Elliott Hulse - How To Become The Alpha Male

Full transcript: Elliott Hulse on London Real

6:36 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Elliott Hulse, the American strongman, strength coach and CEO of Strength Camp. You are a self-made entrepreneur who overcame learning disabilities and disadvantages to become one of the most prolific visionary leaders to a generation of men.

7:03 You run the Strength Camp gym in Florida and travel the world holding Grounding Camps, which I attended yesterday. They use tribal dancing, breathing and active meditation to help men break free from self-limiting beliefs. Elliott, welcome back to London Real. Thanks for having me back. It’s great that you’re here.

7:19 It’s been almost three and a half years. I can’t wait to talk about what happened yesterday because, you know, the whole bioenergetics and the Osho active meditation, you know, you put me on two, and I want to go through that whole thing. Before I do that, I just wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done for the community of people all around the world, of men all around the world. The last time I met you, I had known about what you did, but I hadn’t started practicing, you know, the active meditation stuff until later.

7:47 I started doing it in the parks. I almost got arrested one time from screaming out loud in the parks. I woke up from the Triangle-ization phase, two policemen over me who had been getting complaints about someone yelling in a Royal Park in London. And then later at one of our big live events with 200 people there, I actually walked people through, you know, a very short part of one of the active meditations you teach. I think the warrior one.

8:13 And the the experience was tremendous, the feedback was amazing. So just really want to thank you for that. And you know, I think that pushed me further into a lot of things we’ve done here at London Real. And if I don’t think if I look at the movies and some of the guests, Elliott, it’s always like I’m attracted to kind of this alpha male who brings in this kind of spiritual component or this component that gets men in touch with their feelings. And they’re, it’s no coincidence that it’s Dorian Yates who talks about spirituality, it’s Eckhart Tolle, he talks about getting into the mind through the body.

8:47 You know, my latest movie, Iron Mind, with a guy like, you know, John Joseph or the Cro-Mags, Hardtalk in New York, and we get into the body things. I’ve done with Jocko Willink. Can you? And so yeah, I just want to thank you for doing all the stuff that you do and you have no idea how many people you’ve reached through, you know, everything you’ve done. So just want to say thanks for that.

9:08 Thank you. Like I said, I want to get into the energetics, but I want to start by talking about a post you put on Instagram a few weeks ago where it was a picture of you and American flag behind you and you said “Make America Alpha Again.” Yeah. And I know this is something I’ve seen you trending towards in the last couple years. You know, you have your Grounding Camps, which are incredible, and I want to talk about them later, about really getting people into that physical and into the spiritual, but you started focusing really on men lately, and I think you’ve seen the need to address where we’re at as men and the resurgence of the need for a strong man in our world.

9:47 And I’m just wondering if we could start there because you’ve really gone in this specific direction and I want to talk about it. And I’m sure some people understand it, some people don’t, some people don’t like it, some people do. So talk to us about this. Well, I’m the oldest of four boys. I grew up in a neighborhood with all boys, playing football in the yard.

10:06 I played football, captain of the football team. I was attracted to strong men. I mean, everything that I did, like I say, I’m the king of boys, like it’s always been about boys, so it’s been about masculinity. It’s always been about doing what men do in my life. And in recent years I’ve, I’ve three daughters, right?

10:29 And I have experienced, I’ve been delved into, I’ve been thrown into a world of femininity and I got an opportunity to see the contrast between growing up as a boy’s boy and a man’s man. All my clients were always men. I trained athletes in my gym. It was always just men, so it was just, I was always around men. Now to be, you know, father of three daughters and then to move in and start paying more attention to what’s going on in the world as it relates to how men are experiencing life in civilization, I began to recognize not only in myself but in the world.

11:07 How, you know, this contrasts, almost like this, it seems almost like a fight between what’s masculine and what’s feminine in our society. You know, we see these movements where, you know, men are demonized, women are victimized. And so, you know, just paying attention to that and recognizing that there is some healing that needs to be done has brought me out in my desire to stand up for what I think is right, be there for men, and, you know, hopefully in that way bring some integration to what we’re experiencing in terms of the division between sexuality and then gender, even gender confusion.

11:48 There’s so much confusion going on right now. Yeah, there’s confusion over gender, confusion and gender identity, that like you said, men being demonized, women being victimized, probably not good for either sex. Where is the state of men? I mean, not yesterday, I hung out with few hundred younger men, right, in their 20s, like, and I saw them, and I saw them and I thought, first of all, I wish I had something like Grounding Camp when I was their age. Yeah.

12:14 But I’m like, I was kind of faced to look at, you know, guys that are a generation younger than me and how there’s a lot of weird confusion going out there. There’s messages being sent, there’s gender fluidity, there’s “don’t do this, do that.” What do you think is the wrong message they’re getting and what are you trying to tell them? Well, you know, there’s this push to eliminate traditional masculinity, traditional families. They use the term patriarchy to describe the, the negative aspect, apparently, you know, which is aggression and in our, you know, our extraversion as men.

12:57 Just a lot of the male, the traditional and biological male attributes are looked upon with disdain and, and the like non-trusting, not trusting, you know, so that when we live in a world when the society is such that when a boy comes into the world, what is natural and what is spontaneous and what is biological in him is not seen as proper and okay and needs to be trained out of him, and that’s a lot of what the schools do. It it number one, it robs us of our truth in biology and nature, and also we are no longer living in a world where young men are given a resourceful purpose to follow or a path to follow. You know, we’re taught to be good students, which is sit down, shut up, be more like, Jordan Peterson says, agreeable.

14:00 You know, be more agreeable, be more feminine, really. And then at the same time the training is such that we are made to be consumers more than producers. You know, which is, is feminine, consuming, it’s feminine. You know, the vagina consumes, takes in, the masculine, the penis, produces, it goes out. And so our ancestors understood that boys needed to be taught how to be men.

14:31 You know, we, we like to say that, well, you should just know what, what it is to be a man. Well, for women, they know what it is to be a woman because by, Allah, biology gives them the opportunity to become a woman, you know, like the, the period, the mark, it’s right there. A boy, it’s not the case. A boy needs someone to show him, and that’s where the father comes in. And we live in a world where there’s not as many male role models, there’s not as many fathers.

14:57 Fathers have basically been cast out. There, it almost seems as we’re not needed to some great degree, you know, I don’t need no man, and the government takes care of the woman and the children. So there’s no male mentorship, there’s no male leadership, there’s no mythology. That’s another thing, religion and mythology came about because men understood that men needed a purpose, but in order to ascend, to move towards something, we need an ideal. So, you know, Christians had Jesus as the perfect, perfect male to follow.

15:28 All religions and all mythologies have this perfection of the man and this reached towards and the steps towards going. So today we kind of are skeptic, skeptical of religion, we’re skeptical of mysticism, or are not mysticism but mythology, and, and you know, we, we’ve kind of lost quite a bit in that. Why do you think we trended that way? Well, we’ve become very scientific, you know, so with the advent of science, which brought tremendous technology, and it was wonderful and great, we’ve cast aside stories, metaphors, mythology, things that weren’t, that aren’t necessarily materially true, physically true, but psychologically and emotionally true, you know, things like, so it’s funny because, so for example, in the Bible, Jesus walks on water.

16:19 Well, you got both ends of the spectrum, where you’ve got people who take things so rationally, on both ends of the spectrum, where they’re like, well, that’s impossible, that can never happen, therefore the, the Bible is wrong and it’s based on stupidity. And then you’ve got the people who take it literally, and they’re like, no, Jesus actually walked on water, he could walk on water. Both of which missed the point because they’re looking too much at the material of it, they’re looking too much at the reality of it and missing that, wait, it’s true in that symbolically Jesus tread the emotional water, represents emotions.

16:56 Jesus was able to tread, to walk above, to rise above the emotions and therefore walk on water. When we can look at things mythologically and with that decoding of the symbols in our stories, we then gain the truth that is available in all of it. And so we’ve gone kind of too scientific, we’ve rejected things we can’t, quote unquote, prove. It kind of degenerates everyone, right? Because everyone’s kind of now equal, same resources, same logic, the jobs now are kind of down to the logical brain as well.

17:28 So you see all this is going in a dangerous way. Judge it, because, you know, we really are living at the end of an age and the beginning of a new age. In many traditions this is described and we can experience it by the breakdown of basically everything that’s fundamental in our, in our world. You know, this whole gender confusion thing is the breakdown of the most fundamental aspects of being human beings or living in the physical world, which are the positive and the negative aspects, the male and the female aspects, the yin and the yang.

18:02 That is the, the building blocks of our physical experience here on the planet. For that to be confused means we’re living in a time of breakdown. But at the end of every breakdown there’s a buildup. So as, as they say, the sun, it gets darkest right before the sun rises. Well, yeah, we’re living in a dark time where there’s a lot of confusion, there’s a lot of breakdown, wars and rumors of wars and defamation, and it seems like there’s so much strife and people are against one another, there weren’t more split than we’ve ever been before, but we’re also more unified than we’ve ever been before.

18:39 We’ve got the internet, which has brought us together more than we’ve ever been before. So we can focus on the darkness, we can focus on the breakdown, we can focus on the division in the wars, or we could turn our eyes to the light that’s rising, and there are tremendous aspects, beautiful, wonderful light aspects of what we’re experiencing right now. We’re just like straddling two ages, though, you know, so having judgments about anything will just keep you trapped.

19:04 I’ve got two sons, one and two years old, and I’m thinking, how do I raise men? Yeah. And I’m not always gonna be around, you know, and so I got to do my work now and I’m thinking all sorts of things, you know, when do I do this? Yeah. When is martial arts brought in?

19:20 How do I talk about sexual activity? I had Mantak Chia here recently and we basically, I’m considering showing them how to use their sexual organs, you know, more energy, and to teach them from the beginning, and this is not some shameful piece or something you do in your own and masturbate in the corner. And like, I’m trying to think of what, where I need to take them, what do I teach them about gender? What is your thoughts on gender and neutrality and, like, what do you think we should be teaching young men?

19:45 Well, I have a question for you. Did you circumcise him? That’s a good question. I actually didn’t, but I would love to tell you that that was a great conscious choice. Yeah.

19:57 But I didn’t choose to do it and I think it was too late, you know, and so that’s a great question. What is that, what does that say and what, well, yeah, tell me. Yeah, you know what, that’s a really good question. What does it say that the very first experience that a boy has when he shows up in this world is violence towards his sexuality? Not a good message.

20:20 What, you know, you don’t have to theorize and have to think too much, you know, you don’t, the deliberated on it too long. It’s pretty clear, it’s pretty obvious. You’re cutting off a piece of his genitals as soon as he gets here. What is that saying to the world about the value of men, the value of his sexuality? Why do we do that?

20:42 Well, there are a myriad of different reasons. I did, I, there’s a really good documentary called American Circumcision, because we do it more than anybody. Yeah. Over in America now it’s just basically standard here. He comes, move on.

20:53 Yeah, I mentioned to my wife, and she’s from Bulgaria, and she’s like, what? She’s like, that’s not normal there. But in America it’s just like, it’s just done. Yeah. So it is, according to this documentary and some of the people I have spoken with, it began as a religious rite of passage and it represented a blood sacrifice in the Judeo religion, which made its way over to America.

21:20 Okay. So, okay, that was a long time ago in a different culture, how’d that make its way over into America? In order to, because America was very Puritan, in order to stop boys from masturbating, because they believed that masturbation would create all kinds of mental disease and physical disease. So to help make your boys good boys that don’t play with their penises, is they push this idea that, you know, they should cut off this part of the penis which is highly sensitive, which has something like 80,000 very specialized nerve endings on it.

21:56 So when you know you’re severed or you’re, you know, you’re cutting that away, it takes away a tremendous amount of their sexuality. Now when people look at it logically, it’s pretty plain that that’s probably not the best thing to do, or it’s not the most humane thing to do to a human being. But then we have all of our, you know, things are propped up by our scientists and doctors and whatever they say basically is so, you know, they started using different reasons why, you know, it prevents STDs or it’s cleaner, you’ll have less infections.

22:33 They give you all kinds of quote unquote reasons why it’s okay, the kind of a part of your son’s member. You know, so we’re talking about masculinity and, you know, we could talk all day. I can’t help but think about that original wound that each one of us carry around, right? Yeah, so that’s a sign of that maybe something’s kind of weird going on with our culture when we voluntarily, without question, kind of mutilate our own sons. Okay.

23:01 Yeah, without question. I, so that’s one thing I remember as a boy being told to pull out the chair for a woman before she sits down and I, and I, and I’m all for chivalry, but I remember thinking, and that was like seven, Elliott, and I thought, I’m being emasculated here a little bit. Why am I doing this? I just didn’t know why I was doing this. And so, so I’m just wondering, what do you think we should do with gender?

23:23 Should we say the amount of men are men and women are women and this and that? My sister’s in California, I think she’s raising her son gender neutral. I don’t even know what that means. Yeah. So is it time to put your line in the sand and say I’m not doing this, I’m doing this?

23:36 Mm-hmm. It’s very basic, it’s very obvious. People like to say that gender is a social construct, like it’s made up, that’s made up. You, we are born with biological, very biological differences. We’re very different.

23:52 And so, you know, all of the aspects associated with masculinity and how we show up in the world, protector and provider, are not taught to us, they are inherent. Science shows this. There have been scientific studies where they want to prove gender, that gender doesn’t exist and that it’s a social contract, where they would have, you know, they would trade the roles where the men would do more like home, in the home things and women were given an opportunity to go out into the field.

24:22 And in this society I think this was done in 1800, so it’s done quite a while ago, the they just naturally graduate, gradually gravitated towards what they’ve always done, what feels good and what’s right. So the women came back into their nurturing positions and the men went back out into their building and hunting and gathering and protecting jobs. You know, so I, it’s weird to me that we even have to have this conversation. Yeah, but we do, that’s the thing.

24:53 We really, in America, maybe even more so, I don’t know, this is becoming really, it really is becoming a thing. Mm-hmm. Right, having to deal with pronouns and deal with that stuff, or maybe that’s changing. You don’t want to be a part of that? Well, I mean, I am a part of it because I’m saying this right now.

25:08 There gonna be some nasty comments about me being wrong. You know, it’s the world that we’re living in right now. And like I said, let’s break down before the buildup, so I’m not gonna understand that, like we’re being broken down and divided and destroyed. Our sexuality is being destroyed because it’s dark, it’s getting dark, and it’s going to be dark right before the sun rises. So, you know, it’s the world that we’re living in right now.

25:33 I don’t, I’m not here to fight it or to stand up for anything, but I know myself as a man and the men that I lead and mentor and support, we fare best when we live in a world where there are boundaries and it’s clear about why we’re here and what we’re doing. And if I can provide that and I can be a, you know, beacon for men in that way, then yes, absolutely, that’s what I will do. When you say, me, someone who joined us yesterday, maybe a 25-year-old male and you watch and observe things about his character, what do you see in there that are big alarm bells, that just things to you that thinking, you know, I don’t think this is the way it was, say, a few hundred thousand years ago in our hunter-gatherer tribe, maybe this isn’t the way things were even a few hundred years ago.

26:17 What are some of the things that are just big, big alarm bells for you in their behavior, their attitude, everything? One of the things that gets really confused is the order in the home based on relationships. So we’ve done a great job of bringing women up and empowering them, you know, and it should be that way, but then it gets confusing as to who’s the leader in the relationship, and traditionally it was the men where the leaders in the home, were the provider, where the protector, were the physically stronger ones, and women were the, like Robin to Batman, you know, the nurturer and the sidekick in a way.

26:52 And it makes sense that things are that way because in every relationship there should be a leader. But what we’re seeing now, it’s very strange, it’s very emasculated, feminine boys and women who can’t trust them because they’re not standing up and being strong. So women that then step up and become very masculine women. So, you know, in school, does that school teach women to be more masculine, and it teaches boys to be more feminine, almost like tries to equalize us.

27:21 And then so boys are confused, they want to be good boys, they want to do the right thing, they want to, you know, do what women, with seemingly women are asking them to do, which is to be less masculine, be more like women. But then women can’t trust men because men aren’t being men any longer. We’re not strong, we’re not firm, and so then the women step up and then we have these relationships which relationships aren’t working these days any longer, divorce rates are out of control, but that are backwards where you’ve got the woman who’s the leader, the woman who’s the aggressor, the woman who’s very masculine in the relationship, and then the men who basically like bite their tongue, they basically pander and they become the they become the feminine partner in the relationship, right?

28:05 And women might think that that’s what they want, but ultimately there’s a weird kind of energy dynamic there that isn’t quite right. So it’s not congruent and ultimately both parties, they both, they both win this is, let me go like that. And where are the good men? Where are all the good men? All the good men are trying to pander or trying to be more like women, right?

28:26 Right. And is this something that’s always been on your mind or is it in the last couple of years where it’s just like, wow, I need to, it hasn’t been on my mind because I have a wonderful relationship with my wife. We started dating, we were 14 years old, and it’s, we great, we have a great order in the home, you know, like I said, I’m Batman and she’s Robin, and we, she takes care of the kids and she’s a wonderful mother and she cooks and she nurtures, like I don’t, I can’t see a better job on as a human being to do than to bring forth and take care of children, and I go out and I protect and I provide and I bring home the meat, so to say, you know, so for me, I, that was instinctual and that was a life that we created and I kind of lived in a bubble and I thought, like, this is just, this is the way it is, best it was, it was with my parents too, you know, and it wasn’t until I started getting lots of questions from young men about the challenges they’re having, they don’t know what to do with these women.

29:21 And so I started looking into it, and so I started paying attention to what their concerns were and I realized, like, it’s very different out there and it’s very challenging out there. And but at the same time, we have a tremendous amount of really good resources for young men coming up now. I’d like to mention Rollo Tomassi, he’s got a book called The Rational Male. I think every man should read this book because it’s based on biology and it tells you, you know, not necessarily how to be a man, but it shows you the truth about how women are and how men are and allows us to restore ourselves to our natural positions.

29:59 In that, I was at the O2 Arena here in London about a couple months ago and there were 7,000 people that bought a ticket to watch Jordan Peterson debate Sam Harris on stage. Mmm. And I was in the crowd and I walked in and I talked to so many people in line and you see these men that have been given a direction, you know, 12 Rules for Life, and told, you know, stand up, sit up, stand up straight, your shoulders back, take some ownership, you know, your burden and all that stuff.

30:27 We’re seeing a resurgence of this need for people to tell us how to be men. What do you see when you see something like that, you see Jordan himself and the reaction to Jordan and reactions to what you’re talking about? What do you see here? We’re remembering, we’re waking back up. And so, again, you know, there has been this idea, which is very wrong, that there is something emasculating about men needing to be told how to be a man.

30:58 Once again, biology does a great job leading women towards what is natural and normal for them. For men, we need role models, we need mentors, we need 12 rules or 10 commandments. You know, it’s not a question, because if we don’t get that, we’re gonna, where our energy is going to go somewhere and if it isn’t going towards resourceful rules and commandments, it’s going to go towards, well, I’ll figure it out on my own, through gangs or through drugs or through turning it in on myself, and that’s not forceful for anyone.

31:34 Right. So by not teaching someone to be male and alpha, to a certain extent, and maybe even define alpha, beta, what that might mean, we’re actually getting the worst behavior out of these men. Mm-hm. Cuz it’s this uncontrolled energy. Again, I saw these gentlemen yesterday at the event, if they didn’t have something like that to direct their energy, where does it go?

31:51 And I look at my past, my mind went into substance abuse, sir, mine went into anger, mine went into all sorts of things. Um, and so yeah, what, so my question is, what is this concept of the alpha male, the beta male, and what are you trying to teach these men to do? Well, one of the best ways to describe it is, as an alpha male, you can rise above emotional distractions. Beta is to allow yourself to be carried by the emotions within and oftentimes women, which represent far more emotion than men, to be kind of carried around by then, by women.

32:33 So if we can detach from and look at ourselves and the emotional turmoil, like Jesus walking on the water, Jesus was very alpha. He’s walking on that water, he’s not allowing the emotion of the situation to carry him away. We then stand above the the tumult of the situation. So, so alpha is to be rational, is to be like a mountain, is to be above it all, is to be firm in chaos. Does it mean to dominate?

33:06 It doesn’t necessarily mean to dominate, I don’t, I don’t know dominate is the right word, because dominate sounds a lot like violence, but to lead. Okay. You said something yesterday during the Grounding Camp, you said the most masculine thing you can do is remain still. Mm-hmm. What do you mean by that?

33:25 Well, think about a leader. Do you want a leader that’s easily ungrounded and unseated, or do you want someone who can sit still in the chaos of a situation? And that’s, that’s what that’s what men do. We sit still in the chaos of the environment so that we can lead from a place of rationality. Is there a place for the emotional man?

33:49 Because there’s plenty of examples in history of a man that’s been maybe in tune with his emotions, maybe governed by his emotions. Where do they, yeah, where is the need for that? Because there is a need, right? Tremendous. Okay.

34:01 Emotions aren’t wrong in and of themselves, it’s how we react to the emotion that is wrong, you know. So if we can sense the emotion rising, oftentimes they give us insights as to what’s going on in the unconscious. So tremendous amount of intuition and insight is available through our emotions. When we suppress emotions, we’re suppressing a tremendous amount of our intelligence. You know, there’s, there’s intelligence in our emotions, you know, and that’s why we consult with our women as well, because women are in tune, more in tune with the emotional world, the watery world, the earthly world.

34:36 And so when a, when I met, the question was again, it was what do we do with those emotive men? I mean, do they, and how do we, you said it’s important to have them as well, they’re an important part of it, but I think you were kind of saying that you don’t suppress the emotions. You can, no, don’t. It, yeah, it’s not a matter of suppressing the emotion, it’s a matter of looking at it objectively, not letting them control you. Mm-hmm.

35:01 Not letting them control us. Okay. Yeah, I do consult with my missus sometimes and just get her take, cuz they, because they’re tapped into something. Yeah, much more than us, I feel like they’re much more in tune with energy and emotion sometimes than I. Mmm-hmm.

35:15 Maybe it’s cuz I’m out there trying to conquer and do those things. Um, what’s your take on the MeToo movement? What do you see that that as, and the reactions to it, and how we’ve all felt about it, because this is a lot about gender and this thing. Anytime we have these kinds of movements, there’s got to be a bad guy, and when the bad guy is men, that’s all of us, you know. So now we’ve got people coming out from everywhere pointing to men being bad guys, you know, demons.

35:52 So it’s not to say that that that what’s happened to some of these women is right, but now it’s just creating more division, you know. It doesn’t create unity, it doesn’t create healing, it creates division. And once again, I don’t have too much judgment to back about it because things got to break down before they build up. Maybe we do need to be divided in that way for some time before we can actually begin to see both sides for one another so that we can heal that.

36:20 And so we see like a real division here and kind of a demonization and victimization, like you said earlier. Obviously there’s some events and we’re gonna have to deal with the crimes and these events, but to try to be a, alienate an entire gender is kind of dangerous in itself. They call it identity politics is the term, where, you know, one side tries to gain power by being the victim against the other side. So you have victim and demon, and so there’s a tremendous amount of power in that division, you know, the power gained by it, but then also a lot is lost.

36:53 It’s also dangerous being the victim, right? I mean, it has a lot of short-term gains but has a long, a lot of long-term downside. Yeah, there’s definitely a downside. Mm-hmm. Because he kind of changes the way, it takes your power away, doesn’t it?

37:06 Yeah. I’m a victim, right. I’m sure you don’t teach men to be victims in anything you do. You got it. We got to all take responsibility.

37:14 The election of Donald Trump, what does that show you about our relationship with the alpha or our own maleness and in reaction to him as well? What does that teach you? Because like you said, you’re kind of an observer, which is nice. Might have to go through this period, we’re learning, we’re not learning. What have you seen the last two years of that happening?

37:35 Donald Trump is really alpha. Haha. And a lot of people don’t like it, and I’m not saying I agree with everything he does, you know, my political bent is more towards libertarianism, so, you know, less intervention, you know, more for. But I think right now with the way things have gone, we’ve needed a strong leader. In the past, several leaders have been very beta, and by mere virtue of the fact that a lot of people don’t like him and yet he still stays firm to his word and does what he says he’s going to do, it’s representative of the type of man that we’re meeting again in the world and who ultimately we as men are going to aspire to and hope to become, you know.

38:21 Again, it’s not about what he’s doing, it’s about who he is, the type of man that he is, firm and and aggressive and active, speaks up, doesn’t, never lets himself be a victim. I think that’s amazing. Somebody comes after him, he comes right, he goes right back after them, he never panders, he stands up tall, you know. Once again, you know, I’m I’m just describing who he’s being rather than, you know, what he’s done. And a lot of what he’s done has been really good too, if you look beyond what the media tells us, such as economy.

38:57 Yeah. Okay. Bringing back jobs, you know, that were overseas and opening factories back up. I mean, he’s created tremendous amount of opportunities for a lot of the people who play the victim role and don’t even realize it. Do we need leaders like him?

39:14 Don’t, I mean, I don’t even have to say that we need it, but the world is showing that we need it by his election. I think also too in Brazil, Bolson- aro, oh, this guy, they call him the Trump of the Tropics, he’s another like alpha dude. And I, and I think there’s several other countries too, I don’t want to say them and be wrong, but in Europe where there’s some strong leaders are emerging who are saying no. I even, even, I don’t know what’s going on right now but with the Brexit movement from the EU, that’s like, that’s a very alpha move, you know.

39:48 No, we’re not gonna go along and be agreeable with the way things are going as the collective, you know, that’s a, that’s a very feminine way, which is to get along and to go along, but to say like a mountain, I am firm here, I am, I say no, I’m not going to do that, is, uh, I think it’s good. I think we, I think we’ve gone so far in there just allowing of things that when someone stands up and says no, which is what they’re doing, I think that’s great. Do you think the election of Trump is a symbol that collectively as a society or as a world that we’re tired of the feminization of men?

40:27 One part of the population, yeah, and the other part is that much more angry. So he represents, yeah, he represents polarity in its finest. So it could be a symbol of that but also an equal symbol of people who don’t want that. Mm-hmm. So it exposes the shadow, you know.

40:46 So you look at a lot of the people who are for peace and love and unity, but they’re really violent and angry and mean, you know. I, the left, they would describe it in many circles, are showing themselves to be really violent and to really mean and willing to do whatever it takes. If they got to destroy someone’s character or destroy people’s lives, they’re willing to do it, and that just makes you questioning, you know, I thought this was about unity and peace and coming together, when in reality it’s just about power.

41:19 You mentioned the media earlier. Let’s put media and the internet kind of out there. Well, first of all, what do you tell the young men that you teach? How do they interact with this thing? And the other thing is, how do you know what to believe and when not to believe?

41:34 Because like you said, if you trust the media or if you lead the New York Times, and I’m still currently reading the New York Times, I think I’m gonna stop soon because it is just, it’s never been so obvious to me how biased that paper is on the front page, just telling me their version of the events with their own agendas. Mm-hmm. Versus maybe what’s really happening. And I always like to say, what’s happening around you, right? Is your life better?

41:54 What do you, you know, what’s your immediate effect and not what’s happening with the world. But yeah, what is your relationship with that media and how do you tell people to receive messages from the outside? I’ve never really trusted the media. I was anti-TV before it was cool to be anti-TV. And it’s so funny because like before we had children, I, you know, I had all these plans about how I was gonna raise my children, what we’re gonna do.

42:22 I achieved quite a bit of it, you know. Colleen had natural, all natural births, nursed all of our children, natural births at home, and when I want, I have a traditional heart, I like to do things in a traditional way. And so a lot of what I, what I do is try to block out cultural influence, you know. It’s kind of the rebel in me, kind of be the old traditional man that’s in me when it comes to media, which is your question. I intended to not have a TV in my house.

42:56 This is how funny things off, not have a TV in my house. I was like, that’s it, we’re not gonna have a TV. And I was on the way to establishing that, and then the iPads came and the small phone, the little phones came and the screens came. So it’s like, yeah, we didn’t have a TV but we had all these screens. So it’s like I just couldn’t get away from the screen.

43:13 It’s like, god, it was just, it was gonna be screens in your home, you know what I mean? And the reason why I wanted to get away from it is because of, look, you know, the family no longer has the, the amount of influence, the parents don’t have the same kind of influence that they used to have on the family, you know. We’re now, it’s mostly the media and it’s mostly the schools, mostly the government, you know. They say it takes a tribe, but I’m not so sure I like what the tribe is doing.

43:42 It takes a tribe to raise the children, I don’t want that tribe to raise my children, you know. I’d much rather create our own values in our own home rather than have it being so, it’s like I’m always having to fight against the cultural values now, you know, with my children. It’s like, I got it, I never thought that I would have to have a conversation about, you know, so for example, for example, that gender is not a made-up idea, you know. Gender is actually biological.

44:15 It makes perfect sense, you know, but I have to have those conversations because the media plants those seeds and shows those ideas out there. So it’s inescapable, it’s inescapable. So instead of trying to build up in another direction, I’m busy trying to defend from, from from another, you know. Yeah, what’s been the reaction to you taking more of this male, masculinity stance the last couple years? It’s not even that I started taking it in the last couple years, like I said, I’ve always been there, but I also found that at a certain point I began becoming very beta about it because the world, like, so for example, I’ve always been with men, in other words, like speaking to men, training men, training with men, doing things with men, and so I started gaining in popularity and then women would show up and so I would maybe tone down something I would say or maybe not say something or say something a little differently because I knew women were watching, and I really do, I really lost a lot of my self, you know, I’ll, and I lost the power of my word with men because I was trying to be agreeable because I knew women were there.

45:28 And so the past few years, you know, probably since the time I laughed, I left you, up until, you know, this year in particular, I was in a really confused place and I think it had a lot to do with that, like am I supposed to be more feminine? Am I wrong that I’m this masculine in my assertion and the things that I like and the things that I talk about and the people I want to work with? Should I be more agreeable? And I gave myself over to that and, like I said, I think I lost a lot of my inner strength and an outer influence because of it.

45:59 Because you would kind of have a neck, not a crisis of confidence, but you’re questioning your own message and something didn’t feel right about what you were doing. Mm-hmm. And you think that would that was that, that you maybe weren’t being true to your realness? Yeah, I stopped being true and back. Right, you know, some are, yeah, that’s it, you know, and it’s great because, you know, as I spent that time, as I, as I dimmed my light a little bit during that time, I saw all these guys like Jordan Peterson like show up and, you know, Rational Male and Red Pill, you know, these kinds of things started emerging and like little factions of men empowering one another.

46:33 And you know, as I started, like, delving into it, looking at what they were doing, I saw a lot of them sharing my videos like, here in my harem. Here I am questioning myself, not realizing I was able to create sparks and start little fires all over the place with these little factions on the internet where men are starting to take their power back and they’re starting to realize, you know, we’ve been kind of tricked in a lot of ways. So earlier this year when I started waking up again, I started looking around and paying attention and I’m like, wow, so I wasn’t wrong.

47:01 I, this is true, this is the way we’re moving, this is right, and I’m grateful for being a leader in this movement and I can step back up, I could stand back in my shoes, I can be firm again, then I can speak my mind as a man today. Wow. And so now most of your Grounding Camps are male-only events? Mm-hmm. Again, I started it being congenial, you know, so yeah, being, uh, agreeable and so I started, I had the women there and, you know, it was nice, it was cool, I figured for marketing, and whenever there’s women there, there’s more people are gonna show up, you know, because women attract.

47:39 And I just didn’t like who I was becoming as a result. I, it’s funny because, you know, there are even pictures where I look at myself and I’m like, I look like a woman in that picture, like I started growing my hair and, you know, I became, I started becoming very feminine, which is cool, I wanted to do this so that I can have the experience associated with what I’m talking about, not just conceptualizing. I was there and so I saw who I was becoming and then I saw, started seeing what was happening in the camps and how the guys are very different.

48:09 Even if there’s one woman they start acting very different, because it is in our nature to provide and to protect and to posture when there are women around. We can’t help it. And so there were lots of dish, they were distractions, you know, had some, some things that I would rather have not have happen, you know, because they’re women, they’re, so men are gonna do things that men do when women are around. And so I decided at one point earlier this year too, this is going to be a men’s-only thing, and instantly the energy changed and, you know, we’re restored again.

48:44 And you’re on the right path. Mm-hmm. I saw, yeah, one of your Grounding Camps in the States, like I went onto the landing page and it was like, yeah, you said, I’m sorry that there’s no women allowed at this event, and that’s it. So you, you know, you put that line in the sand. What do you say to the women that say, Elliott, we need this stuff too.

49:00 These are the caveman days, we fought for equal rights, we should be there, you know, we’re missing a big thing and we’re giving the wrong message to our men. And I’m sure men tell you that too. Oh yeah, oh yeah, there are lots of beta men out there. And what a beta me, you know, that yes, it is that, it no, because they’re saying what they think women want to hear, you know. Their mommies taught them to be good boys and they think that by being more agreeable that women are more attracted to them.

49:26 So they got like white knight thing going on where they’re standing up for women but at the same time they’re standing down for men. Does that also not, though, potentially hurt us as a society? Because you know, if we didn’t have the women’s right to vote or equal rights, would we not lose a tremendous resource? I mean, there’s a point where a male-only kind of dominant society does hurt itself. No, should women have the right to vote?

49:54 Depends on who you ask. I’m asking you. You know, so I want to pass on that one only because they, you know, I’m not, I’m not 100% sure. I don’t know, I don’t know, I mean, it is what it is and I’m not gonna fight against it, but I don’t know, because I think there was wisdom in the old way as well, but there’s progress in the new way as well, also too. So I don’t really, can’t say right or wrong, but what I do know is that it’s always been and will always be important for men to do men things and women to do women things.

50:30 It’s how we, it’s how we understand one another. If we can’t separate from one another, we can’t really come together with one, because then we’re all like, we’re all unisex because men and women are doing everything together, you know, in the workplace and in activities and in the home, but everything that we do is together. And men don’t spend as much time with men as we used to, you know, even, you know, I want to go so far back as hunting together, but when there were more men’s clubs, you know, and things that were for men only and all going smoke cigars together and do things that were that way, we would be a bit more firm in what it means to be a man and to be around, and the same thing for women, you know.

51:11 And so, oh, one of the, oh, beautiful woman that I’ve met, a wonderful woman that I met that came to many of our Grounding Camps is an Australian Aboriginal, and she’s right on when I said, you know, we’re doing it just for men, she was like, yes of course, Elliott, because that’s how the Aborigines did it and it made perfect sense for our culture that men did men things, men went out, they did the men things and women did the women things, you know. They have a very traditional culture because they’re not as influenced as we are by these new-age ideas. And so she came up to me after saying that, that we would be separating, that we would be doing just men, and she gave me a big hug and she’s like, this is the right thing to do because there’s too much confusion when we need to do their thing and they need to be by themselves and we need to be our way and then need to go and be your way and do your thing and then we can come back together on equal firmness.

52:10 I know who I am, I know where I belong, I know I’m a man. And again, with men we need someone to model ourselves after, we need particularly older men, ritual elders, icons to look up to and to model ourselves after. And if we don’t have that and all we have is women, you know, then we don’t, we’re actually women with penises. And so once we’re firm in who we are, or you can come back together and then it’s things start making sense again. It’s interesting how these cultures that are more connected, maybe to their tribal origins, maybe our Aborigines, a lot of tribes in Africa have the circumcision ritual, they have a lot of these things still in place and they’re a big part of growing up as a man, and you go out and you have some pretty serious beats to go through, some of these rituals.

52:55 Yes. So I started spending some time studying the process of initiation. Robert Moore was a neo-Jungian, he is also heavily influenced by Mircea Eliade, who studied cross-cultural practices and ideas. He’s got a great book called The but something of initiation is initiation, and he talks about how there are, you know, three requirements in order for initiation to happen. They, you need an elder and you need a sacred space and you need a process.

53:31 Mmm. Okay. And so what what our ancestors would do with young men is there would be in a situation where he turned 12, 13 years old and so feeling his self again, you know, he starts feeling his oats, he studies, so he’s speaking up or he’s acting out, is being, uh, Nagri, about disagreeable. And so you’d recognize that as an opportunity to then take that new profound energy that’s rising in his body and direct it in a particular way. And so the very first thing that had to happen for that process of initiation and those three things to go along with it is it had to be a separation from the world of the mother.

54:08 You got to separate from mom, you got to cut the apron strings, you got to get away from society as it is and you need to attune with and move towards the world of the father. And so the woman and the men understood this. So a little boy, makes, maybe say he’s at, uh, he’s at home and he’s there when his mom and he’s acting up or whatever, the men would come in with masks and they would strip him away and the women would all, oh, you know, they know what’s going on, but they would get all like worked up with, oh, don’t take my boy, don’t take my boy away.

54:38 And then they would take him out somewhere and they would introduce him to the world of the father, the world of masculinity, and a lot of it had to do with, of course, a challenge, you know, because in the same way that a woman sheds blood, then that introduces her into femininity, they would perform practices where the men would give their blood. In fact, my younger brother was very much involved in Native American spirituality and he was a Sun Dancer. One of the practices that they did in order for young men to honor that process by giving blood, he still has the scars on his chest and his back to this day, whether they would pinch right here in the skin and pierce and then tie a string to him and then tie it to the tree and then he would, you know, after fasting and dancing for several days, moved back and forth and put progressively more pressure and then pop himself free, and then the blood would, the blood sacrifice would be given to the earth.

55:42 So that was a physical challenge that was associated with it, but then there also had to be a purpose. Now so, either through a Vision Quest or through storytelling, there would be, you don’t just go back now as a, you know, a boy who shed blood, you go back now with this mindset, with this purpose, with this mission, with this newfound sense of self, way of being and meaning for your life and for our society. And are you trying to do something like that?

56:17 Are you trying to recreate that to a certain extent? In a way, in a way, it’s just that I’m still a wounded boy on the inside myself and still trying to find where I’m, I’m going as well, you know. What is a collective story that we could all tell ourselves, you know, religion did this for us in the past, stories and mythology did it for us in the past. I think what’s really needed is a new mythology, a new, new, unified, or maybe of global, you know, but you know somewhere where we can all as men on the planet agree on certain things and be in that particular way and move the and lead the planet to where it’s meant to go, you know.

57:09 It’s funny, if you look at London Real and if you look at our most popular shows, I mean, what are they, Elliott? They are these older males teaching us lessons. Mm-hmm. And you know, I throw them up on YouTube, I can’t say you can watch it and you can’t watch it, and what happens, you know, 82 percent of the population is men between 25 and 35 years old, basically is my demo, and they watch these things and people stop me in the street and they say, that’s the guy, that’s the guy, that’s the guy, you know, and it’s Elliott and Dorian and Dan Peña and John Joseph, and is that because there’s maybe a lack of that and they’re just looking, they’re trying to search out and find these?

57:45 Well, you can say it’s a lack of it or you could say that you’re providing it. We’re waking up also to, it’s in the darkest time but it’s the lightest time, it’s the brightest time, it’s, it’s happening, we’re at the, we’re at the cusp of two ages, you know. So just ten years ago this didn’t exist, you didn’t exist, one generation ago this didn’t exist and we just did what the TV told us to do and our school teachers told us to do. Now with the democratization of information you can find Brian Rose, you can find Elliott Hulse, oh, you can find Jordan Peterson, you can find…

58:21 Yesterday when I was finishing up our event and, you know, taking pictures and all, the young men came up to me and just reminded me that, Elliott, you’re like a father figure to thousands of young men out there, don’t forget that. I forget that because, like I said, I’m wounded myself, you know, and I’m just sharing who I am and I like to think that, you know, my wounds and healing is the woundedness and healing of all men worldwide. And then as I explore myself and as I grow and I share, I’m just a few steps ahead of all these young men that are looking for that, hunger in for it, thirsty for it, and they go to YouTube and they find it.

59:03 Talk about your wounds because last time you were here, mm-hmm, you had taken a break from YouTube, you know, that had gotten to be too much and you took a step back and, and I remember, I think you had become so prolific on YouTube then, you know, you, I think in your later opinion, we’re giving so many opinions about so many things and you’re like, what am I doing? Yo, Elliott’s talking about everything under the sun. And I think also maybe you maxed out on YouTube exposure, which I totally feel, that it can be really crazy thing that infects your persona, and you would kind of come back with a new version of you and then last time you left me you kind of went quiet, you know.

59:38 What does that like for you? Is that a necessary yin-yang cycle of the evolution of Elliott? Is there parts of you that wounded or feminized inside that you’re still trying to process? Can you tell me what that was like, last few years? You know that in my research, you know, because I’m always looking, my, I’m most fascinated in myself than anything else, so I’m always researching my experiences and what’s going on, and it’s so funny because a lot of my experiences are very predictable and very much described and outlined throughout our ancestry, in our history.

1:00:12 And so our ancestors knew that there was a time of transformation in a young man’s life, usually around 12 or 13, 14, where he needed a ritual initiation with, you know, a process, a mentor, and sacred space. And instinctually we all kind of know that, but we don’t get any support. Well, the same thing happens 12 years later, you know, about middle age, and put it that way, about middle age. For me, I reach middle age pretty early because I started my life really early, got married, so to have a children at 23.

1:00:47 So I come to realize, you know, through looking at this, that this was another death and rebirth opportunity for me and it was right on time and it made perfect sense in retrospect. I didn’t know what was going on at the time, right? And for men at this junction, we have an opportunity to look at our wounds where before we get to look at our power, and then that first state in that first initiation into becoming teenager, that power is surging, that testosterone surging, and so it’s like, okay, now you got to look at how to honor this power and use it properly.

1:01:24 By the time you get to middle age, you’ve been beat up quite a bit, especially if you’re as aggressive as I was, you know. So using the body, using the mind, just going full-bore, I reached a point where it was time for me to deal with some unresolved wound. And I like to say that the body is the mind, and so God started showing me through physical wounds, if you’re gonna get to me, because I’m very much identified with my body, strongman, football player, I mean I’ve always been big, strong, beautiful body, if you’re gonna get to Elliott Hulse, you got to beat his body down.

1:02:00 And so I tore both biceps, tore my Achilles tendon, had a hernia repaired, I fell on my neck and really injured hello my head and really injured my neck. And it was almost like these physical wounds represented aspects of my consciousness that needed nurturing, that needed to be looked at and needed to be honored. And I wasn’t gonna slow down, you know, I was just gonna stop on my own. So these were all kind of like, you know, just chops to my ego to slow me down just a little bit so that I would be introverted enough to go in and explore what’s been going on inside me.

1:02:38 And yeah, I discovered that there are a lot of things that I wasn’t even aware of about myself, hidden ambition, inhibitions, fears and angers that I didn’t know were there that were ruling me from the unconscious. Yeah, many different little fears and angers that ruled me without me knowing. That’s what the sentiment from which I was proceeding. Or now I can look at myself far more objectively and realize that, okay, these emotions are coming up or these old wounds are coming up and showing themselves so they can be processed, not so that they can drive me further into neurosis and to succeed even more and go get it even faster and do it even harder, because that was my old mindset.

1:03:20 Right. Is that kind of a drug in itself sometimes? Just anymore it’s, it’s neurotic, it’s neurotic to constantly be achieving, like I was chasing trophies or I was chasing muscle or arts, chasing money or I was just, because as a man we need a direction to put our energy and so it was all going towards what the world likes. The world likes me to be this way, well I’ll do more of it. The world expects you to be, you know, X, Y, Z, well I’m gonna do it to the nth degree, you know what I’m saying?

1:03:51 We’re all that extraversion will burn you out and destroy if you don’t take time to come in, to go in. This is, this was the time when I became my feminine self, I discovered my feminine, I my feminine aspects, I learned much more about because in Iron John, which is a great book for men, he describes every wound as being a womb. And so you could think of a wound as an opening in the body where, he says, God can plant a seed so that something new can grow on the inside.

1:04:23 So each one of these wounds slowed me down and turned me in, you know, the feminine is about taking in, is about yielding, is it about drawing in, and so I couldn’t be so extroverted in male any longer. I needed to nurture myself, I needed to be kind with myself, I needed to go in. And so it gave me that opportunity where now I’m, it’s so fascinating to be here with you again. I’m on the other end of that season where I was going down when I met you before and now, like, I’m coming right back out.

1:04:56 And you were embracing your own feminine energy, which is okay as an alpha, it’s inevitable because it’s there. Mm-hmm. It’s, it’s confronting it rather than embracing it, so to say, meaning looking at it for all it is and honoring it, being objective about it, and in a way integrating it into our being but not letting it become you. It can’t, if otherwise I’ll lose myself, we’ll lose ourselves. Okay.

1:05:30 So it’s a very interesting nuanced fine line. It’s integration. Okay. Mm-hmm. And what does the Elliott in this feminine energy look like?

1:05:39 Because I’m looking at you from the outside and you’re publishing your book King, you’re putting out these really cool workouts of you doing yoga in your office, and like for me, it’s just still being Elliott. I couldn’t tell, what’s it like being you when these things happen? Far more sensitive and intuitive, trusting my, trusting the prompt within, feeling my feelings rather than, you know, stuffing them down, but also to not allowing them to control, take control.

1:06:13 So it’s, yeah, like I said, confronting, looking at, really just being able to look at with a, you know, objective eye what’s going on on the inside rather than pretending it’s not there. That’s really what it is. Okay. Do you prefer yourself in this state? I do.

1:06:28 One of my mentors, Paul Check, said to me as I was going through this process, you know, and I did some coaching with him and I didn’t even think of it this way and he’s the one that kind of brought it to my attention that, okay, yeah, I am, I’m going in, which is a very yielding yin process, when he says, Elliott, before you become fully man you must become a woman first. At first I didn’t know what he was talking about, like, we, I don’t, what are you talking about, I don’t get it. But in retrospect, once again, I could look back and I was like, yeah, I went in, my introverted part, my white darkness, you know.

1:07:01 So yeah, I experienced quite a bit of that and so now I can integrate it and be fully man. Okay. And you found distractions, drugs, other things like that to kind of keep you from being present in this transition process? No, it’s painful to die to oneself, you know, that everything that I knew myself to be, in the world expected to me to be was sort of set aside and so in that confusion you know I sought distraction. That’s kind of a sign sometimes, isn’t it?

1:07:33 Mm-hmm. Like when I look back at my life and my, like, oh, my need for massive consumption of alcohol, I just kind of wish I could have gone up, someone could have gone up to me and just said, Brian, you realize that this is just a sign in your character, you’re constantly trying to disassociate yourself from life and all this stuff. Can you not see this as an objective, as an engineer? But either I didn’t want to hear that conversation or nobody had it with me.

1:07:56 But you know, the substance use, consumption, or the distractions or the whatever you use, it’s a sign that something is going on inside, right? Yeah. But maybe there’s a better way of dealing with that, right? Well, I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know.

1:08:10 I saw an interview with Sean Penn a few years ago and, you know, he used to be, you know, off the rails, whatever, you said he would drink a lot and fight. Oh yeah. And you know, he was, you know, sober then after, they were sort of interview with Charlie Rose, I watched a bunch of interviews of him and he said something I always found fascinating, and he said, maybe I needed to do that at the time, maybe alcohol that I needed. Mm-hmm. Exactly, and that’s why I don’t judge it, you know.

1:08:32 I was smoking a lot of weed and it turns out that marijuana is very feminizing. So when I look at it, like I stopped drinking, it was so funny because when I was in my aggressive, out-moving yang stage, you know, which is perfectly natural, I would drink because drinking draws that out in you, and I did not smoke marijuana my entire life, I was never smoked weed, but at the age of 36 all of a sudden I start smoking weed and so I realized, and what marijuana was doing was introducing me into my yielding, softer, more feminized self. Interesting, interesting.

1:09:12 So you know, you talked about plant medicine, you used plant medicine, I don’t think marijuana is very different than that if used in a conscious way, meaning it, I, it softened me up quite a bit in order to be able to accept what was going on and to move into that process. Okay. And so again, don’t judge it, just kind of see it for what it is and go through that transition and try to observe and learn and keep pushing through. Mm-hmm. Cuz that’s what, that’s what the alpha does, that’s what males.

1:09:40 Yeah, it’s cyclical, you know. All of life is cyclical, so whatever is up right now is going to be down eventually, whatever is down right now is going to absolutely make its way back up. So being attached by judgment and evaluation only keeps us stuck in that place rather than allowing the seasons to go. Right. And that’s a little bit about what you were teaching yesterday, so I don’t want to get into that, but you said the same thing on my last, our last conversation here.

1:10:04 You said, Brian, those demons that you think you’ve dealt with, mm-hmm, you’re constantly dealing with these different iterations of the rest of your life. I remember you said that cuz someone else quoted it back to me, meeting someone here, they said, remember what Elliott said about the demons, because we think we’ve got all those are done now, yeah, now I’m good. Whenever we’re good, it’s always this cycle, right? It’s interesting because I know, but this latest project, Iron Mind, and me going into this Ironman race and having to really come clean about a lot of my past addictions and addictive behavior, it’s, it’s it’s weird to be in this situation now where I’ve talked about alcoholism, heroin addiction, overdose, secrets, you know, and gone through a lot of this endurance training which reminded me a lot of what you’re doing yesterday as far as getting in tune with them, the body is the mind, as you’ve always said.

1:10:51 And then it’s also making me realize that, Brian, this ain’t over. Yeah. I’m gonna, you know, probably go back and go back and they’ll be these endless cycles and maybe throughout other existences, you know. In real, smarter, yeah, you do get smarter, right? Mm-hmm.

1:11:06 Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk a bit about the bioenergetics, because it’s something that you’ve been attracted to for a very, very long time. I remember I think some of your first lessons were when you took the subway and from Queens or whatever you were living in to New York City and started learning about that stuff. So but before we go into that, talk about Osho, because Osho just got on everyone’s radar recently with the Netflix show and I, I remember living in San Diego and I remember the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and I remember the Rolls-Royces, because it was kind of in the background, I think I was 10 or 12 at the time, whatever, and I never knew that was Osho, and then I never knew that that was linked to the bioenergetics that I ended up course teaching in London.

1:11:46 Yeah. Because of the mean you stuck in my head, and so all of a sudden I saw this series and I saw a little bit of the bioenergetics and I was like, wow, this is really come full circle. So what did you think of Wild Wild Country, which was the Netflix series talking about kind of Osho’s time in Oregon, and then if we can go into bioenergetics? Oh, well, as far as the documentary is concerned, because I read the book written by his assistant, the woman that was in the book, Sheela.

1:12:15 Yeah, what a wild woman. It should have been called Wild Wild Woman because the whole thing was really about her and her pursuits and her ambition and her job, and Osho put her in charge and so yeah, that happened and I don’t think it changes the way system that I received by reading Osho’s words all those years. I mean, Osho is a tremendous influence on the way I think, and an Osho is a revolutionary thinker, you know. A lot of the things I say almost sounds like a contradicting myself, and Osho constantly contradicting himself because the minute we become too firm or attached to any idea or any way of being or any ideal, we lose, you know.

1:13:00 So Osho on one end is, you know, there’s a wild man, but then he’s also a genius, you know, and if you take the time to read his work and to study his life, you see that if you focus just on the wildness of the experience of being, you know, in his presence, through some of the meditations he was doing and what they promoted and talked about in that documentary, you’ll miss all the genius that was available to Osho. So I think he would be proud, you know, if that, if that documentary came out now, he’d probably smile and be very proud. He said, you guys can’t figure me out, can you?

1:13:36 And so I, you know, I and I and I know that about him just reading enough of his stuff and being with many of his students. That yeah, that’s it, it’s an eight, it’s perfectly Osho. And he was a great showman, right? Oh, amazing. Huh.

1:13:49 And he read it, he, I mean, what an incredible thing that happened up there, you know. Again, I was fascinated with Sheela, a character and then quite like her. Yeah, amazing. He’s amazing, up titties. Yeah, yeah, all the footage from the 80s just brought back tons of memories for me.

1:14:04 What they built, I mean, it’s like a hit at airport there, right? I mean, I was just like, this is next-level stopping. I mean, this is really someone thinking big and the fact that he incorporated kind of business and into religion, there was more, he was traditional again, contradicting, he just brought opposite, a very, you know, really interesting, bold, strong, new ideas. So yeah, fascinating stuff. So you think he’d be enjoying this?

1:14:27 I’m pretty sure. One of the things again how he, he blends opposites is with the active meditations. And so, you know, I had been attracted to his books, I was reading his work and then I learned about active meditation and of course, you know, last time I was here I spoke about it. I think that maybe his, those, maybe his greatest gifts that he’s offered to us because it’s the embodiment of everything that he teaches, and you experienced it yesterday when we do those meditations, they’re chaos.

1:14:55 There’s chaos going on but then there’s stillness, and so what he surmised and what he learned from Wilhelm Reich, who spoke of the orgastic wave, and he related all movements of energy to orgasm, which is climb to the height, discharge, and then, or charge, discharge, and then settle, the way we as men in that workshop yesterday were able to settle down, be still and be silent was only possible because we went so wild and we went so high and we went so hard. So that pattern that’s followed through the dynamic meditation, and then we did the Mandala meditation where you’re running in place and you’re focused and you’re lifting your knees and you’re turning your brain off so that your body can keep going, then translates into stillness, you know. So those meditations he designed, he said I designed them with the Western man in mind because we’re so physically ant, we have so much physical anxiousness because of the repressed sexuality, that we needed to get all that energy out so that we can actually relax.

1:16:06 And he started doing it when he recognized that all of his Western students couldn’t sit still. It’s funny the story that he tells, when he decided to start creating active meditations, he would, he would sit out in a park and with his students and, you know, there may be thousands of them there and he’d be sitting and be talking to them and then they would all leave and he would notice that the grass is destroyed and, what the hell happened to the ground, their patches of grass missing. So he started to observe and he would watch, they would sit there listening to him but they would just be pulling, pulling up grass.

1:16:39 He’s like, these people are neurotic, they’re anxious, they can’t, they have so much energy that they can’t even sit still and listen to me. So he said, okay, next time we’re not just going to sit, we’re gonna, we’re gonna do some stuff. And he would exhaust them because, you know, like the meditations are exhausting, it would get them up and get them moving, all their body, breathing and moving out all their energy, and then when it was time to sit and be still, oh okay, good, they got out their jitters, they can sit still now and we can be in meditation, right?

1:17:09 And was this Western mentality because of our maybe relationship with our own sexuality in, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. We’re so, energy can’t, doesn’t, you could try to pretend it’s not there like you were talking about the emotions before, you pretend like it’s not there, but it’s gonna leak out somehow, it’s gonna show itself. So as much as we sexually repress, it comes out in neurosis, even in just weird movements or tics or like, you know, people will have to constantly be tapping their fingers or tapping their feet or chewing their fingers, chewing their jaw, chewing their fingers, all that is nervous sexual energy that doesn’t have a place to discharge.

1:17:46 And not all sexual energy is about ejaculation, you know, even when you had Mantak Chia on here you talked about, you want to preserve the ejaculation but you want to circulate the energy. Yeah. So Osho designed meditations where we can shout or we can run in place or we can sing and jibber and it’s really just about letting off steam, getting it out, getting it out, getting it out so you can actually sink and be still. Right. In the very beginning you said we are going to try to dissolve your mind or dissolve your, your ego, dissolve the ego.

1:18:25 Yeah, the ego gets exhausted trying to maintain face all the time, so the minute you shake your face the ego doesn’t know what to do, because the ego is very linear, it’s very much about holding the boundary, holding a space, it very much wants routine and control, but, and the face is always the seat of the ego, that’s where we maintain our, you know, our face, say face about saving ego. So the minute you start acting ridiculous, you know, like I did last time we were here and I got up, started acting ridiculous, the ego just cannot exist in an environment of ridiculousness. It has to disappear.

1:19:01 And you recognize that when we did some of the activities and I said just shake your head, if you shake your head, lift your face, loose, you become like a kid again and the ego just disappears. Why is it important to get rid of the ego? I don’t think it’s important to get rid of the ego. I think it’s important to put the ego in proper context, you know. A lot of people say the ego is the enemy.

1:19:22 Well, the ego is the, is the, is the interface by which we interact with the world. Without an ego we dissolve. Wilhelm Reich said that the body is the ego and the body is the shadow, so you can even see a person’s psychological predisposition based on their posture. So if that’s the case, you don’t get out of here or you don’t show up here without an ego. I mean, you have a body, boom, ego is going to begin manifesting and it’s proper and it’s normal, it’s natural to have a, what neo-Jungians would call a resourceful ego-self axis, and it’s really what we want.

1:19:56 We don’t want to be personally identified with the ego. We want to have space between ourselves and the mask, the ego being the mask. It’s okay because, you know, it’s designed to protect us, it’s designed to get us what we want, it’s designed to protect other people and help other people get what they want. It’s a good thing, but the minute we start to believe that it is us, then we lose ourselves and we become emotionally and mentally and personally identified with the mask.

1:20:27 Beings decide enta fied with the mask is an amazing thing too because when we have that type of objectivity, the ego is much more pliable, we can have more of a, we can change our ego and it’s okay to put on a different front because you need a different brand new construct by which to approach your life based on a new season, you know. So one of the things I like to say in my videos that was very resourceful to a lot of young men who, you know, men are suffering and suicide rates are going through the roof and a lot of it has to do with not being able to have this type of context for what it is to live a human life, that that sense that I want to die, that I want to kill myself, is right and it’s true and it’s normal and it’s natural, but it’s not that you need to kill yourself, your body, it’s that the ego construct by which you approach your life in this moment is no longer resourceful.

1:21:24 You have to die to it. So you’ve got to let the deconstruct to an old ego, not so that we can get rid of the ego but so that we can reform one that is more resourceful for who I’m becoming in the next season in my life. Okay. And what does the society look like that’s not doing this exercise, that’s not separating from the mask of our ego? What are the tendencies of that group of people?

1:21:46 We’ve become, we’ve become very sad and we become very angry because we take our experience that’s associated with what the ego’s confronting personally and we think that the attack is actually me or the thing that happened is actually me. When we have the distance from it, we can allow life in all of its challenge and all of the tumult and all of the turmoil to just be, and so we can take the beating but not be affected, we could take the challenge and not be affected. It’s once again a matter of creating that objectivity.

1:22:24 So you attack, someone attacks Elliott Hulse, they’re not really attacking me because I’m not just this, I’m not just my ego, I’m not just my body, I’m above and beyond that in many ways. So you can’t, there’s parts of me that you can’t touch. Like so Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, you know, he was a Holocaust, in the Holocaust, and he spoke of being able to attain nirvana, enlightenment, while in a, in a concentration camp, and it was because he recognized that no matter what you’re doing to my body, what you’re doing to my character, you, there’s a part of me that you just can’t touch, you can’t do anything to.

1:23:06 And so being able to maintain that center of self allows life to be a lot easier. And that part was, you, you cannot take away from me my own choice to have my choice of attitude in that situation, that’s what he says. Huh. There it is, there. Yeah, you can’t take that away from me.

1:23:26 Right, that will always be yours. Mm-hmm. You can cultivate that. Mm-hmm. Which means probably getting that healthy, intentional separation from that ego mask and coming forth.

1:23:35 And so yesterday when you’re instructing me in this group of young men, you said, I don’t, I want you to dissolve the, the mind and dissolve the ego and stop thinking about that, the thing I have to do, that argument with my girlfriend or that superhero movie I just watched or that video game. I want dick all those thoughts to get out of your head and I want to get what, were you, where were you trying to get us to? And your non-judgment. Okay. Non-judgment because, so the mind, the ego likes to evaluate in order to keep you safe.

1:24:08 It wants to know what’s going to happen, it wants to predict, it wants to plan, and so when we can get out of that, that need to control and evaluate and judge everything, we can move back into the brilliance of the spontaneity within our bodies. And so with the, with the activity is what I’m hoping to, you know, this was, those were all Osho active meditations, we didn’t do any bioenergetic, we just didn’t have enough time, so I just chose different Osho active meditations in order to bring about this dissociation from our ego, from our rational, conscious, fearful mind, so that what’s spontaneous underneath can emerge. And that’s why we had, you know, the young man who had the visions, their visions, and people all the time during these meditations, wild visions, these things were coming to me.

1:25:02 Well, where was that before? Well, you, you didn’t allow it. Or people who started sobbing and crying, it’s like, I didn’t know that I needed to cry. Well, that’s because the ego construct had been holding it tight for so long that the minute that we created an opportunity for the ego to dissolve, what was underneath and spontaneous and right and true got an opportunity to release itself. Also, because we want to attach and we want to evaluate what’s happening, I reminded them that if sobbing comes up, if anger comes up, if yelling comes up, whatever comes up, any emotion, that laughter comes up, don’t judge it or attach to it, because immediately we want to begin evaluating it.

1:25:42 That sobbing comes up, oh, what am I, a girly man, or what is this, because my mom beat me when I was a kid? Immediately the brain wants to start making sense of things when the body’s intelligence goes far beyond what the rational mind can make of it. You got to remember that the body grows a baby inside of it, it replaces your cells, it’s growing your bone, growing your hair, digesting your food, all without your brain making sense of it. So there’s a tremendous amount of intelligence that can emerge, intuition can emerge when the ego’s relaxed.

1:26:15 At one point you told us to dance and you said I really want you to keep your eyes closed. Mm-hmm. And then the very beginning you said dance, but I don’t want you to dance like you’ve been taught how to dance or you think it’s cool how to dance, I just want you to dance. Mm-hmm. Then later your curse just to keep our eyes closed so we really wouldn’t look at anybody.

1:26:31 Right. Or judge ourselves. Why you asking us to do that? Like a kid, you ever watch a kid before they, because you have little children, before they start becoming self-conscious, it’s so funny, they’ll dance and they’ll move around and they’ll just do whatever, it’s spontaneous in their body, turn on music and they’re just gonna go. But the minute mommy and daddy start going, that’s so cute, come here, look, do it again, you know what they start doing?

1:26:54 Huh? People are looking now. Now that’s when the ego starts to arise and they start becoming self-conscious and they want to do it right. And it’s so funny because we as parents, we screw them up because we say no, no, do it like you did it last time. Well, the last time I did it was spontaneous and I didn’t know you were looking.

1:27:13 So then the kid starts to perform and then we, as we learned that, we begin to do that in our lives. Later on everything then becomes a performance. I recognize this with myself in my YouTube videos, you know, at first was spontaneous, I’m spontaneous, I’m doing it, and then I began to realize people are paying attention and so maybe there’s a formula to it. I was doing whom, how do I go about reproducing that last performance, and then I’m judging my performances, well that video is much better than this video, then the spontaneity just completely dies and that’s when it no longer is a joy.

1:27:45 As a child there is a human being to merely be and it becomes a chore. Right, right. So you’re trying to get that out of the equation in your own life and in all of ours’ lives. So just get us to break and bring patterns, and by breaking it we get a bit more objectivity. So it’s not like I’m telling you a new way to, I’m just showing you the way, giving you an opportunity to see the way you actually are being so that there can be a distance.

1:28:12 One of the, one of the young men that was there, I said he was huge, who’s big dude, he was a strong man, I think he did rugby or something, and during the break he came up to his, like, Elliott, you got a big deep voice, in his big strong hand and he says, I’ve suffered with anxiety and panic attacks my whole life and I’ve had this and I had a really bad one recently and I’ve been scared to have another one. So, you know, not only are you having that anxiety attack but now you’re afraid, so you have anxiety about having anxiety attacks. And when you’re in that environment where you have to let go, when we’re doing the active meditations, being your, the ego is dissolved, anxiety could come to the surface, and what he recognized was, as I was doing the exercises I started to let go, there was spontaneity in my body, and I started to become anxious because I thought I was going to have another anxiety attack, and he started freaking out, but then he remembered what I said, and I said just allow everything to be, and so the anxiety started coming.

1:29:15 What she thought was anxiety, a lot of times it’s just movement in the body that we’re not familiar with, so we judge it and then we start to get fearful about it and then we call it anxiety. Started moving in the body and he was able, and he was such a breakthrough for him, he was able to see the anxiety rising, not be attached to it, be objective and let it pass, and for the first time he was like, I am in control of my anxiety, my anxiety will never control me again, because I can see it now. I can see what I was doing, I was being anxious and when it came I would attach to it and be fearful or judgmental about my anxiety.

1:29:57 Now that I’m free from it I could see that spontaneity move in my body, not be attached, and let it pass. Right. And what are the results you’re looking for when you do your Grounding Camps, especially your two and three-day ones? Like, what’s for you a successful camp? Because I’m sure you fine-tune this and change this.

1:30:15 I mean, what are the results you want to see, you want to hear, what, same? I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, because if I’m looking for an outcome then I’m too attached. All I’m offering is an opportunity, you know, because I don’t know what’s going to happen to each person. There could be somebody that comes and the, and I tell them before we begin that whatever happens is exactly what’s supposed to happen, everything is unfolding perfectly for you, any judgment that you make about what’s going on is you dissociating, it’s, it’s you not getting what you really want, which is, what you really want is the experience, is the opportunity, is the allowance of this whole thing.

1:31:00 And if you go through it the entire time judging yourself, be okay with that, but I want you to see that you did it. So there will be people who come in and they can’t let go, I just, I can’t let go, whatever it is, I’ve been doing it, Elliott, and they’ll come to me at the end, they’re like, you know, I haven’t had the breakthrough that I’m looking for, and I have to remind them, can you see what you’ve been doing? Yeah, I haven’t been letting myself have that opportunity, or I’m looking for something that I can’t find.

1:31:30 Is it very good? That’s your lesson, that’s what you’re looking for, that’s what you came for. Everything is unfolding perfectly for you. So it’s not a matter of having a predictable outcome and wanting the more, and I used to do this, I want something for you, like I want you to get it, I want you to have it, I want you to gain something. The more I do that, the more I’m attached and I’m not allowing and I’m not available in order to help them see.

1:31:55 Yeah, yeah. One of the young men shared a trauma that had come up with him and it was very interesting how you answered his question. You, you, you didn’t try to figure out the trauma, you didn’t try to, to kind of aid him or explain it, you just said, okay, well that’s, that’s what it was. Mhm. That’s, that’s just what happened and we’re not here to analyze it and we’re just here to note, maybe just acknowledge it or notice it or just be it.

1:32:21 I mean, it was, it was an interesting response. Yeah, being able to see it, they say that awareness is transformative in and of itself. Bill Harris said that before he passed away, awareness is transformative in and of itself. Osho even said it in the book called Awareness, where he says if you’re carrying around a bag of rocks, just slugging around this bag of rocks, it’s filled with rocks, and I go to you, hey buddy, take a peek inside that bag and there are rocks in here.

1:32:57 I don’t have to tell you to put that bag down, you just woke up to the fact that I’m carrying this bag of rocks, and you may carry it a little bit longer but now that you know, you’re gonna say, glass is heavy, it’s a bag of rocks, but why am I carrying this bag of rocks? You may be still addicted to carrying it but at some point you’re going, because of the awareness, you’re just buying by going to let it go because you realize it’s a bag of rocks. Dude, I don’t have to make you or convince you, like, come on, let go of that bag of rocks, what are you stupid, let go of that bag of rocks, or you’re some medicine for people carry bags of rocks, here’s a technique for letting go of your bag rocks.

1:33:35 No, you’re carrying a bag rocks, that’s all I need to tell you. Right, right. It’s so, but it’s so Western to do the opposites, right? Right, so commercial to do the other side, here’s a problem, here’s your solution. Mm-hmm.

1:33:45 I’ll wrapped up in one. And you have a very Zen Dao way of looking at things. You’re like, here we’re doing these things and like you said, I’m just showing you the bag rocks. Mm-hmm. You’re not giving you a prescription, I’m not giving you advice, I’m not giving you an integration routine, you’re just saying here, this is your experience.

1:34:01 Mm-hmm. Okay. Are you a shaman? And what is a shaman? Cuz I think you are a shaman.

1:34:06 Yeah, a lot of people think so too, you know. I’d like to think that in order to be a healer you ought to be healing, and I am a deeply wounded man and every shaman is, and as I’m going through and exploring and healing my own wounds, I am a healer by default by virtue of healing. I like to think of, I love Greek mythology and there’s this character that I’ve learned about most recently called Chiron. Chiron is a centaur, he’s half horse, half, and in the stories he’s the master healer, teacher of Achilles, and so he mentors to the warriors, he’s a mentor to the warriors and to the young men and he teaches them and he heals them.

1:34:57 The thing is with Chiron, what made him so powerful as a healer and a mentor and a teacher was the fact that he could not heal himself, he was perpetually healing his own wounds, and as a result he was the master healer. That’s what you’re doing. I’m Chiron, I really identified with Chiron, especially the half-horse, half-man thing. I know I’m a beast, you know, I’ve got that half horse thing going on and then I’m also, you know, I’m a man, I’m intellectual, I like to think I’m rational.

1:35:30 How did you get deeply wounded? Well, as soon as I got here, somebody called for a piece of my dick, you know. We are all wounded, we’re all wounded in various aspects, and I use that as a very, as a funny sort of obvious way, it’s like there, sometimes you get here, this is what we do. But in the Bible it says that the children will bear the sins of the parents. Well, we got parents that got parents that got parents that got parents that got parents, their parents, as all as far back as you want to go.

1:35:59 So you can’t be here by not bearing old wounds and sins and karma from the past. So I think it’s how we choose to identify, disidentify, or how we choose to respond to our wounds, you know. There was a time where our wounds would rule us, but we live in an awakened age now where we have the capacity, the wherewithal, the information and the wisdom to heal our wounds, and as we heal our wounds we healed the wounds of the past. There’s one, I think it’s a Hopi saying, that as one man heals, he heals seven generations past, seven generations forward.

1:36:44 There was a point in the movie we made, Iron Mind, where I say to John Joseph, my trauma as a child was just my parents getting divorced, yet you had trauma I can’t imagine, which was sexual abuse. And I had Dr. Gabor Maté say in here last week and he said, Brian, you’re wrong, everyone’s trauma is just as significant to themselves as anyone else’s. He says you’re wrong to say that one way or the other, we’re all wounded and it’s as deep as everyone else, you should say one’s is more than the other.

1:37:14 Do you agree with that? Every wound is a womb, every one is a wound, meaning that that is where we will find our new growth, that is where we will resurrect, that very wound, being a psychological wound, a physical wound, an emotional wound, is the very soil by which your flower will grow. And I go one step further to say that every master is a disaster and it is in the disaster that the mastery is found. So the more that you can embrace and look for and deal with your own disaster, the more the mastery that you came here to evolve into and to share is exposed and shared.

1:37:55 So a disaster can be a mastery. I think every master, if most of the masters I know that I’ve been able to meet personally. All right, because it’s nice to have masters that are dead. I have so many dead masters. They’re great because you don’t get a chance to see that they s*** fart, smell, bleed.

1:38:13 And so every, when I say master, man and woman that I’ve looked up to, you know, either reading their works or, and then I get a chance to meet, man, they’re weird, they got something strange going on about them, and that gave me affirmation, confirmed in me that it is that very thing that makes that guy weird that makes him such a master, and if you were to erase that weirdness from him, that disaster, reformed him, you would erase all that makes him so beautiful as a master. Just like Chiron, if Chiron wasn’t constantly wounded, he wouldn’t been able to bring the gift of healing to his warriors. Yeah, we call him a master because they’re good at this one thing, it’s like there’s one little tiny thing they’re good at and that’s why we recognize them.

1:39:01 But yeah, to get there, like you said, everything else can potentially be a disaster. Maybe it’s time to talk about self-mastery. Yeah, you know, and if you look at yourself, if you’re really, really good at something, is that also that as a result of some type of disaster as well to get you so focused on this one thing? I could only describe my own experience and the things that I become most obsessed about are the things that I used to heal myself, and that means emotionally, mentally and physically also.

1:39:30 So the barbell, I was an attention deficit disorder kid, that I was really bad in school, I got in trouble, I got arrested, all kinds of, you know, I wasn’t, I was wounded, but when that barbell was placed in my hand and I learned how to grow stronger physically, I made that my obsession because it healed me, gave me direction like every man, young man needs, it gave me purpose, it gave me something to build towards, and then it became my magnificent obsession and the thing that I mastered for myself so that I can heal the world through. Right. Okay.

1:40:07 And that’s why I still identify as a strength coach, you know, we’re talking about Grounding Camp and bioenergetics and these are cool different things, but I still identify as a strongman and a strength coach, I grow stronger and I empower. I think you are a shaman for sure. You remind me of, you know, shamans I’ve had in ayahuasca, shamans, with my most recent ayahuasca shaman you remind me of because he kind of acts the way you act, you know, at the end people come up to him, and I had a really profound ceremony, my second one, and I could have sworn, Elliott, that he was with me the whole time and I had, I had kind of asked for that stronger dose and the whole night he was like, huh, you want a stronger dose, young man?

1:40:47 I’m gonna give you that dose but I’m also gonna be with you here for the whole way and I’m gonna push you, but I’m here, I’m gonna push you. At the end I go, I’m like, oh yeah, you’re with me the whole time, and he’s like, I don’t know what you’re talking about, you were dealing with your thing and everyone was dealing with their thing and I’m here to facilitate that. Mm-hmm. It’s just, you know, it’s kind of not the answer you want but it’s the answer you need.

1:41:06 And I feel like you’re doing that same thing, that in shaman energy of giving this space to these people and giving them this experience but not, not judging it. Mm-hmm. Creating a sacred space, like I mentioned before, the three processes are associated, initiation merely means introduction into a new version of yourself, and so a process I learned, the process of lifting weights and active meditations and made them my tools, so they’re my processes, they’re things that I use to heal myself.

1:41:38 A sacred space, which is always available when we come together in community, so be it a one on one opportunity or in a group setting, there you create a sacred space, the people create the circuit, the sacred space, and as a coach that’s what we do, your kata circuits, sacred space in our gym. And a ritual elder, and a ritual elder is merely a man who’s been through it, done that, and healed his wounds such that he can hold space for someone to go through the same process. Right, right.

1:42:12 It’s a cycle of humanity. Mm-hmm. I saw a bunch of that on my second ceremony, I’ll tell you about it another time, but I saw some like really wild kind of alpha icons of humanity and I saw them kind of doing this circle of guidance and shamanism passed on to generations of humans, and at the same time I was also being completely dissolved and shown that the significance of humanity is nothing in the universe of time, but at the same time I was fighting back and saying, well guess what, we’re still here, and while I’m here I’m gonna honor my emotions, and if it’s just this crazy observations I got, but I don’t know, this it was really, I got a lot of information.

1:42:47 Yeah, yeah, dissolving the ego, it’s imagined, is amazing what’s available when we get out of the way. Yeah, and I think a lot of people experienced that yesterday, because I think maybe not for me as much as some of those young men, this was probably for many of them maybe the single most profound experience of their life when it came to dissolving that in this tribal setting where everything was okay and amongst males. And a lot of them took things away.

1:43:12 One of our guys here I had, you know, psychedelic-type experiences, was seeing things in images and powerful stuff, tapping. One of the things that we found is that in retrospect all of the gifts are given, you know, if you’re looking for it while you’re doing it you’re gonna miss it, but then a week, two weeks, two months, three months later you can look back and you’re like, wow, that wasn’t that alter, to deject area of my life, might alter trajectory of my life based on my perspective. I got a brand new perspective.

1:43:42 And so it’s less about, like, you know, if I give you a tool, that I give you a pickaxe, that’s not the goal, that’s not the gold. But now that you have the pickaxe, you get out there and say, wow, this is much easier to find the gold. And then so the gold is a result of you getting the tool earlier. Right, yeah, and you don’t know what tool you got. Right, yeah, yeah, I can see that a lot.

1:44:06 And also like you said, you built this kind of orgasmic cycle up and I mean just the fact that you got a group that big of young men to just be quiet for even 30 minutes, I mean that’s a major accomplishment. So like you said that, I mean you remember sometimes the yelling and screaming and the chanting, but those quiet spaces you created, mm-hmm, that’s super precious. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s where we can, that’s where we see ourselves. We don’t see ourselves in all the talking and all the acting, all the doing, it’s in the being, you know.

1:44:36 I like to reference a lot of neo- Jungian work, I say neo-Jungian because it comes from Carl Jung, but I am really a big fan of the work of Robert Moore, who created King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, which is, uh, which is a book and in a process by which men come into contact with what Carl Jung called the quadrated psyche. And so when you study personality you’ve got the being aspect, thinking, feeling and doing. We all have these four things, and so he referred to being as King, feeling as Lover, doing as Warrior and thinking as the Magician aspect, and each of the three, thinking, doing and feeling, are very embodied, they’re very sensual, they’re very active, they’re very extroverted, but to come home to our King, the King aspect is being, and that’s the one that’s most confusing to us because we live in a world that’s over mentally stimulated, over physically stimulated and emotional, that when we can drop the emotion, drop the doing, stop, drop the thinking, then the King aspect arises because we’re just being, and that’s really what we want to come home to.

1:45:46 It’s so powerful. Yeah. And some advice I got is, well, on the movie, just, yeah, again something government, I said that, you know, you’re trying to accomplish all these things because ultimately you’re trying to show that you have worth, so maybe you have worth in just being. And we did a meditation for each one of those archetypes yesterday and, mm-hmm, that was super powerful. Mm-hmm.

1:46:07 Just change the script a little bit, I thought I’d ask you while you’re here, racism. You’re mixed race, you live in the South, which is Florida, we see some divisive neskowin up in America and I’m just curious on your take because you also connect across the races to young men who follow you for strength and for all these other dynamic meditations. What do you do? They ask you sometimes, like, Elliott, I don’t know what to do, what do we say, or what is, what are your thoughts on race relations or how we deal with this, or do we need to have more of a conversation or less of a conversation, or just get back to who we really are?

1:46:44 It’s a great question, you know. In the same way that there seems to be this great divide of victim and demon between men and women, which is brand-new, there’s new many aspects in the way we’re experiencing it, we’ve been experiencing this also too with the divide between the races, and I don’t see, I don’t see any attention being shown upon it that provides any value besides creating more division, more victimhood, more blame. And so I think on both sides we can probably stop it.

1:47:27 Like I said, I’m mixed-race, so I’ve got both, you know, and I can see from both angles, and I think the victimhood that a lot of black people embrace is an identity that is disempowering, and I know being colored, I guess you would say, and being recognized as black in America, that there’s almost, and I’ve done it before too, so I know where it’s coming from when identified with that, that you’re almost looking for racism to happen, you’re, it’s like you’re hypersensitive for it, like when is it going to happen, or you expect it. And I can only speak my own experience but I see it with my black friends also, that will begin acting differently because there was, we’re hope, we’re expecting that we’re going to be victimized, in the same way with, you know, men and women, you know, so now women are looking and expecting to be victimized.

1:48:21 That’s not healthy because it shuts us out from authentic communication and relationship with the people that we’re around, and then the other, you know, then the other side are just coming from a black perspective, the white, would, it’s very difficult to come into relationship with someone who has defenses up, who is waiting to be victimized, and sometimes it’s a self-fulfilling, self-fulfilling prophecy. Coming from the white perspective, there’s a lot of shame and guilt, white guilt, white shame, and it’s, it’s funny because in America it’s almost now, it’s it’s not okay to be white and white people are afraid of their whiteness and they’re ashamed of their whiteness, they want to be everything but white, and I think that’s stupid too because you’re pandering to the victim mentality of the other, and also too, I think it’s wonderful to be proud of your race and there’s black pride and you see black power and you see all this happening, but white people have taken it to such a degree that there’s this white shame and that it’s not okay to stand up for your whiteness, where whiteness is amazing.

1:49:39 Western culture built by the white man is an amazing development that came through our Caucasian friends. You see America’s comes from the English, it’s Anglo-Saxon, you know. So there should be white pride just as much as there is black pride and, you know, so people say black lives matter, all lives matter, white lives matter, and it’s kind of like when they don’t honor it they’re actually sowing the seeds of more potential. Yes, I like white and be proud, because if you’re not, you’re like, you say, you’re sowing, you’re prefer, they’re perpetuating the divide through the victim.

1:50:19 This, right, similar to with men and women right now, and with men when we marginalize who we really are or expressing ourselves we’re actually sowing the seeds for just more danger and discord later and we’re also building up these weird relationships that don’t honor the energy. No, it’s fake, it’s made up. Right, yeah, absolutely. So it seems like, yeah, with that you talk about men and you talk about men and women, in black and white, it seems like, and so funny because it’s definitely the case because media is perpetuating it.

1:50:48 White men are the most demonized people in America. That’s nuts, that doesn’t make any sense, and it’s okay because, you watched, like, I think Don Lemon was his name, was just a black gay guy on TV who says that, who says that we should stop demonizing people, this was brand-new, you know, a couple weeks ago, we should stop demonizing people but recognize that the biggest threat to America are white men, and that’s okay. Imagine a white guy, straight white Christian man, said we should stop demonizing people, by the way, black homosexuals are the biggest threat to America.

1:51:27 That would be destroyed, shut down. In fact, there was a white lady who said on TV, she said that wearing blackface during Halloween is not really racist because she had a friend that wanted to be Diana Ross, so she dressed it up like a black woman, man, the media ate her up and spit her out, she was fired from her job. So you could see the hypocrisy in that, but it’s okay for this gay black guy to say that straight white men are the biggest demon and it’s okay, they’re just gonna play it and they’re, it’s, it’s accepted.

1:52:04 But on the other end of the spectrum, if you had a straight white guy say that, it’s imbalance, it’s wrong, and so if we’re looking for equality we’ve got to recognize the hypocrisy in the way we’re doing things now. How does this all play out? You got to break down before you build up. And you know someone who I before, Jesse Lee Peterson, who’s a black conservative and I’ve been watching a lot of his stuff, I really like him a lot, I interviewed with him, says that it’s not about racism, it’s not about black and white, it’s not about sexism, it’s a spiritual battle, it’s a spiritual war, it is our consciousness, we are suffering at a level of consciousness, and so if we can rise above the black and white of things, the male and female of things, and recognize that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson says, the world is broken and lays, the world is divided and lays in broken heaps because man is divided within himself.

1:53:08 If we unify our own divisions of male and female, like I talked about before, my experience allowed me to integrate my male and female aspects, where I’m, as I integrated my male and female aspects I’m that much more manly and I’m willing to stand up for men because I know my feminine aspect. As we can, as we can heal our victim and aggressor aspects within us, as we come together within ourselves, we will see less of it or be less involved in it in the outside world, but it starts with healing divisions within ourselves. Right, and that starts with looking at the mask of the ego and getting in touch with all of our own inner struggles and battles.

1:53:55 Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s an internal game or it’s a spiritual game, it’s above just what we’re seeing on the surface. Yeah, I totally agree and a lot of the powerful names that have been on the show say the same thing, it’s all starts with the individual, with all start taking ownership and action and being who you really are. So, mm-hmm, tell me a little bit about you, Elliott Hulse. Hmm, I thought we were doing that.

1:54:16 We are, but what are some of the things, what’s, what are some things that you do every day that are not negotiable that allow you to be the person you need to be? Sleep. Oh, mess around with my sleep, that’s one. Rhythm, so I recognize that life is based on rhythms, based on seasons, and we have daily rhythms and we have seasons, and so being in touch with the seasons of the, the circadian rhythm in our body is the fundamental pulsation by which we get in tune with, Taoists would call it the Dao, but walking with God, walking with God means walking with nature, doing what’s natural, doing what is prompted from our instinct and from within, and so the rising and the setting of the sun is a basic primal rhythm that must be honored.

1:55:10 Our hormones are affected by it and our energy levels are affected by it, so if there is one thing that’s a non-negotiable for me, it’s maintaining a healthy circadian rhythm, getting to bed on time and waking up at a reasonable hour. You know, if I want to get back on track it begins with that. Okay. And you also honor the seasons of life as well, kind of leisure, and that you think you talked about that last time you, try to recognize that there are certain cycles in the year and you try to kind of honor, not even in the year because there are the seasons of life that I began to recognize and experience myself.

1:55:46 So that whole, the three years of me going into winter time. Winter is yin, yin, winter is feminine because it’s about energy retreating in. Once again, you know, feminine is taking in, masculine is going out, and you just have to simply look at the organs to see what the feminine organ does or the masculine organ does. When springtime comes it’s very like nature’s are jackal ating like seeds and things are sprouting out all over the place, and you honor that process until it comes into wintertime when things recede.

1:56:23 As we recognize that in the annual cycle, we have to recognize it in our life. I see it as 12-month, 12-year cycles, just like we got the twelve months, we got the twelve years, and every 12 years we’re going through this, and then of course an overarching cycle of seasons of life. So now that I can see with objectivity that it was perfectly normal and natural for me to have gone into that introverted winter season after going through really hot, powerful summertime, having the fall and then going into meditating and smoking weed, right, thank you, part of the process.

1:57:04 Yeah, and just allowing it and not judging it. Yeah, that’s the hard part, I think it is for Mason because we live in a world where we’re, it were our value is measured on how much production, how much we can do, because the more we can do the more money we make, the more taxes we pay. So it is of no mystery that we’re trained and conditioned to be extroverted all the time, and the minute a man goes into his introversion, particularly at this season when, you know, he starts getting to middle age, the whole world looks at him with suspicion.

1:57:41 What’s going on with this man? Oh, they make fun of him or they joke about him and they call it a crisis, rather than it being a midlife crisis, is a midlife opportunity for death and rebirth. Recognizing it now, we get an opportunity to honor it in ourselves and honor in others. I love more than anything getting to watch 24-year-old men go through their struggles. I have, I attract more 24-year-old men than any other because now I know 24, 36, 50 or 49, these are twelve, twelve year increments.

1:58:18 I didn’t know it before I learned this but now I watch, I’m like, at 24 you’re at the top of the clock, bro, you just reached 12 o’clock again, you’re gonna go through a quarter of winter, that it starts with winter, the year begins with winter, the season begins with winter, so you’re gonna go through a winter time where you’re confused between age 24 and 26, 27, you’re gonna be lost, don’t try to find yourself, don’t try to make it right, don’t try to go out there and get it. What you’re given an opportunity right now to do is to be, and to be means to allow and just go in and to sense so that something can be born, it’s reborn when that springtime comes. If you make yourself crazy and go nuts during your winter time trying to make it summer when it’s not, by the time spring comes you’re going to be beat up, tired and confused, you’re not gonna have the energy that you need at 27 when you start, when you go back into that spring time, that you would have had if you would have just chilled and allowed and paid attention and self-nurtured.

1:59:22 Right. And so that’s the person that’s attracted to you more than anyone, and you get them to be comfortable with that wintertime experience. Mm-hmm. Yeah, age 24, and I know that in a couple years it’s gonna be 36 cuz all these 24-year-olds gonna be 36, and that’s when I went into my winter time. Right.

1:59:37 And that’s when they’re looking for someone a bit older to kind of bring them through that. Mm-hmm. Someone who’s been there, ya know. Yeah. If I were to ask like five of your friends and say, what is Elliott’s superpower, how was he able to get these things done, you know, what would they say it is?

1:59:54 And because Elliott is really good at this, this, this or that, what would they say it is? I wish I could say I had five friends. Yeah, we have any friends, you asked my wife, why don’t you have friends? Part of it is I haven’t allowed myself to have friends, you know. There’s, there’s a joke in my family and my dad, if he watches this, he’ll assert that he, group, we grew up with him telling us that you have no friends, and this was, you know, maybe one of his wounds, but not to trust anyone.

2:00:27 And so you know, as kids we say, I’m one of my friends, sighs, he says, there you don’t have any friends, you have acquaintances. So I think that made its way and after having a few experiences of having my heart broken by friends when I was younger, you know, I think of several circumstances where, you know, I made myself vulnerable and friendly and then got hurt and then thinking about what my dad said, I kind of internalized it where I really don’t have any friends, that and the fact that I’m difficult to deal with in a lot of ways. I’m a weird guy, I can, I’ve done some things and said some things I could push people away, so that, you know, that’s a little bit about me.

2:01:07 My best friend is my wife, Colleen, and, and maybe what she would say about Elliott is that he allows himself to be who he’s going to be and he trusts himself regardless of how nuts he may seem. And the reason why she’s been my best friend for so long is because she trusts me that way also too. And there are times that, you know, I can look back in retrospect, I’m like, man, I’m so grateful that you followed me into those dark places even though you didn’t know what I was doing and trusted me the whole way through because I trust myself and I have a record, I have a record of making it through and I have a record of doing weird things and being weird ways and thinking outside the box and being a rebel, but every single time I come through and so she’s able to have that kind of trust in me and see that that’s actually part of my gift.

2:02:04 I would agree, I think that is your superpower, you know, allowing yourself to go through those cycles and to observe them and to come back and talk about them. You know, you talk very openly last time you were here and it’s not, it’s not something a lot of guys, you know, that are like you don’t do, and I wouldn’t say it is and I also say that she is definitely under your superpowers too because I met her yesterday, she’s had incredible energy, and I was just thinking, who’s the woman that has to watch you go through this winter time, you know, and watch you do all these things that maybe, I’m sure, but difficult for her, maybe more difficult than they were for you, and to just be there and support you. And I got that, that’s, she’s an amazing and amazing and amazing woman and never questions me, trust me, and that’s really what I need as a man and as a human, even if I’m making mistakes, she, I love you anyway, I said, I don’t, I don’t think what you’re doing is right but I’ll follow you down that path and I’ll go with you and I’ll still love you, and that’s been what I’ve needed and she’s, she’s been there for me.

2:03:09 Yeah, it’s not a mouthful, but I would have had a woman that wanted to have it her way or take control or not trust me, it was just wouldn’t worked, right, be it different, you everything would be different. Yeah, yeah, we’re just wouldn’t work, I’ve been gone. Um, best day of your life, worst day, what are the first things that come to mind, events? Best day of my life, I don’t know, you know, there, there are so many times where I say this is the best day of my life, this is the best moment of my life, and it’s usually the very simple things, you know, speaking about Colleen, one of my favorite things to do is just to crawl in bed with her and snuggle up and go to sleep just holding each other, like that’s the best moment, that’s the best day, that makes the day all perfect, whatever happened then that day.

2:04:07 Sitting down and eating a delicious steak, a ribeye, oh man, there’s nothing better than a perfectly cooked ribeye steak where the fat is just, just soft enough that it melts in your mouth and that you got that little crispy nasaan the outside, man, I love food, you know. Drinking really delicious, I love Evian water but when I’m thirsty and I get a good sip of delicious water, I’m in heaven. I think for me it’s, it’s simple things that I give myself an opportunity to, to relish in and just to love in that moment.

2:04:51 I don’t drink beer very much, alcohol just is, it, it destroys my body even a few sips of it, but this week while we’re in, in London, I had a beer for the first time in months, I was like, I’m gonna have a beer. That first sip of the beer was like the best moment in my life, it just tasted so good. Being in the middle of meditation and feeling my entire nervous system just drop, I’m a high-strung guy, hyperactive, a lot of energy, and when I’m in the middle of that meditation and that one moment where all of a sudden it’s almost like a thud, boom, I just drop a frequency, I’m in heaven, I’m like, wow, I can actually access this, I can actually be still.

2:05:43 Lifting, strongman, strongman in particular, there’s so many moments, I get goose bumps thinking about it, where I’m flipping a thousand-pound tyre and I’m transcending my body by going that next rep, I can’t do it but I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it, and at the end of it just laying there completely spent, that’s heaven. Yeah, these are, these are the heavenly moments, very, very sensual, very grounded, very, very real. One of my children just saying, daddy, I love you, I love you, dad.

2:06:19 My oldest daughter in particular, she’s not as verbal with me in that way as the others, and sometimes she’ll just come and lay your head on my chest and say, daddy, I love you, I like, I’m getting all warm inside now, you know, I want to cry. Let me keep going cuz I’m thinking of other things that I’m grateful for. I was so grateful yesterday when all these men came to me and shared their hearts with me about how much of an impact I’ve been in their lives, you know.

2:06:55 I doubt myself, there’s, like the rest of us, I doubt myself quite a bit, I can do more, I can be more, and I forget how much I’ve done, but then when I get that mirror of the men that I’ve impacted by them standing in front of me and being vulnerable in that way by saying, Elliott, you were the father I never had, and me being mind-blown because I’ve never seen you before, but to know that the impact I’ve had on them and then when they describe the impact they’ve had on others because of the spark that I let loose in their hearts, I am in heaven. Looking at my wife sometimes, you know, I mentioned getting in bed and snuggling with her, well, lookey, just looking at her sometimes, in a smile just arises in my heart and out of my face and I could just, I could just stare at her and just take her in like I’m, I’m drinking her in, like I feel in my body, and I have a mantra where I say, I love my life, I love my wife, and I don’t think that that one could be without the other.

2:07:59 I love my life because I, my wife, it’s amazing. Yeah, life is good, man. There was a mantra you had us repeat at the end of the meditation yesterday, I was really powerful and I think you said I, I was, hit, I, I love, well, so I love my life, I love, I, it was four things that we said, it was like, I, I, I’m grateful for this life, I’m grateful for this love, I’m grateful for this moment with you right now. I’m grateful for this life, I’m grateful for this love, I’m grateful for this moment with you right now.

2:08:39 I’m grateful for this life, I’m grateful for this love, I’m grateful for this moment with you. Yeah, now so that was a, that was a song that I learned from Paul Check, he was one of my living mentors, you know, and he’s an amazing and amazing man, and so I’ve taken lots of classes with him and one of the workshops, you know, he shared that song with us and I was so moved by it that I shared with the young men that I mentor in these, in these moments, you know, to have a big, powerful, strong man who shouts and pounds his chest and flips thousand-pound tires sing for you, brings, bring something to the surface that can’t be described, can’t be made to happen, it just has to be experienced. Yeah, and getting, you know, all those men chanting that or singing that is something that probably only Elliott Hulse could do.

2:09:35 I know. So that’s a beautiful and cherished and rare thing, and we all said it with vigor and it was all okay. Yep. To do that. And then the message is such a beautiful message, you know, you know, mm-hmm, just right there, right now, and we’re grateful for ourselves and everyone else.

2:09:49 So, mm-hmm, so thank you for that. Do you have a worst day of your life or do you think of things that way? You know, I could say that tearing my left bicep, tearing my right bicep, tearing my Achilles tendon, these physical injuries because I’m so physically identified, I’m ethical being and I really do identify with my body and, you know, what I say, the body is the mind. I’m into astrology and my ruling planet is Mars, I’m in Aries and I have Mars in Aries, so I’m very embodied.

2:10:24 I could say that those were very painful moments but I appreciate them, you know. I think of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and fertility, and you think about what Dionysus is in terms of wine and in order for wine to give us the ecstasy of drunkenness, those grapes must be rent, they gotta be tired from the tree and stomped on and mash, then you literally have to destroy the fruit, the beauty of the fruit, in order for the joy, the beauty, the texture, the taste, the ecstasy of the wine to be worth anything. And so I even see those, quote unquote, worst moments as the sweetest moments because it provides the wine of my life.

2:11:24 Tear me apart, Dionysus says, tear me apart, rent from pieces, and fertility is the, is that, is it sex is a death act, you know. That’s why in, I think in French they say the orgasm is la petite mort. Yeah, the mini death, and for men it definitely is because we, like Mantak Chia was telling us, it’s like you give away, I sell Kali, and like every time we have sex I’m like, you just took a day of my life, just took one day away, because it literally is giving life.

2:11:58 You’re dying, you die in that moment of orgasm so that you can bring forth another life, and so the dying of the grapes so that we can have the sweetness of wine or the dying of orgasm, of self and vitality so that we can bring life in is where those darkest days actually are our brightest opportunities in our brightest days. So I don’t know, I don’t know if I could say that there was a bad day, but I got a lot of life to live. So I want to live to a hundred.

2:12:29 Said it here, it’s in record, so you know, maybe, maybe that’ll come. Okay. What scares you? Nothing, nothing. I am not afraid of anything.

2:12:41 The only thing that I may potentially be afraid of is fear itself because that’s the trap. I can handle anything, I’m a strong man, I’ve been torn apart, I even asked for it. So I don’t think there’s a single thing that can, that can, that can unseat me. I’ll handle it, you know, like Viktor Frankl, you could take, or even Gandhi says, you know, you could take my life, you could destroy my body, you can do whatever you want for me but you can’t take my spirit.

2:13:12 Gandhi said it also, Braveheart, right, we’re gonna break power. Yeah, they could take our lives but they’ll never take our freedom. I’ll find a way to find that freedom, to find that joy, to find that space in the darkest of moments. I mean, bring it on. Yeah.

2:13:29 What’s Elliott doing ten years from now? Ten years from now, it’s a very good question. I realized that I am a spontaneous man and any agenda that I have is merely a, is gonna derail me, you know. I used to think in terms of needing to have a long-term vision and a long-term plan but it’s done nothing but frustrate me because when I sense what needs to be done in the moment and I measured against what I hope for, dream in the future, I miss. So I can only predict, but I don’t want to project the future, and if I were to predict, predict the future based on what I’m experiencing now, because if you want to know what’s gonna happen in the future, you look at what you’re doing right now.

2:14:18 I am loving working with young men in various capacities, namely in strength, through Strength Camp, teaching young men. I, you know, you asked before if I’m trying to recreate an initiation process for men, I think every man is initiated through iron, I really believe, because we break ourselves down, build ourselves up, we recreate ourselves, we’re exposed to our weaknesses and we find our strengths under the barbell, and I will never give that up and I will always find a new way to share that with young men. And I did it with my Strength Camps and I’m grateful now to be doing it with our Strength Camp Ambassador program where I’m helping mold Strength Camp coaches to have their own Strength Camp gyms so that they could pass on that process to other people.

2:15:16 So for example, right here in Chester, we just, we have a brand new strength, congrats on handsome. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, yeah, so working with men on helping them now become mentors themselves in the coaching capacity. I am a coach but I’m only a coach, I’m greatest to the degree that I can create other coaches that can do the same thing for others because I’m gonna pass away. Okay.

2:15:40 And what keeps you awake at night? Nothing. I honor my circadian rhythms, I close my eyes and go to sleep. There’s nothing to keep me up, you know, I put on my, I cover and I snuggle up this to my wife and I’m knocked out, drooling in a couple minutes. Ede, does anything kind of always ring through, is like how does that thing I’m kind of constantly thinking of or, you know, something that I gotta get done before I leave this consciousness, you know?

2:16:04 If anything, I, I harp too much on the past and I do, I do carry guilt and shame for past decisions and mistakes. I would say that that’s a weakness, you know, and if I ever find myself fearful it’s never because of what might happen or what’s going to happen, in fact, you know, I like preparing for disaster, in fact I like, I do better preparing for what could be up ahead because that’s empowering to me, but I do get bummed out thinking about dumb things I’ve done, you know. Those are the things that will, that will every once in a while come up and start to irritate me like, oh man, like I can’t believe I did that, and it’s like 10 years ago, or I can’t believe I said that, and was years ago, you know, and so I don’t know why that happens, what that’s all about, but that’s usually what I’m transcending in the moment when something is eating at me.

2:17:05 Right. And now, you know it and identify it and hopefully you can be like, oh yeah, that’s what I do, put that in check. Yeah, right, absolutely. Yeah, Elliott, I’m gonna ask you a few questions I asked you last time and I’m ask you again and actually they’re really poignant and relevant today because one of the young men at the Grounding Camp yesterday brought them up to me, and that’s this question: if you could pick up a phone and call up the 20-year-old Elliott Hulse and give that young man a bit of advice, I’m wanting to know what you would tell him.

2:17:33 And I’ll put this in context, as I was speaking to the one, one of the young men at the camp yesterday and he came up and said, well, I’m a big fan of London Real, and he said I love the question you asked at the end about advice to your 20-year-old self because I’m 20. Mmm. And it just hit me, I was just like, wow, you’re the guy that I’m kind of talking about, and it was just interesting too. Yeah, he just said that point-blank to me and it hit me. So with that in context, what would you tell that 20-year-old you?

2:18:01 Dude, you got this, this is awesome, you’ll be alright, because the 20-year-old me was probably trying to project into the future, like I said before, think about what I should do, make the right decision, and if I could go back and talk to him now, I’d just slap him on the back, I beg, dude, it’s gonna be awesome, you have nothing to worry about, just roll with it. Do you be present? Yeah, doing, just go with it, man, you’ll be all right. Yeah, that’s a danger, I wouldn’t try to prepare him for the challenging times and I wouldn’t try to psych him out with all the great things coming up.

2:18:30 I’d say you got this, you’re gonna be alright, it’s awesome, roll on. That same note, best advice you ever received, could be from a mentor, from a book, from, I don’t know, an entity giving you information in some state, what’s anything that comes to mind? No, the first thing that comes to mind is advice from my father, and my father is a wild, wise man in so many ways. He grew up in Belize, bare-chested and barefooted, climbing trees, and really wasn’t a lot of my dad’s wisdom didn’t come from books or learning because he really didn’t even go to school, came from his experience, mainly of being with himself and by himself in nature.

2:19:13 So he has a ton of really wonderful things, but one is that as long as you get up every single day and do what you got to do, life is going to be okay. The minute you, you know, allow yourself to be derailed and you don’t get up or you think too much, you’re gonna have problems. So you just get, like he would say, like a machine, that’s my dad’s way of saying it, it’s like you just get up every single day like a machine and you do what you got to do. Don’t think about it, don’t over-analyze it, don’t rationalize it, you just know what you got to do, when you just do it.

2:19:45 Okay. That’s old-school advice. Oh yeah, like it. Mm-hmm. Last part of that question, to that 20-year-old, let’s just say male, it’s watching us right now, heard a lot of ideas, maybe it relates to some of this, maybe doesn’t, maybe disagrees, maybe doesn’t, advice to them, how to live their life, how to go out and, I don’t know, be a man, be part of this world, to contribute, I don’t know, what do you say?

2:20:10 Mm-hmm. No, and maintain your frame. Don’t allow yourself to be derailed by the desires of the world, and it has a lot to do with women. If you’re gonna be a man, you’re gonna be a leader, and if you’re gonna be a leader, you ought to know who you are and where you’re going. it right there.

2:21:03 Mm-hmm. I love it. Mm-hmm. Elliott, it’s been a huge honor to sit down with you again. It was a big deal last time, it’s a big deal this time, I won’t lie, and I really appreciate your honesty and transparency.

2:21:14 You’re always like that with me and again it always amazes me and I don’t know why it amazes me because that’s why we’re drawn to you. And you know those videos that you put up, you know, 10 years, 12 years ago, I don’t know when you started, you know, at that old place you had with the truck that would back up and down, I mean you do forget how much that made an impression on so many people and it did on me and it did everyone else that watched those pieces. And so just again want to thank you for doing all that stuff that you did.

2:21:40 And look, I am a bit like you, I have people that come up and say, yeah, I saw your video, and sometimes I forget, but I’m just here to remind you that you are that father to a lot of people and you represent, I think this, this may be, I called an archetype, but of this strong alpha male that also is in touch with being the spiritual entity, you know. And for so much of our lives, my life, I was served up the two-dimensional alpha, and what, and I knew there was something missing there and I think we all knew. And so when Elliott Hulse came up with YouTube, where I saw this guy that was, you know, a strongman, yeah, so he got that box ticked, right.

2:22:17 I’m yet there was a guy that was willing to jump up on the ground, to take his hat and threw it on the ground and do this active meditation that looked like something that only the most beta guy in school would do. That is powerful and it needs me and it moved all those people out there and it said, okay, it’s okay to examine the other parts of you and to talk about the spiritual thing, which we thought it was maybe a feminine trait. Well, maybe it was branded like that.

2:22:41 No. Yeah, we’ve been tricked out of what is truly masculine in dating, which is spirituality. Spirituality is religion, was created by men for men because we needed a path, we needed to make sense of things. Yeah, and I think this is the ultimate feedback mechanism of the views you got on YouTube or the people wanting more of this because like it’s needed. I think, you know, I think it’s something we’re drawn to and so yeah, maybe we have, maybe we turn it, I don’t know, feminize the spirituality because now it’s coming back with a vengeance and I don’t, I don’t want to get hung up on numbers on YouTube but the numbers also don’t lie, they show that there’s this need for this connection and we saw the young men yesterday doing that stuff.

2:23:22 So again I just want to honor you and remind you of the great work you’re doing. I know it’s good not to be too associated with that and I know it’s easy to be distanced from it because people that create stuff out there a lot of times we are kind of distanced a bit from the people that are doing it, it’s kind of how we are able to do it. Yeah, so but anyways I just want to acknowledge you for that stuff, so thank you for coming on here and being all you can be and helping me on my path as well and being kind of a mentor to where I need to go and doing these great things.

2:23:50 So thank you so much, Mr. Hulse. Let’s do this again in another three years or so, and yeah, just keep being you. Thank you for the lessons today. I know for a lot of people they’ll be controversial and they won’t want to hear them, they won’t understand, and that’s good, that’s why we’re here. We’re here to put out ideas that are, that are, that are meant to test you and push you and make you defend them or not.

2:24:09 And so I’m glad to be a part of this and I got one more request, I’d like a hug. Yes. Thank you, man. Okay. Yeah, appreciate it.