A Conversation Not About Fitness | Michael Blevins | Modern Wisdom Podcast 160

Michael Blevins is a coach, podcaster and part of the team who trained some of Hollywood's biggest stars for screen. Expect to learn why exercising is where we connect most closely with what it means to be human, how the modern obsession with training can be damaging mentally and physically. We talk about metaphysics, psychedelics, finding meaning & purpose in life... and not really at all about fitness. Check out everything I use from The Protein Works and get 35% OFF SITE WIDE with the code MODERN35 - https://www.theproteinworks.com/modernwisdom/ Extra Stuff: Check out Michael's Website - https://www.nonprophet.media/ Follow Michael on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/gritandteeth Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #not #fitness #hollywood - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey, I gotta beat my hedge fund at, you know, 6 a.m. to start before everybody else starts. So I wake up to an alarm at 4:30. I get in my car with caffeine, cortisol's running, sympathetic stays up. I'm in traffic, I'm swearing at people. I get to the office, I'm late. I do all this stuff and then I'm like, oh, it's noon, I gotta get my workout in. So I run down to a CrossFit gym, I blast an 11-minute MetCon, crush it, give everybody a high five, get back to the office, finish work, get back in traffic, go home. And then I wonder why I feel like I'm diseased, because I can't sleep then.

• 0:37Chris Williamson?

  Michael Blevins in the building. How are you doing, man?

• 0:41Speaker 00

  I'm good, man. Thanks for having me, Chris. I appreciate it.

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

  Really happy to have you on. We've got one of our mutual friends out with you at the moment, right?

• 0:48Speaker 00

  We do, Elodie. Yeah, Elisaurus.

• 0:52Chris Williamson?

  All the way from Newcastle to... Where are you? Where are you based?

• 0:55Speaker 00

  I'm in Salt Lake City, Utah.

• 0:57Chris Williamson?

  Cool. Sweet, man.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Which is a strange place to visit, I guess, if you're in Europe and you're thinking about coming to the States. It's not generally the destination that you're thinking of. It's usually east coast, west coast. The middle area admittedly is not that interesting, but Salt Lake seems to be kind of a sweet spot.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it just seems to be, I don't know what it is about it. It's, it's pretty here, it's high desert, you know, high altitude, there's skiing if you're into that, there's a lot of outdoors. You're three minutes away from like Red Rock Desert, so it's pretty good.

• 1:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's good, man. Elodie's, Elodie's a little bit of a wanderluster, isn't she? So I'm not surprised that she's ended up on your, on your doorstep. So how would you describe your approach to fitness?

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Ooh, I tend to run away from it, but I have to kind of asterisk that. I, I run away from the fitness industry. Fitness, I think, is really important because it's kind of our last attachment to what it is to be human, right? Like before we become all so technologically advanced that we have robots throwing food down our throat and all entertainment is LED screen and all, all senses are sensed, you know, through some other machine. I think it's, it's kind of the expression of being in your body, your mind, it's kind of a combination of maybe... I don't, you know, how weird you want to get, but it's, it's kind of like a spiritual

• 2:27Speaker 00

  experience when you express it appropriately. And I think my approach to fitness is providing that experience for people, providing like the idea that this is an all encompassing philosophy that influences other parts of your life.

• 2:46Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting that a lot of people use video games, social media, et cetera, et cetera, as a escape from reality in quotation marks? And now you're offering people an escape to reality with fitness?

• 3:01Speaker 00

  That's a really good way to put it. I would say, and I would, I would, I would kind of bookmark that for a really deep conversation about what it is to actually sense something.

• 3:13Chris Williamson?

  We are here. This is the deep conversation, Michael. Let's fall down the rabbit hole, my friend.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  All right. So there's something to this experience and how I frame this for people because people are very, I don't know how to put it because I don't want to, people's initial belief is that what I see, what I hear, what I feel is reality. Right? But in reality, that's not, that's not it at all. So what I sense is an interpretation of certain signals, wavelengths, patterns, particles that my brain translates for something that I can make sense of. So the, the color is green, but that's just a wavelength spectrum.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  In reality, what is that? Like, does that actually exist? Or are we already in a sort of virtual reality? And by putting on virtual reality through our reality, we're just devolving into one level of abstraction. So how I first like to think about it, and this is a nightmare situation for people. This is like, this is claustrophobia inducing. And I like to say, you know, imagine that you, yourself, your body with all your senses were locked into a 12 by 12 by 12 by 12 box. And it was completely dark. There is no light, but the outside world exists around

• 4:39Speaker 00

  it. How long do you think it would take you before you start trying to interpret what's going on around? Like, you hear a car pass, so the echoes and the ricochets of sound, you start to echolocate and eventually, actually very quickly, your body, through an act of synesthesia, would start echolocating and you would start getting visual perception of what's outside of your black box. And this is what happens with people that learn how to echolocate after being blinded or something like that. They can actually navigate a three-dimensional world based off of sound and ricochets and noises because they've taught their brain to reinterpret their own reality. So it becomes kind of a sonar

• 5:22Speaker 00

  thing. And every human has a capacity to do this. In the same sense, if you are missing something, whatever, taste, hearing, the senses take over and you'll, you'll make a map of the world. Like, our, our, our reality is whatever the map we make of the world, but the map is not the territory. So, the best way, I like to put this, is like, actually, that, that, that black room, that is reality. You are already that. Your brain is in a blacked-out container, and all it's doing is interpreting the world around it. And sometimes you get that wrong.

• 5:58Chris Williamson?

  Have you looked at David White's work?

• 6:00Speaker 00

  I have not.

• 6:01Chris Williamson?

  Right. So, you're describing what David White has arrived at. So, anyone that wants to find out a little bit more about this stuff, just search David White on Making Sense by Sam Harris. It is episode 184, which came out earlier this, earlier this year.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Oh, is this the author of A Case Against Reality?

• 6:24Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, so I am familiar with this work.

• 6:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so you know, what, what he's saying is, is a real, serious manifestation of what you're talking about. The world as we see it could be completely different, and he thinks is likely to be really different, but because we have to survive, we've managed to interpret it in a way that allows us to survive. So I, I, I get that. I like, I like that approach. I think it's interesting.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, is it useful? It's always like-

• 6:52Chris Williamson?

  That's the question. That's what I was about to bring it back to. So we go, okay, we've got fitness. We've got this, this bringing back to reality. What is reality? All this stuff. But at the end of the day, what does it matter if what we see is a true representation of what is out there when we don't have any other way than the way that we do have to see that?

• 7:12Speaker 00

  So I totally agree. The utility of it for me and through fitness specifically comes when I say all of these are just representations of reality, but how good you are at interpreting that has to do with your sensitivity. Right? So the more sensitive I am with faulty tools, admittedly, like my eyesight is faulty, my memory is faulty, my taste, my touch, my hearing, you know, I literally ran past somebody the other day and I thought they called me an asshole. And I was like, what did you say? And they're like, oh, I said, I'm sorry. And I was like, shit.

• 7:48Chris Williamson?

  Why did you default to that?

• 7:50Speaker 00

  That's, I've thought a lot about that. I was like-

• 7:52Chris Williamson?

  What about people calling you an asshole as you're running past?

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Well, because I think in my model of the world, I've built a model where the majority of people I run into are not worth knowing and I don't give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm actually on the negative side of it. And it's something I've had to like really work after to really correct that thinking because I want to become more sensitive to other people. So I've started this drill because I realized, you know, when driving in traffic and somebody cuts you off, you're like, ah, brrrr, flip that person off, give them whatever, ruins, you're kind of like, oh, people are so stupid. And in reality, that's not true. People are not stupid. Human beings are highly intelligent. They just sometimes lack attention towards my personal wellbeing, which makes me think

• 8:40Speaker 00

  derogatory things about that person. But if I remap the situation that they didn't cut me off because they're against me, that goes towards not whatever razor it is, I can't remember, but the, the thought is-

• 8:55Chris Williamson?

  Do not attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  Exactly. So if I, if I go back to that model and I go, okay, first attribute a different thing. They cut me off because they're in a hurry. Right? They're late for something. What if that lateness was, you know, their daughter was in the hospital and this is like a drill that a lot of people do. And then now suddenly they come, now I want to get out of the way and help that person out. And so it remodels the world. So I want to become more sensitive to those interactions. And fitness is just a way to become more sensitive to the world around you because you become more sensitive to your output input, right? What the environment I'm in, my heart is racing, the weight is heavy, I don't want to do the activity, my brain is working against me. All of these conversations and inputs and outputs, I have to start to

• 9:43Speaker 00

  manage. And that's something that we don't practice. So we lose our sensitivity with the, you know, the model of the world that we're viewing. And I think the more you get into fitness, the more sensitive you are to reality.

• 9:57Chris Williamson?

  Why is fitness the answer to that? Why can't I do it through something else? What's so special about fitness?

• 10:03Speaker 00

  Um, mostly because it's the glasses that I see through. So I'm applying my bias through most people.

• 10:11Chris Williamson?

  It could be, if I was speaking to an artist, they might say, well, it's obviously art that's the thing to do this. Personally, I'm going to, so I'm going to steel man my own argument here, or your argument. I would say that the visceral feelings that you get, especially when you do high output fitness. But then, again, I can go on the other side of that and say, Pilates, yoga, especially Yin yoga, slow things that essentially is just mindful stretching. There's some very, very present states that you get into there. But there's no hiding being at 180 BPM heart rate, right? There is nowhere to hide. There's nowhere to hide when you're picking up anything over 70% of your max on a deadline. You know

• 10:52Chris Williamson?

  that it's happening. It brings you into the present. And I did a podcast with Paul Bloom, psychologist and philosopher from University of Yale. Beast, absolute beast. And his new book is talking about why people like pain. So how pain and meditation, basically, how, what is the similarity between BDSM and meditation? What do they have in common? And there's this quote from a really famous dominatrix that said, nothing captures attention like a whip. And the point is, the reason that people do these extreme sporting events... Base jumping, that flying squirrel thing, I don't know what that is. Like, the reason that they do all of that stuff is because you, the line between you and death is so

• 11:36Chris Williamson?

  fine and so at the forefront of your experience, you can do nothing but think, put all of you into that particular experience. And I wonder how much of these, you know, as you talk in these sort of almost allegorical, symbolic ways about your fitness, I wonder how much of that experience is you bringing yourself into the present, making it a meditative experience because there's nowhere to hide?

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Well, a lot of it, yes, is presence. And I find, you know, maybe the easiest, most tangible way to feel that is through fitness. But you're right, there are other ways, like art is a great example. But I think art is the outcome of the others. Like if I'm present and I practice and I feel hardship and pain and I translate that into an experience and I want other people to relate that experience, I create art. And a lot of the times where there's effort and time comes art. And so music runs that way. If you're knowing musicians, like how they create music is just a

• 12:43Speaker 00

  huge mystery, but a lot of it has to do with how their experience has informed them. And a lot of that is painful experience. The tough thing is like, what is the difference between, you know, dealing with pain, learning to develop pain tolerance and masochism? Like, it's a fine line. And a lot of the time, especially, I think in CrossFit, people cross that line and then they get lost because they become addicted to the feelings that tolerating pain come with, that release of endorphins, this like... You know, community based sweat angeling is what I would call it. It's just,

• 13:24Speaker 00

  you know, they're addicted to the outcome and they forget to get sensitive with the actual output.

• 13:30Chris Williamson?

  Well, one thing, one thing there is it's using a sledgehammer where a small stone hammer might, might do, right? You know, there's very, again, what did I say? You can't hide away from 180 bpm heart rate. There is no, there's nowhere to go. You know, it's happening. You feel it. You know this place and it's the same place every time. It's like getting drunk, but you going and drilling.

• 13:58Chris Williamson?

  For you guys, it'd be in pounds. So like 100 pounds, 100 pounds deadlifts, tempo deadlifts. Like that's not taking you to a place. You're forcing your attention into the movement. You're drilling the movement. You know, for people that are listening that aren't, aren't sort of fitnessy, think about anything that you have to do a lot, you know, like even changing a baby, you know, spending time with a baby, rocking a baby to sleep. You can choose to do it with or without presence, with or without mindfulness. You can be in that situation fully, or you can be away. And I think people can take that extreme, that top, top end, real pushing, pushing. And that is an easy way. That's the, that's the whip, right? That's nothing catches attention like a whip. That is the whip.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I, I'll, I'll grade this on kind of a curve because there is, there's stuff that demands attention at the very top of intensity. And you kind of, you decide, you described squirrel suit flying and some base jumping. And there was this, uh, there's a documentary called Valley Uprising. I don't know if you've seen it. It's on, it's on Netflix. It's, it's one of the best documentaries I've seen. And it's basically about the culture growth in Yosemite National Park when climbing came onto the scene. So it starts with all the great climbers and how they developed these roots. And it kind of gets to a guy interviews Dean Potter and he's a, he's dead now. He died

• 15:22Speaker 00

  from, I believe, a base jumping accident, something related to that. But he was an extreme free solo climber, one of the best. And people kind of saw where he was headed with it. And so people attribute that, oh, he is just, um, he's just a, what do you call it? An adrenaline junkie. That, that's, that's generally what gets said about some of these people.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Is that they're like just seeking a hit, like they're junkies, right? But how he described it was how I describe anything that requires presence, which he's trying to touch a void. So he was specifically talking about tight wire, like tight rope walking. And he'll walk, you know, freely up thousands of feet where any mistake is certain death. Like any slip and even like certain things, certain inputs that aren't up to you, the wind direction can shift. Anything could switch you off and that danger allows him to be totally present and appreciative of his life. It's actually the opposite of what most people attribute to adrenaline junkies, which is,

• 16:28Speaker 00

  I am risking this on this knife edge because actually it allows me to feel life at this intensity that I can't get doing anything else. But I back that up into, you know, let's call that the sacred space where everything is so, like I don't know if you've ever been to any kind of ceremonial happenings, but they create a space and they clean it and they clear it and everything is precise.

• 16:52Chris Williamson?

  Ritualistic.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Ritual, right. Like, you know, they smudge and they call in directions and they do all these, you know, very ancient and cultural traditions. And the idea is that they're creating a container that they can create sacredness inside a profane world. There's a really good book called The Sacred and the Profane that kind of describes how almost all, all human cultures have this idea of sacred and profane. And the interesting part about fitness is that we've kind of lost that. That's, that's why I kind of go against the industry so much because we've created nothing sacred inside this practice that I think is really sacred, which is intuitively teaching you about

• 17:35Speaker 00

  your own psychology, your own physicality, your own capability, and eventually your own spirituality. Um, but our gyms have become, for lack of a better term, like masturbation pots. Like they're just people going to the gym and looking at themselves and either being just like shaming themselves or admiring themselves in a narcissistic way. And fitness in the industry is purely aesthetic. Like we talk about functionality, right? Like CrossFitters are talking about, oh, it's form and function and it's functional because I lift a heavyweight quickly and look how athletic I am. But in reality, if you've ever dealt with CrossFit athletes, 99% of them are dieting before a competition so that they get more camera time.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Like it is still the same aesthetic problem. There's very few, um, maybe at the top where they put aesthetics aside for performance, which is the expression that we're talking about. Um, but on the sacred profane thing, once I come down to the bottom of the curve where I think that it's not sacred, it's not profane, that's actually still sacred, which is my neat practice. It's very boring. So, um, where I think the most development comes in is actually some of the monotony. Like finding, you know, sitting and thinking becomes the most painful, or sitting and not thinking, rather, becomes one of the most painful experiences somebody could have because their brain is all over the place.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  So, uh, in, in the fitness world that we're trying to create, we had to kind of start over. And, and we constantly start over. We deconstruct what works and then we recreate what we think is better. And so we're constantly breaking this space down and rebuilding it into something that can transform people. And one of the ways, one of the simplest ideas that allowed that to happen is we got rid of the name for our physical space. So there is no name. Like we have a brand that we sell stuff through because we have to file taxes called nonprofit, but the space is just called the space. And one of the reasons to do that is that way, when people have powerful experiences

• 19:43Speaker 00

  here in a container that we've made sacred, they can't talk about it, right? It, it, it's not, uh, you know, hashtag blessed and hashtag got in my, you know, whatever. I'm going to flex, show my abs and then say something inspirational like Gandhi, you know, like, I don't, it's, it's become.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  I guess perverse in a way and what we wanted to do is rewrite that so this space is sacred. People can have experiences and they can talk about the experiences, but they can't talk about the spot that really illuminated that by not having a name. Instead, it's a green building warehouse on Knights South across from a strip club. And people go, what are you talking about? And so no one can find their way here unless they really seek it out. And I think that was the biggest difference that we made is that we don't advertise. We don't try to push what we're doing because if people want to find the thing, they'll do some really hard work, which means that takes away, you know, me having to convince them that fitness is an important thing or convince them that hard work is important.

• 20:49Chris Williamson?

  What would you say to someone that said, all that that is, is another marketing ploy that's triggering off different signals? So some gyms are super out there. They've got the guys with the tans and the white teeth. And then other gyms are, we're functional and we've got the fittest athletes or we've got the biggest athletes or we've got the this. And someone could say, well, that's just another, that's just Michael being another step ahead of the curve there and thinking, well, if I make anti-marketing my marketing, then the marketing will work even better because it sets you apart.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  To some point, that is true. There's a guerrilla aspect to this, but I would probably reply like, well, then we would probably have more than seven clients. But if it was like a marketing scheme to get people into this place. But in reality, there's seven people that are basically allowed on a daily basis to come in and train here. Other days, we might allow a few other guests and whatnot to come train on days that we're training. But on transformational projects, when we take somebody from A to B, we limit it. It's very private here. And I mean, yeah, I would say if the anti-marketing was working, we would actually be making money off it. But no, we don't.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Instead, to support this entire space, we have to create materials such as books and things to read and all of these things in order to support the work that we're doing that then informs the other material that we're writing. It is a terrible business model.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  It's, we joke about it often. It's like, we're really bad at business.

• 22:34Chris Williamson?

  Business. Okay. So I, I walk into your space for some, somehow I've got on the guest list. Someone's got, Elodie's got me in VIP or whatever it is. And I managed to.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  You're gonna be really disappointed if you think you're VIP if you come in here.

• 22:48Chris Williamson?

  You know what I mean, right? The doorman, the doorman hasn't stopped me at the door before he started to shift at the strip club across the street. And I've, I've, I've got in, what happens? What's it like? Tell me about the space. Is people listening? Who will know the, the heritage that you guys have through Jim Jones and all that sort of stuff? Like what, what? You know what? What happens? I walk in. What's it like?

• 23:08Speaker 00

  One of the things that we got right at Jim Jones was having an inside and an outside. In here, stuff happens. Out there, other stuff happens. And so that was the start of understanding a sacred space. And some of the things that we messed up were obvious to us, but you know, oh, we let too many people in. But in reality, when people come in here and they're having this experience, it starts with a lot of conversations. And this, this is why, sorry, I mean, not to use these terms because it's involved, but it's not, what we do is not scalable.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Like, there's never going to be a day where I'm like, cool, what we did worked really well because we know it works really well.

• 23:55Chris Williamson?

  Let's roll this out across five sites. Yeah.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's like, hey, let's like duplicate me, quadruple me. Let's just fill up the space. We've got 5,000 square feet. Let's open up another one down the street, which is like Orange Theories or CrossFit gyms down the street. There's no formula for this. So when people come on in, it's really off putting at first, because for a month, I am just asking questions. And that's all I do. I ask questions. I show them a couple of things. I might have them move around a little bit to get a better idea. I ask them about their work life. We have conversations about their past, their history, their traumas, their injuries, all of these things. And after about a month, people start going like, hey, how much is this place?

• 24:37Speaker 00

  Because I haven't charged anything. So the first month, I actually do due diligence to see if I can actually make it work. The reason we're so successful is because I don't work with people that I don't think I can win with. Like, we can both win. If it's not a win-win situation, I don't want anything to do with it. And it takes me about a month to assess that out, to understand their home life, to understand their background, to understand their motivation. And then, we just start the process. It becomes very one-on-one, but sometimes incorporating groups when they need it. So, the idea here that's different than most gyms is when you go and do a gym, like a CrossFit box, they have a program. It's the best program in the world, by the way.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  It's like, this master elite weightlifter Navy SEAL wrote it. And, uh, he's been to the Games nineteen times in five years. And, um, that program is supposed to be for everybody, because it's the best in the world. It's a super-secret squirrel program, and if you come to this gym, you get to do that with everybody that's a super-secret squirrel. And, uh, you know, that's intelligent programming. Look, and it's written two years in advance. Like, it's written like, you know, a doctorate. It's like, your whole, the next four years of your life are planned. You're back squatting in two thousand twenty-four on a Tuesday at eighty-five percent.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Instead, when people come in, I look at them on the day and decide what they need to do. Now, that, that sounds like it's a last-minute approach. What we're doing is an intuitive approach to a structure that I've broken down. So when somebody comes in after about a month of analyzing, I go back and I work out. In order to get to X on this day, they're gonna need this kind of stimulus. It might be, um, three endurance work, endurance sessions a week, two strength sessions, one body flow session. Uh, two, you know, body work sessions where they're actually getting recovery work. I try to plan out everything and then dose it like, okay, they're, if they're dieting and Aaron is running their nutrition and cooking for them.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Then I'm talking to her in order to slowly break down calorie restriction so they don't ever feel it. Or increase macros in a certain area so they can handle certain adaptations. And then on the day, I have kind of an idea of what needs to get done. You know, during the week, I need these three sessions. And if this day they walk in, I look in their eyes and they didn't sleep well. Well, there goes the high intensity section, right? Like, that's the last thing I want to do to somebody is beat them down so that it's harder to come back. Our model now, as opposed to what we were doing at Jim Jones, which was to literally just fuck people up. Like, that, that's all we were doing was like really hard work. So people were shocked by all the work that we were doing.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  And we became adapted to this heavy workload and we could tolerate it. So then we'd give it to other people, they would break down and we would just laugh like, ah, see? You're missing something in your fitness. And that's what most trainers and coaches do when you come in to see them. They, they want to make you hurt to show them how much you're missing of their knowledge or their expertise.

• 27:41Chris Williamson?

  So it's used, that pain, I think, often gets used in fitness as a proxy for secret or hard work. But I mean, like, I can write a workout for someone now. I'm not a programmer, I've not got my CrossFit Level One. I can write a program for someone now that's impossible to do.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 28:00Chris Williamson?

  And it's hard work. That doesn't mean that I have some

• 28:03Speaker 00

  No.

• 28:03Chris Williamson?

  super secret squirrel knowledge, right?

• 28:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:05Chris Williamson?

  So I, I

• 28:06Speaker 00

  I'll out, I'll out minute on the aerodyne every five minutes for an hour.

• 28:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  Like, it's like, yeah, I can make anybody hurt and that, that's a tool. But in reality, and if you follow Paul Bloom and some of like Daniel Kahneman and a lot of these people that are really delving into the psyche and behavioral patterns of people. We find that pain tolerance doesn't come from beat downs. It comes from so slow accumulated ability, right? Like, I tolerated this much, I lived, cool. It wasn't that bad. And then I come back and I do a little bit more. You look at a, an elite endurance athlete, like somebody like Rebecca Rush is a perfect example. World champion mountain biker, one level a couple of times in a row. She's a repel athlete. She's, she's known as the queen of pain. Like that is her fucking nickname.

• 28:56Chris Williamson?

  That's badass.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  She doesn't go and beat herself down every day. She actually goes and enjoys herself in a natural environment on a bike, being physical in the way that she loves to express it. And then on the day, all this accumulated tolerance gets put towards one competition. And of course, she's going to slay everybody. She hasn't had to tap into the hurt locker every day in order to get amount of volume that's required for professional stuff.

• 29:23Chris Williamson?

  Perfect example of that. Elliot Kipchoge never, never trains above 80%. Ever. Fastest man on the planet. Fastest man on the planet over 26 miles. Never trains above 80% because he's got it in the tank. Now, I wonder how much of that, how much of their particular physiology has that extra 20% in there, you know, like to, to raise that ceiling, it takes a super, a super physiology to have that in the tank. We were talking, I was talking to Steve Horsett from CrossFit JST the other day. And he was talking about how the best athletes will qualify for a local competition or whatever it is by only giving 80%, which means they can go back to training. And I was like, yes, but that's only if your 80% is good enough to be as good

• 30:08Chris Williamson?

  as everybody else is 100%. Or else you haven't qualified, right? So, and I, I, I think that's a really interesting point. Like, you know, how do we, how do people continue to improve, continue to get themselves better without, like you say, just force feeding themselves with this pain and, and, and using pain as a proxy for hard work?

• 30:30Speaker 00

  So this is where the boredom and monotony pays off. Like there's something structurally that changes in the brain with enough boredom. And like,

• 30:41Speaker 00

  If you've ever read a book called Endure,

• 30:44Chris Williamson?

  Alfred Lanzo.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Alex Hutchinson.

• 30:47Chris Williamson?

  Oh, Endurance by Alex Hutchinson. Yes.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:50Chris Williamson?

  Monster. What a guy.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  We had him on the podcast after we read his book, mostly because he wrote, he wrote about Mark and then never consulted Mark. So Mark has a thing. He's like, hey, we're gonna have a conversation. And it went well because we, we agree on a lot of the same techniques and like a lot of the phenomena that's behind building great endurance has to do with the brain and fitness in general. And this is where I said, like, there's something in there in his book. And we've noticed it is that if it's not boring, it's not working for endurance. But you're, there's this ability and maybe I'll phrase this on a bigger spectrum for which we work because we work in general fitness and capacity, GPP. General physical preparedness means that we want to be capable

• 31:38Speaker 00

  in each of the designated energy systems as we know them. So we've redefined a lot of them, but as they go, strength, maybe it's called power endurance for some people. Maybe it's called, for us, it's capacity. Maybe it's metcon, whatever. It's like this 90 minute thing. And then there's endurance and then there's ultra endurance. And in between are fettered with really ridiculous terms like speed endurance. Who the hell knows what that means? And then there's strength endurance was just another way to describe.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  Three rep max. Call it a three rep max.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  I wish it was that simple. But we, we've basically bastardized our terminology, but we do address, okay, this is the systems. But we chart on top of that. One of the things that I think that we're most well known for is taking stuff like the physiology and mapping on a psychological map as well as a philosophical map on top of that. Like overlays, if you imagine you had a bunch of those, I forgot what they call them. Where they have a projector and those clear screens or whatever. And you can kind of lay them and they should all line up. And one of the ones that we've reached psychologically is that each. Each thing takes a different temperament. So, strength is on a very sympathetic fight-flight. That's the energy system.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  It's ATP, it's creatine phosphate. It's this immediate go-to. The presence, it's self-preservation. Like, if you've ever lifted anything really heavy, when it's getting shaky leg and you're starting to do, like, you know, a little bit of palsy at the top just past the knee and you're trying to struggle to get that up, your immediate feedback is let go because you could hurt yourself. Self-preservation is an immediate task for that. So, ultimately, we find with most athletes that are in that channel, they're very self-involved, actually. And not, not as, not to say that as a pejorative. It just means that in order to get good at their sport, they have to be present inside their self. And their self has to be the existing thing that is most important.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  But to an extreme point, that sympathetic state becomes narcissism, right? All importance. And you see it when, when somebody like pulls a super-heavy deadlift and like, you know, he's thumping his chest. It's not egomaniacal, but it's a very ego presence that that person is the most, he did it, he is the champion. And then on the opposite side, we have ultra-endurance, which runs into the multi-day. And even you can see this after a couple hours. You'll see, you know, Kip Chog or like any of these runners, they cross the finish line and they're in tears. They're breaking down. They lost their sense of self. And that's because we find endurance happens in a parasympathetic state, which is loss of self, loss of ego. If you've ever messed with psychedelics, it's ego death,

• 34:22Speaker 00

  which is a deep parasympathetic state. Or you could do breathing drills to get you there. Pranayama, Breath of Fire. All of these things reinforce a state where I have lost my sense of self. I've separated from my body and I've become one with the universe or whatever you want to describe it as. And so, as we map these things, we understand that certain states are good for certain people at certain times. Not everybody needs to run in ultra-endurance, but if your job is very self-centered, sympathetic, you know, maybe you work at a hedge fund where everything is immediate and your sense of accomplishment is very personal. Is your answer going to be CrossFit and powerlifting?

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Because you're just like multiplying the amount that you're in that state. And when you compound that with your commute to work, or the fact that, hey, I gotta beat my hedge fund at, you know, 6 a.m. to start before everybody else starts. So I wake up to an alarm at 4:30. I get in my car with caffeine, cortisol's running, sympathetic stays up. I'm in traffic, I'm swearing at people, I get to the office, I'm late. I do all this stuff and then I'm like, oh, it's noon, I gotta get my workout in. So I run down to a CrossFit gym, I blast an 11-minute Metcon, crush it, give everybody a high five, get back to the office, finish work, get back in traffic, go home. And then I wonder why I feel like I'm diseased because I can't sleep then. And you're like, you're just compounding this state.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  And in reality, like, hey, maybe we should, you know, maybe the, especially if that's working for you, by all means. Like if you're, I don't know, a Jaco character and waking up at 4:30 and crushing the day is the answer. And you feel great, you feel fantastic about your life, there's nothing to change. But most people do not feel good about their life. If most people want change and transformation, they want to become somebody who they envisioned, right?

• 36:11Chris Williamson?

  I think the, um, the mapping of whatever you want to call it, the philosophical, psychological with the energy system. That's certainly something unique that I haven't really heard spoken about before. In James Clear's Atomic Habits, which I'm sure you'll be familiar with, he talks about, he spoke to, um, one of the, uh, Chinese weightlifting team coaches, legendary Chinese weightlifting team coach. And he said, what's the difference between the athletes who are the best and the ones who are the very best? And he said, it's the ones who can put up with boredom the most effectively. So it's, people believe that these top level athletes come into the gym and they're just getting after it. Matt Fraser, perfect example, but almost everyone that's listening will know who he is. Fittest man on the planet like three, four times in a row, probably the best CrossFit athlete to ever live.

• 36:55Chris Williamson?

  I'm also going to guess he probably ranks in your category of people who are happy to forego aesthetic for performance. He doesn't look like the sort of guy who is dieting down to, um, to make sure that he's like, got an extra ab or whatever before the CrossFit Games and, um, You know, you look, you look at him and you think, yeah, yeah, he must be getting after it every day. He's pumped to get into the gym. Like if you, if your coach says, hey, man, it's a recovery day, you're just doing like five by 10 minutes on a rower with a couple of minutes rest and some breathing, nasal, nasal only breathing at 135 BPM. You're like, ain't nobody getting pumped up for that. No, no one's getting pumped up for monoskeletal

• 37:39Chris Williamson?

  work at like a mid, not even getting lean, not even getting leaner, but in fact, probably somehow getting fatter as you do that.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the, he is one of the examples that I'd point to of somebody who, and you'll see it because right before the games, he adds a couple of pounds. Like he will gain some fat tissue. Well, I don't know if it's on purpose, but what it is is

• 38:01Chris Williamson?

  You'll probably need that during the weekend, right?

• 38:03Speaker 00

  For sure. Hyper protective. And that's what people don't realize about that, that state. The other thing is like, of course he like boredom, and that's what Alex Hutchinson talked about. It's like, there's something that develops. Once you become bored with an activity, how you have to deal with the pain of it and the monotony of it. And they, they studied motocross racers and endurance motorcyclists. Because if you're racing for long enough, man, you're, that's a monotony at a level that most people don't recognize because the stakes are still very high, but you have to figure out a way for your brain to not be sympathetic.

• 38:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Exactly. So I have to be very present in the moment, but also almost separate myself. This comes in bike racing too. Events are so long that eventually I have to separate myself from my pain and my anxiety about the future. And I just have to be in a present state and process, make sure I take care of myself. And then when the moment happens, when a break happens, I have to be on it. And now I'm sympathetic and I'm seeking, I'm hunting it down and I'm fighting.

• 39:08Chris Williamson?

  I love it.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  So these kinds of things are really interesting to us because a lot of people think that, man, training's so hardcore. And to be honest, we perpetuated that problem. When we got involved-

• 39:21Chris Williamson?

  Sorry, I want to interject there, Michael. For someone who doesn't know what you guys did in the past, what is a two-sentence summary of your training style since before nonprofit?

• 39:35Speaker 00

  We were responsible for a lot of the bullshit that people know as movie fitness.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  And we did that for a very specific reason because it was a really good platform. So we worked with actors and actresses and stunt crew and crew of 10 movies over the past 10 years. Actually, I think it's 12 years now. So 300, 300 Rise of an Empire, Man from Uncle, Man of Steel, Justice League, Batman or Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Aquaman, and I can't remember the others, but there were some, they all blurred at the same fucking movie.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  And the reason why we first started doing it, well, Mark originally did the original 300 and I came in on Man of Steel and then the second 300 as his assistant. And it was because it was a good platform to show people that actually that this is not special, that this is available to everybody. Sometimes we won that conversation. Most of the time we didn't because ego gets in the way. So you take somebody through a transformation, they change and they want to talk about how hard it was because they want, they want social-

• 40:56Chris Williamson?

  Signaling, isn't it?

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, social praise for their work that they've done. Everybody wants that. Everybody wants acknowledgement of the hard work that they've done. But they make it harder for people to then do that themselves.

• 41:08Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 41:08Speaker 00

  So the difference, well, because if you're like, hey, man, how did you get into such good shape? You're strong, you're athletic, you're really lean, you're tan. How did you do it? And I'm like, oh, it was actually really simple. I just like changed how I viewed food and I ate in a certain manner for a certain amount of time. And I changed how I thought about training and I started to really be curious. Instead of being, instead of being obsessed with what I wasn't, I started to be curious about what I was capable of. And I just did that for six months under the guidance of somebody to make sure I didn't hurt myself and voila, here I am. That, no one's gonna, they're gonna go, oh, I guess it's just easy for you. But instead, they're like, you know what?

• 41:52Speaker 00

  I crushed myself for 27 hours a day for training sessions and I only ate kale and dust for six months. It was miserable and look how good I was. And people, wow, you worked so hard.

• 42:04Chris Williamson?

  You think that creates a barrier, like a seeming barrier to entry? That projects a barrier to entry where people are like, oh, well, I'm incapable of achieving that. I therefore, it's probably pointless me even starting. I couldn't live on dust and kale.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  I think so, yeah. And then they'll attribute it to like, well, he had the best trainer and the best personal chef and bodywork people. They look at all the haves because people are really good at separating the have-nots, which is true. It is easier if you have a private chef. No one is gonna argue that. But like the, this thing comes up too, like, oh, well, they're getting paid to train. It's like, everybody has the same quit, don't quit conversation in their head when it comes to, it is, it's an equalizer and it goes beyond economic status. When you start running all out, the conversation is the same. It doesn't matter if you're male, female, black, white, Mexican.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  Everybody has the same voice that goes, hey, shut this motherfucker down. This is uncomfortable. It doesn't, it's not like, hey, but you're rich and you're getting paid, so keep going. In fact, that's probably the opposite.

• 43:12Chris Williamson?

  I don't need to do this shit. I don't need this. I've got, I've got Gerard Butler's contracted in for two movies at five mill a pop or whatever it is. Like, I don't need to fucking put up with this stuff.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  Done deal, yeah. And, and why would I? Like, people already think that I'm great because everybody around me in my circle tells me how awesome I am. I get awards, you know, on the weekends and I travel and, you know, get blown by supermodels. So whatever the thing is. It does, but it's actually pretty miserable because you lack honesty. You lack any kind of presence.

• 43:43Chris Williamson?

  I want to, I want to interject there because I had Aubrey Marcus on and he, first off, everyone that's listening will know what that episode was like. And if you haven't already heard it, I implore you to go back and listen, number 117, one of the best 60 minutes of conversation that I've ever put out. And he started talking about one of his fears for actors. And he said that because they're constantly playing a role. He was talking about how the persona is incapable of receiving love, capable of receiving praise, but incapable of receiving love, because love is something, it's speaking to you, speaking to who you are as a person, right? It's about, I see you, I see the values that you have, and love is something that requires honesty.

• 44:28Chris Williamson?

  When people are playing a persona, which is literally an actor's job, but everybody that's floating around to one degree or another, your ego is mediating that id, right? It's stopping the id from coming out and being all visceral and just meaning that you run across the road and get hit by a car or whatever. And that, that's, everyone has this degree of persona. And I think that that's one of the reasons why you have actors who seemingly incredibly, incredibly successful. How could he be depressed? How could he be this? It's because they don't, they feel love for the characters. People don't love Gerard Butler. People love King Leonidas. They don't love, do you know what I mean? It's only when you're able to transcend that and actually have, I suppose this is one good, good advert for the advent

• 45:12Chris Williamson?

  of social media, is that now actors are able to flesh out that personality a little bit and be more than just the maximus dudius thing is, yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I think I would take it one step farther and be like, I wouldn't worry about actors. Everybody has a persona, like we are all just characters. And I don't know if you've ever seen.

• 45:37Speaker 00

  Andy in Me, I think it's called, with Jim Carrey, when he was, it's a documentary about Jim Carrey.

• 45:44Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yes. And he doesn't, he doesn't switch off.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  He doesn't. And like, it is so profound. And maybe I'll ruin a spoiler alert.

• 45:52Chris Williamson?

  That's fine.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  In the end, when he's talking about it, and he goes, I realized in a moment that I had become Andy, and people saw Andy in me. And I realized I didn't know who I was anymore because I didn't know who Jim Carrey was. Jim Carrey was just another mask that I needed to try to fit on and get used to again. Which is terrifying. That, that is ego depletion. That's a loss of self, a loss of identity. It's also, in the extreme points, knows as schizophrenia. And so, a lot of these practices that we do, we risk schizophrenia in order to establish an identity. And that, we talk about identity from this sense because we see it with athletes, actors too.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  Actors, it's a little bit more obvious. But let's say that you've been racing bikes since you were 19, and you're a professional bike racer, you've been to the Tour de France, and you retire at 35. Who are you? Like, you, you've just lost everything that you were appreciated for. We see it in the military all the time. You spent $10 million on an asset to learn the, you know, the deadly skills of being an SOF guy. And you go over there, you do, you know, democratic whatever, and you come back and nobody gives a shit, you need to work at Starbucks. Like, you're one of the most expensive, educated people on the planet at killing people,

• 47:15Speaker 00

  or doing whatever job is required. And you come back and there is no use for your skills in society. And so, you have a loss. There's no acceptance there. You need to figure out a persona. And everybody goes through this. So it's not just actors, although actors are kind of the obvious one just because they're pretending to be somebody else.

• 47:34Chris Williamson?

  It's their profession, right? They are forced into this persona all the time. I wanna, I wanna sit in this point. We're supposed to be talking about fitness, but fuck it, this is more interesting.

• 47:43Chris Williamson?

  So I was, I was talking to Tucka Maxx, do you know Tucka Maxx's?

• 47:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do, actually.

• 47:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Have you seen his new stuff?

• 47:51Speaker 00

  I have not. I read, I heard, I hope they serve beer and alcohol in my twenties. And then I followed Ryan Holiday's path of help marketing that thing. So I've been really.

• 48:02Chris Williamson?

  So he's this old frat tire party boy that publicized all of his stuff. And I had him on, I had him on the show a couple of weeks ago. And man, like he's, he's just gone complete. He's rebounded off the other side. He's completely internal. I've done so much self-work, so much self-inquiry. Incredibly, incredibly self-aware, like one of the most self-aware people that I've ever, ever seen. If you want to find out a little bit more about him, he's got a newsletter, which is Lessons I've Learned, that he's tweeting every day. And then at the end of the week, he'll just send you a summary of all of the lessons he's learned. And almost all of them are reflections on himself and this, that and the other. What he was talking about was, people now see him as this guy that created a literary genre, right?

• 48:47Chris Williamson?

  Fratire. He was this guy. He was party guy, fucking girls, going around, doing the thing, getting drunk, throwing up on people. You know, just doing the thing. This is Tuckamax. I put Tuckamax in the Tuckamax box. This is who he is now. And then he goes away and people still see him as that, right? People still see him as that. He then comes back, having done some work. And people are like, no, no, we don't want that Tuckamax. In fact, before this podcast today, right? I went on and someone replied to one of his tweets. He did a lesson I've learned, real good one again. I can't remember what it was. It was all right. Can't remember what it was. And someone replied and said, man, I miss your old stuff. And he just replied and he said, want the old me, buy my old books.

• 49:32Chris Williamson?

  And the point is, we have these different epochs in our life, right? We have, this is who Michael was when he was doing Jim Jones. This is who Michael is now. He's doing, when he was doing nonprofit in the initial stages. Now this is what he moves into now. And people don't like that. People really, really get triggered as they watch people ascend and transcend and become something different from what they were. Because I think that growth mindset and the ability for people to no longer be what they were and be something else, identifies in some people that are watching, holy fuck. Like that person continues to move while I'm in inertia. Like I'm stagnating and this really hurts to watch someone pull away from me.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  So we talk about this in transformation process and there's, there's a lot to talk like to kind of unweave out of this process. It starts with like generally when somebody wants to make a change and they come to us and like, oh, I want to lose X amount of weight. And I think that that's the thing. And my first question is, how fat is your spouse? Right? Like, how, how fat, how, what are your?

• 50:44Chris Williamson?

  How does that, how does that question go down?

• 50:46Speaker 00

  Usually it's shocking, which is a good tool to have. But also to watch somebody squirm is also good. Like, how do you just, because I know already, like, it's very rare that one person is in really good shape and the other person has just let themselves go. And there's a reason for that. But the reason I ask it is because if somebody starts to change and transform, the person who's looking at them closely will see it's a reflection of their non progression. And they will try to bring them down. So you see this in an office, right? Somebody starts dieting and in the lunchroom, it's fucking Karen's birthday. So there's like 12 cakes. And they're like, it's Karen's birthday. It only happens once a year. It's like once in a lifetime. Have a piece of cake. You're like, no, I'm good.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  I'm having a salad. And you're like, everybody will try to get that motherfucker to eat a piece of cake, because it's a reflection of their non compliance. And the, and the closer that person is, the more sabotage they will cause. So when I tell people, how fat is your spouse, or ask them, and they tell me, oh, well, a little bit overweight. And I go, okay, realize that when I require 10 hours to sleep, and you sleep in past them, and I require all these things, and you start to change, they're going to start making you brownies. They're going to be telling, hey, look how good you've done. Let's go out for a treat. You deserve a reward. Because they want to actually stop looking at themselves. And I think that happens, because I think human beings are reflectors. We are mirrors.

• 52:10Chris Williamson?

  Like our Mimetic beings, I think, as Paul Graham says. In fact, in Peter Thiel's job application, he asks people, what is the belief that you hold which disagrees with 99% of the people that you know?

• 52:24Chris Williamson?

  Where are you breaking, where are you breaking the programming? Where are you deprogramming yourself?

• 52:28Speaker 00

  I, and I, maybe we'll get a little bit out there right now, but I've had, you know, this has really helped shift my thinking. I am atheist and I don't think that's a choice. I think I'm, you know, at best agnostic.

• 52:42Chris Williamson?

  Being in, being in Utah and being an atheist must feel like a, a, a little bit of a, a tough place for it to be.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  True, but I don't think there's, I, I think it's just a natural inclination to how you look at the universe. And I say atheistic as in I don't believe in a personal creator. I don't connect with anything like that, but I do not deny creation as a process. And when I look at human beings being here on earth as a product of the sun's energy and the earth's ability to nurture growth and life, I go, yeah, we were created and perhaps our only job is to be a reflection of the universe. So if I contend that the universe is making everything, which I don't think you can argue that, um, I think that

• 53:30Speaker 00

  the universe's art is our brain. So the universe won't, you know, because it's a creation process, why not create something that can actually appreciate you? That is the ultimate creation, right? That, that's your, that's your hope for having a son or a daughter. That's your hope for creating a business is that the appreciation is a reflection of your own creation. So I figure human beings are a reflector in the fact that if ever you're not looking up at the stars going, what the fuck? This is so awesome. This is amazing. I'm so appreciative for my experience here. You're a broken tool. You're a, you're a hammer without a handle. And I think a lot of depressive states are

• 54:10Speaker 00

  a multifactorial, but a big part of that is not being like, not seeing the utility in being a creator yourself.

• 54:18Chris Williamson?

  Man, so Daniel Schmachtenberger, have you ever heard of him? I have not. Civilization Emerging. So he is coming on the podcast this week. I'll link you to some of his stuff. I'll link you to everything that I've spoken, I've dropped on you over this. He has a talk which is about emergence and it is the hardest hitting 20 minutes that I've ever listened to in my life. It's unbelievable. The synopsis of it is that we talk about entropy being the kind of the ruthless force that just continues to pummel everything. Right. That you have increasing amounts of randomness occurring as you go along. It's also supposed to be the reason for why heat occurs and a bunch of other things.

• 55:01Chris Williamson?

  But he talks about the fact that the uniqueness that we have is that we're a conscious agent who is not only a passenger on the ship, but also a pilot able to affect the ship's direction. And like when you fully, fully internalize this conversation on emergence, which will be linked in the show notes below, you'll have to listen to it probably like three or four times to get it. At least I did. It's not a listen to it on two times speed thing like. And when I fully internalized that, I was like, holy fucking shit. Like it's, it's, it's right. It is correct. And you could, you're right with what you say as well. This connection to what is going on, this grander self transcending who we are, all that sort of stuff.

• 55:42Chris Williamson?

  It sounds so esoteric, right? But there's something to it. There has to be something to it because of the way that it makes people feel. And I think, you know, through whatever your chosen mode, whether it be strong psychedelic drugs, whether it be looking up at the sky, whether it be sitting in silence in a quiet room in a float tank, whether it be getting your heart rate to 180 bpm, whether it be, you know, whatever it might, singing on stage, performing the most intricate routine that you can in martial arts form, or, you know, pick, pick your. Like, what are we trying to do? What are all of those things? What have they all got in common?

• 56:19Speaker 00

  They definitely put you in a state, I, I, I connected, and I kinda connected to myself because I went through, obviously, change. And I, I think it's important to recognize what that is. Obviously, I don't, you've probably read a lot of Joseph Campbell's stuff, The Ark of the Hero, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And I think, we, we forget that we're all kind of on that path at all times. And then if ever we're not on that path, we're risking demise. Like, if we're not ever trying to change into the thing that we hope to become, then we're risking just annihilation of the spirit, or whatever you want to call it. And a lot of people don't see this. They just go, oh, you know, I want, I want

• 57:03Speaker 00

  a new body, or I want to be fit for once. And they don't realize that actually what they're, they're talking about is becoming a different person. What dawned on me, so, I mean, if you're familiar with psychedelics, you'll know what the hero's dose is. But a lot of people have a misconception of what the hero's dose is. They think it's because it's so scary that you have the courage to take it. And really, what it is, is it's so terrifying, but the scary part is, it will change you. So a hero is a hero, not because he has courage to go into it, because he has the courage to come back and change. Like, he goes and finds the elixir, and he brings it back, a different person, to help

• 57:42Speaker 00

  inform whoever, or however you want to contextualize that. So, that's how we, that's kinda how I map, you know, my own transformation. It's like, if ever I'm not willing to change, I'm not doing something right. But I, I think one constant that has really helped is like, this map of the universe, looking back, I'm a reflector, yeah, yeah, gratitude journal, like, all that shit. But, in reality, when I look at it, I'm just dumbfounded by how little energy we can actually put out. Like, our output is so miniscule compared to our Creator, our Son. And, I don't know, have you've ever looked at it, maybe I'll send you a link to this. NASA has, if you get out there enough, you can actually hear the

• 58:27Speaker 00

  sun. The sun makes a noise. And it's a rhythm. It almost sounds like a binaural beat. It just And every once in a while, twice a week about, I'll sit down and listen to that. Because it reminds me how fucking pathetic I am.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  And the reason why is because if I want to do a good job about reflecting my environment, it means I do what what created me, what gave me life, what gives me nourishment, which I look at as the sun. And so I do a workout for 15 minutes and I go, ah, I fall on the ground and sweat. And I'm like, oh, that's the hardest thing ever. I'm going to rest for like seven days or whatever. The sun has been up there for billions of years, just putting energy into all of this. And so whenever I feel like I'm tired, I always listen to that video and I get up and I go put energy into my space. Because really, if I create an

• 59:22Speaker 00

  environment, which is what this building is, and I put enough energy into it, other people will come in and they will feel that energy and they will grow, they will change. And then I just create change after change after change. And it helps me figure, again, how pathetic it is, but how I could be appreciative of the process that gave me me, is I can put energy and help people give them them. Does that make sense?

• 59:50Chris Williamson?

  No, no, not at all. One of the things that I've been thinking about a lot recently is how we can kind of transcend our suffering, right? Like, we have things that happen to us, bad things will happen, the people that we love will die. Literally, the only thing that we all know is that one day all of this will be gone. It's the subject of the poet Rilke, and I think it's Freud walking through a garden. It's a short essay called Untransience. Rilke looks like he's going to cry, and he turns to him and says, like, what's wrong? And he says, I can't believe the fact that one day all of this is going to be gone. Isn't it such a tragedy that all of this is going to be gone? And that one day you'll be dead and I'll be dead. And all of this will literally decay into, and he didn't know he'd death, but that's, you know, that's the long, long, long story of that. And it is, you know, it

• 1:00:35Chris Williamson?

  is a tragedy to have that. But as we go through our life and as bad things happen to us, a good example for me that I've been reflecting on recently is I've been injured. So I've had two bulging discs, L3 and S1, which has meant I haven't basically been able to do fitness. Who am I without my Fitness, that's a question I've asked myself, you know, 18 months, 18 months of being the, the kid with the water wings on in the corner of the room, like doing another round of side plank and bird dog and, you know, like core stiffening. I went to go see Dr. Stu McGill in Canada, flew over to Canada to go and see him. That's amazing. He's a beast. Um, and, you know, I did, I, I did this stuff and I'm, I'm thinking, fuck, like this sucks, this sucks, this sucks. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody as a personal development strategy. Like it, it sucked dick.

• 1:01:19Chris Williamson?

  But first thing it taught me was who am I without my fitness? And the second thing that it taught me was reflecting on that means that I can now tell the people that I, that listen to this podcast and the people that I know. Look, if something happens to you where you get something that you thought was so caught to your being, you know, something I've done for 13 years that was, I'm the fitness guy. I'm the guy that's in shape. Not only is my routine around that, my personality is around that, wrapped around that, blah, blah, blah. Like who am I without my fitness? But now I can say to the people that are listening, look, like it will be okay. It's going to be fine because your desire for growth and your desire for progression will naturally, like a vacuum, it will suck other stuff into it.

• 1:02:00Chris Williamson?

  And then when you get whatever you've just lost back, when you develop it and you now have conscious competence of that particular thing, you're so much more appreciative of it. Like today I went in class, class was a, a million things that I'm not supposed to do from Dr. McGill. So I couldn't do any of them. So I had like a poly bar. I was doing like snatch pulls with a poly bar in class and this guy's like flinging 80 kilos around and blah, blah. And I'm like, fuck, like I'm doing it. Like I get to do fitness. This is fitness. Like I know that it's like the, the most nerfed child version of fitness that anyone's ever seen, but I got to do it. And I was like, fuck. Like imagine what it's going to be like when I can pick up 200, 200 kilos again, you know? Yeah.

• 1:02:40Chris Williamson?

  And, and that being able to transcend the suffering that you've had by telling other people, by using the experience that you've had to then teach other people how they can expedite transcending that same suffering or an analogous suffering or whatever it might be, is the ultimate middle finger to anything bad that's ever happened to you. Had an experience with depression, had an experience with a family member dying, had an experience where something that you cared about got taken away from you. If you take that learning, distill it down into something really valuable and then teach it to someone else so that it makes their life better. That is you just going, fuck you. Like you thought that you had me. Not only have you not got me, but you don't have this person either.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  That's, I mean, it falls in line with, I think, Stuart McGill colored that the gift of injury. And that's a lot of it. Ryan Coeur. Yeah, it could, it could be, and this comes back to the depression topic. It's really rare that you meet somebody that is very well off financially and whatever, whatever want to conclude that success is for that person, and that they don't have symptoms of depression. In fact, suicide is more rampant in those middle ranges of successful incomes, middle, high range, than in any other demographic. And you have to wonder at what point, why does that happen?

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  And a lot of it has to do with bad, and this, again, you don't want to wish, this is my, my argument with Sam Harris on philosophy, the point is to reduce suffering. And I go, man, you'll really reduce people's ability to know themselves. And so although you don't wish it on anybody, and some suffering, man, you really want, you want to have compassion and empathy and stop it for that person, but really what you're stopping is their own development. I, suffering is gonna happen. And if it doesn't, how good would it be? And again, this is like, it comes back to my problem with the idea that the soul is infinite, or that we are gonna live forever and a happy ever, and everything is happiness,

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  everything is just so good. Well, do you know what? Like, five days of nothing but the best, everything, makes you not appreciate the best of everything. So it becomes, it becomes nothing. So if you have all good experiences all the time, you have no experiences all the time because you have nothing to compare that to. We need polarity in order to understand the universe. You need up and down, light and dark, you need all these concepts. This is This is philosophically sound where you won't appreciate anything unless you have its opposite. So it's tough to say, uh, you know, man, I, I do want to teach me, in fact, I, I think it's Peter Thiel.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  Like his quote is like, uh, any idiot can learn from their own experiences. It takes a truly intelligent person to learn from others.

• 1:05:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  Which is true, but also there's some visceral things that you just have to learn on your own. And I think being injured is one of those. I, uh, when I was bike racing back in the day, I fell in a time trial and I shattered my elbow. Like 27 fragments. It was close to an amputate. If I tore one more ligament, they would have just amputated it. But they did this weird surgery to get it back. And I'm a fairly physical person and their first thing was like, well, that's over with. Like you're not going to do that anymore. And it was almost like, uh-oh, like, how, like, what, how do we even go about it? But the lessons are, A, you aren't what you do. Like you, your activities are not you.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  They're just something that you process. And I think it's also true to recognize that you are not a noun. You are not a thing. Like you are not, we say a person, place or thing, that's a noun. That's not true. That's, that's a, that's to help grammar work correctly in sentence structure, but it is not true. You are not a thing. You don't just exist. Nothing is a thing. It's all process. All of this is just process. Everything is just moving all the time. And this is, actually, I might lead a segue into, uh, how we got back into the fitness space. Because we obviously speak esoterically very easily. We go off on these wormholes in our podcast about different topics, cultural affairs, all of these things.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  And we have really denied the request to add anything to fitness until this year. Uh, in fact, our symposium is called Fitness is Fucked. So it gives you an idea.

• 1:07:12Chris Williamson?

  Are you just, sorry to interject there, are you only doing that in the UK or are you doing it in the US as well?

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  Uh, we're doing, so we mostly just do the symposiums in the US. The one that we had planned for the UK, we actually just had to cancel because of the fucking Corona scare.

• 1:07:26Chris Williamson?

  Are you kidding? I didn't know. That's so.

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  Yes. Well, it's. It hurts on two parts because I know it's ridiculous. Um, but it hurts on another part is because I am now, because I canceled it, I feel like I added into the panic. Even though it was just, it wasn't Oh, yeah, yeah. Possible for us, right? Like, it was just like, look, people aren't traveling to do this stuff. So if we can't fill out a seminar, we can't come there. Um, and it just doesn't look like it was moving. So we just postponed it. Hopefully after we'll come back because the UK, we have quite a large audience in the UK. Shout out Paul. Yeah, Paul's a good one. He's largely responsible for that. So he comes to our symposiums here. That's how Ellenie got involved.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  Um, she came out, uh, to symposium last fall and, um, those symposiums, although we call them fitness or fucked, people realize really quickly that we're not talking about fitness. Um, unless we're talking about the industry. When you come to the symposium, it's structured that the first day is dialogue. And we don't have, this has changed in the past year. We do not have material to teach. Uh, which is very terrifying for us at far, uh, at the very start. Because most people that teach a seminar, hey, come learn these points that I've dictated that you should know. And what dawned on me last year was that I don't want to teach like that. I want to know what people want to know that we can do, and then we'll go down that. But to get to that point, we just have to ask questions because people don't know what they want to know.

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  And so it starts for the first three hours, we're just bouncing questions off of people. You know, why are you here? What, what are you doing? What do you want to know? What's worth knowing? What's, what is it to understand something? We go down these really deep concentrated things and eventually we, we end up at a very similar place each time. But then people will understand our thinking when you come to subjects. So the next day when we're actually talking about fitness and how to progress it. And, you know, how, how to set somebody up to learn about themselves, they have this, you know, 12 hour conversation to backbone it. It's a lot of context, right? Yeah, exactly. So as opposed to Run at this heart rate for this long. That's just an abstraction. That's just an easy way for me to get out of responsibility of actually teaching somebody.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  But if I actually teach somebody, I'm teaching them to be sensitive and to pay attention to their personal organism, which is, what does it feel like right now? Can you talk to me during this effort? Like, heart rate's a part of it. Is it above this? So what happens if, you know, and this is a really cool experiment you can do with people. We're doing steady state stuff. So I want you to stay around 70% max heart rate. Then we're going to try to express efficiency in whatever modality you want to get good at. Running, biking, et cetera, whatever. Let's take biking. So, okay, you're spinning. You're at 140 for 45 minutes. Everything is fine. I come over, I chat with you. I take my half glass of whatever I'm drinking and I set it on the edge of a box next to you and it's halfway on the edge, so it looks like it's about to fall.

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  Immediately, that person's heart rate will escalate. Their response to the same stimulus will escalate because their brain has just taken on another task. It needs to stop that glass from falling. And so what we do is try to teach people in that space, all of these things personally. Right? If you're just running every day, that's fine. That works. You get pretty fit. But if you're running, thinking about work and all your other responsibilities, you're not actually trying to get efficient at something. So we teach people to clear their thought process, that you create a sacred space in which they can become good at something. And then we enter a distraction. So it's like an advanced meditative process. Right? We bring in distractions, come back to the breath, come back to the breathing, come back to the focus, think of nothing. Something comes up, that's okay.

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  Acknowledge it, but don't worry about it. The glass is not in your control. Physics will take care of it. And if it breaks, your effort still needs to be done. So if something goes wrong, you need to keep doing. You need to keep going. You need, and our, you know, definition of endurance is you need to see something through to the end. The same thing is true with strength. Strength, and this is, uh, we recently came out with our strength manual. Um, and basically, people ask for a long time, hey, will you write some programming? And I refuse to do it. Mostly people just want to-

• 1:11:37Chris Williamson?

  Michael, for the love of God, can you just teach us some fitness for once?

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, just quit talking about physics and dumb shit. Well, I thought about it and I thought, you know, what I could do, because what happens is I say, no, we don't teach fitness. I'm not going to write a program. What happens is people just go to the next shitty program. Right? And then they're like trying to take our concepts and apply them to some other thing, which they don't know it well enough to be able to do that. I can do that. I can go do the Small Love program and, and understand our take on it and understand what I'm working. And therefore the Small Love program is great. The Hash Squat program is great. All of these things work if you have a foundation of understanding what's trying to be accomplished. So my idea was like, I'll bust out a program, I'll explain our methods and I'll be done with it six weeks, it'd be awesome.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  We'll just sell the shit out of it. And what happened is me and Keegan started working on it, bouncing back and forth. And I realized we were fucking in way over our heads. So a six week project became an eight month project. And even then I was still not happy with it. I was sitting on it and then I kind of had some epiphanies and it clarified everything. It's because we redefine strength. And this is what we do. And this is, we write things, not because we want to teach people, but because we want to understand better ourselves. Like I write articles and ideas, not because I'm on a soapbox preaching what, hey, you should do what I do. It's really putting words to paper and articulating them helped me understand them better.

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  So every piece that I write, understand that I learned something by writing it that I didn't know before I started writing it. And this was no different, although my ego was keeping me from learning that lesson. It was like, oh, you already know everything about that. You can express strength perfectly. You can get people strong. And I didn't know how I did it until I redefined it. So we created the strength program. Yes, it's based off of just moving the lifts, the squat in whatever variation you want, a deadlift and a press of sorts. Classic powerlifting, although we do recommend a horizontal as opposed to a, or a press overhead as opposed to a bench press, although both programs work.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  So there is like numbers and things that you should do and it's a, you know, an eight week program and testing at both ends. So it is literally everything that we hate done in a way that we can appreciate it. Which is to start with a definition, which I think is incorrect in most physiological terms. Most people come to strength, they see somebody back squat, right? Heavyweight, fuck, a thousand pounds. That guy's so strong. It's like, yeah, he is, but why is he strong? Is it because he's moving the weight? It's like, no, because movement is power. Like, we refer to things that move as powerful. A wave, when it hits you in the face, is powerful because it's moving. A castle isn't strong, or a fortress isn't strong because it's moving. It's strong because it's holding.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  So when we strength train, we're practicing holding the spine in a very specific position, or a joint, or whatever. In gymnastics, it might be the shoulder girdle, or whatever, neutral, extended, arched spine. All of these things are an expression of the ability to contract and hold the position. And I think when we abstract and we use a barbell to get strong, we forget that we're actually trying to hold our spine in a specific position. And so we forget to express it correctly. And so, we went back and kind of reiterated why we hold things. Why isometric contraction is so important? Why gymnastics is probably the greatest expression of strength?

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  And I know that'll make a lot of people mad, they're like, oh, the back squat's the king of exercises, although has, like, 90% of it is not applicable to 99% of the sports. So... Just, I'm gonna get on a, like, a Mike Boyle thing and people will eviscerate me for my degrading the squat, but in reality, it can teach you some things abstractly. But lifting weight is a level removed from contracting and holding the body. And this is the hardest thing to teach. It's like, the dog is not the dog, right? If I write the word "dog" down, it's not a dog itself. And that's how we've created strength. We've said, "A 400-pound back squat is strong."

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  But that's an arbitrary abstraction for the expression of holding. And so instead, what we try to do is remember that if I need to push against something, it means I'm not developed correctly because I can't control the contraction in my own body. Once I can contract to 100% or whatever your marker is for the expression of strength, it means I have control over my body. I have the will to make it contract in the way and hold against the things that I want to hold against. Whether that's in an MMA fight and somebody puts me up against a cage and I need to hold my position, or it's holding my spine in a deadlift. Whatever, whatever the thing is, strength is a foundation for the expression of power.

• 1:16:39Speaker 00

  And so, power comes only after I can hold my position and my stabilization in order to express power. But people go about it differently. I went about it by expressing power first because I'm fairly good at snatching and cleaning jerking, and that felt better for my ego. But I'll always lose a clean on the squat because I'm not strong. My spine is unable to hold the position that's necessary to stand it up. So, in learning this ourselves, we were able to now apply it to other people. Our strength training looks wildly different than it did 10 years ago. And that's not because the stuff that we're doing before was wrong. We were just insensitive to what needed to be focused on.

• 1:17:19Chris Williamson?

  Man, it's, it's interesting to hear you talk about training plans that are more prescriptive. It's, it's like, you know, everyone that's listening is hearing you in the throes of, I want to elucidate about these ideas and the philosophy that is behind this, but I also appreciate that at some point, like the tip of the spear got to enter the gym and in the gym, you need to know what you need to do. It's all well and good walking into the gym and saying that I'm transcending the ego and I'm going to be present in the breath. But like, you need to know, you need to know what, what weight to put on the barbell or what percentage you're lifting today. Right?

• 1:17:57Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how challenging you've found it. And I don't, I haven't spent much of time listening to Mark talk, but I imagine it must be similar for him as well. Like when, um, when you guys get into one of your symposiums or you get this and you have to actually go, right? Now is the time for people to get a X piece of machinery out or X piece of like kit out. There has to come a point where you go, right? Enough with the like erudite verbose stuff. Time for me to

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:18:26Chris Williamson?

  Lift, lift some things. Do you almost, do you almost resent that a little bit? Or do you still kind of have a, a love for the, for the, that side of, of the movement?

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  No, I, I think it's philosophically applied. Like is how I look at it. It's like, yeah, we do all this hard thinking work, but eventually thinking gets in the way of moving. And what I really want is to move. I want to feel things. There's this really great quote of like, there's thinking, believing, I can't remember the other one, but then there's feeling. And feeling is the, I wrote it down actually. So this is, this is a Buckminster Fuller thing. And it like, it really is useful in the fact that, I don't know if I can find it. Maybe I can't find it. Oh, here it is.

• 1:19:14Speaker 00

  Whenever you think or believe or know, you're a lot of other people because you're you're sensing their ideas. You're just you're reiterating another person's thought or belief. Manticidal beings, man. Yeah, but the the moment you feel, you're nobody but yourself. And so, yes, take our ideas and try to understand them and comprehend them, but unless you translate that into you feeling, it does nobody any good. And so the symposiums, although they're highly emotionally charged and we make it that way on purpose, I mean, a lot of people think they're gonna come here and we're gonna talk about how hardcore we hate humanity and how, you know, how people are disappointing. All those things are true. But when we come here, what we've

• 1:19:57Speaker 00

  done is circle the wagons, right? We've we are in harsh territory. We live in a culture where not a lot of people feel like they belong. They're not connecting to a lot of people. I live next to 20,000 people and I don't know any of my neighbors. Like, I know none of them. I have to come down to a building 30 miles away to say hello to somebody who looks familiar. That is unprecedented in human civilization. So, when I say circle the wagons, it's like, uh, we're in an area that's hostile and we need to band together and talk about ideas and concepts and values that we can all get behind. And that takes getting down to the truth of it. Like, what is true? What does it mean for something to be true? All these ideas. Understand that there is no such thing as truth. There's

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  just, you know, a fixed point somewhere that is changing. And this is where it gets really weird, is we talk about strength, about holding. Nothing is holding. There's no such thing as stillness. Stillness doesn't exist in the universe. It is all waving, it is all particles. Cells are always mutating and dying and creating and life doesn't move. So you should you should, you know, embody that, keep moving, but. Embodied all the things that get you to move in the direction that you want to go. So the symposiums talk about this esoteric stuff, and then when we get down to it, now let me show you how to feel this. And this is the, this is my problem with like a remote coaching situation is like, no, I, I might show somebody how to do a hollow,

• 1:21:24Speaker 00

  or I can explain kind of how to do a wheel or an arch to wheel, or, you know, all these weird body flow things that we've done as of late, uh, the crane dance or whatever. But until you're here in the room and you see me do it and you go, I see you do it. And I go, no, no, no, your spine is like this and your legs like this and your knees and, you know, you're, you're, you're not activating it. You're not active spine, active knee, active hip. And then you feel it and you contract so hard that you cramp up and you fall over. Now you know what it feels like, so you can go practice properly. So the symposiums become a really important part, not only for the conversation, to feel all the feels, as it were, uh, which sometimes can be jarring, but also to feel your body and what it is to actually do something correctly for the first time.

• 1:22:09Chris Williamson?

  How many people do you think that here, this is the team that was behind Jason Momoa and Henry Cavill and 300. This is the team that's behind that. And then someone hasn't done their due diligence and like, yeah, I'm going to go train with Michael Blevins. I'm going to go and get after it. And he's going to tell me about like whether push pull legs is actually better than a five day split. Um, and then they sit down and you just force feed them this red pill about reality over the course of 12 hours while Paul Warrior scowls from the back corner of the room.

• 1:22:47Speaker 00

  I guess it could be shocking, but really, and we get this often, like, you know, what was Henry Cavill's, um, training program? Like, how did he get so big and muscular and strong? And in all honesty, it's like, there was no program. There was a lot of conversations that happened every single day. Like we, we sat down and we did the same thing where I'll talk about a concept or idea. It'll elicit a response and we'll get to training. And then we'll talk about that training after. Why was it hard? What was the conversation like? You know, why did, why did you feel like you wanted to quit after 10 minutes when we had 30 minutes to go? Like, what, do you think you didn't sleep enough? Like, we just ask questions and that, that throws people off because people love definitive answers. And if you love definitive answers, you're not going to like me because I don't have any.

• 1:23:33Chris Williamson?

  If people have got this far in the podcast expecting definitive answers from you, Michael, I don't think that they've been listening.

• 1:23:40Speaker 00

  Right. The answer is five by five bench on Monday.

• 1:23:44Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. There it is. An hour and 20 minutes in and we finally got it.

• 1:23:50Speaker 00

  I mean, even in our strength program, we're trying to like move people. Like I was really hesitant to put anything specific in there, although we need to, people need to know what to do on Monday and Wednesday or whatever. And so we broke it down into who are you? Like try to ask questions like, where are you at? We have three categories, newbie, novice and expert. That's not saying that newbie is easy and expert is advanced and you should do the super secret squirrel program. It shows that designation is different. An expert in powerlifting is going to do a powerlifting meet. Therefore, the structure for which he builds strength is hyper specific. A newbie is learning strength and the destination is really specific. So you decide kind of designate

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  where you're at and then you go down that path. You can always advance the path and become a novice and become an expert. That doesn't mean you're suddenly strong. It means that your destination has changed and this is how we appropriate the destination. So explaining that to people as opposed to Henry did this workout and that workout, I did the 300 workout and then he squat five days a week or whatever it was. And that's how you do it. And then you eat chicken and broccoli. And they're like, cool, thanks. People would, people like that because people don't really like questions in general towards who they are as people. And this is like, we write this in the beginning of the strength. It's really easy to say, hey, what's your squat? I squat 405.

• 1:25:13Speaker 00

  Cool. I think I know who you are as opposed to how do you overcome burdens? Like that, that question to most people will start bringing tears because they stop thinking about a fucking weight and they start thinking about how they dealt with their mom dying from cancer. They start dealing with the trauma of abuse when they were a child. How did you overcome that? It's like, Strength when it comes to the psychological is how do you hold your ideals? How do you hold who you are, your character as a person through the roughest of sort? When you're poor and you're eating ramen and you have no money and there's no exit, how do you not do the easy thing? How do you not go into prostitution? Not that anybody would hire me, but like, how do you not go into these traps?

• 1:25:57Speaker 00

  How do you not turn towards drugs that are escapism? Not the other kind of drugs, which are awesome, but there's these traps in life and we need to know how to be strong psychologically so that we don't fall into them. And I think the more direct we are with our questioning as opposed to abstract, four or five is abstract. How do you, how do you overcome burden? That, that's a direct question. And the more you get to direct question, the more connection you have to human beings, because now we're being honest with each other.

• 1:26:25Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Something that I've been thinking about throughout this conversation is the Tuckamack's epochs of life thing. And it's interesting to see with you guys as well. You kind of have these little cycles of this was us and then this was us and then this was us and now this is us and this is me. And then I'm thinking about what's next and I'm going to try and make a prediction about what I think is, is next for you guys. And it actually comes from Derek Sivers. You know who Derek Sivers is? Yeah. Yeah. So he's on, he's on the podcast tomorrow. I have no idea how the fuck, same as you. He's, he's probably second to you in terms of who's the most challenging to try and get on the fucking podcast.

• 1:27:03Chris Williamson?

  And um, he's got this really interesting thing, right? He talks about directives. So he's read hundred, probably thousands of books. Uh, and what he did was he realized that a book, what most of a book is, is convincing you of the author's authority on this subject.

• 1:27:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Chris Williamson?

  The vast majority of it is a combination of context, which is examples, and you should trust what I say. But like Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep, it is an entire book, an entire book that says sleep out, sleep eight hours a night, but it's, it's fucking 250, 300 pages long, right? That's what, that's what it is, right? So you need, I am an authority, you should trust me. This is why buy in, buy in, buy in, believe me, blah, blah, blah. But, and Derek said this and he fucking red pilled me on it while I was researching him for this podcast, he said it on Tim Ferriss. And um, he says, the bottom line is if you trust someone sufficiently, you trust the authority figure, which is giving the instructions

• 1:28:07Chris Williamson?

  sufficiently, all you need is the directive. All that you need is the directive because you don't need the context, you don't need the examples, you don't need the, the trust me, trust me thing. It's just what do I do? So I, I think that within the next, I'd put a hundred quid on it, I wouldn't put much on it, but I put a hundred quid, I'd put a hundred quid on the fact that you guys loop back around from being in a more super hardcore, real kind of outward showing type of fitness, which was still kind of anti-marketing and like kind of guerrilla and kind of against the grain, into this more erudite, kind of verbose, there is no form system. And I think that those two are then going to coalesce

• 1:28:51Chris Williamson?

  at some point in the future, and that you're going to have a, not a minimum effective dose, but like the concentrated, the uranium 505 fucking version, you know, like the hyper dense neutron star shit. I think, I think that might happen. I genuinely think that your, your, your guys' progression may come full circle and you'll actually get back into, into directives in a very kind of pure and condensed way.

• 1:29:18Speaker 00

  It's possible. I mean, we've, we've removed ourselves from the movie industry because we didn't feel, we don't feel that repetition at that level was helpful anymore. And what it was taking away from was a creative process of like reinventing ourselves because in reality, you're just like the same, okay, you need to lose how much weight? How do you want to look shirtless? How do you like, what kind of food do you like to eat? What kind of exercise hurt you? Like, it's the same questions over and over again. And so there's no personal evolution. We dropped it with a thought that we've mastered it. It's kind of whatever you want to hear.

• 1:29:52Speaker 00

  But you know, it's not that we're closed to the idea, it's that we turn them down because nothing has sunk in. But the second something piques our interest, we go there. And I, we're very like squirrel, like, there's no, there's no plan here. We write down ideas, we have good conversations, and when something opens up, like, this sounds really ridiculous, but we're working on a tarot card game right now.

• 1:30:16Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:30:16Speaker 00

  Uh, it's, I'll explain it later when it's more well-developed. In fact, maybe I'll, maybe I'll send you it once I print it off. But the idea is that we should not be held back by anything that we've made a judgment about in the past. That's really hard to do. I've made a judgment about CrossFit, I've made a judgment about certain competitions, about what it is.

• 1:30:39Chris Williamson?

  The movie industry.

• 1:30:40Speaker 00

  Exactly. And I've made all these judgments. It, I shouldn't, I shouldn't do that. I should leave everything open to interpretation. And not go in like an idiot, like I've never been anywhere before, but to address something as, is this the same thing? Is this, am I recognizing the same human errors? In the end, people ruin everything, but I should appreciate that some people make it better. And I should be open to that fact that some people can make it better. That, our symposiums have illuminated that to me, that there is like a spark and a hope to the people that come here, for whatever reason. People heard me and Mark ranting on the internet, on a podcast, and somehow they flew, and now they want to spend time with us. And they're some of the most genuinely beautiful people that

• 1:31:25Speaker 00

  I've ever met. Their, their stories that they share reinform how we do and how we practice. And that, that's shocking. Um, I don't know, I don't know where it's going. So I also don't like to predict, because I don't want to contain myself, but.

• 1:31:41Chris Williamson?

  I've got my hundred pounds on the line.

• 1:31:42Speaker 00

  I'm fine with that. I'll, I'll, I'll let you bet as much as you want.

• 1:31:48Speaker 00

  I like the space that we have, like I've really like, I said it the other day, kind of over the internet, because we had a conversation, talk about developing the next endurance manual. And we just had a mind blowing conversation about not endurance, like it was.

• 1:32:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all. We were talking about the endurance manual, didn't use the word endurance once.

• 1:32:11Speaker 00

  Well, and I'll share this story if you have time for it, because it's kind of, so I, I, I frequently practice with ayahuasca, like that's, that's a plant that speaks to me in a way that it helps creativity. There's all these other things that go along with it, but I have transformed myself using it. It has taught me how to be somebody that I didn't think was possible. But when using it, it is not all rainbows and trippy, you know, passes through the constellations or whatever your experience is with it. Some of them are very hard and your intentions are really important. We've been trying to practice frequently as of recent because it's harder.

• 1:32:53Speaker 00

  It's not, if you do it every once in a while, it's kind of like a yahoo. And it's whatever, for whatever reason, it's communicated to the idea that I need to sit with it frequently to get good at understanding how things work. And so I've agreed to it and although it's hard and I most of the time want to hit the eject button. Last weekend, I've been writing the endurance manual and I've been having a hard time with it. And Mark, being Mark was like, are you gonna, are you gonna think about endurance this weekend when you sit?

• 1:33:26Chris Williamson?

  Fuck you, Mark.

• 1:33:27Speaker 00

  No, because that's just asking for suffering. Like if your intention is to learn about endurance, you're fucked. Like you're gonna hurt really bad and I have to be really careful with what my intentions are when I sit with the world's most powerful psychedelic drug. Because if I ask for learning, right, like, oh, I want to learn something really specific. The best way that I learn is by burning my fucking hand and that is not fun. So I also have to be careful with like, hey, this time I just want to enjoy myself. Well, guess what? I enjoy suffering. Like it, it can always go south, but this, this time. I was like, no, I'm not gonna think about endurance. I just, I'm not, I've been traveling,

• 1:34:09Speaker 00

  Australia, competing, I'm exhausted. I haven't ever stopped for months and I had to go right into, we basically landed and went right into a ceremony. And so I was like, I'm jet lagged, all this other stuff comes up. So I'm just gonna think about love or something, because fuck, whatever, like, hidden shit. And so I immediately took the first dose and, you know, shit got bad, really.

• 1:34:32Chris Williamson?

  Did Alex Hutchinson's face just float?

• 1:34:38Speaker 00

  Not that bad, in fact. It wasn't that direct.

• 1:34:41Chris Williamson?

  Alex, if you're listening, you've got a beautiful face. I'm sorry about that.

• 1:34:43Speaker 00

  He does. I wish it was that direct, but the lessons in these kinds of experiences are so complex that you really have no idea what you're gonna get. And so I said, love or something, and there's this other process where you like, you know, make an offering of cedar and ceremony when you think about something. And my wife's, my mother-in-law, my wife's mom, she's been battling cancer for quite some time, and it looks like it's getting the better of her for the past couple of months. Her breast cancer has turned into brain cancer, and it's kind of enveloped her entire brain. She's losing a lot of function. So I thought about her, and I was like, oh, well, I'll give an offering, I go up there and I come back,

• 1:35:27Speaker 00

  and I bumped my chest. I've had this like weird pain in my chest for like a month, and I was like, God, that's for sure cancer. I'm for sure dying. I literally am gonna die like in a couple of weeks, and no one gives a shit about me. I've done nothing to affect change in the world like I thought I would, and I'm just a miserable piece of shit. Fuck all these people. Like, so much for the love intention.

• 1:35:48Chris Williamson?

  Here we go, yeah.

• 1:35:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then it dawned on me that this is what Erin's mom's been going through for probably more than 10 years, and how nobody is there for her, and how I'm not there for her right now. And I was just like sobbing for an hour, just like thinking about what a miserable fucking son-in-law I am. How, like, it's like, it's a really hard lesson. And then it dawned on me that I thought about how much I loved her, and the reason why I will go over there is because love is feeling pain and doing it anyway. And when I realized that, I realized that endurance is love.

• 1:36:26Speaker 00

  And that the more you feel love, the more you can endure something. And I was like, this fucking planet has the most visceral way of teaching you lessons that you don't want to learn about the world that you don't want to be in. And I came back and now I like, we had a conversation after that. And that, and it all stemmed around what emotional qualities are we looking for? And what do they, what do they elicit out of somebody? Like, why, why are you able to connect with people that do certain activities and don't do certain activities? And it's, it's really informed, like if people are afraid of psychedelics in my world, I almost am not interested in having conversations with them. Cause that fear shows, and it doesn't mean you have to use them.

• 1:37:11Speaker 00

  It's this fear of change that I see. Are you afraid that you're going to be somebody different? And if you are, why are you afraid of change? Like, why do you not want to be somebody different? You've experienced you up until this point and it's gotten you to this point. But why would you want to shift that around to see what else you can learn or what else you could become? So it is, it's kind of wacky here some days.

• 1:37:34Chris Williamson?

  Man, I like it. Like I say, the, the, the main, the thing that I keep on coming back to is posting out a podcast or posting out a symposium. This is the team behind the 300 movie and, you know, Henry Cavill. And then you get ayahuasca and, and, um, why the heat death of the universe is inevitable and how really it's just entropy, man. And it's waves and yeah, you're at the bottom of a squat. But really, really what I want to know is have you managed to strip away the ego? And it's like 400 pounds on your back. But look, I, I, I get the impression that we could go on for, I could keep doing this all night.

• 1:38:15Chris Williamson?

  Unfortunately I've got to go run a club night, but, um, man, as soon as the endurance things, I mean, I've got a list, I'm just looking at my notes. I've got all of the questions about fitness. This was a conversation not about fitness. That's what, that's what I'm going to title this podcast, a conversation not about fitness.

• 1:38:32Speaker 00

  I can, I can get behind that. Well, look. It's been really good. If there's anything else, maybe I'll send you the endurance manual once we have it. You have the strength manual, right?

• 1:38:42Chris Williamson?

  No, not yet.

• 1:38:43Speaker 00

  I'll send you a copy of that, too.

• 1:38:44Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 1:38:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. Then you can kind of see about it if we're having a symposium. We switched the UK one. We're having a symposium in Salt Lake City. I don't know what your schedule is like. You're more than welcome to come out for it. It's at the end of last weekend in May. I think it's the 30th and 31st. It's a special one because we have some friends at Red Bull. And that morning before we start the symposium, we actually buy everybody-

• 1:39:09Chris Williamson?

  Ayahuasca retreat with Red Bull?

• 1:39:11Speaker 00

  I wish. Till the future. I don't think we can advertise that quite yet.

• 1:39:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:17Speaker 00

  But we actually run the Red Bull 400 beforehand, which is up in Park City, which is the, basically, a competition to run up the ski jump. And it is-

• 1:39:26Chris Williamson?

  Oh, how cool.

• 1:39:27Speaker 00

  terribly fun and also transformative in its own way. So that one is a really special event. We do that every year.

• 1:39:35Chris Williamson?

  Where can people go? They want to come and fly out and see you, or they're in Utah already? Where did they had to get information on that?

• 1:39:42Speaker 00

  Our website is nonprofit with a P H. So N O N P R O P H E T dot media is the website. We have all our stuff, all our goodies, all our books, all our symposiums are up there listed. So and there's, you know, loads of articles. I think we have like 100 journal articles. I've been, I do these micro essays once a week for the past two years. So there's quite a bit of writing up there for free. It gives people an idea of what we're about. How full this work-

• 1:40:14Chris Williamson?

  At gritten teeth on Instagram?

• 1:40:17Speaker 00

  Yes, at gritten teeth on Instagram. Don't find me there. I don't respond very often.

• 1:40:24Speaker 00

  But I have, sometimes they put pictures or whatever. So yeah, find all those spots. And then whenever you want to redo this, maybe you come out to Salt Lake, we'll have you on our podcast.

• 1:40:34Chris Williamson?

  That sounds awesome. Look, thank you so much, Michael. I appreciate that you don't often come on podcasts. I'm really glad that I've managed to get you on this one. Everything that we've spoken about will be linked in the show notes below. The Sam Harris thing, the Paul Bloom conversation, my chat with Aubrey Marcus, any stuff that Michael sends me over once we're finished and of course a link to nonprofit and despite the fact that he's desperately trying to hide away on social media, Michael's Instagram. I found you on Twitter as well. It's like some handle. I managed to I managed to track you down on Twitter as well.

• 1:41:04Speaker 00

  Sworn to black.

• 1:41:06Chris Williamson?

  Sworn to black. Yeah. It just sounds like all of your, all of your social media handles sound like emo songs from the mid 2000s.

• 1:41:14Speaker 00

  Funny that sworn to black was a black deli murder song. Yeah. Super death metal. I used to be super into it, never changed it. I do use Twitter still. I really like Twitter.

• 1:41:26Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Well, I'll put that in there as well. Look, Michael, man, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. It's been, it's been illuminating and interesting and I genuinely wish that we could continue it. Hopefully we will in the future.

• 1:41:38Speaker 00

  Awesome. Absolutely. Thank you, man.

• 1:41:55Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:42:12Speaker 00

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze in there. That's what.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:42:19Speaker 00

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:42:20Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 out of middle without parent.