking at the long term. And that's something we don't do. We're looking at the short term really. Hey, what the stock market is doing today. You know what the next quarterly report is going to look like, these kinds of things. So I think that idea of taking care of the future, being good stewards, that if you think about it, Logan, we all come from those cultures.

16:07 We figured human beings have been on this planet as we know ourselves for roughly 250,000 years, it's only been doing three or 4,000 that we've moved in this direction away from long-term. And it's been particularly within the last couple of hundred years that we've really jumped that way. And even more so within the last 50 years. And it's a blink in history and we all come from these economies that truly world life economies and the indigenous people, people you visited in the Amazon, the Atwal, the Schwab and all these, these people are still living that way. Pretty much. They're losing it to a certain degree because our systems are coming in and the oral started music coming in and the mining companies are coming in. Cattle ranchers are coming in, but up until very recently they'd been living that way and we all come from ancestors that live that way.

16:59 We need to reconsider how we can live that way. In modern terms, again, not living in caves, but maybe take New York City, for example, get rid of all the highways, tendered them into solar panels in the city, all the streets, all the roads. Get rid of the cars. Can you create solar panels and turn all the garages, put mirrors on them and turn them into hydroponic gardens that can grow great food and also be beautiful places for people to visit and rooftops and so forth. You know, it's, there's so much that we can do. It's almost beyond imagination what the potential is, but we can't imagine it and therefore we can make it happen and I believe that we are in the process of making it happen.

17:40 Yeah, I feel that was one. The reason though, wanting to go to the Amazon is a lot of people say that travel is a great way to get educated and especially I feel like a lot of travel these days is just going from one big city to another and oftentimes cities are really the same. But being able to go to see indigenous culture, that kind of still living at least for the most part in that way really begins to shake the perceptions. I kind of feel with our media and the authorities and everything that we're really, most people get locked into a very specific way of thinking and experiences such as that are good for really shaking out of it and at least getting kind of a fluid worldview where you can begin to open up to new possibilities.

18:25 Yes, in particular, I traveled where you're going with an intent and a commitment to come back and change the world. You know, and I think that the trips that you've taken with me that would make that very clear and you know, people can go to my website, John perkins.org and see how on the trips that we do there, the intent always is to learn. For example, the Mayan people in Guatemala, they went through this, their culture, these huge cities, these huge pyramids, the cities were destroyed. Our calendar year around 900 they just abandoned them, went away because they destroyed their environment, they cut the trees, they drained the swamps, they did exactly what we're doing on our global level. They did it on a microcosm level and they know this. And so they invite us to come so that we can learn from them not to make that same mistake.

19:10 And I like to tell people, you know, don't just get on an airplane and travel to be a tourist. Travel to learn and to make a commitment to come back and spread the word and make changes as are doing by having this program. You know, and I think some of this, your commitment to all this, some of it grew out of some of those trips and those visits and the indigenous people and that's a great way to do it. You know when we travel, we leave a fairly big carbon footprint, but I was at suggested people do a benefit-cost analysis. The cost of you going into the Amazon or going into the Mayan sites is a high-carbon footprint, you know, track temple, a few plants and so on. But if you're going to offset that by coming back and really helping to change the perception of the world, that perception of human beings to change the human reality on this planet, to make a more environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling socially just much a mom Alliance, mission statement, human presence on this planet, then it's worth doing it.

20:10 Absolutely. And it definitely was life-changing for me. And I recommend people look into that for calls to you at all. I forget who was on the trip, but someone put it on his leg. It really was a pilgrimage and you know, not growing up religious or anything, didn't have anything like this in my life before, but that's I guess part of the reason why it was so profound. Right. Well, we're coming right up on the hour here, so I want to thank you very much. John, can you mention your website again? New book. We'll have links to everything in the show notes here, but yeah, anything you want people to be aware of.

20:43 Okay, thanks Logan. I'd love to, it's John Perkins. Dot. It's an org, not a com and there's a little box when you go on there that you can put your email address in and we'll receive the newsletters. I'd really encourage you to do that. That basically comes up once a month and on that I've got a big book tour coming up. Remember speaking at a lot of different cities around the United States. I'd love to meet your listeners and that'll be it. Now it's in the newsletters. Within the next month or two, we'll have all the dates and places set up. So I'd encourage people to do that. Can also please preorder the book touching the Jaguar. You can preorder it now through my website that'll take you to wherever you want to go to order it or in your local bookstore and that helps the book get on the bestseller list, which is great as far as spreading the word, you know, I'm not in this for the money, the books making, I'm donating a fairly decent percentage of the profits to the Pachamama Alliance, but I am in it to get this message out as much as possible.

21:39 So I really appreciate people helping me do that. And also on my website, it a link to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I'm on all of those. Thanks for bringing that up. Yeah, of course. Well, thank you so much John. This has been a pleasure.

It's my pleasure, Logan, and thank you for all you're doing and this is the way we get the word out. Thank you very much. Absolutely. My pleasure.

(00:19): Welcome to the health Southern podcast. It is my great honor to have John Perkins on the call today, and if you're not familiar with John, I want to read this bit from probably his most famous books. Then confessions of an economic Hitman, economic Hitman are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of millions of dollars. They funnel money from the world bank, the US agency for international development and other foreign aid organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. The tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions. During this time of globalization, I should know I was an economic hitman. So John, thank you for joining me today.

(01:13): It's my pleasure or Logan. I'm very pleased to be on this show with you. Thank you.

(01:18): Yes. And I've also had the pleasure of visiting the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador with John as well as Guatemala. And that kind of whole bunch of life changes out of that. And you can read some of the stories from that in my book powered by nature. But what I really want to get to in today's show is to discuss these economic Hitman tools and the various other tools, but also how this imperialism is also going on in our health that much of the same thing is going on. So what I want to start with is this idea of conspiracy theories versus facts. And you mentioned this idea of a couple time throughout your books talking about you don't really believe in a grand conspiracy, but instead, there are hundreds of conspiracies. And I think the definition is a conspiracy is useful, that it's a secret plan by a group to do something illegal or harmful. So a theory on this is just people are doing these things. So do you still have that opinion that it's lots of small conspiracies going on?

(02:18): Yeah, I think I like to call myself kind of a conspiracy factual list. It's not a theory that I deal with kind of the facts. You know, we know that there, there was a conspiracy to cover up the whole idea around weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the word no weapons of mass destruction and yet the seems about a government conspiracy that convinced us that there was, we know there was a conspiracy at one point to overthrow Castro in Cuba under the Kennedy administration. We know there was a lot of different conspiracies and, and you know, perhaps the greatest conspiracy proponent is Trump himself, President Trump, who, who constantly seems to think that there's a conspiracy to overthrow him and not through the due process that just impeachment, but because of the political, so there are a lot of conspiracy things going on, but when people talk about a conspiracy theory or you're just a conspiracy theorist or whatever they, they say, I think they usually, they mean something like the idea of the James Bond, dr no, some overriding power, an individual or a group of individuals building Berks of wherever who sit at the top and control everything.

(03:28): And that's something I just don't buy into. Or a lot of small not always small, but there are a lot of individual conspiracies, but they're not all aimed at the same objective.

(03:37): Right. And you give countless examples in your book and stuff that is public knowledge now, but even though it's public knowledge, like not everyone recognizes it. For instance, back in 1953 the CIA coup that overthrew the democratically elected Iranian prime minister most of the day like and installed the show so that we would have control of oil. Like this is publicly accepted knowledge and I think you said like people across the world, I'll know this, but Americans aren't taught this in the school because everything we do as good, of course

(04:07): We're not taught it, but the CIA has admitted to it. It's on the record, the same with a NDA and chili that our involvement there, Henry Kissinger Segra here, state admitted to our involvement there. So yeah, it's interesting that even though we do admit to a lot of these things, we don't teach them in schools. And it's always interesting to me how our journalists often criticized these events after the fact, but when something new comes up, they buy right into it. They kind of don't take into account the history of what we've done. So you know, just about everybody would admit that we made huge mistakes in Vietnam and there were conspiracies to cover up the truth there that we were losing the war. There's no question that General Westmoreland and others were deceiving the American public. But when we go into Afghanistan or Iraq, the press kind of forgets all the lies that were there were put up before.

(05:01): So when Colin Powell goes before the United Nations and says, there's no question that there are weapons of mass destruction, but the press kind of just buys into that. And that's what's kind of shocking to me. It's terrible how gullible we are and how we don't learn from our own history. And I want to, I want to say low in that I'm a very, very loyal American. My family goes back to the 16 hundreds and on the East coast and fought in the American revolution in every war since up through world war two. And I feel that to be loyal, we really need to look at the mistakes we've made in the past, learn from them and move on. And that's why I write the book because I do because I want to admit to the, you know, the way you solve a problem, first you got a problem and then you can figure out how to solve it. And so I think part of my job in writing books like confessions of an economic Hitman is to expose the problem in my new book that's coming out called touching the Jaguar is all about what to do to solve that problem. But before we can solve a problem, we have to admit that we have a problem and understand it and analyze it.

(06:09): Yeah, and another point that I think is important and something I've been trying to grapple with this, like how much is it conspiracy versus how much is just kind of the systemic effects of such the one, the quotes, I forget which book this was from. I kind of poured through your books in preparation of this, but this EHSM system is fueled by something far more dangerous than a global conspiracy. It is driven by concepts that have become accepted as gospel. What do you mean by that?

(06:36): Well, yeah, and that's a very, very interesting point. Yeah. If we knew there was some grand conspiracy and there was a group of let's say half a dozen or a dozen people sitting at the top conspiring to control the world. If that were the case, it would be relatively, well it shouldn't say it wouldn't be easy to resolve that or to get rid of that group of people, but at least we would have something that we could focus on. The fact of the matter is if there's a systemic problem and to a large degree that can be defined as, as the goal of corporations and therefore those who protect and promote corporations like an economist and economic Hitman and politicians and government officials, that the goal of corporations is to maximize short term profits regardless of the social-environmental costs. And those short term profits primarily go to a few very wealthy individuals.

(07:24): I mean we all can participate in the stock market, but it really benefits, you know, the majority of it benefits a few very rich individuals. And so that's a very systemic idea that if we believe, and if we teach in our business schools, which we do, that the goal of the corporation and the goal of all the systems that support the corporations such as our government, is to maximize short term profits. Then that gives CEOs and government managers the right, you might even say the mandate to do whatever they feel is the best way to create and promote short term profits, including bribing politicians. And they can do that legally by the financing campaigns and by offering politicians lucrative consulting jobs or lobbying jobs when they leave politics, bribing politicians destroying the very resources upon which the long term future their industries depend as we see if they were doing with the oil and coal and a number of other resources and many, many other activities that should be illegal. It shouldn't be part of our economic system, but because this goal is to maximize short term profits they become very powerful tools that corporations and those who support the corporations use

(08:46): Yeah. I think an important part of this, the recognition that things that used to be illegal. If you can consolidate the power and the money in order to buy lobbyists, fund politicians and all that, you can change the laws, which is what they've done. And all sorts of industries across time in order to make things that previously were illegal are now legal. Now you can do more of the same. You can continue that process.

(09:12): Yeah. And you know, the whole campaign financing a deal, you know, the laws that have been passed around allowing corporations to play such a huge role and wealthy individuals to play such a huge role in deciding on who's going to be the next candidate and to finance that and really have a huge impact on our electoral process. And that's been legalized. It didn't use to be, they used to be restrictions on the amount of money that any individual or corporation could contribute. But that's pretty much changed recently.

(09:41): Yeah. So I want to discuss the tools used by economic Hitman and the jackals. You talk about it, it seems to come down to this idea of silver or lead. One of your quotes was that they offer the care of corruption. And then if that does not work, they threaten the stick of KU or assassination. So that's some of the tools. And you were mentioning bribes of which they can be legal or illegal ones. There are threats, false science or you talk about putting together economic models that really they're just pipe dreams. There's rigging elections, sex blackmail, all these different tools that are out there. And one of the things that come across in your book is you talk about how these are smart people, they're learning as they go. So they're flexible with these tools and they're innovating and adapting new tools and getting kind of better at this process all the time. Do you have anything to add to that?

(10:30): Well, it's true. And one of the followup books to confessions with the new confessions of an economic Hitman, I won't really go into in the 12 years between running the original and a follow up, how it really got, it's gotten a lot worse. And you know, today we have many different kinds of economic Hitman, if you will, including corporate agents who will go to different countries and say, well, you know, our corporation wants to build a huge manufacturing plant someplace in the world and we're going to employ a lot of people and Hey, in the Philippines, if you give us these tax breaks and, and let us pay our, our workers a very low fee we'll come here. But on the other hand is Indonesia office is a better deal. We'll go there. And you know, that goes on a very large scale.

(11:21): Now even goes on in cities in the United States. You know, we saw, we've seen companies like Boeing and Mike and Amazon compete. Let's get their cities to compete with each other, to give them more tax breaks, to give them better deals that essentially subsidize these big corporations that really don't need subsidies. No, it's pretty well known that our corporate system and even our politicians and our, and our military are heavily subsidized. Those are basically socialistic institutions, but we're socializing the spenders, the big money makers, and we're not socializing. The rest of us were the, and especially not the people who need it the most.

(12:02): I forget who was saying this, but just the kind of hit me that with the whole big bailout back in 2008 that is really kind of ironic that way back in history, they used to have debt Jubilees you know, they erase all debt, but here they weren't Bailey, not the people, but bailing out the exact institutions, the banks that had created the problem in the first place.

(12:25): Yeah, exactly. And the rest of us paid for our tech to our taxes. Yes, exactly. And you know, I mean here we've got a situation where our statistics also are totally skewed. You know, we know now that there are three individuals in the United States who have as much wealth as half the population, a little bit more than half the population. And so if those three individuals, this next year make a 10% return on their wealth and half the population loses, 3% will still show a gain in the economic growth of about three and a half percent overall, which is ridiculous when you think about it. That shows that our statistics of it, you know, so when president Trump or for that matter, previous presidents, all right say, well we get great economic growth, we're growing at three and a half percent. That really means that the wealthy are getting a lot of money and the middle class and below maybe staying, staying still or even getting a lot worse off. And so our statistics are part of this process of lying, part of this economic Hitman process of selling us a perception that doesn't really reflect the reality of the majority of people.

(13:41): Yeah, GDP is not a very good metric to be tracking as far as the results that it's bringing and we can see a similar sort of thing in health. Like even longevity is probably not a good one. Although the health span would be something much harder to track. We look at just for all of our wealth and everything in the U S compared to other parts in the world, the level of mental conditions and all kinds of unhappiness that's here is much higher than other places in the world.

(14:09): Yes, absolutely.

(14:11): So you mentioned in confessions that when you were writing the book, you wanted to call it conscious of an economic Hitman first. I'm curious why the title change? Was that just a book publisher type thing with other better sell?

(14:24): Well, the idea originally the regional idea, after I stopped being an economic hit man, I started writing the book. I wanted to include the stories of other people who had jobs similar to mine and the jackals or the ones who go in. When the economic hit men fail, that people we call the jackals go in either overthrow governments or assassinate their leaders. Some of the things we talked about a little bit earlier. So I started contacting these people, both the former economic gift man and the jackals, and very quickly I get anonymous phone calls threatening my life and my young daughters, she was about the same age as your daughter is right now, probably around two or thereabouts. And I took these threats very seriously because two of my clients, the president of Ecuador, high mural dos and I've head of state of Panama, Theresa has both been assassinated.

(15:16): All the evidence shows that they were assassinated because they didn't buy into the deal. So I knew what these people could do. And at the same time I was taken out to dinner by the president of stoner Western engineering company and one of the largest and most powerful engineering firms in the world at that time. And I just quit being chief economist at one of his rivals, Charles DMA in it as president takes me out to dinner and he says, you know, we'd like to use your resume. You've got a very good resume. You're a chief economist, you have 50 people working for you. We'd like to use your resume and our proposals. You won't have to do any work for us. Not much. Anyway, just let us use your resume and I'm prepared to write you a check tomorrow morning for half a million dollars. This was in the eighties half a million dollars is worth a bit more than it is today and it's nothing.

(16:02): Don't have that today. And then he says, but just don't write that book. And so suddenly I'm being hit with the same carrot and stick approach that I was, I had been using it on presidents during my 10 years. It's an economic Hitman, you know, and being off of the carrot of this huge bride, basically totally legal, it's a consultant's retainer. It's a totally legal thing for them to do it. That was a very unusually large one, but nonetheless not illegal. And I'm also being offered the sick of the amount of the phone calls. So I took the money and in my own defense I would say that I used that money to go back to the Amazon where I had been a peace Corps volunteer and I formed a nonprofit called dream change. And eventually the Pachamama Alliance. Both organizations you're personally familiar with and working with the indigenous people.

(16:52): And I put, so I put the money that I made not into getting a fancy car and then a house or something like that. It put it into developing this relationship in Ecuador, in the Amazon and Andes and in writing five books on indigenous culture shape shifting the world is as your dream. Five books that I wrote before, confessions of an economic Hitman stone and Webster was fine with me writing those books. In fact, they said it probably wouldn't HAMP their business if it did anything. But then after my contract was Tony Webster expired, I was in the Amazon with a group of people taking them into spend time with some of the indigenous cultures they're learning from the indigenous cultures. Oh nine 11 the famous idle Ivan. And after that I flew to New York and look down into this shit. And at this point I knew I had to write a book about my life.

(17:42): I had to talk about the things I've done that make people very angry around the world. And this time I, that my best protection would be to not tell anybody. I was writing this book, not to interview other people, to just write my own story, which, which I thought of originally as the conscience other than economic Hitman, my own conscience coming into play, but somehow that in that evolve or into the idea of a confession, because as I wrote it, I saw what I was really doing was confessing, so I decided I would write this book, I'd write it totally in secret. I wouldn't contact any of the people. That would be a personal story. It wouldn't include any other stories and once I have it in the hands of an agent, good agent in New York and Houston distributing it to publishers, I figured it would be my insurance policy that anybody who might think that they didn't want my message to get out, the last thing they would want to do and make me a martyr, kill me and that would sell out the copies of the book.

(18:40): Right. Amplify the message. Yes. One of your quotes in there that I think is kind of helpful to understand is I often felt jealous of my employees for their naivety. I had intentionally deceived them and in so doing I had protected them from their own conscious. They did not have to struggle with the moral issues that haunted me. So you were brought into this world and told you're going to be an economic Hitman like we are using the world bank, the IMF in order to put these countries into debt in order to control them. But the people that worked under you, you had a bunch of employees at the time. It was, they thought they were doing good.

(19:20): Yes, exactly. And you know, originally, in the beginning, I also thought I was doing good because we're taught in business school that the way to help developing countries or poor countries is to invest heavily in big infrastructure projects. Get the country to take out huge loans to invest in, in big infrastructure projects that was taught in business school. And the economic models show that that's right. And when you do that, the economy grows. But at the beginning of my career, I thought that was doing the right thing. I'd come out of the Peace Corps and working with the company and I'm making the economies of these countries. But it took me a few years to understand that. Again, those statistics are very stupid like I described before, these three individuals in the United States. But if you, that's true throughout the world. And in fact recently Oxfam concluded that 1% of the world's population has more wealth than 7 billion people, most of the rest of the world.

(20:16): So that 1% is doing really well. It looks as though the whole world economy is doing well. And so I came to understand how skewed these two statistics were in favor of a few wealthy families in those developing countries who benefited from that or electricity production that are ports that are highways because they own the businesses that benefited from those. While the majority of the people were suffering because money was being diverted from education, health care, and other social services to pay off the interest on the debt. So it took a while to get that. And meanwhile in building up the staff. And the mandate I basically had was to produce reports that would create the perception. In fact, I believe the perception to begin with, that when countries put themselves into this deep debt, they would be helping their overall economic growth. But as time went by and I realized that wasn't the case, and in fact, I'd been trained by this woman, Claudine, who I mentioned the book of the beginning, who basically told me that I would be doing these nefarious things, but I still didn't.

(21:22): It still seemed to be within the realm of all the economic models that I've been taught the world bank toted and still does. Instead, that business schools still teach us. But I began to understand this. And once I began to understand that, I realized that in order to keep going at this job, I had to continue to deceive the people who worked for me, that I really didn't want to put them in the position of understanding this. And at that point, I was making a lot of money. I was traveling first class around the world. I'm staying in the best hotels, eating in the finest restaurants, wining and dining with presidents. And I came from a relatively poor teacher's family in New Hampshire, rural New Hampshire, and suddenly I'm living what seems to be the American dream. So even though once they understood the evil nature of what I was doing, I didn't want to understand it.

(22:13): I kept wanting to be in denial. And I think that's a very, very important aspect of all of this, that this, a lot of people out there that may in their hearts know that what they're doing is the wrong thing, but they're in denial about it because it's just too easy. You know, we probably all are anybody who drives a car, we know that we're doing a bad King Bay driving this huge piece of metal around. We weigh, let's say anywhere from a hundred to 250 pounds and we're driving around this piece of equipment. It ways to move us places and we're using a whole lot of petroleum, yet we keep doing it. [inaudible]. You know, that's a very simple case, but in the business world is an awful lot of people that are convinced that they're doing the right thing and they want to convince themselves they're doing the right thing because they're making a lot of money and they think they're living the good life.

(23:03): Right? Another example would be if you pay taxes, which I'm not suggesting anyone stopped doing, but you're funding this kind of corruption that is going on. It's under this kind of corruption and you're fighting it, what I call it, death economy, which is an economic system that's consuming its resources into extinction. But in addition, you know, 51 cents of every tax dollar you pay in the United States goes to in the discretionary budget, goes to the military, goes to supporting killing people. And you know, it's what we call defending ourselves from being killed. But a lot of it has nothing to do with that. We've got military bases and places that are absolutely no threat to us whatsoever, but we're funding that and that's part of why, what funds are our economic growth. It's huge as Eisenhower defined a military industrial complex. So yeah, 51 cents of every dollar that you pay in taxes goes toward the military. And that's a little scary. That's the largest in any country.

(24:05): Yeah. And I think one of the, I guess more insidious aspects that I don't feel like you cover it super well in confessions, but in, I believe hoodwinked had the most on this maybe the secrets of American empire, but this idea of the colonizer posing as altruist, which is definitely happening with the world bank and the economics, but that NGOs, that charity organizations, foundations can actually be part of this whole economic Hitman plan. Can we trust the United Nations when we know that that is used in order to buy votes from other countries? And oftentimes we only follow UN ideas when they sued them because we have veto power often there. Can we trust the world health organization, which is, we can see similar sort of revolving door going on. Can we trust the red cross when we see that with the catastrophe in Haiti that they raised half a billion dollars and built six homes?

(25:02): No, we can't try. I mean it's, and it's a shame because we need these global organizations. We desperately need referees around the whole global economy. And let's face it, we're in a global economy, whether we want to be dependent on China or have this independence in it. And this has come up a lot now with these diseases, influenza crisis in China that, you know, can companies stop being so dependent on China? Well, it's very difficult. These are the two largest world's largest economies in the United States. We're very, very interrelated, interdependent. And that's true with so many countries and places. So we've got this globalized situation. There's no question about it. The question is how do we deal with that? So in a world that is globalized and there's no question that we are, and we may all want to get more local and I want to get more love from, and I promote that that's important.

(25:55): By local trade with local banks, buy organic local foods as much as you can, but to realize that as long as we're going to use these computers and their cell phones and airplanes and so much of the rest of the technology, we're going to be globalized. And that kind of a world, you need referees. You need people to make sure that everybody's playing on a level playing field, that you follow the rules. You know, I got 11 and 12-year-olds Krantz who place shocker. And imagine if you put 22 players, two teams of 11 each on a soccer team PO and you just threw the ball in the middle of the field and there was no referee. Well, what happened? Good Lord. You don't even want to think about what might happen. You know? And that's kind of the way the world is. I mean, that's why we need organizations like the world health organization to monitor these things, to control them.

(26:41): And the United nations, unfortunately they don't work well. Primarily because a few countries and the United States being the prime example, have so much control. So when the United Nations strongly, strongly opposed the United States going into Iraq in the second world war in Iraq under the second Bush administration, Bush ignored it and went ahead anyway. And when the foreign minister of Iran wanted to come to the opening meetings, very important meetings of the United nations this past fall, he wasn't allowed to go to the United nations. That's happened many times. It happened with Olivia. It's happened with other countries. It's terribly absurd to think that the United Nations, and if you walk into that building, there's a plaque that says, we're not part of the United States. We're on independent soil. This soil is owned by all the nations of the world that were built on this building. It's owned by all the nations of the world.

(27:33): That's beautiful. But the fact of the matter is to get to that building, you've got to land in the US airport and you've got to go through US territory to get there. And we don't grant pieces to people. We don't want to. We went to the prime minister, the foreign minister of Iran, just this last fall. So we've really used served the United States has usurped the power of the United Nations and other countries too often do things that are contrary to the spirit of the United Nations and the same is true of the world house organization and I think that's a terrible pity because I believe very strongly that we truly, truly need these organizations, but they need to be independent and everybody including the United States needs to agree that they will follow the rules that are still funny as organization,

(28:19): So we need fair referees, but it's a problem when governments and corporations have the power to basically set who the referees are corrupt. Then we'll be back in the next episode with John Perkins to discuss what can be done about all of this. If you'd like more information, definitely check out all of John's books. There'll be links to those in the show notes. In addition, my book powered by nature, this was inspired by that journey I took with John and others down to the Amazon rainforest. If a special deal when that helps support them as unreinforced as well. You can check that out poweredbynaturebook.Com

00:19 Welcome back. We continue with part two of the interview with Chris Plough. If you missed the previous part, you're going to want to go back and listen to that because you'll hear the story of how Chris Plough ended up with a shotgun in his mouth and went through decades of suicidal cycles. Now we turn our focus more, which we began in that conversation, but towards the things that got him out of this and really changed his life in a dramatic way with four or five psycho technologies. And by that I mean the technology is not in the high tech sense, but tools and methods that can be used to really transform psychology, your mind, your emotions, all aspects of health because they're all linked together. Let's dive right back in. So that was the pivot point and continuing to talk to people, share the story, connect with them was a huge thing. But then I know you've been on a journey of uncovering layers of this and really filling that hole, becoming understanding that you are worthy, right? What other tools or journeys or other things happen along the way? What got you from that turning point to now?

01:31 Yeah, there are a lot, and I think there's going to be a few that are probably very, very useful to your audience in particular. I know we're going to go down those and I'm fascinated too, but I can't go over the full realm. So the first thing I did, and this was back when I was 33 I hit it a very, very deep burnout, and I had made the choice. Part of this was good planning. Part of this was just pure luck, but I made the choice to stop everything that I was doing for a little while, including the company that I was responsible for and to drive an ambulance with two friends from the UK to Mongolia, 10,000 miles. Right. And essentially what I did is I ended up not realizing it. It wasn't conscious, but I use this adventure as a way to completely get out of my patterns in life and in this space of adventure in this time where I was driving 10,000 miles and it took us, you know, a month and a half to do, there was a lot of time of just ass in seat time where you had nothing to do but think and to feel.

02:31 And I began to reconnect with a lot of things in my life. And so the first was that I used in experience, I use this very unlike my normal life experience to create a different space in life and to have a different feeling and to reconnect in a different way. And I continue to do that. Like me, I'd be going on adventures every year and I still continue to because that's one of the ways that I find this opening in life. Another way that I found was, it was just the year after that that I ended up applying and to open the kimono with a Tim Ferris, which was this first very, very deep group get together of incredible people, but everybody was open and everything else and it was where I met many people who are in my friend circle now who have helped me forward, you know, Joey Coleman was there, Jason Gaignard, so on and so forth.

03:18 So I developed a more meaningful and more connected and a more open relationship with people who are also growing who I could learn from. A third was I joined a mastermind where we began to share everything in our lives and so I began to get this habit of sharing more and more like the good and the bad in business, the good and the bad in personal life, the good and the bad and relationships, and that allowed me to become more and more open. Fourth, I really began to go deep into meditation and reflection and awareness so that I became intimately aware of what was actually going on within my mind. What was going on within the body, what was going on with the unconscious? What was I actually feeling? And to be able to have the courage to sit with it as opposed to try to change it.

03:59 And then along those lines, for me, very early on, this must have been back, I think 2011 was when I first began to experiment. I utilized medicines and psychedelics in order to essentially provide an experience where I could gain greater clarity into this being that is Chris Plough. Because there was so much of me that I couldn't even see or I didn't understand or I wasn't in touch with. And I began using that to literally disassemble everything that I had created. That was my ego structure. It was, you know, where I got my confidence from what it was I do, my identity. Everything in life I began to disassemble to understand what is the essential Chris Plough? Who is Chris Plough with all of these things? Who was I born to be? What is my soul? And get down to those levels. And sometimes even on lighter doses just to have conversations with my unconscious and literally talk back and forth.

04:50 I would sit down with a laptop at times literally and type questions and then have answers come back through that. And then finally the just being able to, and especially in the past two years for me essentially putting all of these tools together, the adventure, the relationships, the very, very clear communication with others, the psychedelics and the medicine, the meditation and having them all coalesce into my life in a way where I felt this insane and intense, beautiful soul healing and then especially in the last year, began to put that forth to help other people and found that all of these things that I've been through in life, the good, the bad, the otherwise all these tools I had learned for self-understanding, recognition and becoming a realized actualized person that I could apply them to help other people. So they had a purpose and meaning outside of me.

05:42 That's a long answer to a question that you asked, but that's the path. Like that's the path of putting all of these together. And for me, all of them are just as valid. Right. You know, some people choose to embrace psychedelics, some don't. Some choose to embrace meditation, some don't. Some choose to embrace relationships. I think most people, I think that's a really core one that you can't really, really go without in this particular lifetime, but you could also be among those who chooses to go up the mountain, have a just a relationship with self. So I guess that one is optional as well, right? Or nature or nature with God or whatever else. So there is a relationship there, but I needed all of them to see the whole of me and all of them have been integral to getting to where I am now.

06:23 So you've mentioned you kind of started with this stuff around 33 then you have that conversation with your friend at 39 which kind of shines new light. Do you feel that you would not have been does obviously like the first time you did psychedelics or the first time you tried meditation, it's not like, Oh, I'm no longer suicidal. That was it. Mostly longterm journeys, long term process. And a lot of people are kind of looking for the like one thing that changes everything. I often like after a psychedelic journey it's like everything's different but nothing is different and it can be very interesting. But so my question is do you feel all that work was kind of leading up in your saying, even in the mastermind, the business groups and whatnot, like you were sharing more than previously you had, even if it was just business stuff. And that kinda got you in the position to really have this conversation that happened with your friend. Would you say that's accurate?

07:20 Yeah, 100% and the, I was fortunate that the mastermind I was in was also when we're like every aspect of life was looked at. So I would share in business, but we'd share on the personal side would share on the relationship side. And you know I was sharing to a substantial depth, but I wasn't sharing the things that were scariest to me yet and it just wasn't ready.

07:41 Yeah. I have to ask now. Like you've had lots of these conversations, you've gone very deep. You really opened up in many different ways. I'm sure there's still, is there still things that you're scared of talking about things you haven't got

07:55 Sharing less the of talking. But so now it's, it's the point of, of being in doing so I've essentially literally disassembled myself to the point and reassembled myself from a point of I believe that I understand my soul. I believe that I understand my being right. And in the past three years of this journey, especially, it felt like I've been a Caterpillar in a Chrysalis and everything's been dissolving and everything's been reforming. And I'm at the point now where it's like the butterfly needing to re-emerge from that cocoon. And so the thing that I find fearful, I think there's always things that we find fearful. It's just part of the human experience. It's not the conversations and it's not seeing or understanding myself now. It's like expressing myself and being seen in this completely unarmored in this completely Chris' Plough in the completely me way in the world, right?

08:47 Like that is something that both literally excites me to my core and like quakes me to my core. And so yeah, that's the leading edge of my own development is this expression and being essentially. So rather than thinking about it rather than wondering about it rather than searching for it, et cetera. Like I know me and now I just have to be me and Oh dude, what an incredible time. But I'll tell you like there are times that even that can be overwhelming and I need to sit back and do some care for myself because it feels scary as well.

09:21 Yeah. When you're growing then the things that you used to fear, you can handle those but then you come across new things, right?

09:30 Yeah. And you find more ease with it over time. Like it's, so this is happening faster and faster and faster with me because I'm able to lean in each day. And then once you get used to some of these tools, like I would depend heavily on psychedelics to get to a point of connection with self because it was the only way I knew how to get there. But over time, you know, between developing the neuro pathways and understanding the path there and everything else. Like I found ways back just through meditation and I have meditations that take me into that very similar state, even to the point where my visual field can begin to be affected in an almost psychedelic way just for meditation. Right? Or the moments that I wake up in the morning and that little brief few seconds or minutes from when I awakened to when the mind is like fully, there is this beautiful space.

10:13 And so I've essentially created a life where I have just a lot of at bats. So rather than I'll journey, you know, once a week or once a month, there are all these different things that I would do overtime. Like I get to do this daily now. And so in this daily practice, I get to make progress daily and I get to face these things daily and I get to care for myself daily and I get to feel connected daily and it moves faster and faster. And I've learned that each time I do this, that even though in the moment it feels so scary, it almost feels life or death at times that just on the other edge of that is this enormous relief. And so begin to train the nervous system to look forward to that relief as opposed to being afraid of this moment right now.

10:56 Right. There's a quote out there that I love that is like this too shall pass. Whether you're feeling great or you're feeling in danger or you're feeling sad or whatever else, like it will pass, it'll come through and I just remember that. And so then it allows me to stay with it. But, but along there, the thing that's shifted for me, and I know I'm going on a little of a tangent, but I think this is a really, really important note is because I was so highly driven before, like I would push myself to do things when I went to, you know, jump off cliffs in New Zealand or do bungee jumping or whatever. Like I would literally just force like it was like pushing my body like we are not going to stop. We're going to do this. And now I've come to a place that's very different where I don't force things, I rarely, rarely force things anymore. And I have this immense love and compassion for myself and that means that I'm actually caring for myself in the process of doing these things and at the internal emotional very raw me feels more cared for. And so it's more willing to lean into these things. And that shift from aggressively pushing or driving to compassionately supporting and still stepping forward has huge impacts on how I feel about myself and how I get to interact with other people.

12:14 And you mentioned you had these several different tools, the meditation relationship with other people, psychedelic adventure. Did I miss one there?

12:23 Is there one more? I was literally doing that inflow, so I've got to think for a second adventure. Psychedelics relationships with others. I think just do you have general relationships and then you also have like those people that you sit down and have the most core deep conversations with who are willing to illuminate your blind spots and deep self-connection whether that's for some people it's meditation, some people it's walking is like some people's journaling, like whatever that deep connection is for you just to be able to do that fun.

12:52 So I want to point this out for other people as you were saying, these tools, they work great for some people, not for everyone and the mix of tools, but I think that's a very good key thing is one you had to like try out a lot of stuff. I mean you could probably list 20 things that didn't really work well for you. Right? So there's so many opportunities, healing methods, different self-awareness methods out there to try a bunch of things, find the mix that works for you because no one thing is a magic bullet, although there can be those magical times in life. There is, it's really a lot of stuff. And as you were saying before, and one of the things I wanted to drill into on this is with these tools, what specifically, in what way did they help you? You're mentioning that that connection to self really came from the psychedelics, but now you can really get there similarly just in meditation, but for people that may be interested in pursuing one of these paths, what do you feel are the strengths of the different tools that you've used?

13:51 Hmm. So like the whole like just go to someplace that's outside of your normal environment, whether that's an adventure or travel or whatever else, just it's, it's so easily accessible. You can jump in your car now and if you're listening to the weekend, if you have a job and everything else, you can literally just take a weekend road trip and that is enough to get you out of the space that you're normally in and it's just so easily accessible. Right. So accessibility for that and accessibility, it's completely legal. Great. when you think about relationships and everything else, I just, we're human. We're wired for connection and so we want those relationships anyways. And I think that no matter who you are, and I know this in my life going forward as well, I'm going to stumble. I'm going to fall. There are going to be times when the support of others is going to be helpful and me continuing forward and there's going to be times when the people I'm with stumble and fall and I get to help them forward. I think that that is incredible to begin to create now because longer-term efficacy on this path, I believe that it's one of the better, better think. It's one of the best investments that you can make,

14:52 Right? And very important for health. Just like physical health too. I mean studies showing that the, the social relations we have is probably more, you could eat the worst diet. If you have a really good social circle, you're better off then vice versa. Not, not important. Hopefully get a social circle that once you improve that along with you as well. But yeah, I think that's, and as you were saying, it's a long term thing. You got to play the long game with all this stuff, right?

15:16 100% Oh, when we get into psychedelics and medicine the beauty of it is, it was really helpful for me is it showed me a place that I didn't know existed and it did. So without having to have incredible skill, right? I can get there through meditation now, but it would've taken me a long time, potentially even years to develop that skill in which cases, a lot of times I could have fallen off the bandwagon or lost faith or whatever else, right? So the fact that it can take you to a place of understanding self or a place of feeling more oneness or a place of feeling full or just a place of honesty and it can take you there and you need no skill in order to do so, you just have to, to go with the experience and hopefully be supported by somebody who's loving and caring around you to make sure you're okay. That is insanely good about it. The one bit of advice I always give to people is though medicine is beautiful and very useful and always optional. Like it is literally just showing you something that exists within you and has always existed within you and so the medicine is never necessary but it can be helpful.

16:14 It's a quick path, quick rep there and with some potential danger on the dark side, so you have to be careful with it. Absolutely

16:22 Do be careful. Rick respected like there was an incredible reverence that I have for it and a sacredness that I hold for it. The meditation and the path to understanding self and really going down that route is I think ultimately for me has been the best kind of long-term game that I could play, but it took a while to develop these skills and it took a while to find the types of meditations that actually worked for me. It took a while to understand that I had this toolkit of meditations or this toolkit of mindset things that I could do and each one helps me in a slightly different way and I've learned how to apply them when I have the need. Sometimes I just need to feel loved and connected. Sometimes I need to be very present with the body. Sometimes I need to literally just release myself to go into more of a theta or even gamma state.

17:04 And in there just experience this fullness in this oneness and this connection outside of myself that is intensely healing. Right? And so what I also love about it is that it can never be taken away. It's completely illegal. And even if I am locked and strapped down in a gurney and hospital bed in the middle of some insane asylum, which I don't believe will ever happen, but just to say that is, it's accessible to me no matter what at all times in all places and all reasons. And so I carry it with me and that brings me an incredible sense of safety and peace, knowing that that is always with me. And then, you know, just the willingness to have deep conversations with other people. I think that's just an incredible skill, right? It's a gift to be able to constructively and lovingly and compassionately show somebody something that they need to see in order to have a better life and to be willing to receive that same thing you know, and have, that is just a beautiful skill because it's not done out of criticism.

18:02 It's not done out of tearing people down. It's not done out of a being attacked, right? They ALS, it's done in the most kind, compassionate, caring way so that we can all go forward. And where I think this leads into, if I just go one more step forward is in the past year I spent a lot of time really sitting down because I realized that come to this like sense of wholeness within me that was deeper than I could imagine before. And I began to wonder, ponder this question. It's like, great, I'm here and I love me now. I love me. What an awesome thing. And I was like, but what do I love more than me? Like what is it like? Is there anything that I love more than me? And if it can be surprisingly a long time to think of anything that I loved more than me, which may sound a little self-centered, but you know, like there's a real years

18:44 Without loving you. You needed to bask in that glow for a little while.

18:47 Yeah. Do it 100%. And I think that we are wired this way. There's nothing wrong with loving yourself, but the one thing that I came down to, I love more than me was us like, that's the only word that I can think of. But I mean, us as humanity, I mean, us as my friends, I mean us as those who choose to step forward and explore and grow. I mean, us in all of those ways, all conscious beings combined together, not singularly, but us being together is the one thing that I love more than me. And then that brought additional meaning to my life to go great. Then the purpose of my life is also then beyond me, which was insanely helpful because there are times when I get tired, there are times and I get worn out. There are times and I'm like, ah, can we just stop growing? Can I just watch Netflix for a week? You know? And there are times when I feel really worn out and if it's just for me that I'm willing to take a break for awhile, it's just for me that I'm willing to sometimes be lazy, you know? But if I really consider that this journey is for us and man, I'm on this and I'm in and that really helped me as well.

19:59 And the more I think about it, the more I see the interconnections between these different tools and methods. For example, going on adventure because you're broken out of your normal routine and habits that's going to facilitate being able to go deeper into conversation. Right? And even, you know, sometimes it's easier to have a deep conversation with a stranger or someone you just met, someone you know intimately for whatever reason

20:24 You elucidated that just perfectly. And thank you for sharing that. I, yeah, thank you for that. I think another thing with it is it begins to train you to embrace change, right? Because essentially at the end of all of this, like what the ego and what the unconscious and everything else is, is most scared of. Even when you're in these darkest places, it's scared of change because even in these darkest places, at least it's predictable and at least a sense of the sameness and a sense of safety with it. And the biggest things that I experienced where it would be that adrenaline dump are when that internal part of me, that emotional part of me feels like it's everything is going to change and everything is out of control. And then because of what I experienced previously in life, it's expecting the worst. Right? And so to be able to embrace change and see in life have like real experiences that begin to inform and change that wiring to go.

21:15 A change isn't that bad. And B, often when change happens, the better comes, right? Yeah. Sometimes it can be difficult. Sometimes some bad stuff happens as well, but more often I've been blessed with more. I did this thing called a life scroll last year and I wrote every experience that I can remember for all 43 years of my life at that time, 42 but I continue at each year and here's the places I lived. Here's the emotions I remember feeling here. Some key moments happen. But I also went through and wrote down like the hurts and the blessings like the hurts where the things that just hurt me more than anything. Blessings, you know, blessed be more than anything and both effected my life very, very dramatically. And there's more to this now. But for the one part that I'll share at this moment I think it is helpful.

21:55 When I finally went down and listed all the hurts versus blessings I had at that point 47 hurts in my life. And I had, I believe I might be a little off in this number, 137 blessings. And so they're literally three times as many blessings. Right? And to see that brought a deeper awareness, that change, cause these were all change-makers within my life. That change was three times as likely to be positive as it was negative. And that began to allow me to more consciously rewire my operating system and my neurology and my nervous system to expect the positive even while preparing for something that may not be positive and how many of those hurts became blessings do so. Thank you. I will go full in. Like I sat down with each one, you know, the first was I sat down with whiz, my father, a biological natural father, choosing not to be in my life.

22:44 And as I wrote about it, wrote about and wrote about, wrote about it, like I got to the end of it and I was like, Oh crap. I'm like, this was actually a blessing. It was a blessing. And I felt it not just intellectually cause there's an intellectual knowing there's a deep body knowing I was like, this is a blessing. And so I literally wrote about every, all 47 of those hurts. And without forcing it, without expecting it to turn one way or the other, every single one of them became a blessing. And I just realized I've been, that at that point had, you know, over 200 blessings in my life. Some of them happened to be a little painful, some of them have to be a little pleasurable, but that was the only difference. Every one of them was crucial to me. Being here, every one of them led to a better place in life. Every one of them I was insanely grateful for. And that further shifted how I look at life as well and has been insane. I can feel it in my chest right now as we're talking. Like I feel this expansion happening even in talking about this like deeply, deeply rewarding [inaudible]

23:46 Of the psychedelics. There's a wide range out there and I know you have some experience across a good many of those different ones, just like these tools we've been talking about, meditation versus psychedelics versus conversations, all of this, they seem to have like a kind of sweet spot where they help the most and they all tend to bring awareness of self and some different things like these, especially if used in that manner. But could you pinpoint maybe like a few of the ones you've used most had best success with for yourself as well as other people? Hands down. The one that I've had the most experience with and the one I just

24:21 Had the most access to and I develop the most trust with was siliciden. Psilocybin is the one I found two things. One is that it showed me the truth and allowed me to connect to my unconscious and to see reality more clearly outside of the lens that was allowing to fog things up. But then it also brought pleasurable experiences. One of my first experiences with it, I was, I didn't know anybody who did these things, so I had to teach myself. So I was playing with very small doses. One of my first decent experiences, I sat down to watch being Elmo on Netflix and it's this guy who like spent his whole life puppeteering everything else and got to become Elmo. The beautiful thing about the stories, you get to see somebody doing the thing they love and bringing joy to the world and everything else.

25:03 And I just remember feeling so full of joy for this person and so full of love and everything else. And that was a formative experience with that medicine because it brought all those feelings into my life in such a deep, visceral way. So very, very helpful for that end because depending on your dosage level, you can have very different experiences. And for me, hands down the most impactful and the most trusted LSD I had some experiences with, it doesn't feel as comfortable to me. It feels digital. And so it's not a favorite, but it has brought truth in just lifting the veil without bias is what it feels like. It's like, it's like amplifying me versus putting me into contact with some other type of intelligence. MDMA is, and people should look up studies on this. Incredible for what it can do for releasing trauma.

25:56 It is incredible, like the effect it's had with people with PTSD and long term trauma over the course of one or two therapeutic sessions. Doing a, you know, with therapy, with a therapist in this guided place is incredible. And I'm gonna get this statistic wrong, so please people look it up for yourself. But it's something like, you know, 80% of people treated saw a reversal, their PTSD symptoms permanently in one to two sessions. Like it is that dramatic in that powerful. And then there are others out there. You've got st Pedro on the cactus, you've got the eye Evine I've had some experience with that, but I'm actually going to have a deeper experience later this year traveling to a place where it's legal to do it. That's another little note I'll put on this is, you know, there's questionable legality on these things and I just warn people to please be careful.

26:46 I personally believe that it is a God-given, right? Whatever you believe God is, it doesn't matter to me. Like I believe it is wholeness and oneness, but it's a birthright. We'll use that word to have a direct and loving and understanding connection with our own consciousness. And so that's the way I see these things. As it becomes more and more public, I've chosen then to ensure that I am always on the right side of the law so that I can talk about these things openly, cleanly and clearly and know that I'm not in danger of being incarcerated. But as you're exploring, please be careful yourself because in some places these are legal. In some places, they're not. They are becoming more and more legal even in the US and so I would encourage you to explore the places where they are so you can truly explore without the fear of repercussions.

27:30 And then a five Emil five MEO, which is the toad and is the most powerful psychedelic that there is. I've had an interesting relationship with that one where my first experience with it, I was very locked in and the ego and myself were very afraid and terrified of going and I was actually administered twice the, the normal blast off white off a out dose in total and refuse to go. And instead of like going off to, you know, explore another universe or another reality or another dimension. I literally went into every cell of my body. But I also found that insanely healing and insanely comforting. And so I, the reason I share that is just to say just because one person has had an experience on one of these medicines does not mean you're going to have the same experience. There are so, so dependent upon your mindset.

28:18 They're so dependent on your view of the world. They're so dependent on your setting. They're so, you know, set and setting is what you'll hear over and over again. They're dependent upon your biology, that dependent upon your diet, they're dependent upon all of these things. So the willingness to do this in a place where you feel absolutely safe and cared for and the place when you're in a good mindset and you're, you know, know that you're going to be okay. And the ability to release expectations that just because Joe had this experience or Chris had this experience does not mean that I'm going to have this experience and instead I'm willing to allow this to take me to where I need to go to best heal will serve you very, very well.

28:57 Yeah, I'd say I did notice everything you said there. I think that's right on. Definitely check in to the legality. It is wonderful that we're kind of going into a new psychedelic Renaissance and if you just looked like there's some 30, 40 different universities that are doing research on these for a wide range of things like you, Chris siliciden has been my go-to. The main one I have received tremendous benefit from. I've found it really good to like handle addiction as well. And there's some research on that and in doing, yeah. I also want to say, you know, find someone that is skilled in administering this, whether that is a therapist or like a showman and you can also do self-directed, but be very, very careful with that. And I have done that and also burned myself doing that. You do very much want to be careful. But I think because it is such a helpful tool for so many people, I am happy to see that more research is being done. More people are understanding this and it's a subject we'll be covering more in future episodes of this podcast.

30:04 Beautiful. And as I, like I, most of my stuff was all self directed in the beginning because I didn't know anybody else. And quite honestly at the point I was, I didn't trust anybody else.

30:12 Well the legality also makes that harder and kind of forces it on.

30:16 Yeah. And so just be really careful with that though. The last thing I'll say on it, and this is a personal point of view, if you're listening, you do not have to accept this. I always believe this with my points of view. I'll share them, but it's all completely onto use where you take them on. But I believe we are entering this new psychedelic Renaissance and I believe that in doing that, each of us has some responsibility to be very responsible with these so that they aren't used in ways that lead towards them being completely cracked down upon and completely made illegal again. And we have to wait 2030 40 50 years before we get this chance again. So be careful with them and use them with, with respect and, and the sacredness that I believe that they weren't and use them carefully. And the other point about this is it's an incredible expense.

31:03 So what are you going into this adventure? Or you've had a life-changing event. Like I lost my parents at a point in my life and that was a life-changing event. Or you go on a psychedelic journey, you have that life-changing event. All of these things essentially break this moment of awareness and this openness to you and you, you get all of these insights and everything else. But I'll be brutally honest with you, you don't get any gains until they've been integrated into your life. It's like having a beautiful dream and a lot of inspiration. But all of the gains are made during integration. So to make sure you take the time to not just great, I get to go on another journey and then a few days or a week or a month or whatever else to like process and you know, understand the lesson and integrate it and make some shifts in the patterns in your life and everything else so that you're ready for the next one.

31:48 And quite honestly, I know, you know, some people go like full into this and I have, so I'm completely preaching from a point of having been there where it's like, okay great. Every week we're doing this. Every week we're going to run through this. Again, I'm a driven person, so are many people listening to this level up faster, level up faster, that's completely unnecessary in most cases and counterproductive like at the most, I would imagine, you know, once a month. And you know, even towards me if now like exploring and doing this in other places completely legally and everything else, man, once a quarter at the most, and I'm trending towards maybe once a year. But again, I'm using these other tools to get daily insights and so I continue to move forward and so again, just know that they don't have to be done all the time and like you really make all your gains during integration and please be responsible both because I love and care and I want you to be well and because I want humanity to continue to have access to these tools for as long as possible.

32:51 Right? Yeah. And I feel that's another reason why you need multiple tools in your toolbox, right? The meditation, journaling a bunch of different things, relationships with people and communication. Those are tools that are then going to help you ground out inexperienced like this. And it doesn't just have to be psychedelic. Same thing if you go on some wild, crazy adventure, right? You need to ground that into your experience in order for there to be lasting change. As I said before, sometimes it feels like everything's different, but then you get back to your life, you get back to your normal routine and nothing is different. It is grounding practice that allows you to take those, the theorial things, what those wild thoughts, those embodied experiences, those state changes, the different things that occur and be able to really bring them forward in your life.

33:39 Well, well said and along the way try to remember to have a little bit of fun as well, right? Like this experience of life I believe is meant to be joyful even though we often have suffering in it and I know that I have a propensity to get very serious with these days and okay, I'm going to do this work. I find the joy in it as well and allow it to be light and allow yourself to laugh at yourself and the silliness of it all and I think that that's going to make the journey a lot more fun as well. I don't think, I know from experience it's going to make the journey a lot more fun.

34:10 Maybe it will be led in on the cosmic joke. The cosmic joke is we're here. All right Chris, this has been an absolute blast. We've actually gone a little bit over an hour. Any final thoughts or anywhere you want people to head to, to check out more information? I know you've got a book coming down the pipeline though. That may be a way out. Yeah. What do you want people to know?

34:35 Yeah, so I'll be brutally honest. I'm just beginning to kind of come out into public about a lot of these things. So if you want to like reach out to me or see some stuff, I'm doing Chris, Plough.com. It's very much unformed. But it will continue to be formed throughout this year. I'm writing a book about the story and the process I found out of suicide and depression in order to help people with that path that will be released this year. And more than anything, please just be safe, be kind, be caring with yourself, be compassionate with others as much as you're able to and grow Explorer experience. My hope in this world for me is that I get to be me as much as possible. Chris Plough gets to Chris, Plough his little butt off and just enjoy Chris Ploughing around this world and for each person I want them to do the exact thing. I want you to be you and to you like the action of being you as much as you want in this world and to have that freedom and that's my wish for you. Excellent.

35:30 Well thank you so much Chris. I'm sure this podcast will help some people and if you've been listening and really enjoyed this, spread it, reach out to Chris

35:38 Reached out to me and let us know. Thank you for listening. Thank you. At Lost Empire Herbs, we guarantee our herbs will change your life or your money back, more energy, mental focus, better sleep, sex hormones, workouts and more. Unlike the vast majority of supplements out there with us, you can notice a feelable difference to perform at your peak where you don't have to pay for it. That's what performance herbalism is all about. Get started by going to lostempireherbs.com and take our new quiz to find the right herbs for you.

00:18 Welcome everyone. We're here again at the health sovereign podcast and today should be a very interesting, a little bit different of an interview. We're going to dive right in, diving deep today on the line and I have with me my good friend Chris Plough. And as I said, diving deep. So Chris

00:38 Shotgun in your mouth. How did you get to this point? Well, so for context I'll give just a little bit of the story and then we'll think we'll go from there. Like so I think there's a variety of reasons that we end up in a place. And I know for me it was all these wounds around abandonment, around worth specifically my natural father and my mom had an incident early in life that really affected my nervous system, made me really fear, anger, maybe fear and my own worth. Like, like what did I do to deserve this? And later on, he chose not to be in my life. And this is really early age. This is all before two years old. And so like then it was again, further like rejection, abandonment, et cetera. And then, you know, where his kids' irrational stuff happens. And so when my mom got with my stepfather like there was a rational anger and fear around why would she choose somebody else over me?

01:35 Right? And so all these things got coalesced and I had a pattern in my life where when I felt deeply, deeply rejected, especially by woman it would send me into the spiral that I didn't understand. And so I had felt so deeply wounded by the rejection of a woman and felt completely worthless, couldn't feel my own worth, and just spiraled completely out of control. And so I found myself driving out into the middle of the desert when I was 16, and I drove out through the dirt roads in New Mexico and there was this unofficial landfill that people would drop stuff off at. And I drove up into an and pulled up next to a Hill. And I had a, a boombox next to me and I was, I was playing amazing by Aerosmith. It's an incredible song that actually means something very different to me now.

02:22 But I was playing, it slid over into the passenger side of the truck after I parked and I did, I pulled a shotgun, my parents shocked him that I had stolen out of their gun cabinet. And I put the barrel in my mouth and I took my right hand and I went down and flipped off the safety and I took my right thumb and I put it on the trigger. And I had every intention of ending my life at that moment because I couldn't see a life worth living. I couldn't feel my own worth. And I hurt so badly. I just wanted to attend. And for whatever reason, to the depth of my soul, I wanted, well apparently not to the depth of my soul, but to the depth of it, this physical being, I wanted to pull that trigger and I, I couldn't.

03:05 And I still remember to this day like, that tastes like oily pennies. That's the taste. And I couldn't. And then I pulled it out after being there for, I don't even know how long. And I felt even more worthless because not only was I a failure with all these other things in life, but I couldn't even do this. Like I, I couldn't even do this simple act. And then I drove back, entered the house. My mom and dad happened to be sitting at the table and they were like crazily concerned with where I was, what was going on, et cetera. Cause they, nobody knew. And I dropped the shotgun shell that had pulled out of the gun on the table and then we began to talk a little bit. So that was 16 years ago and I didn't have peace with that until I was 39 to begin to like the path out. And I didn't really feel peaceful with it until 41. So for nearly 25 years of my life, it was this cycle of depression and suicide. And I felt caught in that cycle and never really thought I would get out.

04:08 Hmm. I was just looking before the show. And suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the USA. That's, that's a lot. I mean we're, so we're talking about healthier and so many people focus on the physical right and not getting heart disease and Alzheimer's or cancer. And obviously, that's very important. But since starting the show I wanted to cover really all perspectives and health and obviously the mental and emotional is such a huge part of that.

04:38 Well take their own life, not to drop it more like it's fucking fascinating. Like more people, excuse my language, I don't even know how language goes on on your show.

04:47 Let it roll. And it will find, I think we can just throw an explicit marker on this.

04:53 Like more people take their own life than have their lives taken. It's like what a time to live in. It is a time of prosperity and abundance, but it's one in which people feel so incredibly lost. And I, I know and understand that feeling

05:07 Well. And especially when we look at them, I mean the irony is in the USA, right? Which should be, everyone's better off than other places in the world materially. Right? But we have such problems and I never got close to suicide myself, but I think like all people, I definitely did imagine like, Oh, I thought about it as an option. I never went far as planning or anything like that, but it certainly was on the table. So yeah, the, it's, it's so important to, if it's the 10th leading cause of death, we definitely need to address this. So in sharing the story, there is obvious, I think you did well as far as explaining how you felt at that time, but also why it was that way after many years of reflection and working on this.

05:52 Yeah, I think number one is often we're just in these cycles where we don't really understand why we have these behaviors and these feelings, right. And especially when they're overwhelming and all we can do is feel this incredible thing that for me, it's a feeling in the bones that are number. And it continued for many years afterward because sometimes I would get home and I would like pull into my house after being out with a bunch of friends or, or at a party or even, you know, something that was supposedly a successful fulfilling event in life. And I would feel so deeply alone and I would feel it in my bones and then my stomach would drop. And I knew what that meant. It was that similar cycle. And so my way of dealing with, for decades was I would force myself to sleep because I knew that if I could sleep and wake up in the morning, there'd be sunlight.

06:40 And in that sunlight I'd feel a little bit better. And I'd find a way to just keep going and make it through another day. And I don't think anybody deserves to be there, man. Like, like truly. And there's an incredible number of causes. Like, I've worked with people who have PTSD. I've worked with people who you know, feel worthless and unloved themselves. I worked with people who do a variety of reasons. They feel like they're a failure because they're not living the life that they believe that they're supposed to based off of their parents or the society or their culture or whatever else. Hell, some people are just like literally just exhausted from trying to make ends meet, work, you know, working multiple jobs and just feel in this prison of financial lack for, for lack of a better term. There's an incredible number of reasons that we ended up in that place. But I think the places are the same. And so what's important is how can we begin to move out of that place?

07:30 So you mentioned that you had this time when you were 16 years old and for another 16 or so years longer in that you went through these cycles. I'm curious that you come close to it ever again or did just sleeping on it seem to put away and

07:47 Yeah, there's a key moment. If it works for y'all, I'll share it now. Is that okay? So yeah, it continued on for actually 23 more years. That's like in the depth of it. And I was at an event, this was in January, right before my 39th birthday. And at this point it began to change instead of getting to that same depth where I'm just like, I want to end it and everything else, I literally just got to a point where I wanted not to live. I didn't want to live cause living was painful …like living, it was like this endurance challenge in this pain that I was enduring day to day and age was just wearing me down and grading me down and I was just, I was done. I didn't want to kill myself but I didn't want to live. And I found that at that time I happened to be at this event and I decided on my 39th birthday, I'm going to do it.

08:42 I'm finally just going to do it and do it for real. And I knew exactly how I was gonna do it and plan it out. I knew where it was going to go and it was just there. And in the process of this, I began to have a bit of an emotional breakdown. Unfortunately, I happened to be at this event and happened to be around friends and it happened to be rooming with a very dear friend of mine and I never really said that this is what I was going through. But lo and behold, sometimes the universe works in interesting ways. He knew what that was like and I'm not going to share his name just because I haven't really asked his permission to do that yet, but we were rooming together and one evening he told me a story and he shared his story so deeply of what he'd been through and where he was.

09:24 Now that I knew that he understood he was the first person I really had a conversation with where I fucking knew that he understood and then he told me what his life was like now. And what do you describe about his life? About, you know, yeah. Every once in awhile this darkness comes, but it's not the same as before. And rather than living in it day to day or week to week or a month, a month, like maybe every few years, it comes around and it's less and less each time. And, and it's not the same darkness. It's just a thing that you come in. It's like a, it's a little shadow of a cloud that passes and, and life is good. And I could not imagine that because I'm at that point for 23 years, have lived in this place and couldn't imagine a place out of it, but because of the depth of his story, because I could see his eyes because I knew that he knew what I felt like, and he was a living example of what was on the other side.

10:16 I decided to trust, decided to have a bit of faith and faith for me is a weird word, but I don't think there's anything better than that because it's essentially a belief in something that I'd never have had actual proof of myself in my own life. And so rather than going to my life on my 39th birthday, I made a very different decision. And the first part of that was precipitated by the fact that this gentleman sat me down and looked me in the eyes and said, I want you to have a list and I want to be the first person on your list. And whenever you get to this place, I don't care when it is, I don't care what time it is. I don't care what's going on, you're going to call me. And of course, people have said things like that before, but it was the first time like really reached into my soul and I felt it.

11:00 And my integrity is so strong that like, okay, if I promise that I'm going to do it, even though it's the last thing in the world that I want to do. And so he ended up being the first person on my list. And then the decision I made was I'm going to go around and I'm going to talk to everybody close to me and I'm going to share what I had been experiencing for the last, you know, two and a half decades. And the first person was my grandmother. And so rather than going today in my life, my birthday, I went and drove up to my grandmother and I surprised her. She didn't know it was coming and I sat down with her and my hand and I shared exactly what I'd been going through for the last part of my life. And it was such a release in shame.

11:36 Like I really, I didn't realize there was so much darkness and so much shame there in doing that. I told her the story of this friend who had helped me. And you know, I mentioned the list and I didn't think anything of it and it always gets me, she demanded to be on that list, like demanded. It wasn't even an ask. And then every person I went to thereafter, it was the exact same story and it was easier to tell each time and the shame was less each time. And I realized more and more people, as I began to share this, they began to share that they had gone through similar things and like I didn't feel alone anymore. And then this list grew and then by the end of it I had this list of like 11 people, 11 people who felt my life was worth more than I did.

12:17 And it was proof, man. Even in those times, the doctors would come back like I couldn't refute this list. It was physical proof that whatever I was feeling, experiencing was not real. It was all within my head and it was all like clouded and everything else and both talking about it, releasing the shame and the creation of the list were the path out for me. [inaudible] Well, I'd never heard that part of the story and that's quite amazing. What I want to ask is, was with your friend at this event in January, the first person on your list, was he the first time you had really shared this stuff before? I mean, you mentioned before, after the initial story with the shotgun, you talked to your parents about some stuff, but for that 20 years that you never really let people in. For the most part, I didn't grow up with this identification, this belief that the world is unsafe and that the only person I could really depend on was myself.

13:14 So in times of turmoil, my automatic reaction and it, it, I still have a tendency towards this way. My automatic reaction is to pull into myself as opposed to reaching out to others. And yeah, I had never shared that story before then. And even with that first person, I didn't share everything with him. I'm not, to begin with. Like he just saw enough of it that he took the first step and I was very fortunate with that. And then that allowed me, because of what he shared and the space, the vulnerability that he created, it allowed me to step into it and share more than I'd ever felt comfortable before. Were you surprised that he too had had similar experiences where you’re thinking like, oh, I'm the only person that's ever had this before? It's the weirdest experience because there's a lot of similarities in life that he and I have and I was both completely surprised.

14:05 I think my mind was completely surprised, but like my heart, like there was something in me that, that knew that there was something in me that felt that that simpatico, that felt that resonance. And so it was so weird that I was like flabbergasted and not surprised at the same time. Yeah, and you mentioned the word shame and I think that's a big part of why you kept it hidden for so long, but also the same thing that would stop a person from sharing it in the first place. But as you shared it, you were saying that you're releasing the shame around it and it just felt so much better. Could you go in a little bit further on that? Because I do feel that is a key piece. And I know even when I do have issues, like, you know, I don't always share directly with my wife, even though if I did do that, it would make it better instantly.

14:52 And I know for whatever reason we get in these loops in our head and that may be a minor thing or maybe a life-altering life-changing thing like this. Yeah, I think that we experience several corrosive emotions. And, and in my particular worldview, in my particular experience, I don't know if any is as corrosive as shame. I've heard it described as this once before, like guilt is feeling bad for, you know, something you've done and shame is feeling bad for who you are. And so like there's this inherent feeling and belief in yourself that the, a, whatever it is it's going on, you deserve it. And B, you're not worthy of anything more and see that nobody else would understand. And D, that you're alone in this experience. And that just furthers this, this spiral of isolation. Right. And so you never ended up breaking out of it because of all of these beliefs.

15:42 Nobody else understands this is my own personal experience, you know, et cetera. And because of that, the one thing that literally like telling the story and going out and sharing with people what I had been through, I'll tell you right now, it was the hardest thing that I'd ever done in my life to that point. And I've driven a motorcycle in the middle of winter to Siberia. I've slept outside in minus 42 degrees. I've done some things in my life and this was the hardest thing that I'd ever done. And it was literally the most freeing. So what happens is I, I've come to like experience. We have this shame and the shame is like this dark fog. It's like this black fog that's all around us that obscures our vision, keeps us from feeling the things that we're feeling, keeps us from connecting to others.

16:26 And literally just by talking and sharing the story of these things that go on to somebody who will sit there and listen. It's as if like there's this light that comes in and the fog begins to evaporate. Like, cause it's nothing. It's a theory. It's not even real. Right? But it feels so solid, no Paik that you just get lost in it. And so when that begins to dissolve, like this light comes in and you realize like this darkness wasn't an all-encompassing darkness. It's not a solid thing. It's not this like huge blackness that I can't get out of. It's just a fog. And literally the fact of sharing it every time it lessened and lessened and lessened and less than until I got the point where it's like I don't feel shameful about this. I don't feel shameful about it at all. And matter of fact, the number of people as I go, like I've never told anybody this, but, and would share their story and not just a, okay, I've had those conversations or I've had those feelings or, or anything else.

17:21 But literally I've had several people who have been like, so here's the funny thing. I've been to that edge. You know, my one friend was like, I've literally had this bag of nerve gas and I was just about ready to put it over my head cause that was the easiest way that I could imagine out of this. And somebody knocked on my door. Hmm. And another one's like, you know, I was literally standing on the ledge of a building and I thought I was going to fall forward. And I ended up falling backward and fell onto the floor of the building. Right. And like, like the number of people who have been to that place. And I'm like, we're not alone. Like, no, we're not alone. We never have. And it's an illusion. I don't even know. I'm censoring myself at this point. I've already cussed.

18:02 Like it's an illusion that we are. Right. And that was one of the more healing things to the point where I know, hope I'm not skipping too far forward or, or missing anything. But that happened at 39 and I continued for months and months and months to talk to people. Everybody close to me. I just had a deep conversation with and by the time I was midway through my 41st year, right. So about two and a half years later, I ended up traveling down through New Mexico and I went to that same spot in the desert. I was literally in that same spot, the desert, and I sat down to meditate and the sun was coming up and as the sun rose like, okay, I'm like, I'm gonna feel this. This was a big point in my life. All right, I'm going to feel this and this isn't going to be easy, but I'm going to endure it.

18:49 And as the sun rose, man like all I felt was peace. Like all I felt was peace and there was none of that darkness or that blackness or anything else there. And then all I could feel was love, like literally love and gratitude for that 16-year-old who had this incredible strength not to pull that trigger. And so I just meditated and I sent love back to that kid and it was like, it was like the last of the shadow had just been released. And I literally and I don't, I'm not saying this for effect, I'm just saying this, to be honest. I literally have not, I'm now 43 years old. I literally have not feared or worried about suicide again. And you know, I can't say what the experience of my life is going to be from here. I would never claim that because I don't think anybody understands that, but I don't have any fear of it whatsoever. And it's a fascinating experience to move from something that was so all-encompassing, so deep that I could never imagine being out of it, to literally being on the other side of an experience and almost having difficulty imagining what that was to be within it. It's like waking up from a dream

20:03 and want to ask about it, I guess the courage to share with other people. So you had this person that had the sympathetic resonance, he had had similar experiences and you also saw that he had turned it around in some ways, some fashion. So you had faith as you mentioned that it was possible and it would be possible for you for whatever reason you felt this at this time, but as you said like to go and have this discussion with further people, too many people that would actually be a worst fate and death. Right. And I'm sure that that crossed your mind that way. Yeah. Even though it's a conversation, like it shouldn't be like that, but it feels like that it feels like or death.

20:48 Is there anything else that, cause yeah, and I'm sure other people that may be in that place where I've been in that place that felt that same when you're depressed, right. It feels like it's awkward racist that it's going to last forever even though that's generally not the case. So how do you make that first step? It's fascinating like things like that in my life, especially at that time. Like when I would step into a conversation like that, I would feel literal fight or flight. Like adrenaline would dump my vision would tunnel might, my hearing would get kind of tinny. Like I would literally experience a full-on fight or flight trigger. Right. And it was so hard because when that happens, then it becomes really hard to think, right? All you can do is like you're there in the moment and your body's just like, do I run?

21:31 Do I hide? Do I fight? Like me? That's all it gets good it's going on. And the things that really, really helped me with it is one, I started with somebody who I knew loved me more than anything. Like I, ah damn, I love my grandmother. There was a part of me that knew that this was the safest possible place that I could like do this with. First, I didn't start with a place that I had other fears and stuff around and that was really helpful. The other part about it is I had done things in my life where I'd experienced that physical danger in different ways and so I wasn't like this feeling of adrenaline dump wasn't unknown to me. It was just in a different context. Like I had gone bungee jumping. I've done other things before. I had learned like from bungee jumping that literally if I just keep, even though like full of adrenaline dump everything else, they just keep stepping down this plank and then just step off of it, it's going to happen, right?

22:25 So my focus is just one step, next step, next step, next step, next step, next step. And so I've just trained myself that literally in that moment, rather than worrying about anything, all I do is what is the next step? What is the next step? Was the next step. Okay, ring my grandmother's door. Okay. Say hi. Okay. Walk-in. Okay. Say I'd like to talk to you. Okay. Sit in the chair in the living room. You know, like literally step by step and then just begin it. And then the third was breathing. Like literally I, I've learned this through meditation. I've learned this through mindfulness. I've learned this in a lot of ways. In that moment there's a particular breathing and you'll know this better than I do, but I've just found it helpful. It's like there's a certain breathing box breathing that I believe was also taught to soldiers back in world war II and all throughout time.

23:13 And in those super traumatic moments, like you breathe in for four seconds, you hold it for four seconds, you release it for four seconds and you hold it for four seconds and you continue. And that is a way of telling the body that you are actually safe regardless of what it's experiencing. And it begins to calm the, and it begins to bring, you know, blood flow back to the brain and you begin to be able to process. And that has been insanely useful to me multiple times in my life. So during this time from when you were that initial suicide attempt to 39 when you had this change like you became a very successful entrepreneur business person, right?

24:08 To the outside world you were on cloud nine. Yeah. Well, that can add to the isolation a bit as well at times. But it was also, I'm very fortunate for it. So I learned early on that for me, like the one of the ways that I could get attention and some of the stuff that I craved was achievement and was I good at achieving? Like, you know, and I love learning. Like I've always had this beautiful innate curiosity and I love to learn anyways. I had succeeded in a lot of realms in life. I was, you know, an incredible student and had done really well there. I learned to do construction and was incredibly good with that. I had learned computer architecture and computer engineering and had, you know, worked with a startup and you know, achieved honors. Within that, I had moved into the realm of theater and had won many, many awards for theater.

24:54 I started a company and grew it from zero to eight figures over the course of a few years and into a global company. Everything else. So like to the outside world, like Mr. Plough, Chris had his shit down and he was living the life and, and I was also like because I was not always happy with my life, I would do reckless things, but people on the outside wouldn't view that as reckless. Like he doesn't care about his life. They'd be like, dude, he's so fearless. And dude, he's adventurous and looks at all the stuff that Chris gets to do. But I, I was using that to try to fill a hole that could never be filled at the time. And I was using that to put forth this facade of perfection's facade of achievement so that I could try to feel good about myself. And there were parts of it that I really enjoyed as well.

25:42 Like there were times in there I was having an incredible time. There were times that I was really doing what I wanted to do, but there was a lot of it that I just felt insanely, insanely alone. Yeah. That achievement could only momentarily make you feel good, but as you said, it can't fill a hole if at your core you don't believe you're worth living. Right. And yeah, and if you like to keep running at that speed, like what I was doing essentially as I was taking what is essentially, you know, a journey or a marathon in life and I was turning it into a sprint. And so I was literally sprinting every day and it's no wonder that like between like this depression and suicide that I was experiencing and feeling worn down by that, by not really putting attention into relationships and openness and connection and fulfillment in life and all the things that would normally fill me up.

26:31 And by running at this sprint speed for so long, it was inevitable that I would essentially have a complete burnout because there was nothing, nothing left in the tank. And then when there was nothing left in the tank, that's when I got to the point of, Oh crap, I can't do this anymore. And fortunately, that for me eventually came about in great. Here's a whole new path. We've got to try something completely different because the old patterns are obviously not working. I'd done it for so long, but it was a dangerous place to go in because it could have very, very easily without the right influences. Without that moment, with that beautiful friend, it could have gone the exact opposite.

27:14 Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week to conclude with Chris Plough as we dive into the transformative psycho technologies that Chris has used and also I myself have used to make big changes in life, so stay tuned at Lost Empire Herbs. We guarantee our herbs will change your life or your money back, more energy, mental focus, better sleep, sex hormones, workouts, and more. Unlike the vast majority of supplements out there with us, you can notice a feelable difference to perform at your peak or you don't have to pay for them. That's what performance herbalism is all about. Get started by going to Lost Empire Herbs.com and take our new quiz to find the right groups for you.