Why Humans Need Winter, How Too Much Christmas Is Dangerous, Rites Of Passage & More With Paul Chek.

Welcome back to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. Welcome back to another epic episode with my friend Paul Cech. This one's a doozy. You're gonna love it. Be sure to listen to it before Christmas. That gives you plenty of time. Cause it's about why Christmas could be.

A very bad thing.

No, I'm just kidding. Christmas is not a bad thing. But you'll learn what I mean on today's show. This show is brought to you by the Human Charger. I actually have been using this thing a ton when I've been traveling. Reason being that when I travel, my circadian rhythm needs a little help, shall we say. And in addition to that, it helps with energy levels, it helps with mood, it helps with mental alertness. Here's how this mysterious, magical machine works. It generates this calibrated white light that suppresses melatonin, which is a good thing when you want to be wakey, wakey. And it stimulates the photosensitive proteins on the surface of your brain using this white light that passes through your ear canals. How cool is that? So you slap this thing on anywhere where you are at in the world where you need a burst of wakefulness, or if you're a shift worker, or if you just need something as an alternative to a cup of coffee in the morning. And it works like gangbusters. You get a 20% discount on the Human Charger. Tiny little thing, looks just like an MP3 player. You visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com HumanCharger and use code BENchar20 to get 20% off of the Human Charger. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com humancharger and use the discount code BEN20. This podcast is also brought to you by something that my little boys for their podcast. It's called the Go Greenfelds Podcast. They have a food review podcast. They use the stuff that this company makes to design their own high protein amazing waffles. They cook things for breakfast that have stuff like bone broth and colostrum and no gluten. They use almond flour, they use breadfruit flour, they use coconut flour, and they use some of the best tasting protein powder on the face of the planet. It's a vegan protein powder that comes along with digestive enzymes. In case you didn't know this, you can hack a vegan protein powder to have the same amino acid bioavailability as a whey protein powder. And if you pair said vegan protein powder with digestive enzymes, and not only does this protein powder do just that, but also tastes like a Wendy's Frosty. It also makes amazing waffles. You get a 20% discount off of it. And anything else made by organifi, Their green juice, which is a green superfood blend. Their red juice, which is like Viagra.

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Anything. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Organifi that's Organifi with an I. And use discount code BEN to save 20% off your your entire order. So enjoy that. And now onto today's show, recorded straight from the library of Palacek, which is why the audio might sound a little funky. We literally snuck into his library, set up a card table and a couple of chairs, and sat across from each other, surrounded by the wealth of knowledge this guy has amassed for the past 12 years. He's read, I think, every book that exists in the world. And so we were surrounded by books. But I was in my portable podcasting mic setup, and I even forgot one of my microphones at his house when we went to his office. So I had to use one of his microphones. But my audio ninja, her name is Carrie. Hello, Carrie. Kerri did a fantastic job piecing this one together and making it palatable for you. So enjoy. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Show, I went into a complete crisis itself. I didn't know I was without my strength and my power, my ability to show off and demonstrate and be a badass. And I went into a real deep spiritual crisis that pushed me very deep into my meditative and spiritual practices.

Time ceased to exist, and I thought I was only outside for about five minutes. I went out there, the sun was up, and I come home from work, and then I opened my eyes and went, wow, I'm doing tai chi. And it was dark, it was pitch blackout, and my wife's like, where have you been?

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power.

Speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is, for you, that's the natural movement.

Get out there.

When you look at all the studies.

Done, studies that have shown the greatest.

Efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Well, I do not know about you, good sir, but I am chock full of some kind of weird energy surging through my system, and I think it's related to whatever's in this. In this big cup in front of us right now, what. What crazy concoction have you. Have you pieced together for us for.

Tea for today's podcast, that is organic gyasa with some restore herbal formula for helping connective tissue and joint health, with some shilajit minerals and a few drops, I believe, of a solar flower essence with energy from each of the planets of our solar system. And some odd nova clarity, which is a mix of exotic mushrooms, herbs, and organic raw honey infused together as one concoction called Ben's Tea.

Is there any bat wings in there? Any bat wings or black ant powder or anything like that?

Just the one growing out of your back.

Just the one growing out of my back, dude. It's an amazing concoction, actually. We may have to write that down and add it to today's show notes. And of course, you may have already heard him on the podcast that we recorded a few months ago in which we delved into heavy rock, lifting and building your own water, charging stations, mandala art therapy, and a whole host of amazing concepts in kinesiology. But the man who is back on the Ben Greenfield Fitness show today is, of course, who I consider to be one of the most internationally renowned experts in the field of corrective and high performance exercise, but also holistic health. And he's a guy whose unique approach to education is changing the lives of a lot of people. For some, and this blows my mind, he flies under the radar. But for me, having really discovered him, like 12 years ago, but honestly, having kind of like renewed my knowledge of what he's doing just recently, his name is Paul Cech, and Paul, in the last episode, covered his extremely crazy past as a top triathlete and a boxer and a motocross and rally car racer. The dude has done everything. He has body, mind and spirit optimized, and he teaches other people how to do it, too. And I find him to be such an intriguing fellow that is literally decades ahead of just about every health and exercise professional on the face of the planet. I had to come back down to San Diego and spend just a couple more days with Paul, not only sipping his crazy Guyana tea, but doing plenty more, chatting about a lot of what Paul does to turn people into what I would say would be a complete human. So, Paul, welcome back to the show, man.

It's a pleasure. Thank you so much, Ben. And I'm very grateful that you're interested in being whole.

Yeah, well, being whole is definitely something we'll delve into today. But before we do one other thing you do. In addition to drinking this crazy, energizing tea that you concocted from the dizzying array of bottles that are around your kitchen counter up here at the Heaven House above San Diego, you do a morning Tai Chi practice. Yes, you told me, because you took me out there, and we did it this morning. We held this. What was the wooden thing we were.

Holding in our hands?

We were holding a Tai Chi ruler in our hands. And you said that this practice was something that could transform your life. And you told me about what would happen if you did this for 100 days in a row and why it was important. Can you walk me through what we did and why you do what you call it the gong.

A gong is 100 days of committed practice? Yes.

Okay. How's that work?

Well, the Tai Chi ruler practices is one of many practices. It was taught to me by Master Fong Ha, who was really my teacher that introduced me to others. Aside from my intellectual knowledge of Tai Chi, I wanted to find someone I had enough respect for to submit to his guidance, which isn't easy for me to do. And I did find a true master, Master Fong Ha, which, for those that are interested, you can find him@fong ha.com f o n g h a.com and he. His first gong he gave me was Zanzung, which means stand like a tree. So the first thing he did was have me spend an hour a day for a hundred days standing like a tree, which is standing in a relaxed tree, like, posture with good upright posture.

You don't mean like a hundred days like dong? You mean like in the morning for 100 days?

No, I mean, you know, an hour. You choose an hour.

Right.

And you stand like a tree and.

You breathe, but you're not standing in the front yard for 100 days while your wife comes out and feeds you soup.

No, no. That's the most advanced level of training. And you have to really sort of ossify before you can handle that.

I did just release a podcast episode a few weeks ago with Robert Peng. I went to New York City, interviewed this qigong master, and he spent 100 days in a hole with no water and no food. For the first 20 days, he had, like, a bean for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He had a master oversee the whole thing. And he came out the other side literally able to, like, zap people with his hands. He developed so much consciousness of his own energy while doing that.

That's commitment.

Yeah.

For me, with my life being a lot like yours, it was. I really had to devote myself to committing myself to one hour each day because I really had so much going on. But that's what you do when you choose a teacher. You know, when the student is ready to master appears, they say. And Phong Hu impressed me in many, many ways, including being funny and grounded and playful and all the things that I felt like I would love to become more of. So I did the stand like a tree for a hundred days. And there's different elements to it that I won't bother you with now. But the second practice was the Tai Chi ruler. And he said the man who taught him the practice, which is holding this specially designed piece of wood, the Tai Chi ruler, which we do sell through the Czech Institute for people that might be interested in more.

I have one now.

Yes, you do. And so I committed myself to. At that time, I was doing 40 minutes of that practice a day and I did three gongs in a row. And I had tremendous growth and development. And I found all sorts of wild stuff would happen as I got deeper and deeper into the center of myself and learn to be truly connected to the heavens above and the earth below. Animals would come from all over the place. Birds. I'd start doing my Tai Chi session by the time, you know, I'd have my eyes closed. But I'd finish my session, open my eyes. Sometimes there'd be like 150 seagulls surrounding me or five or six squirrels and piles of lizards and all sorts. It was like everybody was just coming to hang out. Because I found as you get more and more calm and sensitive, it's like.

Something out of a horror movie. Slash Johnny Appleseed.

Yeah. You know, and the thing is, I found that they're very, very sensitive to us. And when we are at peace with ourselves and become non violent within ourselves, they feel safe to come around us. And it's like, wow, you have this great big giant family. And you know, it's an interesting thing because it really makes you much more conscious about how much meat you're eating because you realize you're eating your friends, you know. And I've been teaching it to myself.

Clarify by saying that you and I just both punished an enormous piece of chicken.

We did. We reincarnated a chicken.

Yeah. How did you describe it?

I said, we didn't. This chicken's not dead. It's now becoming Ben Greenfield and Paul Check. And that's quite an upgrade.

Exactly.

And so I taught that. I've been teaching that practice since probably about 2002. To students all over the world. And many of them, including myself, had significant enhancements of voyances such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, precognition. And many of them actually got so much opening and so much increase in their abilities that it scared them. So I would get letters like, wow, you know, I'm, I'm knowing that things are going to happen in people's lives before they happen. I'm seeing people's auras. And for some of them it was overwhelming because to experience that much of what's going on below the radar of the ego was quite shocking. So I have to then take them into techniques to how to manage all that. But as you saw, it's a very, very simple technique. But the secret is committing yourself to growing with it.

And for us, we weren't standing like a tree, we were kind of moving in circles.

Yeah. So that's the Tai Chi ruler practice.

Okay.

Yeah, so it's a different practice.

Very simple though, simple to learn.

And most of the things that are powerful are simple. And people in today's world get so up in their head, if it's not bells and whistles and LEDs and plugins for computers, they don't think it's got any meaning or use. But.

Or if it's not some kind of a plant medicine. Right. This is the deal that I've told people. I've done holotropic breath work before and had an out of body experience that rivals what I've experienced on psychedelic plant based medicines. And you told me that when you've done this Tai Chi exercise that you showed me this morning, that you've gone to some very intense places just doing that single exercise.

Well, I've gone as deep as I can go with psychedelics. And I'm medicine man, spirit guide. I'm licensed federally to use plant medicines and I've probably done 400 shamanic journeys both for my own research and exploration and in guided therapy sessions. And for me, it was really important to be authentic. So I committed myself to the Tai Chi, the qigong, the meditation practice. And I've been following that path for a solid 15 years while also doing research and work with plant medicines. And I was able to get as deep on the Tai Chi ruler practice and some of the other practices. But the Tai Chi ruler took me the deepest. I literally made it to computer complete and utter. No mind, pure awareness, no ego, no time, no space, just pure unadulterated presence and awareness with no subject object duality and Remember the first time that happened to me and I came out of it, it was mind blowing because time ceased to exist. And I thought I was only outside for about five minutes and I had been out there. I went out there, the sun was up and I'd come home from work and then I opened my eyes and went, wow, I'm doing Tai Chi. And it was dark, it was pitch black out. And my wife's like, where have you been? Dinner's been on the table for a while. And so I truly had an experience of the depth of removing the subject object duality and paradoxically being more alive than ever, but being more still, more present and more conscious. But without it being me, it would be pure consciousness. And I have made it to that level on certain medicines, but then you have to use the medicines to get there. So you kind of get chained to that. If you don't do the work of growing your abilities to do that naturally.

Right. A lot of people begin to rely and it's very trendy these days, DHT and Ayahuasca or DMT and all these places, plant based journeys. And people don't actually learn how to tap into that same, that same feeling of just letting go and flowing with their consciousness all on their own by doing some of these practices that you're talking about, like, like Tai Chi or the other one. You know, time just flew by. This morning when you and I were working out, we were lifting these enormous rocks and we talked about this in the last podcast, these rock stations that you build and rock towers that you build. And we went out there and we did that this morning, same thing. You set this little timer for an hour, felt like five minutes. And I'm there stacking rocks and scratching my head and looking at rocks and walking around and choosing a rock and stacking it and then ding. And it'd been an hour.

Yes.

And you actually have a. You shared with me a phrase. I want to ask you what you mean by this. You say, never rush in a rock garden. I believe that's a Paul Chek TM saying. What do you mean by that?

Well, what I mean is that, you know, when you're, when you're working with rocks out in nature like that, rocks are very, very different in that unlike the gym, where everything's balanced, you know, a barbell's balanced, weights are balanced. But rocks, the center of gravity can be way over to one side of the rock. They got very sharp edges. Insects that bite are on those rocks. You're standing on things that can bite.

There's rattlesnakes, there's fire ants, there's black widows, there's rattlesnakes, there's fire ants. I was a little bit paranoid.

Scorpions, there's tarantulas out there. And you know, things that don't want their home disrupted and you have to pay very close attention. Plus, you know, as you saw, you know that that stack I built this morning is probably up there 14ft tall. And you have to stack rocks. My, my rule is don't use any cheat mechanism. So it's bare hands, bare feet, and no ladders. You've got to stack rocks on top of rocks. So it's, it's really requires tremendous athletic ability and you have to be fully present or you can get killed. You can have a rock stack fall on your head or you can break your leg. And you know, I learned the hard way by leaving a lot of blood in the garden. And every time I left blood in the garden, I realized that I was trying to push a process. I was trying to make something happen. I was trying to glorify myself with how strong or how.

And I learned that I had to go into my center, relax and connect to everything around me and be guided by that invisible force called consciousness or intuition. And so if you're rushing, it's usually marrying you back to you. And the rock stacks tend to fall over and be more dangerous. And so never rushing a rock garden literally means this is not a gym for kids. This is a gym for spiritual growth and development. And the cost of being too youthful and too up yourself is usually blood.

It can be a gym for I, actually, when I left your house last time, we hunted down a rock facility at our house. Like, like a, not a demolition facility, but this place that they use rocks for, for, for construction.

Yeah.

And we drove our pickup truck in there, me and my two 9 year old boys and we spent 4 hours filling the back of the pickup truck with rocks. We took them back to our house and we built these, you know, just like we talked about. And if you guys want to listen to my first episode with the Paul, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com PaulCheck it's spelled with not a ck but just a k c h e k Paul Chek. And you can listen to where Paul describes how you should build a rock water charging station and why. And by the way, if you want to listen to or access the show notes for today's show, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com PaulCheck2. Like PaulCheck the number two. And I'll put links to the other things that Paul and I are talking about and we'll talk about today.

We're going to.

But my children love to. Love to stack the rocks. And we built these rock charging stations. Great for kids, too, because they learn to handle these little unwieldy objects that are different than barbells or dumbbells or even sandbags.

It's very good for kids and I do recommend it for kids, but they need to be supervised. And the thing is, kids haven't developed such a big ego that they're trying to show off to everybody or prove to themselves how much of a superman, so they're more engaging in a natural, playful way. But most kids aren't trying to pick up rocks that weigh more than them and put them over their heads. You know, when I build these rock sculptures and when I'm teaching people in classes, I often get bodybuilder types or crossfitters who think they can pick up great big heavy rocks and run around in the garden like they're, you know, in some kind of a race. And that's when blood gets flying around. So you can do it with anybody. But it's. It's a great practice for kids because it teaches them to be present and it teaches them to be creative and it teaches them real fitness.

People rush a lot. I've spent the past 48 hours with you now, and we've done a lot of talking. I mean, you sat me down and stood me up and read me the riot act about my own life because you.

Out of love.

Yeah, out of love. And a lot of people have never talked to me like that before as far as warning me about my own pace of life and my own excitement about getting all this amazing information out to people and the fact that I can. I can kind of burn my fire too hot in the process and eventually burn out in the same way that I know you. You personally experienced.

Yes.

And one of the things you were talking to me about, because I know a lot of people struggle with this. Right. We have a lot of hard charging high achievers who listen into this show. And you showed me a piece of paper that was 32 freaking years worth of work.

Yeah.

That you'd create. What's it called? The Check.

Life Alchemy process.

The life Alchemy. And it took, you know, took us like two hours to go through it. And I know we didn't even take the deepest dive into it that we could But a couple things really, really leapt out at me when we were going through that. And one said that one time you said people make mistakes when they've achieved a big goal. They've, they've written a book, they've completed an Ironman triathlon. They've. They've lost their, their 30 pounds that they'd had a goal to lose during the year. You said that they make a mistake after they've achieved that. And it really resonated with me. What's the mistake people make?

Well, it's very, very Western to not go into. So I was talking to you about the seasonal energy. So I said, spring is the planning phase. Summer is the action phase. Fall is the celebration phase. So you plan for your triathlon, you train for your triathlon, you cross the finish line. That's the celebration. And then you've got to go into winter, which is the rest phase, where you regenerate yourself. And you use the time that you have to rest and introspect and meditate and open the door for intuition so that you can say, okay, this is what I did, but let me spend time with myself to identify. Do I want to do that again? Do I want to do an event that hard or that long? Do I want to spend that much money for that much big of a project? How did I feel? What did it do to my relationships? Am I becoming who I want to be? Is it too stressful? And so the winter phase is the phase of deep rest, introspection, and calming the mind enough and resting the body enough so that intuition gets invited in. I use the example that the mind is like a garbage disposal. If it's turning and you stick your hand in it, you lose your fingers. But if the mind is calm enough, then the insights we call intuition can make it through into the conscious mind as real information. But as long as the mind's engaged in cognitive processes, intuition hits that garbage disposal and there's so much noise in your head, you can't hear that still silent voice of the universe speaking to you. So if we don't go into a winter phase, we don't regenerate, we don't recuperate, and we don't get clear on what we want to create next. So we run into the next project without awareness of whether or not it's producing our dream or whether or not we're breaking ourselves down further. It's kind of like if a woman has three kids a year apart, it's likely to put her into a state of serious health challenges. That may kill her or.

And the kids, they're born with nutrient deficiencies.

What's the rule?

Like, you're supposed to wait two or three years.

Two or three years.

I talked with Kate Shanahan about this when I interviewed her about how women who just pop them out, not barefoot, stand in the kitchen like they did back in the pioneer days, but they push out babies at a pretty rapid rate. Not that I'm accusing any of our podcast listeners of having too many children. Children are lovely. But yeah, you push them out too fast and they wind up with some nutrient deficiencies. I think we have more people who are not having babies at too rapid a rate, but who are instead doing too many Ironman triathlons or marathons. And it's a great business model. I remember when I raced Ironman, maybe I know you raced triathlon professionally for a while. You'd cross the finish line, right? And the only way you could get into the race without it being sold out was to get up at like 6am the day after you'd completed the race and go stand in line, you know, in the rain, in the cold, in a park somewhere, waiting to write another $800 check so that you could sign up for that race for the next year and get in. And as soon as you write that check, what do you want to do? You go train for the race, right? You want to start trading. So it's this vicious cycle. And I've seen, you know, 50 year old people just hormonally destroyed their skin rack, their bodies broken from. From that process or the process of achieving a goal at the gym and then wanting to move on to the next one, or achieving some massive certification and knocking out their cognition with the next one. And never listening to what you described as that still small voice. Yes, because you're just go, go, go.

It's basically going. In my alchemy model, spring and planting is the air element, and that correlates with mine. The fire element creates is correlated with the metabolism of the body, the warmth system in the body, and the sun outside of us. And the fall element is the fruiting phase where we, you know, harvest the vegetables, take the fruit off the tree, or complete the project. But winter is the completion of the cycle. Imagine if we skipped winter, how quickly the earth would just be dried out, dead and catch on fire. So when a person goes from race to race or project to project, or, you know, business adventure to business adventure, they go literally from air to fire. And air feeds fire. And earth is where the wood comes from. So if you just go air, fire wood, and back to air, you don't have anything to control the fire or anywhere to grow. You know, things have to regenerate. So you just go from fire to fire and you end up spending more money than you do on triathlon equipment and racing on doctors, therapists, acupuncturist, massage therapists, drugs.

Guilty as charged. You know, I've taken off seasons before, right? And my off season turns into getting a new snowboard and then spending the week preparing to hit the slopes. And you wind up doing squats and deadlifts and cleans and then snowboarding all day and getting home and hitting the sauna and sweating it out and having. Having a couple glasses of alcohol and then getting up the next morning. And because you spent all day Saturday snowboarding, you want to go, maybe hit the gym or go for a swim. And the off season turns into just more training. I know we have a lot of people who listen in and just go, go, go, but they don't have that winter. And it relates to something else that you mentioned when you're talking about this, this winter, that when you're in the winter, you actually, obviously you don't tell people to just sit around on their. But you have like this. And by the way, when we say winter, this is for some people that may be time of year, might be the summer for them or the spring. It's just. It's a saying, right?

It's a symbol of the type of energetic movement. It means energy moves. See, in winter, in winter, all the energy that's in the tree above the ground moves below the ground into the root system, and that's where it does its growth and development down below, because that's the foundation of what grows above. So basically, in the spring and summer, the tree is growing up above the ground and the energy is going outward. But in the winter, the energy, the fall and winter, the energy moves back down into the root system. So. And the energy of the earth moves back down into the earth. So the winter season is the season of regeneration and recuperation, so that the tree has the root system adequate enough to grow taller in the next season. Or it'll just be like a building that gets taller and taller with less and less foundation, or a sailboat with a bigger and bigger sail but no keel on it. You know, it blows right over. Right.

That's why people do things like have sex and eat lots of food in the winter. Yeah, that's theoretically, it's a good thing to do? Yeah.

Stay warm, make love, and, you know, celebrate that you have celebrate.

Yeah, yeah. You talk about recovery and different forms of recovery. You know, when, when I hear the term active recovery or passive recovery or some personal trainer listening and perhaps hears this, they think, you know, passive recovery is maybe, you know, doing a sauna and active recovery is doing dynamic leg swing. But you broke it down a lot more completely than that. What are the different forms of recovery when you're, when you're in a winter phase of your life?

Yeah, there's three in my system. There's three types of rest, active rest, passive rest, and total rest is really sleeping and doing nothing. But sleeping is the most concentrated form of total rest. And sleeping is the most powerful medicine in the world that's free. And almost anybody that's out of balance needs to sleep either. Not if they're not lacking sleep, then they need more regenerative time. And when we fall asleep, the cognitive mind shuts off. So we stop influencing the physiological functions of our body with our mental emotional processes and we go into deep rest where the autonomic systems can truly do their job without the top down influences. In modern parlance, passive rest means using an athletic activity or a movement activity that is different enough from your primary activity or a given sport or whatever your primary goal is that those muscle groups and movements don't detract from, from the activities that you are working on. So if you're a triathlete, for example, swimming, biking and running would not be passive rest exercises.

But if you're an MMA fighter, they might be.

They might be. For example, when I trained the army boxing team, I put them in the swimming pool and did a lot of shadow boxing and neck deep water. Because it is hydrotherapy, there's no impact and it actually decompresses joints, facilitates the sensory systems of the body. So the sensory stimulation of water moving past the skin and the hair actually sends so much information about movement and proprioception into the spinal cord that the brain cannot listen to the pain information coming to the body. So it down regulates the pain spasm cycle and improves blood flow, decompresses joints and speeds healing up quite a bit, but it gives them quite a deep level of fatigue. But it's the type of fatigue that does not detract from their boxing performance and enhances their ability to handle the contact of boxing. And the water has a therapeutic regenerating effect, so it speeds wound healing from all the impact. So that's real passive rest. Another thing we would do with boxers is Play basketball, You know, those are activities that are fun. They're team sports. They're far enough away from boxing that playing basketball recreationally allows you to be active and to have fun. But it's significantly different enough that it's considered passive activities. Now, even playing basketball, you've got to be careful with competitive fighters that they don't get so crazy about it that they burn themselves out. So there always has to be conscious awareness that these should be joyful activities, not intensely competitive activities. And then.

Active rest means using your given activity at about a 30% reduced intensity. So, for example, for a person who's a distance runner, you would take your most recent 10k time and you would drop 2 minutes off your pace per mile, and that would be the speed that you would run in your active recovery phase. So if your 10k average mile was 6 minutes a mile, you'd run your recovery runs at 8 minutes a mile and no faster, or you will not get the recovery out of it. It will actually continue to work you out or be catabolic. Excessively catabolic.

Yeah, this makes a lot of sense. These are all things you could do in the winter and what you were talking about with the water. I've gone and worked out with a guy who we both know, Laird Hamilton. I do his pool workouts in Malibu. When I'm there and we're down at the bottom of the water, leaping from the bottom of the water up to the top with dumbbells and doing farmer's walks at the bottom of the pool, often getting out, getting in the sauna, getting in the cold pool, jumping back in the water. And you're worked after two hours of that, but you wake up the next day and you feel restored and recovered because it's all this kind of passive movement in the water. So I hear what you're saying, and I've experienced that. And speaking of Laird Hamilton, this is something I wanted to ask you. Maybe a little bit of a rabbit hole here, but, you know, there's these guys, these badasses, right? Like Laird Hamilton. And I know you work with like, motocross athletes like. Like Danny Way. And for those who don't know who you he is. He's the guy who motorcycle jumps over. No, no.

Anyways, the skateboard.

Oh, yes. He did the skateboard over the China Wall.

Yeah.

And then there was another guy, like a motocross guy. Another crazy guy.

Yeah.

Robbie Madison.

Who's Robbie? Every record of evil people ever set in another.

Another guy to up on YouTube. Why do you think that these guys come to you to help them, like, what is it that you're doing for them that a typical sports performance coach isn't doing well?

Oftentimes they're injured so bad that nobody knows what to do with them, and they're told that their careers are over. Danny Way came to me with a spinal cord injury and was told he'd never ride a skateboard again.

First he was a paraplegic, and then, unfortunately, he went to a medical professional that didn't do a thorough enough evaluation, and he got a spinal adjustment on his neck and that he already had bleeding in his spinal cord, and that just caused it to bleed. It swelled up and compressed his spinal cord. And he became a quadriplegic for about two weeks. And he was in terrible pain and couldn't move his body. And after six months of that, he could barely walk and function. And so he became, as you can imagine, extremely nervous that he would never be able to compete again. And nobody knew what to do with him. Nobody wanted to touch him because, you know, a case like that's very dangerous for most people to work with. So I completely rehabilitated him, and it took us about six months, and he went back and won his first contest back. Robbie Madison came to me for a couple of things, but one time he crashed and had a rib sublux so bad it compressed his aorta. And nobody wanted to touch it because they were worried that the aorta might have been punctured. And if they move the rib, he might bleed to death. And so the doctors told me he could never ride his motorcycle again. And he didn't know what to do. But he, you know, he had worked with me before and knew and he was away traveling, so he'd seen a bunch of other professionals, and he finally said, I gotta go see Paul. And I straightened that out for him in a few sessions and got him back on his motorcycle again. Laird's come to me over the years for help just keeping his body in top shape and. And has used me as a consultant for diet and recovery and variety of things. And Gabby, his wife, was my client before Laird, and I helped her back in the late 90s, early 2000s, and she really liked my work, so she brought Laird to me. But I work with a large number of these people. I mean, the list is long, and usually they're coming to me because they're either at a performance plateau and don't know, none of the pills, gimmicks, gadgets and tricks are working or they're in a psychological crisis, a midlife crisis or a transition crisis, or they're injured and they've been medically retired. I've brought several people out of medical retirement to go back and make millions and millions of dollars. And the medical doctors told them you cannot perform again.

You're too dangerous. I've seen the posters on your wall, people you work with. It's crazy. I've seen your mad scientist lab where you rehab people, seen your gym where I worked out this morning before hit the rocks. But I don't think that's why people.

Come to you, dude.

I mean, I really don't. I, you know, all due respect, I think the main reason that they come to you is because you've been in the trenches.

I do.

You're not just some like, out of shape doctor who's smart. You're, you're not some, you know, super fit guy who's, who's a meathead. You, you've been studying this whole like mind, body, spirit optimization thing for a while. And, and when a guy like, you know, you told me stories of your youth, you know, riding motocross, you've raced rally cars and you've professionally boxed and you were one of the army's top triathletes. And, you know, your, your list of accomplishments is pretty deep. And dude, this, this relates to something we were talking about on your patio earlier today. How many gurus out there, how many doctors out there are one trick ponies, or what you call them. I wrote it down. I've got to hear my note. One prong gurus you call them. What is a one pronged guru?

Well, a one pronged guru is somebody that has a tremendous amount of knowledge in one aspect of life or one pathway. So they might be very skilled at musculoskeletal medicine, but not understand diet and lifestyle factors. Or they may be a life coach, but have no knowledge of exercise, exercise principles, recovery or diet. So in my system, to be a truly well rounded exercise healthcare, medical professional or coach, you have to understand each of what I call the four doctors. You have to understand how the mind works and how the emotions function. And that's Dr. Happiness. How to set goals effectively, how to have a dream, how to work with your life story and understand yourself at a deeper level so you know who it is that's doing these things and why. Then you have to understand Dr. Movement, which is movement of body, movement of emotions, movement of mind and movement of spirit. You have to understand Dr. Diet, which is, as I shared with you, the body feeds on food. So you have to understand the basic principles of food and farming and biochemistry. You have to understand that the emotional body feeds on emotions and you have to understand why it is, for example, that people keep trying to repeat place their emptiness with food when really they have an emotional emptiness. And the mental body feeds on thoughts. So you have to understand, you know, you have to be able to look at a person's diet for thinking and why are they over consuming and why are they using their mind with such intensity that it's starving or even burning their body out. They have to understand Dr. Quiet, which is the science of rest. And we just alluded to some of that. But Dr. Quiet really is all the practices I call working in, which means using practices that give you more vitality per unit of time than they cost to do. Working out means you're using more energy and resources per unit of time than you're recovering. Which is why those are catabolic activities that require an anabolic rebound. So like we talked about earlier, if you skip the winter cycle, you skip the anabolic recovery. So you go deeper and deeper into the catabolic cycle. And this is why we have so much rampant body wide global inflammation, which.

You explained to me is something that you can do for years. Like, you know, you, you could, you could give me a timeline like the path that I'm on.

Right.

If I keep on this path.

Yeah.

And I personally don't begin to incorporate winters into my life. And you are, you, you know, I have in my hand somewhere back behind me, you know, this whole list of, of things that I should be doing in the winter. You know, more yin foods instead of yang foods. Yin being the more feminine, you know, gentler form of winter form, you know, like raw vegetables and taking baths in cool water and using more yin essential oils and you know, and, and being careful with yang things like, you know, coffee might not be something I should be drinking in the winter phase of my life and you know, or minimizing hard charging on a bike could be replaced with Tai chi or qigong or, or soft yoga or slow rhythmic breathing and a of lot, a little bit of extra sleep. But I could still go for 10 years right before, before it really starts to hit me hard. And I think that's what a lot of people don't realize. They're like, what do you know? Because there's a lot of people who are, who are listening in, who may have been on this health journey for five years without a winter and they're doing Just fine. And you yourself hit rock bottom.

Yeah, I did. I didn't hit rock bottom so much. I did actually push myself right to the edge where I was walking on a tightrope physiologically, but I hit rock bottom that I, you know, like you, I devoted my life to helping other people live and love more fully. And, you know, as you get more well known, you create a Persona that needs to be fed. And if you're not careful, you fall so much into the identity of being, you know, the rescuer or the savior or the guru or the information giver. And you can quickly convince yourself that what you're doing is so important that you've got to keep doing it even when you're tired. And I pushed myself to where I was just doing. You know, I was traveling non stop for 25 years on airplanes. I was training at all sorts of weird hours, circadian stress for years on end, having a hard time sleeping.

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I saw a photo of you lifting a guy over your head.

Yeah, I. I had.

Tell me about that.

Yeah. So, you know, what happened was I used to do these stunts where I would pick up, you know, people, big, great, big strong guys. And put them up over my head and do lunges and stuff with them. And I got to a conference in, I believe it was in England and I was really exhausted. I was probably about.

For these big strong guys. You, how big are we talking?

Well, one of my guys that I put up over my head was 6 foot 8, 245 pound competitor from the Highland Games. And he was one of my students and he kept bragging about how strong he was. And I finally got tired of hearing it because I could look at him in 10 seconds, see he was not really that strong. He was strong because he had a lot of muscle. He was a great big, huge. Any giant would be strong relative to someone 5 foot 8, right? So I said, if you're so strong, pick me up and put me over your head. And he couldn't even come close. So I said, now I'm going to show you why I'm your teacher. And I picked him up, put them over my head, held him over my head horizontally like a plank of plywood and did a walking lunge with him. And then everybody in the class, even a Navy seal, proceeded to ask if I could do that. And so it became kind of a, an attractive stunt that draw a lot.

Of pretty good party trick.

It's a party trick, but it brought a lot of people into my system because they really respected my strength. But as I was sharing with you, one day I was coming into a hotel at 11 o' clock at night, flying in from another country, probably 20 or 37 into a long trip circadian, stressed, exhausted, eating on the road, you know the whole story. And these two guys run up to me and begged me to do this stunt for them. And my inner voice said, don't do it, you're tired. And the guy kept begging me and I succumbed to it. And my ego got the best of me. And I said to the guy, you know, it's scary to be up in the air. You got to hold yourself nice and stiff or I can't hold on to you. And he said, okay, I'll do it, I'll do it. And as soon as I got him up over my head, he buckled and got scared and turned into a ball of mush and slipped through my hands, landed on my head and blew out my C5, 6 and C67 disc, tore the interspinous and transversal spinous ligaments and left me with a very severe spinal instability. Two completely sequestered discs, spinal cord compression, and I lost 26 pounds of muscle in the next six weeks and couldn't even carry my briefcase for months. And it took me six years to rehabilitate myself. And I went into a complete crisis of self. I didn't know who I was without my strength and my power and my ability to show off and demonstrate and be a badass. And I went into a real deep spiritual crisis that pushed me very deep into my meditative and spiritual practices to find the person that I really was. And so when I was sharing with you out there, I said, having been through that, I can recognize the young men in me and other people, and I can see what the fire looks like when it's burning too hot. And so I was just sharing with you then. You know, you've got a good constitution, you eat well, you do a lot of things right. So you probably got 10 years before the candle burns out. But life, the quality of life goes down every year and you end up taking more and more supplements and more and more performance enhancing foods and more things to enhance your sex life. And the list just gets so long that now you're counting, you know, 48 pills every day and all these patches and supplements and you're lost in all that.

And for me, it's a vicious cycle, right, because like, I'll return home from, from us being here in San Diego and there'll be, there'll be 10 boxes from all these different, you know, biohacking facilities and all sorts of new fitness gear and new supplements. They send it all to my house because I'm the immersive journalist or like I'm the guinea pig who looks into this stuff and then writes about it and podcasts about it for other people. And then I try all this stuff and it makes this situation where I'm dumping these things into my body so I can go and tell people about them, but then telling people about them creates the vicious cycle of needing to be that guy who gets more to try. And you go back and forth without any winter. And I know you and I talked about this a little bit. It becomes exhausting and it get, eventually gets to the point of burnout. And you describe this, you, you, you, you describe this as a counter myth, basically. And I think it's something a lot of, you know, hard. Maybe you're not, you're listening and you're, you're not, you know, a journalist or a blogger like me or a podcaster. And you're, you're, you're just, you know, you're a hard charging high achiever. What's a Counter myth. What does it have to do with this?

Let's just step one step back, and I'll make a key point. A myth is a story, but it's a story with meaning. It's a story with much more meaning than the words convey. And so you just described Santa Claus coming over and over and over again. Yes.

Every day at my house is like.

Christmas Santa once a year. Doesn't he, Ben?

Well, yeah, there's this whole pile of gifts to unwrap, and all these cool podcasters I get to interview and I get. And then this pile of gifts goes in the corner, and before I even have a chance to fully explore them, even detail them more for people and. And help people introduce them in their own lives, bam, There's a knock at the door, and all of a sudden, here's a whole new list of people to explore and bookstore. You know, I'm reading a book a day right now, which I have for the past 10 years. Over 4,000 books.

Yeah.

But, yeah, you get to the point where it's dizzying information, so just pretend.

You were Santa Claus. It would take you a year to recover from one year of traveling around the world with your reindeer, going down everybody's chimney, and leaving all those gifts. And if Santa did that, Santa would not come anymore because Santa would have adrenal fatigue, go into hypothyroidism, and go to a hospital and die and spend all of Santa's money, and his elves would starve to death. So, you know, when we're coming to the myth and we're coming to the things that we do, I would start by saying, well, look at the myth of Santa Claus and know that Santa Claus is smart enough to only do that once a year. And when we try to be Santa for everybody all the time, then the reindeer die, the elves get exhausted and get pissed off, and those elves are your glands, your organs, your musculoskeletal system, your brain, and all those little helpers that often don't get listened to and need love. So a myth is the story that drives us to be the person we are. But most people's myth is unconscious. So some people are acting out Daddy's work ethic or mommies and Daddy's expectations, or trying to be the superhero and maybe taking Tony Robbins seminars and being told you should be a vegetarian, and you can go with sleep deprivation and not realizing that these things really actually don't work for very long. And most of it is stories. And most of the people that do that end up being clients of mine or other people like me, because they also, behind the scenes, are dead Santa Clauses. And so the myth is the story that we act out, whether we're conscious of it or not. The counter myth is the repercussions of that story. So a simple repercussion of being Santa Claus too much is adrenal exhaustion, which eventually leads to hypothyroidism. And for an athlete, it's important to remember that the itis stage, inflammation stage, becomes an osis stage. So when you go from itis to osis, you get osteoporosis or tendinosis or spinal stenosis. And once you're in that stage, the grass goes from being lacking water in the inflammation stage to being dead, brown grass that you have to dig up and replant. So the counter myth comes as pain. It comes as challenges and relationships. It comes as the inability to have a healthy sex life. It comes as cognitive dissonance or chaos in the mind. It comes as adhering to rigid behaviors, even when the environment is suggesting that you need other ways of relating. And it leads to.

A person hitting bottom at some point. And oftentimes because of the way we approach things in the west, with a lot of pills in their pocket, they're poisoning them and making all their physiological systems and their capacity to regenerate much, much depleted. And so the counter myth is really what's happening, and reality is what's happening right now. And if your story does not match what's happening, then you're in trouble. Ken Wilber says, if the story you're telling yourself doesn't match the story you're telling other people, the chances are good that you're going to get fatigued, get sick, and burn out or die, in paraphrase. So whenever the story we're telling ourselves does not match the story we're telling other people. So if the story you're telling somebody on stage is, look at me, I'm healthy, I'm a badass, but the story you're telling yourself and your girlfriend is, honey, my, I don't have enough energy for sex, or I'm tired, or I'm frustrated, I have so many boxes to open, or I wish so many people didn't want my attention all the time, that's a counter.

I need to take more of my God pills to get through the day.

Yeah, that's. That's the counter.

And I think for some people, it's. It's not pills and cats. For some people, it's. It's the Internet of things, right?

Yeah.

There's so many new things that come out before you know, you're just surrounded by all these different forms of technology that are running your life. And for some people it's, you know, it's people in the biohacking sector, right, who, who are wearing 18 different self quantification devices and their life is all of a sudden overrun by machines that are dictating when they go to bed and when they wake up and who they talk to and how they breathe. When this, this idea that you're presenting is that you need this winter in your life and you need to embrace. How do you, how do you, how do you describe getting away from the counter myth? What is that called?

Well, the becoming aware of what actions, beliefs and behaviors are dream affirmative and getting you to where you want to be so you feel good about yourself. And the story you're telling yourself matches the story you're telling other people.

You know, speaking of all the technology though, here's one of the things I see over and over again because I work with the best athletes in the world and executives of all types. You know, I'm not a cheap guy to visit because I don't want to work with people that aren't committed, but I have people coming with all those gadgets strapped to them and thousand dollars a month worth of supplements. And the question that I always ask them is, since you got all this biofeedback technology, how come you're not learning anything from it? Right? It's telling you when you're tired, it's telling when your heart rate variability is off, it's telling you everything you need to know, but you're not listening. And that's proof that a person's unconscious of their myth. And that's why I have to do work at a deeper psychological level and get into the spiritual dimensions or the psychic dimensions. Because it is the psyche that's driving the body, it is the ghost in the machine. And everyone keeps treating the machine but not recognizing its one sense of awareness of what their soul is and what their spirit is that's lacking. And so they're acting out. Usually a program story, not something that's authentically bringing them to a place of legitimate success or legitimate happiness.

A lot of people.

Whether consciously or subconsciously, seem to really want to beat themselves up, seem to really want to dig themselves into a hole, seem to want to go out on the weekends and do back to back Spartan races and cross. And don't get me wrong, you know, Ironman, Triathlons and Spartan races. They can be a ton of fun. Right? They can be a cool little feather to put in your cap. Why is it that you think, you know, I don't want to get sexist, but I know this is more common among men than women from a cultural and historical standpoint. But why is it that you think so many people in this day and age feel that urge, that desire to just go suffer and engage in these masochistic type of events?

Well, because we are tribal people. We first were nomads and we became hunters and gatherers. Then we became agrarians, and that's when all hell broke loose. But we used to live in tribal cultures that had to have a myth to teach them how to engage the world, how to understand the mysteries of life. What were the proprietaries of right and wrong? What did it mean to be an adult? What did it mean to be a warrior? Who do you engage with force? And who do you not engage with Force? And who is the chief? And in most all tribal societies during the. There's a great book that goes into this a little bit, too. It's called 10,000 years from Eden. Metabolic 10,000 years from Eden by Charles Heiser Ward.

Okay, I'll look it up and put it in the show notes.

Yeah. And he showed, for example, that it was the adults in the tribe that went out and did the hunting and gathering. And almost all the tribes could get all their needs met within about three and a half to four hours a day. But, well, those adults, which at that time would have been people, you know, between 18 and 22 or 23 years of age that were the parents of the kids, were out doing the hunting and gathering. The education was being imparted to the children by the grandparents. The wisest people in the tribe who had seen the wars, who had seen the battles, who had seen the mistakes, who had seen the cost of doing things wrong and being too aggressive and too driven to consume. And so they taught the children through singing, dancing, acting, arts, crafts and storytelling, which is how a child's brain learns the best and how most of us learn the best, which is why we love watching movies. Movies and stories. And so basically what happened is they would educate the children, but the children all had to go through a rite of passage to become a contributing adult and to be able to face the realities. In other words, at some point, the child has to come off the tit and step into their own shoes, because a tribe cannot feed enough children when they don't have enough adults. So if you don't have enough hunters and protectors and harvesters and you've got too many children, then you don't. You have too much consumption relative to productivity. So all the children had to go through a rite of passage, usually around the time of puberty. And in many of these rite of passage ceremonies, which was run by the, typically the shaman, the medicine man, the chief, and the elders of the tribe, many of the male rites of passages were things where you would be taken to the edge of your life. Literally, you could die in them.

Like what?

What's that?

Like what?

Well, they would. One of them, for example, one of the Native American ones that I've studied, there's lots of them. But the. The. All the people, all the elders in the tribe, all the adults in the tribe and elders would line up and they would create a pathway that the young. The young person going through their rite of passage would have to run through, and they would all have a big stick, and they would beat the living hell out of that person. And the person has to get through from one end to the other, and if they can't make it out the other end, and, you know, they would purposely wound them, hit them in the head, hit them in the face, but they were conscious not to do so much damage that it. It ruined the person. But they taught them that life is tough and war is tough, and you've got to get beyond yourself and be able to survive challenges and pick yourself up even when you're half conscious, just like a good fighter in a boxing or kickboxing ring has to learn to do. And if you couldn't make it through, then you were. Had to go into an extended childhood where they had to give you special counseling and support to turn you into an adult, or you were a liability of the tribe. Now, they don't do that so much with women, but in many tribes, they have brutal, brutal rites of passage for women, such as having their clitoris removed. And, you know, some of the African rituals for women are just, you know, to a Western person, they're just shocking. But a woman's rite of passage is heard here first.

Paul Chork. Check. Endorses clit removal.

No, no, Paul. Check. Endorses loving, tender compassion and honoring that.

Part of a woman. I know that. I know that's not a joking matter. I don't. I don't mean to be insensitive, but it sounds to me like what you're saying is that we in many Westernized cultures do not. I don't remember undergoing A rite of passage. No. And when I was a kid.

Right. So to finish the women, their rite of passage was having a baby. And as you know, research shows that for if a man had to go through as much pain as a woman, he would probably die. Our nervous systems aren't wired to handle that much pain. And as you know, many women do die even today giving birth. So the adult women trained the young women what it meant to be a mother, how to prepare. And then their rite of passage was giving birth. Now the women, by the way, just so you know, this is something that you might find very interesting. The Native American sweat lodge was designed by the women elders to put men into a situation because the sweat lodge represents the female womb and the process of going through carrying a baby for nine months and delivering it. So when people go into a sweat lodge, they're actually recapitulating the growth and development process of the fetus and the stress.

That a mother sweat lodge is pretty damn uncomfortable and stressful.

Exactly. And it's designed to teach a man exactly what it's like to be a woman and what she has to put up with and how much endurance she has to have and how much toughness she has to have to carry that baby and deliver it. Remember times the refrigerator wasn't always full.

Did you hear that, fellas? You guys need to all go sit in a sweat lodge.

Yes. And be ready so you know what she's going through. Don't get too cocky because you're going to get your ass handed to you and hopefully on a cold blanket if you're lucky.

Well, guys can't have babies, so what should men. Because for example, there's this concept of a vision quest.

Yes. And vision quest is different. A rite of passage means to become an adult. A vision quest means to figure out who you are as an adult and what is your unique function in the tribe and what is your unique expression of yourself that brings you into your own spiritual path of spiritual development and self expression that is uniquely aligned with your God given gifts and talents.

I asked because my kids every year go to a wilderness survival campus. It's called Twin Eagles Wilderness Survival in Idaho. And one thing that they offer when a boy is 18, up through the age of 25, I want to convince them to let my kids do it when they're maybe like 15 or 16 is they take them in, they equip them and they send them off into the wilderness for like a week just to survive on their own as a form of a vision quest. But that's not what you're saying, from what I gather. Rite of passage, let's say. Let's just use my own boys as an example. Like how, how could I put them through a rite of passage without, you know, traumatizing them?

Well, a rite of passage today means to become a man. So they have to learn to accept responsibility. They have to learn to put themselves second to the needs of the women or the needs of the family or the needs of the society or the tribe is what it would have been. They have to learn to that things can be very painful and tough and that you can't wimp out. They have to learn to face battle and face death because that's very real and it always has been real and it's very real today, especially when you got Donald Trump as your president. He's going to give us all a rite of passage ceremony if we're not careful.

So.

If I said to you, Ben, what does it mean to you to be a man? How is that different than you as a child? What would you tell me?

What's different between Ben at 35 and Ben at 14?

I provide, I protect, I procreate. I didn't make that up. Those are the three, three Ps of manhood I've seen somewhere. But that's, that's honestly the first thing that comes to mind is I do those things, those three things, and I didn't do any of those when I was 14.

And have you ever had to do any of those when you were too tired or didn't want to?

Absolutely.

Good.

Yeah.

And if you don't do it, I'm.

Doing it right now. I'm talking to you. I'd rather be sleeping.

If you don't do it, what happens to your family?

They theoretically would perish. Even though my wife is a very.

Very able woman, well, she might lose faith in her man and say, I married a boy, not a man.

Right.

Okay. And that causes a lot of problems in relationships today. So what happens when an entire culture is doing that and a culture is a bunch of people doing the same thing? So we have a culture full of children at all ages who are more interested in how pretty their boobs are, what kind of car they're driving, or their lip job, or how many clean and jerks they can do in a CrossFit contest than they do in actually caring for the planet and caring for the things that are meaningful, that are life sustaining and important. So a rite of passage means to get your head wrapped around with absolute Clarity as what you are here to give your life for and what is meaningful and to protect your loved ones and protect the earth that feeds you. Not to over consume, not to be destructive and not to go to war for foolish unintelligent means. And to invest in democracy or invest in.

Intelligent means of engaging a possible enemy instead of acting like a kid and throwing sticks and stones or bombs and weapons when we should be working things out. Because now our little toys can destroy the entire planet and kill all of us. So when you have pubescent teenage presidents and leaders of countries with nuclear weapons, we have children running a world that could be totally destructive.

So to give your bunch people sucking on a tit and holding a gun.

Yeah. Now you know if you take a 13 year out year old kid and say, now you've got to do a paper route and you got to make $1,500 a month or the family's gonna starve to death. So get your A out there. Johnny. Johnny at 13 is not ready for that kind of responsibility. That'll scare the kid to death and he will lose his sense of being a child. He won't get to play, he'll collapse into himself and he'll begin to resent responsibility and he will begin to.

That's not how to do it.

That's not how you do it. But there is a time when we all know logically that we need to teach children what it means when we have rules and they need to be adhered to. What it means to do things like drinking cars, drinking and driving cars or playing with firearms or all the things you see in the news every day. And so it takes a man to create a rite of passage because only a man knows how to be a man and we lack men. And taking your kids off into the wilderness and teaching them what it's like to be hungry and to have the responsibility of figuring out how to feed yourself and to study what is edible and what is not edible, knowing that if you eat the wrong thing, you could die out there. Those are legitimate rites of passages to give a child a progressive increase in responsibility. So your paper route now is what you got to do to get toys. We're not just going to throw money at you. And Santa Claus isn't just going to come out of the sky. And for my son, I said, I'm going to meet you halfway. You want to buy this $200 remote control car, then you're going to earn it. This way you're going to go out and collect cans or you're going to do things for your dad. So my son used to make money by going to the medical library. I'd give him a list of 100 research papers that I need and the journal titles, and he would go research them out, get them out of the library, photocop them. I'd pay him a dollar an article. And so he would come back, he would spend his entire weekend and bring me back 100 research papers, and I would give him 100 bucks.

I love it.

I do the same with my kids. If they want to buy a Lego that they have, they have two jobs. They are in charge of photographing, cleaning, listing, and showing guests when they rent their room on Airbnb, that's one of their jobs. And then there are others that they have a podcast and they have to do the research for the podcast. They have a virtual assistant who they meet with. They have the recordings that they do. And so for basically the deal between me and my kids is if they ever want a book, aside from Frickin Captain Underpants or Diary of a Wimpy Kid, I will buy a book for them. But they know that books are something. They ask me for a book, boom, it's done. If it's a legitimate book, I will buy it, no questions asked, because they know how highly I value books. Anything else, they got to bring money to the table, they need to contribute. So that's. You're saying that's an acceptable, like, miniature rite of passage.

Rite of passage. And then I think that men need to be exposed to.

The rigors of real work. When I was a young man, I had to work when I was tired, I had to work when I had blisters. I had to do things that were uncomfortable. And my father did not accept expensive excuses. And you did it or there was consequences.

You're keep a lot of social workers in business, man.

And, and so. But this has to be done intelligently or it's child abuse. And that's why I say it takes a man to make a man. You can't have an idiot making men or you make idiots. And we have plenty of that. Now, to give you an example of what a rite of passage isn't. To give a contrast, when my son went to high school, he was a high school wrestler. And I remember he went to La Jolla High School here in San Diego, which is where a lot of the rich kids are. Rancho Santa Fe and La Jolla is full of the rich kids. And I remember the first time my son went to La Jolla High School. He came back to me, he said, dad, you would not believe it. These kids are driving Porsches, Corvettes. He said, you walk into the parking lot, it's like a showroom for exotic cars. He said, there is cocaine floating around in the hallways. These kids have credit cards, they have exotic cell phones, they've got exotic clothes. The Girls are wearing $500 shoes and dresses. And that is not a rite of passage. That is how you keep a child codependent on mommy and Daddy. And unfortunately, mommy and daddy are trying to shape their kids into exactly some kind of a copy of themselves, but not realizing that by giving all that to them, they have no respect for money, they have no respect for responsibility. And so they end up hiring expensive lawyers to bail their kid out of jail because they got crashed their car, stoned out of their mind, and killed somebody else. And all that stuff. That's the opposite of a rite of passage. But unfortunately, it turns out to be a rite of passage, doesn't it?

Absolutely.

The hard way.

Yeah.

Unskilled, unintelligent.

And so I can't wait to see how your little boy turns out.

Well, my little boy will be just like your little boys. He'll be out in the woods learning survival skills and getting hungry and facing the bears and learning how to use force.

And I don't know how he's gonna survive. Man, he's gonna suck a candy crush.

He's gonna. He's gonna get into martial arts training not to be a badass, but to learn how to manage himself and to learn the rules of the game and to learn how to use force with empathy and compassion for the enemy. Not to disable or harm, but to create safety and security for himself. And this. You know, your question's really pointing to this. We have so many people out there torturing themselves with exercise, doing stupid things and burning themselves out. And look how big my dick is. Look at how all my tattoos. Look how big my bench press is. Look. You know, and all that stuff's fine when you're youthful, but if you're not careful, you don't learn the function of exercise. You don't learn when enough is enough. And what should be used as a growth and development process turns into a bunch of teenagers that are 45 trying to show off who's got the biggest this or the fastest that. And then we have a world that doesn't understand the use of food, exercise, diet, lifestyle, entertainment, sex, drugs, or rock and roll. And we're right where we are today. And the point being is that it was the job of the grandparents, of the elders and the tribal leaders to stabilize that and distinguish. When is giving too much to a child dangerous? And when is not giving a child enough dangerous? When is working hard enough that you have to push yourself into the very depths of yourself important? For example, you know, I come from a farm and if my father cut the hay and all of a sudden bad weather was coming and it was the rain for four or five days on Vancouver around, which is very common, if we had to get that hay up out of that field, and it meant we had to work day and night for three days in a row on minimal sleep, you either get that hay off the ground and into the barn or you lose your entire crop. And that's thousands and thousands of dollars that mom and dad have to come up with to feed the animals. And the farm collapses. So there's a real example of becoming a man. And it's. It was our parents and our elders whose job it was to teach us when to tap into ourselves, but also how to manage ourselves. So that when wars, famines and tough times came, we had something to give. But what do we have today? We got a world full of so called athletes constantly drinking monster Red Bull, shooting up with all sorts of steroids, and all of this just to look cool and try to get some attention. And then when the real responsibility comes, there's nobody to pay the bills or they're dragging behind, or when it comes time to make love to mama, their penis won't work because they left it in the gym. And so these are real, real challenges that lead to an abuse of a lot of medical drugs, a lot of recreational drugs, and cause a lot of broken relationships. And I think we can guys like me and you, it's our job as leaders in the community to stand up and be an example for others to follow and learn from the mistakes. And I shared the mistake that I made that helped me see when too much fire is burning in you, but only because I did that to myself. And so our job is to try to be a light to others who are ready to really achieve true mastery and become a whole person, not a moron with muscles.

I agree. And to help people prepare for the zombie apocalypse by the sounds of it.

Well, you know, I like to think positive. I believe in creativity. But I think the fact that you and I are sitting here discussing this is, is a fact that the tribal elders are at work right now.

Yes, I agree. I agree. And this podcast, just like the One before only scratched the surface of your knowledge. You've shown me reams and reams, literally 20 years. You know, you're like a, you're not a hidden gem, but you're, you're a gem that I think enough people don't know about everything from your, your holistic practitioner program to all the different certs that you offer.

I've got links in the show notes for you, for y' all listening. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com PaulCheck2 that's Paul. Check the number two. The last time that I interviewed Paul, what I gave to you guys from Paul was the ability to be able to get a lesson of his holistic lifestyle coach certification program for free. It's his level one. It's called the HLC program. If you want to just kind of tap into a little bit of the program where he goes over what he calls the primal pattern, his check zone exercises, how to apply long term body, mind changes, a whole bunch of very, very cool things. And Paul and I are even trying to, trying to figure out ways we can work, work more together. So you're probably going to see a lot more of Paul as you listen to the podcast. But then the other thing is that we're going to give you this cool little PDF that Paul made that lets you tie together the Dr. Diet, the Dr. Quiet, the Dr. Happiness, and the Dr. Movement that he describes so that you can better wrap your head around what the details of each of those are. It's called the Check Healthy Core Cycle and it's a PDF that you normally have to pay to get through his program, but we're just going to give it to you for free for listening. It's got some very cool simple exercises you can do in it to do things like ensure that your transversus abdominis is activated properly. Little kite string trick that I learned from Paul that I personally do at my desk a few times a week now, some very simple lower abdominal exercises, things that seem like they'd be pretty simple to do will make a big change in your breathing patterns, your oxygenation, a whole lot more. So I'm going to put links to all that stuff. If you just go to two ways to get it. Go to the show Notes if you want to, to access all the things we talked about, the book, the, you know, the vision quest in Idaho, all those things we talked about, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com PaulCheck the number two PaulCheck two and you can also just go to BenGreenfieldFitness dot com checkinstitute if you just want to dive right into some of the stuff that, that Paul does, some of what he teaches. Especially like if you're a freaking personal trainer or physical therapist or a chiropractic doc or an MD or an ND or a. Do I think that any of you should highly consider going through his program? Because I've looked at it and I can tell you what, if I had a doctor and I looked at their resume and I saw that they were a check practitioner, I wouldn't even ask any questions. I'd go in hands down because.

I've got a lot of trust in this guy. And Paul, I know this, this might sound like I'm blowing smoke, but I've been told that you're the. How old are you?

56.

That you're the 56 year old version of me. Awesome as people say that.

Well, that's a compliment to both of us.

I profess to be where you're at.

You've got more hair than these. So you're doing something.

I've got a lot more hair and a lot fewer BICs.

Yeah. So, hey, I love you, man. And thank you for being a wise elder and leading by example.

I love you too, Paul. Thanks for coming on the show, man.

My pleasure. And thank you all for listening. And let's all work together to make the world a more beautiful place for everybody. And learn to use exercise scientifically, but creatively, too. Use food and rest beautifully and make life more of an art form than something that we survive out of ignorance.

Go list some heavy rocks. All right, guys, thanks for tuning in.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.

Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.