Diamond Dallas Page - Be Positively Unstoppable: How To Master The Art of Owning It

Full transcript: Diamond Dallas Page on London Real

2:41 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Diamond Dallas Page, the former professional wrestler, actor, and founder of DDP Yoga. You started your professional wrestling career late in life, at age 35, and eight years later you won the World Wrestling Heavyweight title, becoming one of the oldest champions in history. Known for your unrivaled work ethic, determination, and passion, you were inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2017.

3:08 You have since starred in 15 feature films and appeared in 18 wrestling video games. Your book, Positively Unstoppable, encourages readers to eliminate excuses and take control over their lives. Your interest in yoga started after a major back surgery, and you credit the practice with transforming your life. You went on to create DDP Yoga, a revolutionary approach to fitness that combines the best of yoga positions, sports rehab therapy, old-school calisthenics, and dynamic resistance.

3:36 To date, you’ve helped thousands to overcome injury, obesity, and other physical limitations.

3:42 Brian Rose: Diamond Dallas Page: Welcome to London Real, man.

3:45 Diamond Dallas Page: It’s good to be here, man. I think it’s been really good to be here. I appreciate you thinking of me.

3:52 Brian Rose: Bro, no, it’s my pleasure. I’ve been following your stuff for years and I’m a big fan of your message, the positivity, and also just your incredible system. It’s great stuff. I’m on the app and I plan to use it a lot over the next couple of weeks, because we just got put in lockdown here, and unfortunately they don’t think gyms are an essential service. I disagree.

4:13 Which means I’m gonna have basically my stairwell and running as my options, but now I’ve got DDP Yoga, so we’ll talk about that later, because I want to know exactly where I need to go. But this is perfect timing. You know, I wanted to start off and tell you my brief journey with yoga, because I think you’re going to be able to chime in. You know, and maybe also tell me your journey. But you know, I didn’t get real about my body till I was like in my early 30s, and then I finally stopped the party and started taking things seriously.

4:41 But I got into the martial arts and the tough guy stuff and the big lifts. You know what I’m talking about, right? What are you squatting? Yeah, I do. Right, right.

4:49 You mentioned that kind of thing, and that’s a good route, but it’s a young man’s game, and you get to a point where you’re like, why am I doing this? Like, why am I trying to bench a house? And, luckily, one of my guests on the show was Dorian Yates. He’s a six-time Mr. Olympia. You know, probably one of the top five bodybuilders of all time, and he invited me down to Spain, and you know, Dorian’s a little bit older now, and he said, “Brian, I want you to train yoga with me, and this is a guy who used to be, you know, 270 pounds on stage with four percent body fat, and now when a lot of those guys are injured, and we’ve had Ronnie Coleman on here, and he’s going through lots of surgeries.

5:27 Dorian now does yoga. He can do the splits, and he actually walked me through a practice on the beach in Marbella, and it was an amazing thing, and his teacher took me through it. I got a little teared up because it can be an emotional experience, as you know. And I started a journey on yoga, but I got to tell you, Dallas, you know, I tried it, and I got some great things out of it, but it got to a point where I didn’t want to go to the usual class. I didn’t want to get adjusted, and I got a little frustrated, and I kind of wanted to go back and do something with a different energy.

5:59 I wanted to kind of punch a bag. So I stopped training yoga a couple years ago, but I miss what it gave me, but I also didn’t want to do it in the style that it’s typically taught. If that makes sense. And so it’s great that you’re coming in right now, because I kind of want to get back into it, and you offer a completely different take on yoga. You look at it through a different lens, and maybe you could explain it to people who maybe are watching us that would never think about doing yoga, or people that think yoga is one thing.

6:28 You’ve actually just completely turned it on its head, so maybe you can tell us a bit about it.

6:35 Diamond Dallas Page: Well, for starters, to really understand where I come from, because I am the guy who wouldn’t be caught dead doing yoga the first 42 years of my life. It’s just, it was not something that Diamond Dallas Page was ever gonna do, or Joseph Faulkenberg, my original name, was ever gonna do. To really understand my journey, you gotta understand I didn’t start wrestling until I was 35.

7:03 My career didn’t take off till I was 40. And the only reason it ever took off was because I had all that experience three years earlier as a manager and a color commentator. So I already was feeling my way around the business and understanding the psychology of it, and when my career took off at the end of 1996, I was 40, man, and by the time 1997 came around, 1998, 1999, I mean, I went from the bottom of the card and probably around ’95 I was at the bottom of the middle of the card, and by ’97 I was in 13 out of 24 either main events on pay-per-view or, you know, semi-main, but always in the top three matches.

7:51 And when you’re working at that level, you’re wrestling, people think, they see it on TV, oh, they wrestle once a week and a pay-per-view. No, we wrestle sometimes 24, 25 days a month, and then travel 100,200, 300 miles, hop in a plane, fly across country or fly to the UK or fly wherever, hop in the car, drive 100,200, 300 miles. I mean, the road is brutal, but when you’re on top, you’re not just doing the wrestling and the road work. I was on the Tonight Show, Craig Kilborn, Hollywood Squares.

8:32 I did a movie called Rat Race. I mean, I was working so much, but you’re riding this tsunami that you never thought was ever going to get there, because when I tried to wrestle at 35, I had friends fall down laughing. Like, I’m talking about guys in the business, or we call ourselves the boys. Like, just are you crazy, you’ll never be able to do it. By the time you start to figure it out, you’ll be way too old.

8:59 And I was the king of holding back the hands of time. My first day in the Power Plant, where I started learning how to wrestle, I left with ice bags on my knees and on my back. I would take that on the road, and everybody looked at me and were like, what do you put ice on your body for? To take down the inflammation. You know, I was the first guy to do chiropractic every single week, uh, Vlad kinesiology, acupuncture twice a month, uh, organic eating, eating real food.

9:38 Like I’m talking about food that’s organic, no GMOs. I mean, I was ahead of the time. When all of that, that’s what helped me to stay young. But coming into 1999, I had just signed a multi-million dollar three-year deal, and I had a match, it was a tag match, and Kevin Nash powerbombed me, and he wasn’t trying to hurt me by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn’t that bump.

10:08 It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and the spine that God gave us, these vertebrae, in between them are these amazing things. They’re called discs. They’re like shock absorbers. Well, think of a disc being a jelly donut, and you step on it. That’s what happened to my L4 and L5, the discs between them.

10:32 And so, and let me just,

10:34 Brian Rose: and Dallas, let me ask you a question for people that don’t understand what professional wrestling really is, because some people say, okay, yeah, it’s not real, but the damage you guys take is more than a professional fighter. Right?

10:50 Diamond Dallas Page: A hundred percent. Now, all you have to do is think of it like this. You’re watching a cowboy movie, and the guy gets shot and he falls off the horse.

11:01 Was it real? Did he get shot? No. Did he fall off the horse? Yes.

11:07 Is he experienced at that? Yes. You can’t fake gravity. No, you know because you’re gonna fall. So all those falls, you can’t fake gravity, and even when you’re trying not to hurt each other when the red light is on, meaning the camera is on, that’s red light fever.

11:28 And guys are coming in, you know, as they get older, you can see they’re trying to hold back a little more because they don’t want to get hurt. But when you’re younger and you’re jazzed up, man, something, I ran nightclubs since I was 23 years old, and when you’re running a nightclub, you’re still a bouncer, you know, and I can’t tell you how many brawls I’ve been in to get people out or whatever, because I worked in stuff, from biker bars to high-class bars, but still, someone gets drunk and they’re getting thrown out. The worst fights I’ve ever been in is professional wrestling.

12:03 And we know who’s going to win. Wait, I don’t want to spoil that for anybody. Wrestling is no, but you can’t fake gravity, and that’s where the really brutal part comes in. And going into 1999, I ruptured my L4 and L5, and I had three spine specialists tell me I’m done. You had a hell of a run, but you’re done.

12:31 And I had just signed that multi-million dollar contract, and if I didn’t wrestle within six months, that contract was gone. So I never, in ’97 and ’98 when I headlined, I, I can’t even tell you how many, you know, Monday Nitros or Thunders. I can’t even tell you how many of those I headlined and main evented, but pay-per-views was like 13, 12, or 13 in 24 months. So I was working with all the top seven-figure guys. I was making a quarter of a million dollars, which is a lot of money, but for where I was at, that was like nothing.

13:13 And now I finally got paid, and now they’re telling me my career is over. And my wife at the time, Kimberly, she was trying to talk me into yoga, and I was like, F that. I ain’t doing yoga. You know, I’m just, I’m that guy. About three days after I went to the third spine specialist, and he’s like, you’re done.

13:35 We can’t. Can we fuse the back? Fusing really wasn’t that good 25 years ago. You know, so he said, by the time you get healed, if you, you know, it’s just, you’re too old, too old to do that. So Kimberly finally talked me into doing yoga.

13:54 And we’re using a Yoga Bhs tapes. There’s Brian Kest, great guy, today he’s one of my friends, but back then he didn’t have anybody who did modifications. So everybody’s like Gumby, like they’re super yogis, and Kimberly’s killing it, but I am so frustrated because there was no modifications. But very early, I started to feel, even though I couldn’t do it, I had to modify it. I started to feel my body.

14:27 Like I could feel a little bit of flexibility come back. I could feel a little bit of strength coming back, and within the first three weeks, I felt a significant difference. Now, the whole time I’m doing rehab for my back. I’ve rehabbed both shoulder surgeries and both knee surgeries, so I know a lot about rehab. So one night, I’m still doing the rehab and I’m doing the yoga, and one day I mix them right before I went to bed.

14:59 I’ll never forget, Kimberly walked by me. She goes, wow, you’re really getting serious about this now. I’m about a month in, and I’m like, I’m getting back in that ring. She goes, well, you know, you do what you got to do. And then I added in old-school calisthenics, starting with a slow burn movement, and then I added in dynamic resistance, which is just time under tension.

15:22 Weight lifting would be considered time under tension. If you grab two dumbbells and you got five pounds, you can just do this all day long. But if you got 45 pounds, you go from doing this to really having to lift, and you’re not just engaging your biceps. You’re engaging your fingers, your hand, your forearm, your shoulder, your traps, your feet, your calves, your quads, your glutes. If you are wearing a heart monitor before you started doing curls, maybe your heart rate would be 72 or 85 or 92.

16:01 After that set, it’s gonna be like 120,130. You’re never going to really know it. You’re sweating, but you don’t really put that together like you would running or doing StairMaster. You see, what I figured out is every time you flex or engage a muscle, your heart has to be faster to get the blood to the muscle. So what I created, completely by accident, Brian, is DDPY, and I’m calling it DDPY today.

16:35 I’m branding it that way, why? Because I want people to stop calling it just yoga, because it’s not. It’s such a fusion of things. But today, what I created, DDPY, is kick-ass cardio, and I put a heart monitor on you that goes right to the app that comes right up on your screen, so you know where you are in your zone. That’s kick-ass cardio.

17:03 Dramatically increase your flexibility. How? By breaking up scar tissue, which also alleviates pain and creates mobility, so kick-ass cardio. You go, dramatically increase your flexibility, strengthen your core at a whole different level. Now, here’s the real kicker: minimal joint impact in less than three months.

17:30 I was back in the ring. Now I had to go see my doctor, who had my Lloyd’s of London policy. I had to go back to see him to get cleared before WCW would let me come back to work. And he said, in three months, he had never seen anyone recover like where I was. Now I started with 20 minutes, and then I did 20 minutes later, and then the next day I might do 25, and ending at 25, before you knew it, I was doing that.

18:07 The last three weeks, I was doing three hours a day, not at one time. I broke it up. Here’s my job: get your body fit so you can go out and bang around out there. At 42, they said my career was over. At 43, I was a heavyweight champ in the world.

18:28 And what that means, so people go, that’s wrestling. It’s faith. That’s an Oscar for us. That’s what this right here, that’s what this is. Uh-oh, it’s like an Oscar for us, right?

18:44 It means everyone, everyone in the organization says, guess what? DDP earned it. He put in the work, and he’s good enough that we’re gonna give him the belt, right? And I got it three different times, and no one had ever gotten it. The oldest guy up to me was Sergeant Slaughter, and he was 41.

19:06 But no one had ever started where I started, from obscurity, as a manager and a color commentator. I mean, those guys, and God bless them, the guys beat the hell out of me in the beginning, and I mean, really, they didn’t try to, like, break my neck or put me in the hospital, but it’s not checkers out there. We’re really hitting each other, not in the face, like that’s a T-zone. Don’t hit each other in the face, but it happens, but it’s a show. It’s a show, and it lets people, you know, instead of just watching the TV, or watching a movie and yelling at the movie, to yell at people and scream, and that’s why the fans, they’re like the third person in the ring.

19:52 They are a part of the show, and that’s what I love about wrestling so much. Is that people will let you know who’s over. And I created a sign when I would come out. I’d throw this up over my head, and they didn’t really see anything. The meaning, the writers, the booking committee, they didn’t see anything in the 35, 36, 37, 38-year-old guy.

20:18 They didn’t see anything, but I created a move, which was called the Diamond Cutter that came out of nowhere, and people want to be surprised. If they want that surprise. If they don’t want that surprise, they don’t want to be surprised. Uh, but with my move, it would make the crowd pop and scream and jump out of their seats, because I never did it the same way twice in a row. I developed like 50 different ways into it, and it made it just pop the crowd.

20:54 And I actually worked with AEW, because that’s a new company, where WCW used to be. Vince McMahon owns everything, but he doesn’t own AEW, and AEW is owned by Tony Khan, who owns the Jacksonville Jaguars. Well, Cody Rhodes, Dusty Rhodes’s son, and I always say without Dusty Rhodes there is no Diamond Dallas Page. I’ve been mentoring his son Cody since he was 12. Now he runs AEW.

21:28 And so I went and wrestled one time, and it was magic.

21:32 Brian Rose: Okay, let me ask you a question, Dallas. What can the world learn from wrestling? I mean, if you look at what happened to mixed martial arts from wrestling. I mean, you saw the UFC, really, that the stars adopted a lot of stuff from wrestling, right?

21:50 I mean, all the talking. Chael Sonnen came, and then we thought Chael was crazy, and then Conor McGregor took it to the next level. I mean, come on. As an old-school wrestling guy, to watch that sport kind of adopt your shtick, what was that like to watch, and how well did they do it?

22:09 Diamond Dallas Page: Um, I thought those guys were unbelievable.

22:12 Now, there’s also a lot of brotherhood in MMA, as you know, uh, and a lot of them just go for the, uh, personal, you know, “We love you, brother, I’m gonna beat the hell out of you, but I love you, respect you.” There’s a lot of that too, but that doesn’t draw money. Yeah, that doesn’t really draw money. Um, now let’s go back a step. The guy in boxing who did it all at its highest level is Muhammad Ali, right?

22:39 You know, but where did he learn that? If you watch enough interviews about Ali, you will hear him say, “I took it from Gorgeous George.” He was getting interviewed in Las Vegas for a fight he had coming up, and Gorgeous George was in the radio station, and they had speakers on, and he was, I mean, of course he was a huge fan. I have a picture.

23:04 Brian Rose: Who is Gorgeous George?

23:06 Brian Rose: Dallas, who’s Gorgeous George?

23:08 Diamond Dallas Page: Gorgeous George was one of the biggest one of the biggest names in professional wrestling. He put professional wrestling on the map in the ’50s when television came on the scene. Okay, wrestling was one of the huge things about it. Now, this guy was in movies, like, starring Gorgeous George.

23:32 It was kind of like what happened with Hulk, and now who’s the biggest star in the world today?

23:39 Brian Rose: Oh, The Rock, right?

23:41 Diamond Dallas Page: One of us got it. I’m out. Muhammad Ali is my hero growing up as a kid, right?

23:47 I get to meet him. It was a really big deal while we were there, and he still could talk pretty decent. And he says, “Lock up, Diamond,” and he calls the lockup. “How sweet is that, hero locking up with me?” It was magic.

24:08 Brian Rose: So George kind of started off that whole what do you call it, smack talking? What is it?

24:14 Diamond Dallas Page: I think it’s, there’s better than, and there’s less than, and there’s different then, and the guys who are different, then they stand out, and when they’re great, they really say that. George did things like, he went in the ’50s and would get rollers put in his hair. He would wear the robes, and he had a guy spraying perfume as he walked into the ring in the ’50s.

24:41 I’ll tell you how over Gorgeous George was. He demanded 25% of the gate, not the net gate. The gate made $10,000. He walked out with $2,500. Would you be, like, walking out with $25,000?

25:00 You know, George was crazy, crazy over, and Muhammad Ali took that stick, and then after that, it was like everybody, Yo, Dusty Rhodes, Superstar Billy Graham, Uh, Terry Funk, Ric Flair. I mean, these guys, it’s just, it’s sick talking, you know, and making sure that you don’t, uh, you know, you’ll throw in a or an F-bomb.

25:28 Brian Rose: Right? Exactly. You got to watch that.

25:31 Brian Rose: And who does it best in in mixed martial arts, in your opinion?

25:36 Diamond Dallas Page: I thought Chael, I’ll tell you what, McGregor and Chael. I had to cut coin toss, but I really liked Chael because he had a cadence. I mean, you know, he loved professional wrestling. Uh, I don’t know if Conor did or not.

25:51 Kind of just being Conor, amped up, you know. I mean, you know, he’s, you know, he’s the real deal. And, uh, so Chael, but I really thought that Shale could have made the swing into professional wrestling, but he was super beat up at the end of his career, you know, and now you got to go wrestle 24, 25, sometimes 26 days in a month, and then do it all over again. When I was on Hollywood Squares, some of the people who were stars, you know, were sitting around grabbing some lunch, and someone goes, so wrestling, when is your season off?

26:28 And I said, when we get hurt.

26:30 Brian Rose: Yeah, now, well said. You mean injured?

26:34 Diamond Dallas Page: I don’t mean, oh, you say, I shouldn’t. I started, when we get injured, I said, not when we’re hurt.

26:42 Most of us who are over 35 are always hurt. Always. It’s a knee, a back, a hip, a shoulder, your neck, whatever.

26:51 Brian Rose: Yeah, and so you’re right. Chael Sonnen had that wrestling-esque part of him.

26:57 Sometimes he would make, I don’t know if he ever rhymed, but he might have rhymed. He made these bold statements, and then he would kind of like leave. But, um, I agree, but he was the first time we saw that in mixed martial arts, because usually it had that martial arts code, that budo, respect thing, which, which is great, but like you said, it doesn’t sell tickets. And at the end of the day, it’s entertainment too, and I think the UFC had to kind of find its way to understand that, you know, because like I said, it’s based in martial arts, but Chael took it to one level, and then McGregor took it to the next level.

27:30 But like you said, I think it was him being him, and then you saw guys try to copy it, but if they’re not congruent with it, if they don’t really believe it, the public knows it’s not true. Right?

27:43 Diamond Dallas Page: A hundred percent. Now, those are real guys too. Right?

27:46 So just imagine that you get to go out there, and no matter who you’re fighting, like, if you can knock him out, you knock him out, and you get to back up what you say. And professional wrestling, I get told, make that guy get your stuff in, we make that guy look good. How do you get over? If you really look at my career and where I was, and the bookers, we call them, not believing in me, and where I got to, man, I, it was getting the fans involved. And I wasn’t trying to be a good guy.

28:21 I was being a bad guy, because being a bad guy is a lot of fun, but when you get the people behind you, man, there ain’t nothing like it, man, because wrestling fans, they’ll run through fire for you. Yeah, and that’s some kind, that’s when I first started, like I said, DDP got me back in the ring in three months. Now, if I had TV that day, we get there at 12, I might leave at 12, because if I’m in the main event by the time that goes on, that’s 10:30. So by the time I get out of the ring, calm down, take a shower, get ready, I’m walking out the door at 12 o’clock at night, you know, on to the next town.

29:04 But, you know, I, during those days, I would do it again, three hours, because I’m in my 40s, and I’m about to go out there and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I work like I was in my 20s. When I say work, I mean performed like I was in my 20s, but because my body was so warmed up, and I was eating the most nutritional food. By the time I was 43, my daughter Brittany was making me, and you see it everywhere now, cold-press organic juice.

29:41 Brian Rose: So you’re way ahead of the curve, 1999.

29:44 Wow, yeah.

29:45 Diamond Dallas Page: My brother Rory, he’s the one who got me into it, and I would if you just, whoa, you’re juicing. Yeah, drink it within 25 minutes, or it starts to degrade, starts losing its vitamins, because of the air and because of whatever. But when you cold-press it, it’ll last three days in your refrigerator, but you can freeze it for three months. So my daughter would make me literally gallons, but all in Cool containers like this, and we’d fill them up, and I’d leave, and I’d freeze them and bring them on the road with me, and as I throw ice on them,

30:18 Brian Rose: and I want, I want to definitely get into the, I want to get into the nutrition component of DDPY for sure.

30:25 Brian Rose: Just to finish with wrestling, what can we all learn from wrestling? Like you said, I think one of the things I learned today was, it, you, there’s better, there’s more or less, and different. So if you can’t be more, you want to be different. That’s one thing. But what else can we learn?

30:41 Like, everybody learn, is it all about, it’s a show, is everything a show? Is it all about hype? I don’t know, you tell me.

30:51 Diamond Dallas Page: I’ll tell you what you learned. 90% of those guys, when they first started, and I don’t mean the Hulk Hogans or the Brock Lesnars or the Kurt Angles, I’m talking about the Edge, Adam Copeland, Jay Reso, who was Christian, Diamond Dallas Page, Daniel Bryan, Eddie Guerrero, Rey Mysterio.

31:15 Every one of those, every one of those guys were told they were crazy, that they would never get to the show. All those guys I just named, they’re all either Hall of Famers or future Hall of Famers. They believe in themselves. It’s the Rudy effect. Okay, I’m training Rudy right now, the Rudy from Notre Dame.

31:46 The Rudy effect: being told, are you crazy, you’re never going to be able to do that, or they laugh at you because they don’t see the vision. That’s owning it, that’s owning it at a different level, when you are able to push off the naysayers, and that could be your mom or your dad, that could be your wife, that could be your uncle, your best friends, and they’re telling you, part of it is they don’t want to see you disappointed, but that’s how you get to where you’re going. No one gets immediate fame, money, drinking, respect.

32:28 You gotta earn it all, and you gotta put the work in. Ryan, inside my Hall of Fame ring, the inscription says, “Work ethic equals dreams.” Exclamation point, DDP. And I think when people look at a Rey Mysterio or Eddie Guerrero or Diamond Dallas Page or Daniel Bryan and they go, wow, those guys made it up to the tippy-top of the card. They made millions of dollars, but they did what they love to do.

33:04 And when I was out in Hollywood and I was trying to, you know, I’m going to school with Skip Howard, fine, great acting coach. I’m out there, and this one producer wants to meet me, because a lot of people want to meet me when I first got out there, because they were fans. And this guy hadn’t done anything in a while, but I went to see him, because there’s no bad meetings, right? And uh, he said to me at one time, he said, “So let me get this straight, you captured lightning in a bottle, like your career, you said it yourself, you were the anomaly.

33:42 You said it never should have happened, but it did.” He said, “You caught lightning in a bottle. Now you come out here and you think you’re gonna do it again?” He goes, “This is like a trillion to one. What he goes, the odds of you ever pulling this off, or, you know, are most likely never gonna happen.”

34:00 And I said, well, I don’t even remember his last name. I remember his first name was John. I said, well, John, I have to disagree with you. He said, really, and why would you disagree with me? With everything I’ve done, why would you disagree with me?

34:14 I said, because I know how I did it the first time. You know, I didn’t just, it didn’t just happen to me. I put the work in at a completely different level, and right now, well, coming in the next year, I’ve got my own show coming out, and it’s a very dark superhero show that will be on Netflix. It took 22 years to get here. Now, will it explode?

34:42 Who knows. You never know what’s going to hit, but it’s a lead and it’s with a lot of actors that are really good, and the storyline is amazing, and it’s never been done before. So it’s that work ethic and determination, which I guess all wrestlers have.

34:57 Brian Rose: You know, you mentioned The Rock. You know, I remember when The Rock was in London, I think, about 15, 16 years ago, and he had just started his acting career, and I think he was in some bad movies, you know, like Daddy Daycare, or something, and I remember he came to the gym, and someone’s like, The Rock is over there training, and he was a real quiet, focused guy, getting his workout in, and everyone thought he was crazy.

35:22 I think people forget when he crossed over to Hollywood, it was not happening in the first few years, but now look at him, you know, he’s one of the biggest stars in the world. Is that something that’s bred into you guys as wrestlers, where you go and you were taught, like you said, you got to make it happen through grind, grind, grind, belief, determination, putting in the work every day? I mean, are you not surprised when someone like The Rock makes it, because that’s how he made it in wrestling?

35:49 Diamond Dallas Page: I, I, I wasn’t surprised, because that guy is a visionary, you know, and I use Rudy as an example, and a lot of people go, wow, that movie is so inspirational. If you haven’t seen Rudy, read it, go on your streamer, look it up. It’s super inspirational, but the real story was, Rudy got that movie made, and that is next to impossible to actually happen, but he was the driving force that got the movie made. And when you go back and look at it, so, wait, we’re gonna make a movie about a guy who had one tackle in one game?

36:27 We’re gonna make a movie about that guy. That’s not the movie. That’s the payoff. The movie’s the journey. It’s all about the journey, and The Rock’s journey is amazing.

36:40 He might have been a head step ahead, because his dad was Rocky Johnson, the first Black tag team world champions. His uncle was Peter Maivia, who was a top legendary Hawaiian wrestler. So he had that, but the people, they pushed, Vince pushed him down people’s throat, and they booed him. They would chant, “Rocky sucks,” like this cat. I mean, he’s, I think, one of the smartest and best performers I’ve ever seen, that can do just, can do everything.

37:20 I’m not just saying everything, can do everything. He’s hosted, and this was where he really got his boost when he hosted Saturday Night Live. That’s no easy cure. He’s coming out of our world, he’s never done anything like that, and he killed it, and now that’s how I saw he was singing and dancing and killing it on Saturday Night Live, and now literally, he’s not one of, he is the highest-paid star in the world, but he’s not just doing that. He’s doing TV with Ballers.

38:02 He’s doing reality, uh, competition shows that he’s hosting. He’s got this new, uh, plate that would have happened this October. It’s called Athletic Car, and he wants to make it bigger than the Arnold. You know, he wants to make it. He’s just in everything, and he’s got, I have the craziest work ethic on the planet, but I’m sicker to be 65 in five months.

38:30 You know, so The Rock’s only 46, and he is a steamroller. And again, I put something out. He had two weeks in a row about nine months ago, or so, that, uh, two weeks in a row, number one. His movie was, and I just went on, left a video, and we made something really cool to, you know, just put them over and say, dude, just want to say, super proud of you, keep up the great work, because he’s one of us. He wrote back a tweet on Twitter that was like, wow, he took the time to write that.

39:06 Brian Rose: Wow.

39:06 Diamond Dallas Page: And I know he’s got his people, but he oversees everything, like that, you know. So it was really cool, but again, my acting career is something I’ve been working on for 22 years, and you mentioned earlier I’ve got that number of films you know, that I’ve done, a lot of them no one’s ever seen. But that’s all the practice, you know. There’s a lot of matches no one’s ever seen that I have in the meantime.

39:32 I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy. I knew it was going to take time, and that’s when I started to focus on what today is known as DDPY, DDP Yoga, because I could control that. I could put the work in. No one’s going to tell me what I can or can’t do. And Brian, I was $548,000 in of my own money before I made a dime, eight years.

40:03 Again, just like it was in wrestling, it took eight years for DDPY to start to become a household name. Eight years to be an overnight success. Isn’t that crazy?

40:14 Brian Rose: Isn’t that crazy, because you look like an overnight success. You know, when people look at your Wikipedia page, they’re like, oh, this guy blew up in wrestling, and then from there he immediately did DDPY, and now he’s on Netflix.

40:30 Diamond Dallas Page: But it’s not like that, and I think it’s important for people to know that you got to believe in yourself. A lot of times your friends and family actually just don’t believe in you. They’re not the ones that support you. A lot of times they’re the ones that are thinking, you know what, honey, maybe you should just walk away from the half a million and go do something normal. But you got to have vision and focus to push through.

40:52 Brian Rose: A hundred percent. I mean, it’s like, owning it. Positively Unstoppable. You brought the book up earlier. The art of owning it.

41:02 Diamond Dallas Page: It is that six-inch piece of real estate in between your ears, the story you tell yourself. That voice, that’s, you know, so many times, like when I blew my back out, and those three spine specialists told me my career is over. The emotional gravity inside me sucked me down, and for about a week, it was probably the longest ever, because if I ever get bummed out or start feeling a little depressed, it’s like a couple of hours and I pull myself out of it.

41:37 But this was a really big deal, like everybody said I couldn’t do it. You know, and they said that my whole life. But, you know, when I started doing the yoga, I knew it was helping me, but I knew it wasn’t everything I needed, and that’s where the whole DDPY thing comes from. That I, I just knew that if it was ever going to happen, I was going to have to make it my own. But the biggest thing I had to stop doing was emotional gravity.

42:15 I had to stop with a negative talk. Like an example would be when I went up for my Hall of Fame ring. I hadn’t been in front of a crowd like that in 15 years, we’re talking about 20,000 people in an arena. When we do our Hall of Fame, millions of people watch it on USA and on a WWE Network, and I could have been in my head. What was I thinking, writing a 27-minute speech?

42:44 Well, what if my iPad freezes on me? What if I freeze? What is, what if, what if they’re not getting what I’m saying? That’s not what my head was at. My head was at, this is going to be the greatest day of my life in professional wrestling.

43:02 This is the benchmark. This is, I’m going to blow people away. I’m going to make them laugh, I’m going to make them cry, I’m going to inspire them. And when it was all said and done, bro, that was my finest moment in professional wrestling, and it was the greatest thing, and I loved it. There was a lot of work, a lot of work put into that talk, and I had everybody right in my hands from the minute I walked out there, and Eric Bischoff gave me an amazing induction speech.

43:40 So if we were the first ones out of the gate, and we were off to the races, and again, if I don’t put that in my head, it doesn’t happen like that. What was really cool, Beth Phoenix, who’s also going into the Hall of Fame that year, she’s married to Adam Copeland, who goes by the name of Edge. They’re both Hall of Famers. She came up to me after her speech, and she said, I got to thank you. I said, thank me?

44:06 Thank me for what? She goes, I was listening to your speech, and I was, before that, I was getting in my head and questioning myself, and as I watched you, I realized I got this. I own this. This is going to be the best thing I’ve ever done. And she killed it.

44:25 Brian Rose: Nice. So tell me more about the DDPY and the yoga, because I told you about my journey with yoga and how there was something there, but also the culture wasn’t my thing. So, like, I haven’t done it now in a couple years, and this is something you saw right away, and you were like, I want this stuff, but I don’t want this stuff, and I’m going to make it my own. I mean, can you speak on that? Because you know, you make yoga okay for tough guys to do, and I know a lot of your clients are the guys that would have never touched that, but now they have this practice in their life that changes their life.

45:03 Diamond Dallas Page: I think the first part of it was, it was real. It was authentic. Everybody knew, I mean, I did interviews about it before it was ever a thing. It started as yoga for normal people. That’s what I called it, and it was when it was just me doing it, and people saw me change, and they saw how, you know, limber and friggin’ strong I was.

45:29 If I’m still lifting weights back then to keep the cosmetic look right, so this became my cardio, this became my, you know, my strengthening and my core training. Like, the weights were for the cosmetics, you know. The DDPY was so I could keep doing it, and I knew that I was gonna end up doing it for the rest of my life, just to heal me. And again, like, I’m six months, or 65. But if you saw the things I could do, you would go, you’re not over 38 physically and mentally.

46:08 What things I could do now? I don’t do stupid things, you know, not anymore, but enough of them. But the whole part of the yoga thing, the thing that I don’t want to say turn me off, because I respect all types of yoga today. But in the beginning, it was a whole spiritual mumbo-jumbo, and I didn’t, I respected it once I got into it, but I still didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t for me, and I know that I could be in the yoga world if I just would have just went to the left a little bit.

46:46 I could have been one of the biggest names in just yoga, but that wasn’t who I was, so I wanted to be true to myself. I also knew that I didn’t develop this workout, this lifestyle, for yogis, because they’ve got a thousand different types of yoga. Plus, they get it. The people who need it are the other 98% of the world that really needs some kind of, we’ll call it yoga, in their life, because they played sports, they got hit by a car, they got in a car accident, they fell off a bike.

47:29 Something, you know, they need it, because it’s not just physical, it’s mental too. No spiritual stuff with me. It’s if there is a spiritual end, it’s, you can. If you see, I mean, the people I’m working with right now. I tell someone asked me 12 years ago, so where will Diamond Dallas Page be in five years?

47:56 I said, I will be the next Jack LaLanne, who is a big fitness guy, you know, in the States. I’ll be the next Jack LaLanne meets Tony Robbins meets Richard Simmons, because I help a lot of big people, you know, and it’s not just that. We have these incredible weight-loss stories, but my focus is to help. When I developed this program, it was not, help me, but to help our guys beat up, athletes. It would help cops.

48:29 It was to help firemen. It was to help military, because these are the guys, guys and gals, who got to go from zero to 60. Now, how do you do that? Well, you need to have, like, this inner strength, and what DDPY gives you is, um, like, if yoga’s over here, we’re way over here, and I don’t want to be like it. I respect it, but I don’t want to be like it.

48:58 I want to be different, then, because one of the things that I knew was going to be the first people that would believe in me were the people who were fans of mine, and they knew that I wouldn’t, like, get them to do something that wasn’t real, that wasn’t authentic. Um, and then I helped that disabled veteran.

49:18 Brian Rose: Yeah, tell me about that video.

49:20 Diamond Dallas Page: Yeah, it’s Arthur Boorman.

49:22 Brian Rose: I think a lot of people probably have seen the video.

49:25 If not, we’re gonna have a link below, tell me about this, so for people that haven’t seen the video, explain, like, the beginning and then the end, because it’s an incredible transformation.

49:37 Diamond Dallas Page: When I first started this whole program, one of my partners is Dr. Craig Aaron. I call him a yoga doc. In 20 years of yoga experience, teaching and he’s a chiropractor, and he knew the body inside now, so he wrote this book. Yoga for Regular Guys, and it was dubbing at YRG.

49:55 And then at some point, you know, I was like, okay, we wrote the book. Now we, it was really well written, it was a little tongue-in-cheek, but it was really well written, because we were real serious about the program. And I said, okay, it’s time to do the videos. And anybody who did those videos back in the day, anybody who did the videos, I would send them an email like it was me. There was no company like I have today that sends out an email that I wrote, but I actually have an automatic thing that does it.

50:27 But back then, I was the automatic thing. I cut, pace, and put it up there, put their name on it, and basically it said, hey, I thank you so much for investing in my program. I appreciate you believing me. I’m not trying to sell you anything. I appreciate it.

50:44 I just want to say thank you, and I’d really love it if you could take the time to answer five questions. Well, Arthur’s answers were insane. Like, they were unbelievable, and I was like, okay, sounds like you need some help. Tell me a little bit about yourself. And he said that he was a disabled veteran that he was morbidly obese, and this is what got me.

51:08 He said, I’ve relegated thinking of myself as a piece of furniture. And I was like, wow. I was like, send me some pictures so I can see what I’m dealing with. And he sent me these two pictures right here. Um, let me just see if I get it up here.

51:26 Brian Rose: Oh, come on. I agree.

51:29 Diamond Dallas Page: He sent me this picture and this one. So this one here,

51:35 Brian Rose: yeah, and wow, this one here. Okay, wow.

51:40 The knee braces didn’t bother me. I didn’t realize that he also had a back brace on, that his wife had to put the sleeves on his legs, then again, put the knee braces on, and then pull the sleeves over his legs, hook him up to his back brace, hand him his cuffs, and hobble to the bathroom every morning for 15 years. I didn’t realize that. Wow. When I saw the cuffs, I was thinking, man, oh God.

52:12 So I sent him, I knew his whole thing was his only goal is to lose 50 pounds so that the, the military will, you know, do the surgery, because he’s a VA, he’s a veteran, and he really wanted to get to 20 years in, but at 14 years, done, 100% disabled. So his goal is to lose 50 pounds. He’s 5’6″, 297 pounds. Get under 250, we’ll operate. Well, I sent him this eating plan.

52:44 It was a friend of mine named Dr. Fred Bishi, and he had come up with this way of food combining, where you don’t mix proteins with carbs, and you eat in order, and I sent it to him. Now, if he writes back to me, you know, I’ll give it a try, or I think I can do this, right? Back, hey, awesome, keep me posted. But he didn’t do that. He wrote, I can do this.

53:08 I should send me your phone number. That’s the first person I ever talked to that I didn’t know who was doing my program. And we talked for an hour. Bottom line is, that’s what I really learned about him. He just wanted to lose the 50 pounds.

53:25 He ended up losing 32 pounds the first month, 22 the second month, 18 the third. That’s 72 pounds in three months. In six months, he would end up losing a hundred and forty. Ten months in, ten months, he lost 140 pounds. More importantly, he lost the knee braces, back brace, and the canes, not just to walk, but to run.

53:51 Now, the video is way better than this, but when you’re looking at this guy becoming that guy. This guy, get out there. Come on, messages. Okay, this guy becoming, but this is what it’s about. That guy being able to do that.

54:17 Brian Rose: Wow, it’s amazing.

54:19 Diamond Dallas Page: This is my favorite picture. Look at that. I’m like, Arthur, why is your son holding you? He said, Paul, not anymore.

54:29 From that guy to that guy. Now this is my favorite picture. Coming up, he’s five-six. One year the day he’s with his six-foot-two son. They take a picture standing on his back.

54:46 That’s Arthur Boorman. His video didn’t take off immediately, but my business partner Steve re-cut it, and it was at the right place at the right time. We became DDP Yoga. It was eight years plus, and that video went viral. I didn’t even know what viral meant at the time.

55:15 In 2012, people really didn’t know it. But yeah, we had a million hits on Arthur’s video. And well, here’s what happened. I was on the way to the airport, and Steve texted me. It’s a tweet, and he copied and pasted it and put it in, and the tweet said, “Stop what you’re doing right now and witness real magic.”

55:35 It was David Copperfield. When I landed, he sent me another tweet, “One of the most inspiring videos ever.” Starts off slow, well worth the wait. Something like that. Tony Robbins and that was the beginning.

55:54 And then we brought Jake in, you know, Jake. I sent the video of Arthur to Jake, Jake “the Snake” Roberts, and without Jake, without Dusty and Jake, I don’t have the, you know, Hall of Fame career. I just don’t have it. Those guys took me under their wings, and they helped guide me. They loved how I put the work in, and I really wanted to help Jake.

56:23 And he, at the time, he was so bad. He was in the booze and pills and coke and crack, and I told him, I said, bro, I said, if you do this workout and you lose 20 pounds on your own. He was over 300 by that time, and he couldn’t even get up and get down. It was brutal, but I said, you do, you lose 20 pounds on your own, I’m moving back to Atlanta, I’ll move you in, I’ll take care of everything, and we just started filming what I was calling “The Resurrection of Jake the Snake.”

57:00 And it’s on Amazon Prime right now, and we were like the number three or four most-watched documentary on Netflix while we were there. Highest rated, five stars. Crazy reviews. So Arthur, I inspired one guy. He has inspired millions, and Jake and Scott Hall, aka Razor Ramon, were two of them.

57:30 And that movie, The Resurrection, um, yeah, so we went on Shark Tank, and we didn’t get a deal, but I wasn’t there for a deal. I was there for exposure. We did a million dollars in five days in sales. Wow, and that year was insane, and it took three years, but without Shark Tank, last year we beat those numbers. So it isn’t about the money to me, and anybody knows I got two possessions that are of value to me: that world title, my Hall of Fame ring.

58:11 Of actual possession. Everything else can go. That’s what means something to me. Not about the money. It’s about helping the people, because that’s the greatest quan on the planet.

58:27 If Ryan, if you knew how many people on my uh, not just Twitter and Instagram, that I talk to that text me, they have my text number, because I watched them put the work in. There’s this guy named Brian Cann, brother, who was like 390 pounds, and one of the pictures, he picked his foot off the ground, next picture right next to it, he’s still about 360. But he’s holding his foot over his head. I got a hold of that kid. I said, wow, you can’t fake that.

59:04 And I did it for a girl named Stephanie, same thing. Couldn’t pick her foot up, foot over her head. She was still like 300 pounds. Now they send me what they eat all the time, and there’s a number of them.

59:15 Brian Rose: And, Dallas, let me, let me ask you a question, Dallas.

59:18 Let me ask you a question. What does it say about the state of the world and what we know about nutrition and physical health, when you know Arthur Boorman is basically, if he hadn’t met you, he might be dead or worse off now, and no one else told him what to do, you know, you know, and everyone else was probably trying to give him medication. He didn’t know what to eat. He hooks up with you, and you give him a fairly simple physical practice, which from there changes also his diet, and now he’s probably one of the fittest guys you’ll ever see.

59:54 And yet there’s probably hundreds of millions of people in the world that are getting the wrong information, or don’t have access to that. I mean, how did we get to this state? Do you ever think about that?

1:00:04 Diamond Dallas Page: Yeah, I do. It’s all about money.

1:00:06 It’s all about, I mean, Big Pharma controls the world. Now take these pills, take these pills. If you knew how many people I’ve gotten off of 20 medications and got down to one or two. I mean, take these pills, eat this garbage. I mean, when you can, it’s so if it wasn’t for social media, first of all, we wouldn’t be here right now, right?

1:00:32 Um, social media has a really bad dark side, but it’s only a piece of it. There’s a lot of really amazing things about social media and reaching people. Like, if it wasn’t for Netflix and shows like that, or streaming systems like that, or Amazon Prime, you would never see a movie like Food, Inc. or Genetic Roulette, or GMO OMG. Like, how can they put movies like that on television? Because all you gotta do is watch a football game, Subway, um, friggin’ pizza, whatever, Coke, Pepsi.

1:01:20 I mean, everything that’s on that TV is garbage. I mean, again, I’m a guy who wants to eat healthy, because I want to feel awesome. And when I get people, like we do a thing where we’ll bring in, in our neighborhood, people who are in just the worst pain, and they’re like in their 50s or early 60s, and the first thing I have them do is watch Food, Inc. and Genetic Roulette. And if you can watch both those movies and still not understand why you feel like you didn’t watch them, you were talking to somebody because there are, most people want to keep their head in the sand, but they don’t want to know.

1:02:10 I don’t want to know. You know, I know it’s bad for me, but I don’t want to know, like, okay, uh, I’m not, I’ve been saying since I was 59, I’m not preparing for 65, that’ll be here tomorrow. And now literally it’s months away. I tell everybody I’m training for 75, 85, 95, believe it or not, 105. You see, I’ve been sitting when you, you’re here the whole time, and at any time, in any place, I could take either one of my feet, pull it up in the air, and literally pull it over my head, at six-foot-four, 220 pounds, and 64 years young, and have a conversation with you.

1:03:01 That is core strength at a different level, and I’m constantly trying to find ways to take DDPY to the next level. And it’s taken me nine months, but I’ve found it, and I’m gonna send these to you, brother, because this is gonna trip you out. You’re gonna say, hey, I just talked to Dorian Yates. He wants you to send them to him, because this is lifting weights, the buzz, the pump, without doing it. Now, these aren’t even up for sale on my site yet.

1:03:40 These are just at the end of the, um, the end of, I’ve done all my tests. I’ve done all my, I’ve done all my, uh, research. We’ve refined these, me and my buddies from Rock Cups. These are called DDPY Jacked Straps. That’s the deal.

1:04:02 Now these are BFR straps, and there’s a lot of really good ones out there. They were mainly developed by a Japanese fellow, uh, developed them, and they’re BFR, blood flow restriction. These are used for rehab. The only reason these haven’t taken off is because there hasn’t been a vehicle, and they didn’t look anything like this. These aren’t the ones that are the blow-up ones, like you would blow up, uh, um, a blood pressure cup, right?

1:04:42 And then you gotta let the air out. Now, when you’re doing rehab, you can pump them up, do the set, let it out, another set, pump them up. But with my stuff, we can’t do that, because it’s a flow, so I had to find something, and I hooked up with a buddy, and we became partners on this, and this is a gel strip. Okay. This will go around like this.

1:05:12 Well, first of all, let me show you this, this knob right here, that’s what makes it tighter. So when I pull the tab here, this is what happened. See how it just got tight? Okay, got it. And when I crank it, or as I say, jack it, that’s where it goes.

1:05:32 So you compress the muscle, and what happens then? When you do that, you restrict the blood flow, and I, I don’t know enough of the science to explain it yet. Have you ever heard of Dr. Andrews? No. Dr. Andrews is the guy in the U.S.

1:05:53 He’s out of Birmingham. He is, like, if Tom Brady, God forbid, tore his bicep or something like that, when Vince McMahon tears his quad, or Triple H tears his quad, or you, you know, you have knee surgery or shoulder surgery, or your tendon, right there, cuff, you go to Birmingham. And I don’t care if you’re from California, Oregon, or Florida, you go to Birmingham, because that guy is the man. Okay. So this is a rehab tool.

1:06:23 Brian Rose: This is usually a rehab tool, but you’re not gonna introduce it into the standard DDPY practice. All right.

1:06:30 Diamond Dallas Page: This will be called DDPY Jack, and what it’ll do is it slides up like this, and it goes to the top of your bicep, and then you lock it down, and you can see right now, my arm, and again, I’m doing this for you because I know that you love to lift weights, and this is going to be your weight training with no weights.

1:06:53 Brian Rose: Wow.

1:06:53 Diamond Dallas Page: So you can see right now there’s no real pump or anything, but as soon as I jack them up, I’m just gonna turn it down a little bit.

1:07:02 I’ll put it back up in a second. Okay, and I’m just gonna go, three, two, one. You can see my three, two, pull, three, two, three, full, three, two, four, four, three, two, five. You see how everything is popping, popping like hard as a jack.

1:07:23 Brian Rose: Dallas, you jacked.

1:07:25 Diamond Dallas Page: Jack, and then I’m gonna just turn a little bit, and I’m gonna flex it, and it just spins itself off, and the dial cuts back. Now I’ve got a whole team of guys and girls that are out, and they’ve been, let me sit down with your site. Okay, cool. Uh, we could tilt the screen back up, maybe, just so I can see it, but yeah, that’s good. Actually, not too much.

1:07:46 That’s right.

1:07:47 Brian Rose: Why is that so hard to do?

1:07:50 Diamond Dallas Page: So, um, so the biggest thing that this gave me was density in the muscle. Again, I’m 60, I’m 64, going to be 65. I, on my 64th birthday, I had been doing these straps, earlier versions.

1:08:08 I just made them slicker and more user-friendly, and what happened was, I was six months in this training with the straps. I had never done more than 10. 10-second push-ups. You lower for 10, you hold three inches off the ground for ten, and you come up, ten, nine, the whole deal, right? And those are really hard, by the way.

1:08:33 That sounded easy, but most people couldn’t do one of those. Right, right. And even guys in great shape can barely do three. You’ve got to be in really great shape. Never doing him, you get three or four unless you’re a freak.

1:08:46 Okay. But the bottom line is, for six, I know there’s no 64-year-old man doing 10. On my 64th birthday, I got to 10, and I went, I’ve got 11. And I did 11, and when I did 11, I thought, oh my God, is it possible? Could I get 12?

1:09:07 And I went down. I held, and when I got 10, nine, eight, seven, if I couldn’t go any farther, so I lowered the knee and pushed the rest of the way out. But who gets stronger in their mid-60s? Nobody. But I figured out how to do it, and again, when I get, I obviously get amped up.

1:09:34 This is the same guy in wrestling, you know, when I believe in something, when I’m passionate about it, when I’m feeling unstoppable, I know I’m onto something. If it works for me, I know it’ll work for you, because you’ve got that work ethic. You know how to do all that. Oh, and that’s some people, oh God, I don’t think it really worked for me, because you won’t work. You’re right.

1:10:00 If you work, DDPY works. And this is something I’m telling you right now, bro. I said it a year ago. I am going to change the face of fitness. A year from now it might take a little bit longer, but I’m going to change the face of fitness with these straps.

1:10:21 And it’s like with this other shutdown again, but it’s going to be a while before we get this whole, you know, this whole, uh, covid thing straightened out. But who’s to say that some new one doesn’t come out then? Right? Bottom line is the gym business has changed. The guys who are the real meatheads, they’re still in the gym.

1:10:44 They’re still finding a way to get in the gym. The regular people who signed up for the gym, they ain’t gonna sign up anymore, right?

1:10:51 Brian Rose: And so they entered the homework out, and they needed alternatives, which is what you’ve been doing now for years and years. I mean, just briefly, Dallas, if people are going to jump into the app, and I’m going to be all over that tomorrow, and they’re going to go through a 30-minute workout with you, I mean, what kind of things can they expect, you know, from a beginning level and intermediate?

1:11:10 We saw you there doing, I think, these isometrics where you’re putting two muscle groups against each other, or you’re talking about a 10-second push-up with just a bodyweight. But most people who’ve never heard of that are thinking, that sounds weird. How’s that ever gonna help me? How’s it gonna get me fit? But this is the essence of DDPY.

1:11:29 Diamond Dallas Page: Right, right. But first I gotta say, I’ve had people cut, oh my God, DDP, I can’t work out with him. He’ll kill me. That’s the farthest thing from my view. Like, literally, the farthest.

1:11:42 Like, my workouts on my app, they start with bed flex, meaning you work out in bed if you can’t get out of bed. I got three workouts for you, that’s amazing. Then they go to chair force, where you sit in a chair, sit in a chair, and you’re flexing, engaging while you’re in the chair. I have figured out, if you wear the heart monitor, how to get your heart rate jacked up sitting down. And what I was saying before, you know, bed, chair, and then stand strong, as using the chair, which helps build back balance, especially as you get older.

1:12:24 First thing you lose is balance. Most people’s hips don’t break and then they fall. They fall because they don’t have any more balance, and they break their hip. That’s how that works. So, bottom line, they start bed, chair, stand strong, then you go to beginner, they go all the way to psycho extreme stuff.

1:12:48 Now, every one of them, the chair force workouts have a Diamond Dozen, where I’m going to show you one move at a time. The stand strong have Diamond Dozen. I’m going to show you one move, watch it, then do it with me. Then you get the beginner. There’s a Diamond Dozen.

1:13:11 I want to show you one move at a time. I don’t want to scare people away. Take yoga and put it out of your brain. This is yoga for people who wouldn’t be caught dead doing yoga, and that’s men and female. Now, will some yogis dig it?

1:13:29 Absolutely, probably about 10 to 20%, but that’s it, because I’ve got you counting, deep breath, twist it open, count it back, three, two, one, come on, back up, bring your left fist back, take your right fist over, hit it, one, one, one, two. I think you’re doing stuff like that. Right, I’ve got explosive, but all again, there’s always someone in my earlier stuff teaching you how to modify, so on one side of my, let’s call it my, uh, the workout, I breathe, I’m pretty sure, heart energy, but there’s someone on a knee, like in a lunge, on a knee.

1:14:15 Arthur is doing it in a challenging position. I’m doing around the middle, so I keep giving people like, there’s, I’ve had five 600-pound people be able to do this workout, because, naked, so anyone at any level can do DDPY. DDPY meets you where you are, and you’re going to be gender-free for me, and different from James, and different from Bill, and Ted, and Alice, and Mary. Everybody’s at their own pace, and that’s how I teach this. I’ve got to work out in Jack workouts.

1:14:58 I’ve got a kid who’s 19, who’s one of the top runners for Morehouse. His dad was a professional wrestler, and Michael is a thoroughbred. I will get him to just reach out and grab the ball, flex the squad, flex his glutes, take his arm up with a touchdown, bring it down, take it back, a Diamond Cutter, Hulk it up, or to adjust. I will have him go from 60, 59, or 60 beats a minute to 150, taking his arms up twice.

1:15:30 Brian Rose: Wow.

1:15:30 Diamond Dallas Page: And this is all videoed, all videos, so people can see it’s real. And what’s fascinating is, I come from the world, let’s call it, of make-believe. You know, we’re entertainers. We’re out there to, you know, to work you and make you just step. When wrestling’s really done the best, like my match with Bill Goldberg, Halloween Havoc 1998, you will be suspending your disbelief for a while, like, this is real, like what these guys are doing.

1:16:09 This is real. They don’t know what’s going to happen, and it was just, I don’t know. And I had, not just like that. That was Sting and Randy Savage, and you know, where we suspended the disbelief for a little while. But what I do here is authentic on its highest level.

1:16:32 And the people that I find, there’s a Facebook site, and anybody can go there, and it’s DDP Yoga, one word. It’ll say members. It just went over 53,000 members now. On my DDPY app, I take something from Facebook once a week, and I call it Fabulous Facebook Fridays, and all I’m going to do is read something or show you pictures of someone that someone posted, or a video. And there’s a woman this week, I don’t know how old she is, but she got in a car accident, and she was like, never going to walk again, and she willed herself to walk on a walker, but for years that was it, till she started doing my program.

1:17:32 And then she says, thank you so much, Diamond Dallas Page, for helping me to do this. And then she’s in front of her walker, and she pushes it out, and she takes one step, and then another, and then she pushes it out, one step. I was getting choked up just, you know, just thinking about it. But when I see that she takes, like, 10 steps, I mean, that’s powerful. That’s amazing.

1:18:05 That’s why I do this. I tell people all the time, you say, I’m depressed, I’m down, what do you do? Switch your advice. I said, help somebody. Right, like, what do you mean, like, help somebody?

1:18:17 If you help somebody, you’re gonna feel good about you. That’s who we are as human beings. Unless you’re a psychopath, sociopath, you know, you help someone, you feel good about you. That’s what life is. That’s the quan.

1:18:35 Brian Rose: Yeah, it takes so long to learn that, though. You know, Dallas, you just said something that so many of my greatest guests say, usually at the end of the conversation. Dorian said it at the end of our first conversation. He said, Brian, we are all one. That’s what he always says.

1:18:51 He says, or someone will say, we’re all here to be of service. You know, but it took me 40 years to figure that one out. Um, but once you figure it out, the whole world opens up, doesn’t it? And you’re like, ah, now I get it. Now I can feel good.

1:19:04 The crazy thing is, though, Dallas, is that if you turn on MTV, or you turn on a lot of television, you get the opposite message, you know, Instagram, you know. But as kids, a lot of times we’re taught it’s all about you. It’s all about how much you make, how great you are. But then when you get through life, you realize the real goal is helping others, which you do. And again, the energy and your workouts are great.

1:19:26 The set is great. I mean, look, you really bring it, and there’s tons and tons of content on your app. It’s crazy. Um, I got to ask you about diet, Dallas, because absolutely that’s important to you. Um, tell me what are the basics you usually tell people when they come to you for diet, because you got some things where you just say, look, do this, this, this, and this, and that’s a baseline.

1:19:46 Brian Rose: You’re already gonna start feeling better. Talk to me.

1:19:50 Diamond Dallas Page: Well, you know, sometimes just getting a candy bar out of somebody’s hand is a big deal, you know, and for that person, I think they just start slowly eliminating things, and do the program. You’re going to feel better. But people who want to work with me, and I’ll put it at that level, they, and these are people who really need guidance, and I let them go at their own pace, but I have them do what I call the list.

1:20:23 And the list is right there on the app, in the user guide section, and the list breaks everything down before you can get anyone to really want to change how they eat. They need to be educated. And like I said, this is where the internet is amazing, because you never would have got the chance to see Food, Inc., which I believe in 2007 won the Oscar. Uh, you need to see Food, Inc., especially if you live in the United States. You need to see what they’ve done to our food, and don’t think that genetically modified food is only in America.

1:21:05 It’s everywhere. The next thing I do is I watch Genetic Roulette, and Genetic Roulette really starts to, oh wow, that’s what they did to the wheat. That’s what’s in the wheat. Wheat used to be nine feet tall, now it’s 18 inches, but it yields three times the mass. Corn, if it’s not organic, has, in the United States, if it’s GMO, which is 95% of it, has a pesticide interwoven into the DNA of the corn, because it’s not what God created.

1:21:48 Neither is the wheat. It’s so instrumental that that same kernel of corn is registered with the EPA as a pesticide. Again, learn about what you’re eating. I don’t call cow’s milk cow milk. I call it cow’s puffs, because that’s really what it is.

1:22:10 I mean, it’s all about, I challenge, this is the easiest way to do it, because then you’re not giving up everything, you’re just trying something different. Just eat vegetables and protein. That’s it, for three weeks. See how you feel. Organic vegetables when you can get them, especially when it comes to what they call the Dirty Dozen: berries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, uh, greens.

1:22:44 And then if you go to my app, every bit of the food that we make is GMO-free, no gluten, no dairy. Uh, 90%, well, all mine is organic, 100%, but on the road, you can’t always do that, because they don’t have it, so you eat what you got to eat. A lot of times I bring my own food, right? Like, I bring, I love bagels. Well, I’m not gonna eat the regular bagels, because what people don’t really realize is, if you watch the movies, you will, but I say documentaries.

1:23:23 The gluten in wheat attacks your joints. Now, when I was 40, first of all, when I was 40, that was 24 years ago. Gluten, I should say, genetically modified wheat had just been introduced, so I could take it. I could eat it, but at some point, man, I, I use it myself as a guinea pig on everything, and I kind of feel like, and if you know everybody’s different, if it works for me, there’s a good chance it could work for you, but I think the easiest way to do it is to just eat protein, try to make it organic, and vegetables.

1:24:10 Go three weeks, you’re going to feel completely different.

1:24:14 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a great intro. Now introduce, stop. Right, like, bring back, bring back milk, bring back wheat, bring back, but not all one time. Bring back one at a time.

1:24:24 If you feel like, stop it. Yeah, yeah. The gluten is a funny one, because you mention it to people, and they say, oh, I’m not gluten intolerant, blah, blah, blah, but they missed the point. It’s that, first of all, we eat a lot more of it than we think, and it probably makes most people feel bad, and it probably leads to just bad bodies. Um, and when you cut it out, you’ll realize all of a sudden, wow, and it’s hard at first, because everyone loves their pastas and breads, but after a couple weeks of feeling great, you’ll find substitutes.

1:24:56 Brian Rose: I think that’s a great tip. And then sugar, you said before we’re all addicted to sugar in some shape or form, right?

1:25:03 Diamond Dallas Page: Pure, pure. White sugar, there’s nothing natural about it, right?

1:25:07 Brian Rose: And yet it’s in everything.

1:25:09 Diamond Dallas Page: No, 100%. They did a documentary on that. Yeah, just, um, Kate Kirk did a documentary called Fed Up, and it was all about sugar. Really enlightening. Now, I don’t ever try to get people to do that, because that’s next to impossible, but I thought, can I do it?

1:25:33 So for three, three months, my goal was three weeks. If I can get three weeks, I want to see how I feel, and what happens after three weeks. If you cut down your sugar, which I did, eight to ten grams a day, that’s what I was eating in sugar. By the third week, I didn’t want it. Like, my girlfriend, her name is Paige, and she’s like, hey, baby, here’s a pizza.

1:26:02 She gave me a piece. There’s a company called Justin’s, and they’re peanut butter and chocolate, and they’re actually real peanut butter, real chocolate. And she gave me a piece. Guy, I don’t want it. She just, come on, you love these.

1:26:15 Nope. I go, I, I swear to you, I have no desire to eat it, because I know as soon as I do, I’m going to crave it again. But right now, it doesn’t own me. And I did it for three months, and then I let it come back into my life, but now I really control it. I’m nowhere near as much of a sugar addict as I was.

1:26:43 Nowhere near it. And then I’ll just go, like, three weeks again, just to, like, clean it out, and then I’ll, you know, instead of eating a whole carton, like, I look at, there’s a great product over here, and they don’t pay me this. It’s called Nada Moo, N-A-D-A-M-O-O, and it’s made from coconut. It’s ice cream, where Ben and Jerry’s had, like, I think it’s like 37 grams of sugar in a quarter cup, and two-thirds of a cup, versus anywhere from 11 grams to 14 grams.

1:27:21 And it’s delicious, but today, if I’m going to eat it, hey, like a quarter cup, I might take a quarter cup, throw a handful of blueberries in there, you know, and I’m just as satisfied. I’m never gonna let sugar own me again, and that’s the whole thing, that whole thing about my book, Positively Unstoppable, you know, the art of owning it. Like, it is so important, because it can be whatever you want it to be, and for that moment, it was sugar for me. You know, I just wanted to have any more questions.

1:27:54 Brian Rose: Yeah, I mean, I was just, yeah, I kind of want to know what’s next for you. Yeah, you know, and I want to get your final thoughts, but also know, like, what’s Dallas doing, at 70 years old? Like, what’s your future look like?

1:28:06 Diamond Dallas Page: For start, don’t let me say I want to give you that quote at the end, and I’ll answer that question one second, but I want to read this to you first. And this is a guy, I call him the Professor.

1:28:16 He’s one of my guys who does my program, and he’s a zealot, and he loves to lift weights too, right? And his name is JJ. And I reached out to him when I started to do the, um, uh, okay, now I need people who do the program to, you know, give me their feedback. Um, okay, let me know if I’m screwing up here. Let me just look here, comments.

1:28:45 There is Jack comments, so I wanted to give me him to give me feedback, along with these other 15 people I have doing the program. And he sends me this, um, the other day. I told him, make sure you do the weight lifting, all right? Get your maximum weight lifts, all right? Get, like, know exactly.

1:29:05 He’s really strong. He’s like 300-plus bencher. He’s in his 40s, um, he’s not that big a guy. It’s like a 180 or 190 or something, so he’s moving some weight. So I said, no weights for 90 days, let’s see what happens.

1:29:24 He sends me this. He said, I’ve been lifting weights for five and doing DDPY two days over the last two years or so. Since Labor Day, I’ve done nothing but DDPY Jacked, every day, no weights. I did a midpoint lifting test yesterday on my heavy sets. I lost no reps on my, he said, during Kobig.

1:29:57 My alternative was light weights in high reps. I lost two reps over that time. He said, on my lighter sets, I gained strength and reps. And then he says, massive surprise, since I’ve been lifting only air for the last 45 days, that’s power. This guy, he’ll do, I’ll send you the video.

1:30:27 I want to get your information, your email, all that, so we can stay in touch. But if you come, if you come to Atlanta, I want you to come and stay with us for a couple of days and see what we’re doing. You’ll really dig it, and I mean, stay with us, because this is like the best Airbnb on the planet.

1:30:50 Brian Rose: Um, so where is Dallas going to be in five years?

1:30:54 Diamond Dallas Page: Well, one of my goals when I went to LA was not to be The Rock, because, my, I was much too old to envision that.

1:31:02 Uh, plus, there’s only one Rock. Uh, my goal was just to be a working actor. That’s all I wanted to be, you know, something that I could, I could support myself off the acting. I’ve been doing it 22 years, and you got to get that break, and like I said, that Netflix thing, it might change my life, might do nothing, and that’s the way it goes, but I’m going to keep working towards that. Um, I believe DDPY will be, you know, it’s not a fad workout.

1:31:39 There’s a piece of yoga, and yoga has been around here forever, and they’ve all got different names, from Ashtanga, um, you know, there’s all sorts of Angara. There’s all sorts of different yoga workouts. Again, mine is developed for people who would be caught dead doing yoga, and that’s the biggest crowd ever, and my goal at that point will have been to literally be a household name. And if I, you know, I honestly got to believe if I died today, it’ll get bigger, because it’s real and it helps people.

1:32:26 Um, I want to be in a position, I’m not far from it right now, where I pretty much can do what I want to do. Um, you know, I’m financially situated, that if the world goes upside down tomorrow, hopefully, knock on wood, that doesn’t happen, I’m good. I have zero debt, so I’m pretty easygoing about all that. Mike, I, I want to, I want to just continue to do what I’m doing. You know, I love what I do.

1:32:59 I love the girl that I’m with. She’s amazing. Uh, she’s my better half on so many different levels, and she’s a yogi, and she’s been teaching that for 12 years, but now she teaches DDPY. Um, you know, man, I’m loving my life so much that I really wouldn’t change anything. I just keep doing exactly what I’m doing.

1:33:22 Brian Rose: Nice. And, uh, it’s going to make, it’s going to make a huge, huge impact.

1:33:28 Diamond Dallas Page: So let me, let me leave you with, for people out there who have heard me talk about, you know, owning it and that inner voice, that story you tell yourself, I’m going to give you a quote. Uh, it’s a very, very famous guy’s sentence, but I want to see if you know who it is that said it. He said, the repetitions of affirmations leads to belief, and once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.

1:34:01 Now, that’s not a well-known quote at all, so I would expect you not to know it. But you have any idea who might have said that?

1:34:11 Brian Rose: I don’t know, and I, I should know, but I don’t know. Though I do believe that, but I don’t know who said it.

1:34:19 Diamond Dallas Page: Now, it’s fascinating, because when I read it, I was like, wow, and then I saw his name right under it, and I was like, wow, and then I thought about it, and I went, I know his affirmation.

1:34:34 Like, I know it. I know exactly what his affirmation was, so I’m going to tell you what his affirmation was, and you’re gonna know exactly who actually said it. Now, when you really think about that, like, what’s the odds of that, you know, that I knew his affirmation? As soon as I looked at that quote, when I saw his name, and when I say it, you’re gonna know it, and 90% of the people will know it, who are Joe right now. Oh, here’s his affirmation: “I am the greatest.

1:35:16 I’m the greatest of all time.” “I’m so pretty.” Who is that? That’s your favorite guy, man. That’s Muhammad Ali.

1:35:26 Like, you know what’s fascinating about that? How did you know? Too, you know what I mean? Like, how did you know, how did all the people who were listening, of course that’s Muhammad Ali. How did you know it?

1:35:39 Think about that, because he said it 10 times. No, he said it, millions of times. He was saying it when he was a kid. It was so burnt into him. Everybody knew it was his affirmation.

1:36:04 Now, if you can get to that, where people know who you are by what you say, that’s powerful.

1:36:14 Brian Rose: That is, super powerful, bro. I have had an awesome time with you, and, uh, I definitely, we got to get together and break some gluten-free bread and have a gluten-free beer, if you cocktail.

1:36:36 Diamond Dallas Page: There’s a great beer. They don’t pay me to say this.

1:36:42 It’s called Duram, and the first place I ever had it was in the UK. I was somewhere in New York, and it was just a really cool pub that was there, and I looked on the menu, and I saw fish and chips, and it said optional gluten-free, and I looked up at the server and I go, is this real? Do you really have gluten-free fish and chips? And she said, oh yeah, this is on Wednesdays. Every Wednesday.

1:37:12 Today’s Wednesday. I said, man, I wish you had a gluten-free beer. She was, oh, we got that too, and they brought me Duram. I now get it. You know, I get it by the case from one of the better beer places around here, and, uh, it is an amazing beer.

1:37:30 You know, I would be drinking it if I drank all the beers like I used to.

1:37:34 Brian Rose: Nice. Yeah, we got some game here in the UK. We’ve come a long way.

1:37:38 Diamond Dallas Page: So, uh, you know, yeah, you’d be surprised.

1:37:41 Brian Rose: Um, and look, Diamond, I really appreciate the time. I’ve been a fan of yours for many years, and I’m super pumped, because literally, we’re locked down as of tomorrow, and I’m gonna be using DDPY in the stairwell here, going through routines. So when we finish here, I’m gonna get your number, and you’re gonna tell me exactly where to start. But I’m super excited, and I’m hoping people watching us want to jump in as well. Best thing to do is go to your website, app, what’s the best way going forward?

1:38:08 Diamond Dallas Page: The best thing, especially if you’re in the UK, you know, the DVDs are great, but then you got to get a man and the customs and all that. Just get the app. You can try it for seven days, plus nothing. Try it for seven days. And again, there’s Motivational Mondays, but there’s not just that Motivational Monday.

1:38:27 There’s 300 of them up there. You know, there’s, I just started doing Fabulous Facebook Fridays. These are all things to to inspire you to keep putting the work in. There’s so many, so many videos of all the people who have done our, you know, our program, and we do their stories on them. You know, there’s all the different cooking shows and breakfast, lunch, dinner, salads, soups, wraps.

1:38:56 Like, everything is up there, and then the workouts go from laying in bed, this super psycho extreme stuff that we do, and there’s everything in between. The program meets you where you are. Go to DDPY.com or DDPYoga.com, and, uh, you know, give it a shot. Try it, and if it doesn’t work for you, just discontinue the app. If it does, then you’re off to the races, and you’re like, if you really put the work in, it’ll never be just I love it.

1:39:28 Brian Rose: I love it. I love your energy, Dallas. It’s incredible. It’s infectious. You obviously pour your heart and soul into everything you do, and from what I’ve seen on this app, there’s so much content in there, and it’s again, it’s all you, and you’re in, and, uh, it’s just tons of energy.

1:39:43 Diamond Dallas Page: So I appreciate that.

1:39:44 Brian Rose: The book is Positively Unstoppable, the art of owning it. I love this concept of owning things. I spent my whole life trying to own things that have power over me. You know, first it was alcohol and drugs and smoking, and I beat them all, and now it’s mindsets, and I’m just working it, you know, and every time I do it, I get more powerful, and I feel better, and I’m also, I’m, I’m of more service to my fellow man when I do that.

1:40:07 Brian Rose: So I really appreciate you, man. Thank you so much, and, uh, just want to wish you all the best.

1:40:15 Diamond Dallas Page: Thank you, bro. It’s been your pleasure.

1:40:18 Brian Rose: Spoken like a true wrestler.

1:40:20 Diamond Dallas Page: I love it.

1:40:21 Brian Rose: All right, there he is, Diamond Dallas Page. Go check out the app. I’ll be on it tomorrow. Um, get the book, and, uh, love you guys.

1:40:27 Brian Rose: Until next time, we’ll see you on London Real. Thank you, Dallas. Appreciate you. Bye-bye.