#182: Jason Nemer - Inside the Magic of AcroYoga

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Jason Nemer, co-founder of AcroYoga. Jason is an incredible character, who travels the world with next to nothing. He introduced me to my latest obsession -- AcroYoga. Along with Gymnastic Strength Training, I've been doing AcroYoga -- and I think about doing it all the time. AcroYoga is closer to partner acrobatics: Cirque du Soleil routine meets sensual-but-not-sexual contact. Even if you have no interest in doing AcroYoga yourself, there are many takeaways and recommendations in this episode that can benefit your life. And for those of you that are interested, we even do a couple of video demos, which can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNH4S22Ijao&feature=youtu.be. But don't feel like you need to step away from the purely audio experience of this podcast to follow along. Incidentally, the video was recorded at Creative Live, my favorite place to learn online. I've taken hundreds of courses there, but the one I'll recommend is Six Months to Six Figures https://www.creativelive.com/success by Peter Voogd. Enjoy the show! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Audible http://audible.com/tim. I have used Audible http://audible.com/tim for years, and I love audiobooks. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book http://www.audible.com/pd/Teens/The-Graveyard-Book-Full-Cast-Production-Audiobook/B00LXHQO22/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding http://www.audible.com/pd/Travel-Adventure/Vagabonding-Audiobook/B00GCHWZHG/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose any of the endless options they offer. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim and get started today. Enjoy. This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5 billion under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I have used for years. I love audiobooks, and I have two to recommend right off the bat. Number one is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and that is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, the only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished. It's amazing. You will thank me. The Graveyard Book. The second is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what became The Four Hour Work Week. So, all you need to do to get your free 30-day trial is go to audible.com/tim, and you can choose one of those two books, or you can choose from more great options than you can

• 1:05Tim Ferriss?

  possibly imagine. So that could be a book, that could be a magazine, that could be a newspaper, it could be a class. It's that easy. Go to audible.com/tim. That's audible.com/tim and grab a book. Enjoy.

• 1:21Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra-wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second.

• 2:02Tim Ferriss?

  I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim, take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and I'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis, but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et

• 2:47Tim Ferriss?

  cetera, can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first 15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast.

• 3:30Tim Ferriss?

  But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of.

• 4:01Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, my friends and frenemies. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease out the habits, routines, tools, favorite books, et cetera, that you can use and test and apply to your own life. And the topics we explore, the experts we interview, range from people in the military to entertainment, sports, and everything in between. And this is an "everything in between" episode. My guest is Jason Nemer, co-founder of AcroYoga. You can find him on Instagram @JasonNemer. And my apologies for the sucking in the background. That's my dog obliterating a kong.

• 4:45Tim Ferriss?

  This is audio verite for you folks. And Jason is an incredible character. He's a vagabond. He travels the world with next to nothing and has introduced me to my obsession for the last six to 12 months. Now, along with gymnastic strength training, I've been doing AcroYoga, and I think about doing it all the time. It is not what you think in your mind of as yoga. It is totally different because I, of course, have found yoga historically, for me, very boring, and I always strain a hamstring. It's not fun. This is the opposite of all of those things. It is closer to partner acrobatics, a Cirque du Soleil routine meets sensual but not sexual contact, if that makes any sense.

• 5:30Tim Ferriss?

  And if it doesn't, it will in this episode. There are lots of takeaways, lots of recommendations. It was also videotaped. We do a couple of demos, and you do not need the video because we walk through it in audio. So you can definitely just listen to this podcast. But if you want to see some of the demos visually, you can go to youtube.com/TimFerriss, two R's and two S's, to see it. And it was filmed at CreativeLive, my favorite place to learn online, creativelive.com. And go to creativelive.com/Success. I asked them of all of their courses. They have hundreds. I've done a lot with them. What would they recommend that I share with you guys?

• 6:12Tim Ferriss?

  And they brought up Six Months to Success, which is actually Six Months to Six Figures by Peter Voogd. So Six Months to Six Figures by Peter Voogd, V-O-O-G-D, has incredible reviews. Just check out creativelive.com/Success. But I want to keep this as short as possible. It's already long because I had a lot of caffeine. I've done a lot of thinking on Accor Yoga today. When I'm not doing it, I want to be doing it. And by the end of this episode, you will know why. And hopefully, you will get a chance to try it yourself. So, please, enjoy.

• 6:49Tim Ferriss?

  Jason, welcome to the show.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 6:52Tim Ferriss?

  What are we drinking here?

• 6:54Speaker 00

  What a great way to start.

• 6:55Tim Ferriss?

  I enjoyed the label. I enjoyed the label so much, I have to share it with the world.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  It's duck shit oolong tea.

• 7:02Tim Ferriss?

  Duck shit oolong tea.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  It's true.

• 7:03Tim Ferriss?

  What is the story behind the duck shit portion of that?

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Well, back in the day, I hear, in a region in China, there was this amazing tea. And it was so good that they had to play it down. So, they called it duck shit tea. And it was played down for however many centuries until it's been discovered as an excellent tea.

• 7:23Tim Ferriss?

  It's not bad, I gotta say. I'm enjoying the duck shit fragrance, oolong tea. And it is almost as odd sounding as our first encounter. And I remember the dinner at which we met. And this was in LA, probably Venice, maybe Santa Monica.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  Santa Monica.

• 7:44Tim Ferriss?

  And it was at, whose home was it?

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Dean's. Dean's home.

• 7:47Tim Ferriss?

  Dean. And I was with my buddy Travis Brewer.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  The ninja.

• 7:52Tim Ferriss?

  The ninja, who is very much worth checking out for those people who have not seen him in action, American Ninja Warrior, and so on. And we were sitting somewhere close to each other, maybe next to each other.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  We'd captured a bunch of photographs of the day, just running around doing craziness.

• 8:09Tim Ferriss?

  At the Santa Monica Green and elsewhere. And of course, you are the co-founder of AcroYoga, but I didn't have much in terms of exposure to AcroYoga. So I said, "What is AcroYoga?" And he said, "I'll show you." And that led to an Instagram photo that I posted, which was just something along the lines of just another Saturday night, not sure how I ended up here, and I was in reverse bat position.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Well done. You know exactly the pose.

• 8:36Tim Ferriss?

  In what I used to call butter kinasana. Butter kinasana. I'm not good with this such-and-such an asana memorization of terms. But the, now what is that, how would you describe what that looks like? And maybe we'll do a quick demo on what that looks like.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Well, basically, if you were a human bat and you were hanging upside down and you were holding your ankles, that's pretty much what it looks like.

• 9:00Tim Ferriss?

  It's kind of Spider-Man position.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, Spider-Man, upside down, monkey business.

• 9:04Tim Ferriss?

  Right, upside down with your feet together, sort of in a butterfly position.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 9:07Tim Ferriss?

  And then the person who's supporting you, you, the base, are on your back, legs roughly straight up in the air in an L-base position. And your feet would be basically right on top of my upper thighs.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 9:22Tim Ferriss?

  And those are the shelves.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 9:24Tim Ferriss?

  And I remember being spun around, felt like I was in a washing machine of sorts, which is actually a term, of course, used in Acro. And it just blew my mind. What are the origins of AcroYoga? How did it come to be?

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Well, you know, anytime we talk about origins, there's my version of my experience of the story. There's the historical perspective. So what I'll do is I'll share from my perspective what and how this all came together. Basically, I had a lot of acrobatic experience. I started when I was 12. And I competed in sports acrobatics, which is basically like gymnastics and figure skating put together. It's a routine with partners, music, dance. So I competed in that for many years, found yoga in college, and then ended up in San Francisco where I met Jenny, the co-founder. And Jenny had a background in the therapeutic flying. So what you were describing, being upside down and being massaged, that's something that I learned from Jenny. She learned it from other people.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  So acro yoga, to me, was me and Jenny meeting and pretty much putting together our bag of tricks.

• 10:31Tim Ferriss?

  And that bag of tricks, so I will say, just in terms of personal experience, has been incredible because you have not just the sort of acrobatic, and this is a term that maybe you would not use, I don't know, but a very kind of yang-driven, strength, athleticism component, which is the acrobatics. But then you have the very yin, very restorative therapeutic Thai massage. There's more to it, of course. But my hips, after now doing this reasonably consistently, in particular the last two months, but for the last however long.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Year, year plus, yeah.

• 11:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, year plus, good lord. I realized today that I've been a professional rider for 10 years.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 11:16Tim Ferriss?

  Almost to the dot.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 11:18Tim Ferriss?

  I was like, man, that explains the hair loss. It's been a long fucking time. But my hips, my knee issues, ankle flexibility, my progress from grumpy baby position. For those of you who know yoga at all, imagine you're laying on your back, kind of holding on to your big toes and pulling your knees into your armpits. Historically, very uncomfortable for me. Still not my favorite place to be, but much improved. And I feel years younger. I mean, athletically speaking, more mobile than I was even when I was competing in wrestling and Jiu Jitsu and Judo and whatnot.

• 12:00Tim Ferriss?

  What was the birth moment of acro yoga per se? Like, when did that meeting turn into acro, which is now practiced, I don't know, in how many countries, would you say?

• 12:12Speaker 00

  We have 55. I went up and counted it recently, 55 countries that there are certified teachers, but it doesn't mean that the reach isn't bigger than that.

• 12:20Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  But it's definitely a global practice at this point. The creation story is actually pretty magical. Jenny and I had been hearing about each other and we were training at the same circus center. She was doing contortion during the day, I was teaching trampoline at night. So we kept orbiting around each other and had a lot of common friends, but just didn't meet, didn't meet. When we finally met, we got together at a party and I immediately put her into a hand-to-hand, where she's doing a handstand on my hands. And then she put me in folded leaf, which is, you would say, the down dog of therapeutic flying. It's where my body's in a hanging surrendered position. My head's in her belly and she's supporting my weight. And that was the first time, as an acrobat, that I felt what it was like to be inverted, but not be engaged.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Because acrobats are very controlling and controlled in their body, but to surrender, it was amazing, just those two poses. And then we were up until 5:00 a.m. talking about this practice that would use all these different skillsets and we saw how things like partner yoga would help people communicate and that the basic therapeutic flying, that's not very advanced, teaches people acrobatics in a soft way. And we put, really, all the pieces together that night.

• 13:34Tim Ferriss?

  So it came to, I mean, it was orbiting, orbiting, orbiting, and then?

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Collision.

• 13:39Tim Ferriss?

  Collision and synthesis.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:42Tim Ferriss?

  Let's rewind just for a second to go back to the, and I want to get the term right, the acrobatics.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Sports acrobatics.

• 13:49Tim Ferriss?

  Sports acrobatics, which I believe is also what Andriy Bunderenko.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, he was a sports acrobat.

• 13:55Tim Ferriss?

  From Cirque du Soleil, who I spent a bit of time with in Los Angeles when he was there, also did it. What are the categories? Because you have, what, it's like two men, two women?

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:08Tim Ferriss?

  And then mixed gender, how does it work?

• 14:10Speaker 00

  It's the pairs, you have three different pairs, men's pair, women's pair, mixed pair. You have women's trio and you have men's four. That's the partner acrobatics. And part of sports acrobatics is also platform tumbling. This is when you have a hundred-foot-long strip and people run full speed and do crazy flipping and twisting.

• 14:27Tim Ferriss?

  I saw a, I think it was a quadruple backflip.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was on my feet.

• 14:32Tim Ferriss?

  Did you see it? I think it was probably from your feet or Coach Summers' feet, so.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd never seen a quad tumbled, I'd never even imagined it was possible. He did it easily.

• 14:41Tim Ferriss?

  That was insane.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  It was nuts.

• 14:43Tim Ferriss?

  Men's four, let's talk about that because I think this is something people may have seen in performances in Vegas or elsewhere. Very often by people from Eastern Europe or former Soviet Union. What does that involve?

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Men's four usually have two bases that are about the same height, same build, a middle, which is, I would be a good size for a middle on a men's four, I'm 5'9", 160, and then the flyer, varying sizes, always the smallest one. And basically, if you know cheerleading basket tosses, that's, they do a lot of tempo skills is what it's called, where the flyer does flips and twists and lands back on the basket. And there are two, actually three different routines. There's a balance, a tempo, and a combined. Balance routines in men's four is just a pyramid. It's no music, and it can be that the base is doing a back bend for you yogis in Urdha Danurasana, and then the three people are standing on this guy's belly, and the guy

• 15:39Speaker 00

  on the top is doing a one-arm handstand, cray cray.

• 15:42Tim Ferriss?

  That would have been Andre.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:45Tim Ferriss?

  That would have been Andre.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  I don't know if he-

• 15:47Tim Ferriss?

  He was a flyer.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was a flyer. I don't know if he did men's four or men's pair, I don't remember.

• 15:50Tim Ferriss?

  I'm almost positive he did men's four. You could correct us, of course. Andre Bondarenko, you should check him out on Instagram.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Such a nice guy.

• 15:57Tim Ferriss?

  Sweetheart of a guy, and just a monster.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, a badass, certified badass.

• 16:02Tim Ferriss?

  The, and for those people who, as I didn't, know, basket case? No, not basket case.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Basket toss.

• 16:12Tim Ferriss?

  Basket toss. It's like basket case is me, basket toss, sounds like something pornographic, and it might be, but in this case, it's effectively, is it-

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Further down, you hold your wrists.

• 16:22Tim Ferriss?

  You hold your wrist, and you're basically with other people weaving a-

• 16:28Speaker 00

  Human trampoline.

• 16:29Tim Ferriss?

  Human trampoline with your forearms. And it just blew my mind when I first saw, at Cirque du Soleil, you were there.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:38Tim Ferriss?

  When, with Andre, we went behind the scenes and we saw them warming up.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:42Tim Ferriss?

  And they're just getting launched from 20, 25 feet, and then landing on this human trampoline-

• 16:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:49Tim Ferriss?

  That is effectively the size of the top of a stool.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:52Tim Ferriss?

  It's just incredible.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:54Tim Ferriss?

  And I remember Andre and I were having tea, and he was talking about, at some point, and I'm gonna paraphrase this, obviously, and maybe butcher it- In the Ukraine, when he went to some type of regional championship and there are a bunch of people warming up, different teams, and one of the teams had a flyer who was super aggressive and wanted to make an impression on everyone, and tried something really outrageously hard, and it was a concrete floor, and he just took a headfirst spill on the concrete floor, those folks got carted out and the competition continued.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 17:28Tim Ferriss?

  And that was his path, and all of their paths, out of that world and into one of prosperity and economic feasibility for careers.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  I heard a very similar story, and this is something that I see as the pitfall of acrobatics, a potential pitfall. I trained in Bulgaria when I was 15 with the Bulgarian national team. The year before, we brought them to California, took them to Disneyland, blew their minds and learned from them, and I heard a few years after that that the men's four, same thing, wanted to intimidate the other men's four. So what I was describing of these four high pyramids, they were doing a four high one-arm pyramid and they fell. And the kid broke most of his bones. He didn't die, but it was the end of his career. And I think also for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, there were a number of Chinese gymnasts that died trying vaults, trying to do these very difficult vaults.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  And yeah, the dark side of acrobatics can be when your body is an obstacle to your goal, and this is where the yoga and the acrobatics can weave so intelligently the dynamic power of acrobatics, but the reality that you got your body for your whole life. And how do you make these educated steps towards what you want?

• 18:41Tim Ferriss?

  And this comes back to the surrender component, which may sound very woo-woo to some people listening, and that's okay, because we're in San Francisco, so suck it up.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Woo-woo!

• 18:53Tim Ferriss?

  And take it. We're not going to get too crazy, maybe we will, but the, flashing all over the place, and this is a bit like Memento, but one of my other influences, this coach named Jersey Gregorik, who's the Polish Olympic weightlifting coach I've mentioned a few times, 62, leaner, stronger, more mobile than I am by many, many factors, and he's probably 135, 140, can get on an indoor board, like a balance board, and... Hit a perfect snatch with a barbell loaded full of weight, ass to the floor, and then stand up and put it back on the floor. He just didn't, with effectively no warm-up. Correct.

• 19:38Tim Ferriss?

  He's just an extremely impressive athlete and his longevity is phenomenal. And he said to me at one point, because my habit of course is push, push, push, break. You push? I know. Stop everything for a while because I'm incapacitated. Push, push, push, break. And he said, "You have a Ferrari engine," and paraphrasing here, but he said, "You have to remember, you have a Ferrari engine in a Hyundai body. Like, you're going to just blow yourself apart." Or it's like, "Your mind is willing, but your body is not adapted." So you need to," not his words, mine, like chill the fuck out. Yeah. And play the long game, which I'm, I'm becoming better at. And part of what has aided that is the therapeutics. Yeah.

• 20:20Tim Ferriss?

  And something as simple as, you mentioned surrender. So in the type of training that I'm focusing on right now, I'm actually doing the gymnastic bodies work with Coach Summers, the former national team coach for men's in the US. He was on the podcast as well. But that is not a surrender. No. Type of training, and it can't be. I mean, to, to do it properly, and I really, really enjoy it. But if I'm doing that, say, two days of stretching, two days of strength training per week, I might then be doing, and I have been doing, acro on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for an hour to an hour and a half in the mornings.

• 20:59Tim Ferriss?

  And the, just the traction alone that you're able to get from the, and for those people wondering what the hell traction is, I mean, simply put, and chiropractors may disagree with this, but let's just imagine you're on an inversion table and you get flipped to a point where your head is below your feet and you feel your spine is being decompressed. Think of that as one form of traction. You can get traction on your wrists, traction on your ankles. Right. And so I thought what might be fun, and this is going to be a visual component, we'll try to describe it, but you mentioned a couple of things. You mentioned folded leaf. Mm-hmm. And- Would you say that is a good place for people to start with acro?

• 21:40Speaker 00

  There are a lot of good places to start. Therapeutic flying, what I like about it is it's very soft and gentle. If there's extreme mobility issues, I think there are other things that people can do to gain confidence and to learn how to communicate what they need. The way that we teach the practice is base flyer spotter. So the spotter can not only keep it safe, but they can also make sure that the base is in the correct alignment. So it's too hard to say that this pose is the exact place to start.

• 22:08Tim Ferriss?

  But it's one place to start.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  It is.

• 22:09Tim Ferriss?

  Now, when you say base flyer spotter, that is simply to say that generally you're practicing in groups of three?

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 22:15Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Let's just show, and for those people who are listening to audio, I'm sure I mentioned it in the intro and I probably mentioned it the outro. If not, you can check in the show notes, fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. But we're capturing this on video.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  We are.

• 22:30Tim Ferriss?

  So we might as well do some stuff that's well suited to video and we'll talk through it. But let's just go to this mat here. And...

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Oh, wait, we gotta do it the right way.

• 22:41Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, I was gonna catch you.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  My Dutch friends would kill me.

• 22:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this is, so, yeah, the end and I lean back. And then we bring the partner down. So apparently the Dutch acrobats get very upset if you don't do that. And I've got to the partner, I'm like, you know what? I've had enough with the Dutch. I love their kickboxing, Ernesto Houst, love you, but from all the jiu-jitsu, I'm just like flop. I've made a lot of, I'm not gonna say enemies, that doesn't really happen in acro. So I am standing with my feet reasonably close to your hips.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Yep, I want to be able to touch my flyer's feet.

• 23:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  My feet are turned out just below the hip bones.

• 23:16Tim Ferriss?

  I am standing straight up. It's almost as if you've seen the UFC. You're like open guard on your back. This would be where I try to punch you and then you kick me in the face, but that's not acro, that's MMA. All right. And then flyer, fingers forward.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  You got it, you got the acronyms and everything.

• 23:30Tim Ferriss?

  Just so people, yeah, I learn, I'm a young padawan, just learning what I can.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  Dang it.

• 23:36Tim Ferriss?

  And then...

• 23:36Speaker 00

  So the most important thing is that you understand when to be water and when to be earth and what parts of your body. So I'm gonna be watery with my arms and really sturdy with my legs. So we'll take a deep breath. On the exhale, I receive with everything and then I push up with the legs.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Here, a lot of times, the flyer will want to put their hands down and practice their handstand training. That means they're a control fleek.

• 23:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Tim Ferriss?

  See, fold their top, the top of their hands down the floor. So at this point, for those people listening, I am supported on Jason's feet. I'm completely upside down. I'm basically in a L-straddle position, for those of you who know anything about gymnastics. And so this is folded leaf. Sometimes, in hushed tones, jokingly referred to as leaf blower.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Oh my god, I didn't know that was gonna come out of the podcast.

• 24:27Tim Ferriss?

  I'm trying to help people with the images here. So this is scarecrow, right?

• 24:32Speaker 00

  It's a scarecrow. Basically, what I do as a base is I try to let your body unwind patterns. So as I bounce and shake, a lot of times, our mind is connected to muscle groups and flexing them when they don't need to be. So the true therapist is gravity, which helps to let your spine hang like a plumb line.

• 24:51Tim Ferriss?

  And, and could we show, for instance, uh, let's see here, Super Yogi?

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 24:59Tim Ferriss?

  So...

• 25:00Speaker 00

  So Tim likes traction. So what I can do is I can let my legs come off my 90-degree. His weight will start falling back. We'll take a deep breath together. On the exhale, my legs go back, and then I resist with the arms. It's okay?

• 25:14Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Two more. Inhale. Exhale. So I'm pushing the legs back, then giving resistance. I got a little wrist traction there. One more time. Inhale. And exhale.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  And then where I love to go is to open up your triceps and your shoulders. So I'm gonna place my hands under his elbows, and he can bend the elbows and the knees at the same rate. And can you bring the elbows closer? Does that feel okay on your shoulder?

• 25:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I'm gonna be a little careful on the left, just to add a reconstructive, but yeah, this feels fine.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  And in general, where the body can be vulnerable in the flying is in the shoulders and the lower back. So communication is really important, and just listening to your body. All good?

• 25:56Tim Ferriss?

  All good.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Sweet.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  Side bending is also a thing that can really help the health of the lower back. And what's different with the therapeutic flying from yoga is your body doesn't have to be engaged. You're not using your muscles as the flyer. So you don't have to work uphill, basically.

• 26:15Tim Ferriss?

  Alright.

• 26:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yaman. Yaman. So those are some basics of therapeutic flying. And some people who heard a bunch of grunting and weird noises and just don't know what the hell is happening, or from people who might have seen the video. I have, actually, let's demonstrate one more thing. Because I was in South America doing an immersive, which was a great experience, meaning a two-week intensive of acro yoga training. First week was dedicated to the acrobatics, second week to the therapeutic flying and Thai massage. And I was visiting a friend of mine named Chris who has developed some lower back and hip issues from a lot of sitting. He's a former high-level athlete. Right.

• 27:04Tim Ferriss?

  And I gave him what is sometimes referred to in the acro community as leg love, which is typically done, for those of you who just saw it or I'll just describe it. So Jason was on his back, basing me, supporting all of my weight on his legs. In effect, that can get tiring. And so after you've received effectively massage, being floated on someone's feet, you then help to... Release the tension. Release the tension in their legs and restore their legs a bit. Exactly. And so I did that to, actually, you know, my line of development. Right. Brilliant. So... This podcast is getting better and better.

• 27:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. So what I did for Chris, and this is something I've done for a number of people now, and obviously, consult your qualified acro yoga professional. I'm no doctor, don't play one on the internet, but is, so let's say we just came down, right? So we came down, and we're here. There are a couple of very easy things you can do. So just from this squat position, I'll get his legs straight, and I'll actually just hold his feet in between the crease of my leg and my upper body, and then lean backwards. So I'm giving him traction at the hip and the lower back, even though I'm not holding on to anything. So good on my ankles, too. Yeah, and a lot of traction on the ankles and external rotation.

• 28:30Tim Ferriss?

  Other things that are pretty easy to do would include you do a little bit more traction. So you step in and I'm just going to shake the legs to get them to relax a bit. And then turn the feet in, put them behind my hips and lean back.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  And what's great about this pose is the therapeutic flying is an external rotation. This is a counter pose, it's an internal rotation. So that's where some of the yoga intelligence starts sneaking in is how do you counter the muscles that you've been working?

• 28:59Tim Ferriss?

  And for those people who are, say, you know, CrossFitters who are afraid of seeming too crunchy to their buddies, whatever it might be, this is an excellent complement to any type of Olympic lifting or lifting that involves squatting.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 29:13Tim Ferriss?

  I've found this to just be a huge performance enhancer, to have this done just for...

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Can I get you on my feet for one second in a bird?

• 29:20Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Just to show what my theory is of why your hips are a lot more evolved now. Squatting flexibility gets...

• 29:29Tim Ferriss?

  Look at this guy's hips.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  It gets increased when you have 170, 180 pounds on top of you. So it doesn't just warm the body, but it lets us access new flexibility.

• 29:41Tim Ferriss?

  That's one that you need to watch the video for, yeah. If you want to see freakish hip mobility...

• 29:45Speaker 00

  I have open hips, it's true.

• 29:46Tim Ferriss?

  Open hips, good birthing hips, then you should watch the video. So I'll just demonstrate a few more.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 29:52Tim Ferriss?

  They're super simple, that there are many, many options. We could do open up, you could do bus driver, that's what this one's known as. And they all look really silly and they are as profound, I think, for athletic performance or just general health as they are, in some cases, ridiculous looking. Another that I've found just incredibly helpful is just swinging. So this type of movement...

• 30:23Tim Ferriss?

  And I won't do too many more. You can get fancy and do like the circle eights and stuff. But I'll show one more and then we'll get back to the interview. So in this position, feel free to correct me if I'm messing this up. But you can effectively push down on the feet and get the hips off the ground and then use the hand or not to loosen up this entire lower leg and hip region. And literally just doing those few things.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 31:04Tim Ferriss?

  I was able to alleviate Chris's lower back pain significantly. I mean, symptoms, you know, 40, 50% decreased.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Awesome.

• 31:11Tim Ferriss?

  And that is, in my experience, not just a Band-Aid. It's not like you swallowed a bunch of Ibuprofen. With regular use, the effect seems to be very persistent.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 31:23Tim Ferriss?

  My hips feel great and it's like I never thought in my entire life I would ever say that.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. That makes me so happy. That is the goal of the practice is that you can find a way to interact with acro yoga that will affirm who you are now and who you're going to be for the rest of your life. And one of the really cool things that I've seen is acrobats, yogis, and healers, all three lineages, people can do it until they're 90, 100. Gymnasts, not true. I have not seen 100-year-old high-level gymnasts just because it's very high-impact. But there are styles of acrobatics, styles of yoga, and styles of healing that are really affirming who you are so you're not depleting yourself as you're learning these cool things.

• 32:02Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Coach Summers said, I think it was, I know, in the world of high-level gymnastics, like I know a lot of stupid people and I know a lot of old people. I don't know a lot of stupid old people who've made it that long. But speaking of some older folks, you've mentioned to me, of course, a number of your teachers. Number of your influences. Could you talk about Liu Yi and your experience with your healing teacher? And just give some context on who these people are.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  Sure. So Liu Yi is a Chinese acrobatic master, he's a circus master. He traveled throughout the world back in the 50s. He was actually telling me a story about when he performed in Africa and they had this act where you throw these big pots around and the pots land on your head and the Africans carry things on their head, so they weren't impressed, they didn't clap, they had to take it out. So he's just a treasure trove of really amazing stories about circus and he's been in the Bay Area for quite some time now. I met him about 13 years ago. We have a little short story about this. I met him, I go into the circus center, you know, I'd competed high level acrobatics, but I hadn't trained high level in a while and I see him training people in one arm

• 33:13Speaker 00

  handstands and I as a base never learned how to do a one arm handstand on the ground by myself. So I'm like, "Mr. Liu Yi, you look like such an amazing teacher, I would be so honored to work with you. I just did a yoga teacher training and yoga is a four letter word, I might as well just spit in his face." So literally for the next three years, every day I would see him in the circus center. "Mr. Liu Yi, I'd love to work with you. Oh, you have too much experience. Oh, you very old. My way, different way." And when I speak with my pretend Chinese accent, it's in so much love.

• 33:45Tim Ferriss?

  It's still pretty good. I mean, I've spent a lot of time in China.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Oh my god, so this is Liu Yi and Liu Yi has been a mentor in a lot of ways and he has a lot of different techniques. He's right when he says that because he came from circus and I came from sports acrobatics. One day I go into the circus center and he's teaching a kid how to ride on a bicycle backwards by sitting on the handlebars, like he knows so many random things. And recently, just this year, he has sciatica and he got into a car accident and it got worse and he's basically been out of commission now for quite a while and I've been trying to connect him with one of my other master teachers who's Scott Blossom, who's amazing Chinese medicine doctor, acupuncturist, Ayurveda, which is an Indian science of medicine,

• 34:31Speaker 00

  and he's also a shadow yoga teacher and in the world I think there are 20 certified shadow yoga instructors, that's a whole nother conversation, but he's basically a triple threat amazing human. And today, before this interview, I finally, I went to Liu Yi's house, I picked him up, I took him over to Scott's office and...

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Louis doesn't speak English very well and I understand him and we have a good rapport. So it was really good to be there and for about, I don't know, six to eight minutes, he was just reading his pulses, just feeling his hands. And from there, he basically did needles, did a lot of different techniques. And before he got him on the table, I was in a moment where I just sat on the floor when they were doing the pulses, I closed my eyes and I did a metta practice. Metta means loving kindness and this comes from Thai massage. Thai massage is an amazing practice that weaves spirituality and healing. So as I closed my eyes and I'm meditating, my heart's pumping, my hands are getting hot, I'm just basically cultivating all this chi.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  And I didn't think I was going to be able to lay hands on Louis at all, but then when he got him on the table, he's like, Jason, feel here, okay, put an elbow there. So I got to do, you know, I have two of my masters here and I get to give love basically to this man who with his hands has sculpted my handstand, my one-arm handstand. So it was just a really cool thing to feel how acrobatics is really powerful, but nothing is more important than your health until you start losing your health. And to have these tools to help people feel better, there are very few things in life that I think are more noble to dedicate to than learning techniques to help people. And you know, metta, loving kindness, compassion, meditation, these are things that are very easy for everyone on the planet to start practicing as soon as they build the desire.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  And I think human nature is such that we have the desire that we want to help people. We want to make people feel better. So yeah, that was an amazing way to start my day, to see these two masters come together.

• 36:33Tim Ferriss?

  I've been very struck by a few things just related to what you just said. The first is that a lot of people who come into healing have a history of being injured themselves or even injuring other people. A lot of judoka in Japan end up then going into bone setting or just a traditional, let's just call it not traditional, but western medicine.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:58Tim Ferriss?

  And the second piece is that I was very surprised when I did the immersive. I hadn't had any real in-depth exposure to the therapeutic flying that...

• 37:12Tim Ferriss?

  Having been so aggressive in all of my individual sports to date, I've always, since I was introduced to acrobatic, been obsessed with the more dynamic, violent, perhaps, fast-

• 37:24Speaker 00

  The shiny objects.

• 37:25Tim Ferriss?

  The shiny objects.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  The squirrel.

• 37:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, which are, yeah, that's my story of my life. But that- I was astonished to find that when I did the immersive, I was actually, in many ways, more drawn to the therapeutics.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:42Tim Ferriss?

  And I think that's because I've just overdeveloped or overfocused on the kind of hard-driving aspect to such an extent that I don't have a rate limiter. It's like I have no, on my tachometer, I don't have any red zone. I don't even see it, it just blows apart. And that helps me to start to calibrate and pay more attention. By paying attention to someone else's body, I feel like you learn to pay attention and listen to your own body.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  For sure, especially if you have good guidance. That is a very strong principle from a lot of my teachers, body comfortable. If you're not comfortable as a giver of healing arts, you're violating the first thing. So you actually get to be, and unfortunately in English, there's not a good term for this, selfish. And to be a good healer, you have to be very selfish. You have to really listen to who you are, to where you are. And from that place, if you really understand, you have the potential to give in a way that's not depleting, give in a way that's not gonna hurt you, because that's gonna be a very short healing career.

• 38:44Tim Ferriss?

  What is the handstand approach that you thought of this morning? So you mentioned this, and I said, "Save it for the podcast, I don't wanna hear about it." So tell us.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 38:55Tim Ferriss?

  A lot of people listening are interested in handstands.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:57Tim Ferriss?

  There are a lot of crappy handstands out there.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  I've seen most of them. In different shapes and forms. Well, this is where, again, I feel like the acrobatics and the yoga start to mix. I've been doing shadow yoga for about six years now, and there are three prelude forms.

• 39:12Tim Ferriss?

  Does Raz Al Ghul run? He's the bad guy in Batman. He doesn't run shadow yoga. Sounds like something out of...

• 39:18Speaker 00

  Marvel Comics.

• 39:19Tim Ferriss?

  Out of like the Avengers movie.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Kind of. Jeandere Mitte is a Hungarian martial artist who came up with this.

• 39:23Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like Raz Al Ghul.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's some darkness to it.

• 39:28Tim Ferriss?

  We'll come back to that. Okay, so we'll dig into shadow, but please continue.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Well, it came from my shadow practice this morning. So there's a pose where, I'll just do it real quick. There's a sequence, and one of the poses is with the fingers interlaced.

• 39:41Tim Ferriss?

  So you're just, you're just, you're standing, feet shoulder width apart, roughly. Hands flat on the floor with your fingers interlaced.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yep, and I would never think to do a handstand like this, and I was doing my practice this morning, and I'm like, huh, I wonder how hard that would be. It was really fucking hard. So thirty years of acrobatic training, I've never seen anybody do that handstand. I'm sure it's been done, and I tagged a few people on Instagram this morning. Andre is one of them, Miguel Hand Balancer is another. And my third attempt, I figured a couple of things out. Basically, if you let the pinky go wider, and you let the thumb go wider, you have a big enough base, and you gotta start using the pinky and the thumb. But it was just, you know, as much as I feel like acrobatics is very fixed, gymnastics is very fixed, as long as the mind is not fixed, and if you have playfulness, and you have a ritual of discovery, this practice keeps expanding.

• 40:34Tim Ferriss?

  There's, I love the cross pollination when you expose yourself to different physical disciplines. So you have yoga, we have acrobatics, then you have sports, so let's call it sports acrobatics, circus, Olympic gymnastics, for simplicity's sake.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Artistic for the people that really know.

• 40:57Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, okay, so very interrelated but different disciplines. Breakdancing, so for instance, that position you had right here reminds me of, I believe it's called a 2000 in breakdancing. So, well, you have a 1990, which is a one-armed spinning handstand.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 41:16Tim Ferriss?

  Which is generally on this portion of the palm. Mechanically speaking, very similar to a pirouette, even the way they go into it with their legs, and then bring their legs together.

• 41:29Tim Ferriss?

  But a 2000, if you found somebody who was very good at teaching or performing a 2000 and explaining it, they would probably have a lot to add to that conversation. So if any b-boys out there, b-girls, want to add some commentary on how to do 2000s properly, you will assist me in, at some point, having too much to drink and injuring myself. So that is that. I have to just ask, what on earth is shadow yoga? Can you describe this, please?

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Sure. I love describing this, because it's something in my recent past, I'd say five years, it's a thing that's affected my life the most positively. As a gymnast and acrobat, I would have lower back pain, you know, it would come and go, but it was a constant teacher. And as soon as I found the shadow practice for over five years, I wouldn't say I've been back pain free, but if I wake up and I have back pain, I know if I do my practice and I do a number of things that are conducive to my health, I can clear it. So shadow yoga is... Jean de Remeté is a martial artist, he was in the army, I'm not sure which army. He's a certified badass, and he's such a deep yoga practitioner. I've actually never met him, but Scott, my teacher, has told me a lot of things.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  One of the things he did in a demo is he took a deep breath, and then he sat. And then he took another deep breath, and he sat. And then he looks with a big smile, he's like, "Do you know what I did? I ate the breath." And he starts laughing. Basically, he can just metabolize a breath, he doesn't need to exhale. He's a yoga master, full-blown. And what he did is he studied in Pune from Ayengar. Ayengar is one of the...

• 43:09Tim Ferriss?

  What is Pune? Is that a place?

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Pune is a place. Pune is a place in India where Ayengar, who's a man who, basically, other than Chris Maitreya, the father of modern yoga, I would say Ayengar is one of the most influential people who has come to the practice of yoga. So he studied with Ayengar for a number of years, and he also went to the south to study Ayurvedic medicine, and in Kerala, they have... Temple dancers, bartoktium, temple dancing, and they also have khalari martial artists. And the martial artists and the temple dancers were moving much more in circles. And he was watching them and he was learning Ayurvedic science. And he basically started to fuse all of these things. So if I were to give a couple of sentences, the elevator speech of what shadow yoga is, it's based in Iyengar technique for the asanas.

• 43:55Speaker 00

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

• 44:40Speaker 00

  And you start circulating the energy through the body.

• 44:43Tim Ferriss?

  Well, the bone stacking is a pretty good, pretty good segue into all sorts of topics. For people who want to learn more about shadow yoga, is there a particular resource, other than Google, that you would suggest?

• 44:54Speaker 00

  It's, yeah, shadowyoga.com, I believe. They have a DVD. The unfortunate reality is, I think there are like 20 certified teachers in the world. So he's very, very strict on certification. I mean, talk about Mr. Miyagi. This guy is the definition of yoga, Mr. Miyagi.

• 45:11Tim Ferriss?

  Salty old dog. I like those. I know it's inevitable that, well, I aspire to be a salty old dog myself. So I like hanging out with the cantankerous, opinionated, but highly competent salty old dogs.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  He's a guy for you.

• 45:25Tim Ferriss?

  Although, yeah, he might not put up with me. That's a separate issue altogether. Bone stacking. Let's talk about handstands for a second again. And I always mess this up. Is it A-T-B?

• 45:37Speaker 00

  A-T-B.

• 45:38Tim Ferriss?

  Ooh, look at me!

• 45:38Speaker 00

  Well, you also learned it in Spanish. That was A-E-B.

• 45:41Tim Ferriss?

  A-E-B. That's right. That was a whole thing in and of itself. I did my entire immersion in South America in Spanish. There were a number of people translating for a handful of folks who only spoke English, but I found it more entertaining to see how badly I could mangle things by running on the Spanish alone. So let's talk about ATB. Should we just do a little demo of what that means?

• 46:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe I'll talk a little bit first. I'll paint an analogy. So I like the analogy of bridges. So the alignment is basically...

• 46:09Tim Ferriss?

  So ATB stands for what?

• 46:11Speaker 00

  Alignment, tightness, and balance. So, and I like it in that order because until the body gets aligned in the most efficient way possible, you are losing energy for every second you're attempting the handstand. So alignment is the holy grail of all acrobatics. And what's great about these ideas, the ideas are really simple. The practice is a pain in the ass. It takes sometimes decades to get a straight handstand. But alignment is straight. Straight is strong. So if you learn how, and our bodies are not made straight. Our cells are circular. Our bones are not two by fours. So it's an impossible task that we try to do to turn our bodies into these knives that cut through gravity.

• 46:53Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the things that Louis says? His like short expressions when people are doing handstands?

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Well, so today, his leg isn't working very well. One of his legs, he can't walk up the stairs very well. And I joked at him, I said, "Louis, your body's not one piece." Because he says, "Make body one piece."

• 47:11Tim Ferriss?

  One piece, one piece.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, he likes the body to be unified. And then I have a Russian coach that says, "Make body one bone." Same, same. It's basically unifying the body and that's the second part of the ATB. It's tightness, it's integration.

• 47:23Tim Ferriss?

  And if you see, for instance, for, I know you've seen this, but for people listening or watching, if you see a photograph of a gymnast midair, or a diver for that matter, they're not relaxed. Like, look, look at how tight they are. They're usually in like...

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:40Tim Ferriss?

  The like.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  And a cool experiment, for those of you at home that are interested, is you can hard-boiled an egg and take a raw egg, try to spin them both, and, well, I don't want to spoil it.

• 47:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, well, you can try that. That's also, if you're an idiot like me and you hard-boil some and you forget which ones are raw, spin it, and you'll see very quickly which ones are hard-boiled, because they'll fly off the counter, probably.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  Another good Louis-ism, and this is good for anyone to put in their backpocket, and I'm so happy that Coach Summers also agrees with me on this, Mo-extension.

• 48:12Tim Ferriss?

  Mo-extension.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  M-O-extension, Mo-extension. And what he's talking about there is, it comes back to Newtonian physics, action-reaction, the second law of motion. If you push into something, it pushes back, so as you push down into the floor, there's basically a rebound, and this rebound is what makes your hands stand light, and it's what makes the body a lot more unified.

• 48:34Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly, so it also, if we're going to look at sort of the hierarchy, right, if you were to do one, and I'm not saying you have to choose one, but if someone wasn't, if someone could not somehow wrap their head around the alignment piece, right, they didn't have somebody to help them, but I just said, "Okay, you know what, forget that. More extension." Like, more, well, no, I'm just going to say, it helped me with my alignment to focus on the extension, because it took, effectively, one piece out of the puzzle, because it locked it in place, meaning, you know, and, but, of course, having someone to help with the alignment is, is a huge resource, but you were talking about bridges.

• 49:17Speaker 00

  Yes, so, a bridge, basically, it can be the analogy of the body. The, the metal is the bone structure, so the first thing they do when they're building a bridge is they got to get the pylons in place, and they have to get the metal in the right alignment. From there, they pour the cement, and the cement is basically your muscles, and the muscles, just like the cement, can harden onto those pieces of metal. So, basically, you align the metal, you pour the concrete, as the concrete hardens, it gets super stable. I haven't really figured out the Part of the analogy of the balance, maybe has something to do with, you know, the tension of the cables, yeah, yeah. But at least the first two have a picture for you to think about.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  And there was a point in gymnastics history in the 70s where the Japanese gymnasts were dominant. And they had a lot of techniques that none of the other world had seen yet. And one of my friends was very connected to that lineage. And he said that at the Olympics, they had a big interview with this guy. And like, you have to tell us your secrets. How are your gymnasts doing? They're just blowing us all away. He says, it's two things, strength and flexibility. And that was pretty much the end of the conversation. And there's actually a third thing in my experience. It's technique. And one of my definitions of technique is how skillfully you use your strength and your flexibility. So if somebody doesn't have a lot of shoulder mobility, they're doing handstands.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  They want to get as much mobility as they can. So Coach Sommer calls it compression strength.

• 50:51Tim Ferriss?

  Well, he would, in this particular case, he would want, now, always dangerous speaking for Coach Sommer.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:59Tim Ferriss?

  One of my favorite salty old dogs. So he can slap me on the internet if I get this wrong. But if I had to guess, I would say that he would argue that you shouldn't, if you're going to practice handstands correctly, you would want to get to the point where this type of shoulder flexion is comfortable so that you're not using a lot of muscle to get.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  I would agree. And if you don't have whatever flexibility you have, you want to access it. So you want to eventually have a surplus of shoulder flexibility. I was born with circus shoulders. So if you have a surplus of the shoulder flexibility, being vertical is very easy. That's what you want. But if you're stiff, you don't want to not get that one inch of flexibility utilized. So basically, the technique is using your strength and flexibility as skillfully as you can with what you have. In one day, you can't get stronger or more flexible, but in one day, you can affect your approach and affect how skillful you are cutting through gravity with the line of your body by finding these little hinges and taking as much of those hinges out.

• 52:02Tim Ferriss?

  So let's, what do you think about doing a little demo?

• 52:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:05Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So let's look at ATB, and I'm thinking what might make sense. I'll do it first.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 52:11Tim Ferriss?

  And suffice to say, I don't think I have great handstands.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  I disagree.

• 52:15Tim Ferriss?

  They're trending in the right direction.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 52:17Tim Ferriss?

  They're getting better, which is all I care about. I'm no Bone Dorenko at this point. Also weigh 100 pounds more. That's not true. But I digress. Alright, so.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  So, foundation. You want to have your hands shoulder width. So you can put the hands down and I'll just inspect your foundation. This is definitely where Louis will spend a lot of time. Ideally, you're tenting, so this knuckle comes up. And what that does, that puts a vector to root the naughty knuckle.

• 52:45Tim Ferriss?

  This is also very Spider-Man like. So if you ever see a close-up of Spider-Man like this on a cover, he's tenting his fingers. It's hard to do without the ground. But, in other words, if your fingers are completely flat on the ground, you're popping up the second knuckle.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 53:01Tim Ferriss?

  While keeping the knuckle of the palm on the ground. Because if this pops up, what's it called?

• 53:06Speaker 00

  The naughty knuckle.

• 53:06Tim Ferriss?

  The naughty knuckle, which is this index that constantly pops up. Okay, so let's say.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  Your hands look great.

• 53:12Tim Ferriss?

  Alright.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  And they're the right distance apart. So you can go up however you like. I'll support you on the way up.

• 53:18Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  And I'll let you have your head neutral. His head is down. I step in between the hands, hug his thighs, and bring the ribs in. Domesticate the while.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Good. Are you breathing? Elbows in more. Elbows in. Yep, good. Look down with your eyes. Fall towards your fingers a little bit. Fall towards, right there, right there. Yep, bingo. Keep the hands strong, keep the breath. Keep falling towards me. Yes, right there, right there.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  How are you feeling?

• 53:46Tim Ferriss?

  Good. I think I'll come down.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 53:49Tim Ferriss?

  So, the, what I'd love to see also is, so if you could go up in a handstand. And I'm not going to do a great job of spotting. I'm working on that also, but.

• 54:03Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love for you to show some examples of common mistakes.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Yep, I love that. Well, I'm not gonna do the most common mistake is taking my hands wider than shoulder width. I wanna have a vertical line, so I'm not gonna compromise that.

• 54:14Tim Ferriss?

  Now, do you always, do you personally point your middle fingers forward?

• 54:18Speaker 00

  I do.

• 54:18Tim Ferriss?

  Some people, quite a few gymnasts do index, but you prefer middle finger?

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Well, and I don't believe in right and wrong until you define where you wanna go. And what I teach is partner acrobatic handstands. So if you're practicing with the hands turned out as a base, I'll have to have my hands turned in. Super awkward, so the techniques I'm teaching...

• 54:38Tim Ferriss?

  Right, because we're gonna be...

• 54:39Speaker 00

  We're gonna be here, so if you're practicing...

• 54:41Tim Ferriss?

  This is a, this is hand-to-hand grip?

• 54:43Speaker 00

  It is.

• 54:44Tim Ferriss?

  Reverse hand-to-hand?

• 54:45Speaker 00

  You can practice with yourself.

• 54:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  You can't practice hand-to-hand by yourself.

• 54:48Tim Ferriss?

  Hand-to-hand's pretty tough.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  Cause you need a right hand with a right hand, and not many people have that.

• 54:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. But, okay, so right, train as you want to compete, so to speak.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 55:00Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so I'll let you, instead of placing them too wide.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  Okay, you ready?

• 55:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 55:08Tim Ferriss?

  So for those people wondering, that was a...

• 55:10Speaker 00

  Straddle jump.

• 55:11Tim Ferriss?

  Straddle, straddle jump, basically. Okay, so from here, now, if I were to just practice my coaching here, and so we have...

• 55:18Speaker 00

  Before anything, I'd bring the head down.

• 55:20Tim Ferriss?

  Head down, okay.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  Yep, cause then I have more access to a straight line in my spine. You can turn one of your feet to the side. Yep, hug around my thighs with one of your arms. Yep, find my ribs with the other hand, and pull everything up and in. Yep, there you go. That's it.

• 55:35Tim Ferriss?

  That's the... oops.

• 55:36Speaker 00

  Technical difficulties.

• 55:38Tim Ferriss?

  Aligning, then tightness.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 55:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I could pull your feet apart.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  You can also push me down, strong, from the thighs, yeah, push me down.

• 55:46Tim Ferriss?

  Push you down?

• 55:47Speaker 00

  No, not that way.

• 55:48Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, down into the ground?

• 55:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 55:50Tim Ferriss?

  Got it, got it, it push you down.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, stronger, way stronger, way stronger, yep.

• 55:54Tim Ferriss?

  And I remember there was another, now I'm just gonna do some rotation stuff.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 55:58Tim Ferriss?

  Also doing this kinda stuff.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 56:00Tim Ferriss?

  And then, let's see, tightness, balance, and then we can do just kind of a hot potato.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 56:07Tim Ferriss?

  Alright, so now, what other, you can either come down or get still demo. What are some of the most common mistakes?

• 56:14Speaker 00

  I'd say elbows are one of the most...

• 56:17Tim Ferriss?

  Bent?

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:18Tim Ferriss?

  Bent and... Spinning the wrong way?

• 56:19Speaker 00

  Both. So, saying a straight arm is a very undescriptive way to talk about how to position these bones. So, when you're down here, basically, you can spin the eyes of your elbow forward, towards each other, or back. And what you want to find in a handstand is the eyes of the elbows are squeezing towards each other. This gives you a lot of integrity in your handstand. So, I'd say elbows, from there, probably the head being really far away.

• 56:48Tim Ferriss?

  Because that also just leads to the cascade of piking at the shoulders, and then bending too much at the lumbar, trying to use the legs to correct, and then you're done.

• 56:57Speaker 00

  So, bring the arms up is another good one. Beginner acrobatics, relax. Uh huh. Yeah. Intermediate, advanced, expert is when the shoulders touch the ears.

• 57:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I can't get that high. I'm getting better.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:09Tim Ferriss?

  But not quite.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  So, if people get the shoulders and the ears even close to each other, the arms in a straight line, that's going to take care of a lot of the problems. You really shouldn't coach above the shoulders for the first several months.

• 57:22Tim Ferriss?

  Shouldn't coach above the shoulders?

• 57:24Speaker 00

  There are a lot of misalignments.

• 57:26Tim Ferriss?

  You mean, just coaching from, basically, here to the fingertips?

• 57:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. From here down is where most of the big problems come from. So, if you're looking at why are they arching, probably has something to do with something that's happening from here down, so...

• 57:39Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you've said to me also, I mean, there's a lot of magic in the hand and the foot placement.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:43Tim Ferriss?

  So, paying attention to that...

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:46Tim Ferriss?

  Pays dividends. And, the, uh, the next question I wanted to ask you was, actually, one thing I wanted to just throw out there that I found helpful. And this was at a place called Athletic Playaround...

• 57:59Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 57:59Tim Ferriss?

  In the East Bay here, in Northern California.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  Sheerest place, in Emeryville.

• 58:03Tim Ferriss?

  That's right, in Emeryville. Great place. And I took a handstand class, ages ago, with a teacher...

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Sam.

• 58:10Tim Ferriss?

  Sam.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  Amazing teacher.

• 58:12Tim Ferriss?

  Sam was amazing.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:13Tim Ferriss?

  And I remember what she had us do at one point, and it was just such a simple idea. And it was this, basically, she had us... Traversing the room, going back and forth, I'm not gonna do it right now, but I like to walk. She had us in rows and going back and forth and we were supposed to go up into a handstand. Now, it could be only 45 degrees, like if you're a beginner, like don't try to, lest you topple over, just go 45 degrees. And if I went up with this leg, I would come down with this leg. So it's sort of like a scissor at the top. And what she noticed is that people would go, they would walk like this, and then they'd do, put their hands out, kind of like Frankenstein, and then go into it. And she said, "All right, let's try something different," because people were flipping and flopping everywhere.

• 58:56Tim Ferriss?

  She said, "I want you to do the same thing again, but instead of that, you're gonna start with your arms way up over your head, shoulders elevated. This doesn't move at all, and I want you to do the exact same thing." And all of a sudden, just stability 10x'd. It was incredible.

• 59:10Speaker 00

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

• 59:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:32Tim Ferriss?

  One bone.

• 59:33Speaker 00

  One bone.

• 59:35Tim Ferriss?

  What other teachers or mentors have had a big impact on you?

• 59:41Speaker 00

  Dharma Mitra Yogikli has been an amazing teacher. He's a Brazilian yoga teacher. He was born and raised in Brazil, and he came to New York and met his guru Yogikupda in, I wanna say the 70s, the mid 70s. And out of everyone that I've met in the yoga world, he is, he does the practice. He's super deep. He teaches psychic development techniques.

• 1:00:08Tim Ferriss?

  Psychic development techniques?

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Tim Ferriss?

  What are we talking about here?

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  I mean, there are things that he learned from his guru. The practice is a lot of visualization and breathing techniques. Some humming sounds that unlock vibration in the head. And I was studying with him for-

• 1:00:25Tim Ferriss?

  A numb-trippy thing to do in a sensory deprivation tank. Actually, which I've experimented with a bit.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  I bet.

• 1:00:33Tim Ferriss?

  That is a full-blown psychedelic auditory experience without psychedelics, but that's maybe for a different podcast.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  You know, vibration is vibration. There's a lot of ways to unlock those things.

• 1:00:43Tim Ferriss?

  Hitachi magic wand?

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  Exactly. You have one too.

• 1:00:47Tim Ferriss?

  Which, by the way, was recommended to me by a Russian medical massage expert and not in the red light district, for relaxing hypertonic forearms.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:00:59Tim Ferriss?

  The original version, plug-in version, which you can get at your friendly neighborhood sex store, on high, as it turns out. But, so, was that, no, is that, I'm gonna get my terms wrong here. Not Swami, guru, no, something Gupta.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  Yoga Gupta.

• 1:01:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yoga Gupta.

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  That was-

• 1:01:18Tim Ferriss?

  Are you referring to-

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  His guru.

• 1:01:20Tim Ferriss?

  His guru.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  Who's an Indian guy.

• 1:01:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, got it.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  It's basically a lot of really ancient knowledge that, to some degree, a lot of the yoga knowledge is able to be accessed on the web. You know, you can really look, acrobatics still is not. It's still really hard to find any valuable acrobatic written text. But the really, the thing that's valuable about yoga masters is they communicate things energetically. They, they, this is a saying that comes from Dharma Mitra that came from his guru. "Once blessed is a student that can copy the teacher physically. Twice blessed is a student that can copy them physically and mentally. Three times blessed is a student that can copy them physically, mentally, and spiritually." And there was a day where- The guru was gone and somebody said, "When is he coming back?"

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  And Dharma said, "He started to move as the guru does and started to speak with the same tone of voice." "The guru will come back on May 31st." Are there 31 days in May?

• 1:02:21Tim Ferriss?

  Let's just pretend there are.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  And sure enough, he came back. So, he's a teacher of these very mystical aspects of yoga and at the same time, he does all kinds of crazy asanas, asanas or poses. He has a poster of 908 yoga postures. And so, when I saw this poster, I was like, "I have to meet this guy." And when I finally met him, the types of teachings were much more fulfilling and deep than physical poses. It was really philosophies on life, the way that he interacts with the world. I just watch how he eats a salad. He looks at every piece of food before he puts it in his mouth. The mindfulness practice and the compassion. So, yeah, Dharma Mitra.

• 1:03:02Tim Ferriss?

  Big influence.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  And he's 77, the same age as Liu Yi. The two of them haven't met, but I've got my 77-year-old masters.

• 1:03:09Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think they would love each other or kill each other?

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  No, they would love each other, for sure. And I've seen Liu Yi with a Thai massage master and I was really interested to see how that would go. And, you know, it's kind of like in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, when you've got the party at the end and you've got Anakin and Obi-Wan and basically all the dead Jedi masters hanging out in spirit. When I see masters together, I swear that's what it seems like. It's like, "These magical spirits are getting together and just celebrating life together."

• 1:03:40Tim Ferriss?

  What are some... Well, actually, before we get back to the acrobatics, I want to ask you about contemporary yoga, as it were. Just the state of yoga in the United States, popular yoga. I was put off by yoga for a very, very long time. And maybe this is going to be like speaking out against the church. I don't know, I don't want to create any problems. But, I'm curious, what are things that you see in the yoga world that drive you crazy?

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  Well, yoga can be like-

• 1:04:15Tim Ferriss?

  Aside from not pointing their feet when they do handstands.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  Or sticking, no, it's job security for me. The worse they do at handstands, the more clients I'm gonna get. So I'm not upset of their handstand technique, that's actually great.

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  I feel just like religion, yoga can get very one-wayed. It's my way or the highway. This is the right way and everything else is wrong. That's challenging to me about some yoga systems and people. I also feel that there's a ceiling on yoga. And the ceiling is, you have all this amazing knowledge and all this amazing practice, but how are you bringing that into the world? What happens when you're in traffic? How are you with your mom? Do you talk to your mom? Do you tell her the truth? So I feel like acro yoga and acrobatics and other partner practices help to take that wisdom that people spend so long cultivating and they give it life, they give it access.

• 1:05:09Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good point. Yeah, you get to rehearse the human interaction element. It's like, well, that's great that you're listening to a Dharma talk and sitting on a floor and doing your poses and listening to a speech about compassion, but like, when you go to a restaurant, like flip out at your server because they didn't get you water in two minutes instead of their normal five or whatever it might be. I never really thought about that, but it does, the community aspect and the communal practice of acro has been one of the things that has kept me with it, quite frankly, because in many worlds, there is a high degree of skepticism or even aggression towards outsiders or visitors, right?

• 1:05:52Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:06:24Tim Ferriss?

  What it sounds like you were alluding to, that the Acro helps you to practice things that otherwise might be compartmentalized to a bunch of poses by yourself on a yoga mat.

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:06:37Tim Ferriss?

  And I think that that group practice or partner practice also has led to, I don't have any involvement with the non-Acro yoga community.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:48Tim Ferriss?

  But a lot of the Acro folks, they do almost everything together. It's not just the yoga. It's like they have group meals, they cook, they do fundraisers, they help each other's companies.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Tim Ferriss?

  And that sort of tribal cohesion is something that I think, and this was driven home from me when I interviewed Sebastian Younger on the podcast, is something that I think we need as kind of social creatures. But I could go on and on.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  I'm so happy you're going on and on. And for you, when I first met you, I felt that, I really hope that you actually step towards the Acro community, because I feel like people that are celebrity status, people that are very good at what they do, it's really hard for a lot of those people to really let their guard down and to feel accepted as the human they are versus the titles that they are. So the fact that you're reflecting this means that what we've done to build this community is working, because everyone's a freak.

• 1:07:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  In so many ways. And what happens when you practice Acro yoga is you still are practicing yoga, you still are doing solo practices, and you're understanding where your blockages are. And if you're a big asshole, the community is a self-regulating machine.

• 1:08:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  If there's one person that keeps standing out in the community, they're going to get told from many different people. So we really hold a standard of evolution, and the way that we interact with each other gives us the potential to keep evolving in the direction that we want to as a community, which is the counterculture to the iPhones, to Instagram, to the Facebook. And I think those things are all amazing. I think it's really important that we learn how to use technology in a way that leverages more connection to T. And I feel like there's a big hunger for real, authentic, wholesome, human connection. And I feel like that's what we offer.

• 1:08:42Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think about doing a little bit of, I guess you would call it, solar?

• 1:08:47Speaker 00

  Acrobatic flying?

• 1:08:48Tim Ferriss?

  Acrobatic flying?

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  You basing or flying, or both?

• 1:08:51Tim Ferriss?

  Either, I'll fly.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:08:53Tim Ferriss?

  I've only been doing basing for the last couple of months, this ought to be entertaining.

• 1:09:00Tim Ferriss?

  So I'll be the spry flyer, but I don't know what you think would be of interest to folks. What I will say, I'm just gonna demo something really quick, don't know which primary. Alright, so what I'd encourage people to think about, just so we have some shared vocabulary here, is think of bending at the hips as piking, alright? If your legs, this is very oversimplified, legs apart, straddle, okay? So this is going to be a very sort of common position. And you can think of it just as like sitting down on the floor with your legs spread,

• 1:09:38Tim Ferriss?

  back straight. This gives you a 90-degree angle here. This is shelving, it is gonna be used a lot in acrobatics. So just, so I don't have to explain that when I'm upside down.

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  With that great description, I think we should play with corkscrews.

• 1:09:54Tim Ferriss?

  Corkscrews, okay.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  Have you done corkscrews?

• 1:09:57Tim Ferriss?

  I've based it, I don't know if I've flown it.

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  Today's your lucky day.

• 1:10:00Tim Ferriss?

  Today's my lucky day.

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  Let's go star.

• 1:10:02Tim Ferriss?

  Star, yep.

• 1:10:05Tim Ferriss?

  So hand-to-hand grip, you're gonna have these two fingers on the wrists.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  So basically I want to keep the arms strong and the legs receptive, and you can jump when you're ready.

• 1:10:14Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  And let's do up and down to straddle about a few times, just to calibrate.

• 1:10:19Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:10:21Speaker 00

  Alright, let's go 180 to the front plank.

• 1:10:24Tim Ferriss?

  180 to the front plank.

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  Uh huh, good. That's it, arms strong.

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

  We'll switch the hands, switch again, straddle and go slow. I gotcha.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  Look at you, Twinkle Toes. Nice one.

• 1:10:39Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  Awesome. One more time?

• 1:10:41Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:10:43Speaker 00

  Good, yep. Arms strong, belly down. Switch the hand. Then the second. Straddle wide, nice and slow. Nice. We gotta bust a hand-to-hand, we're here.

• 1:10:53Tim Ferriss?

  Hand-to-hand?

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  Yep, straighten your arms. Don't think about it. Strong arms. Even stronger elbows. Fall towards my feet, right there.

• 1:11:02Speaker 00

  Mr. Tim Ferriss doing a hand-to-hand. Elbows in more, arms in more.

• 1:11:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  Newton, push down. Push down, yes.

• 1:11:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, buddy.

• 1:11:13Tim Ferriss?

  Woo, that was good.

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  Newton saved the day.

• 1:11:18Tim Ferriss?

  Alright.

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  You're a flyer now.

• 1:11:20Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks, man, I'm trying. Trying, I need to... Stop drinking gallons of cream every day. Take some, take some weight off these thunder thighs. That was good.

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  You're fat is my fit.

• 1:11:36Tim Ferriss?

  You're fat is my fit, that's true. Oh, I was saying, I was actually

• 1:11:42Tim Ferriss?

  working with a flyer, very, very gifted flyer. I don't know if you've met Kiplin?

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:11:47Tim Ferriss?

  Kiplin Sagmiller. At Kiplin on all the social, K-I-P-L-I-N-N. Very gifted. And I said to her at one point, I said, "Kiplin, you realize that this routine is starting to get easy. I need you to eat more."

• 1:12:05Speaker 00

  Put some sandbags on.

• 1:12:06Tim Ferriss?

  If this is gonna be progressive resistance for me, I need you to gain like 10 pounds a month for the next 3 to 5 months.

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  Maybe she just get pregnant.

• 1:12:15Tim Ferriss?

  It's an expensive way to train.

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  True.

• 1:12:19Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

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

• 1:13:22Tim Ferriss?

  You can calibrate that. You want to do a quick calibration?

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll tuck it on you.

• 1:13:27Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  You got a base?

• 1:13:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  You got to earn your paycheck. Okay, I'm going to not drop this very heavy thing on your head.

• 1:13:36Tim Ferriss?

  Drop my mic right on my front teeth, that'd be great.

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  Okay, so what's great about this is there's not a lot of risk involved as I just bring my feet up a little bit, testing the water. If that goes well, a little more advanced, can be a tuck. If that goes well.

• 1:13:50Tim Ferriss?

  You can baby hand to hand. Arms more forward, forward, yep, keep coming. Right there, better. Awesome. Your quality of grip is nice.

• 1:14:02Speaker 00

  Steepness is nice.

• 1:14:03Tim Ferriss?

  It's getting there.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Tim Ferriss?

  So, the, uh, testing here and picking your feet off the ground, and you can also do little movements just to help activate the stabilizers in the shoulder.

• 1:14:15Speaker 00

  And what's, what's cool about the way that we train with humans is, there's no machine in a gym that can teach you how to unify your body. There's no machine that can teach you how to have a really strong line because it takes human chaos to create the stability to match that chaos.

• 1:14:36Tim Ferriss?

  There's, uh...

• 1:14:38Tim Ferriss?

  A rig that I'm pretty sure I came up with, but who knows? Sarban rig? Uh, well, actually, hold on a second. That could work. So, the way that I put it together, so I was chatting with Coach Summer, who helped me set up this incredible rings contraption that we were talking a little bit about, which includes something called a 50/50, you call it the Dream Machine. Yeah. So imagine you have a... Thank God for the Dream Machine. It's incredible. Yeah. So imagine you have a harness around your waist, looks something like a rock climbing harness. This one's from Sam, I think it is, and a lot of Sam in this episode. And you clip that to a cable that then goes up over a pulley and then down to the rings. Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:22Tim Ferriss?

  And that allows you to work with effectively half of your body weight, let's just call it. And therefore, you can progress in movements that you might not be able to even attempt safely, such as an iron cross, or a Maltese, or a Victorian, a Vic, or any number of things, back lever, etc. But let's just say that's too intense, right? Because right now, I have medial epicondylitis in both elbows. I also have severely inflamed right elbow bursa, this is a lecranon bursa on the right side. And putting aside all the weird drugs and injections and so on that we might explore, I'm gonna put that as a footnote for a future episode. The device that Coach Summer helped me to install involves power levers.

• 1:16:05Tim Ferriss?

  So, power levers, and I'll put out some photos and videos of this at some point for people to check out, are awesome. So now, it's in combination with the 50/50. Mm-hmm. And you'll see some people mimic this by using straps, or they'll fuss with the rings in such a way that the rings are effectively mid forearm. Right.

• 1:16:29Tim Ferriss?

  Power lever looks like a RoboCop glove. I already like it. Yeah, and it's made out of metal. There's a strap that goes around the forearm. And on top of the forearm, you have basically a uniform ridge of, let's just call it a half inch that goes down to the top of the hand. And then perpendicularly, you have these holes drilled. Let's just call it 10 holes that go from the elbow to the fist. Now, what does this allow you to do? It allows you to take off the rings and then clip in the ring strap at your elbow. So now, the point of support is closer to the fulcrum of the shoulder. Makes it even easier. Much, much easier. But, over time, you can then just move it out one notch at a time, or two notches at a time.

• 1:17:14Tim Ferriss?

  And that's a little off-topic related to the handstands, but it's just been an incredible boon for training. Yep. Especially if you're, let's just say you're trying to attempt a movement like a proper ring dip with a support position at the top with your hands really externally rotated. Surprisingly hard to do. I mean, there are people who can do 20, 30 dips who cannot do two proper gymnastics ring dips. So, if you can only do two or three, you're doing a max effort set effectively. Makes it hard to get the skill practice of that movement. So you could use something like a 50/50, right? To allow you to do, maybe it's 10, 15 total reps, 20 in a workout.

• 1:17:54Tim Ferriss?

  The handstand rig that I was trying to figure out came out of a problem. And the problem was, if I were kicking up to a wall, or facing a wall, and then losing my balance and coming out of it. Even worse. Exactly. My total time in the handstand position for practicing the alignment, tightness, and balance was really minimal. It was kind of like surfing, where it's like, okay, I want to get good at surfing, meaning standing on the board and carving, but 99% of your time is spent paddling. Swimming. Yeah, swimming and paddling. And that's fine, it's part of the sport. But, like, what if you could use a wave pool? Or what if you could use wake surfing? Suddenly, you're able to really accelerate your progress in some very interesting ways.

• 1:18:36Tim Ferriss?

  And so, we were chatting a little bit earlier, I didn't tell you about the rig, but you were like, does it involve just touching your toes on something? Which is what Coach Summer calls a Chinese handstand. So you're underneath a bar of some type, and you're just touching with the tippy-tippy tips of your toes, which requires you to maintain a lot of extension. Right. The issue, though, that I would have with that as a novice... Is that if I lose the extension for a split second.

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  You'll get in trouble.

• 1:19:01Tim Ferriss?

  I'm fucked.

• 1:19:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:02Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna fall one way or the other.

• 1:19:04Speaker 00

  Travis is gonna win.

• 1:19:04Tim Ferriss?

  And then I have to get the hell back up there.

• 1:19:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:19:07Tim Ferriss?

  Which is very, very nuanced. So what I realized is that I have a squat rack. It's a Rogue rack. And there's a dip attachment that goes on the side. And the dip attachment is, let's just call it, it's literally about this big. What I'm doing, for those people who can't see me, is my arms are bent 90 degrees, elbows at the sides, and my hands are straight out, kinda like a Lego figure. And it's roughly this big. And what I realized is, the actual grips were big enough for an Olympic weight plate, uh, what's the collar?

• 1:19:41Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:41Tim Ferriss?

  And I had some Therabands, so I could put a Theraband around the very end, and then lock them on with collars.

• 1:19:48Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:19:48Tim Ferriss?

  I could kick up, get my feet inside, and then that allows me to be that one bone, one body.

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Tim Ferriss?

  And use my wrists and my shoulders to correct. As I get fatigued, of course, I'm going to make mistakes, I'm gonna start correcting by piking and doing all these bad things that I'll get chastised for later by Coach Summer in some hilarious emails that I hope to publish at some point. But then you just.

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  The Summer Diaries.

• 1:20:15Tim Ferriss?

  The Summer Diaries, the notebook, featuring Coach Summer and Tim Ferriss. You just tuck down, and then you're out.

• 1:20:23Speaker 00

  Awesome.

• 1:20:24Tim Ferriss?

  And it's just been an incredible accelerator, in terms of getting just mileage in, in that proper position, right?

• 1:20:33Speaker 00

  Well, this doesn't surprise me, because in the year-plus that I've known you, you've asked me so many seemingly gentle questions that have rocked my world. And one of them that you asked recently was, is there a sequence that basically puts together all of the... Important poses in AcroYoga. And I don't know if you know Bolero?

• 1:20:54Tim Ferriss?

  Don't.

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  It's a classical song.

• 1:20:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I do. Is Bolero the one that's played in Ten? It's the one that's played in Ten with Dudley Moore.

• 1:21:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:21:02Tim Ferriss?

  And Bo Derek.

• 1:21:03Speaker 00

  And also Caveman, if you've seen that movie. But basically, the guy that wrote that, I think it's Revell, he wrote that to educate people in all the different pieces of the orchestra.

• 1:21:15Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:21:15Speaker 00

  So it starts with violin and viola. And it's actually a beautiful song. But I thought, okay, I have to make this sequence that basically strings together every pose that I can think of in AcroYoga. I want to put Bolero in the background. This is a very educational thing. It is going to be beautiful. It's not about the sequence. And basically, what I've done is I've made these grids with front plank, reverse front plank, back plank, all these different things on one column, and then all at the top. And then I cross-reference. What is it like to go from a throne to a reverse front plank? Is it beginner, intermediate, advanced, or an expert? Or not possible? So basically, what I want to do is go in the lab, which is with me and a friend, and just do all these different transitions.

• 1:21:58Speaker 00

  And then basically, try to get a unified field theory of AcroYoga, basically. So Einstein's one of my heroes, and he worked on this most of the end of his life. He was trying to see how the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, gravity, and electromagnetism were all related. And I feel like something that I want to do with AcroYoga in my life is to keep pulling out these equations, pulling out these similarities between these seemingly unrelated things that, once you crack the code, and this is very Tim Ferriss, because you asked the question. Once you crack the code, if I can come up with a five-minute sequence that has all of these very important, basic moves, that's what unlocks the human potential for very complicated flying transitions.

• 1:22:42Speaker 00

  So, yeah.

• 1:22:44Tim Ferriss?

  And also provides, well, number one, I can't wait to try it. Number two, it also provides motivation for the student. And I think that if you look at, for instance, and this is part of where the thinking came from, because the frustration was born of... And frustration, I think, in many cases, is a good thing. It's just, it gives you an itch that needs to be scratched. You need to figure out how to scratch it. And in this particular case... In any physical practice that is not regulated in some way by high stakes competition, which has its own kind of filtering and self-selection. Mm-hmm. But it's totally different because like, let's say you're in China and you're putting together a national gymnastics team.

• 1:23:27Tim Ferriss?

  You don't care if you completely destroy 999 athletes to find the one who can tolerate a just unhuman amount of workload and has freak strength. And that's how the Chinese train. Exactly. And it's also how, I mean, a lot of military-trained dogs, for instance, like, they don't care if 99 of the dogs get completely messed up, as long as they find the one that's going to save 100 lives in the field, or whatever it might be. I shouldn't say they don't care, but it's just an unfortunate, common side effect. Right. But when you're dealing with recreational practitioners and you don't have, say, a national championship in that vetting process, like, anyone who wants to participate can participate, I think it's more akin, in some ways, to like, child's martial arts.

• 1:24:10Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:24:51Tim Ferriss?

  the business or the organization of akryogo, in terms of retention, if people want to get to the next belt, i.e., master the next five-minute sequence? Yeah. It's not only, it's a mutually beneficial construct because it keeps these students motivated and it keeps the entire ecosystem thriving, right? And so, I remember thinking to myself, if you look at, whether it's jiu-jitsu, or those are, I mean, or judo, or akryogo, it's very common, you go into a class and it's kind of, it's whatever the teacher might want to work on that day, or whatever occurred to them on the drive over, or maybe it's something they want to practice themselves. And there's a lot of benefit to that, but, at least for a, like...

• 1:25:35Tim Ferriss?

  OCD perfectionist idiot like myself, I need to know

• 1:25:40Speaker 00

  Where are you going?

• 1:25:41Tim Ferriss?

  Where I'm aiming.

• 1:25:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Tim Ferriss?

  And the, so the idea of the sequence is really fun. That's what, as you know, I've been working on for the last eight weeks or so.

• 1:25:48Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:48Tim Ferriss?

  And ended up getting the entire sequence, except for one, which everybody had trouble with, even the teachers, so I don't feel that badly about it, the London spin.

• 1:25:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, that one's hard.

• 1:25:57Tim Ferriss?

  Motherfucker.

• 1:25:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, that one's hard.

• 1:25:58Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I was able to, we were able to do it 80% of the time.

• 1:26:02Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:02Tim Ferriss?

  But it's, it ain't pretty.

• 1:26:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:26:04Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, but the rest of it, it's just incre, it was really fantastic to have, this is something that Josh Waitzkin, who's been on the podcast, so the inspiration for the book and the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer.

• 1:26:16Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:16Tim Ferriss?

  Considered a chess prodigy, but I don't think that applies, even though he has incredible talents, he can take his learning system, his approach and apply it to just about anything. Jiu-Jitsu, his first black belt under Marcelo Garcia, who's like the Michael Jordan of Jiu-Jitsu, six, 10-time world champion, I don't know, I mean, just, there's no close second place. And he's also applied it to a number of other fields, Tai Chi, he's applied it to now surfing, and he would call it learning the macro from the micro.

• 1:26:43Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right, so.

• 1:26:44Speaker 00

  Oh, I like that a lot.

• 1:26:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right, so, like, for instance, and you can learn a lot about someone's body awareness just by having them do an ATB drill.

• 1:26:52Speaker 00

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:26:53Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, and if you want to learn, let's say, how someone is in language well, you could just offer them two pages of dialogue that include idiomatic jokes. Humor, that's a high bar. Like, you can figure out a lot by seeing how they interact with foreign, foreign language humor. And in Acro, like the corkscrew, that's a really good diagnostic tool.

• 1:27:16Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:17Tim Ferriss?

  You have to do a lot in the corkscrew.

• 1:27:18Speaker 00

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

• 1:27:56Tim Ferriss?

  Dislocate sounds terrible. Now, is that where you come here and they jump through the middle?

• 1:28:01Speaker 00

  That's inlocate.

• 1:28:01Tim Ferriss?

  That's inlocate?

• 1:28:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:02Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so dislocates the other way.

• 1:28:04Speaker 00

  Dislocates the other way, where the arms are here and they go like that.

• 1:28:07Tim Ferriss?

  Oh!

• 1:28:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, you gotta have some ability for that.

• 1:28:09Tim Ferriss?

  I need to work on that. I'm not ready.

• 1:28:10Speaker 00

  You're never doing that. You can base it, you're never flying it. I don't say never that often.

• 1:28:16Tim Ferriss?

  I'm happy to save my shoulders. They've had enough abuse. Left shoulder already has pins in it. I don't need more of those. I really implore people, and you can find, I'm sure, synopses of this online, but get ahold of the meta-learning section of the Fuar Chef, because it talks about how to work on one skill to develop it in such a way that it transfers to many other skills. And so, for instance, if we're looking at sequencing and role-switching, I think this is really helpful for any type of partner practice. In the world of tango, when I was in Argentina, I learned the female role before I learned the male role.

• 1:28:49Speaker 00

  So much easier.

• 1:28:50Tim Ferriss?

  That seems really weird, but working with Alicia Monti, who's an incredible, world-class dancer, learning the female role because we had to. We didn't have enough women in the class. That's how it came about. And it was like, hey, when Buenos Aires was being populated by immigrants, like, the dudes would dance with one another. And it's like, hey, this isn't just for the Castro.

• 1:29:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:29:09Tim Ferriss?

  This is actually, there's a functional purpose here. And after learning the female role, it made it infinitely easier for me to learn the male role. Now, in acro, it's not a strictly male-female thing, as we just saw. But very often, because men are sometimes, or often, bigger than the women they end up basing, and they're just not very flexible, oftentimes you are. But guys will be like, "Ah, I have strong legs. I'll just hold you on my legs." And the...

• 1:29:38Tim Ferriss?

  Even though I'm kinda chunky by acro standards, as a flyer, I try to fly whenever possible, when there's someone like you, or Justin Bent, or Daniel Scott, or some of these guys who are just incredibly solid bases, I wanna fly because it helps my ability to base.

• 1:29:55Speaker 00

  It also, one step further than just understanding is compassion. If you're always basing and you're saying to the flyers, "Why are you so scared?", and then you fly, you're like, "Oh my god, this shit is scary", or vice versa, if you're the flyer and you base a little bit, you're like, "Why are you so wobbly?", and then you try like, "Oh, I understand why you're wobbling."

• 1:30:15Tim Ferriss?

  Well, in South America, there's this one woman, very nice, very super flexy flyer, who was, and I take it that this is a common term, bossy flyer?

• 1:30:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:29Tim Ferriss?

  Just like berating the shit out of every other base, and it was just like, "Okay, why don't you try it?", we were doing hand-to-hand, it's like, "Let you try it, let you try to base."

• 1:30:41Speaker 00

  I bet that was a humble pie.

• 1:30:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and that remedied the situation pretty quickly. And it's not that one is harder than the other, they're at any respectable level, they're both, they involve enough complexity and physical demand to be a humdinger, I think, and not very humbling. But the, I really, the, so, for people who are listening or watching, it's like, we've talked about the acrobatic flying, we've talked about the therapeutic flying, the most interesting is not treating those two as separate practices, but in the case of, for instance, when I'm practicing now, doing say 45 minutes of acrobatic and then 15 minutes of therapeutic. And it's, for me, it's like having, it's two extra days of recovery.

• 1:31:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:31:25Tim Ferriss?

  And it was reminiscent in a way to what I used to experience when I was training at this place called Fairtex here in San Francisco for Muay Thai. And the Thai trainers would do, I mean, very rough...

• 1:31:38Tim Ferriss?

  But nonetheless,

• 1:31:39Speaker 00

  Time massage.

• 1:31:40Tim Ferriss?

  Therapeutic Thai massage by just like wa- ish. I mean technically they were Thai and they were massaging me, so I guess it was Thai massage. But they were just, they would walk on you.

• 1:31:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:31:48Tim Ferriss?

  And before and after, and that was just part of the warm up and the cooldown.

• 1:31:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:52Tim Ferriss?

  And this just reminded me that that self-care, what people might dismiss if they're kind of hard-edged males especially as too soft and new agey and whatever, is actually a performance enhancer for the hard aspects.

• 1:32:10Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:10Tim Ferriss?

  In part.

• 1:32:12Speaker 00

  For sure. And this is the term hatha yoga. A lot of people hear it. It means sun and moon. Ha is sun, tha is moon. So a lot of the physical practices of yoga is about getting the masculine and the feminine energy to balance. So if you are on either side of the spectrum, we are all on one side or the other unless we're super balanced between strength and flexibility. Some people naturally are more strong, some people naturally are more flexible. Wherever you are as an athlete, as an acrobat, and even as a yogi, my belief is that you want to get towards that 50/50. So somebody like you is not going to expand their acro yoga or their yoga practice as intelligently until you get more mobility.

• 1:32:54Speaker 00

  And so being able to put in these therapeutic poses at the end of a practice, it's not just to make your body feel better in that moment, it's to set you up better for your next practice. Because if you're building strength and you're not building range of motion, you're basically making a time bomb. And when things go off, then you really need some deep healing. So if you do, you know, homeopathic doses of healing along the way, unwinding the tension that you built up in your practice, it's just intelligent training.

• 1:33:22Tim Ferriss?

  The Princess Bride method? Iocaine powder?

• 1:33:24Speaker 00

  Exactly. Did you put it in?

• 1:33:27Tim Ferriss?

  The Dread Pirates Roberts training curriculum.

• 1:33:30Speaker 00

  Inconceivable!

• 1:33:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. And the...

• 1:33:36Tim Ferriss?

  The simplest perhaps incentive that I had very early on to base, because I was like, I was watching and I'm like, "That's cool. I think that'd be really helpful for jiu-jitsu." And in fact, I mean, a lot, there's a fair, I've seen a fair amount of crossover. People who want to, who have good kind of rubbery guards are really effective bases. And if they want to improve one or the other, they're very symbiotic.

• 1:34:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:34:01Tim Ferriss?

  But what I realized very quickly after my first or second attempt, because I was like, "Ah, it looks cool. The flying looks like a little bit more fun, but I'm too chunky. And the basing looks like a lot of work." But then I did it, and what I realized was, when we're sitting down like this, so I had developed some back and hip issues. We're sitting like this a lot, and I'm sure Kelly Starrett, PT Extraordinaire, could comment on this more intelligently, but you're effectively pushing the head of your femur forward. You're sitting down, your femur is getting set or pressured in an unnatural direction over extended periods of time. When I lay on my back, put my legs straight up in the air and support weight, I'm reseating the femur in the proper place.

• 1:34:42Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:34:43Tim Ferriss?

  And it's that alone, I feel like just basing someone, even if it was just basing someone in folded leaf or bird, which we did, you know, "Jack, I'm flying" kind of thing earlier, for a few minutes, at the end of the day, is just incredibly beneficial. Let me ask some rapid-fire questions. The usual. So, when you think of the word "successful", who is the first person who comes to mind, or people?

• 1:35:13Speaker 00

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

• 1:35:57Speaker 00

  of how brilliant you are and how open your mind is, like, that's a high bar. And, you know, I've read more about his life, and he writes about love beautifully. And some of his quotes, one of my favorite quotes of his, I'm not gonna say it right because it's in German. He says, "I like to cut wood because I can see the fruits of my labor." And just a lot of really simple things, like, as much as he was, you know, in the stars, he's very pragmatic. And Gandhi, similarly, he didn't see the world in the box that he was born into. And when I see people that really don't take the world as it's being presented, and they have a vision of how things can be, and just that resolve, I feel like both of them were

• 1:36:40Speaker 00

  so committed to their vision and had so much resolve, and both of them changed the world in such big ways. So, that's a big definition of success for me.

• 1:36:51Tim Ferriss?

  And I wanted to highlight something you just said, because the ability of Einstein to comment on beauty is something that I think, or to speak on the qualitative aspects of life, with the razor-sharp perception of a trained scientist, is something that's underappreciated, I think, by people who might be inclined to be scientists, is very clinical and dry. Richard Feynman, another great example, physicist, but phenomenal teacher, surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman is one of my, sort of, favorite books of all time.

• 1:37:33Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any particular books you've gifted most to other people?

• 1:37:37Speaker 00

  The Prophet.

• 1:37:38Tim Ferriss?

  The Prophet?

• 1:37:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:40Tim Ferriss?

  The Prophet, these are lessons from Jesus?

• 1:37:44Speaker 00

  Uh, no, he's a Lebanese guy. I don't remember exactly his name. It's with a K. First name with a K, last name with a G. I cannot pronounce it. He's actually... Yeah, and it's basically, he says, he's this guy who is speaking to a crowd. And somebody in the crowd will say, "Speak to us of pain." And he'll say, "Pain is the..." blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. "Speak to me of love. Speak to me of being a father." And there's this, I love really, the hairs are standing up as I think about it. I love really accurate, condensed, Shakti-filled, energy-filled statements. Something that you can read in a few minutes, or you can read for your whole life.

• 1:38:28Speaker 00

  So, the Dao De Ching would be a close second, and I feel like they have similar things. Where there's so much energy in each passage that you can sit down and speed-read it. But the depth of these ideas and these concepts, that's actually the book that I have on my traveling altar, because all I do is travel. So I have the Dao De Ching, and oftentimes I'll just, before meditation, open it up randomly to a page and read about something, and then just have that be what I steep in as I sit.

• 1:38:56Tim Ferriss?

  So, I have to ask, because you just reminded me of it. You are constantly traveling. You have a very nomadic existence.

• 1:39:04Speaker 00

  Not very. I am fully nomadic.

• 1:39:05Tim Ferriss?

  Fully nomadic?

• 1:39:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:39:07Tim Ferriss?

  What belongings do you travel with?

• 1:39:10Speaker 00

  Well, I have a rolling suitcase, a backpack, and an ukulele. In the backpack, I have my computer, a bunch of notes that are gonna turn into a book sometime probably this year, and it's really dangerous.

• 1:39:20Tim Ferriss?

  Nonfiction?

• 1:39:21Speaker 00

  Uh, and it's acro yoga, acro yoga stuff.

• 1:39:25Speaker 00

  I have my altar items in my backpack.

• 1:39:26Tim Ferriss?

  What are in your altar items?

• 1:39:28Speaker 00

  Uh, different things from different places, things that I've been gifted from students.

• 1:39:32Tim Ferriss?

  Like what?

• 1:39:33Speaker 00

  Uh, rocks, um, I've got some earrings from a girl that I'm her godfather, um, I've got a Mexican flag, the box is actually from Lebanon, because I was born in Mexico, but I have Lebanese heritage, so it's just a lot of mementos that remind me, it's photos as well, I have a photo of Dharmamitra, I have a photo of myself when I was in China, competing at world championships when I was 16, and it's just things that feel important to me that keep me grounded.

• 1:40:00Tim Ferriss?

  So, in a sense, would you say, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I was gonna ask, what is the function of the altar, but is it your mobile sense of home, I mean, is that effectively what it is?

• 1:40:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, and to a large degree, because of my life and lifestyle, my home is my community, and I have friends all over the world, that if I, if and when, it's a when, it's not an if, when I stop traveling full-time, I'm gonna not have that part of my life anymore, so, to be able to go to Germany and hang out with Julia and Pascal and their daughter Leah, who I love to death, and I've seen the baby since it was in the belly, and done acrobatics with them for many, many years, that's really what home is, but having the altar, the unpacking the altar ritual is just, you know, like when I was a kid, I had Star Wars toys and games, and I would love to set up my Star Wars stuff, it's the same thing, where it's like, this is my magic kit, this is what makes me feel like a kid, it makes me feel excited, I put a candle on it a lot of times when I'm meditating,

• 1:40:56Speaker 00

  it's just, it's my happy place, my traveling happy place.

• 1:41:00Tim Ferriss?

  What else do you have?

• 1:41:01Speaker 00

  Um, I have some throwing knives.

• 1:41:03Tim Ferriss?

  Throwing knives?

• 1:41:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:41:04Tim Ferriss?

  Any particular type of throwing knife?

• 1:41:06Speaker 00

  Uh, I've had many types, throwing knives are easy to lose, so, uh, pretty much every time I roll through Sacramento, there's a place that I know that has them, so, that's where my family is.

• 1:41:16Tim Ferriss?

  Can you mention it, or is it like a?

• 1:41:17Speaker 00

  Wild, wild sports.

• 1:41:18Tim Ferriss?

  Wild sports throwing knives?

• 1:41:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, they've got guns, they've got worms, and they've got throwing knives, so.

• 1:41:25Tim Ferriss?

  You're ready for the zombie apocalypse.

• 1:41:27Speaker 00

  You never know.

• 1:41:28Tim Ferriss?

  Have you ever been stopped in customs for the throwing knives?

• 1:41:31Speaker 00

  I haven't. The knives were lifted out of my bag in Panama. When I went to Bali.

• 1:41:37Tim Ferriss?

  Lifted meaning permanently borrowed.

• 1:41:39Speaker 00

  Permanently borrowed, yes. When I was in Bali, like, I don't know if you've been.

• 1:41:43Tim Ferriss?

  I have, yeah.

• 1:41:43Speaker 00

  So you know, if you have drugs, we're gonna kill you.

• 1:41:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:46Speaker 00

  Well, another thing on the customs form is, do you have anything with pointy, any pointy objects? And I was like, ah, I really don't want to give them up, so I smuggled in some throwing knives to Bali. I've said it out loud. The Balinese police might hunt me down, but...

• 1:42:01Tim Ferriss?

  The Balinese Mossad are on their way.

• 1:42:04Speaker 00

  It's a small impression.

• 1:42:05Tim Ferriss?

  If so, that's a huge budget misallocation.

• 1:42:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm a small fish.

• 1:42:08Tim Ferriss?

  Niemberg's not the biggest threat out there. Anything else that comes to mind?

• 1:42:12Speaker 00

  Frisbee. I'm a frisbee golfer, so...

• 1:42:15Tim Ferriss?

  A self photo of that.

• 1:42:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. I love frisbee golf. It's basically, I love training in many different ways, in hand-eye coordination.

• 1:42:23Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any go-to frisbee for frisbee golf? I guess it would be disc golf.

• 1:42:27Speaker 00

  Disc golf, yeah. It's not a sport, it's a pastime. I correct people when they get really serious, because there are people that have caddies, there are people that have like 20.

• 1:42:35Tim Ferriss?

  What?

• 1:42:35Speaker 00

  For real. Those people think it's a sport. It's a pastime. No matter how hard you work at it, it's a piece of plastic and you're throwing it around. I like, there's one called the Rock. It's a mid-range disc. It's very even flying, not super good with distance, and the T-Bird is my go-to driver.

• 1:42:54Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, so I mean, it really is like having a set of clubs.

• 1:42:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, you got your nine iron, you got your pitching wedge, and the discs fly differently. First of all, you have to get a repeatable swing before you have any success, just like golf. But once you have a repeatable swing, you can feel the nuance of this one fades left, this one fades right, this one goes straight, so...

• 1:43:12Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anything you've, anything that you've learned in Acro that has translated to helping the frisbee golfer, vice versa?

• 1:43:22Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I think every practice that I do, they are relatable. How well I can listen to you at the podcast, how well I can do any number of things, it's all sensitivity, confidence, clarity, repeatability. So I'm always training and I'm always playing. And playing and training, for me, I've figured out a way for them to be synonymous, so I don't work hard at things. I do things that I'm passionate about, and I love what I do, so that's, everything is related.

• 1:43:55Tim Ferriss?

  What is, now this is a funny question, coming up on your very minimalist kit that you travel with, but what is the purchase of a hundred dollars or less that has had the biggest positive impact on your life in the last memorable space of time?

• 1:44:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, we've already got it, it's the frisbees for sure.

• 1:44:16Tim Ferriss?

  The frisbees.

• 1:44:17Speaker 00

  And I was hanging out with my two brothers and my dad, we decided to drive up the coast and the three brothers, or me and my two brothers, we've played frisbee golf our whole lives, so we love it, my dad, not so much, but we got a bunch of discs and then we went really high up on Highway One and threw them out into the ocean and my older brother doesn't like it, "Oh, you're putting plastic in the ocean," but to watch a disc fly for like, you know, about a minute, it's magical and it's, in yoga, there's this philosophy, swaha, I call it, you know, fuck it, whatever, let go. So when I throw discs off of, I've thrown it off Montepicu, I threw it off Chichen Itza, they did not like it in Chichen Itza, but I like to throw frisbees off of really high

• 1:44:59Speaker 00

  objects and when I'm in those very ceremonial places like Montepicu, it's like, what am I, what am I releasing? So it's a, it's an intentional act.

• 1:45:07Tim Ferriss?

  It's like burning something on a piece of paper in the flames of a fire.

• 1:45:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, but then you get to watch it fly.

• 1:45:13Tim Ferriss?

  Then you get to watch it fly.

• 1:45:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:45:17Tim Ferriss?

  What do you believe that other people think is insane?

• 1:45:20Speaker 00

  That you can trust people, you can trust a lot of people, that you don't have to live in fear of strangers, strangers are just people you haven't flown yet and I've been all over the world, my mom was not happy when I was gonna go to the Middle East for the first time and I was actually in Boston about to lead a teacher training and this is when the Boston Marathon bomber happened and I had 15 students that were on lockdown for 24 hours and I got on the phone to my mom like, "Look mom, you think Israel is dangerous, I'm in Boston, like you cannot, you cannot hide from danger, but I don't think that's a reason to not trust people, I'm a very trusting person, I've traveled the world in some very sketchy places and I've never had anything bad happen to me

• 1:46:02Speaker 00

  and I, I assume the best in people, I assume that I can trust them until they prove me wrong and I think a lot of people think that's crazy, but when you do this practice enough... Trusting is like a muscle that you flex. And it doesn't mean that I'm a cowboy with it. Like, I have really good credit assessment. You know, I can tell, is this person trustworthy for this engagement I'm about to have? But just in general, having an open mind, having an open heart, believing that people have good intentions.

• 1:46:32Tim Ferriss?

  How much of that do you think is bad things not happening to you versus seeing things in the most positive light? Right? Because you had your throwing knives left in the panel.

• 1:46:41Speaker 00

  True.

• 1:46:42Tim Ferriss?

  So like shit happens.

• 1:46:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:43Tim Ferriss?

  I'm imagining.

• 1:46:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, one of the, one of the things that happened to me that was really amazing was I had all of my objects liberated from me. I was living in a van in San Francisco and I had my 30th birthday party. Basically, I didn't want to work in restaurants. It's like, I'm a yogi, I'm gonna do this, I don't care how hard it is, I love this, boom. So I was living in my van, my 30th birthday, my friend throws me a party. And that night I got a book on Buddhism, a case of coconuts, hung out with my friends. The next day, my van's gone, my home's gone, everything is gone. So I go crack a coconut and start reading about Buddhism, because what the fuck else am I gonna do? And page four is talking about homelessness and wandering. I'm like, that's what I'm gonna do.

• 1:47:28Speaker 00

  And that started my nomadic traveling. And if I stayed in San Francisco and tried to make it as a yoga teacher, acro yoga wouldn't be a worldwide practice. So the ability to let go of what's not working and really assess what is working and what can I be excited about? It's true, it's not that bad things don't happen to me. I don't label a lot of things good, bad. Can I evolve from this? What do I want now? Where is my center now? And this is all from yoga. Well, not all, my parents, a lot of other things. But yoga is the daily practice that helps me bring this wisdom into action steps in my life.

• 1:48:03Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned something that I've never heard you talk about, and we've never talked about before. But the restaurants and then the decision, fuck it, I'm gonna do this full time. Walk me through like the 24 hours that led to that decision. Because at the time, was, did you realize it was financially feasible? Or was it just a? Hail Mary, this is what I'm meant to do. Walk me through like the 24 hours before you're like, alright, I'm pulling the trigger. This is what I'm doing.

• 1:48:30Speaker 00

  Well, I made up my resume for restaurants and I was living in San Francisco. We had a rent-controlled house that three yogis were living in because the people that had the rent control left town and, you know, I was like, I was dirtbagging it. But at that point, all I needed was yoga and food. Like, I didn't need money. I didn't have other ambitions. I wasn't traveling the world, so if I had enough money to take yoga classes and to eat well, that's all I needed. When I got to that point of, do I get a job or do I really dedicate to the yoga thing? It really wasn't a choice. It was, it was such a big thing that happened in my life when yoga really hit me over the head. This is all I want to do, and if I do these other things, I'm not being true to the practices that I've been learning about.

• 1:49:14Speaker 00

  Like, this is, this is time for me to really dedicate to this. And my mom had a van and she was, she didn't need it. I'm like, huh, I never thought I would live in a van, but San Francisco was and still is super competitive with yoga. And yoga teachers are some of the most underpaid people on the planet because they have the potential to really bring a lot of beauty to people's lives. And, you know, they get paid thirty to a hundred dollars a class, depending on what city you're in. So if I didn't live in the van, there really weren't a lot of other solutions I saw. And until the van was liberated, then I saw the other solutions. And living on the road, actually, you know, you're never, you're never really successful, at least I haven't been, in the cities where you start things.

• 1:49:56Speaker 00

  It's, you know, you go further away from where things started and you're more luxurious and more exotic. San Francisco is still a difficult city to fill a room for me. So if I would have kept hitting my head against that wall, I wouldn't be here, the practice wouldn't be here, so.

• 1:50:11Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. I love that. So we're gonna wrap up with just, just a few last questions. Suppose this is as good a place as any to ask. If you had a billboard, could put anything on it?

• 1:50:25Tim Ferriss?

  What would you put on it?

• 1:50:26Speaker 00

  Play, play more, play, yeah. I feel like people are so serious and it doesn't take much for people to drop back into the wisdom of a childlike playfulness. So I think that's, if I had to prescribe two things to improve health and happiness in the world, it's movement and play. Those two things. Cause you know, you can't really play without moving. So they're kind of intertwined. But if you're just moving and you're not enjoying yourself as you're moving, if you're on a treadmill, treadmills kill your spirit. I mean, not, there are reasons and times to do treadmills, but if that is your only way of moving your body, you're selling yourself short.

• 1:51:10Speaker 00

  There are way cooler ways to move your body, way more fun things. And I just happen to have the good fortune to learn a lot of these really cool things. And yeah, so play.

• 1:51:19Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome. Jason, where can people find you online? What would they like them to check out?

• 1:51:26Speaker 00

  Acryoga.org is the website and there are free learning opportunities. AcroYoga International is the name of the company that I run. And on YouTube, you can go there and see a bunch of free videos that get you started.

• 1:51:41Tim Ferriss?

  What is the handle on YouTube?

• 1:51:43Speaker 00

  Acryoga International.

• 1:51:45Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, Acryoga International. And we'll put all this in the show notes, folks, so you can find everything else. Anything on social you'd like to mention? Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, where are you?

• 1:51:55Speaker 00

  It's all Acryoga and it's all Jason Nemer. So jasonnemer.com, Jason Nemer on Instagram. I try to keep it simple because I like to keep things simple if I can.

• 1:52:04Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome. So much fun, always great to hang.

• 1:52:07Speaker 00

  Right on.

• 1:52:08Tim Ferriss?

  And more flying and basing in the future.

• 1:52:10Speaker 00

  What a weird grip. That's not very useful. There we go.

• 1:52:15Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man.

• 1:52:17Speaker 00

  Good stuff. Thank you, Tim.

• 1:52:19Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks. And everybody listening and everybody watching, as always, you can find the show notes at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. I'll have links to everything that we talked about. And until next time, thank you for listening and thank you for watching. Signing off.

• 1:52:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm on.

• 1:52:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm on.

• 1:52:37Speaker 00

  That was fun.

• 1:52:40Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close

• 1:53:20Tim Ferriss?

  friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley have

• 1:54:04Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:54:49Tim Ferriss?

  Not a sprint and little things that you may or may not be familiar with like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et cetera, can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first 15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them.

• 1:55:34Tim Ferriss?

  In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free, there's no downside that I can think of.

• 1:56:18Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I've used for years. I love audiobooks and I have two to recommend right off the bat. Number one is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and that is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, the only audiobook I've wanted to immediately listen to a second time as soon as I finished. It's amazing, you will thank me, The Graveyard Book. The second is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what became The 4-Hour Work Week. So, all you need to do to get your free 30-day trial is go to audible.com/tim, T-I-M, and you can choose one of those two books, or you can choose from more great options than you can possibly imagine.

• 1:57:01Tim Ferriss?

  So that could be a book, that could be a magazine, that could be a newspaper, it could be a class, it's that easy. Go to audible.com/tim, that's audible.com/tim, and grab a book. Enjoy.