Elliott Hulse - The Body Is The Mind

Full transcript: Elliott Hulse on London Real

5:45 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Elliott Hulse, who is a strength coach and owner of the world-renowned Strength Camp gym in St. Petersburg, Florida. Your fitness coaching and personal development YouTube channels have over a million subscribers who tune in for education and inspiration to become a stronger version of themselves and empower others. Elliott, welcome to London Real.

6:06 Thank you for having me, Brian. It’s, it’s an honor to have you here. People been asking you for years, and so I’m just glad it finally happened. You just landed in London 24 hours ago, and I always like to ask people that come here, especially from America, I just wonder what your impressions are of, of this city. I think every city has an energy.

6:25 I was just wondering what you feel when you’re here, and, and even when you were here, you know, in Saint Petersburg last couple months, when you think, I’m going to London, I’m just wondering what does it mean to you? Hmm. So I decided to watch a few documentaries on Netflix. We watched one, uh, called Angleyland, I believe, and it talked about the, uh, the transition of kings to different kingdoms that built up to where we happen to be right now, which is England, and the, no, like the Normans.

6:54 Yeah, they came in, and Anglo-Saxon. So it was really fascinating to get that history, which I watched a couple months ago. I landed here, and essentially it just reminds me of New York City. I grew up in New York City, so it reminds me a lot of New York City, just the amount of people and the buildings and the buses and the cars going by. The, uh, the Uber driver asked me, like, what’s the big difference, what’s the one thing that you’ve noticed so far in 24 hours of being here?

7:21 And I’ve got my children with me, and, uh, the very first, uh, question they had about something that was odd was inside the tour bus it said “Mind your head.” Yeah. My daughter’s like, what does that actually mean? How do you mind your head? And I was like, well, it means watch your head, and that’s what we do back home, we watch our heads.

7:43 But then me and the Uber driver continue to speak about it. Really makes more sense to be mindful of your head, because you can never really watch your head, so it’s probably much more proper or correct here. Yeah, it’s fascinating how that language plays out. You know, Tarantino said it in Pulp Fiction, like, in Europe they got the same things we got in America, it’s just a little different. And so here, like in the Tube you’ll see “way out.”

8:05 They don’t use “exit.” And yeah, all these little kind of just little strange different things. Yeah, but it all traces back to the history of this place. And so like, he said, this had such a tumultuous history, whether it was World War II or World War One, or even all of the Anglo-Saxon conquering, the Tower of London. You know, people used to, the Norms used to come up that river and, and wreak havoc on it.

8:26 Yeah. And so like, I, I’ve been here 13 years, and I’m obviously an American, I have a British passport as well, so dual citizen, but even to this day I see things about the British that I notice that now I understand them more as I understand the history. And, uh, you know, yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the, the bombings and the Tube, where we kind of had our, you know, kind of our 9/11, you know, our getting attacked. And I remember what I noticed the most about this town was the next day everybody got up and went back to work.

8:56 And I was just like, this is interesting, like we didn’t react and there wasn’t a lot of complaining, it was like back to work. And I just thought, like in 1940 when they were getting bombed by Germany over and over again, it was like you get, you, you get back to work, keep calm. Yeah, keep calm and carry on. Keep calm, carry on, baby. It’s funny, it’s funny.

9:14 So, uh, those are good observations, really good. I’m curious if you can contrast London to where you’re from, St. Petersburg, or you’re where your gym is now. For an Englishman here who’s never been to Florida, how would you describe where you live, you know, the Strength Camp gym, if you had to? Uh, well, I’ll contrast Florida with London, because I’ve got a funny story. When I got here yesterday, I gotta tell you the truth, I was a little disappointed.

9:39 You know, we, we showed up and we ended up in it in a neighborhood where we have our loft and whatnot, but you know, coming from where there’s blue water and palm trees and sand, and you look in the water and you can see all the fish swimming, and it’s just paradise, and we do a lot of staycations because I have four children, so our vacations are like at the Don CeSar Hotel and on the beaches. So I’ve been building up this idea for my children and in my own head that we’re gonna go on vacation. I really just didn’t kind of like switch it from we’re going to a city, we’re not actually going on a staycation like we do in Florida.

10:15 When I got here I was like, where’s the nice stuff, like the beach? And it was kind of unconscious, and then it took me a moment to like switch and realize like, wait a second, I’m in a city again. So, um, it was just, it took a moment there to realize that like the vacation is taking advantage of all the history that the city has, as opposed to chilling on the beach. Yeah, yeah. There are some, like any city we got, you know, nice neighborhoods and kind of ugly stuff too.

10:40 So what’s, what about like the weather and the contrast and even the history down there? I mean, you’re, you’re down there near where Cuba is and where, you know, South America isn’t that far, and like, I’m from San Diego, but I don’t know what Florida is really like. I mean, how would you describe Florida or the South to someone from Britain or even from Germany? Oh, that’s a loaded question. Okay.

11:02 All right. Answer as much as it is you want. Yeah, well, my parents are from Belize, right, which is right across, across the Gulf, right? And, uh, so when they decided to retire from New York City, they wanted to go back to Belize, but they obviously didn’t want to leave the whole family, so they wanted the next best thing. And so they started looking in Florida and specifically along the Gulf Coast.

11:27 So it was kind of like a home away from home for them, obviously with like, uh, you know, American amenities as well. Okay. So they were, that was kind of returning home to them, right? And then we followed, you know, I wanted something different for my family, so we decided to move down there. Okay.

11:41 Now I’ve been to Miami, but they say Miami’s not Florida, and I lived in New York, and New York is definitely not America. So St. Petersburg is probably a good representation of Florida? No, no, that’s why it’s a loaded question, because you got like Southern Alabama, Florida. Okay. You know which is Southern Alabama.

11:59 Okay. And then you got Miami. So like, it just depends. I mean, we had the swamp like right in the middle there too, you know, there was a documentary about football players in this part of the, the state that, like, they were just pulling the fastest football players out of this part of the swamp. And, um, and it was because they have a history of catching rabbits to eat.

12:18 So like the kids and the pe, there’s that port was the kids and the parents, they’d go out and they’d hunt rabbits with their hands. So they’d run and catch them, bring them home and then cook them and they eat it up. And I was like, so these kids were like super fast and agile because for generations they’re catching rabbits to eat. So you got that, you got Miami, you got Southern Alabama, St. Petersburg is somewhere in the middle in that it’s a small city that’s just starting to build up now.

12:43 You know, they said that the, uh, when I got there about 10 years ago they said that the, uh, the mascot bird is the crane of Saint Petersburg because there’s cranes everywhere. All right. It was a joke. All right. So it’s on the up.

12:58 Yeah, it’s on. It’s the thing is that it’s beautiful. So if you want to be in paradise, we’ve got the most beautiful beaches in all of Florida for sure. St., uh, St. Petersburg has Fort De Soto, which was ranked the best beach in America like five, five years in a row. Okay.

13:16 So you’re in paradise pretty much. And would you ever move? Is there any of the place you’d move in America, or is that’s it, that’s home? Not a chair. Okay.

13:24 Even when you’re sweating 100 degrees, you know, in your non-air conditioned gym doing the workouts, it’s still, it’s home. I appreciate the sweat though too. I mean, remember, my parents are from Belize, so I mean, and they grew up in a time and a place where, like for example, my dad didn’t wear shoes, right? Okay. He just, like when he came here and had to wear shoes, it was kind of a burden.

13:45 It was like, I gotta put on shoes now. Right. Kind of sucks, but you deal with it. Um, so the sweat was like, I grew up in New York, we didn’t have AC in our house. We have AC in our cars because my parents knew what it was like to be in sweltering weather all the time.

13:59 So when I got down here and it was sweltering weather, it was just kind of like, well, I’m at home, right? It kind of fits. I try to describe people like New York in August. I mean, it’s hard to describe like how hot it is if you don’t have AC. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s, you know, I remember I used to spend a couple summers in August when I first got to New York City, and I was, I was working on Wall Street, but I hadn’t make any money yet, so all the guys that did were out in the Hamptons, and I was like walking around this town and it gets really vacant.

14:25 And if you don’t have AC, it’s just this, I guess it’s very Caribbean. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, I kind of appreciate that. I like that. When my shirt’s not soaking wet at the end of a workout, I’m a little worried.

14:35 Right, so we did a bodyweight workout out in the park this morning and like no sweat. I’m like, I did the same exact workout four days ago and I was wringing my shirt out, so a little disappointed. You mentioned your parents are from Belize. What was it like growing up? I think you’ve said before, you know, you had a dark skin and blue eyes, and you’re going to school, there was like white kids, there were black kids, and you were trying to figure out identity to a certain extent, I guess we all were, but how was that different for you?

15:03 Well, I remember the first time actually being cognizant to the fact that, wait, I don’t know what I am yet. I know, neither does anyone else. When, uh, when a kid asked me, he said one day to me, I must have been maybe in like first grade, says, Elliott, what are you? And race was never really a conversation in my house because we’re, we’re all mixed in Belize. You’ve got the, the natives that lived there, but then of course the Europeans came and bought their African slaves, and then it was just a big orgy, and you know, right, a good majority of people look kind of like me, you know, brown, maybe more brown, maybe with slightly different features, but very, um, very mixed in that way.

15:40 And, uh, so I’m like, what do you mean? Like how do I find out? You know, he’s like, do you know what you are? I’m like, how do you find out? And so he tells me, look inside your pants and tell me what color your penis is.

15:53 I guess this is what like a first-year, first grader would say. And I was like, I don’t know, man. So I couldn’t figure myself out in that way. Yeah, a little embarrassing. Now that’s where the first great boy was.

16:05 Yeah. Is it pink? I was like, wow, no, I’m not pink. So did you have to assume an identity later on, in like high school or beyond this, or was it a topic to you? Uh, I think I carry that question with me for a long time.

16:27 I remember being like in sixth or seventh grade and going to the library, and this is when I really got into reading books on philosophy, because, uh, I picked up a book by Rollo May called, um, “Man’s Search for Himself.” Okay. That’s what the title was. And, uh, because I was searching, like you know, what are you? I think actually that might have been the name, “Who Are You Really?” or “What Are You Really?”

16:50 Something like that. And, um, from that point on I got introduced to the expansive world of philosophy and quantum physics and you know, this whole idea that even religion started answering a lot of questions for me. I got involved with Alan Watts and, and Eastern philosophy and religion, and you know, it sort of transcended the flesh, and I found a home there. I found more of a home in being human and having a human experience, or being a spiritual and having a human experience, rather than, you know, identity in what I look like, what social class I came from, or who I was identified with, you know, uh, even, even things that people allow to identify themselves in regards to achievements and stuff like that.

17:39 I, I transcended that all pretty quickly because I was exposed to these ideas, you know, due to my questioning so early on. That’s, that’s a good thing, right? To get away from a lot of these superficial ways to identify ourselves. Well, it was soothing, soothing to my soul, you know, good or bad. You know, it’s neither here, here nor there, but, uh, I did find it a resourceful and very consoling, um, idea to share with many friends and young people and ultimately the people that watch my videos, because in a way we’re still all looking for our, our identity, you know.

18:17 You might know that you’re British, you might know that you’re Haitian, but who am I though, you know, amongst that? Who am I among the, beyond my social class? And it’s a universal question. In fact, it’s like the oldest cool question, you know. Yeah, that, and to connect, I mean, I feel it so much now, everyone has this urge to connect, and so do I.

18:41 You could argue that’s why I’m doing this, you know, it’s my, my need to express and connect, you know, but that’s a different interview. I was outside waiting for you before you came up, and I was, I was actually playing around with a little bit of your active meditation, and I was thinking that’s probably the most anti-British thing I could possibly be. Yes, that’s why I can’t wait to have everybody doing it here, right? Guys gonna be so uncomfortable.

19:01 Yeah, it’s funny, I have this theory like as you go higher up the latitudes, you know, people just get a little more repressed. You know, you kind of see it with the British, you see the Japanese to a certain extent, and those are the same people that when they have a few drinks they do the crazy stuff, you know, they, they go really bonkers. And I was right, the closer you are to the equator, the closer you are to maybe just being in tune with your emotions and expressing them more easily.

19:22 Yeah, I don’t know if that’s true. Well, Alexander Lowen, who’s, uh, one of the people I read a lot of his books, he, um, he mentions the very same thing. He’s a psychologist and, uh, psychoanalyst, and he was also MD, pretty smart dude, and he observed clinically, obviously, that the higher you go up the socioeconomic ladder, the more neurotic the individual becomes, and you know, the neurosis happens in the body, so very tense, very tight, very tight-lipped, not, not moving too much.

19:51 You know, I got in the cab, I got in the Uber with an African guy, he’s from Nigeria, he’s been here about six years, and, uh, right away I could feel his energy. He’s talking loud, he’s using his hands, he’s very expressive, and, uh, I get in the cabin like right away I’m, I’m jiving with him because I’m like, this guy is fully out, everything is, is on display, you know, and you could, you could tell just by the sound of his voice that he’s giving it to you as opposed to being calculated and held back and stifled, which, you know, most of us happen to be. Yeah, especially here in Britain, I think we have like you said the, the the, uh, the latitude, but then we have this like socio-economic hangover, I think, from probably the Industrial Revolution, where like all the wealth started happening in here and like everything was happening, like the 1800s, and it built this new money in this class, and I think a lot of, uh, Brits, the way we dress and everything, I think we hold a lot of of that tension and repressed feelings.

20:48 Well, you know, I think it’s interesting though, because then when a bomb goes off, people who aren’t fully in touch with their animal, fully in touch with their gut and their heart, go to work again the next day, right? So you’re much more easily manipulated when you’re not fully embodied. You’re just a Pavlov, you’re just a dog, you’re just, you’re easily tethered and manipulated. So I mean, for civilizations to run as tightly as they do, and the tighter the civilization, the tighter the individual, right?

21:19 The looser the person, the usual, the society. You mentioned like the Caribbean or close to the equip, wait, these are loose people and they’re shaking their bodies and talking loud, and the looser the civilization. So you know, if we shake our butts a little bit here more, maybe, maybe when bombs go off we’ll stay home, be scared like we should be. Thought about analogy, I went to school with a Cuban guy and he just reminded me of him. He was from Tampa, funny enough.

21:43 Yeah. And yeah, he used to, he used to remind us all that, you know, we’re up in Boston and there was a little more to life than just studying. Yeah, all the time. Yeah, you know, you always said that strength and, and, and conditioning were kind of one of your, you know, one of your go-to’s, you know, it’s something that came natural to you and playing football in high school, but yet you also went really early on into the spiritual piece, and I know, I know you read Osho and that kind of got you into that act of meditation, and I was just wondering, I mean, that seems, it seems different to me, you know, a lot of guys when they rep, when they relate to something physical they’re good at, they stick with it a lot of times.

22:18 I’m just wondering if you ever think back and wonder why you kind of went, went that way with it or decided to incorporate both. Well, I didn’t ins choose to incorporate both, are, I experience that my body is my mind. I experience that the more free and embodied I am down here, the more clever, the quicker, the more sharp, more intelligent I am up here. I mean, there’s been enough studies, I mean, how many studies we need to know to have to tell us that exercise is good for the brain?

22:53 You think better when you exercise, when you breathe, you know. So that has been my experience, the healthier I am physically, the healthier I am in my mind, and it’s as old as yoga, you know. If you look at the, if you look at the philosophies of spirituality in the East, they don’t exclude the body. You’ve got qi gong, you got tai chi, you got all the martial arts, you got yoga. There they recognize that if we, if going to get our minds, right, we’re going to be fully available mentally and spiritually, then we had better be fully engaged and, uh, experiencing what’s happening in here in our body.

23:36 Why, I used to train martial arts for a long time, and I, I finally realized I was trying to, jujitsu and Thai boxing, and I realized there’s nowhere else as kind of a mature male in his late 20s where I got to express myself physically. It was like it really wasn’t art for me because I couldn’t dance or I, I wasn’t allowed in society to be aggressive, and so when I was doing this I could yell and punch and kick, and every now and then I would realize, wait a second, I’m doing these carnal things that I’m just repressed to now. You know, I just went and trained today and I did like this leg workout, and I’ve been watching some of your videos lately and I’m like, I didn’t scream, I didn’t shake around, I didn’t do anything cathartic.

24:11 I just pumped some iron in a quiet kind of way and then went home and took a shower, and I feel like I missed something there. Yeah, you missed that energetic release, you missed that, that full experience of doing the thing. Rather than, you see, when we go to the gym and we have a goal in mind and we do, we go through the motions robotically, it robs us of the experience of the actual workout. I mean, think about going to the gym just for the workout, not for the goal, not so that you could put a check next to the reps and sets that you did, but so that you can really get engaged with what your body wants to express.

24:44 You said you want to express yourself, well, there’s no better way. They say that, uh, more people have grown enlightened through dance than any other medium, you know. So we’re all, we’re excited about all the new plants that are helping us open up, but did you know that you can have the same experience by dancing ecstatically? No. And most people wouldn’t believe you, right?

25:04 You said that dance could get him on another spiritual level. So we kind of rob ourselves of that. Is that the kind of Western way, or the, right, is that the civilized way, keep you off the, keeping you go to, go to work, right, right? So that’s a way, a kind of a control method, the mind. Yeah, well, yeah, right, get the body’s the mind, you know, tight bodies, tight mind, and the more rigid and square you are, the more you’re manipulated by data and ideas rather than intuition and feeling.

25:35 Right. When you say the body’s mind, you also, when you see someone’s body, you can immediately determine a lot of things about their mind, and if you want to make changes in their mind, you can go straight to the body. Or could you tell me more about what you mean when you say the body is the mind? Well, I, I’ve got the backing of the 4,000-year-old practice of martial arts and Chinese medicine and yoga and whatnot, so I’m not making this up, but if you want a more, a westernized view on it, a lot of the work done by Wilhelm Reich, particularly to answer your question on characterology or character structure, he did, he did a fascinating job, you know, of course, maybe not up to everyone’s standard, but it’s fascinating, and there’s a lot of correlations between what he describes as a physical posture or the physical holding within a human being and the psychosis, you know, whether it be, you know, you’re neurotic or, uh, he had several different categories including oral, masochist, neurotic, schizoid.

26:44 Those are the four character structures, and man, it kind of really, it kind of lines up. When I meet someone or I look at them, their posture can immediately relate to the various character traits of say a schizoid or an oral, you know, their bodies take on this particular form, and then when you line it up it’s like, wow, there it is. Right. And it’s silly, but it’s not a hard and fast science, you know, that’s, that’s soft science. Right, but it’s fascinating.

27:12 It is fascinating, and on the same sense you can start working on someone’s body in order to go to their mind, which is kind of against everything we’ve been taught really in the West, is if you have a mind problem, let’s work on the mind, not on the body first. We like to cut things out, right? You know, that’s how, that’s how we started getting all of our technology, was Newtonian physics and cutting things up into little pieces and just looking at the, looking at the pieces rather than the whole, you know.

27:40 It’s almost like we almost ignore the whole because the whole is, is, is difficult to pin down, right? You know, the pieces are easier. Do you think we’ve gone too far in science a bit? I was raised in a science household, my dad went to Caltech, he was an electrical engineer, you know, I went on to MIT, and like in my house, like there was a lot of dancing going on, uh, there wasn’t a lot of writing and English and history. Like for me it was like, Dad does this and I’m going to do this, and so my head was like a science fair, that’s what I was doing, and so it’s only later in my life when I kind of made a spiritual connection in different ways, but, um, yeah, is that just kind of a modern you know, society evolving, does it go to the mind first a lot of times with technology?

28:22 Osho’s interesting, uh, because he talks about how they’re a new mankind, a new human kind is evolving where it’s not a right or wrong, it’s like saying yin is better than yang. All that yang, you know, forget that yang, it’s no good, it’s better than that’s the silliest thing, that day is better than night, summer’s better than winter, we could do away with winter. There’s the Western mind and there’s the Eastern mind, and, uh, he’s quick to point out the flaws in each, you know, he makes jokes about the Indians and how lazy they are, he’s Indian by the way, because they’re so spiritual that they never get anything done.

28:57 It takes them forever to do things because they think they’ve got another 40 lifetimes to get it done, it’s no rush. So essentially everything is just spiritual, and then you’ve got the complete other end of the spectrum, which you described as your, your your, your upbringing, right? It’s a matter of bringing them both into harmony with one another, because you, you can’t have one without the other and not have imbalance. You can’t have black without white, can’t have up without down, can’t have the Western mind without the Eastern mind.

29:29 It’s just beautiful that information now has allowed us to get in touch with one another. Of course the Western mind has been imported to the East, but now we’re getting the information through the internet and books and whatnot, you know, a lot of the gurus and stuff who, oh, for example also like the Tibetan, the fact that Tibet was invaded by China and we had the Dalai Lama leave Tibet, I mean like that’s a great thing, now the West gets the gift of the Dalai Lama, right? It’s all these people come and teach.

29:57 So yeah, you stay away from that good and bad, and it’s just, it’s just elements of what’s going on with life. Yeah, we have, we have leanings. I kind of like the pseudoscience, sort of airy-fairy hippie side of things, because that’s just my nature, you know. I never really did good in math, but I did really well in literature and writing and reading and art, you know, and movement. So I appreciate both, and it’s just a matter of we need you’re leaning and we need my leaning so that we can all have a good time.

30:30 Right, you know, I’m, I was worried last year that this interview might never happen, and that’s because of probably now your super famous, you know, blog post that said “Why I Stopped Making YouTube Videos 2007 2014.” It read like an obituary, and, um, me as a YouTuber, first thing I thought was, I’m so jealous, you know. Yeah, because, uh, you know, sometimes that, that, that interface and that distribution network can, can be its own nightmare to a certain extent, and, um, you know, I think about it all the time, the amount of things that we publish, and for me four years ago I was like, I’m gonna do one every week, and I need this, this, I don’t know who I promised that to, but I promised that, and I made sure it happened like come hell or high water, and, and it, it definitely changed me as a person, you know, and some good things about it and some not so good things about it, and the more I do, and the more content, the more I get comfortable talking, but now maybe it’s the more I get comfortable talking, and I know that you talked about some of the things that you were going through, um, where, you know, not everybody wants to talk to you, Elliott, when he’s off camera, you know, and so all these things, I was wondering if you could just talk us a little bit about kind of what was going on with your mind there and, and what had happened like the previous seven years, and maybe talk about what’s happened since, um, if it’s okay.

31:49 I always wanted to quote a couple things you said from the blog, just for people that don’t know. Sure. Yeah, just to kind of get me going, get them in perspective, but, you know, you said, quote, “The seasons in my life were changing, but I was too attached to my success to let go and move with nature.” I think I was talking kind of before you made the decision, and then you said, “I’ve learned that if you are wise enough to honor the spontaneous subconscious urgence of your heart and gut, that life will take you exactly where you need to be with very little friction.

32:14 But if you deny or ignore the urgings of the heart and gut, life will meet tremendous resistance.” “None of this is done by logic. In fact, the logical mind has very little to do with the process. The only thing the head can do is get in the way, and that is exactly what happened to me.” Uh, and you finished by saying, “I began attracting tremendous negativity toward myself, my loved ones, and my videos.”

32:34 I was just wondering if you could take us back to where you were at, September, uh, what’s that, about 10 months ago? That was great, by the way. Yeah, kudos to the guy that wrote that, that describes it completely. I was wondering how you were gonna respond to me quoting you, because it’s, it is a nice piece there. Yeah, that’s really good.

32:51 That’s, that’s it in a nutshell. I’m gonna sound crazy or great, so depending on who’s listening, what God told me to, my intuition, my body, the Tao, the way, the universe. I, I feel I’m a feeler, you know, not as much a calculator, and that kind of gets me in trouble sometimes. That’s why you need both, but the feeling was there, and I tried to be logical about what I was feeling, meaning, like, this doesn’t make any sense, I mean I’m at the top of my game, this, you don’t stop, in a lot of the comments where you don’t stop when you get to the top, and it was just a sense that I have to stop.

33:27 And when I fought against it by continuing, I started getting injuries, I started, I, when I say negativity, I was getting what I deserved, because I should have stopped, and I was moving into speaking about things that I really probably had no business speaking about, because I got to keep making videos, doing things for more, uh, excitement to, to get more people to watch my videos, you know. I know a lot of YouTubers who end up doing that, you know, that because we’re not like TV stars or movie stars that work for a season and then disappear, or make a movie, disappear. We’re just like constantly pumping out content, we can’t really hide and recover, you know, so, and everything becomes game, right?

34:16 I mean, the problem is, is that anything can become game. And well, you even started off commenting on strength and fitness, and then it became a separate channel for asking you questions about the non-related stuff, which was great, but then I always wonder, like, then when’s the line? Do you bring the camera at home, right, your kids go on camera, and it’s like when you’re in this moment of, I got to create more content, mm-hmm, it starts to get a little crazy.

34:38 Yeah, you, and you can start getting really, uh, like exuberant. You know, um, rest in peace, Greg, Greg Plitt, um, I don’t know if you’re familiar with him, but he was another, a fitness blogger, and man, he was like, I’m not a fan of too many people in my niche, you know, and it’s for no other reason than I’m just not watching too many people, but he had my eye because he’s a good looking guy, he was entertaining, he was full of fire, and, uh, you know, he ended up pushing the envelope, and he made a video where he was like a train chase him down, you know, and, uh, it didn’t end well. Wow.

35:16 And I kind of took that as a sign also, it’s like, you know, how far are you gonna take it? Like this guy, you idolize this guy, you look up to him, are you gonna end up like him? Do you want to end up like him? And again, rest in peace. I saw that as one of the signs to look back up.

35:34 Right. For people that don’t know, if you can just tell us from ’07 to ’14, like your evolution, I mean, we were just talking in our war room over here, and you were talking about how YouTube was initially, you know, a business tool, and you were doing things that now, you know, internet marketers do today, like six years ago, like, and you, I remember you saying that, you know, you’re up in, in the loft at your gym, 100 degree weather, you’re like actually coding websites before there were Squarespaces and all that stuff, you were, you know, doing SEO and no one was using that acronym, and like you’re really old school when it comes to that. What was your journey to get where you, where you were in 2014?

36:13 Well, real quickly, I moved down to Florida as a personal trainer, I worked at a gym, um, but I wanted my own business, I knew that right away, and I wanted a family, you know, and, you know, the two kind of like they challenge each other, right, you know? So I quit my job, and you don’t get clients without any leads, and you need a lead source. When you leave the gym you don’t get leads, so you don’t get leads anymore, that’s your lead source. So I quit, and I knew right away, I was like, I got to get on the internet, because the internet is where people go to find personal trainers.

36:50 So I dove really deep into internet marketing so that I could fill my, I didn’t have a gym at the time, but I could fill my calendar with, uh, with clients. And at the same time, when I discovered internet marketing to fill my, my client load, I realized that there was a whole world out there that I, that I just stumbled upon. So as I trained my clients, on my time off I started creating products, creating email lists, and doing what the internet marketers taught me on the side, and then brought the two together.

37:24 Okay. And that became the whole piece, Strength Camp, the gym, all the videos. Yeah, it’s all coming together now, right? Yeah. So that happens.

37:34 So September 2014, you obviously been thinking about that for, for most of the year, I guess, last year, or different pieces of it, um, what, what made you finally write that article? Um, you obviously put a lot of thought into that, you were writing at a local library, um, you’d probably test, I’m sure you probably mentioned that to your family or to your friends, and then you finally just, I was like, I got to make this decision. Was, was there anything that made you finally just do it?

38:04 I didn’t like who I was becoming. I noticed my behaviors and the things that I was doing, and, uh, that’s not who I wanted to be, and, and that’s where I got really uncomfortable, you know. I made some mistakes with, uh, with friends, and, you know, saying things and doing things because I was inflated, you know. I was, I think what happens is when you take on a particular role, and especially if it’s this role where you’re making videos every single day, it’s not like, you know, the movie’s over, good, go home, you know, we’ll see it in the box office.

38:33 Uh, it’s one of these things where like all the time you’re playing the character, uh, that line gets a little blurry, and I’m thinking that I’m actually, yo, Elliott, and everybody has questions for me, so I must know everything, right? And if you know everything, then you could do whatever you want. And that’s the story I started telling myself, and I, I was getting in to things that I didn’t, I shouldn’t have been for who I want to be, not saying I was getting into drugs or hurting people, but it’s like this is not who I want to be.

39:02 Right. You didn’t like that guy you were becoming. Right in the head, quite a great distance, and you were making like 24 videos a week at some point, which is like, I think, like you said, for your niche you produce more videos than most anyone, and probably in most niches really, um, you know, even your typical YouTuber. What was it like when you went cold turkey? What was the response to that, to that blog post?

39:23 Um, how was that first couple weeks for you? I checked out completely, so I wasn’t sure what the response was, I didn’t care what the response was, and it’s not that I don’t care about my fans, it was I need distance. So I took the opportunity to also move my office out of the gym, and, uh, and just, I spent eight months doing yoga. And, and essentially what one of my mentors said to me, says, Elliott, you’re being forced to repay all the winters that you ignored.

39:54 In other words, like, I was living in summer for eight years, so ignoring the rhythm in my body, ignoring the rhythms of the natural rhythms and not taking rest because I was, I had something to prove, I had a lot of fear and anger to, to exercise. And I did it, and it was like, okay, good, now you got to pay back with a lot of rest. So I really, I rested. I didn’t lift weights, I didn’t go on and try to achieve some other big goal, I rested. How did that feel?

40:27 Was it frustrating at times? Did you want to get at the deadlift, or did you, you were like, I’m going to make myself just do the yoga, or was it, no, just thinking about picking up weights made me cringe. I, I, my body just rejected it. It was just so much of an overload that my body, and again, I’m an intuiter, so my body was saying, it was like, I can’t do it. I couldn’t put logic to why I would go and lift weights again.

40:55 Of course I do now again, but I was waiting. I said to myself, I’m going to take as long as it takes for my body to be ready for my, when I say body, again I mean mind, when it all lines up again, and, uh, and it’s gonna happen on its own. Okay, so eight months was the, and when did you know it was time to come back? Is that right out of hibernation? Yeah, that’s what it was, it was just hibernation.

41:19 Did you know you would someday, or did you just not think about it? Was it just like, I’m going to be present and I know I need to do this? Yeah, I didn’t think about it. Okay. Yeah, I was just present with it completely.

41:29 My wife is is my biggest fan. She’s my partner, she’s my best friend, and when I need the best advice she gives it to me, and if I can get her blessing on something, I know it’s right. And she would just say, Elliott, take your time, you know, when you’ll be ready. She sensed that I would have to go back to making videos, I’d want to go back, but even when I was like, I don’t know if I ever will, she says, don’t worry, take your time, you’ll know when it’s right, and just listen to your body.

41:59 That’s what she kept reminding me. It’s interesting how that can take eight months, you know, it’s interesting how the mind slash body just takes that time. You know, you said maybe to take a few winters to decompress and figure out. I don’t think I’m done resting yet though, I believe, you know, I, what I’ve really had to learn was, uh, or how to, how to go based on my rhythms, you know, and I know this, I make videos where I talk about it, you know, I know this, but acting it is another thing, and, uh, and it requires just the detachment to say the season’s over, I’m going into this one, but ultimately summer comes back, so just chill out, let it go, because if you hold on too tight, then it might not come back.

42:42 If you, if you like the guys that like end up using a lot of, um, anabolic steroids, it’s like, well, you’re pumping so much in there that, guess what, it might not come back. If you, if you don’t stop, it’s the same thing, you know, that whole yang, go hard attitude. If you, if you do it right, you’ll get them, you’ll get those seasons, but if you go too hard, adrenal fatigue sets in and you end up with disease, and, you know, that’s a whole nother battle in and of itself.

43:10 But like as young American men, like you were talking recently about some of the lessons you kind of learned, I mean, we’re taught to go hard, and like, I remember some of the, the, the things that you said like, do big things, you know, and, uh, you know, all of that stuff, you know, rest is for the weak, that’s what you said on your kind of comeback video in April, um, I mean, what’s drilled into our head, isn’t it, as kind of, you know, the American dream and American mindset. So you were just kind of realizing that there’s a time for that and there’s a time to take a break. Okay.

43:40 Yeah, it’s, again, it’s like having multiple summers in a row, it’s not, it’s not natural. Life, it goes based on rhythms. I mean, every day we have our anabolic phase of sleep and catabolic as we get up in the morning, all the adrenaline comes. I mean, it happens on a, on a daily basis, but it also happens on an annual basis, it happens in a lifetime basis. You have the springtime of your life, you know, then you got the summer, like, you know, between the ages of maybe like 25 and like maybe 50, 55, like summer, then it’s fall, then you start like realizing that you gotta pack away a little bit for the winter and, you know, take better care of yourself, then there’s winter where it’s like, well, now I’m laying cold.

44:28 Right, right. You got to honor it, you have to honor it. Right, we want to fight, you know, that’s why we got so much plastic surgery and, and Viagra is like, wait a second, you’re in a brand new season, embrace the season, love your, your gray hair, man, it’s, it’s a wonderful new season, like when the trees turn, and one of the things I miss about New York is that the trees don’t turn in Florida. Your hair changes, it’s like, man, the beautiful trees, we celebrate the orange and the, the yellows that the season has to bring us, but then like you want to not honor the beauty that’s arising in your body as you go into the fall, into the autumn, you know, honor it, man, it’s beautiful.

45:11 Right, right. So you’ve been back a couple months now, how just, if you observe yourself, like the last eight or ten weeks, how is, how are you different now, whether it comes to being on camera or your ideas? I don’t know at all, and I don’t have an answer for everything, and I think that’s, it’s been challenging because I really don’t have an answer for everything, or in the past, like I really did have an answer for everything. My parents even told me that.

45:39 Yeah, your parents always said, Elliott hasn’t answered right now, you have an answer for everything, but when you got on YouTube, on YouTube you really had an answer for everything, right? Okay. Yeah, and if I didn’t have an answer, I’d make up an answer, right, and that was, and I guess I got really good at doing that, like I said, my parents told me that, that, that was my problem, you know, what your problem is, Elliott, you got an answer for everything.

45:58 Well, guess what, Mom and Dad, I made it because I got an answer for everything. But now the evolution has been, I don’t have an answer for everything, sometimes I just don’t know. Okay. And the 2015 Elliott is happy to acknowledge that. Yes.

46:15 Okay. Oh, it’s so, it’s so much more freeing. Right. Yeah, I, I listened to a few podcasts just to kind of prep for this, but they were, they were 2013 Elliott, in 2014 Elliott, and one was like Brian Calallen show, and I know Brian, I interviewed him, was great, and, uh, Art of Charm, I know Jordan, and, and but it was, it was different than your videos in the last couple months. It was, uh, you were almost taking the role as the guru and just being that guy, embellishing that guy, and yet you’re recently in your videos you’re more of the, I’m just being me.

46:46 It feels like to me like I’m just being me, and this is the me now, and I kind of think this, and sometimes I think this, and this is kind of, I started out that way. Okay, but then the mirror, you know, the world is your mirror, and then if the mirror says, Elliott, you know everything, because wherever I go, I mean, Yo Elliott, my channel is Yo Elliott, which basically means, let me ask you something, so the whole world is looking at me like, tell me something. So I had to get away from the mirror, because I don’t have anything to tell you anymore, and that space allowed me to see how attached I was to that image to now say, okay, good, I don’t know everything, in fact, guys, that’s all right.

47:27 You said Jung says you can, uh, the lights, you can be inflated by the lights. Oh yeah, and it’s so powerful, and then it’ll change it. Yeah, if you, uh, if you study some of the work of Robert Moore, who is, uh, neo-Jungian, yes, meaning he comes from the lineage of Carl Jung, uh, he talks about the balanced masculine being king, warrior, magician, lover, and in each one of those you also have shadow, or well, more, more tied to what I’m saying now, you have immature versions of them, and the immature version of the warrior, you know, we think we’re warriors a lot of times, but really we’re the immature version, the, the not fully embodied version of the warrior, which is the hero.

48:06 The difference between the two is that the hero thinks that he can do it by himself and that he doesn’t need help. Man, there’s no humility, there’s, I can do it, I’m invincible, and I don’t need any help, and that’s really the, the driving force behind that type of attitude, at least it was for me, was fear and anger, you know, anger that I want to prove myself, and I think a lot of us are there, especially when I say us, I mean younger guys, or where I was a few years ago, we’re there, or anger, we have something to prove, there’s fear that you’re not going to make it, that you’re not going to be somebody, that you’re not going to be able to take care of the people you love, and with that comes the arrogance, at least for me came the arrogance of, nothing’s going to stop me, I could do anything, and God, the universe, my body, intuition wanted to teach me that, okay, now it’s time to grow up and actually become a seasoned warrior.

49:06 A truly seasoned warrior is cautious. I mean, it sounds crazy, right, because a lot of my videos are like, don’t throw caution to the wind, throw caution to the wind and just go, cause that’s what I did, that was my advice. But the, the seasoned warrior knows that he can’t do everything and that he does need help, and that’s the difference. Right. And he needs rest sometimes too, right?

49:29 The hammock, you saw the hammock in your office. Yeah, yeah, but a few years ago that, that hero Elliott wouldn’t have ever considered a hammock. It was all about less sleep, more business, more leads, more videos. Yeah, right. Yeah, um, I relate to that young man with fear and anger, you know, and I did that too.

49:49 Um, I was in my 20s, I was in New York City, and I was trying to go to Wall Street, and I was just, it was just about get the f***ing money, and in my look back I don’t know why I was doing it, but I guess it was a lot of that anger and fear, and fear of not becoming the person everyone expected me to be. Right. Um, but at the same time, as I look back, I was, I was, um, sabotaging myself the whole way. It’s like trying to put a square peg in a round hole, and I look back and I’d be like, okay, you had all these things you’re trying to do, right, and then yet you were trying to, in your spare time, you were, you know, partying and being irresponsible.

50:19 Yeah, trying to be responsible, just like, it’s going to catch up, it’s bound to catch up and smack you right in the face, right, you know, and we all get our unique slap. you know what the slap is for one person. I mean, sometimes it’s disease. You know, I, I think I’ve read somewhere that, that age 35 for most men is when diabetes and cancer and heart disease starts knocking on your door, saying, you’re screwing up here. Whether or not you take heed is a different story, but that, I was 36, I’m 36 now, so I was 35, I was 35, basically nature knocked on my door and said, uh, uh.

51:03 So I started going crazy, crazy in my head, which was like, okay, I gotta slow down, stop. Right, right. Part of the new vision, is it kind of this idea to be in 100 communities around the world, is it a bit more of a Strength Camp that’s based on, you know, these real physical meetups? I know you’re here in London, you’re going to Berlin, going to Stockholm, was this kind of part of a newer vision, if you call that, or was that something that you always wanted to do?

51:28 I made that up when you asked me the question. Oh. What is your vision? Well, let me see, I don’t know. I’m not saying you have a vision, but your body probably does have a vision, you know, maybe you don’t know about.

51:41 The way it works for the way it’s worked for me up until this point, and the way I see it moving forward, because it’s kind of been good that way, is I set an intention for what I would like to have happen, but the, but the logistics or the actual, the tangible expression of it is up to the universe, it’s up to God. So for example, I remember setting the goal, writing down literally, and I do write my goals, I just don’t get too attached to them, and I don’t get attached to the numbers in them. I remember writing the goal that I’m going to be standing in a stadium with thousands of people motivating them to be the best versions of themselves.

52:14 I mean, that was my, I saw myself, I visualized it, I felt it, I’m there and I’m doing this. Little did I know that the path would take me in front of a video camera where it’s over a million. I’m not standing in a stadium, I’m standing in my gym with a video camera and a million people are gonna watch this. So if I would have been so rigid as to hold to the logistics and the tangible expression of my goal, then I wouldn’t have gone on this incredible ride.

52:48 So when I say a Strength Camp in 100 cities, really what I’m saying is I’d like to export the ideas that, that surround Strength Camp, which is you can become a stronger version of yourself and empower other people, however that’s going to happen. 100 cities, it’s going to be a thousand cities, it’s going to be ten thousand cities, it’s gonna be whatever God says it’s gonna be, but I just aim in that direction that we’re exporting this. Okay. And then I get brilliant people around me that can have, make it happen.

53:18 Was this European tour something that last year you would have considered, or is this kind of an evolution? No, I wouldn’t have considered this at all, because it was all about the views and the videos at that point. Okay. Okay, I have a question I’ve been asking some people lately, and I want to ask you the same question. What is your relationship with money?

53:44 I think we all have a weird dysfunctional, that’s a great one. Yeah, and I was just wondering what yours is, you know, even if you had like one word that you would associate with money, because, you know, we’re all yin and yang in here, you know, we have businesses, but we have to be true to ourselves. I was wondering what yours is. Man, when you say yin and yang, that’s money. It’s put in, get out, it’s the natural rhythm, it’s the systole, diastole, it’s the, it’s the way the world pulses.

54:09 Economics is the pulse of the world, because it’s trade, and how do human beings interact? We interact with trade. We offer value in an exchange. You know, you can offer value with and have an exchange just through a hug, that, that’s, that’s an exchange, that’s trade. Giving you some of my energy and love, you give me back some of your energy and love.

54:30 Trade on the economic level is merely that. How much value can I create and keep the channel open to receive the value back? I think that’s where a lot of people who want to create a lot of value, especially in this age where you can through the internet, also have hang-ups for receiving love back, and I think it comes from our experience even with our parents, you know, I give that love but I don’t deserve, because love is conditional. So we put, put up blocks against receiving the affluence that is due to us, you know, and when I say put up the block, I don’t mean that there, there’s, there’s just one thing you’re going to move out the way.

55:07 I mean, setting up your, your mindset such that you will engage in the activities and behavior that will allow you to receive, and I don’t think you deserve anything that you haven’t offered, and if you do get something back without putting something in, it’s gonna catch up and bite you. I mean, look at, like, Enron and, and whatnot, you know, the evil rich people. Well, yeah, when you’re hurting other people and you’re hurting the planet, it’s gonna catch up and hurt you and everyone else.

55:35 I mean, that’s my only hang-up with regard to money, if you’re doing it in a way that hurts another individual or anyone, or you’re destroying our planet, you’re in the wrong. Has your thoughts on your own business changed from, say, now to, say, exactly one year ago when you were slightly different? Is your approach to the acceleration necessary of your business, has that changed? No, again, for me money has always been a sanity, more of a sanitation thing, like, can I just, can I take care of myself and my family?

56:09 Like, I’ve never been too extravagant with, you know, buying Lamborghinis and whatnot, like it’s just, didn’t excite me. I’m not too excited about anything except getting other people excited about life, you know. So, you know, I have a nice house for my family, I can send my kids to good schools, we can buy really good food, we can go on nice vacations. So any other money that comes to me beyond that, I think Brian Tracy called it, like a, Santa, what do you call it?

56:37 I think a sanitation level. Okay. It’s one of your earlier, early audio tapes. Yeah, I know, that’s wrong word, but it doesn’t matter, you know, there’s, there’s a, there’s a set level, anything beyond that is just a matter of how, how much value I’m putting out. So it’s just a scorecard at that point, you know, am I creating tremendous value?

56:54 Well, then the bank account will go up. If I keep providing the same value that I’m creating right now and not creating, open up any other channels, I’ll still be okay, because I can do the things that I want to do with my family. So it’s never been a scorecard thing for you? No. Yeah, it feels that way.

57:09 You have a new gym than you had a couple years ago, and like you said, you got the house, you have things you, you need settled, and now you can really work on vision, or just communicating more and getting other people excited. Yeah, that’s really empowering, you know. I, I, the gift to me is seeing the transformation in the people that I serve. The gift to me are the stories about people who were really down and out, and one thing I said in a video I made three years ago, dug them out of the ditch, and now their life is great.

57:41 You know, that, that’s, that’s the blessing that I receive. You said the whole family doesn’t value things, they value experiences. Um, I know you brought the whole crew over here, which is quite a task for international travel, uh, four kids, your wife, um, what’s it like? Family, has that always been something that was super important for you? Was that your parents that instilled that?

58:04 And how do you balance that, you know, work, life, family, peace? Well, balancing it, we had this conversation earlier, and I really took to a piece of advice that I heard from Dan Kennedy once, uh, who was a, his business guy, read a lot of his books, uh, he said, decide on your lifestyle. When I hear that, I think core values, the things that matter most to me. Decide on your core values first. What do you value first?

58:34 And then build a business that you could fit around it. And that’s essentially what I did, you know, and that’s why my children are here with me now. It’s like I’m, I knew that, we knew that we wanted to keep Colleen home, was my wife, and not working. That was a core value, which we struggled hard for in the beginning. We knew, uh, the type of, just the type of life that we wanted, I wanted for my family and for myself, and so the business has to mold itself around that.

59:05 I, the, the thing I say more than anything right now, my response is typically no, like it’s just no, no, no, no. Elliott, we’ll double your revenue, you’re, I’m gonna be away from my kids, no. I knew the power of no, it’s a great book. Yeah. No, it’s such a blessing.

59:23 You have an auto response on your email that basically says no, it says like, you know, we’re really busy doing our stuff, uh, you know, Tim Ferriss has the same thing, so that’s, that’s important for you, keep keeping an auto no because you got priorities, like you said, core values with your family. Yeah, you got to create boundaries, and it’s tough too, because when you’re in a position where you’re serving so many people, and my heart is with those I serve, uh, if I don’t create boundaries then I won’t have anything to give, you know, because we can be drained by, by the very people that we love and want to serve. So the best thing for everyone is the, or the boundaries that we can create for ourselves, right, even with your family, like your children and whatnot.

1:00:07 I had to learn this one, I’d be reminded of this one very recently, it’s like you need Elliott days, because, you know, I’m thinking like my days off, but I’m with my family, are good enough, but really no, I need days by myself. So one day a week now, I call it E day, that’s on Wednesdays, and I’m not just out of the gym, not just out of my office, but not at home and by myself, because that boundary has to be there so that I can have enough energy and love for everyone in my life. Did that come to you on that break in the hammock one day?

1:00:42 No, a good mentor. Okay. Paul Chek shared that with me. I’ve been having some conversations with him about how to manage this. He and I are very similar in the type of businesses that we have, uh, and he, he said you need to take a day where you’re away from everyone, even your family and your wife, you know.

1:00:58 So I get it. Right. Speaking of your wife, you got her on camera to do a training session in the gym. It feels like that that probably, uh, wasn’t an easy thing to do. Um, I’ve tried to get my mom on camera, she won’t sit in this chair for some reason, I got her on like a one minute video but that was it.

1:01:13 But, uh, it was really sweet, she’s definitely, you, it compliments you in so many ways you can see, but, um, what, what was that about? Was that, and was it hard to get it on camera or was it just something you guys decided to do? Well, we, I eased her into it, just like anything you want to get a woman to do, you can’t just slam it on, you got to kind of like set the lighting in the scene and put some candles up and you find out later it was her plan anyways.

1:01:37 Right, right. Yeah, but it’s all said and done. So, uh, we began slowly, like I, she, she started training with me on the time off, you know, she, she wanted to begin exercising with weights, which she wasn’t doing before, um, which is a good lesson, you know, listen to your trainer husband. She was good, she was doing a lot of high intensity cardio and cutting her calories and gaining weight. I was like, well, you need to increase your calories and start lifting weights.

1:02:05 She won’t listen to me, you know, because my mom says that the, uh, the shoemaker’s wife wears no shoes, who’s gonna listen to me, you know. Um, so, uh, she took my advice and said, let me get you into the gym and start weight training a little bit. Now she’s hard rock solid, burning fat and feeling better than ever before. So when it was time to turn the cameras back on, I was like, well, you’re here, the camera is going to be on, and you’re okay with that?

1:02:32 And she’s like, all right, because she’s already used to her workout, because I was otherwise you can train her anymore. So I was like, well, you’re gonna have to leave, I’m sorry, the cameras are gonna be on, if you don’t wanna be, be here you gotta go. So, uh, so the cameras were on, she was in the background for a few videos, and then, you know, I started asking her questions, she would answer it. So I mean, she, she has a sense of duty also, because she has a lot to offer, there’s a lot that she can say that I think young women and a lot of moms that watch my channel, a lot of women, you know, even the girlfriends of a lot of the young men that watch my channel, they’re curious like, what is this guy’s wife like?

1:03:09 How does she deal with him? Or what kind of challenges do they have? So she senses that it would be a value also for her to contribute. I think as men we crave that female energy too, we don’t know we need it, because we’re kind of again taught this big things, oh, guys, guys, guys, Hollywood movies, but I think we need that female energy in many forms, whether it’s a strong female or a caring or a nurturing female, and maybe that’s a nice thing to have on your channel too.

1:03:40 Yeah, well, I’m just gonna be whoever I am, and she is a big part of me, so the camera’s on and you see Elliott, you might happen to see his best friend and wife, children on camera, yes or no? Is that something you make a conscious decision on? You know, I, I think you could be paranoid, you know, which I think is, is normal for a lot of parents, um, but I don’t think it serves, I don’t think it serves anybody. I started to realize that it wasn’t serving my children when they were wondering why, you know, my daughter’s getting older, she’s in social media, she’s like, well, Dad, why, like, why wouldn’t, why wouldn’t I be in your video?

1:04:19 And she only needed to ask that once and I was like, yes, why, like, you’re my children. So yeah, so, you know, I use Snapchat and I use Instagram, we’ll take pictures and stuff, sometimes they’ll appear in a video, like my son, uh, happened to be out of school one day and Colleen wanted to train, I was like, well, he’s gonna be in the video, so we made the video and he was there, so it was cute. People, people respond to it. Well, also, you know, yeah, I’ve got an 11 year old and, uh, she’s been in there a few times and so I’ve had this question with myself, but again, I was like, it’s me, it’s an extension of myself, you’ve seen so much of me, and she’s a part of me, and you could overthink it, but we’re trying to protect them, but they’re, that’s silly, because they’re gonna put their pictures out there anyway.

1:05:02 Yeah, they’re gonna, it’s the world we live in now. Yeah. So yeah, it’s kind of a natural progression. We were talking about Dorian Yates earlier. Yeah, um, I think that’s how you first heard about us, so it’s, uh, I mean, who would have thought, you know, I have 200 guests that Dorian would have been the most watched.

1:05:17 Yeah, you know, I mean, he’s six times Mr. Olympia, so it, you know, he has a special heart in a men of a certain age group that grew up with him on their wall, maybe you were one of them, or maybe it was guys a little bit older than you that would remember Dorian. Oh, I remember him, yeah, for sure. I mean, he was Mr. Olympia when I was first getting, I was about 14 years old, just getting into weight training and stuff, so I get the magazines and of course he was on there, and as a champion and whatnot, so I had very vivid memories of Dorian Yates growing up.

1:05:47 Right, and he, he was interesting because he started talking about very spiritual things and some psychedelic things, and at the end of the episode, which like I didn’t really, I was like, I can’t believe this is happening, you know, and we had already done our whole ayahuasca ceremony in our early days here, and so now Dorian’s like, oh yeah, I was in Brazil, we were like, that’s the last thing I expected him. Yeah, right, today. Yeah, but I mean, he had lots of interesting perspectives, and of course as you would expect, I asked him, you know, about steroids on the episode, and, you know, he said something at the time which was really simple, he said, Brian, steroids are used in all sports, and it’s, it’s a line that’s rung true so many times, and at the time Lance Armstrong was kind of coming out of the closet, so all these things were happening, and then you were finding out that, you know, in a tiny small frame guy that was being used, and in MMA sometimes it was being used, and I was wondering, do you think that as men that steroids and supplements can be part of our journey, or part of a journey of a young man when he’s trying to explore and test his boundaries, do you think it’s something I don’t know, that’s natural to try, or that it’s always going to be in certain sports?

1:06:51 How is that yin and yang with you? What are your thoughts? Man, it’s powerful stuff, and just like with anything that’s powerful in the hands of an immature person, it can, it can be really damaging. You know, I take myself for example, I got to a point where I started using it because I wanted to continue to excel in strongman. So when I say the wrong person using it, I mean I was fueled by fear and anger.

1:07:22 You don’t want somebody who’s scared and angry trying to prove themselves getting into things that’ll give them an opportunity to self-destruct, right, because with the type of attitude I had, I was purely masochistic. I, it didn’t matter, no pain, no gain really was a living, it was embodied in everything I did. So I’m looking for pain, right, and you know, when you’re 25 years old, like you don’t think that, you know, five years, all this is gonna catch up on you, bro.

1:07:55 And I took my first sign, me again, once I’m, once again I’m intuitive, so, uh, I knew as it was changing my character, it’s not who I wanted to be. You said you got kind of quiet, anti-social. Yeah, I got really into, and I’m not an anti-social guy, but I got really anti-social and kind of like grumpy and like snappy, and, you know, no judgment against steroids, this was my experience. So it was only a few months, about, uh, four, five months, but that’s all it took, and, uh, and then I tore my bicep, and at that point again I, I take it as a sign.

1:08:30 Maybe I’m superstitious, but it was an omen to me. So I tear my bicep and I was like, well, there’s my answer, I ought to stop this s*** because it’s just destroying my body, you know, but I wanted to see I, I think that’s something, that’s why I don’t judge, I’m not judging or saying you should or shouldn’t, because the curiosity is really what’s really fascinating. I want to see like how far can I go, how far can I take it, man? And you know, I took it so far that I got a warning sign, just like we do when we’re 35 and we get heart disease, or not heart disease but maybe like high blood pressure, at that point, because it starts off small, like a pop bicep, not a destroyed liver, you know, high blood pressure, not heart disease yet.

1:09:13 So I took the sign and I was like, wow, you know, this was it. I’m not trying to be a professional strongman for a living for the rest of my life, I’m not going down in history for this, you know, like I’m not a Dorian Yates, that’s a totally different story, you know. I’m doing this just because I’ve got a vengeance. So I decided it was time to quit, but it gave me an experience and it gave me a story that I can tell, and I think that’s what makes things so interesting when you live life to its fullest, is if you’re aware and objective enough, you take all the mistakes and they become beautiful stories to tell your friends and children and grandchildren about what not to do, because here’s how I screwed up.

1:09:51 And that put the kind of the end to the pro strongman career, uh, there, I mean you were always smaller for a strongman guy, so it was awe, I mean you were already probably working extra hard to keep up with some of the size of these guys, is that right? Oh, size was always easy for me, in fact I, I got my pro card completely natural. Okay. So I mean, I can get really strong and really big, but you know, the seed was planted in my head that, well, if you’re this big and that strong naturally, what if, you know, and I played college football, all throughout high school, all throughout college, completely natural, and it was just that, you know, push it that one step further, and, uh, you know, the universe delivered.

1:10:30 So what’s it take to be a good pro strongman? Oh, you’ve got to not only be strong but well conditioned. You know, the difference between powerlifting and strongman is in powerlifting you do one rep, in strongman you might have to do six reps and then pick up a stone and load it, you know, so much more conditioning is required, and functional strength, when I say functional strength I mean your ability to quickly adapt to the medium. Uh, with, with barbell training you don’t have to do, it’s not too athletic, this squat, deadlift, with, um, with strongman training, I mean you’ve got a keg filled with water that’s, you know, 150 pounds and you gotta get it up on your chest and it’s sloshing around and you gotta press it over your head, and then you gotta do that multiple times, your stabilizers have got to be really strong, your core has got to be really strong.

1:11:26 You have a famous video with Cali Muscle where he came out and trained. Yeah, that’s right. Like props to anybody who goes on, uh, on film to do something like that, you know, we had Steve Maxwell in here and he trained with the Bar Stars guys. Yeah, the Bronx, and I’m like, he’s 60 something and I’m like, props to you for going out there. A lot of people wouldn’t want to go near it because I think it’s all on tape, but what did he learn and what did you learn when he came out and did, because you were, you had him lifting boulders and things like that, was that kind of, you know, again like that functional meets, you know, bodybuilding type musculature?

1:11:56 Yeah, I mean, like the title says, it’s bodybuilder versus strongman, and, uh, it’s not a matter of who will win, because I was conditioned to do the things that I do, except I’m half the size of Cali, you know, so I, I look good in that video because he’s on my playground, you know. If I, if I went to, to the gym with Cali, he’d crap on me, and especially if we took our shirts off, you know. So, but, uh, he, he kept up pretty well, I mean he, he was fairly athletic, you know.

1:12:23 Yeah, stronger than a lot of people, like to say bodybuilders aren’t that strong, well, I, I would beg to differ. I mean, this guy has lifted a lot of weight, and he was definitely keeping up with the, with the loads we were using, so props to him. That was fun. And did, how do things like that happen? He just calls you up and shows up, and do you get a lot of people that come to see you, that come to Mecca?

1:12:46 One of the goals I had early on when I started my business was that people will come from all around the world to Strength Camp. Now again, I don’t know how that was going to happen, but I set it as an intention, like we were talking about with regard to goals before, and part of the reason why I had to move my office out of the gym is because people from around the world were showing up and knocking on the door, and I was like, I can’t get any work done here. So that dream came true.

1:13:13 I decided to create a, uh, an open gym where from four o’clock to six o’clock every Monday anybody from around the world, wherever you are, please feel free to come here, and we make a video. I have a series on my channel called Open Gym, and we get people that come from everywhere, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, we’ll get them from Europe, we’re getting from Scandinavia, of course Canada, I mean we just, we get people from around the world that come and train. And now they come just at that point so you can get, yes, and you have your office somewhere else you can get, right.

1:13:46 Yeah, cause they’ll show up, you know, other times also, but I’ll let my guys take care of. Do you ever step back and think like about the kind of influence you can have when you make a video, and the fact that someone from Japan or Australia, they might book a trip to come see you in Saint Petersburg and not go to the Empire State Building? I mean, are you trying not to think about that too much, or you’ll go back to, you know, 2014 where it was thinking about it too much?

1:14:11 It was, it’s hard to receive sometimes, it’s almost like, uh, there’s still a disconnect for me, like I’m walking through London and, you know, five people, yo, Elliott, hey, Elliott, you know, when guy’s driving, I, I stuck my hand in his car and shook his hand. Um, for, for a while it was like, wow, this is weird, and even my wife, she’s like, wow, this is weird, and I felt uncomfortable about it. I almost was like, I don’t want, I was never, I’m never standoffish, but almost like, this is strange, and I had this whole awkward, uh, deal with it.

1:14:40 Now I celebrate it, it’s an evolution, it took me time. I didn’t sign up for YouTube thinking I was going to be a celebrity like a lot of people do now, because in, you know, 10 years later you got two YouTube celebrities, you know, I, there was none when I started making YouTubes, that was not my intention. So now you got guys that are doing it deliberately, if they get recognized in the street, I’m sure they’re like, well yes, this is, this was the point.

1:15:06 For me, when I was getting recognized the street, and I was like, oh, I never signed up for this, what’s actually going on? And it’s happening in London too. Oh yeah, we were in Montreal last week, same thing. I kind of, um, it might sound strange but, uh, I’m gonna look out, I have an avatar too, my wife knows too, she’s like, that looks like a guy who watches your videos. Wow, you can almost sense them.

1:15:29 Also I, sometimes I mean it doesn’t happen to me the same extent, but people that come up here in London, I can almost notice them out of the peripheral, and then like one out of ten, someone will come up to, and they’ll be like, do you know how to get to somewhere else, when I think they’re going to be like, oh, London, and I’m like, oh, now you’re being an idiot, right? But sometimes you can, yeah, notice people. I’m guessing 99% of the interactions are awesome and positive.

1:15:48 Oh yeah, uh, 100%. Okay. I’ve never had anything negative, there was one guy that was really drunk and he wanted to keep talking to me, but that was like the most negative experience. Right. You mentioned goals that you have them, that you probably, I’m guessing you journal or something, but you try not to obsess with them and obsess with the numbers.

1:16:06 I’m just curious how that works with you, and did you learn that behavior over the years, and do you write a lot? It’s been my experience, it’s been my experience that if I can embody the vision as if it’s already done, it’s already done. So I can write it down and there’s almost a sense that like I’m just writing my destiny. It’s almost like it’s already done but I’m writing it, and I also know when I’m writing something and it’s my ego. So the goals almost like come out of me, in other words it’s like I’m psychic a little bit, and this has just been in retrospect, I’m not saying I discovered I was psychic, I discovered that like when I can, I can almost sense that this is the direction things are going, and I write it, they just happen, and I’m not surprised anymore.

1:16:58 I used to be surprised, especially when I was struggling early on, I’d set my goal and I’m like, there’s no way this thing will ever happen, but I’m going to believe in it anyway, and then it happens. It’s just happened so many times now that I don’t say I take it for granted, but like the word becomes the flesh. If I say it’s going to be done, it’s just going to be done, and I don’t have to fight for it, it’s like God just wants this to happen. Do you journal every day?

1:17:25 Do you write a lot to yourself? I keep various forms of journals, like for example I mentioned in a video not too long ago that, uh, I keep dream journals. When I, when I can remember my dreams, oftentimes they end up taking the form of pictures, like what I was depicted in my dream, I’ll draw a picture. So I have a, I have a pad, a notepad, but it’s all blank pages like for sketches, it’s a sketch pad. So a lot of it is like colorful mind maps and drawings, because that’s really, that’s how I get my thoughts out best.

1:18:00 Okay, what can we learn from dreams, or what do you learn from your dreams? My dreams kind of tell me what’s happening in my life now more than anything, and again I, I’m superstitious a little bit again, so, uh, you know, I look at them as omens, and I’m like, what is this dream telling me right now? And I’ll spend some time mulling over it, and, uh, more so than anything what I receive is a symbolic representation of what’s actually going on right now.

1:18:34 You know, so, um, one, one very vivid dream I had many years ago when I was in the throes of trying to, to get it going, and, you know, business, trying to build in, and I’ve got a family and things are tight, we’re deeply in debt, was, I was standing in, and I was, and I was going through a paranoid phase too, I was watching a lot of, uh, Infowars videos, and I thought like the government was gonna come and get me, and like, yeah, I was, that fuels the paranoia from stuff like that, sort of fuels the, the anger, and it helped me, you know, pro strongman, scared of the government and $90,000 in debt, so I was, I was very fearful that, that everything was on the brink of collapse. I felt this, you know, you know, Alex Jones talked a lot about economic collapse and I believed it, like it’s real, like it’s gonna happen now.

1:19:29 So that energy drove my attitude and it was in me, and I had a dream where I was standing in my kitchen, it was a big guy with a beard, he almost looked like a lumberjack, and he pointed me in my chest, he’s like, you got three months. You got three months, and I, I didn’t know what to think, and I woke up and I spoke with a mentor, and, you know, and I thought about it and like what the symbolic symbology was, and it was, I’m living life like I have no time left, I’m living my life like I have three months left. You’re living your life as if you’re, as if you’re in the brink of disaster, and that’s how I felt every single day, like I’m on the brink of disaster, I had better keep going.

1:20:22 So whether or not, you know, that’s the truth of the matter, like it fit for who I was, like I wouldn’t have that dream right now because I’m far more relaxed. Do you think about that time, being $90,000 in debt, you know, worried about how you’re going to pay for these things, were you still living in the basement, that kind of thing? Do you, do you ground yourself in that often or is it just kind of somewhere back in the back of your head? No, I don’t even think about it, and it kind of robs me of, uh, my storytelling ability, because it’s good to tell those stories, it’s important to tell those stories, especially a lot of people who just find me and, you know, they’ll say things like, well, you’re lucky, Elliott.

1:20:58 I’m like, wait a second, I guess I didn’t articulate the struggles enough for you. So, but it’s, it’s my nature to move on quickly, you know, I’m always on to the next thing, I don’t hold on to the past for no other, no philosophical reason other than I just like to keep going. So, um, and then also I, I once read a book by Wallace D. Wattles, where he, he mentioned it, you know, and in retrospect I look at it and I’m like, that’s pretty good advice, uh, not to, not to, uh, fantasize about how bad things are, you know, don’t talk about your hard times, because what you’re doing essentially is like you’re, you’re identifying yourself with hard times.

1:21:46 So if there were hard times, let the hard times be hard times, but move forward because times are good. I try to do that now, not talk about the hard times, because I feel like I’m just expressing them and encouraging them. Right, but then, then my, my girlfriend would be like, you’re not talking, so I try to find some balance between being a communicative and you’re not dwelling on those pieces. So yeah, you mentioned the word mentor like three or four times, and I know you mentioned Paul Chek and other people.

1:22:12 Are you someone that’s always seeked out mentors and known the value? It’s interesting for a man who’s charging ahead and we’re in fear and all anger and all this stuff, usually that young man doesn’t really seek advice as much, but you seem to have done that. Yeah, I’ve been blessed enough to have mentors that happened upon me, you know, they were guys I worked for, uh, there were guys who just intrigued me very early on, and, uh, and my uncle being my first mentor per se, it was my, my mother’s brother who taught me strength training, you know, which ultimately became my life.

1:22:49 Martial artist, he was. Yeah, right, bodybuilder, martial artist, he ran marathons, I mean the guy was all-around athlete, and here I am four years old, he lives with us, and you know, imagine when you’re four years old and you see a guy doing backflips and chopping bricks with his hands, you’re dazzled, you know. And so I, I latched on to him and he was like a god to me, so he taught me how to do push-ups and, you know, things like that, so without him there’d probably be no Strength Camp.

1:23:15 There’s a good possibility, because then he went on and studied, uh, how to become a personal trainer, he took his ACE certification back in like 2000, and no, not in 2000, I’m sorry, back in like 1993 or ’92, it was way back when, like personal training wasn’t even a thing, you know. A few years later it was like only rich people had personal training, now with CrossFit everybody has personal trainer, you know, but it’s group personal training. Uh, he, he, he decided he wanted to quit, I mean the path that he took is very similar to mine, he had a professional job, he had a divorce and kind of, which I didn’t have, he decided he wanted something new, and he always loved athletics, and he was like, how can I get back into what I was doing when Elliott was a kid in the basement flipping and chopping bricks, and, and he discovered that there’s a profession where you can go into a gym and people will teach you, who will pay you to teach them how to train.

1:24:10 So he decided to embark upon that journey. I was about 14 years old at the time, and he was, he started spending more time with us again, and I fell back in love. I was like, wait a second, you’re telling me, okay, you’re earning a living now, Uncle Elroy, by teaching people what you taught me when I was four years old? I know exactly what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, I’m going to teach people how to get strong. So he, he, he was instrumental in my molding me as a child, and then right at that age 14, when we need, I use mentor as a term for what we all need, namely as boys, I’m talking, which is an elder, you know, an older man who can kind of show us the ropes a little bit, and he was that in that way for me, and then I recognized the power of that, and I was lucky enough to have attracted several other older men in my life until I got to a point where it’s cognizant of it and realized, oh, these are important guys for me, I’ll go out of my way and make sure I can keep them around.

1:25:14 Okay, and you do that now, actively? Yeah, and you probably never use the word mentor when you talk to them. Uh, no, I mean because, well, I pay them, so that you’re a coach that way, right? So mentor is a little kind, it’s kind of like, it’s one of those words, it’s kind of on the fence a little bit, because a mentor is somebody who should just happen into your life and, and support you, like an uncle or, or your dad’s a friend, or, you know, just an older guy at work or something like that, but, um, it’s, it’s evolved to the point where, and we live in a world in a day and age where, uh, if you can afford it, choose your mentors.

1:25:55 Go and like, I want that guy, and a lot of times there’ll be coaches, you know, there’ll be people who have other things to do, they’ve got other businesses, or they’ve made it a business to coaching young men, and, uh, you should definitely go out and if you can afford it, hire that guy. Right, no, it’s interesting, I’m always trying to give suggestions about people and finding mentors, and I find that most people don’t use that word, it’s just some relationship and some value is exchanging, sometimes we’re money, sometimes for not something, inspiration, but, uh, you know, it’s really powerful. I have a friend of mine who’s, I also train with, and I, um, I guess this is more just a question more than anything, and like a lot of men, and it was me at some point in my life where we, maybe we’ve been living in our head for so long we haven’t been listening too much to our intuition, and maybe following the wrong goals, like for me money was a big problem with mine, and, uh, just trying to capture that thing, and when I got there I didn’t know why I was there.

1:26:48 Yeah, and you know, for me, I, and with London Real I went on this journey where I went and, uh, and had that ayahuasca ceremony, and it was something that for me I probably could have got there with, you know, meditation, or maybe I could have got there through maybe physical activity, or maybe some dance or maybe some of that stuff, but for me I feel like part of me needed just to hardwire my brain to my heart for three hours and get this download that I barely could recognize that was really uncomfortable, and to just show me a window into where maybe I should be. And so it’s something we’ve always talked about on our show and it was kind of signature, but I’ve used it, you know, two or three times sparingly in the last four years, and I’ve found that, you know, whenever I’m getting anxious, sometimes I find when I’m in a queue, as we call them in London, and I’m frustrated, the queue isn’t moving, that I know it’s a time when I need to get back to my heart and realize what I should be appreciative of and some of the things in life that are important, as opposed to what I got to do that minute.

1:27:45 Right. And I was wondering how you feel about things like psychedelics or things, substance like that, that might jump people to an, to another opening or another vision as tools, or do you think they, that that’s used when maybe we’re repressing all these other communicative ways, like you said earlier, like with dance, that are available? Mm-hmm. I want to know your thoughts. Mm-hmm.

1:28:10 Uh, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of people talking about shamanism now, you know, there’s a lot of people are around. Yeah, and ayahuasca is almost becoming trendy now, and when they’re right, when, you know, when the girl, ladies in Chelsea who lunch are now talking about it, and then ayahuasca is a very shaman-based piece. Yeah, the language is happening. The other thing I’ll just, before I let you finish, you know, ayahuasca is funny because, you know, LSD brought all of the baggage and the counter culture and the anti-government from the ’60s and ’70s, which I don’t think the world’s ever really got over, and so now this is this new substance, new name.

1:28:42 Oh, it’s, it’s not, and because you purge, it can’t be used as a fun thing, God forbid. So now it’s okay, and it seems to be a new conversation, and with shamanism, so it’s great that it’s a new conversation. I agree. Um, and we like medicine in our culture, I mean Western culture, we want a pill for the thing, but if you look at many forms of shamanism, the shaman is doing this dancing and moving, he’s finding the spot, and he’s being very sense, he’s very sense oriented, he’s very in his body, he’s moving around, he’s singing, he’s, because he’s awakening that spontaneity in the body that, that only God could speak through.

1:29:30 So I happened upon the work of Wilhelm Reich through Osho, who has a form of meditation that’s called Dynamic Meditation. Right, that looks a lot like I want to do that. It looks a lot like that, right, and I had some profound experiences. So through that experience, you know, there was no ayahuasca, that wasn’t a part of the conversation, at least for me, 15 years ago when I found that, doing that. Yeah, 23.

1:30:04 Right, right. Use that for long periods of time, like even up to an hour of that. Oh, it’s for a full hour. A full hour we’re doing that. I mean, you’re gonna have something happen, especially if you’re fully engaged, meaning you, you have to actively shut your brain off and be fully engaged in, in, in the spontaneity, and you know there’s some, there’s some tips and tricks to making that happen that I talk about sometimes, but so that’s a group activity and it’s very introspective, and if you allow it, you, you’ll have some tremendous experiences, uh, a lot of catharsis, a lot of that connection that you spoke about, and it carries through, it changes who you are.

1:30:46 So the instructor who taught the first class also did private sessions in a craft she called bioenergetics, right, and I took a bioenergetic session, so it was just she and I, and she had me begin with a lot of heavy breathing, so I think I was in a position like this for about five minutes, I mean I’m going, she’s like, faster, harder, open your mouth, open your eyes, breathe, and then she had me let down and had me do some exercise and moving around, and this is the very first time I had a completely spontaneous emotional release that happened with laughter. I, she had me doing some real awkward exercises and I broke out into laughter, involving a mattress maybe? Yeah, yeah, open the mattress.

1:31:42 So she had me do this, and you know, I’m, I’m seeing her and I’m going through the Dynamic Meditation class because I’m depressed, I was going through a really tough time at that moment, I was still in New York, Colleen was pr, we just had the baby, we didn’t know what we were going to do, we’re living in a father’s basement, and, uh, and I started laughing like I was a six-year-old again. I mean, I don’t know when the last time most of us watching this, if we’re adults, laugh that, laugh that like your belly hurts, you’re laughing so hard and you can’t stop it, it’s like you’re, you’re possessed by the joy demons, and I got possessed and I could not stop laughing, and I, and I’m apologizing to her at the same time, saying, I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s going on, she knows what’s going on, I have no clue what’s going on, I’m laughing, laughing.

1:32:24 She’s like, it’s okay, it’s okay, you have some repressed joy there that’s pretty, joy, right? And so that was my first experience with bioenergetics, and, uh, I moved to Florida, uh, a few months after that, because a lot of things opened up in me, I was able to see things clearer because I didn’t have all the, I wasn’t repressed any longer, and depressed and repressed. Uh, I moved down to Florida, a few years after being there I looked up bioenergetics again and I found Bob Glazier, who is a, I mentioned Alexander Lowen, he’s a student of Alexander, he was a student of Alexander Lowen, and they both passed away.

1:33:04 Bob just recently. He was a bioenergetic analysis, who’s a psychologist that works mainly with your body, shaman. He taught me how to breathe and move such that I would have awakening experiences, and I did it on and off with him, you know, sometimes every week, uh, for about three years. All kinds of stuff came up, a lot of crying, a lot of anger, you know, this is why I was able to resolve a lot of my anger issues, not through talking about it but by getting it out physically.

1:33:46 It almost looks like an exorcism when you’re working with somebody in this way, and that’s why, you know, when you, when you watch some of these shaman videos on YouTube, uh, it looks a lot like the evangelical churches in the South in the U.S., they’re falling out, they’re falling all over the place, the guys putting hands on them and they’re shaking and s***, a lot of that goes on because that’s our muscular system is holding on to our tension so much that when you get the opportunity to actually open up your, your breathing and your movement, all kinds of stuff comes up. So I experienced over the course of years the slow release, because, you know, the ego needs time to resolve what’s going on and, and process it, the release of a whole lot of baggage that we all ultimately carry, and I’m a pretty expressive person, so, you know, I could, sometimes you get someone who’s been so repressed that like it’s ugly, as then they just cry or they really get emotional.

1:34:42 Yeah, it’s just a, it’s an avalanche, and I had some pretty deep avalanches, but, um, with regard to psychedelics, so the first time I’m saying it on TV, I’ve used ayahuasca, and the way I describe it was a instant manifestation of three years of bioenergetics, in other words I, what I did for three years, I don’t want to say happened in one minute, but it brought me back to the experience, because what happened for me was a lot of the same catharsis, I was able to go with it because I wasn’t afraid of my unconscious, which has a lot of suffering and sobbing. So I, I went right into sobbing, I started with laughter but I went into a lot of deep sobbing, crying like a baby, but I was familiar with it. Yeah, right, but you, you had done that before.

1:35:39 I’ve done it for seven years, that I was like, oh, I know what this is, this is, these are my repressed tears. Okay. And I allowed it to happen, so, uh, you know, it can happen naturally, it’s just that you can, you’d have to do it through your body, you have to open up your breathing and move, you got to actually, like we were talking about before, you got to be expressive, you got to get your physiology involved, or you could take some medicine and it’s just going to happen to you.

1:36:04 Okay. I know you don’t like the word bad or good, but is one better than the other? Uh, well, if you, what’s required with what I described as my journey is a safe place, a trusted mentor, somebody be there with you, and a rigorous process, meaning that like we’re, we have a process here and when this happens we do this. So what we really need are seasoned shamans, we need highly educated, grounded, here today, seasoned shamans, and it’s probably going to end up being like psychologists, and especially those that go into neo-Reichian forms of psychology, which is all body oriented, or we, a guy who knows how to mix up some tea or have you smoke something and just keeps you in a little area, so you know, it’s not good or bad, it’s just this, this is the, this is like going to university.

1:37:11 And this is like, um, you know, a weekend course, you know, do you want, you want it right now and you get the same certificate, or do you, you know, you work with someone and develop a relationship and, you know, purge over the course of months or years? Did you have a good shaman? Yes. Uh, yes. Okay.

1:37:30 But you know, when you’re work, and that’s the other, that’s the other thing, when you’re working with a shaman, when you’re working with a psychoanalyst, someone like that, there’s all kinds of transference, encounter transfers going on, and that’s another part of what makes this much more difficult, because you’re dealing with a human being on a deeply emotional level, and you know in psychology they call it transference, where you start transferring a lot of your emotions that are mis, you don’t know where to place on that person, and it comes back, and so there’s that, that happens, and that’s the risk of being a human being and opening up with human beings. Um, I thought that that’s what I wanted to do at one point, I wanted to help people in that particular way and be a shaman of sorts, but then I realized I can’t take on all this transference, right, I have my own children, you know.

1:38:19 So with bioenergetics you couldn’t take on that kind of transfer, or not right now? Yeah, it would require what is required of shaman, when shamans were respected as they traditionally were, they’re, they’re essentially like without family, and their sole purpose is for the tribe to be their family, and everything is transferred onto them. They’re typically a little schizoid, you know, because they end up either cracking up and deciding this is what I want to do, or it cracks you up, you know, shamans were always a little weird, but they’re the ones that people listen to because they had access to the unconscious, they got, or the non-conscious, they had access to God in a way, you know, they sensed things and they definitely had a felt sense of the emotions amongst the tribe, so that’s a lot to take on emotionally and physically.

1:39:17 Or can society go back there? Can we, can we create that type of infrastructure? It would be great, it’d be cool, especially for the lack of mentorship that most young men have, and, and that would be some, a process, a ritual that we could go through that would support evolution, especially during trying times, or you know, I think it’s a good conversation that we’re, we have medicine that, uh, that ancients have been using that, uh, that if administered properly and with the, with the good process and good elder, um, can do the same thing in a shorter period of time, I think would be an amazing option to have as opposed to let me prescribe a cycle of, you know, opiates for you for your PTSD or for whatever.

1:40:01 I mean you’re in Florida, as opposed to maybe you go to this, you know, ayahuasca clinic with a shaman who spent 10 years doing this in the private room, and you do it, and you know that’s your weekend, uh, you know, treatment, and you come back and it’s okay, and we talk about it, and you know, yeah, but I don’t know if we’re going there, uh, you know, I know America, whenever the conversation opens up it’s, it’s happening. Right, that’s true. Um, so a tool that you might use, again, you might not, you don’t know.

1:40:30 Yeah, uh, I don’t think we’re ever clear of our demons, you know, they come back, especially if we’re not aware, and I’m trying to remember who said, I think something I was reading with Carl Jung, but, uh, he basically was saying when you, if you think that you’ve resolved your shadow issues, you’ve got shadow issues. This, this, this is the game that we, we bought into when we got here, we’re going to be battling demons, we’re going to be battling with the shadows, there’s always a spiritual war going on. The minute you think, I’ve got it all figured out, I got resolved, I’ve cleansed myself, oh, now you’re in trouble.

1:41:12 So yeah, I, I could see it as a, as a tool to use when, uh, when necessary, you know, I get a, I get a quite a bit of relief and, and rejoice out of movement. I get it from bioenergetics, I get it from deep breathing, I get it from Dynamic Meditation, I get it from standing up right now and just pounding and yelling and smiling and like, fun, I won’t do it. Oh, it’s great, right, because that ultimately, that’s what the end point is, to be fully embodied.

1:41:46 Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s how I feel after a ceremony. Well, you’re so right about the shamans, like I have a female shaman here, and I’ve been really fortunate that my, I’ve done two ceremonies, to be honest, quite right here, and I did a lot of crying. Yeah, you know, I had a lot of, uh, issues, and, uh, you know, that I went back to my childhood and my seven-year-old self, and that was a couple years ago, and yeah, at the time you think, oh, that’s done, you know, I went back all the way to seven years old, I don’t know if I can go much further, but, but you know, when you talk about the shaman, I mean she’s a fascinating woman, but you know, whenever I talk to her, six months of the year she’s in the jungle and then she’s here and she’s there, and I mean she always told me, she said, Brian, I want to move to Peru, but like Mother Ayahuasca tells me I have to be in this city, because that’s where all the pain and the tension, it’s usually in an urban environment where, and so she’s like, I have to be here, which means, yeah, she’s taking on all of these kind of, you know, issues, and I know people that do group ceremonies, I’ve never done it, I can’t conceive of it.

1:42:39 I did one ceremony one time with someone else in the room and I had a hard time focusing, but there’s a lot of energy in the room that can be transferred, you don’t know what you’re getting into, and you’re very, you’re very open at that point. Yeah, very unzipped. You’re right, you’re vulnerable. Yeah. Um, but thank you for, you know, telling us about that.

1:42:59 Um, you know, I wrote a blog about my second iOS experience and I put a picture in there of me and my seven-year-old self, and it was so telling to some people because they saw it and his brain, and my parents got divorced, and yeah, like when I’m in my ceremony I went back and realized that ever since that happened when I was seven, I was just building up these walls around me and so no one could let me in and hurt me, and so I just did this whole like, you know, hero’s journey life, like how you’re talking about, I’m gonna be the guy, and, and so when I finally saw that in the, I was, I could kind of see the way I had been acting in my life and I was just like, okay, now you gotta open, let some humans in your life. Yeah. And so, so I wrote this, this, um, article and I put this little picture of me as a seven-year-old, and when I read your blog, uh, of your seven year period in the time you were taken off from YouTube, you put a picture in there, and I always think it’s telling when a vlogger puts a picture in there because I think it tells even more than what the story arc might be, and your picture was sitting on that red camping chair where for four days you sat out there, and I think you were taking a break, maybe it was 2010 or something, uh, you said you had a cup, maybe some vodka, club soda, and you just sat there alone, and I was just wondering, I got a picture over here, I just wanted to show it to you.

1:44:05 I guess that’s your daughter there. Oh yes, of course, she’s screaming. You look, uh, you look really happy, uh, and you look really calm, and, uh, I was just wondering what was happening with, with you there, and wha, what do you see when you see that picture again? Man, that was our first vacation as a family. I have four kids now.

1:44:26 That’s my youngest daughter, Simone, at the time, and all I wanted to do was take my family camping. Interesting thing, my parents grew up in the jungle, so when they came to the United States and they discovered that people go back outside, they were like, that doesn’t make any sense. So as kids, like our neighbors would go camping and whatnot, and my dad would be like, we came here so we don’t have to do that, so you’re not going. So, um, so when I got my family and I started thinking, the one thing I really want to do is take, I want to have a family that goes camping, I want to take them outside.

1:45:00 So, um, this camping trip was funded by my first product launch. You know, things were challenging, I mean way past that, things were really still challenging, but I said to myself, it was my first like influx of cash, um, it may have been like seven thousand dollars, and like for me at that time that was like a windfall, you know, I paid off some bills and I had a few hundred bucks left and we went and bought a tent, we bought, uh, I don’t even think we didn’t buy a fire pit because my wife was scared of the fire at the time. We bought it, we bought a tent, we bought a tent, we packed the minivan.

1:45:39 And you didn’t go in Florida because that, that wouldn’t have been a camping vacation? No, we didn’t go Florida. Okay. Yeah, there’s Fort De Soto, I mentioned, like they have the most beautiful beaches. Okay, well they have beautiful campgrounds, so we drove about 20 minutes south, we, we pitched our tent, I mean Colleen went camping when she was a kid, first time for me ever, and, uh, it rains, we, we’re, we’re sleeping in the, uh, in the, in the tent, which was a cheap Walmart tent, so it’s leaking in on us.

1:46:06 And I forgot to close the mini, minivan door, that’s where our food was, and raccoons came in the night and tore up all of our food, opened the cooler, egg yolks were everywhere, all over the seats, it was a disaster. So, um, that picture was the following evening when we finally got everything cleaned up, the sun came out, I poured a cup of vodka and just sat in that chair and didn’t move, and just, so is the, Simone was crying, Colleen dropped her on my lap and I just sat there with her, she wanted, I don’t know what she wanted, but I was sitting there and I was having a great time with her screaming on my left. It’s like the early version of the hammock.

1:46:50 Yes, yeah. The warrior taking a rest. Yeah, it was the first rest I took, man. Yeah, and that’s why it was like days, you were just like, oh yeah, and you could unplug. Yeah, it was the first time, first time in a long time, you know, I, I moved to Florida ’07, so about three years of grind, grind, grind, grind, and that was the first time I gave myself permission, I think, to even have a drink.

1:47:17 No alcohol for many years, I mean who’s got time for that? We got to get up at 4:30 in the morning, meditate, write your programs, and then get to the gym. Right, right. You know, when I was looking at this I thought of the movie Citizen Kane, uh, and maybe that’s a big analogy. Have you seen that movie?

1:47:31 No. So it’s this movie that was made like in black and white, and I think it’s Orson Welles, and it’s this, it’s this story, I think he was, um, making an allusion to the Hearst empire with his publishing empire and all this stuff, and at the very end there’s this guy and he built this entire career and this publishing thing and he makes enemies, and at the end he’s dying and he says the word “Rosebud,” and everyone’s like, what the hell is rose, but Rosebud, and like people are, the whole movie they’re trying to figure out what it is, and it goes back and it’s this little sleigh he used to have as a child and it’s called Rosebud. And I thought of that, and then I saw this movie recently called “Senna,” and it’s this, um, documentary about an F1 driver named Ayrton Senna, he was a Brazilian guy, and since they have the footage you see it all kind of in real time until he actually was in a crash and was killed.

1:48:12 But he says, he says, when he was doing all the F1 stuff he said what I really missed was back in the day when I just used to race go-karts and it was just about the competition. It wasn’t about the money, it wasn’t about the fame, it wasn’t about all the politics, it was just about the go-karts, and I was just wondering, do you ever miss five years ago, you know, when you’re sweating up in that loft, 100 degrees, and you’re getting those autoresponders and all that stuff, and, you know, it’s so new and fresh and still a struggle, but I don’t know, do you ever miss those days? Country music.

1:48:46 It’s an interesting thing, because I moved from New York City where there was no country music at all whatsoever, like didn’t exist, you know, and then I moved to Florida and, uh, I was driving my dad’s old van, that’s how, I, you know, that’s what I drove, it was an old 1987 conversion van, the, the window was busted out and I’ve never replaced it, so I just get rained on, and the radio only played like three stations and they happen to be country stations, so I’m like, South, yeah, I’m in the South, right? So, um, I’m like, all right, I’ll give it a try, I mean it’s something in my ear while I’m driving, and I find myself crying, like what is going on, what is this music doing to me? It happened to be, you know, country music is real salt of the earth, at least it was, it’s kind of changing now to more pop, but it was real salt of the earth stuff about being with your family and working hard, and just my favorite song wasn’t the one that made me cry, but it really was my anthem at the time was “Chicken Fried” by Zac, Zach Brown, where he talks about how, you know, on a Friday it’s nothing better on a Friday night but cold beer and pair of jeans that fit just right, you know, with your family, and so, uh, that time in my life that music really got me through because it touched my heart and kept me motivated, you know.

1:50:05 Darius Rucker had a lot of songs about his daughters growing up, and, and Colleen and I would look at each other and look at the kids and cry, so it was one of those emotional drivers when that music came on, it was one of those emotional drivers that got me through the tough times, because country music’s about tough times. Yeah, and I, it doesn’t resonate with me as much anymore, you know, music comes and goes for me, and, uh, but now when I, when those songs come on, you’re talking about nostalgia and Rosebud, when those songs come on, which was about that time in that picture, I, we, I start getting nostalgic and I’m like, oh, I remember when things were that way, and, right, these songs meant a lot to us, but you also remember those times were tough and we’re through that and we’re forward and we’re moving on.

1:50:48 Yeah, fair enough. When you think of the word successful, is there a person that comes to mind, even if it’s a person that’s dead or a person that’s alive, but you know that word, who would you associate that with? You said the body is the mind, my body’s 44 years old now and I’ve watched it over the last four years when I’ve been doing London Real, and it’s changing, and I’m, I’m trying, and, you know, I just, but it’s changing and I’m making peace with it, but at the same time the whole concept of strength training, in my opinion, is, you know, pushing the body to do the things that it would normally do, and how are you dealing with your aging process, and you know, as you’re, how do you make peace with the fact that that vehicle that affects your mind is, is changing, and I guess it’s breaking down, right?

1:51:59 Well, breaking down is one weight of my weight, you’re 36, seven, yeah. Well, you’re right, it doesn’t function in the same way, it requires much more upkeep. I’ve got to be, I’ve got to be much more cognizant of the way I treat it, I can’t abuse my body anymore. How, you mentioned before, like going out and drinking and partying, staying up late, I mean if I want to perform at my best, the only way I can provide value is by being fully here. I have to be fully engaged in every moment, that’s, that’s how I know whether or not I’m doing a good job, am I fully present and engaged with what I’m doing, and I cannot be fully engaged and present if I’m tired, right?

1:52:36 So if I, like for example, we’re having this right now, and I judge how well this interview went based on how engaged I was, in present I was, and I know that if I was up too late last night, especially with jet lag and whatnot, or if I, if I decided to have a couple of drinks or whatnot, it wouldn’t work out, right, it just wouldn’t happen the way it should happen. So it’s just a matter of how do I have to pace myself on the level of exercise, nutrition, stress, and, you know, all the other activities, the energetic weight that is carried when you have a family, you know, uh, like any other athlete would, am I treating my body the way it needs to be treated for game day? You know, every time I wake up it’s game day, so I better be eating right, I better be exercising.

1:53:25 My problem is over-exercising, I’m learning now how to actually back off, and it’s a little bit of a challenge, but what drains me and what really robs me of my life force and my ability to remain fully engaged and present with the people that I love and anything that I choose to do is, are you burnt out from lifting way too much this week? So, you know, I don’t not lift because my body’s breaking down, I not lift because I need to preserve, it’s just a different way of looking at it, I need to preserve my energy for full engagement in my life. Right, right.

1:54:00 It’s almost like your body’s teaching you a new lesson in a way. I learn new things as I get older, I’m like, okay, you got to be a little more patient, you got to be a little more this, got to be a little more of that, value of your body a bit more than I used to. So yeah, what’s a non-job? I had to ask you that before we finish up, man. When I answer videos on YouTube again, my objective is to provide as much value as possible, and I was getting a lot of questions from young men who got trapped in the idea, uh, the dogma, the old story that you got to graduate college, you got to go to college, you got to graduate, you got to get a respectable job with a salary and health benefits if you’re going to be a respectable human being in society, and I transcended that because I didn’t, that wasn’t the story I wanted to play.

1:54:50 I remember, remember my uncle? Yeah, well, he walked around with a br, with, he didn’t have a briefcase, he had the duffel bag, and he, he worked out of the back of his trunk and like made hours whenever he wanted to and kind of freelanced, and so early on I knew that I wasn’t going to have a salary and health insurance, I knew that I was going to be more like my uncle, so it was deeply embedded into my character that this is the way things were going to be, and I, like I said before, I’m kind of psychic in that, well, that’s what happened. But looking back it’s like, uh, that type of lifestyle choice, uh, transcends most of what we’re used to, you know, you, that’s, that’s like, you know, maybe five percent of us can do that, because it takes you out of the, the realm of perceived security.

1:55:37 You know, when you stay on the path it’s because, well, you want to be secure. Well, I kind of ditch that idea that there is no security, and then I just transcended it, and while I transcended it, building my business, I learned a lot of things along the way. So when I would get these questions, I could, I could feel the pain in these kids’ hearts, and I was like, I made a video one day and I said, you don’t have to do that, you know, there’s actually another way, you don’t have to go get a job, you can create a non-job.

1:56:06 And when I said non-job, it’s not so much entrepreneurship in that like you’re going to become a slave to your work, it’s, are you going to do something that you love every single day? You could work for someone else and it’d be a non-job, but you can actually choose the kind of work you want to do. Just because your dad and your grandpa were lawyers doesn’t mean you have to, if you’re, in order to have a successful life. And with the internet it makes it that much more available, it makes it so much more available to us to create careers in like the most obscure areas of, of interest.

1:56:40 Like for example, my children have really latched on to this guy, he actually is British, Dan, DanTDM is the name of the, uh, this, the station. Okay. It’s a YouTube channel, DanTDM, DanTDM, uh, it stands for Dan, Dan the, my, the Diamond Minecart. Okay. He makes videos playing Minecraft.

1:56:59 Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So he gets on his computer, he records himself, and he has the greatest commentary, I mean his, his audience are kids between like the age of 7 and 14. He has the greatest commentary, he makes these beautiful worlds and he goes through and he finds things and he builds things and he does, and he has wonderful commentary. The guy is making a killing, I mean I know what YouTube pays me and he’s got about two times as much subscribers, and I know they’re watching more videos, actually you can see the views because my kids will watch his videos eight times in a row and I’m like, every time they’re watching his videos.

1:57:35 So I mean that’s so obscure, you know what, there was a time when you, if you just played video games all day, well you could pretty much not have a career and just be a loser. This guy plays video games all day and he makes a killing because he’s providing value, and the value can come back this way. So you’re in court encouraging people to kind of explore the non-traditional and find a micro niche and think about a non-job. Yeah, as opposed to a perceived security job, right?

1:58:00 You just got to figure out a way to, to offer value. I mean it’s just a principle, it’s the same principle I said before, the more, who said it, the more people you can help, the faster you’ll get to where you want to be. Just think in terms of how am I creating value and how can I open the channels to receive that value back, it’s as simple as that, and the channels for receiving value back are so obvious and available to us now, I mean you can with Apple Pay, I mean you can just pull out your phone and pay for anything.

1:58:30 I mean getting people’s money, per se, you know, we’re stealing from them, but getting people to offer to give back value is easier than ever before. Look at Amazon, just push a button, you know, find a way to get people to push a button to keep you alive so that you can keep providing value, right? And find a product, you did that very early on, right? Well, that’s what people find valuable. Yeah.

1:58:51 When we sit down in five years in 2020, what do you think we’ll be talking about? Oh man, that’s a good question. 2020, well, let’s see, my children, my oldest daughter will be 15, so we might be talking about how to fend off boys. Yeah, I don’t know, that’s a journey, that’s a hero’s journey in itself, the journey, right? You know, the way I look at it, I’ve, I’ve got three daughters, there, there are two perspectives that I take.

1:59:16 Number one is how am I being as a man, because I think that’s gonna, I mean only time will tell, but I think that’s going to have a lot of impact on how they choose their partners or what kind of boys they choose to engage in. I mean they could go the opposite way also, but this is the story I tell myself, so I try to be the best that I can possibly be, and also with their mother, and I think it’s very important for them to see how I am with a, with a woman, you know, so this is, even if it’s deep within their unconscious, they have an idea of like how a man should treat a woman, and that’s how I treat her, treat them, and, uh, and the other thing is, is teaching them to have core values so that they can make their own decisions based on a paradigm of responsibility, you know, I try not to make too many things taboo, that way they can be out in the open and we can talk about them in the light of core values and, you know, the decisions you make, so I don’t, I don’t worry.

2:00:18 Yeah, that was kind of a joke with the 15, but yeah, I don’t worry, mine’s 11 and so I just take an inch, I just think this is a super growing experience for me, because, uh, you know, when I try to protect her, I’m thinking to myself, what am I protecting her from? It’s from this world and all these experiences that I had, and so it’s like, you know, a lot of guys without daughters usually say, oh, she’s never gonna leave the house, and you’re not going to see a boy until she’s 20, but it’s just like, that’s not realistic, and so, you know, we talk about these things and I try to keep a dialogue going, but at the same time I’m realizing the same thing is that I’m her standard as a man, my relationship with her mother is her standard for baseline of relationships, and so, but it’s constantly catching myself in that, in that, look, what were you doing when you were 11?

2:01:01 You were slamming doors and you were rebelling against the nearest authority figure, it didn’t matter who was closest, and so like I try to realize that she’s trying to, you know, kind of build her ego up in a healthy way, um, and let her do it, and if I have to be, you know, if it has to be a hard day for me sometimes, it’s, it’s how to create this kind of, this body that’s going to go out and be able to be, uh, to be self-sufficient in the world, you know, and yeah, to excel. My wife and I have been dating since we were 14. That’s crazy, which actually makes us scary because it’s four year, three years, because Isabel will be, uh, 11 next month, three years, so three years from where she is right now is when she and I hooked up, and, um, I, you know, don’t wish that she was doing what I was doing.

2:01:47 That’s interesting. All right, so that number’s on your mind, right? I met your mom, I mean, but the, the story goes, I married her and we’re happily ever after, right? So, um, I can’t, can’t judge, man, you know, there’s a great poem by, uh, Hafez, um, Khalil Gibran, um, where he talk, it’s called “On Children,” uh, “The Prophet” is the name of the poem, but he has different sections in it, one’s called “On Children,” and he gives this beautiful analogy of what we are as parents to children with a bow and arrow, and, uh, I’m going to paraphrase this poorly, but he describes the parents as the bow that bends, as we just, we’ll just bend as far as we can so that we could let go and allow the children to soar off into the future, and it’s not our responsibility to do anything but to bend as far as we can to get, give them the best projection and then back off, right, because once you send them out, which, I mean we’re sending them out the minute we send them to school, they turn on TV, you know, we’re always sending them out, uh, we, we did our best bending, but then we have to let go, and if we interfere, and of course I’m saying it, he does it in a poetic way, so definitely go out and read the poem, um, if we interfere we’re, we’re in essence hampering the development of humanity, because the children carry the future, you know, so there are so many that say, uh, they look at children today with all the technology and, um, you know, they shouldn’t be doing that.

2:03:24 Wait a second, that’s where the world is going, what do you know about that? They’re the ones that are gonna carry the future with the technology or with the brand new ways of doing things and thinking, not you and your old, you’re gonna die, you’re out of here, right? So encourage and protect, the best will protect, meaning like feed them, make sure they don’t kill themselves doing anything crazy, but you can’t change their minds, you can’t predict their futures, they’re going to be what they’re going to be, and it’s good for the future, and bend and put all your energy into them, and then you gotta let them go.

2:03:57 Yeah. You still find time to read Oh man, that’s interesting. No, because you’re well read. Yeah, I’ve read enough, that’s it, I’m done. No, I don’t, I don’t read that much anymore, uh, and when I do read I find myself going back to like the same maybe five or ten books.

2:04:18 Uh, I find that there’s just too much regurgitation and too much fluffery, there’s almost too much information now that it just, to me it’s almost like boring because it’s like, I heard someone say the same thing in a book that was written 100 years ago. Your philosophy is not really jiving with me too much, so besides that, besides the fact that I haven’t found anything that really excites me, you know, even like, you know, you read like the new science and stuff like epigenetics and biocentrism and stuff like that, I’m reading it and I’m like, this sounds like Taoism, I read Lao Tzu already, you know, it’s like, it’s fascinating, right? I mean consciousness is actually is a real thing now, science is proving it, and I’m just like, you’ve been there.

2:05:06 Yeah, I read, you know, I read doubt about Taoism, I read Buddhism, I mean the Buddha said this s***, so I don’t need your special language to convince me, I already got this. Um, plus the time, yeah, my time is so spoken for, I go home, I have to prioritize and the time that I do get, I much rather meditate, do the actual thing, like, you know, all the stuff we’re learning about consciousness, you can keep reading about it, I’m gonna actually just meditate. So instead of reading about it, if I have extra time, which I create space for, it’s in deep meditation, not reading about consciousness.

2:05:42 Okay, right, right, that makes sense. And that’s deep quiet meditation as opposed to the active meditation, or is that still part of your schedule as well, the active stuff? It’s, I do find time, I do do sitting meditation, um, and I also use frequencies, binaural beats, that I find really helps me out and more so than anything, it brings quiet and stillness to my body. I always go to the body and I know that if I, if the meditation’s working because there’s no tension left in my body, my body feels empty and heavy.

2:06:22 So when you’re carrying a lot, the Dynamic Meditation, I don’t do the Dynamic Meditation and bioenergetics as much anymore, or as tense, intensely as I used to because I was younger, and that’s why I think young psy, traveling the world, having young men do this, because you’ve got a lot in you, you got to use it, um, and if you use it, the whole point is to use it up so that you can sit still, right, because sitting still is the point. So when I do the sitting meditation it’s, I’m fully embodied, you know, there’s not this, it’s not in my head, I’m actually scanning my body to see where am I holding, and you’ll find that you’re holding in some of the strangest places, you know, you might just find yourself like holding your lips, like how the f*** am I holding my nose, and then I let my mouth relax, or I might just be holding my feet like this, and then, you know, 10 minutes of meditation and I’m like, wait a second, what’s going on there?

2:07:17 Boom, I relax my feet. So I’m just scanning my body, right, eyes, jaw. Oh yeah, all that stuff. Yeah, right, and all the, what’s that, belly, belly. Yeah, belly, and all that tension is stored in your musculature, that’s, that you said that really resonated with me when I heard you say that, because it’s not in your brain, it’s in your shoulder, it’s, for me it’s shoulders.

2:07:36 And all right, it’s all there, so if you can get rid of it there, then it gets rid of it. I always ask every guest that says, here, a few questions at the end, I’m going to hit you with these, these are signature London Real questions, so here we go. If you could make a phone call to the 20 year old Elliott and give that young man a bit of advice, I guess he’s still in New York City at that point, probably done, doesn’t have the family yet, I’m guessing 20?

2:08:01 Uh, I was probably still playing college football, 17, 18, 19, 20, that’s probably my junior or senior year playing football at St. John’s University, St. Johnson, which is in New York State, New York City. Okay. New York City. Um, if you were to give that man a bit of advice, a quick conversation on the phone, what would you tell them? I would give him reassurance that you got this, bro.

2:08:28 That’s all I would just, I, I being 36 looking at 20 year old Elliott, I’d be like, dude, you got this, don’t worry about it, you got it. I guess he didn’t know he got it. No, you know, because that’s when you’re out to prove yourself, that’s when you don’t know, the future is so wide open that it could even be scary, like where do I go, what am I going to do, who do I trust, who do I listen to? There’s so much confusion at that point in our lives. I think that’s why I still, I resonate so well with young men in that, in that age bracket, because like I was, I played that game real hard.

2:09:06 Yeah. And, uh, and if I would say it to any young man that I talked to today, I’m like, dude, you got this. Another one that I would add to that is that you’ve got this because of who you are, not what you’re doing. Right, and, and a lot of times that’s my advice when I’m speaking to people today, it’s don’t worry so much about what you’re doing, who are you being right now, you know, what, what, what virtues are you working on right now, and what shadow material have you recognized and you need to break free from right now, and if you could be fully present and engaged and, and embody your best self right now, you’ll be all right, doesn’t matter what you do, you know, if you’re honest and integrity.

2:09:52 Brian Tracy said integrity is the iron quality, because it means that you’re saying what you intend to do, you know, what you say you’re gonna do, you’re gonna do, and we all have lofty virtues, you know, we, we value family and we value health, but we work too many hours and we eat crappy food, so integrity is a matter of what are you actually doing in relation to what you say, because saying and writing down and coming up with what your virtues and value, what your values are, is, is crap, or who are you being right now. Right, right. Okay, second part of that question, best advice you’ve ever received?

2:10:30 Best advice I ever received, oh, it’s along the same lines, and it’s my, it’s from my father, and my dad, basically in a very roundabout way, and he says it multiple different, from multiple different angles, but one way he says it is, if you just get up every day and do what you’re supposed to do, you’ll be fine. A little different, I said be who you’re supposed to be, but I think when he says it, it’s kind of inherent, it’s implicit, like do what you’re supposed to do, and, uh, he would say also, if you get up every day and you work, just don’t worry, don’t worry about anything, you just get up every day, you do the best that you can today, that’s it, don’t worry about the future. That’s why, like, I think I have an aversion to like making goals too tight, because my dad kind of beat it into my head, it’s like, don’t worry about the future, the future will be fine, you just take care of today.

2:11:32 And that’s the way, you know, when I say being present and engaged, that’s a, that’s a corollary to, you just do what you got to do today. What was I watching? I was watching the Martin Luther King new movie the other day on the airplane here, “Selma.” Yeah. And, uh, one of the guys quotes the Bible, I, I can’t remember the verses, like, but something where Jesus says, uh, along the lines of, look, check out the birds.

2:11:58 Yeah, they’re, they’re, they’re, they, in other words the birds are happy, they’re well fed, and God takes care of them, what do you think he’s going to do with you? He’ll take care of you, just chill out. And then he goes on and says, like, look at the lilies in the field, look around you, look at nature, everything is perfect, everything is going the way it should be, chill out. I know Jesus didn’t say it that way, but that’s it, like look at nature, nature’s fine, the birds are fine, you’ll be fine.

2:12:24 Right. I’ve heard that a lot, relax, that’s a lot of people tell themselves. Uh, the last question, part of that is, you know, to the 20 year old is listening to us right now, I know a lot of 20 year olds listen to you, um, what do you tell them when they want to, how to be like Elliott, you know, when they want to do what you do, I know a lot of people do, do you know, want to do what you do, what do you tell them? I want to tell them what my father told me, be better than me, you know.

2:12:51 If you want to be me, that’s a good start, that’s fine, because I’m a pretty good guy, but be better than me, fi, find my flaws, find my faults, look, be critical of me and do a better job. Good answer. Yeah, I, uh, I really enjoyed this conversation. Yeah, it was great, thank you. Thank you for coming on.

2:13:16 You know, there’s just something about powerful men that speak the truth in their heart that just resonates with so many young men, or even older men like me, you know, and I think somehow when you come in where they see that you’re like them, or they see that you’ve had the anger and the fear in you, and then you talk about the stuff we really want to get in touch with, I don’t know if it’s our feminine energy or something that we’ve tried to repress in that first 10 years of running, like you were running I was running. Yeah, it’s just, it really speaks to these young men, and I don’t know if we’ve ever had that, that, that kind of, that on tap in the past, you know, because it was always kind of the Hollywood archetype or this guy or the hero, and I know one of your things you learned with your eight months off was is to get help, you know, you can help other people, you know, and, and, uh, I’ve had a few people on the show that, that people relate to because, um, they tick the box on the guys saying, oh yeah, okay, he’s, he’s a tough guy and a strong guy, now I can let my guard down, now let me listen to him, and he talks about emotions and he talks about the feelings I’m feeling and he talks about doing these crazy things, and, um, I think that’s just a great channel, you know, to get into, into minds that really need it.

2:14:28 So yeah. Yeah, as men we haven’t had much of that for the past hundred years or so, right? You know, maybe until the tribe days. Right. Well, we might have contact with, you know, these elders and these shamans, but yeah, we haven’t really had that in our media forms, and you know it’s obviously being craved out there.

2:14:46 So, uh, so yeah, so very important, so I’m glad we finally hooked up. Yeah, thank you for having me on. Yeah, it’s been a pleasure, um, thanks for going deep and answering all these questions. Welcome to London. Yes, uh, I think Europe and Britain is going to be good to you, and, uh, you know, I look forward in the future and hopefully we sit down here in another few years, that would be great.

2:15:04 Yeah, thanks, brother.