How to Hack Health in All Areas with Justin Noppé

Justin Noppé works with health and fitness for a living, so I used this conversation to ask him the questions I actually wanted answered. We get into the metrics worth tracking and the ones worth ignoring: VO2 max, why he rates resting heart rate and morning respiration over chasing your HRV score, and what the numbers do and do not tell you.

From there it is the practical stuff. The four movements he builds everything around (push, pull, hinge, squat), the difference between eccentric, concentric and isometric work, a pre-bed stretching routine for better sleep, and why following your curiosity matters more than any perfect programme you will not stick to.

Justin's Neuro Resilience course: bit.ly/neuroresiliencecourse

Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co

The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Justin, I've I've at this point, I think I've lost count about the number of conversations we've had. I know we've we've done like three official kind of podcasts and we've done a few other things. We've done a video on reading, and we we even have, I think, some lost tapes, some like unreleased dialogues that I'm gonna be releasing at some point. Um but uh yeah, I I want the focus of this conversation to be about health. Now, when I first met you, you were introduced to me as like a learning expert, like uh like Eric Brown, a mutual friend, was like, I met this guy and he's like a learning expert and he's memorizing all these things. And I was like, okay, cool, that's interesting. But then after talking to you, learning is only a small part of kind of what you're interested in, right? There's so much. I mean, I don't think I could talk to you about a topic. I don't think I have actually, where you've been like, sorry, I got nothing on that. There's always like something. There's always something you could bring to the table. Pretty much anything, actually. Um, there's like a huge breadth of knowledge there. Um and recently I've been picking your brains on cardio because I have a jujitsu competition in a couple of months, and I was like, yeah, Justin talks about cardio a bit. I'm gonna start asking him questions, and then it became like this whole program, and yeah, and you're kind of like my my Wikipedia for cardio at the moment. So um I guess I kind of to open this up, I want to ask you um, what is your personal relationship to health and fitness? And you know, why, first of all, is it very important to you? Um, I think I kind of know the answer, but you know, and if so, why is it important to you? Why do you spend so much time prioritizing it?

SPEAKER_03 1:45

I mean, I think to answer that question in the beginning, it's just it's important to say, like, I'm a nobody when it comes to you know this topic. I I'm just a guy doing his own exploration. And you know, you mentioned some very complimentary things, and I think the easiest way to say that is that there's a weakness in every strength. And definitely one of my strengths is that I do vast amounts of research according to a certain framework of like, how does this mechanism work? And how can what are the biggest levers that I can pull on this mechanism as well? And so I approach my entire life like that. You know, anything that just picks my curiosity just a little bit, I'll dive in, I'll try and understand mechanisms, how it's influenced, you know, where it comes from, all that kind of stuff. So, really, my background was uh a place of ignorance, to say the least. And to say that, like in the last two years, is where I've really seen a lot of my results come in is phenomenal. I could kick myself for some of the crap that I did when I was younger. Like, you know, it just wasn't the right amount of volume, or um, you know, I wasn't doing the right exercise for the right area or whatever it is. So um my approach to this, to say the least, is that the mind and the body are one. You can't separate the mind out. If you if you try and understand what the mind is, the mind is just a big bundle of nerves. But those nerves permeate everything. And one could argue that the nervous system is the self, because the nervous system is what tells the muscles, the body, um, the heart, the lungs, the organs to do certain things, you know. I mean, it's a little bit more complex than that, but I'm sure you're getting my analogy of like, you know, there is this concept of embodied cognition, which is that you know, your nervous system runs throughout your body, it's not just localized in your head and that's where it stays. You know, there's impulses that run throughout your body that will inform everything that you do. Um, and there's a breadth of research and knowledge that says that you know, when you contract your muscles, your muscles start producing all these like signaling hormones that go into things um which recruits um all these other things and start signaling other things that happen in your body. And the end result of pulling that lever is increased memory, increased cognitive function, you know, increased clarity, decreased brain fog. You know, uh just yesterday you and I were sending audio notes back that said that people who exercise and have bigger muscles, um, they're less likely to respond to the, you know, the classic, you know, diabetes sugar test as severely as someone who doesn't exercise because the body just knows what to do with that sugar, with that glucose when it hits. Um and so it's just this idea that I think my approach and the way that I connect with it is almost like hygiene. Yeah. It's it's almost like a mental hygiene. The idea of you know, flexing your muscles. Most people are like, oh, you've got to choose a goal, like a body fat percentage or this. That for me is irrelevant and it goes more to like a process-based thing of like, you're gonna brush your teeth? Great. Why are you brushing your teeth? Oh, because I've got this goal of having perfect teeth, or like getting the girl with my beautiful smile, you know, and it's just no, it's it's hygiene, you know. You can enjoy brushing your teeth, you can hate brushing your teeth, but you still do it. Um, and there's ways to to kind of get around that. So I think hygiene is the best way that I've heard it's being described, but I would say it's it's it's hygiene that you really enjoy as well.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Right, okay. Yeah, I love that frame. So it's for you, it's more just like a like you give me a reason not to do it almost. That's the kind of vibe I'm giving you. Like, what's your why wouldn't I do it? As opposed to I need a bunch of reasons to do it. Um same as brushing your teeth, if you use that analogy. Um, okay, so could you share a little bit about how you first became interested in the sphere of health? Because just to give listeners some perspective, um, you're not just interested in, say, cardio or something like that. From from my understanding, and maybe you can clarify this, you're interested in almost every metric, you know, whether that's VO2 Max, strength, um, like every health metric you can think about, including sleeping, flexibility, right? And I'm sure the list goes on. But like, how did you start becoming interested in that? And what was the journey like?

SPEAKER_03 6:22

So it was quite interesting because you know, my background is that my dad was a very famous uh Dons choreographer and teacher from South Africa. So I grew up around a you know, a physical um culture, shall we say? But South Africa is also very sporty and things like that. And then my own personal approach was that I was involved in a lot of water sports, kayaking and sailing and rowing, and you know, and it it's like any kid, anyone, you know, you usually have an introduction through games you play, sports, um, any kind of competitions. And I eventually took it into martial arts. And with martial arts, like I didn't care about being the biggest or anything like that. It was always about like, could this person take me or could I take them? Um, and you know, when you're skinny, I used to be so thin and you know, so lanky that you could, you know, a stiff breeze would blow me over. Um, but I was hiding almost behind this thing. My identity was rooted in this idea of like um I'm superior in the ways of martial arts, and therefore no one is ever gonna best me. And it was rooted in identity. And eventually I started at the age of 25, like suffering pains in my hip, in my shoulders, because all I was doing was doing um, you know, the martial arts without any kind of conditioning, strength and conditioning work. So then I started getting into more strength and conditioning work underneath um, you know, my my god brother and his tutelage. And now he's like he's he's one of the top CrossFit athletes in in the UK. Like he ranks on their numbers and their boards and things like that. Yeah, yeah, he's he's a monster. He's a monster. And even then, he's like, you know, compared to other CrossFit athletes, you know, he he would say like he's not even a ch uh a competitor. Um, but yeah, he is incredible. And so he was then pushing this kind of stuff on me as well. And the approach basically comes at, oh, I get exposure to this concept and this person and this idea. And I realized at some points, I'm like, just let's all cut the crap. What is it that I'm trying to do? What is it that I'm trying to achieve? Why do I want to achieve these things? And it was that time that I started doing much more research into okay, what are superfluous kind of things? What are nice to have versus wait, what are the necessities? And this way of approaching things is what I then started infusing in my work. What are the broad strokes? And so the broad strokes for for everyone, and in my opinion, from my perspective, from all the research that I've done, the broad strokes are like health means nothing unless you're getting adequate sleep. But it ties in because if you're not doing exercise, your sleep is going to be affected as well. Because you're you've still got like a lot of sugar running around in your system, for example. Um, just one of the things where it might not work so well. So you've got um all these stats around sleep and how sleep's affected. But then the second marker is gonna be nutrition and food. And then we start going into like, okay, what are the physical interventions? And the physical interventions, as far as I classify them, are then gonna be uh your exercise interventions. After that, you've got breathing interventions, and after that, you've got these types of like stillness frameworks as well. Now, within exercise itself, I would argue that you've got um, you know, skeletal muscular kind of resistance training, then you've got cardio, then you've got flexibility. And those are going to be micro um strokes inside the broad strokes already. And so, yeah, I think largely what I settled on after years and years and years of like looking for the perfect approach and being influenced by Tim Ferris's like optimized way of approaching everything. And you know, like, holy crap, I can do this one exercise and become like a deadlifting god, you know, just when one exercise from 20 minutes a week. Like, pardon my French, fuck optimization. Optimization usually leads you down a very narrow path where you have a lot of fragility. So, okay, forget optimization. What a what's a broad approach that we can take that's still ticking boxes, that still gives me a framework that I can utilize? So as soon as I stopped saying optimize, optimize, optimize, you know, you're and and and to be honest with you, that's also where you see a lot of like social media come in today. Where influencers are famous. Why? Because check out this new exercise where this new this person is doing this weird movement and like can I do that movement? And those movements that are really catchy are usually like accessories or a blend of two movements together. And if you if you zoom out, what's the broad stroke movement of that? Oh, it's this simple movement. That if you're not doing that movement, you have no business doing this very specialized movement anyway. Right. So yeah, I think those are yeah, the thoughts.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Yeah, well, there's a kind of whole like system and a framework that you have there. Um I I want to circle back to what you said at the start of that, and you made quite a bold claim actually, to the effect of something like uh I'm paraphrasing, but like health means not nothing if there's not adequate sleep, something along those lines. Is that right? Yeah, um, I love the the the fact that that's so bold because it's sort of like what I'm hearing from that is like prioritize sleep before you even talk to me about health. Like if you're if that isn't important to you, good sleep, we we we don't need to be talking about lifting or cardio. If like sleep is something you can just kind of uh if you're drinking caffeine in bed and trying to get by on four hours sleep, we can't be talking about VO2 Max at that point. That's kind of what I'm interpreting that as.

SPEAKER_03 12:01

Can you can you let's let's let's be honest and let's let's be inclusive and yeah, you you can't talk about like VO2 Max if you're getting bad sleep and things like that. But yeah, at what price? What's the consequence you know of that? And I would argue that usually like athletes and people who are whose job it is to exercise are probably the worst people to go to for advice because they will give you a system of winning and optimizing for winning, and the price, the consequence that you'll pay is usually going to be your body as well. I mean, I've known professional dancers whose feet and knees and back are like things that they in later on in life in their 40s, their career stops, stops, grinds to a halt. Why? Because that system is a system of performance and feeling pain for your art. It's amazing how many dancers have that perspective of like, you know, it's okay to bleed for your art. I'm like, sure. I I guess right, you know, whatever, whatever you want. And that's the beautiful thing about human expression is that the the best system means nothing unless your passion's in it. So yeah, let's be inclusive about that. But let me cycle back and give you, I'll give you an example, John. I've got a client at the moment who is trying to round out all of their health. Okay. Sleep is in the tank. Sleep is absolutely in the tank. So five hours a night. Um, you know, my client's got a whoop, so able to tell me, you know, particular particular metrics on this kind of data. Um, you and I have had discussions like um my wife's got the order ring, I've had the whoop for a year, she's at the whoop for a year. I'm using the Apple Watch uh at the moment because of you know what the measurables, how accurate the data is, when do they measure data, things like that. So I'm very much like in the loop on this type of stuff. I do enjoy it. Um, but I don't let it dictate me. This guy's data, broad strokes, it starts with quantity. How much sleep are you getting? And so anywhere between, let's say, seven to nine hours is more or less what you need. That's fine. That's your sleep need. Um, this guy's getting like five hours, four and a half sometimes. So, okay, cool. What does your food look like? Not enough calories, not eating enough calories, and not eating enough protein. So, whatever your feelings on diet are, you know, like as a macronutrient, he's not getting enough protein. And obsessed with training, wants to train even harder and harder and harder, and is maxing out like his active calories. I mean, he's doing like three and a half thousand calories of um, you know, burn per day. I mean, you know, calories is a rough metric anyway to believe in. But this guy's sleep turns out to be he is not eating enough in order to get quality sleep, and he's not eating enough protein to actually feed his body. So there's a lot of issues that are going on there. And the prescription is don't exercise actually, prioritize your sleep.

unknown 15:01

Right.

SPEAKER_03 15:01

Because once you balance out, you know, once you can get yourself to a foundational stable level of homeostasis, then we can start adding stress to it. But if we just start adding stress to his body, it's it's a matter of time before things start breaking.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

Right, okay. And what are the kind of seeing as we're talking about sleep, what are some of the suggestions you're giving your client that could also be applied to kind of general, the general population that also struggle with sleep?

SPEAKER_03 15:30

Um, I mean, a lot of the time it's going for this idea of quantity first, then we can start having conversations about quality and frequency. So most people are like into the data, just like I was, just like I guess I am. You know, like, oh, how do you increase REM sleep and what's what's your ratio of REM to DEET that you need, and restorative sleep is a blah, blah, blah. And the answer is unless you're getting the qual the quantity of sleep down, the rest doesn't matter. The rest doesn't matter because quality will be dialed in after you get the quantity, and the consistency of quantity matters more. So unless you're getting your seven to nine hours a night, there's no need to have more of a conversation. And looking at, well, what's stopping you from getting that's that seven to nine hours? Okay, what interventions can we put in place? I mean, there's all the typical ones about like have having a sleep oasis, like my friend likes to say, you know, where your room is sacred for sleep. You have your bedtime routines, things like that. But then we start to tie in. Uh I mean, I mentioned to you the five physical factors. I talk about them as harmonies. You can harmonize with your exercise. If your sleep is suffering, what does your exercise look like? Because chances are, if you're over-exercising or under exercising, we've got something that we can change for you to be able to sleep better. Yeah. Right? Uh, what does your breath work look like? I know someone who did like Wim Hof's breath work before going to bed because he thought it would relax him. And I'm like, are you crazy? It's hyperventilation. It's like, like, this is this is like the opposite that you want. You know, what the hell are you what are you doing? Um, you know, food as well. Some people, um, I'm I'm in this camp. I can eat food before bedtime, and it will actually increase my restorative sleep, my quality of sleep. Everything just goes up, all the metrics go up. Whereas my wife, if she has anything, if she just even sniffs food in the like three hours before bedtime, it'll disturb her sleep. Like you cannot believe. Wow. So it really is something that is um quite personal. And so I find that this is this is quite a little nugget here. You know, all of these things are iterations. And personal responsibility comes into it with this idea of like, I need to find the iteration that really connects with me at this stage of my life in this season of my life. So it's always going to shift. There's never going to be this set structure that I follow. It's always going to be like, oh, I'm finding that this works better for me at the moment. So I'll stick with that at the moment. Oh, this isn't working anymore. Let me see if something else works better for me. So this iterative approach, and if you ever speak to someone who's trying to get into health and fitness, they'll outsource their iterations to someone who tells them, this is how it is, you do three sets of ten of this and this and this. And of course, when they fail that, because it doesn't speak to their personal preferences, their their personal idiosyncrasies or their passions, you know, they're like, oh, it just wasn't for me. I clearly I'm just not an exercise person. Yeah. Instead of taking that approach of this is something to iterate. It's a it's a beautiful thing for me to learn to so I'm gonna sound very American here, dance with instead of dance. Something to dance with.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Speaking personally about sleep, um since having these conversations with you and tracking, which we I want to get into shortly, um, I've started prioritizing my sleep more. And what one of the things I noticed is that, you know, if you're used to something, you know, uh the example that comes to mind is like Mike Tyson was used to being broke, so that when he made 300 million, he still found a way to kind of get broke after that, you know, just kind of the the pullback of habit and identity. And I think I've just formed this identity of someone who is often sleep deprived and does often burn the candles at both ends. And now it's like a bit weird for me to just not be that person, you know, even though it's like I could go to bed now and I am tired, but in the past that hasn't stopped me. And so, like a weird to kind of like I have to kind of like do it. And then when I have a good night's sleep, I feel amazing the next day. It's like nothing stresses me out, everything bounces off me. I'm like bulletproof. So then when I wake up, I'm like, why don't I do this more often? You know, this is so, you know. I mean, that's a great question, John.

SPEAKER_03 19:55

Why don't you? Let's ask this question. What does it mean? Well, like if a person like works hard and they sacrifice sleep, like in your mind, is this this person like do you attribute good qualities, bad qualities, or neutral qualities to this person?

SPEAKER_01 20:14

At the moment, now I I associate negative qualities to them. Um I think as well, just to kind of round out that question, I think I've had bad sleep partly because of my environment of having a young kid and kind of getting used to it almost like it wasn't a choice for a while. Like when I was a teenager, I would lay in and sleep late, and I would always kind of get my good sleep, but then you you make a bottle in the night, and you kind of it's like normal for me to be sleep deprived. That's me. And now it's like I could probably have better sleep now, you know, and it's like a weird shift. So yeah, it's a it's a it's a good question. Um, but now I'm start definitely starting to see that like what am I what am I doing? You know, sleep is so important, and you can really feel it like clearly when you sleep well the next day. 100%.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

Um Mark, do you have any input? Yeah, no, all kinds of interesting things I'd I'd love to ask about. I mean, specifically related to sleep, I was curious when Justin mentioned breathing as being laid to sleep, because I wouldn't have Yeah, food, exercise, that makes sense. But when obviously Wimp off breathing before bed doesn't make sense, but I I instantly wondered is there a kind of breathing that does facilitate better better sleeping? And I was just curious about that.

SPEAKER_03 21:30

100%. I mean, let's let's use this framework again and talk about broad strokes. And the idea is that um let's say you're being chased by a cheetah, you know, in the savannah, you know, that that old chestnut, you know.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

Classic.

SPEAKER_03 21:45

And um what's your breath work gonna be when your sympathetic nervous system is really activated and you're super stressed out? Like you know, basically, you're taking in huge gulps of air um for fuel. Uh a lot of If your breathing is out of control, it's in your chest, it's very short breathing, it's very loud breathing. And if you look at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, you've got someone who's like super relaxed. What is their breath work, you know, gonna be? What is their uh the sound of their breath? Where are they breathing into? Like what is the cadence of their breath? You know, and basically we're we can say that any time that we can take control of the breathing, the heart rates and therefore, you know, all the other things after it, like blood pressure, um, you know, these types of things are gonna come into flow with that. So we have control over our breath at times, and then at other times we don't. So when we're talking about breath work and we're preparing for sleep, I mean, imagine an hour before sleep. You do 15 minutes of breath work where your goal is to just breathe slower than you were breathing the minute before. Calm yourself down, you know, um very light breathing. And so I always promote uh Patrick McKeown's uh breathwork stuff for anyone who wants to learn about this kind of thing. Um, I made um my own like heart rate variability resonance breathing um track on Insight Timer as well, based on some research about skewed resonance breathwork, which actually opens up the mind. So you've got breathwork there to be cognitively aware. Now that would be bad as well for bedtime. So bedtime is usually about calming down the breath. You know, it's it's lengthening out and focusing more on the exhales in order to bring the heart rate down. So there's a type of breath work. I actually do this after cardio as well for uh heart rate recovery. You know, in the two minutes after you finish an exercise, you should watch how many beats per minute does your heart rate actually drop? And a faster drop usually means better recovery. And so you can actually teach your body to do that faster by focusing on the exhales and the exhale holds. Short inhales, longer exhales, short exhale hold as well. And you'll just notice that your your heart rate drops pretty quickly. I've done so many recordings, you know, just that I share with my clients, like on my phone, where all of a sudden you see this heart rate in like the 160s, and all of a sudden within a minute, it's like choo, choo, choo, choo, and I'll stop the recording when I get down to like below 100 beats per minute, you know, and I've just been out for like a run or something like that. So definitely that would be the uh the breath work to promote.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

Yeah, that is that's fascinating. I definitely want to go and learn more about that for sure. I think the other thing I was really curious to ask you about, Justin, but I have certain later time to derail the discussion. It's been focused on sleep too much, but I was really interested in asking you more questions about the the mind-body connection you mentioned just near the start. I haven't spoken, that was really fascinating. But I wasn't sure quite exactly what the question I had to ask was, but I definitely have an awareness that I think a number of people can't consider themselves to be a mind kind of walking around in a meat suit, and I think a lot of people can feel disconnected from their body. So if I had an awareness of this kind of mind-body connection, and I did feel disconnected from my body, how would I kind of change that such that I was feeling that more strongly or better? Or how would that be and maybe optimizes the wrong word in what we said already, but how could I increase my sense of that mind-body connection if I'm new to the idea?

SPEAKER_03 25:25

You know that that's a great question, Mark. It really is a great question. Um, I'll speak to it from the lens of my wife. So um, John, you know, Mark, I'm not too sure you know. So my wife Lori is a registered dietitian. Okay, she's associate director of clinical nutrition at this huge hospital here. She has two master's degrees, and she's a functional medicine practitioner of gut health. She literally heals people's guts, like people who are experiencing pain and bloats, and like they haven't had solid stools in years, and you know, they can't, they always have like acid reflux, like the worst of the worst. You know, people who like vomiting, you know, has just become a regular thing for them because they can't hold food down or something like that. You know, so it's really how do you feel the mind-body connection when you feel like your body is working against you the entire time? And it's you you feel like you're at war with your own body. Um, you know, these are very uh very difficult things to get over. And I think that to shift your perception on that is a is a it is a tough thing. The starting point, I think, would be that there is a holistic um solution out there. So if you are not suffering from like a malady, a particular illness, a particular thing, um, it's worth getting to know your body in particular. And that means challenging the assumptions that you're making. Challenging the assumptions that you're making about what should and shouldn't be. Oh, but I should just be able to eat blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, I don't know. If you're like me, you got you know celiac disease because it's genetic, and you and your dumb, dumb wisdom decided to go vegan for a while, and that just triggered celiac disease in you. Congratulations. Irreversible celiac disease, you know? Hey! So um, you know, so um, but now that I own that, I actually am very happy without gluten in my life, which means no pizza, no pasta, I'm like, no skin off my nose. I actually don't mind because there are gluten-free options if I want to eat like that, but it actually the worst thing that happened to me became a blessing once I reframed it. And I was like, oh, you know what? This forced me to explore this avenue that I was not interested in in the slightest. And so it becomes that as well. Sometimes, you know, we have to experience that trauma to then uh be forced to look down a particular avenue. Um and I think that that would point at just this question of awareness. So once again, it's challenging assumptions, it's raising awareness, asking yourself questions that matter, like what matters to me? You know? So with exercise and training, it was always body weight that mattered to me. Always body weight. Whereas my my brother cares about lifting heavy, heavy weights that matters to him. And I couldn't care. Like he's like, Oh, I just got a 400 kilogram deadlift. I'm like, that's an insane amount of shopping that you are preparing to pick up. Come on, like just do two trips to your car, you're fine, you know. Um, but it's it's passion, and so awareness helps that in an immense way.

SPEAKER_01 29:39

Um yeah, that's a great question, Mark. And yeah, loved that answer. Um I have something that I want to talk to you about, that kind of extreme weightlifting thing. But before we we get into that, I'm curious if you could just talk a little bit more about what you've learned from your wife. Um, like what ideas did she kind of introduce you to or help you flesh out, you know, and because it's kind of you are literally married and living with someone whose like successful career is nutrition and health, right? So it's uh it's kind of perfect in a way because you love this stuff, and I I guess you have loads of conversations about you know these ideas as well. So yeah, it's cute.

SPEAKER_03 30:23

You know, you know, our really our romance actually started um when I had just learned about like the personalized diet, which was you know, out of uh I can't remember where it was, but uh these guys were saying that like people's blood pressure, uh blood glucose levels responded differently to different foods. So you give some guy sushi, blood sugar skyrockets. You give a different guy sushi, blood sugar is fine and stable. And so everybody needs to test themselves. So at the time that I met my wife, you know, I actually revealed to her what a dork I was and what a nerd I was with this stuff with a spreadsheet tracking my blood glucose levels every 30 minutes. I was pricking my finger. This is before the days of like continuous glucose monitors that you just tack onto the back of your arm. And here's Justin with like these pens, you know, the little lances and like tons of needles to like prick my fingers every 30 minutes of a day for three weeks and coming at that with that data. So, you know, that's when she was like, Oh, yeah, we're we're gonna get along great. Um so that I would I would answer your question by saying the two biggest things. The first thing is it took me a while to kind of figure this out, but once I was able to speak to it, it made sense and I could predict her answers everywhere. And I think that that's that's really my strength is being able to kind of like map out a certain sense of logic or a system and then being able to speak to it. Her logic is how do you stop toxins from entering the body? Period. That's it. You know, so as a nutritionist, the toxins that you put into your gut are gonna have an effect, no matter what they are. Right? So um if if there's a a risk factor of an effect, don't eat it. Don't eat it. You know, there's no there's no benefit to eating it. Why would you eat it? There's you know, it's this idea of like benefit versus consequence. There's no benefits and there's potential consequence. Why are you putting a toxin in your body? So, you know, people there there's a bit of a debate at the moment about vegetable oils, and and people who are very health conscious are like, don't eat vegetable oils. And you know, I don't eat vegetable oils, I don't include them in my diet because I live with someone who considers them to be, you know, toxic. And there's a lot of people who are like, oh, it's fine, you're not gonna grow cancer just from like having some vegetable oil, it's fine. It's true, you're not, but you're still introducing a toxin into your body. You know, there is still gonna be an effect, and you still need to detox that. Your body still needs to work that out of your system somehow. How is that gonna happen? Are your pathways open or blocked? Blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think this idea of like, you know, knowing your choices and knowing what are you letting in was the first major idea. And then on top of that, the second major idea that I I think um I really got from her is portion control. You know, and that that's helped my weight, like you can't believe. And when I say portion control, she just asked me, she's like, Are you eating a serving? How many servings have you had? I'm like, what are you talking about? Servings. What do you mean? Like, I'm not I'm not full, I'm still hungry. Come on. And it's just this idea of what's the ratio of food that you're eating in comparison to you know, like what you can actually handle. So I don't know about you, but I can finish off an entire can of Pringles if I wanted to, just one shot. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 33:49

Easily.

SPEAKER_03 33:50

And then the next day my guts would not be happy with me and I'd be on the loo, right? Whereas now, um, I don't need Pringles anymore, number one, because of the oil situation, but you know, we still have um, you know, some some healthier alternatives that are cooked in like avocado oil, for example. And um, you know, I'll actually measure out a serving, and my stomach is happier for it for me measuring out a serving. The love handles, sure, if I, you know, if we want to go that route, sure, you know, that that helps that too. But it's just more the idea of like the gut. So I think those are the two, you know, um minimizing toxins coming in, and then number two is uh portion control and just being very aware of portions and not just eating whatever I wanted, however much I wanted. And I think that speaks to something about the perception of agency and self-control. And, you know, the more you exit, agency is very interesting. You know, the more money you have, the more control you feel you have. Sure. But the more control over yourself and Dominion of the more agency you feel you have as well. So people sometimes flex their control about themselves in very unhealthy ways as well. And I find that this is more of a healthier way of feeling can in control, also.

SPEAKER_01 35:11

Yeah, I love that. I just had this idea that for most of us, the portions that we eat are decided by other people, you know. Like when you buy something out or you get you get a meal at a restaurant, it's not you that decided the portion, they give it to you. Even like when you eat from a bowl, it's like, what's the portion till the bowl gets full, right? That's the like you didn't really decide that, it's just like the bowl told you how much to put in there. Um, and you're saying like empower yourself and you be the decider, you know, of what portion you want to have.

SPEAKER_03 35:43

And you know, it's interesting that you say that because that I like I'm six foot two, 180 pounds, what's it like 82 kilograms essentially?

SPEAKER_01 35:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:53

And my portions compared to my active calories, which is just an estimate, my portions are like 1.5 times the size of my wife's. And now we can eyeball that kind of thing. Um, she's pretty good at being able to eyeball calories according to portions because she's been doing it for like 20 years. Um, and so what I'll do is I'll just take whatever she's eating times by 0.5, you know, like plus plus another half, and and that'll be more or less I'm good with that.

SPEAKER_01 36:21

Yeah. Wow. And uh can you give give us a like some examples of what you would call toxins? Just some kind of basic things to get started with to look out for, you know, to avoid toxins in what we eat.

SPEAKER_03 36:37

Um sure. The the four that I usually tell people with a brain that are gonna make the difference. Yeah, uh yeah. This is one of my pet peeves, is when these like learning experts and people telling you how to get rid of brain fog, and they're like, eat avocados, it's a superfood, or eat blueberries, it's a superfood. Like you can't say that unless you've done a blood panel and you can tell that this person is like deficient in this particular like it's not gonna work like that. Yeah, you know, yes, whole foods are better than you know processed foods, without a doubt. Um, but I've got four that I tell people to stay away from in particular, which is vegetable oils because of inflammation, and inflammation leads to brain fog. So it's all brain oriented and thinking oriented for me. Uh, the second one is sugar and the impact it has on the hippocampus, right? Uh gluten, same thing, and then the final one is alcohol. Um, so those are the four that I tell people to stay away from. Um, what I know my wife would say, and these are the broad strokes of nutrition that I recommend to most people anyway, is first of all, um whole foods-based. That's it. You know, are you eating something that our ancestors from 200 years ago would identify?

SPEAKER_02 37:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:54

You know, it's that simple. And most of the times that means not eating ultra-processed food. So it doesn't matter if vegan, paleo, like, yeah, you can throw whatever label you want on it, but what's the broad stroke? Is it whole foods? Straight up. You know, and then you're automatically avoiding a ton of toxicants. Now, you and I have gone back and forth on this, and like, oh, the body will break it down for sure. But the gut, the effect that it'll have on the gut, like the body will the body's amazing, the body will absolutely do its job, but the residue that it leaves behind, the effect that it has, you know, on the working parts, you know, um, that's that's just our kind of perspective on it as well.

SPEAKER_01 38:41

And uh I appreciate that you bring up the gut element because I've heard uh some kind of top, you know, well-known PhDs uh coaches online talk about how they are not gut experts, and there's actually still like a lot to learn and discover about gut health, and it's still in this process of like you could just because you've got like a PhD in nutritional science doesn't mean you understand the gut inside out. It's like this whole other almost like alien entity that we're still kind of figuring out and developing ideas as we go.

SPEAKER_03 39:18

100%, yeah. Yeah, like um there's been so many connections between like the the guts and the brain as well. They call it the gut brain axis, is um how much of an impact it has. So we talked about that embodied cognition, the fact that the mind is in the body, like your biggest cranial nerve that actually leaves the the head is the one that's connected to the gut as well. You know, there's there's a straight up, uh I don't know if it's the biggest actually. Sorry, I maybe I misspoke, but there's there's a huge nervous connection between the gut and the brain.

SPEAKER_01 39:52

And uh I mean when when we experience, I don't know about you guys, but when I experience anxiety, anger, I don't feel it behind my eyes. Like it's like it's like in my body. Yeah. It's uh yeah, it's like that that tension. I personally carry stress. I think I might have mentioned to you before, like in my diaphragm kind of area, you know, that's that's where you throw in some steep deprivation and some stressful events. That's where there's this sort of buildup of like this not kind of thing that kind of that's that's the area that it is, which is you know, linked to get and I would imagine and things like that too.

SPEAKER_03 40:33

Yeah, it's it's interesting where we keep. I mean, like I can't speak to this. I think this is a topic that I know a lot about, about like where do we hold stress? Sure, uh physically, but I think that um you know the whys and the mechanisms are like this is this is beyond my ability. Congratulations, John. You found one area.

SPEAKER_01 40:54

Until next week.

SPEAKER_03 40:58

Yeah, I just a lot of the research in there, uh like I'm not such a fan of, you know, where it's like, oh, if it's in your stomach, it's related to your you know, your second chakra, which means that you're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, let's let's see the data on that, please. You know.

SPEAKER_01 41:14

You mentioned one of the toxins uh as alcohol. And I first of all I want to get your own kind of uh personal, I'm curious about your own personal relationship with alcohol and um smoking as well. Like let's include uh smoking and alcohol and marijuana and things like that, you know, that kind of collection of quite popular narcotics that people use. Um, what is your own relationship with that and how how do you think they uh you know they ought to be used for maximal health longevity and things like that? Like just what is your opinion on people using them?

SPEAKER_03 41:56

I mean, if the objective is maximum health, maximum longevity, the answer is take them all out.

SPEAKER_02 42:03

Right.

SPEAKER_03 42:04

You know? Uh there's the like we got to think about like what are the use cases, like what is this gonna be good for? Um you know, you could make arguments about like social lubrication for a lot of these things, you know, the smokers are more likely to actually talk to one another, you know, in asking for like cigarettes, lighters, things like that, um, than non-smokers. Smokers also take more breaks than non-smokers, but you know, that's just like, oh, well, because I'm not exercising, what I want to do is do this insane other thing instead, where which would, you know, kind of have this effect where I would meet people. Like, what? This is insane. Like, what are we doing? Like, yeah, I'm gonna hit myself with a hammer in that way when I'm in the emergency room, I get to talk to people. Like, no, just go to just go to the gym and talk to people, you know, it'll be fine. Um, so I think look, that's a bit vague and a little bit uh let's say out there. So let's go, let's bring it back and let's just talk about it. From my my relationship was I was a 30-a-day smoker until I was 25. Yeah, did not know that. Yeah, I was a hardcore smoker, like it was my identity. I was like the smoker. I could do all the tricks and blow the rings and like swallow the cigarettes without it burning me. And um yeah, yeah, I was very much invested in being a smoker. Um, you know, yeah, there was a lot there. Um I drank until I was about 18 and I decided to stop drinking as like an experiment, and it stuck. And I haven't had a drink in now uh 23 years-ish, maybe more. Yeah. And I mean, you know, when you're younger, you miss it a lot more. But as you get older, like, you know, socialization doesn't necessarily revolve around alcohol in the same way as it does when you're younger. Yeah. Um, yeah. And it's affected me, you know. Sometimes I was going on a I was being set up by friends with a woman before I met my wife, and um, and I was like, hey, let's go for coffee in the morning. And she's like, Why are you saying coffee? Why don't we just go for a drink at a bar in the evening? And I'm like, I don't drink. And she's like, I don't think we should meet each other. What? She's like, drinking's a part of my life. I'm like, I that's fair, I suppose, you know? Yeah. Um, so yeah, I don't think that it worked out just. Yeah, oh, it worked out, you know. Yeah. It totally did. Well, so um, yeah, to ask, like, what are you what are you optimizing for when you're drinking alcohol to see that there are no benefits, essentially? Any benefit that you can say, like, oh, but what about all of the you know, the parabanes and the you know, in the wine and all of that? Like a handful of nuts can give you like double or triple what you're looking for in the wine. So, like, are you making an excuse? You know? Social lubrication. Okay, but that's also a skills-based approach. Like I need Dutch courage to go and talk to someone. Surely you should work on your courage or you know, practice talking to people instead of relying on a drink. So it's almost like you know, a crutch or support. Same with like marijuana. Oh, I needed to relax, or you know, I had an ex that always told me like I can only engage in intellectual debate if I've smoked a little bit, you know, have a bit of a toque, you know, and then I can talk to you. And then I would talk to her, and she would just sit there glazed anyway. So like no point. Like, what have we done? Wow. You know, you went from intimidated to just like catatonic. This is great. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:34

So with the, I don't think what you're saying is controversial at all about smoking, right? I mean, I think you know, it's quite well widely established that smoking is just unhealthy. Um alcohol. I think excessive drinking, binge drinking, for sure. I think everyone would agree that's not healthy. Some may argue like a glass of wine with dinner or something like that is has some health benefits, but I think what you're suggesting is the health those health benefits could be got in a different way, um, and they and it wouldn't come with some of the negatives as well. Um but the one that's sort of a lot of people debate is the marijuana use, you know. Like some people would say that um it's a medicine and it's you know, it's like has all these properties and you know what?

SPEAKER_03 46:20

I was wondering if that was gonna make a show. So, okay, if you look at the science, like don't don't don't follow me like Andrew Huberman, Stanford research tenure professor, you know, and you listen to his his ones on alcohol, his ones on tobacco, his ones, you know, there's there's so much data that suggests that none of it is useful. But you don't need another another blowhole on a podcast telling people what they can and they can't do. But what is usually a better way of doing it is to say broad strokes and challenge your assumptions. So if a person's having like one glass of wine, you know, broad strokes, is that a bad thing? No. You know, cigarettes, if a person smokes like one cigarette, uh, sorry, one cigarette when they're stressed out or something like that, which happens once every three months, is that a problem? No. Um, the problem is the repetition. The problem is the cadence of it, the frequency, how much or how frequently are we then having one glass of wine with a meal? Because if you don't have the skills to be able to deal with certain issues, that's what is going to happen, is that you're going to start relying more and more on this. And this is my argument against things like psychedelics and psychedelic therapy, as well as um psychedelic tourism, which I know that both of you have experiences with and can speak to a lot more than my experiences. But my experience is that when I find people who do it once and then they don't develop the skills to maintain or to help them cope with life, the they'll just collect the same amount of, I don't know, negative habits, patterns, you know, bad processes, and be like, oh, you know, when I last got relief from this was when I smoked marijuana, went on an ayahuasca journey, or like took mushrooms. I'm gonna do that again so that I can feel some relief from this thing. And so that I would, I would, I would say, you know, if you're listening to this, challenge your assumptions on if it's your choice or not. If it's something that you're using to basically give you a break, or if it's something you're using to truly push yourself forward. If you're using it to give yourself a break, like, oh, I just feel so like clogged up with life. I just need to connect with Mother Aya again. You know, I just feel that I just feel that beauty and that warmth of that connection. Like again, that's where the challenge comes in. Like, what are you doing? You're creating a cycle of dependency. You know, you have and and my modus operandi here is skills, not pills. Focus on the skill work more than anything else. Um and that's what I would invite people to consider. It's like with marijuana use, yeah, you know, it's not gonna kill you, but if you do it regularly, not only is it going to, you know, bring up your probability of death, number one. But number two, is that it will have long-term cognitive um issues, right? Uh impacts. And then number three, it's gonna impact your ability to deal with things anyway, without it. You're gonna need it. It's gonna start to become a dependency. It's not a drug like heroin is that hooks you with that kind of a dependency. This is much more of an emotional uh skill, a coping mechanism, a strategy, dependency. You know, oh I can't calm down without it.

SPEAKER_01 49:41

Yeah, okay, yeah, this is some really good stuff. So one of the I think you'll appreciate this, Justin. And Mark, you can chime in next if you like. But one of the ideas I had related to something like an ayahuasca. Um I was thinking about it, and say someone goes on an ayahuas in the jungle. If you take away the actual ayahuasca, if you look at like they're now the the the kind of health factor of their week there or two weeks there, they're going to bed when the sun sets, they're waking up at sunrise, they're sleeping in pitch black, they're eating whole food at specific times of the day, right? They're cut off from the internet, they're hanging out with people that like show their best selves to them and give them a lot of attention and hugs. Like, surely, like this is almost like the perfect, perfect health environment. And I'm curious to what extent that actually influences the that was the best week of my life, and I feel so rejuvenated because of that versus just like it was the the ayahuasca, you know, and obviously that's the that's memorable, and the experiences that people can have on that ultimately is the thing that changes them, right? It's an experience that can make you think differently. Um but yeah, no, I did I did think that because when I've been on different types of retreats, I just felt so healthy, you know, and just so good and pure. And that I think was just the lifestyle of being more tribal and and valuing health. So yeah, curious what you think about that.

SPEAKER_03 51:16

I I I agree with you. Uh I think Burning Man has got a great a great word for this, which is like when you come back to real life after your travels and things like that, they call it decompression. After you've gone from Burning Man, which is uh what's called like psychologically, it's an emotional stroking rich environment. People are very nice, people are open, inclusive, and you go from that environment, let's say, like I did, to London, to North London, to Tottenham, you know, it's not exactly an environment where people are like, good morning, how are you? What's your name? Give me a hug, nice to meet you, you know. Or the people that are doing that, they usually haven't bathed in a few days, you know, they've been on the streets, you know, a couple of gallons of white lightning first, you know, first thing in the morning. Um, so let's just say that um the decompression is a real thing, yes, 100%. And the travel, the trip, um, you know, the brain studies that have been done on changing location to be able to access different uh mental states is significant to show that just change where you are. So travel is a fantastic way of doing this as well. And like you say, the experience, can we separate it out? Um, I also think that bonding is something that's quite interesting with connections with humans. And, you know, like if we're taking ayahuasca as the example, you know, it's not a pretty picture. It's not exactly like, oh, I was at a party and, you know, decided to do a little bit of ayahuasca with the wife, and you know, it was a great evening. You know, we went home and just said, now, like, what, puked your guts out and like had to mop it all up the next day. Like, no, you know, yeah. It's it's it's really exhaustive. It's not a pretty picture. Um, you know, there's a lot of like physical trauma that we can say, just very, you know, acute momentary trauma, very short-term trauma, and people bond through trauma. Having gone through something like that with someone else, you know, it's this shared idea of like, I've been through this and you've been through this as well. And we can talk to that together, and people back home won't recognize this, also. So there are things like that, but could you replace that with, I don't know, like this hardcore obstacle race or being stuck stranded in the jungle for three days, and like, yeah, you could replace it with a lot of things which are probably less safe anyway, as well. You know, so yeah, I'm I'm I I think I think you're 100% right on that, John.

SPEAKER_00 53:41

Mark, do you have any thoughts on this? So I have I have large quantities of thoughts on this, it's very fine very interesting. Um yeah, I don't know. I kind of I think there's the same ways I can go with this one. This could have a long discussion purely on this topic, so I'm very interested in it. But I actually had a question that preceded that. I actually wanted to ask Justin. I'm kind of come back to this. Um but we were talking a certain amount about avoiding things like smoking and alcohol, um, but from a nutrition point of view, I suspect about psychoactive substances, he was going to say, you know, therefore mostly avoid in a certain kind of way. But I was wondering on the nutrition side of things, is there something which, again, broad brush rather than specific, but people generally don't get enough of they could benefit from having more of? We're saying no vegetable oil, you know, no um you know, gluten, those things are potentially bad. But is should in fact most people be eating more of a particular food group or is there something that's missing that could be added? Yep.

SPEAKER_03 54:36

Yep. Vegetables.

SPEAKER_00 54:39

Just more vegetables.

unknown 54:40

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:42

Profound, Justin.

SPEAKER_03 54:45

And because they're kind of right, okay.

SPEAKER_00 54:49

Are they good and bad vegetables or just get them all down here?

SPEAKER_03 54:53

If you look at like the self-reported stuff, the thing is that you'll get a lot of people eating meat, right? And so it depends on your preferences with regard to your your, you know, your dietary, shall we say, persuasion, if you're vegan, if you're carnivore, if you're whatever, um, you know, each one of those would have deficiencies, shall we say. You know, with a vegan diet, you tend to find people don't eat enough protein because then there's this whole debate about like, you know, uh complete proteins and how much of it is bioavailable. Um, so I would say that you usually find those kinds of things, but you wouldn't really know unless you do a blood panel with most people, right? And if you do that, then you've got to take it over the long term because you could see short-term fluctuations but long-term trends as well. The only thing that you will see out of long-term veganism is a lot of people failing it and going back to a normal diet. So um, carnivore is the same thing. You'll see people failing it. My the hilarious thing about carnivore, I have to share this, is it's so funny. When you introduce your pet, let's say, to a new diet, the vet recommends, oh, okay, introduce 10% of the food to be the new thing. And when when their poop stabilizes, when it's not runny or whatever, and they have solid poops, increase it by 10% again and increase it by 10%. So it's this idea of gradual approach, right? Progressive overload, if you will. With carnivore, I keep seeing like all of these influencers who go from like you know, regular diets to strict carnivore in a day, and they suffer from like terrible diarrhea. They called it like the carnivore diet diarrhea for two weeks. And I'm laughing my ass off because it's got nothing to do with carnivore, but rather introducing an extreme diet, you know, or like new ways of eating suddenly. Right. And so, you know, I find it hilarious. But again, we're coming at this from the perspective of what are most carnivore people missing? Most carnivore, they don't eat enough of the organ meats or like the extras. They just think, oh, steak's fine, steak's good enough. Like, what about liver? What about heart? What about kidneys? What about you know, the thymus? Uh, you know, there's there's a whole host of things as well that you could be eating from that animal. So it usually just comes down to um broad strokes. You've got to make sure you're getting your protein, your carbs, your fiber. Um what am I missing out on? Fats. Yeah, yeah. Healthy fats. And for most people, the fiber, the fiber aspect tends to usually be missing. And the micronutrients that are available, the minerals and micronutrients that are available in vegetables, most people under eat that. They'll they'll eat generally enough protein, enough carbohydrates, you know, potatoes, rice, braids, things like that. Great, cool. Uh and the fats, you know, there's been this hoorah in the last 10 years about like healthy fats, healthy fats, and now people are eating healthy fats. Great, wonderful. Congratulations. But vegetables, if you ask people to take photos of their plates and send them to you, like it's nowhere near the the like it should be a mountain of vegetables. Vegetables like are no calories whatsoever. They're empty calories. You could eat as much as you like, but most people undereat vegetables and they are incredibly beneficial.

SPEAKER_00 58:09

That's fantastic. I sort of background process why I wanted to challenge you with the ayahuasca side. I felt a certain need to try and say, surely, Justin, what about this? What about this? Making it you know worthwhile pursuit and exploiting the fentanyl the ayahuasca uses. And this is why I come up with. I'm on, I want to hear your rebuttal if you're interested. Go on, which is I make it personal. I remember one of my first experiences with ayahuasca itself, Nikos Streaker. And as John has described, there was, I think at the time I definitely underappreciated to what extent the benefit was conferred by a week of healthy eating, exercise, and then people and all that thing. I think at the time I underestimated that aspect. But I think the ayahuasca aspect was was very big as well. But I was very overconfident after it. I was like, oh, everything is great, things won't be ever the same ever again. I feel amazing. Wasn't too concerned about integration and stuff because I was like, yeah, no, things is, you know, which was you know a mistake, perhaps. But I remember even, you know, in in more difficult patches of my experience subsequent to that, I could still reflect back and think, well, you know, I right now things are looking pretty grey and not so good at this particular moment in time. But I could refer back to having seen things from a different perspective and realizing now that even just having had one sort of transcendental mystic type experience, things could look a very different way from how they look now. So I think there's a certain value to be had from even how your kind of perspective radically shifted to a sort of different state of awareness, a different experience of reality, such that even when you're in a kind of less good, less positive place, you could think, oh, hang on a second. There wasn't things did look very differently not so long ago. So actually, my perception of different things more than I think. Perhaps rambling a bit here, but my point I'm trying to make perhaps somewhat ineloquently is that I think some of the nature of that kind of experience, just having it even once, can have a sort of confer some kind of benefit, at least by referencing it. Although I completely concede that even though it's not chemically addictive, people can, like you were saying earlier, get kind of behaviorally addicted to like, oh, I'm gonna oh I just need another ceremony and you know and keep going on that kind of train. So I've not expressed that as eloquently as I could do, but I nevertheless hear you're a both one.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:14

No, I I uh I don't have that's uh like it's completely valid, you know, everything that you're saying. I mean, you know, the concept of perspective is always interesting where you're like um you're in a bad situation and then you think back to when you were in a worst situation, you're like, oh, it's not as bad as that, I'm fine, you know, or you're in a good situation and then you recall something that can make it better, you know? And so memory is super powerful, 100%. Um, and like you're saying, that having that having that experience and the perspective that you had during that experience, even though you might not keep it, to be able to revisit it, huge, huge. So if I could offer a rebuttal, here are the two steps to that rebuttal. Number one, put yourself on a scale of minus one, zero, and plus one, where minus one is something that you're lacking, you're in a state of pain, you're in a state of problems. Zero, you're back to basics, but just like a bank account, you don't have anything left to invest in anything else. The plus one is when we start investing in ourselves. And what you'll find is that people with ayahuasca psychedelics looking for answers in those boats, usually they're not in a boat of plus one, they're in a uh boat of negative one, which means that it's it's kind of like the whole gambling addiction thing as well. Like the the people who are getting uh pushed these things on are usually in fragile states that they're they're more likely to then buy into you know like the latest online casino or something like that, get their hundred free chips and try and like you know make all their money like this, they're more vulnerable. And so people who are in like minus one states, psychologically speaking, much more vulnerable. And that's where we see, like in at least my perspective and the people that I've seen, a large majority of the population who go there, they're looking for answers, they're looking for that thing to fix their lives. Okay. Now if you then look at um if you look at people going there to get a different perspective, like you're saying, that's great. You know, it is definitely a strength. Um I forgot my second point. But the yeah, the first point still stands. It's this minus one, zero, and plus one. And I think that's it. That's my second point. My second point was if you study memory, every time you revisit a memory, it changes and it changes its shape. And this is why like witness testimony on the stand um is no longer valid anymore. Witness testimony, you can tamper with someone's memory, you can change the color of cars and things like that. And so by by doing work and revisiting memory, you can actually see different things like that. You know, so um I would I would say that the only form of rebuttal here is that you could revisit other memories and actually put perspective on them that makes them something that uh would serve this same purpose. But in saying that, I mean, like, why do that when you've got a perfectly good memory from your ayahuasca retreat anyway? You know. So it's the only rebuttal I got, but I don't think that it's a rebuttal. I think that your point is entirely valid. I think that it works really well. Um, the only difference being is that I think it would take you out of the moment. That's all. And I think there's a lot of the only reason you would need to be taken out of that moment is if you don't have the coping strategies to deal with that moment. But usually that moment that you want to be taken out of is where you should be present.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:41

If that makes sense. I'm sort of in danger of jumping around too much when I ask you questions, Justin, because there's so much fascinating stuff I want to ask you about. I think I think I was slightly amiss of a bit of the put interconnection, a little bit of the the portion on stress, right? And you know how I always hanker after the Justin Knopp cheat sheet on things, you know, nutrition, those kinds of things. I was wondering if I could try and extract from you the Justin Knopp cheat sheet of stress, but I was wondering if I could if you'd be willing to subdivide that into sort of chronic inacute, right? If I come to you and I'm Justin, I'm like, I'm super stressed right now. Right now, I'm experiencing stress in this moment. And also if I was kind of long-term, like I'm just too stressed out. What you would say as the again, very, very broad brush, you know, not too individualized tools for dealing with stress according to Justin.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:28

I So this is my my um my system that I usually coach people through is like, do you need relief right now? Like, is the stress you're currently experiencing and it's still ongoing with this? In which case you need stress relief. You need to be able to create space from this stress, distance from the stress. And it's about distance and time to give yourself breathing room. So that's step one. Step two is then making sure that you're able to recover from the stress you've experienced so you can go back into stress tomorrow. And you know, you're you're not um you're not as much in a negative place as you would be, right? So we've got a kind of a stress recovery going on after that as well. Um, the third thing then is then do we have a stress mitigation strategy? Like how do we avoid the stress happening from next time? And then the fourth point, and this is the final point is do we have a stress resiliency program? Like, how can I make it so that the stretch, uh, the stress becomes irrelevant to me in the future? So those are the four points. It's some breathing room, some recovery, mitigation, and then tolerance.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:36

And what what do each of those stages look like? I mean, particularly when you say recovery, I'm sort of what is what does stress recovery look like? Is that a sort of relaxing or you talk about that?

SPEAKER_03 1:05:46

Essentially, so if you think about stress and what you need to recover from stress, like breathing room from stress is one thing. But uh let's let's say like this, if you've got finals week for you know university or something like that, you're under extreme amounts of stress. How much time before you bounce back from that finals week?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:07

Might take me two or three weeks, yeah. I reckon.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:09

There you go. And that's and that's your recovery. So like if we get dialed in on habits, uh eating habits, exercise habits, sleep habits, um, you know, hobbies and interests that might be able to take the three weeks down to one week. You know, what does it look like to take control of your recovery process as well? Like, there's so many times that I hear people talking about like crinks in their neck or like pain in their shoulder and well, isometrics is actually a fantastic form of actually healing a lot of these types of things as well. Um, and I say to people, like, what are you doing about your your injury, so to speak? And they're like, I'm just waiting for it to heal. Like, that's fine, that's valid. There's nothing wrong with that. And there's a lot that you could do as well to kind of stimulate recovery to. So um creating space is in the moment, recovery is after the moment, mitigation is like that moment is in the past, and we're trying to plan for the future. And then tolerance is when you're at that state of plus one. I've got energy to invest in making myself stronger. Not just avoiding this, but I can meet it head on next time and it won't even touch me. I have transcended this stress. And that's what I'm obsessed with is how do we transcend stress or you know, that particular form of stress.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:23

Have you found the answers to that question? How do we transcend just stress trusting? Well, I mean, as I should perhaps want to ask that, but as a little kind of just a quick, just a quick one, you mentioned uh briefly isometrics, and I have no idea what that is. And so I wondered if you could just briefly explain what that is.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:41

Sure. So in the broad strokes of like looking after yourself, you've got exercise, right? Uh skeletal muscular resistance training. And within that, any type of movement has got three um three ways to work the muscle, right? We've got the eccentric, the concentric, and the isometric. Ecentric is usually the lengthening phase where the muscle gets longer. So think about a bicep curl. As you lower the weight down, your bicep muscle goes from this like this one bold to like flat. And that's going to be the eccentric phase, the lengthening phase, your bicep muscle gets longer. The opposite is the concentric, goes into one big ball. Okay. And then at any point in time, if you stop the movement and you just hold that tension, that is an isometric um movement. Well, it's not a movement technically, but it's an isometric uh contraction.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:31

To sort of hold it halfway or any fraction thereof.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:34

Any fraction. You can hold it at the peak, you could hold it at like the complete lengthened. Um, but anytime you've got tension on your muscle and there's no movements, it's an isometric. And so isometrics are fantastic for healing, especially if you can bring in like you know, low percentage uh activation. So you're not trying to struggle against it, you're just trying to like feel the muscle and make it move, and it's not moving, and you hold that for a long duration of time, 30 seconds to a minute, that can really help you with a lot. There's actually a lot of um injuries here that you see, and a lot of influencers that speak to injuries around uh different things um with isometric treatments. So it's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:16

Fascinating. Yeah, I'm gonna have to do more research.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:21

I I remember having uh like almost like an inflamed Achilles tendon that just was not going for weeks and resting didn't do anything. And then I found some like rehab program and it was getting me to do these like ridiculous exercises like you know, like involving isometrics, and I was like, this isn't gonna work. Like I need to rest there, surely. And it's like pain just went. Like 15 minutes later, I was like, whoa, there's something to this. There really is. It was like crazy because it was really annoying me. So every time I would walk or go anywhere, I was in pain. After 15 minutes of this rehab stuff, it would just went. I was like, okay, it's time to upgrade to what I think is possible with the body now. Um I have a question for you. It's kind of a specific question about stress. So a lot of time people, when it comes to stress, they deal with like general stress. And you know, it may, now that I think about it, be in a lot to do with uh sleep deprivation. You know, maybe they're actually like not sleeping, waking up a bit too early, going to bed a bit too late, and the week goes on and on before the weekend where they drink and kind of pass out, and that stress builds. So there could be just like a general like lack of sleep. Um, it could be like relationships that are just making them stressed out, conflict, certain thoughts that they're having. There's lots of different reasons for stress. Um but what about that type of stress that is like almost like deeply physiological that almost looks like a form of Pavlovian conditioning? You know, like you know when uh an abused dog just gets like told like stop or something like that, and that you could see the entire system of the dog changes in a second. That's got nothing to do with sleep deprivation, got nothing to do with thoughts that they're having. It's in there in that system. So I was wondering what you could say about that and you know how one could start to like unravel that and start to build health when they have that kind of conditioning.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:25

Yeah, no, this is valid. Um the the main perspective that I take on the brain, which might be a hot take for some, but for most you know, uh neurologists, neuroscientists, it's it's pretty standard, is that the brain is an automation machine. So I'll say that again. The brain is an automation machine. The job of the brain is to automate whatever you tell it to do and to do it better. So the brain will recognize patterns and give responses. It'll recognize different triggers in the environment and it'll give responses. Now, the responses that it's been doing again and again will start to group together into a uh basically an entire clump of responses that just come back as a single response. So the first time the dog gets beaten, let's say, there's a bit of confusion and whatever, but it starts to pay attention to all the environment kind of cues. The environmental cues will then stimulate it next time. So the next time, maybe it's not enough, maybe this the third time, the fourth time, the fifth time this dog gets hit, it now has started to create a pattern, an automated pattern. The dog has no choice in it. Why? Because when we're stressed out, we activate sympathetic nervous systems, things like that. Fight or flight responses kick in. And your brain is going to signal these things to keep us alive. Right? And so think about it like this. Our movements in personal development, I call them the three big movements. There are three areas for us to think about. Area number one is self to others. Get over ourselves so that we can give, right? We basically have to take this journey where we deconstruct ourselves and realize who do we want to help and how fulfilling it is to help others, right? And it's got to do with the idea of humans as an animal. If we dissect the human species, we are humans first. And all humans work in the same way, which is we are stronger with a tribe, which is we seek social validation. There's a whole ton of things about basically giving to others. So self to others is the first movement. The second movement is short-term to long-term. And a lot of the time we'll see that type of thinking, you know, instant gratification is immature. There's an immature sense about it in terms of like, I'm not being judgmental on people calling them immature. What I'm saying is children. You know, the marshmallow test is a perfect example of this. The children who can delay gratification usually wind up being more successful because they see a point in delaying gratification. So they practice delaying gratification as well throughout their lives because they they've they understand this type of thing. People with instant gratification usually get themselves into major problems like emotional instant gratification. If it's instantly, you know, within me to feel gratified if I express my anger at you for for doing something and I catch you and I start conflict with you, and you turn out to be Brazilian jujitsu, you know, son of God, and and you turn me into a pretzel, you know, like I know you would, John. I don't know about that. Yeah, the idea is that it was a stupid move on my part. It was a very stupid move on my part. So short-term to long term. And the the last movement is survive to thrive. How do we move from a survival state? So the dog is in a survival state. Anyone who is traumatized in the same way from like violence, like that, abuse, things like that, you're going to be in a state where you're sensitive to triggers around you, which could put you back into that state. Right? Which is why, like, you, you know, go and see a therapist who is trauma-informed, this trauma-informed therapy, which is about helping people to manage with that, break those patterns and deconstruct those patterns. Now, for the those of us who aren't necessarily traumatized in that way, we do also have these kinds of patterns. I've got patterns where people stop talking to me and they walk away mid-conversation because they are um you know trying to be aloof, uh, trying to take control by not speaking. You know, like if we start fighting and someone goes, and they walk away, it is incredibly triggering. Well, why? Oh, it's a pattern response of attention, and I realize who did it when I was younger? Where did I, where did I who basically was the person hitting me as a dog? Oh, it was you know, my mom, my dad, my parents, whatever. That doesn't mean that they're bad people, but I learned that pattern there. A child's brain made sense of the world and decided that this was the pattern.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:53

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:53

Okay, so we've patterned ourselves and we've automated this response. It's a physiological stress, and it's our responsibility as an adult to unpack that because no one is going to do it for us. And by unpacking that, we become far more tolerant of stress and almost transcend that stress in the future. Like, how do we replace that stress-based automation instead with a smile-based automation to laugh, you know, or laugh at ourselves, not not maliciously laugh like, ha ha ha ha ha ha, I've won the argument. You know, but rather this this this concept of like, oh, geez, I caught myself. I almost I almost flipped out. Wow, I can't believe I almost got caught up in this, like, this loop again. Wow. Wow, I'm very proud of myself. That's awesome, you know?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:39

So yeah, I think that um to be said, it's just the automated brain and how we pattern our ourselves to respond. And the answer to that, I believe you can't practice fighting with people. You know, it's not realistic, it's not very healthy either, you know, to just go around picking fights and be like, this is it, I'm gonna practice not responding to people when they walk away. Uh well, good luck. But you can do that with visualization techniques. And so this is what I do promote with people as well. There's um that study on free throws. Uh, we talked about it before on previous episodes of your podcast, where you know, group number one was told, you know, practice free throws for two weeks. Group number two was told visualize them for the same amount of time, and group number three did nothing. And of course, the improvement that you saw in the group that actually visualized it in meditation was one percent less than actually doing it, which means that in these incredibly emotional pattern things, like we can't practice if um you know our parents like uh hitting us or something like that. We can't do that in real life, but we can condition our brains to deconstruct this pattern, to go backwards, you know, to condition a new response and to automate a new response. And so it's this idea of like reps. Well, let's do a rep scheme here. So, I mean, a very easy way to do this is uh a meditation that I made called the smile bank, which is every time I saw a dog, I would smile. And so I practice in my mind smiling at the dogs that I had in memory from yesterday. And this is going back to what we were talking about, Mark, about perspective and you know, having the memory of ayahuasca in your mind to help you through more difficult times. You've got a memory bank full of things that can make you smile and doing a certain amount of reps in helping you to then be reactive to your environment in a very positive way, in a way that serves you because who wants to feel triggered? Hands up. Hands up? Nobody? Nobody? Are you sure? Come on, it's on the table. Anyone? You know, so yeah, totally. Everybody wants to feel good. And so the way that we do that is automating it is is my uh I don't know. I suppose, Mark, we could say that that's my secret to stress transcendence.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:59

Yeah, I uh I what you just shared about the visualization kind of makes me think that a lot of the stoic exercises were sort of like visualizations on how to act wisely, you know, like imagining the worst case scenario. It's not just about that. The important part is how you're gonna deal with it and you practice that part, right? That's where you can kind of visualize. It's not just imagine bad things. It's like imagine bad things, and then how are you going to deal with it? That's the important part of the visualization or viewing things from above, you know, you're just practicing being more detached and viewing things from that perspective. You know, you're just running that simulation. Um, so I've always thought of those techniques as like ancient forms of virtual reality training. You're just using your mind and your visualization skills to do it.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:45

Yeah, without the expensive tag of like Apple's new, you know, goggles or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, that's 100% it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:54

I wonder if I could just sort of check that I've understood by way of what you were saying with the sort of stressful patterns, right? So would it be accurate to say that um in the case of your example you gave where when someone walks away mid-conversation and kind of that's a sort of a negative pattern, um, and that that after is triggering for you, you could then use this visual technique to sort of in a sense kind of overwrite the existing pattern such that you are no longer triggered. Is that correct and that kind of understanding of what we've been saying? And that I suppose you could you could do this, presumably, you know, obviously, in the example we gave about you know like having arguments with people, that's not a good way to practice in real life. But if it was something that not quite so extreme, you could you still also do it by just sort of trying to make a conscious choice to overwrite your previous conditioning, as in without the visualization.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:44

So this is the thing is that the conscious choice is in the doing. The conscious choice doesn't happen within the moment. Okay. So let me let me put it like this. Okay. Um if you're prepping for a speech or a presentation, so I've I've like my my my number one kind of brag that I can have here is that uh a two-time best-selling author, um, I coached her to do her TED talk. Now she's already a keynote speaker, she's making like $25,000 per keynote that she does. And she books out like 20 a year, it's ridiculous, you know. Sounds good, and so yeah, I was like, I want that life, please. Um but uh you know, she she couldn't program her mind to remember the words of a 10-minute TED talk. Like she was having difficulty with that. Okay. So the idea there is if she had gone into stress, like into a practice situation with the same things, cameras on her, people in front of her, that wouldn't have helped. Um, let's say if you're super stressed out as well about speaking in public, more speaking in public isn't necessarily going to do the same thing. Even if you're like, right, this is it. I'm gonna make a decision, it's not gonna affect me at all. Right? Because the body responds to signals, not you telling it. So if you want to build muscle, you telling your body you want to build muscle isn't gonna signal it to build muscle as much as let's say going to failure or stimulating your muscle in uh, you know, some kind of fashion like lifting weights. Or, you know, one could make the argument of you know, just taking steroids and, you know, or uh phallostatin, which is you know the antagonist of myostatin. So there's a whole other world that we could explore there. But let me just give you rather a personalized example. How about that? This is what happened. Social rejection, like I said, um, people walking away from me is very triggering for me, or at least it used to be. It used to be incredibly triggering to the point where I would be crippled by it. I would in I would be um beside myself. And so, you know, uh this one friend was like, hey, I'm coming to London. I'm like, cool, come stay with me, we'll do all this thing. Great. Day number one, uh, I'm not gonna stay with you, I'm actually gonna stay with a friend. So, uh, okay, yeah, sure, no problem. Yeah, that's okay. Sure. Okay, I'll see you tomorrow. Great. Tomorrow comes. Same thing happens. Oh, you know what? I've got another friend in town, I'm gonna go stay with them instead of you. And of course, my brain was hearing they're more interested in seeing other people than seeing you. Because you're not as valuable, you know, that kind of pattern was running, and I was like, uh, and this happened like three or four times in as many days. And on the day that I was supposed to see them, they're like, oh, by the way, you know, I'm bringing my friend around as well, and then I'm gonna go stay with them instead of with you. And I'm like, I'm I'm just like, you know, for forget the friend, forget the friend, the effect that it had on me. I was a zero out of ten that day. I was in the fetal position on the floor, crying my eyes out because I didn't know what to do. I was just, I was, what is happening to my body right now? You know, really, I have no control over this, I have no idea. And so what I did was um, it's called the APET Meditation. It's a manipulation from the Human Givens Institutes and some of their thoughts. They've got a great book called The Human Givens, I highly recommend it. And I made a meditation based on this. And this meditation basically worked like this I reimagined a situation where this person was saying to me, Justin, I'm gonna go hang out with my friends instead of you. And I played that 20 times and my reaction. And what I did was 20 times I turned up on a dial how viscerally they were hurting me. You know, up to 10 and down to 1 and up to 10 and down to 1 until I was desensitized to it in effect. Okay. Maybe it's not the best approach, but it worked for me to hear this person like spit venom at me. Justin, you're not worth anyone's time. Why would I want to spend time with you? I'm gonna go spend time with my friends instead. Okay. And what I did is I also turned up, and I do recommend this with smaller things as well for people to see because was my friend actually saying that? No, they weren't saying that, you know? And my response was like, Oh, you don't value me. And of course, if you turn that up, that's like I want to be valued, you know, and you basically turn up like the crying child that wants attention inside you. So you can really see what's underneath the surface of like all the double speak and all of that. And then what I did was I then wanted to keep her like uh venom at 10 out of 10. And I wanted my response to be returning with like a joyous kind of love, go in peace type of emotion because that's the only thing that you can really do in that scenario. You want to fight, you're gonna turn up anger. You know, you want to be vindictive, you're gonna turn up anger. None of that stuff is good for me. You know, it's that that whole concept of drinking poison to hope the other person suffers from you doing that. So this concept was that I try to turn up how much I said, go with love. Sure, absolutely, no problem. And part of that was in realizing that this person had no clue, no social awareness to know the impact that was going on with me, didn't check with me. And that came down to her skills. And her skills was basically uh a level of maturity that was just blissfully unaware of other people in their lives. Number one. Number two is that I hadn't drawn a boundary or a border, either, you know, a healthy boundary, a healthy limitation to say, like, look, this is gonna be stupid, you know, um, and being able to deal with this before it got escalated because I was trying to be too nice and polite based on my own kind of automatic patterns. But again, this meditation helped me to realize that by role-playing this time and time again and playing with these dials and turning it up and turning it down. And then eventually, what do I want? I want to say, go in peace, no problem, do what you like, big smile on my face, not a big fuck you smile, but like a general, like you'll be happier going with them. So go with them. Absolutely. I want you to be happy, you know, and realizing that also is this idea of like, sure, and you know, like when you've got time for me, that's fine. But, you know, like I'm not gonna break my back about it because you didn't break your back about it. So, like, you know, let me give into this relationship as much as is being given equally, you know, and just take it from there. And on that day, I went from a zero out of ten to a ten out of ten. I felt great. I felt great, not only because I solved my problem, but also because I had found a solution to solve future problems as well. And I've needed this meditation like three times since then and done it properly. I mean, like two hours of role-playing the situation, but a two-hour fix for almost like a permanent fix in your life. Wow. I don't know anyone who wouldn't make that trade.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:46

Yeah, and yet people often don't like people don't make that trade, though, right? Which is the crazy thing, because of uh, I don't know why why do you think they don't? Because most people they haven't spent two hours doing visualizations, even though I bet there's people listening to this right now that have a specific problem they could work with. You've just given them the technique, you've recommended the book. You even have a guided track on this as well.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:14

Uh I do yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:18

You do, yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:20

I it's so I say that because I've got one that I made a long time ago, which might be a little rough around the edges. I could share it. Um, it's it's private, you know, because I'm a little bit, you know, like, oh, it is rough. Got it. But uh I I have made a series that are a little bit better that is inside my neuroresiliency course. So I do have, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:38

Yes. Okay. So you're you're basically giving people like you've you've done the work for them if they want to just have a easy version. Yeah. And yet how many people will actually take that that leap, you know? I I hope, I hope that it's more than like than I'm thinking. You know, I hope that it's like 50%.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:55

Um well this is this is interesting, is that you'll find people are motivated when they're in pain.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:01

And when they're not in pain, they're like, I'll do it tomorrow. It's fine. I'll do it tomorrow. It's fine. You know, oh, I know where it is. I'll remember this and I'll come back to this. And that's why, like, you know, there's a lot to be said about people who try and invest in themselves on a regular basis. But the ones who try and invest in themselves and say, Let me, I'm gonna try this today. Okay, I'm gonna make a meal out of it, are usually the people who are also victims to the cult mentality that's out there, where they'll be like sucked up by um, you know, the guru out there who feeds people happy wisdom because they were once a monk for a year but now are millionaires, you know? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:40

A skill this brings up, a skill that I've uh I credit some success to, something that I've been practicing, is speed of implementation. So if someone recommends like an app or an idea to me, I find that if I can just act on it instantly as quickly as possible, good things almost always come from that compared to okay, I'll check it out in a month. Right? It doesn't mean you have to like spend hours on it, but you just act on it, right? You just kind of like, right, I'm not messing around. So, like, say for example, you're listening to this podcast, as you're listening to it now, you're like Googling this stuff, you know, like getting on it straight away. Or maybe at the end of the podcast you've written a little note and you're gonna go check out just its course or whatever resources he gives you. It's like getting on it without waiting. Even um, I was on a call actually when someone just was like, hey, there's this thing called Substack. Um, it's meant to be good. I was just like, on the call, signing up to it. And that was the beginning of the stoic handbook, right? It's just like, do not wait. Just like get on it. You know, only good things will come from it. And I've seen that in other people too.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:46

I think the you know, we were talking about exercise earlier on, and I think this is also like the easiest way to start is um you know, think about it like what were you doing yesterday, and just do like one more today.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:01

So cool. So, you know, if two hours of meditation to get a permanent fix is a little bit much, like try try ten repetitions today. You know, if if starting with something that's incredibly traumatic is a bit of an ask, then start with something that's less traumatic and something that you just want to like it's annoying for you. You know, so start small and just do it a little bit more frequently and get more like confidence and get more like experience and expertise going um with these types of things.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:30

I want to ask a quick question about the the sort of potential scope for this kind of guided meditation type exercise, uh, in the sense that is it for I guess you could just answer a little bit just then. I was gonna say, is it just for addressing kind of uh triggering events in your mind? Or what what is the extent to which this could be useful for?

SPEAKER_03 1:31:51

I mean consider this. Um, what you're doing is you're training your brain to identify patterns in the environment and you're telling it what what response you want in that pattern. So, for example, if I patent myself stepping onto stage and instead of feeling anxiety, I decide uh, you know, I'm gonna turn up that anxiety and be like, oh, don't look at me, you know, don't judge me. Or something. I'm like, oh wow, that's interesting. I've got a judgment thing. Okay, cool. That's interesting. Well, how about I get up on stage and instead just be like, I can't wait to help you or support you or stay, you know, something like that. And then when you're in the real situation, you're more likely to encounter that type of thing. So it could be, you know, in terms of like uh programming your own software, you know. I like that. And it's this concept of like, okay, what is gonna trigger the software? What is gonna be the the signal that your brain is gonna be catching and paying attention to? And then what is gonna be the program that you load after that? And so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:55

So there's kind of a Q Q and M program. Okay, I've got I've got I won't I want to try and try this, Justin. I'm gonna go away two hours after this, right? So I want to see if this works as an example, right? I one of my fears I want to conquer in the world eventually, you know, when I know I've completed life, is when I will be capable of dancing without alcohol in a sort of in a current environment, without caring particularly anything about it, but dancing like a complete Muppet. Because I, as of yet in my life, I've been unable to ever do this, right? I get on there, dance for what can I use your technique to make me, instead of when I get there and sort of feel self-conscious and afraid of what people and myself will think of myself, could I reprogram using your technique so that I am capable of dancing like a semi-normal human being? Do you think? Would it apply to situations?

SPEAKER_03 1:33:43

I don't think anything is going to make you dance like a semi-capable normal human being.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:47

Okay, that's I agree that was a bit ambitious.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:51

But I mean, like, what does a capable human being dance like anyway? And so, yeah, no, let's let's get serious. To to answer your question, like in terms of like fear alleviation, it's like fine awareness, identify that fear, and practice the the the cue of being there and seeing the most malicious faces you can imagine, and being like, I'm just gonna dance and make them smile. Yeah, you know, and I can't, I'm just like grooving and enjoying myself. And like, yeah, you can absolutely get to that point. You can, yeah, you know, how long it'll take you or how much it'll take you depends on the kind of cues that you're running through a lot of the time. Depends on how how like uh incredible the fear is as well. Um, you know, so there there are things that you can do as well as then instead of just testing it out at the night pod, let's say, you could also test it out in smaller ways, like let's say run the program, write the script, so to speak, and go and practice it by dancing in front of your family, you know, something like that. You can practice it out and see how it feels. Am I running the script or not? What's going on? Uh you know, so you're basically having a couple of um let's say friendly matches before the competition.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:07

I'm gonna let you know how this goes, Justin.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:10

Hi, I'm excited to hear about it.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:13

Yeah, I like that. That's a great challenge. Um, because yeah, we've talked a lot about the dancing thing, Mark. So yeah, this is it. We'll have a follow-up.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:22

It's the final the final boss.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:23

Definitely sign up, sign up to John's substack to find the the answer. What happened with the work?

SPEAKER_00 1:35:30

If this works, yeah, and I'll turn into, you know, I'll turn into like uh, you know, someone who loves dancing all the time, he would be like, what happened? I'll be like, because this miracle adjusted method, yeah, it solved my life long difficulty of dancing.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:42

This is gonna be fun. I know. I the other thing to say is that like, you know, what is the point of dancing?

SPEAKER_00 1:35:52

Are you asking me specifically?

SPEAKER_03 1:35:54

I mean, this is just a rhetorical question where you're like, in a club, you know, if you define dancing as like, well, I need to be the best dancer that's out there, well, why? Why do you like motivations personally? Why do you need to be the best answer? Number one. But number two, what effect is the best answer in the world gonna have on other people around them? You know, it's usually intimidation, isolation, the person's gonna feel like, uh, or maybe entertainment, they're gonna stop what they're doing and watch. So you're either gonna be at best a dancing monkey if you're the best answer there, or at worst, you're gonna be someone who actually makes other people feel less than, right? So I had this whole kind of like approach to dancing where I'm like, I just want to make other people feel at ease as much as possible and get other people to kind of be as relaxed as possible around me. And that was the goal of dancing, right? So the question is, is what is the goal of dancing for you?

SPEAKER_00 1:36:54

I would like to be able to enjoy it. That is okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:58

And so here's my question is do you enjoy it when you're alone right now? Do you enjoy dancing when you're on your own? Forget the club, forget other people. By your silence, I would say that's a resounding no, Mark.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:15

I mean no, no, I was thinking about it. I think like occasionally when I'm just in a kind of reasonably good mood, just because I happen to be, and to sort of quite specific music that they would never play in clubs. So but for the most part, no. I think there's instances where occasionally I'm taking it for a spin, but largely no.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:36

I think um I can relate to to what you're saying because it's it's completely normal. I think most people are like, how would you dance to that? And how would you dance to that? And how would you like what? It makes no sense. I never used to be able to dance to anything that wasn't like uh two-step, you know, some form of like garage, you know. And um basically, um, you know, even if the beats per minute were turned up too much on dance music, I wouldn't be able to dance to it. Too slow, I wouldn't be able to dance to it. It would be very difficult to find the rhythm of the the song for me. And now I don't care. Like I can dance to anything. Literally, you put on like Tibetan throat singing, and I'll like find the rhythm and be like, hey, Tibetan throat singing.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:16

Yeah, let's go.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:17

And and it's about like finding like how can I harmonize with this thing? And that's and like I've mentioned this before: the 10 harmonies, how can I harmonize with my body? How can I harmonize with exercise, my life, my emotions, you know, things like that. How can I harmonize with a stimulus that's out there that is triggering my brain into an automated pattern? Right? It's all about harmony for me to get to a plus one state where you're thriving, you're focused on what your gifts are, uh, how your gifts are going to benefit others, as well as um, you know, what's a long-term way to dedicate my time? What's a long-term direction I can take in those ways? Um, you know, you're you're basically looking at harmony being a key word here that that I think flows through all of that for me. And so just the question is how do I inject my passion for X music into Y music?

SPEAKER_00 1:39:11

That's all I have to think about this one now. Any questions, John? Any questions?

SPEAKER_01 1:39:24

So I I did uh I love all this, but I did wanna um sort of like we're in the sort of home stretch of this conversation, I can feel and I I uh it's really important for me to cover some of the kind of more nerdy health stuff. So um Justin, when I first started talking to you, like, hey, how can I improve my cardio? You asked me, you know, what are you using to track and how are you measuring stuff, and do you have an Apple Watch? And and I was like, Yeah, I got an Apple Watch, and you said download the app, Athletic. It's like an AI coaching app on the app store. I don't know if you know, I'm sure there are other variations of this kind of dashboard for your health metrics. Um and then you give me a run-through of like what you're looking for when you could wake up in the morning and you talked about heart rate variability, um, you talked about restorative sleep, um, general like resting heart rate as well. Uh, you kind of like had an overview of your rate of respiration as well, and just your general level of recovery and things like that. So, could you just explain a little bit about your thinking on you know why like someone's listening to this, so like heart rate variability, you know, like why should I care about that?

SPEAKER_03 1:40:40

You know, yeah. Um everything is a rabbit hole to go down, and heart rate variability is no different. Yeah, it's absolutely a very big rabbit hole. What I would warn people against is heart rate variability is not a metric that is actually um accurate. The way that it's being measured in the science and the data that we've got on it, I would steer away from heart rate variability. It's good to track it to know where it is and where it isn't and things like that. You'll be able to see trends. But most of the time you can't influence um heart rate variability because it is uh it's an aggregate measurement. It's made up of other measurements. So the two that I recommend people pay attention to is resting heart rate and respiration rate upon waking up. Because those two metrics will tell you if they're within range, green lights. If they're a little bit out of range, yellow lights, be careful, and if they're way out of range, red lights. And what you'll find is actually if respiration is out of range, you're usually sick. If heart rate is out of range, uh too high, you're usually too stressed. So those are good metrics. And then obviously, like good quality sleep brings those metrics into like a nice harmony. And if you want those metrics to stay um in a healthy place over time as you get older, you need to exercise to keep those metrics going well. Um, you need to create a stimulus for your body to respond to, to get stronger to, you know, that that whole concept of hormesis. So the broad strokes, resting heart rates, respiration rate are the two things that you can pay attention to that would really be green light or uh red light, you know, to be stop and go with your exercise for the day.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:24

Okay. Yeah, that's that's useful. And just I want to just get your thoughts on this. So sometimes I meet people and they are very interested in self-improvement, they read books, they maybe meditate, or you know, like they're just they're into this space and it's great, right? We have lots to talk about. But then I'm like, what's your workout routine? Or like what's your kind of gym habit? So, you know, when's the last time your heart rate went over 140 beats per minute? And they're just like, well, I sometimes like walk to the shop or something, and I'm just like, oh, like, I don't know how you could live like that. Honestly, like exercise is so important for me. I just can't like to take exercise away from my life would be a form of deprivation, it'd be a form of like, this is a challenge. You've now got to live without exercise. And I'd be like, I can do it. It's gonna be hard, but I can do it. What do you think about that when people just don't exercise? Do you think they're just missing like some obvious important thing, or do you think they can still thrive without it? You know, I'm just curious.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:29

No, I um I mean we can see it in our elders, you can see it in parents a lot of the time. You know, they didn't they didn't exercise because um they didn't have time or things weren't available to them, the knowledge, the equipment, the locations weren't available to them. And you know, you'll start to see degradation in terms of range of motion, their ability to do things. Uh, biggest things is balance. And that's why paying attention to people like uh Peter Atia, who calculates like how are people gonna die and how can we prevent that? You know, and what he what metrics he pays attention to. Um, you know, there's this idea of like you don't know what you don't know. So had I been born 50 years ago, would I be into exercise to the same degree? Probably not. I'd probably be like at least 10 steps behind where I am today because there wasn't as much information available. It wasn't normal, it wasn't common. So we really are expressed by our environment a lot of the time. Um, you know, the people who were exposed to exercise were exposed to one way of doing it, which was the way that you were taught, you know, like your traditional way or whatever. So there are a lot of ways of exercising that actually are super healthy. Like, so if you go to Japanese judo, um, they've got an approach to exercise which is phenomenal. And then they've got their sports as well. Like some of those judokas are some of the healthiest athletes out there, in my opinion. You know, but then you you flip it around and you go to somewhere else and you see the their style of training, um, it focuses only on the technique of the sports, not on physical health or general physical preparedness or anything like that. And you start to see a little bit more frailty kick in, and so people as they get older, they'll stop doing the actual sport because their bodies aren't as strong anymore. And so that for me is a sure sign of it. So um I think it's just as again, you don't know what you don't know. And like you were saying before, in the beginning, to get a person addicted to exercise and really connected with exercise, there has to be a practice of repetition. And it's it's like coffee, it's like you know, beer. These are acquired tastes. Exercise is an acquired taste. Most things that require efforts will have incredible rewards, just like uh, you know, spicy food, you know? Incredibly rewarding to eat spicy food. I wish I had started eating spicy food when I was younger because it's it's yeah, I yeah. So the idea, the idea again is is the exposure, I think, helps. So if you're someone who exercises, try and try and you know, support a friend who doesn't exercise. You know, so like completely do what they do. I've got a friend of mine who's terrible. He challenges people who don't exercise, and then he pushes himself to be like, look at how strong I am. And of course, then they puke their guts out or something like that on the assault bike. And you're like, was that really necessary? Would you think that they were at a level where they could handle that? Like, have you just messed up their mind in terms of exercise? Like, they'll be like, I'll never exercise again. It's terrible, you know? So it's always like, how do we create good experiences for others with exercise? And it usually comes back down to like get people interested in exercise through things that bring pleasure or interest. It's that simple. Just love what you do, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:53

With a spicy food comment, uh, is that like referring to like a dopamine release or something when you kind of experience the pain and then kind of swing the other way, or are you talking about something else?

SPEAKER_03 1:47:02

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like, yeah, um, building up a tolerance to spicy food um is incredible. And like the benefits that it has on your body as well is incredible. Um but this is just my personal uh my personal experience, my personal preference. Came to London, tiki masala was the standard and it was spicy for me, I couldn't handle it. And then I graduated to like Rogan Josh, and then you know, that was still super spicy for me, and I couldn't handle it. And then I went to live in Thailand for a year where the locals kept forgetting that I ordered like um foreigner food, you know, tourist level spice, and they kept giving me local level spice and burnt my palate for a year. And that was terrible. Yes, that was absolutely not progressive overload. That was a very, very large oversight in people serving me food. But when I came back to London, I could handle, you know, a Madras and then up to Vindelews, you know, and there's so much flavor that comes once you once you are able to basically handle the heat. The heat doesn't burn and you have a pain sensation. The the heat actually just opens up the entire palate. And for anyone who's curious about this, I'd recommend having something like some chili flakes or something like that, something that's a little bit spicy and put it in your mouth before you have a cup of coffee. Okay. You know, five minutes before a cup of coffee, have a little bit of chili or something like that, you know, just enough for you to tolerate. You don't have to burn yourself or anything like that. And just notice how it changes the flavor profile of the coffee. That's what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:38

Ah, okay. Very cool. Yeah, I've just I've just started ordering like the next sort of spice, spicy thing from like the Indian. Um and yeah, it's it's it's it is kind of becoming a bit of a like you said, graduation where I'm like, you know, I really want to kind of get to that next level. It's almost a personal challenge. I don't like that it's defeating me. You know, it's like I need to be able to eat. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:03

Um forget jiu-jitsu belts. Now it's gonna be just which Cari level we need to change. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:09

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:11

When I first thought about this uh kind of conversation, Justin, I did mention to you that it would be good to provide some kind of generic recommendations for people in relation to flexibility and strength and cardio. And now, as we're having the conversation, I'm realizing that that's probably not a good idea. And only because the way that you work is like you want to know why someone's doing something, right? Like, what are your goals, what are you looking to achieve, where are you at? Like whenever someone's working with you, it starts with this kind of deep dive into like what are you actually doing and where are you? And in a way, like providing kind of generic templates may actually not serve someone as well as like actually them spending the time figuring out exactly what they want to be doing. Um do you agree with that? Do you think that there's some wisdom to that?

SPEAKER_03 1:50:04

I think uh a hundred percent yes, and and in the same breath, I think that there are some broad strokes which are pretty pretty easy to hit anyway. Right. You know? Um, but again, it's like take the broad strokes and apply your personal interests to the broad strokes. So the broad strokes for me in in resistance training are push-pull, hinge, squat for movement types. Right. Right. So a push can be push-ups, but if you don't like push-ups and you've got a gym membership, then you go into the machines, you know? Or if you don't like push-ups, but you're obsessed with gymnastics rings, then you do ring push-ups or ring dips, you know? So you can do body weight. But if you don't like that type of stuff, you know, and you like barbells, you know, bench press is a push. So the application of it for Exercise is that you're doing any movement that is pushing a weight away from you or pushing you away from something else, right? So it's a push movement, nice and easy. But the the application of that is just where do you take it? You know, for me it's body weight. I love body weight. But even within body weight, we've got weighted calisthenics, you've got uh freestyle calisthenics, you've got endurance calisthenics, and then you still have like skills-based calisthenics where they're doing like front levers and planches and things like that, right? So there's all these categories of like uh, you know, categories underneath the category anyway.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:29

And then, you know, like you've got Olympic lifting. Well, Olympic lifting does a pull and a push simultaneously. There's usually a squat involved and a hinge involved as well. But there's usually no rotational movement in that, and there's no usually no unilateral movement in that as well. So you've got two movements, but you're leaving out a host of other movements. So in terms of this, it's just an exploration of push-pull-hinge squats. What do you like? What do you want to do? And what are some ways that you can just shake it up anyway? Because the quantity of it. Did you do any push exercises last week? No. Okay, cool. Let's do some this week. How much can you do? How much do you want to do? All right, cool. Now that you've laid that down, the next time you come back to it, let's say in three months, can you do more? So if we take a very simple approach, we don't need a perfect program. It's just a matter of like, what can I do that's going to be, you know, simulating pushing movements, pulling movements, and then how can I progressively overload this? How can I how can I be better six months down the road, a year down the road? And better sometimes just means the same number, but more control. So think about pull-ups, like maybe in a year, you can still do the same number of pull-ups today as a year from now, but a year from now, your control and your mastery of those, those movements is going to be, you know, uh you you'll see a noticeable difference. So yeah, I think that's the broad strokes for um, you know, resistance training. A pull, a push, a hinge, a squat, and it's up to you, but remember that there's a certain amount of that that you need to be able to uh stimulate a response from your body. You know, so what is that stimulation? So we can talk about going to failure or near failure to stimulate muscle growth. We can talk about frequency to stimulate muscle growth. We can also talk about um training you know, zero to five reps to stimulate strength adaptations, not size adaptations. Size adaptations usually are anywhere between six to thirty reps if you go according to the science. So, you know, you go deeper into the rabbit hole as you go down, but the first thing is make a choice to go down the rabbit hole. Pull, push, hinge, squat. It's pretty easy.

SPEAKER_01 1:53:52

And what about some board strokes in relation to cardio, um, the value of VO2 max, and then also while you're there in that area, flexibility and mobility.

SPEAKER_03 1:54:05

So the value of VO2 Max is is according to you know Professor Dr. Peter Atia, um, it's the number one marker that'll improve your longevity and quality of life. And VO2 Max is the volume of oxygen that can be maximally consumed by your body when you're doing rigorous activity. And so just getting yourself from below average or average to above average in VO2 Max is going to extend your life and your capacity. It's it's gonna be a game changer. Simple, simple answer is pick a cardio exercise, whether it be cycling, running, stationary, you know, like in a gym, it doesn't matter. All cardio matters, you know, because um in the capacity of just just do something that you think is cool, that you like, that you want to do more of, put your emotion behind it, and you're gonna find much more enjoyment. So the concept there is that again, it's quantity. You know, last week I ran for 10 minutes. This week I ran for 15 minutes. Next week I ran for 20 minutes. And the week after that, I decided to do two days of running, you know. So be gentle with yourself in the beginning if it's if you're starting out. And if you're starting out, just measure your quantity. How much running did I do last week? So even if I did a minute of running this week, it's more than zero minutes of running last week. That's a win. But then that means next week you've got to do two minutes, you know? So be sure that you're choosing something that you look forward to, you enjoy, and you'll progressively get stronger and better at it, and it'll start to become part of your identity. The slower you take it, the more it becomes part of your identity as well. So that's yeah, cardio.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:52

Yeah. Okay. Um and uh I I've had some conversations with you about this, but I just want to clarify for people listening. Is it realistic to make changes to our VO2 Max? You know, or is this something that we're kind of born with and you know, you can make like 2% improvements, but you know, the the people that are the distance runners are the distance runners, and that's just them and it's genetic and oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:56:19

So, you know, VR2 Max is pretty much like, yes, genetically scripted, you know, if you have the genes for it, you're never gonna be above a certain number or whatever. That's true. Yeah, 100%. But the the expression of your body is never gonna be uniform. Your VO2 max depends on your conditioning throughout your life. So if you stop doing exercise, your VO2 max is gonna go down. You know, if you exercise more, your VO2 max is gonna go up. So it's all relative to you as well. As much as you know, genes load the gun, habits pull the trigger. And so, what are your habits? So even if your VO2 max, genetically speaking, is programmed to be crap, by you habitually exercising, you're probabilistically changing your fate, essentially, to be um, you know, live longer, live healthier, better quality of life later on as well. Yeah. Um and realistically speaking, you can change your VO2 max in a very short space of time, but it requires a lot of vigorous activity rounds where you're putting in hard, hard, hard work, as much work as you can manage for the entire round, three minutes up to eight minutes per round. They say that the optimum is the one that we talked about, which is the it's called the Norwegian high interval training protocol, um, which is four rounds of intense exercise with three minutes of rest between each round, or four minutes of rest, depending on where you source it from. So ultimately you're doing like 28 to 32 minutes of exercise with breaks included, and it is incredibly fatiguing. Incredibly fatiguing, and you will see results with just one session a week, you know. But again, if we're going back down to broad strokes, to go from nothing to training that type of protocol, you will throw up, you will be faint, you will hate it, you will you will hate your experience. But, you know, unless you're I suppose masochistic in some way. But how about going from nothing to running down your street and walking back? How about going from nothing and you know, jogging with a friend for five minutes and then you know saying, Hey, I'll catch you back at the car? You know, those types of things, being around environments that also promote a lot more exercise. You know, if you are a result of the people and the influences around you, put people around you whose habits you're happy to let influence you. So put healthier people around you so that you are the least healthy person. You know, that idea of like if you have five fat friends, you're about to be the sixth. But if you have five healthy friends, you're about to be the sixth, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:03

So personal anecdote and update. So I've done four sessions now of the Norwegian uh split program that you've just outlined. And today, actually, a couple of hours ago, I did Judy 2, and I was sparring a couple of very fit MMA fighters, you know, they fight regularly, and I was like waiting, like, when am I gonna get tired? And I was like, not really coming. And it was like, okay, when is the round is done? When am I gonna be like, oh my god, I'm glad that's over. Didn't really happen, you know, and that's like the first little like little sign of like, okay, there's something that's changing. And to be honest, like when you do this type of uh split, you realize, at least I realized, is like like jujitsu is not as hard as this in in terms of like cardiovascular, like you can find little spaces to have a breather, but the point of this uh high-intensity training is that you do the opposite, you're always looking for ways to push and mentally that changes things as well. Yeah, you have to kind of dig and find yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:00:11

There's uh a friend of mine that he and I are working on this idea of like how do we change unhealthy habits for healthy habits? So you know, drinking games that you usually play, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, every time she slays a monster, you have a drink or something like that. But what if you're doing a watch party like that? Instead of drinking, you you do push-ups or something like that, or you someone calls out an exercise and you have to do that, you know, five times every time you know the slayer slays or whatever. And it's always like that. And so one of the things is about like how do we spend time together as friends, but do exercise that's really sucky to do on your own as well. And so he's literally taken uh assault bike sprint protocols and just invited friends and be like, come on, let's make a thing of it, let's just suffer together. And it comes back to that idea of connections really help. Um, you know, traumatic instances create better connections.

SPEAKER_01 2:01:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:01:03

You know, because ultimately you suffer together and you know that you've shared this thing that other people won't understand. So yeah, I think that's that's huge. Yeah. Um, to answer your question, by the way, on the flexibility thing is that there are several styles on flexibility as well. Like, are you doing flexibility to get strong in those ranges? Are you doing flexibility to try and extend and open those ranges? You know, are you doing flexibility for exercise or relaxation is the first one. You know, just like breath work, flexibility work can work in the same way. And so the one that I suggest to people is having a stretch before bed, which means getting into positions where you're stretching yourself that you could fall asleep in, essentially. And chilling out there for let's say two minutes, or if you're timing it with your breathing before bedtime as well, an inhale of let's say four seconds and an exhale of six seconds, that's already ten seconds. So do that for you know, five to ten breaths per position. And just try and relax and just fall asleep and tell your body to just relax and fall asleep. And um, you know, in terms of helping your sleep, that type of flexibility really helps you to relax. It lengthens the muscles, it gets rid of a lot of like muscle tension. Does it really help in terms of extending your flexibility? Uh, not really. In a passive sense, it might, because you know, you have to collect like five minutes of 30-second holds throughout the week to be able to say that you've extended a range, but usually you have to sit in a discomfort of eight out of ten discomfort in pain to get that kind of gain. And so, well, if you're gonna do that, why don't you just do ballistic and loaded stretching anyway, which is usually has stronger returns on the time invested.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:52

So, you know, I think I think I'm gonna make a guess, but I think m most people listening to this when it comes to flexibility would probably want the range of motion that they had when they were like in their twenties or something. You know how you can kind of lose your range of motion, it's not so much that they want to be doing pancakes, but they just want to be able to move their body as it's meant to be moved. You know, does that still apply what you just said about the it's very hard to get there?

SPEAKER_03 2:03:19

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, in terms of like, you know, increasing your range of motion, the kind of like sitting in it for two minutes and relaxing, it's not really gonna do it. It might if you do it for a very long period of time, very frequently as well, like on a daily basis, twice a day, you know, sure, you'll get there. You know, throw enough spaghetti at the wall, some of it's gonna stick. Sure. 100%. And it's just a man of quantity. But if you want to get dialed into your training, um, you can get dialed in. So the reason why I recommended that is because that form of stretching feels great. Where most people have like an aversion to stretching because it sucks. It doesn't feel good. So this type of stretching, you just put yourself in a position that feels good and you stay there for a couple of minutes enjoying it and breathing. And then from there, you could then graduate into all right, I'm ready to extend my range of motion into something that it used to be like, oh, I used to be able to touch my toes and I can't now. Okay, cool. Let's get to toe touches, right? What does that look like? You know, so like I said before, there are other methods of stretching that are going to be far faster and train the strength up a lot more than just going into that position and holding it for 30 seconds.

SPEAKER_01 2:04:35

Right. Are there any resources or tools that you are found useful or that you recommend people look at? Um people, stickers, you know, anything like that?

SPEAKER_03 2:04:50

I don't recommend any because they all didn't work for me. So I would I would recommend that people follow their passion. So if they find someone that they think is cool, that they like, yeah, jump in, jump in there and explore it and iterate on it and be like, huh, you know what, I like this, but I want to explore something else. And I want to explore something else. And so we go back to those positive emotions, you know. Um, and so basically it's the idea of exploration, curiosity, follow, follow that, follow your passion. Yeah. I spent over, I think it's about $9,000 with various courses and experts and personal coaches to coach me, like one-to-one or group, or you know, I bought their course or whatever. And I can't tell you how much it was, just a lot of it just didn't work for me. It was a waste of time. Waste of time. Because most of them, if not 99% of them, were saying the same stuff, which was okay, so you want to get flexible? Okay, we're gonna, I'm gonna prescribe you these 17 exercises that's gonna take an hour each day minimum. I'm like, how about how about I give you the finger and you give me my phone call, you know, to quote the matrix. Like, I was just this is stupid. Yeah, I could I could write a program where I'm just gonna throw enough volume at it and I'll get a result. But I didn't want to invest that. I wanted to be smarter. So, you know, if a person wants to kind of really open things up, yeah, throw enough volume at it and you're gonna see returns. Your body is gonna respond to that stimulus.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:26

Okay, and now the million-dollar question, what if someone's listening to you and they're like, okay, well, I want to learn from you and I want you to give me some guidance on all of these things. What's the best way to kind of get in touch or pick your brain, ask questions? And I know you're very if someone comes to you and they want to talk to you, I know you're generally open to that and you like to kind of engage.

SPEAKER_03 2:06:48

Yeah, yeah.

unknown 2:06:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:06:49

Yeah. So I I'm actually not taking on any um like clients or anything like that, but I'm always open to having conversations and helping people out. Um, you know, I predominantly work with uh corporations and corporate entities now. Um, but I do have a course that talks about all the emotional stuff that we've been talking about as well. So that's always open. And I will be running a cohort through that course, um, you know, like AMAs and things like that, and just like opening up office hours through that course. So that's usually the easiest way. Um yeah, I think apart from that, it's just messaging me, saying hey, asking questions, like I'm just like anyone else, I will respond. I'll say hi, and you know, we'll definitely be interested in in helping and giving back. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:07:35

Can you share any like logistical details about the course? Do you have any dates yet, or is it still in development and that's being flashed out?

SPEAKER_03 2:07:42

No, it's it's uh yeah, no, no, it's it's been going already. It's it's had you know a couple people passing through it already. It's um the logistical details, it's uh three phases. Phase one is getting out of your own way and making sure that we're dealing with your like negativity bias, survival ship bias, whatever the negative emotions are that you technically go to in your patents. Phase two is um how do we turn up positive resources and positive emotional patterns? And then phase three is about how do we include past and future and unify them together to bring you into like a little bit more of an integrated experience. Like if I asked you, what are the top three experiences that you had in your entire life that have defined you? You know, very few people have thought about that. Very few people will have an answer. And those are the kinds of questions that I'm like, look at the shape of your life. Look at the shape of your life and own it.

SPEAKER_01 2:08:45

So yeah. Well, when you asked me that question, Justin, I did I did remember that we've done three podcasts together. So you know, but no, that's a really profound question. Yeah, that's uh that's great.

SPEAKER_03 2:09:04

Yeah. So yeah, so um a lot of it is just basically um, you know, if you think about if you think about it, it's turn down negative, turn up positive, and then let's let's look at your life with those lenses. And so um, yeah, that's the course essentially. Um how do we stay on point and how do we how do we do all these um these things? And the support is more important. It's it's packaged into 20 lessons with a lot of a lot of work and a lot of prompts to do as well. Logistically speaking, I think it's super cool because you get to actually have discussions with friends, family members, etc. Um, I designed it to be something that's interactive, that involves the people in your life as well. Um, and I think that that's the the big difference, the big selling point there.

SPEAKER_01 2:09:57

Yeah, and when it comes to this kind of stuff, I I can't I kind of like want to remind people that when I interact with you just then, I kind of feel like you give this impression to me, at least, where everything's always been good. You know, you come across as like you've always been the kind of happy, popular guy, and you know, like good, you know what I mean? Like you come across with that kind of like leadership and you you make people feel comfortable, and you know, you're the one that we can look to and ask for guidance in the room, you know, that you come across with that kind of figure. But it's kind of crazy when you actually share that you have changed a lot over the years. You know, you gave some examples today of being almost like crippled with this kind of pain of feeling rejection. That's almost impossible to think about now. I can't like the person I'm speaking to now, I can't imagine that happening. Um, so it's kind of crazy that you've gone through this. And I just think that's worth reminding. It's like you don't really want to be getting ideas and advice from people that have never really gone through anything, have never really done the work. It's like, I've always had a six-pack. Let me teach you how to get six pack abs. It's like, no, it's better to talk to the person who used to be obese and then got six pack abs. Like that's the transformation there that they can teach you.

SPEAKER_03 2:11:17

Yeah, yeah. I I hear that. Yeah, I really do. I think we're yeah. Ultimately, ultimately, I think it also depends on the person. You know, we come down to the same thing. You know, if if you don't like my face, my content's not gonna be relevant to you because you'll you'll have a bias against me. But you know, if you don't mind my face, then it's gonna it's gonna work. But if you enjoy my face, that's uh that's gonna sell you know all of my ideas. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:11:46

All right. Personal preference, yeah. Okay, well, um, I'll include links to everything. I think the show notes to this episode are gonna be pretty intense. There's gonna be a lot of concepts, and yeah, there's gonna be a lot. Um looking forward to digging through it all. Um yeah, thanks. Uh also want to shout out Mark. Thank you for joining and providing some quick questions and challenging Justin, a much needed battle that happened that I had to kind of step in and moderate a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 2:12:17

Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure to be uh you know witnessing you two uh podcast intellectual giants, I might say. It's been a pleasure to be involved in the conversation and uh feel like listening to my favorite podcast. I get to sort of sit there and also occasionally ask a question in real time, which is pretty cool. It's the podcasting listener experience deluxe right here.

SPEAKER_03 2:12:39

It's a good way to look at it, actually. Yeah, John, you'd have to do you'll have to do a live version at some point, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01 2:12:45

Yeah. Yeah, we'll have to figure that out. Um, yeah. So thank you, Justin. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and providing the time and giving value. I've learned a lot um and I've had a lot of fun. So I appreciate you.

SPEAKER_03 2:13:00

Yeah, likewise, I've had a lot of fun. Thanks for uh thanks for thinking of me and having this conversation. It's been uh it's been great. I loved it. Thank you.