Steve Maxwell - Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Master

Full transcript: Steve Maxwell on London Real

3:50 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Steve Maxwell, the American fitness guru, author, physical educator, breathing coach and Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. You’ve been named one of the top 10 trainers in the USA by Men’s Journal, and spend your time traveling around the world with just one duffel bag, teaching students like Joe Rogan about mobility, strength training, martial arts, and more.

4:15 You received your black belt in jujitsu from one of the renowned Brazilian trainers, Helio Gracie, and were the first American certified to teach Gracie jiu-jitsu. Steve, welcome back to London Real. Number five five. Wow, it’s crazy. Can you believe it’s been that long?

4:32 Well, every year you come back, and I always tell people Steve Maxwell books the next episode when you’re here. Go on your event one year ahead, because you come back, cuz you’re traveling the world and teaching people, and so we’ve done this almost every year. Last year we did the hotel workout instead, which, you know, nearly broke the internet with you and me, you know, taking our clothes off and scrubbing ourselves and fixing our, and we just got training in the usual furniture in the hotel.

5:00 Yeah, it was amazing. It was right, and we just got done training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, so we’re gonna post that video as well, and Steve just went through a whole Gracie defense system. It was a lot of fun, man. I have one too. Man, thanks for having me on the show.

5:11 I’m very humbled. You know, when I see the quality of your guests, well, I feel like little Petey from down the street. You get some real amazing people on the show, and I’m really grateful that you include me amongst those people. Well, my pleasure, man. It’s always great having you here.

5:27 And like I always tell people, like Steve, you got this twinkle in your eye that is like from a 25-year-old man. You know, you got this twinkle in your eye. You’re always like, you know you’re just excited. You’re, you’re always fresh, always like, hey Brian, what’s going on, let’s do this. And you know you got it.

5:43 Maybe you got to share that with us. Well, while you’re here, how do you keep that twinkle going that? I force the life energy. Yeah, it’s more than just, okay, you’re still moving, you’re very active. You know, you just did train me in jujitsu, but like, you’re just still living life, right?

6:00 Almost like it’s new to you, right? I’d like to make every day like the last day of my life. Every day is the first day of my life, but I always think of it also as the last day of that life. Wow. So I try to live it pretty forth I can, and you just have that mindset, that mindset.

6:14 Okay, I do a lot of meditation and mindfulness exercises, and you know, I yeah, I actually work on that life energy, that life force. I’ve had some really good teachers myself. Okay, I practice, you know, various forms of Taoist yoga, and she calm and along with the Russian Slovak Health System, and kind of created this little Steve Max flow system and I think those exercises really keeping me feeling pretty energetic, pretty spry. Yeah, but you know, we all get old, we all slow down, and you’re turning 67 this year?

6:50 67 this year. This year. Yeah, okay, December third. Not mentally mode, a lot of times, you know, you start to get aches and pain, can make you very negative, and you get, you know, complaining and negativity, and so forth. One of my missions, though, is to try to help people free themselves from pain.

7:08 This idea that you have to age in a way that you end up crippled on a walker or a cane, or end up in a wheelchair. I don’t believe it has to be that way. That being said, my own elderly relatives are a real cautionary tale. I mean, in my family tree I can see what would await me if I didn’t take steps to correct it. So I take great steps so I don’t end up like grandma and granddad, and even my own parents, really heart disease, or what do they have, heart disease or a lot of arthritis in the family.

7:44 Okay, a lot of arthritis. I have some arthritis. You can’t play sports like wrestling and jiu-jitsu and play hard like that without ending up with some dings and some injuries and things. Okay, but every day you’re proactive. But I’m very proactive, I believe, and this exercise system I’ve created for prevention.

8:05 It’s like preventative medicine. Okay, really strenuous, with my diet really strict. I just am very, very strict. Okay, maybe we should talk about some of that. I want to talk about that first.

8:17 I want to say you were just training with Rorion Gracie recently. Yes. He’s like a kid himself, and he’s, what, in his 70s? No, no, he’s like a year older than me, but he looks like a kid. Okay, still young, has that twinkle in his eye, very spry.

8:30 I did a private one-on-one, and I was doing all the throws in him, and it’s time to take it easy on him, and you said, no, no, you know, if you, if you try to slow it down and put the brakes on, that’s the way you’ll do it in real life. I want you to really throw me. But the way the guy lands, he’s like a feather. He just lands in such a way that he’s not hurt. It was really quite amazing, and this was at the Torrance Academy.

8:56 Yeah, the old Gracie. Okay, gotcha. He’s not part of entering here on sting Okay, he’s still like doing his own thing, and you know, like three families, I think he’s like me, right? Right. Okay, well, they’re divorced three times.

9:08 Warren’s attic, his go with a couple different generations Okay, that’s a very slow new crop of young blue and purple belts coming up. Okay, and Helio Gracie was training way into his 80s and stuff, right? He was still good in the matter there’s nine 90s in the movie Choke, which is an incredible movie. Everyone should go watch it. He’s training with Rickson, and he’s probably, I don’t know if he maybe he’s in his 90s at that point, but it’s fun to watch him.

9:34 He probably was in his eighties around that. Okay, and you knew him and you went down to his house in Brazil? I wasn’t actually. I stayed with him for a month. Wow, and he, results of the Gracie Academy quite a bit, and people, for people that don’t know who is Helio Gracie?

9:47 Helio Gracie took Japanese judo, jiu-jitsu. The terms were almost synonymous. The Brazilians continued to call it jiu-jitsu, but it was like the old Kodokan style. There was self-defense movements defenses against punch, kicks, the weapons defenses, all the throws of modern judo, and a lot of ground fighting. They knew just about everything we know today.

10:14 There was nothing new under the sun. And what Helio did was he polished up the Japanese system a little bit, because he met Maeda, who traveled from Japan down to he traveled all through Europe, through Cuba, through Mexico, down through South America, and Maeda was a mighty fighter. I think there’s a book on Amazon now called The Toughest Man Alive, or something, about my age’s history. Okay, and he was the direct line of the Gracie family from Japan. Okay, he went there.

10:48 He didn’t actually teach Helio. Oh, he taught Helio his older brother Carlos, and Carlos taught his younger brother. But Helio had a real mind for it, and being small and not particularly strong, he also had a mind for adapting the moves to suit smaller, weaker people, and Helio’s idea was to create a style of martial arts and self-defense for the middle people, and people that weren’t particularly, there weren’t athletic. He could still defend themselves, right?

11:18 Businessman, housewives, you know, people that were not athletes, non-athletic. And what really differentiates Gracie jiu-jitsu is the teaching style. He’s created this very interesting teaching system, which is, what, how would you describe it? Well, kind of what I did with you today. You introduced step by step.

11:39 You introduced the movement patterns, and then you, the combat application you start with real simple things like we did today, and you just build on that foundation. And notice how we would stop and repeat the first move, and the second, and then we’d add a third move, and then we go back and review the first, the second, the third. That kind of repetition is really good to get it in the nervous system. Also notice I kept saying slow down, slow down. They’re really, really big into slow motion.

12:08 Okay, and it’s interesting, because as far as I know, he didn’t have any education other than maybe high school. I studied motor learning at university. I was a health and physical education major at Western Civ State University. It was a renowned PE school, and that is solid motor learning. This is the way you teach skills of people.

12:33 It’s land somehow he figured this out in his own slow motion, and you just keep repeating. First move, then you had the second move, then you get back to the first move, then the second and now the third, and then you get back to the first, and you never overload the student with too many moves If you do three to four moves, that’s a lot. That’s probably a big mistake in martial arts or jujitsu today because the guys come in and they want to do the inverted heel hook, and you’re like, wait a second, let’s figure out how to get up and get down, and let’s work on the base.

13:06 Start with the basics and build from there I do understand the desire to just jump in there. You know, you see the MMA and TV now, and all the videos, and yeah, I mean, the young guys get excited. They want to just jump right into it, but it’s a mistake. It’s gonna really impair your learning, and a lot of guys, you know, they find that they struggle with some of these moves in the beginning. Some of them actually jump in there and find they don’t have the knack for it.

13:34 But I believe if you’re a really good teacher, even a guy that’s not particularly coordinated or doesn’t have the knack, you can still teach those guys if you’re patient, and you do it step by step by step. If you really want to experience the traditional Helio Gracie style, you got to go to North Miami, where the Blanchard brothers are Blanchard Brothers Jiu-Jitsu. They were the last people to directly get their black belt directly from Master Helio. Oh, okay, and of course Rorion and his grandsons.

14:03 Rorion, of course, Rickson, Elson, Royce you know, these were the people that are carrying on Helio’s legacy, right? And they teach that old school. Of course, I got a magic Euler Gracie in San Diego. Yeah, he’s amazing and so Helio, and also this system was born in Rio de Janeiro, right? And that’s what we’re saying, because there’s a little flavor of the city in Gracie jiu-jitsu, right?

14:28 Flavor, because it’s not the safest place. I mean, I actually did some good evasion when I was in Rio. Like two kids rolled up to me on Copacabana, and I did. They did, because Steve was teaching me today what it’s like when someone gets in your space and you don’t know what’s going on, and they came up asking me like, what time it was, and it soon became really apparent that they wanted my wallet. Yes, they did, and I got the hell out of Dodge.

14:50 It’s all about awareness, really. Yeah, but like the Rio de Janeiro flavor. And I love Rio, by the way. I was lucky enough to train at Gracie Barra. I trained with the Brazilian top team guys, Murilo Bustamante and all those guys, really fortunate, fantastic, love those guys, and Norrish very proud.

15:05 Yeah, Mario Sperry was there. Let me tell you a crazy story. I went down to Rio for the first time I think it was 2006, and I had emailed Brazilian Top Team, because I’ve been watching the Pride videos, and they were like, somebody replied like, yeah, come on by. And I found it was really hard to find. It was a place called the Bay, which was the Athletic Association, right on the lake between Ipanema and Copacabana.

15:26 Lagoon there. Yeah. They were doing, and I walk in, this place was like an athletic association with tennis courts, and you go in the back, and there’s this mat, and on the mat, I kid you not, both the new girl Nogueira and others are rolling. Anderson Silva’s rolling, Mario Sperry, Murilo Bustamante, and Ricardo Arona. I got all the same mat, rolling and I was just like, are you kidding me?

15:48 And I was watching Pride Fighting Championships, and these were basically the greatest guys in the world, and I was just like, and I went up to Bustamante. I was like, you got my email? And he said, what email? And I was like, oh, I’m Brian from America. I want to try, and he’s like, okay, let’s train.

16:00 So it just, and they’re just like, his friendly common as an old shoe. Yeah, right. Yeah, they’re so very non-arrogant, friendly. They invited me to their belt ceremony that night. I got some pictures with Nogueira.

16:12 I mean, Nogueira was legend, fact, I mean, how cool is that? It was amazing. So I’m there with my hero, and I used to go, and I trained Gracie Barra with the Gracies, then I trained there, but still as I told you today, I was just, I was nervous every time I’d go into a class or something, because I was just, it was still starting to be a little mean. I mean, think of, I mean, what are you doing? Jiu-jitsu, well, you choke a person unconscious.

16:35 Yes. Today, you twist their arm. The trick point, you know, you either submit or something pops. And you know, in the Gracie self-defense there are strikes. We didn’t do strikes today, but I showed you where you could put strikes.

16:50 There are kicks and slaps and chops, palm heels. You know, we don’t use closed fist that much, because it’s dangerous. Your breakage figures? Yeah, no, we’re not boxers or karate guys. Yeah, you had some nice little palm strikes that were kind of, man, strikes are all there.

17:06 Yeah, but you know, the point is you are basically taking your body and putting it in the care of someone else. You are trusting that person not to hurt you, but you get a person that doesn’t have good motor skills or good motor control, or maybe he’s just kind of a jerk. You can really get badly hurt. So you’re basically, you know, putting yourself in danger to learn this particular martial art. Now, 90% of 99% of the time people are wonderful.

17:43 Yeah, that’s why I insisted that you go slow motion so you can really feel yeah, because if he tries to do stuff too fast, people need to get really hurt. Yeah, that’s why slow is really important. I still remember those first times, like when I first went to Copacabana for the first time. Like every day I had to psych myself up to go to Gracie before the class, and I was, I was terrified, and I just kind of get there super nervous. I feel like, all right, just do it, just do it, and then roll, and I get through it.

18:11 That was like a huge win, and then I go back the next day and the next day, but look, it always works out well. Everyone, see, always feels so good after. You feel so good afterward. You’ve got a great workout, you met some amazing people, I learned. Yeah, there’s some good calorie burn.

18:24 You always cool. Yeah, you get some açaí afterwards. It doesn’t get any better than that. Go, you get a coconut you drink that on the beach. It just doesn’t get any better.

18:34 And any grappling, it’s a different kind of mentality and I think it’s a different kind of camaraderie. Yeah, I mean, as a person, straight karate, and we tie, and the Muay Thai, we tie bonds. Oh, I’ve trained in that. There’s something different about actually punching someone, as opposed to grappling and rolling around with each other, sweat and everything. Very much, I mean, you develop a kind of closeness that you don’t get in the striking, at least that’s what I found.

19:01 Yeah, because you’re close. I mean, you’re holding your bodies next to each other. You know, it’s like, I don’t know, there’s something weird going on there, whereas we say puppies or kittens. Yeah, you know, it is rolling around and grappling. I mean if you think about it, most of the apex predators are grapplers.

19:18 That’s how they practice, even killer whales. They grapple. There was an amazing array of a mother killer whale, orca, teaching her calf how to hunt great white sharks. It’s one of the few apex predators that can take out a great white, and they actually caught it. It was a New Zealand boat trip, and this killer whale struck it from underneath, grabbed the shark by the snout and turned it over, and sharks have to continuously swim in order to breathe, and she held it there until it suffocated.

19:55 A choke. She choked it out and then she opened it. Yeah, and her, in the kid, little calf ate the, deliver it. It was a teaching. It was a, she was teaching the baby how to hunt.

20:09 Okay, in that. Wow. Yeah, so that’s what the apex predators do. And we want to see lions, you know, out on the savannah, they strike and they take the prey down, and they get that neck choke. Wolves, foxes, you know, even Wolverines, badgers, they’re all kind of hunt like this.

20:26 Yeah. If you ever want to understand what Brazilian jiu-jitsu is, it’s basically, I remember it just reminds me of, like, me and my brother trying to beat each other up when I was nine years old, except now I know what to do. Yeah, but it looks like you’re in your pajamas, yeah, right? That’s what kids are rolling around in the living room for, and your mom standing, you boys, stop it. Yeah, it’s probably the most fun thing in the world.

20:47 You don’t need the internet. You don’t need a mobile device. You just need, you know, two guys or two people, you know, the two women, whatever, it doesn’t matter. And I even showed you that look, that little movement things that you can even practice, shadow wrestle by yourself. Yeah, you just take those movements, you can put them together in an infinite number of combinations, and you know, you basically keep your, you can keep your skillset sharp even when you don’t have a partner, and it keeps you really movable, because one of the things that really differentiates really older people, like really old, from younger people is the ability to get up and down off the floor with ease.

21:25 A fall will kill a lot of people. It does kill, that old apple, right? And break. Yeah, my grandpa broke his hip. He fell, infection, and usually then you can’t move.

21:34 You become immobilized, and what happens to the vascular or cardiovascular system, that’s it, so it’s basically you end up with a heart attack or a stroke, right? Because you’re not getting the lymph going, the blood circulating, because you’re immobilized, because there’s a broken hip. But why did the hip break? Well, a lot of times it’s in mobility. Step notice, and this type of stuff.

21:54 So something like jiu-jitsu can keep you pretty young. If you go back to the right way, it can destroy you. I know a lot of people that train, you know, they go in and they tear into each other like a pack of wild dogs, and that’s not the way to go. Some schools are like this, and people are getting hurt a lot, but you can train in a way that is very sustainable, even into a blue stage. Yeah, yeah.

22:18 When I’m training with good guys, black belts and things like that, I rarely get injured. Well, is it usually the upper belts, the masters, the sort of soft roll and relaxation? Yeah, they have the control and aren’t gonna hurt you. It’s always the white and blue belt guys. There are a little dangerous, squash, the big strong guys.

22:34 Yeah, they don’t know their own strength. Yeah, and they can really hurt you. You know, you were a wrestler in high school and at college level, NCAA division. Explain what that is to people, because that’s no joke. Wrestling is in America, especially Midwest America, like a religion, and the wrestling room is where they go to break men’s wills.

22:54 Right? It is a very tough sport. America has its own style. Wrestling is called folk style wrestling. It’s similar to freestyle, but there’s more mat fighting, but a lot of it’s predicated on the ability to take someone down and put them on the mat, and you win the match by pinning their shoulders flat, and it’s not as, it’s not that easy to do against a struggling person.

23:21 There’s a lot of technique to it, but there’s a lot also, a lot of strength and power and explosiveness, and it’s very hard training. It’s quite demanding, very exhausting, very, and they have no stalling rules. They just make you go at it. You know, you can actually lose a match through stalling if the referee thinks that you’re not putting your whole heart into it, you’re not going for it. So I did four years of that.

23:47 I had my senior year, was 18 and won 18 and a, what, wait, did you wrestle 158? 158. Okay, well, I wrestled all through college, 167 or 150. Okay, so I wrestled my junior year in high school. I changed high schools, and I had no friends, and there was the other guy that had no friends in the class, and he said, Brian, let’s wrestle, and I was like, I’ve never actually done anything physical my whole life, and he took me into the wrestling room.

24:15 And Steve, I remember they took us out for like a hill run, and I like, they just crushed us, and then we went back to the wrestling room and wrestled for like two hours, and like the way the producers were, I couldn’t walk for days, and I went from this skinny little geeky guy. I literally just filled out. I must have put on, I don’t know, 10 pounds of muscle or something, but literally my shoulders got wider. Everything about me changed. Girls started noticing me.

24:41 It was just the weirdest thing, and it was almost the same thing. I was kind of a reclusive, shy boy, small for my age, wasn’t particularly athletic, and my father literally made me go out for wrestling. I mean, he made me, under great protest, and I found I loved it. It was one of those things I had a good knack for. You know, I wasn’t good at gridiron football, right?

25:06 It’s a small, what we call American football, grid, too small for track and field, okay? Didn’t have the endurance for cross-country, too slow for sprints, too small for the field events, basketball didn’t have hand-eye coordination, or, you know, heights. You know, they didn’t have gymnastics in those days. Nor soccer. You know, it was baseball, bat, hand-eye coordination, but man, that wrestling, I had an instant success with that.

25:33 It felt good. It felt good to get wins in every, you know. I thank God the old man made me do it. He tried to teach me boxing because he was a Navy boxer during World War Two. Okay, was that actually the Pacific Fleet champ?

25:45 Sam Maxwell? No way? Yeah, man. Panama flyweight. It was a tiny little farm boy from West Virginia, and they used to bring all the troop ships together in the Pacific, and they would set up these fights in the aircraft carriers, and he was the bantamweight, bantamweight champ.

26:02 That’s crazy. Do you imagine that scene in the middle of the Pacific? Goes, you wake me up in the rigging looking down, and Sharon and I get really, really into the putting bets and who’s gonna win? You have stories about World War Two, or do you not really? Yeah, I think it made a huge impression on him.

26:20 Really, he was, you know, they call that the Great Generation and was it, or do we, was it the Great Generation? I, I’ve just heard it referred to that, but there’s old-timers, have some tough sons of guns. There’s guys like, during World War II they were, they, I don’t think it’s been another generation like that, what they faced. Yeah, war of that scale, that was pretty something else. And in the Pacific, he was even in the Pacific on a destroyer escort.

26:50 He joined as a 17-year old. He lied about his age, and he shipped out of Hawaii, and his ship, the USS Waterman, received 13 battle stars. That means he was, they were in 13 battles. They were coming Kazi And it’s a real interesting thing to note. This is what he said.

27:11 He was part of that group, the very first group to go into Tokyo Bay at the end of the war, and they sent the little USS Waterman in there kind of like a sacrificial lamb to see if the Japanese were going to honor, because they might not have. They didn’t know. Yeah, they were supposed to put white flags and all, and to identify all the batteries, all the gun emplacements protecting the harbor, and my dad said that when they looked at it, there was like thousands of these flags just everywhere, of all these guns trained on their little ship, and they just didn’t know what was going to happen.

27:47 They just chugged around that thing, and then he was part of the occupation force. He was there in Japan after the war with MacArthur, so he saw a lot of a lot of stuff, you know, that phase of the war, because they had burned that city to the ground. I mean, it was, he was pretty ugly. I said he saw a lot of awful things across cities. Yeah, and I said he saw a lot of death and destruction during the war.

28:09 He was in some of the major battles during the Pacific, and they supported some of those Marine Corps invasions, and it was like, it was pretty rough. The Pacific was really hairy. I mean you always hear about the stories in Europe, and like, okay, those were hairy too, but the Pacific, it was just man, relentless. The Japanese were tough. Oh my gosh.

28:27 Hey, and they were fighting for their homeland at that point. Yeah, first there was major Bader’s, but then they were fighting further, huh, and man, those guys, Italia, they, the Japanese army, the soldiers were really, really quite amazing. Yeah, you know Iwo Jima you hear about those stories, just like they were willing to fight to the death. Yeah, it really worked. They have to fight to the last man.

28:52 I had Jocko Willink over here, the US Navy SEAL, and I took him out on the HMS Belfast, and we made a short documentary film, and we were inside one of the gun turrets there, and he just looked around, and he was, and he said, respect he said, Brian, imagine, during a battle, you can’t see anything. Nothing. All you’ve got to do is put these shells in here and fire, and any moment you could just get slanted go on. Yep. He’s like, I’d rather be infantry somewhere in a trench than be there.

29:23 I’ll tell you, man, being on that little ship out in the Pacific. Wow, man. Yeah, so he’s got some real adventure. But that, he was a tough West Virginia farm boy that wanted to get the heck off the farm. His dad died when he’s young, so he was living with his mother and this uncle on this farm.

29:39 It was like almost like the Amish. They use horses to do everything. Yeah, they raised livestock and did everything by hand and horse. Horses, right? And he just wanted to get off the farm, man.

29:53 So with the GI Bill he’s able to put himself through college, majored in entomology, if you can imagine, yeah, and work for the federal Department of Agriculture his whole career. Wow. And what did he teach you, your dad? Well, resiliency for sure, a real work ethic, because this was a guy that worked from the time he was just a little kid, and he knew what it was like to work. Say, put that in my mind my brother and I had jobs from the time we were like 12 years old.

30:20 You know, I went to college, and I had all my tuition already saved up. He never would let us spend the money, or he used to infuriate my brother and I. But I’m telling you, when I graduated from college I had no bills. Of course, the college was a lot cheaper back then, right? It was a state college.

30:38 It wasn’t like a real expensive college, but I knew at 12 I wanted to be a physical education teacher, or at least something to do with PE, and yeah I had that all paid off, man. All I needed was extra money for books and, you know, stuff like that. Well he would have seen the post-Depression era, so he must have really valued it, and he was saving too. He had a special fund, but he had this college education fund that he started when we were 12, whole way through school.

31:06 Every scrap of money we worked, and where I mowed lawns and I worked at a truck car wash place, and I mean, I even wanted to spend them. Anyone let me in, and he would, ladies I work for a furniture moving company, furniture, and all this kind of stuff. And it was really interesting. He, that work ethic was really important. And I think he had a kind of, in a real confidence about him.

31:32 You know, I wasn’t nearly as confident as he was, but I think once you’ve been through the trauma of combat, and you’ve seen war like he did. I mean, everything else pales in comparison to that. Yeah, yeah. I think he had some PTSD, but people didn’t call it that back then. Didn’t say, he probably did, you know, because he saw some really traumatic things.

31:52 He told me about being kept awake at night, one of the, one of the islands, there were so many bodies in the water. You would hear their heads hitting up against the bulkhead, and he was sleeping, and it was the bodies being washed with the waves. There’s just so many dead. I mean, that has to haunt you. Yeah, it has to if you see just human death on that scale, even if it’s the other the enemy.

32:17 Remember the USS Indianapolis that once survived, the sank, and that f***ed all those guys. They’ve got narcs, shark attack. Yeah, he was part of that pickup where they picked people up, and you find that rescue, and most of them were, it just saw, just, you know, happy stop it was just awful. Just all, wow. Yeah, yeah, I’m sure that, really, yeah.

32:39 Respect for this man. He was a real pain in the ass, and he was, he was one of these guys that was never said, fine, you know, no matter what you did, it was always something he could have done better. So yeah, so tough growing up, but you can, I respect him for what it was. All right, so you’re in the wrestling room in college, and like for people that don’t understand, I mean, Daniel Cormier is fighting in the UFC. He’s fighting heavyweight title.

33:03 He’s got a fight this weekend, and Daniel’s shorter than the guys. He’s usually fatter than the other guys, but he was an American wrestler. Who’s American? I think it was college All-American, All-American. and he said, in that room, they try to break each other mentally.

33:17 And he said there’s guys that grow men cry in those rooms. I cried my freshman year. I can’t, I was a high school, Harry, I was really good in my area that freshman year. In college I just got crushed by the you know, the dangers and the seniors. I just beat the heck.

33:34 It’s no accident, by the way, that if you look at the UFC and MMA, that almost every weight division, there’s former NCAA wrestlers in top 10. You know, like that Henry Cejudo, who, do, yeah. Yeah, he was an Olympic wrestler. He was Olympic, residency, double-A champ, I believe, and but you’ll see, you know, John John’s Yeah, fantastic wrestler. And the early pitcher, you know.

33:58 I mean, you just name anyone, Chuck Liddell, California state wrestling gym. It gives you a good base for going to MMA, because you got the mental toughness, you got the work ethic, and the skills of wrestling, the ability to put people on the ground, you know, it could be, yeah, really high level wrestler when you can put the guy in the ground, that gives you big advantage in a sport like MMA. Yeah. Guys, jiu- jitsu. We fight off our back, but it’s really hard to play jiu-jitsu in MMA because of the rules.

34:30 The gloves that limit the gripping, you know, the slipperiness. It’s, it’s hard. I mean, there are guys that are very successful. Yeah, you know Jamie Maia? Yeah, name one.

34:41 But I mean just tons of guys that. But if you can dictate where the fight is taking place, which, if you can dictate, and put the guy in the ground. Yeah, yeah. And we’ve seen, like, Khabib and Conor, like, you put him on the ground and all your stress, P&Y on your butt. Single-leg takedown is, I’ve ever seen that.

34:57 Just now he wasn’t like a wrestler. He came from karate, but he learned his wrestling was, he was so good. The Canadian Olympic team wanted him to try out. Yeah, they trained with them, and that’s how he got so good. Any shocked?

35:09 It was really good. Yeah, that’s certainly, you know. So wrestling is a good skill to have, right? Now most wrestlers don’t go into jiu-jitsu, especially back when you did. That’s right.

35:19 That was, well, right back when I went in. This is like ’89, ’93, UFC there was, this is pre-UFC, there was no place to go with wrestling skills. What are you gonna do? you could go into coaching, which I did. I coached high school for a couple years.

35:34 But what else are we gonna do? If you were really a high-level you could always try out for the Olympics if you could get sponsors, but back then they didn’t even have a really good organized program. There was John du Pont, decorated, the Foxcatcher. Yeah, that was the first time they had a really good program for high-level wrestling, but that was a really unfortunate circumstance. My coach in college, Dale Bonsall, was the junior coach at Foxcatcher when all that went down.

36:05 Now there’s a great movie called Foxcatcher, that kind of. Yeah, that was a complete fiction, by the way. Okay, now they got that completely wrong. Okay, was he really a crazy guy? Oh yeah, John du Pont was bona fide crazy.

36:15 Okay, but a lot of the movie was just fiction. Okay, interesting. He was one of the few guys that would actually fund wrestlers to actually focus on training for wrestling, so they could go to the Olympics. And this is when you really help us, wrestling at the time, right? And the guy that the the real driving force there was, thank God, David Schultz, the guy he shot.

36:33 Yeah, probably one of the best wrestlers that you guys never put out. Right up there with Dan Gable and probably John Smith. Those three, really, I mean, there was so many good wrestlers, but there’s three really standing out in my mind as being even above the great. And Schultz was certainly one of the more technical guys. Okay, that’s, there was a row champ.

36:57 I actually went to a couple of clinics that he taught, and had a chance to actually meet and see this guy at Foxcatcher. And, folks can see, really well. My coach actually invited me down there. Unfortunately, I was kind of in family mode at that point. I graduated.

37:11 I actually left the teaching field and got into the very early stages of personal training at that time in Philly. Okay, so it was really hard to get down there to practices. Well, let’s do, you like driving across the London? Yeah, okay. And but I mean, DuPont ended up shooting David Schultz, right?

37:29 And killing him, right? Yeah, it was always really sad. What a crazy situation a really nice. Okay, so then you get into jiu-jitsu, which again, this ’89, I tried, we tie, Muay Thai which is the mother art, and we tie. Okay, I dug, Friday, for a little bit.

37:43 It’s just not a striker, you know. I actually tried kung fu. That’s a really good kung-fu guy. Okay, and Kempo karate, and it was, it was okay. I just wasn’t really adapt or, o-town, it’s striking, ours okay.

37:56 In ’89 I went to Hunter College, and my first Gracie experience, and it’s like, wow, this is what I’ve been looking for. How do I learn this? I even said, the horn, what do I do? He says, you got to come to terms. So at that time I just set up my own gym, 1990, in January, so I own my own business and I was able to take off, and I also had space where I could set up my mats, and I invited some of my old wrestling friends, and just want to invite anyone, and then I would study some videos, and I would just roll with anyone that would be willing to roll, and then I started taking trips out to California.

38:36 I started going out so much. Hawaiians started to help me save money by putting me up in his house with, Hannah in here, on, just yeah, they’re like six kids running around, and Royce, the UFC champ, was like just a teenager himself, sleeping in the garage on this little mat, and we’re gonna just open up this academy. Did you ever imagine that this family would go on to shock the world and be known around the world? These guys that, their name starts with the letter R, but you pronounced it as if it’s an age, you know.

39:09 Rorion went on to start the UFC, and it changed everything, everything, and the whole world saw Gracie jiu-jitsu was the most effective martial art ever created. It certainly was. If the guy, that guy doesn’t know any jiu-jitsu, yes, you know I mean, that was what he wanted to show. He and they were always confident, or they were very confident, because they were proving this in Rio de Janeiro for 20 years for many, many men, but no one knew about her 80 years.

39:34 Yeah, no one really knew about it outside of that country They had many, many fights down there, right? On the concrete. I mean, there’s old-school stuff, old-school stuff, straight fight my teacher, Helio Gracie. I’ve heard different versions, but somewhere between 42 and 45 street fights. That’s a lot of fight industry he was a wild guy.

39:54 Yeah, like the Parson had hundreds, right? Rickson, a degree, and these names like, if you’re not familiar, you go check them out, because each one, and like they said, they start with an R, has a whole massive incredible history. Nixon legend, you know, fought it. Well, one of the original shows that became Pride. Royce was the very first fighter in the UFC.

40:14 He was specifically chosen because he was thin He wasn’t muscular, you know. He was athletic, but, you know, he was just, it’s a whole range, a skinny guy, and almost too nice, almost too friendly. He didn’t have that, looks like the pointer. He started developing into more of a killer instigator in the beginning, you know, and they picked him because he just didn’t look like a fighter. He looked like you know, just this handsome young guy, but he didn’t look particularly tough.

40:43 Because they could have picked Rickson, they could’ve picked X which looks like a fighter. He looks like a line, 20, 30 pounds heavier, very muscular. I just said, Sal, father picked thin voice who wore that bag, EEE, and he just shocked the world with, what the heck is this guy doing, right? you can watch UFC 1. He won UFC, what, 1, 2, 3 4, I think 3 was the one he had to pull out, right?

41:10 And we’re Keith Hackney. He had, he had a fourth of the match. Okay, yeah, just spent too much energy against Kimo Leopoldo, right? Leopoldo, yeah. And this is, so this original Kimo was another one of those marsh monsters.

41:23 Yeah, okay. There’s guy like Royce, yeah because guys, like 230 pounds or so, and he was massively strong. Power, look for ya, and try you trained Royce, cardio and strength, before I was doing. I was gonna strengthen conditioning for him before the horse’s wife worked for me at my gym, exercise. Okay, she was one of my trainers.

41:41 She was putting herself through college. She was in medical school actually, and I call it a medical school. She was starting to become a podiatrist, and she was working for me. She worked for me at another club, the Society, Oakland, and then when I opened up my gym with my ex-wife TC Maxwell. She came with me, and she was teaching in my school.

42:03 Okay, and then I introduced her to Royce when, say, I was going out to Torrance so much, they started sending Royce, and he would stay with me for, you know, a couple weeks at a time. So you’re deeply entwined with the Gracie family? Yes. UFC starts where people now know you. Nineties, is this a five, six billion dollar company now?

42:20 That’s, has fights every weekend. It’s global, but back then it was a shoe strike. It was this no-holds-barred pay-per-view phenomenon, where they at first weren’t even gonna have a ref in the cage. They were gonna, like, just, what, people going to let people go to like, whatever, death and the very last time they put in John McCarthy, who was a cop, and they threw him in there, and you had like Kimo Leopoldo dragging across in it. It was crazy.

42:44 People’s teeth flying out. One guy with one boxy glove. And then Royce, right? And they come in with all the Gracie brothers with their hands on their shoulders like the tradition. And well, Rorion actually went around to his friends, and at that point I was, yeah.

43:01 I had already opened up my academy, and I guess it was late 1990, but I wasn’t really qualified to teach. We called it a practice, because I couldn’t sell teaching, but I was teaching I mean, someone had to do it, because there was no one else around there. There was no Hens or Gracie or Marcelo Garcia, or there was no one in these cars. It was just me. Okay, so he came around, literally just kind of pitching people and throwing some money into this venture he had, and my wife and I put $10,000 in.

43:35 Which to us, we were fledgling business owners. I mean, you know, I had no business back, I was classically trained as a PE schoolteacher, and my wife, when I met her, she was working in real estate. She was a bartender, and, you know, work in real estate, and, you know, we didn’t have any money, but we scraped up ten grand, put it into our Ian’s venture because we really had a lot of confidence in him. And that was the, us, and he went to all these different people and cobbled together this money.

44:07 And they did this thing in Denver. There’s UFC on a shoestring. They used to, you know, the people used to send videos to Rorion to see if they could get into the UFC. After the first one, everyone wanted to jump in, right? So he’d look at the videos and they would meet us at the hotel, these wannabe fighters that wanted it, and they give him a tryout in the ballroom in the hotel, and they would bring all his cousins and brothers, some of the higher-ranked students, and they would just do a fight, right, in the ballroom, like on the carpet.

44:46 Whether that’s on the courses, in the carpet. Yeah, I remember, Haley, I’m just beating the snot out of this guy named Gracie. He’s like one of the cousins. Yeah, just beating the snot out of some poor fool, because this is back in the day when everyone on the corner, mall martial arts dog, thought they were the greatest in the world. There’s chi.

45:03 I mean, there was really no proving ground, so people were really delusional and they never knew any better, but they didn’t know realism, you know? A lot of the karate was point fighting and pulling punches. And yeah, you know, I mean, boxers are always toughest, [expletive] wrestlers always really tough, judo players do it for real. You know, you had those guys, you know, realism, that you know, you go full-bore on each other in those sports but still no one had ever seen anything like this, and no one had ever seen the kind of ground fighting that there’s just the submissions, and people are just in a state of shock, but it caught on so quick.

45:36 But then you spawned this huge, I mean, there was so many fake guys coming out. Purple belts coming up from Brazil, and the purple belt mysteriously changing to black by the time they landed in Miami, because there was such a huge business, business, Pete, while there was such a huge demand for teaching, because everyone wanted to do it after they saw Royce’s successes, right? So that’s when Rorion and Helio came up with the concept of the Gracie jiu-jitsu instructor training program, right?

46:09 And that was the first person graduated from that. Okay, and the way I was doing it was, I was going back and forth, back and forth, and then they would say hi to me for a while. They would send, you know, they would send people like high-level instructors. They sent Kiki and Wreak, they started sending Helio at that time. Houston Gracie was all part of the whole thing, and he’s always sending guys to me, so I was saying these guys quite frequently, and on my own practicing, and I was growing up the belt ranks, and I was able to do it because I had a good background in wrestling already.

46:39 I’m sorry, it was like a pretty, you know, that’s like a big leg up, and because I already had the balance and the mass sense and all this. I needed the techniques that Nicole. Fast forward 30 years, forward to today, and you look at the UFC. You look at any city now in the world, there’s probably multiple jiu-jitsu schools. Like, what do you make of all that?

47:02 Well, I mean, Rorion really spawned the real revolution. He was the guy, the real brainchild, you know? I mean, you got a credit. The guy, we all pulled our money out by the way when John McCain, Senator McCain, was really calling it, you know, human cockfighting, you know. It was making a lot of money with pay-per-view.

47:22 It was making, it’s starting to really make a name for itself, and a lot of people claimed that the boxing commissions had McCain in their pocket. now, I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but that was the accusation that boxing was really jealous of the revenues that this fledgling MMA was creating, and they started putting pressure, you know, lobbyists on these senators, and McCain was quite outspoken in his opposition to this type of fighting, and we saw it just going for right. So Rorion says, you know what, I think I’m gonna get out of here while I can and get my money.

48:00 So these Sodas, the super entertainment, right? And when he pulled out, I pulled up. Okay, so I didn’t make any money, but I didn’t lose any money. Okay, I got my original investment, maybe a little bit more. Okay.

48:11 Some shady going on, Las Vegas, that’s never happened before, right? In Las Vegas politics. And like Zuffa bought it for, I mean, what was it, a million or so? Yeah, they ended up having to put in a lot, a lot, like 20 million or something before it, it even then, it’s a stench. But I mean, it was a serious investment, and it barely happened.

48:32 It was the reality show that, on a whim, that I think finally that got real attraction. Ain’t it like almost a mainstream sport now. It’s mainstream, almost obesity worldwide. I mean, any major city, and you’ll find MMA schools, but it also was good for jiu-jitsu, because it’s one of the three disciplines you need. You definitely need to have how to kick and punch, whether that be Muay Thai or traditional karate, or, you know, any of the traditional striking arts.

48:59 You definitely need one of those arts. You definitely need to know wrestling, so at least if you can defend yourself against takedowns you need to know some wrestling, and you definitely need to know what to do in the ground to defend yourself from the, the, the one of the coffee when they punch ground-and-pound. Granite, back, yeah, yeah, yeah. well, look, he changed my life. I mean, I moved to London, and OH – I come from New York City where I had nearly almost killed myself through my own addictions and overdoses, and I came in, OH, and I met a guy who trained me in jiu-jitsu, and it literally changed my life.

49:34 Steve literally gave me my own life back, gave me my confidence back, my manhood back. And I went to UFC 37 at the Royal Albert Hall, 38. It’s called Brawl at the Hall, right? This is with the Royal Albert Hall, where there’s like operas normally. And literally they put a cage in there, and I saw Frank Mir get knocked out by Ian Freeman.

49:53 I saw Matt Hughes and Carlos Newton with that crazy triangle choke that then dropped him, and they thought they both passed out. I mean, that was my first experience. I was crazy, wasn’t I? And I got addicted, and I trained for eight years straight in jiu-jitsu, and started training striking, and went to training white eye and it changed my life. I went.

50:11 My buddy was training with Enzo Gracie in New York. I went there in ’02 and trained with him, the place that was above the methadone clinic on 38th Street. It was just full, and it was just nasty. And I trained with John Danaher back when he had hair, and you know, and I went down to Rio de Janeiro, and I just went on this crazy adventure, man, that changed my life, and I still trained today with a black belt, and so many guys, it’s their single favorite thing to do.

50:35 But the thing is, if you wanted to make it sustainable, you got to really, really, you know, as a man, an aegis? I mean, let’s face it, we all get old. We all slow down. You start to get dings and wear and tear in the body. No one’s thinking about that wear and tear, by the way, you know, when they’re doing these things, when, right, you’re not thinking about.

50:55 You may not get an acute injury, but you’re getting all these little insults to the body over time, and that’s what eventually builds into arthritis and auto rheumatoid problems, and you know a lot of people end up in pain, so you got to take steps to protect yourself. So how does one, that’s one of my messages. Okay, now you all love doing jiu-jitsu, yeah, but you really got to be smarter, by the way. Tap early. Tap often.

51:24 Don’t overtrain. If you’re training more than four days a week, you, you’re getting diminishing returns on your investment. This is in jiu-jitsu, you cannot train every day, at least not hard. You could probably drill every day, but you can’t train hard every day, really. If you’re trying too hard, more than three times, though, it’s too much, man.

51:43 You’re never gonna last. You can do that when you’re teen 20, maybe even early 30-something, you know? Yeah, and when Steve says, tap early and tap off, and tap is when you basically submit. Okay. I heard you say, okay, guys, about to break your arm or break your leg or choking unconscious, you tap.

51:59 That’s a beautiful thing about jiu-jitsu. That’s probably why it’s such a great martial art, because you can go hard, hard, 100% trying to basically kill somebody, and then, right before you’re about to do it, there’s like, okay, okay, okay, I’m good, and then you start over and reset, and you can do it again and do it again, and because you’re going so hard you get real-world experience, as opposed to a kata or some point fighting thing where you’re holding back and it doesn’t actually train you for a really, really honest-to-god exerting yourself. But the other thing too is, allowing beginner guys don’t want to tap for some reason.

52:31 They don’t see ego thing, and it’s crazy, yeah, because it’s the fighting out of submission holds that caused a lot of damage. Once again, it might not be like a real acute thing, but it’s definitely damaged. You wake up the next day, and my arms are sore, on my shoulder, but you get these, these little minor insults over and over and over, and before you know it, you got to quit. Your fingers also, on the shoulders, your elbow. I learned a lot about myself when I don’t have, like, I’ve been close to tap sometimes, and I’m like, I don’t need to tap here, and I’ve gotten out of things.

53:05 You know, so here’s the beginner. I know you don’t know where that is. Beginner, yeah. You know, as a black, but I know you know, yeah, by the time you’re, like, your level purple, boy, you have a really good idea, true, when you should tap it when you showed it. Yeah, but this first couple years could be really bad, but even then I figured this way if we would roll, and let’s say you get me in a really good hold.

53:27 I already made the mistake. I’m getting out of your submission hold isn’t really technique, right? If you really know how to apply that hold, if you’re like world-class, I’m going to tap. Yeah, but if you get it on, isn’t quite set right, but it kind of feels, well, I shouldn’t be there. In my mind, I made the mistake.

53:48 A noise, the mistake. Okay, Brian, good job, right? Let’s move on. Yeah, right, why risk it? Yeah, I see what you’re saying.

53:54 You know, it’s not like I’m going to get a gold medal or $100,000 check. I don’t even want to risk it, because maybe it feels kind of loose, and I feel like I can fight out, but also good, and that’s when people really get damaged, right? And then you’re off the mat for six months. And the other big thing, and this I’ve seen over and over, don’t let people stack you up in the guard. For people that don’t know, Kings wins.

54:18 My name’s, one person’s on the bottom, he wraps the legs around the person’s waist, and from that position you can defend yourself and even attack the person, as opposed to the person sitting on top of you, where you have no defense. But people, one of the things that really differentiates it from other grappling sports is the use of the guard, and the fact that we fight off our back a lot, but a lot of the damage to the spine, and Rickson will tell you this. Hold on, which others here, on, says I never let anyone stack them anymore.

54:50 If someone stacks me let’s go up when they’re trying to get past from between my legs, I just let him go. My eyes defense, my cross side is so good. He says, screw the points, who cares about the point? He says, I’m just playing you know, to win. If you can’t submit me, I don’t care how many points.

55:10 Again, ya know, I’ve seen so much damage to the spine from just being stubborn. You get a good triangle, and he can’t submit the guy he’s just hanging on. Your legs are getting tired. He got you jacked up on your neck. No, you’re right, you’re right, point made.

55:25 And then, and if you’re out there, I agree with you. I had that caused a lot of spine problems. Yeah, I was rolling with, a guide, I train with Ross Nichols. He’s a black belt. He’s going to Abu Dhabi next month, and he had me in some new hold, and like my jaw really hurt, but I didn’t know the whole that.

55:41 I’m like, this isn’t, I didn’t know I shouldn’t tap here, so I didn’t and then like I got out of it, but like I couldn’t really chew very well for a day or two. Somebody wasn’t smart, but also like, it wouldn’t, maybe it was good – for me – no, I didn’t have to tap there but also I was already, and made the mistake, and I was already in a bad position, and it just took the mistake, you know. So the rest is just your plain threshold. So my question for you, Steve, is how can people prepare their bodies so when they’re, turn 67, they can still be doing what you’re doing, which is super active every day.

56:12 What are some of the basic requirements of your system? The single most important thing, I think, is strength training. It’s really important, but you don’t need a lot of it, and there’s a lot of confusion in strength training. I mean, there’s many different systems that get you strong, and pretty much any system of strength training, it doesn’t matter. We’ll bring you within about 5 years to your genetic peak.

56:33 Hmm. why? You’ve been training for about between 3 and 5 years, some people sooner, some people later. You pretty much have already hit your genetic peak. What you see is what you get.

56:43 You don’t have this unlimited ability to keep gaining size and muscular strength. You just don’t. Okay, there’s one of the big lies of the muscle media industry. They keep making you think that you’re just going to keep growing and getting stronger forever, and, you know, they fool you by telling you to switch programs, and you get really good. You get really good at the new exercises, but then if you go back to the old exercises, you find that you lost ground.

57:08 You haven’t gained anything. Okay, yeah, so don’t think that way. You’re, stick with the same basic general exercises. Okay, and you don’t need anything fancy. You know the five pillars?

57:18 You know, a push-pull, horizontal push-pull, vertical, hinging movement, a squatting movement, definitely work your neck, your grip, your forearms, your feet, your calves, and maybe some specific exercises for your torso, like your abdominals and your lower back, maybe a rotation or something. Doesn’t that need to be fancy? Okay, and it doesn’t need to be heavy weights. It does not. But well, it’s amazing because there’s a lot of new research coming out.

57:47 James Steele, James Fisher, Brian Shawn Feld. They’re finding that loads even as light as 30 percent of your single rep max will still make you just as strong as 70 or 80%. Now here’s where the confusion comes in. People say, what? How can you lift 30% and get it as strong as you could at 80%?

58:10 My bench is gonna go way down. They don’t understand the difference between demonstrating strength and building strength. If you want to be good at a particular lift, let’s say bench press or squat or deadlift, you gotta practice those moves, and you got to practice it with heavy weight if that’s your goal, to be a strong man or a power lifter. But if your goal is general strength, general then you just do non-specific exercises, you know, like bench press or push-ups or dips, some type of overhead press or pike push-ups, chin-ups or pull-ups or pull-downs, some form of squatting, or if you have a bad back, you can do like press and get good results.

58:53 You know, some form of deadlift with a hinge, if you can’t do dental, if for whatever reason, gives you back extensions or reverse hypers, you know, you substitute. You can swap exercises, and you don’t really need more than one set. You know, this whole idea that you need to do multiple sets to reach, you’re saying is this simply not true? There’s new research that had come out, it just doesn’t matter, heavy weights or light weights, high reps, low reps, heavy weight.

59:21 So if two programs, right, one requires really heavy weight and one requires more moderate weight, I’m probably gonna go for the more moderate weight, ’cause I think it’s safer, because what everyone’s missing is it’s not just all about hypertrophy and strength. You got to look at the long-term wear and tear effect on your body, and athletes shouldn’t be training like bodybuilders with split routines. The majority of your time needs to be in the dojo and the academy or if you’re a basketball player, or even if you just play recreational tennis or golf, that’s where you need to spend the majority of your time.

59:57 So body weight stuff, with body weight, with a skill to make it fun, and then interesting, and then you do your strength training. You were even telling me today once a week was just a new study came out, people over 60 years old, you do get no more benefit for doing two or three times a week. Once a week is ideal for people. My agent, and if people want, they can go look up our hotel workout, which is on YouTube, and Steve, this, pretty amazing comprehensive hotel workout where we’re using elastic bands, and we’re using, you know, the back of the bathroom door, but we’re hitting, I think pretty much every, every part of the vibe pillars that you talked about, and if it was strenuous, don’t get me wrong.

1:00:38 I got a workout, but it wasn’t like I was doing a 1 rep max, but what I was doing was very intentional. Well, it has to be hard. Yeah, it was hard. It’s the two most important things is your time under attention, or some people say time under load. You’ll see cuts or tall abbreviating the intense.

1:00:57 It has to be hard. Now, a lot of people misinterpret intensity to mean the percent of your single rep max. Intensity is really a measure of effortfulness. The, that has to be really hard, or your body has no reason to build muscle or strength, or in my case, I’m not gonna be building anymore. I’m going way past Thursday’s, but my body has no reason to hold on to the muscle I built.

1:01:22 And with older people, age-related sarcopenia, where your muscles just start to go away, is a real problem, so you got to maintain a fairly intense level of strength training rate till the day you die. But the good news is you don’t need to do it more than once a week. You can keep a very high level and it sounds like heresy, but if you really think about it, I’ve actually taken a stopwatch and measured people’s sets in the gym. You know, the typical movement, you know, the guys are you know, they’ll do a set of 10, but if you look at the stopwatch, it’s like 15, 20 seconds.

1:01:59 Second up, second down, right? Uh, when I go to the gym, it’s slow movement, pause, squeeze. I don’t want it, ’cause any, I don’t want to use a lot of momentum, because that can cause some real trauma on your joints. Yeah, micro-trauma. Slow, controlled no momentum.

1:02:20 And say I do like 70 to 90 seconds, that’s three or four sets that these other guys are doing. Now, I’m not saying doesn’t work. Of course it works. You can use a really poor form, you can go really fast. There’s no, it’s not a matter of does it work or doesn’t it work?

1:02:38 I’m talking about sustainability over the long haul. Yeah, it’s, if you’re training slow, high tension, I like to get to a momentary muscular failure, because that means that I have done everything I can that particular day. I know for a fact it was intense, because they can’t do another rep. It’s hard to measure intensity. Sometimes you don’t have to go to failure to get good, because always you’re really dumb, but I liked you because I know for a fact, oh, I did everything I could.

1:03:05 I put in a really good honest effort, and if you train that way, you can train into advanced age. You really truly can, which people should be thinking about. You really need to be thinking about, nature, but a lot of guys in the gym when they’re 25 years old, I did the same. 30, I just, like, one rep max, I’m gonna live forever. That’s in the center of my chest, but thirty years later, 40 years later, oh, my shoulder, my back, my neck.

1:03:30 You know, and you want to train until the day you die. You want to. And then you add sport, let’s say like rugby or boxing or Muay Thai or jiu-jitsu or an MMA on top of that, kind of crazy weight training. Wow, you are really setting yourself up for a lot of pain when you get older, and it’s unnecessary. I’m really big into super slow and isometrics.

1:03:51 Well, you don’t do any movement at all? Your canonical work is not important. Number of reps do not matter. Anyone that is questioning this, go to PubMed and look at the research. I look at it all the time, and you’ll find that the number of reps mean nothing.

1:04:08 It’s the time under load. Okay, you can do reps really fast, or you can do reps really slow. It’s the time under load, not the actual number. So mechanical work, I prefer to do as little mechanical work as possible, so I don’t get any more aware, Ontario. You keep it real fast, right?

1:04:24 Only do what’s necessary. Yeah, well, I mean, the thing is, like even just holding a weight, you’re doing, you’re not doing any, any mechanical work. If I gave you a 100-pound barbell and how do you hold it, right? Here in the mid-range. You would be working, but metabolically, and there would be a tremendous demand placed on your muscles, and eventually your cardio-respiratory system you’ll be breathing, you’d be sweating, and I imagine doing like 10 exercises with these various holds, right?

1:04:55 It’d be a great workout. Yeah, no mechanical stress in your joints. All right, so I’m really big and nice about this guy, Diamond Dallas Page. He’s kind of taken yoga. He’s a former world wrestling guy, and he’s kind of made it his own version without using the word yoga, and he’s got a lot of guys that would never go into that, to just rehabilitate it.

1:05:12 He does these really slow push-ups, and he was talking about, so he’s talking with his own Rogan, and you know, to a young island gym, they’re like, oh, why would I ever do that? I’m gonna do 100 push-ups, but he does these push-ups, and the pedlar, they’re killer. Like, he apparently, they sound brutal, they’re very brutal. I’m actually for anyone that wants to try, there’s a really good test. Try starting at the top of a push-up and take 30 seconds to slowly lower down without stopping stopping, stopping, smooth continuous movement.

1:05:41 Thirty seconds down, just barely touches your chest, barely stop. It’s right now. Thirty seconds back up, and then one more thirty-second rep going back down. 90 seconds worth of work. Thirty down, thirty up, thirty down.

1:05:55 If absolutely most people won’t make it the first time. Hmm, even though that’s pressing 200 pounds, won’t be a lot of guys, walked. I mean, some, some people. Well, now of course you can cheat. You can lock your arms at the top and rest, and you can kind of, like, do like sigma reps, because each time you hold, you’re getting like a brief little rest, but if you keep it really honest.

1:06:18 Honest effort, if that’s really hard. Yeah, you do a set of chin-ups that way. Set up pull-ups. Set a dip. Set of push-ups.

1:06:25 You know, even bodyweight squats, and there’s another technique that I use with the bodyweight to make it even more effective. It’s called intentional antagonistic co-contraction. It’s a little hard to teach. Maybe you remember Tony Wong, you know, when they used to do the slow high tension, you know, punches. Yes, you know, that was a very popular system.

1:06:45 It was like isometric muscle groups working against, yeah, working on, you’re working one muscle group. Charles Atlas and his dynamic tension. I’m sad thing. Okay, science has proven that that is actually a very effective way to train, and there was people doing super high tension or arrow curls and squeezing at the top and holding it, you know, pitting one muscle against the other. Yeah, and they actually tested it against people using 7% of the single rep max, and they got equal results in strength on a Dynamometer, isometric.

1:07:19 I know, but we all kind of grew up with that. How much do you bench? How much do you bench? I mean, I chased my bench press for 10 years. Steve, I was one of those guys.

1:07:29 No, I mean, I was, other shoulders. Oh my gosh, I just was obsessed with it, and I would go there, and every year I got a couple pounds more, and I tried to hit 250. I think I ever got there, and I haven’t beat the bench in like five years now. I don’t miss it. I can’t believe I ever pursued that.

1:07:45 It’s ridiculous. It, I mean, it never affected my jujitsu or anything I love to do. I mean, and I’m, I train now. I do a lot of breakdancing. I do leg training once a week, and I feel great.

1:07:57 I’m in some of the best shape of my life, and I’m not chasing this bench press goal, which was silly. The heavy weights aren’t necessary. You can get really strong now, once again, not to demonstrate strength. If you need to be a power lifter or strongman competitor, or if you’re into the CrossFit Games, you got to practice those skills, and you got to use heavy weights, but if you want transferable strength to any sport, including grappling, isometrics, or what we’re talking about, you know, using high tension bodyweight exercise, and you can create this internal resistance, so that even the strongest man will have more than enough resistance, even bodyweight squats, which are really easy.

1:08:35 I mean, to give an example, there was a point where I was in the combat conditioning. Do you remember company? Yeah, yeah, yes. Yeah, that royal court was like five different exercises. I used to Hindu squats.

1:08:48 Yeah, so my son and I, for New Year’s one, here, this is many years ago, probably 20 years ago, just for giggles, on New Year’s Day we both did 1,250 squats while watching TV. Wow, the bodyweight squats, and to make sure we didn’t cheat, we had these little grocery counters, like clickers, click click, 1, 2, 3. So each time click click click, and we both did 1,150 squats, or 250? Wow. Usually, I mean, for anybody, try doing 100.

1:09:24 It’s our rule. It’s brilliant. Doesn’t go a mental game, right? We did straighten our legs out a few times, and it would shake out but we just kept going until we got it. Took us, I don’t even remember how long.

1:09:36 I just remember it’s a really long time, like an hour. I don’t know whether it’s, now, we were going pretty fast, but come now. The other day I did bodyweight squats. I, by using internal, again, antagonistic co-contraction, pinning my hamstrings and hip flexors against my quads and my glutes. I was able to make myself fail within about 90 seconds, just real high tension.

1:10:03 Okay, gripping the ground, corkscrewing, creating as much tension in the muscles as possible, not straightening my legs, only doing the bottom two-thirds. Is called short lever training. Yeah, in other words, I’m training in that mid-to weak range, where I’m just dropping my hips, bowing my knees, and I’m not coming up the whole way, keeping incredibly high tension. May, about, necks were gone. I fell over backwards.

1:10:27 In the, you made me do that in the hotel workout I think with the, the deadlift with the bands. He wouldn’t let me lock off at the top, and it was real quick, so you can change the leverage. So, in a clever fella can figure out how to use a light weight to still make the muscles work incredibly hard. Now, why would someone want to do that? Well, most young fellas are thinking, why?

1:10:49 I want to lift as big a weight as I can. Yeah, because it’s the wear and tear on your joints over the decades. It’s just unnecessary. Okay, and then I started training in 1964. It’s a long time.

1:11:01 It’s a lot of mileage, and I’ve done some pretty crazy routines. I’ve done some very same routines, but I’ve done some really, nothing up, see stuff. I’m lucky I didn’t destroy my body more than what I think. I had a pretty good constitution. I do.

1:11:16 So you’ve been in the, you’ve been in the personal fitness industry for a long time. I started actually training people professionally as an undergrad at West Chester in 1972. Okay, one of the first Nautilus gyms in the Eastern US. Oh, it’s almost 50 years, and I did get into high intensity for a long time. High-intensity training, the Arthur Jones Nautilus theory.

1:11:37 Yeah, later Hammer Strength, and I was on the ground for that whole thing. Okay, and I did single set high intensity training for a long time during the eight, you had in the show. Yeah, it was a big proponent of that system very much, and one of his mentors, Mike Mentzer. Yeah, the münster twins who I did phone conversations with. Okay, Mike Michael.

1:11:58 And I had a guy, knowledgeable Dr. Gregory Alice, is a brilliant exercise guy. He was one of my original managers. He had, he was the owner of that old Nautilus gym where I got my start. Okay, and then later I got into the super slow exercise system, maybe you’ve heard of this, and this guy Ken Hutchins, who worked for Nautilus and Medical Sports Industries, created this, the system of very slow high tension exercise and it’s very, very effective and very safe, certainly good for people with any kind of ailments, joint injuries, elderly people, people rehabbing.

1:12:36 But a lot of people pooh-poohed it for, as being a good system. But the latest research from Fisher and Steele shows it’s just as good. One, one, two, two, four, four. You know, 30, 30, 30, 10 seconds up to it all, brings you to the same pace. It doesn’t matter the speed of movement.

1:12:55 Really isn’t important. Fast explosive reps are slow reps, but what the fast explosive rep does is wear and tear the joints. This is what I found. Okay, that’s, for that reason, I’m really low as to do the kettlebell stuff anymore, because I just found that the fast snappy explosiveness was really bugging my, my joint. So you were, what you were, like the first guy?

1:13:18 I was one of the very early pioneers. Okay, I found that it was causing a lot of wear and tear, so I just stick with the bodyweight and the isometric. I, the swings and the snatches, just do where at your joy. I just, years of, you know, years and years and years of training. Tell me now, at 67?

1:13:35 Well, not quite 67, but yeah. I love a kettlebell, and I mean I love it because it’s intense, and it’s this big ball that can really get you to get a workout. There’s no doubt it works. Yeah, and I, I mean, I was doing 32 kg snatches and, you know, my lower back was just like, somebody gotta watch your shoulders. You, it happened.

1:13:54 Yeah, you got to be careful. And a lot of the early pioneers of the kettlebell movement in the US, I’ve already really badly damaged the joint okay, they’ve had multiple surgeries and hip replacements. You know, I don’t know whether I should name names, not, but it’s, it’s it’s on the record. My ex-wife, it was a very early pioneer in the kettlebell movement in the United States. The names DC Maxwell.

1:14:15 She was on the cover of Pavel’s book from Russia, with Tough Love. She was on that cover with John McCain’s wife, and she’s had to have a hip replacement surgery, and she blames a large part of that on that more explosive kettlebell type training. She thinks it really caused a lot of wear. Okay, she had had a hip injury as a, as a girl. She was an equestrian, and a horse fell over on her, so she already had a funky hip.

1:14:46 But she says that the wear and tear on the joint from the explosive kettlebell training really just put her over the edge, and she had to add the hip. Okay. You, Mr. Dorian Yates, what do you think of Dorian and his training, and his, sister? Well, I mean, for sure he proved that, you know, very low volume. And when people call high volume, really, if you looked at all the sets like I said, the average guy in the gym, the sets last, in like 20 seconds, and you take, you know, three or four of their sets right together, it’s really equal to like one set of high intensity.

1:15:23 It’s the same volume. If anything, it’s almost the same, and the idea that you need to train every day and multiple sets, and, you know, that a lot of people have this mistaken notion that to get to reach a genetic potential, you need to do several exercises per muscle group and multiple sets, because that’s what we were taught when the industry started, and then everyone thinks that’s normal and all that, and then you just repeat, monkey-see, monkey-do. Well, look at the picture of the and, bah, Mr. Universe, when Arnold and Mike Mentzer went head-to-head, and Arnold [expletive] won that competition, that bodybuilding competition for the finals.

1:16:00 A lot of people thought Mike got robbed, but it was a Weider-sponsored competition, and Joe and Arnold was Weider’s boy. You know, I’m not saying they cheated, but I’m just saying that it was controversial, and it’s time, just saying, but when you look at the two physiques on YouTube. Oh, I’m on the Internet. How can you possibly pick a winner between those two? Both were massive, bus were incredibly muscular and vascular and defined, right?

1:16:32 Arnold at that time was reported to have been training 26 hours a week. That’s a part-time job. Mike Mentzer was training 90 minutes a week. 90 minutes versus 26 hours, 19 minutes a week. With the high-intensity system, high intensity, three 30-minute workouts.

1:16:51 Anyone that says it doesn’t work, just go Google right now and look, and you believe he was only trained in any minute I, I know it was. Wow. I actually was one of his students you know, like phone consultations. Okay, so I trained with Dorian Yates down in Marbella when we made our movie with him Inside the Shadow, and he pushed me through one of his high-intensity work. It was brutal.

1:17:13 Oh my god, pewter, I mean, it’s a puker, and then it’s like going the first time in wrestling, right? Oh yeah. Holy sh*t. I mean, he took me to places where my brain, what had had no, it didn’t understand how to go there, and he before that he said Brian, I want you to lift this like I took a gun to your little baby’s head. Then he got their fourth of John.

1:17:33 Okay, God, I just had a boy, and he’s like, that’s what I want you to feel when you’re at the bottom of that leg press and you think he can’t go up. He can’t get. I’m about to pull the trigger, and he took me through that workout. I’m screaming. I feel like I’m, birth, it looks like a given birth.

1:17:45 And then afterwards he said, Brian, that’s one thing you trained at one time. He’s like, I did that every week for years and years and years, and you got to bring that intensity every time to the gym, and you can’t quit ten percent earlier, 20 percent earlier, or you don’t see the growth. Well, here’s the thing too, you don’t need to go to that extreme to still get really good results. That has been proven in, you know, science has shown that. But I do believe in going to the momentary muscular failure, but here’s the thing, you can do that kind of training with shitty form and hurt yourself just as much as you can doing a high-volume, high-intensity bodybuilding or powerlifting, or you can use really slow controlled movements and go to the same level of muscular exertion very safely with very little wear and tear on your joints, and that’s where I’m at.

1:18:35 Okay, I’m withdrawing on the intensity, right, but I am scrupulous with the technique and the form. No screaming, no yelling, no facial expression. Yes, you watch a hotel workout with me, it’s not going to be just my face. He’s like no tents because I, I’m the typical guy in the gym. Again, monkey-see, monkey-do.

1:18:53 I grew up in the, you know, watching the guys in gym, like, ah, touching my face. You’re like, no, Brian, I used to love to scream too, you know. Yeah, I still scream a line, but I’m very careful about just controlling the breathing. Okay, which directly translates that that type of panic control, and your ability to push it, really translate well into sports like jiu-jitsu, or not? Yeah, that type of mental control.

1:19:15 Yeah, okay. Always relied about the Russian athletes. Yeah, remember, it was all that, we’re always supposed to fight. How do they train their face? And they would be on the gold medal platform, their smile, just stoic, and I always admire that, and it probably helps, right?

1:19:31 And all of that, I think it does. Probably cortisol levels, controls your emotion, panic breathing, and breathing, because what you’re talking about takes a lot of concentration. It’s harder. It’s like, just do a slow… It’s very intrinsic.

1:19:43 It’s internal. Yeah, instead of, like, being concerned with watching the weights go up and down and counting the reps, what you’re doing is you’re internalizing this workout. Yeah, and it’s very mental, but it’s very transferable to sports like martial arts and all that. Now, I don’t expect your listeners that are hardcore weightlifters and powerlifters or CrossFitters to change anytime soon, but what I would ask the people that are into those things, to at least think about it, and if you are suffering injuries in the gym, and you’re sore, and you’re already starting to develop arthritis, you can get great results from this system and maintain your youthfulness and your bigger and your mobility into a band stage.

1:20:24 I believe that everyone’s gonna be forced to go to that type of training at some point, barrage to start sooner than later. And I’m not saying the other systems don’t work. Of course they were, there’s any number of systems that work, but if two systems, one takes an hour, one takes 30 minutes, I’m gonna go with the shortest system, two systems, one is potentially dangerous to my joints, I’m gonna go with the safe one. It’s just the way, you know. Yeah.

1:20:53 I would challenge everybody watching right now just to ask yourself, like, maybe a three or four times over the course of maybe a week, why am I doing what I’m doing now? Why am I training the way I’m training? You know, a benefit ratio. Yeah, and am I stuck in an old dogma, an old way of thinking? Why is it a one-rep max that I’m obsessed with?

1:21:10 Why? Or do you really want a body that can be something to move for the rest of your life? And like, I had asked my, have some hard questions. If you’re you know, if you’re chasing those one-rep max, is why you’re doing it? If you’re trying to get big, why are you doing it?

1:21:24 And just maybe have that conversation, because it could lead you to a place where it’ll end in tears, you know, whether through injury or through, meant, worse expectations. Or, you know, Dorian is at peace with his body now. He’s one of the few guys that can go to Mr. Olympia competition, and he doesn’t have to be the big guy anymore. Dorian does yoga. He can do the splits now.

1:21:42 Wow. He’s cool. I was definitely a genetic phenom. Yeah, even. Yeah, I mean, I was a Martha guy.

1:21:48 Yeah, he’s amazing. I love Dorian, but, you know, he tore his tricep, in torez, bicep tendon, and he, you know, he blew his body out, and now he uses his body for things that he loves. So it’s like, for me now, I’m breakdancing, I’m swimming, I’m doing jiu-jitsu, I’m running when I want to. Younger I do legs. I feel great because I, I got in touch with, okay, why my lifting, why am I, these one rep max is like, what’s the point?

1:22:10 So I feel like I’m, I’m using my body in a fun way to, well here’s the other thing too. Now, if you are a weightlifter, your sport is strongman competition, Olympic lifting, powerlifting, maybe CrossFit, maybe some of the people that care about community, where they’re, and there’s this hybrid lifting thing where I think it’s called the Beast Press, and you do a pistol squat, pull-up, and I think a single-arm press with this really huge, I think it’s the 48-kilogram kettlebell. Okay, so like hybrid type, it’s massive.

1:22:49 Yeah, okay. If that’s your sport, okay, yeah, you’re gonna, you’re gonna risk your joints. You’re gonna risk injury going after the heavyweight. Yeah, at some point you may exceed the structural integrity of your joint, and you’re gonna have a bicep tear off and roll up on your arm, like Bobby Maximus, the, the former Jim Jones guy. You know, here’s that bicep ball rolled up at some point.

1:23:15 That may happen. You don’t know at what point the amount of weight and the force is going to create this injury. Yeah, you don’t know. But if you’re just training for health or fitness, or you’re training for longevity, or you’re training to be better at a sport, you’re an athlete, you have no business training like a weightlifter. One sport doesn’t transfer well to another sport.

1:23:45 The strength transfers, but all the other skills don’t transfer. So in my way of thinking, this strength training should prevent injuries. Part of the five, five trainable factors is prevention of injuries. You want to prevent, not cause. So if you’re getting hurt in the gym, you’re lifting it all wrong.

1:24:06 Yeah, you should never get hurt in the gym, unless you’re a weightlifter. If you’re a weightlifter, you’re gonna get hurt. If you play jiu-jitsu, you’re probably going to get hurt. You accept that in normal sports, but you should, you should not accept that in strength training. You should not.

1:24:22 The strength training should prevent the injuries, not create them. So, well, said. On that, talking about breathing, because most people don’t realize you’re also an expert in breathing, and you teach breathing, so what don’t we know about our breath, and what would you be thinking about when it comes to breathing training, and then not when you’re training. Well, number one, you don’t want to breathe through your mouth. A lot of people are mouth breathers out there.

1:24:45 I broke my nose twice in college wrestling, and I had a really bad deviated septum as it was, a hell, it struggled for years with nasal breathing, right? And I didn’t always eat so well. I had some questionable eating habits, and I was a food that I, that I probably had, not an outright allergy. I mean, if you had an allergic reaction, it’s, but sensitivities. Okay, I had food sensitivities, and my nose would get stuffy, and I, and it’s very bad for the dental health, for the palate, you know, for inflammation.

1:25:19 Breathing theorem. So you want to breathe through the nose. Inhale, exhale. Does it release some type of carbon monoxide, or no? And no, nitrous oxide, and it’s produced in the nasal linings, and this nitric oxide is drawn down in the lungs, and it opens the blood vessels to increase blood flow throughout your body.

1:25:40 So you’re missing that vital NO production when you inhale through the mouth. Wow. The other thing is you don’t want to allow yourself to snore. That’s usually because the mouth opens. People begin to either mouth-breathe, or just the palate begins to vibrate.

1:25:58 So I’m very big on, easier, putting tape over the mouth, or you get one of those little Japanese chin straps, and a bomb in the Amazon, UK or Amazon US. It kind of holds your jaw, and that kills the snoring. It keeps your jaw set, and you have the best night’s sleep. You become very oxygenated for sitting you breathe through your nose. It now, so, piece of duct tape over your mouth, when that duct tape.

1:26:22 Okay. Some people, pretty sensitive, women in particular, very sensitive skin. Okay, so any guys, not so much, because we shave, but it’s like this paper tape that you can put it over. You can buy it at any pharmacy about, I’m here in London, and a pharmacy. Wow, and it keeps your mouth, and man, you wake up so much more refreshed.

1:26:41 You’ll find that you’re, any kind of dental problems just go away, because your saliva washes over the teeth and remineralizes them at night. Your teeth remineralize themselves. So if you do have frequent trips to the dentist, or you’ve had dental caries or inflamed gums, keeping the mouth shut at night is really good. Wow, that’s the next leg of chinstrap, or a little piece of tape. We know people with sleep apnea have to kind of do all that stuff, and it can, it can kill their, even normal people.

1:27:12 Okay, but we know that, like, breathing in the wrong way and you’re losing oxygen, it kills your REM sleep and all that stuff, but it can kill it. That that’s an extreme existed at stores, or you think you might snore. Yeah, I’m going to tell us, if you wake up and you have any kind of drool stains in your pillow, you’re probably snoring. Okay, there’s a good chance you are, and if you’re snoring, you’re not getting the right sleep, the right sleep, because you’re breathing through your mouth, which is gonna hurt your dental work, and your cells aren’t being oxygenated properly, and then you have upper chest breathing.

1:27:46 A lot of people breathing in the upper lobes. As long as it’s a habit, most of it’s alright. Levequ, Euler breathing, okay, or another dysfunctions like their, their breathing’s through the ribs, you know, intercostal breathing. Neither is, is good. How do you start breathing that way?

1:28:01 You learn to breathe into the lower lobes of the lungs. Think of the upper lobes of the lungs as the fight-or-flight. You’re in a constant state of, villages, hyper-village, and even. And why are most of us breathing up here? Because they learn it from watching your parents.

1:28:17 I think it starts in grade school, when you force children to sit in chairs all day. It makes it a little harder to breathe diaphragmatic. When you’re sitting like this, how can people, hunching so, do you think we’re also starting to go to the upper chest, but, and are we in a world that just always is in a panic state as well? Then, very worried and upset, you know, everything, get this, sets you off. You can really learn to calm yourself.

1:28:44 That’s what yoga is all about, you know, the pranayama. Yeah. You learn the diaphragmatic breathing, and when you breathe, the breath down into the lower lobes of the lungs. Think of the lower lobes as rest and digest, upper lobes, fight-or-flight, parasympathetic nervous system versus sympathetic. You want to get yourself in a calm state.

1:29:03 You learn to breathe diaphragmatic all the time. Is there any way you teach people to practice that as well? One thing you can do is you just start with one hand on your clavicles, one hand in your, neighbor. Okay, and then you just feel any movement in the upper chest. One of the first things you do is you just, observe yourself breathing in the mirror.

1:29:23 You should see no movement. As a matter of fact, you shouldn’t see any movement in a person when they’re breathing, even if they were to take a big inhale. You know, like right now, I’m going to, yeah, you’re not gonna see hardly any movement in my torso. I’m still inhaling. See almost no movement, so gradual, and everything’s just, everything is expanding out of my tummy and out my back and my ribs.

1:29:49 Now, do you ever breathe upper, yeah, sometimes. You know, like, you’ve heard that went off then? Yeah, you know, that’s a very good way to prepare yourself for, like, a really traumatic experience, like laying in freezing cold water. It works, man. Yeah, how you feel your body.

1:30:06 Also, I think it’s important to breathe upper chest and expand, just to keep the flexibility and mobility of your intercostal muscles and your ribs, because if you never breathe in your upper chest, this can get pretty tight through there. Okay, so yeah, it’s good to breathe, but your steady state, Archie, calm, in pranayama breathing exercises, to just expand the whole ribcage, but 90%, 95% of the time, lower low. And when I trained, I tried to breathe like it means your belly should be coming out.

1:30:36 Your belly just comes out, but it’s subtle, right? But most people think, I got to hold my belly in, so I’m the six-pack person, but really your belly should kinda, I remember seeing Chuck Liddell in the UFC fight, and his whole belly was coming out and breathing, and I remember just seeing that, thinking, wow, I’d never seen anyone breathe that way, but it looked like a really efficient way of breathing. And for the most part, inhale, exhale through the nose, but sometimes when you get really, really strenuous, it’s okay to vent the CO2.

1:31:03 Okay, what is the chi gong and pranayama stuff? What’s that stuff that Rickson does, whereas whole belly’s going inside his ribcage. It’s like a form of, well first, he’s using bellows breath, or some people call it breath of fire, and it’s a system to create heat in the body. It’s not for, really tight in our Aveda, they have three constitutional types, the pitch of the Kapha and the Vata, and it’s not good for Europe. I’m pretty sure you’re a Pitta we are hot, just naturally heat, so we don’t want to create this heat in our bodies, so it’s unnecessary for us to do.

1:31:44 I am naturally hot, and he’s doing this stomach-churning. I like an internal stomach massage. Okay, which is just some other, was that, it’s a whole different thing, unrelated Asian things. Or how does a yogi family, a family just watch the movie Choke, or our YouTube? This, and it’s Rickson doing this.

1:32:00 You know, it’s amazing control. It’s amazing. It’s this weird, like meditation, separate his transverse abdominus from his rectus abdominus, so he can separate that smooth underlying muscle from the two strands of abdominal muscles, and then he can make him dance. And it’s just tremendous muscle control, tremendous mind, and watch. What do you learn that you know?

1:32:21 I’ve never been able to be successful like he does. I mean, I can do stomach-churning. I’ve never learned to separate but it’s funny. My kid Zach, when he was just a little kid, he figured out how to do it. I said how do you do that?

1:32:34 I just never could do it, but for me it’s unnecessary. Okay, you know, I can do the internal massage. The other thing you want to watch for is overbreathing. A lot of people breathe too many times a minute. What creates your desire to breathe is the build-up of CO2 in your bloodstream.

1:32:51 That’s what people don’t understand. It’s not the lack of oxygen, it’s the build-up of CO2, CO2, and you have these sensors in your neck and your upper chest, and this is what prompts you to breathe. But what happens is we get too sensitive to the CO2, so we overbreathe, and that starts very early, you know, with first grade, second grade kids are already breathing dysfunctionally. I blame it on sitting and inactivity, and just sitting and slouching, and poor posture, and all those things that go into creating upper, upper chest hunching over a desk, and so forth.

1:33:22 Okay, so if you’re going to sit, make sure you have a nice straight spine, like we’re both sitting right now, right? And try not to get into this, but you see it all the time. Okay, people sitting like that. And I try putting your hands on the clavicle and the belly, and just trying to see if you can decrease your sense of tiramisu CO2 by just letting the CO2 build up by doing this exercise. I call it breathe light, to breathe right.

1:33:45 I didn’t invent this. We do it. This is a, yeah, you, you slippers purposely slow down your breathing as long as possible. You just take, you just enough air in your chest, and you should feel like what we call oxygen hunger, where you feel like you want to breathe more, but you just kind of hold it. Did this, like, up to ten minutes.

1:34:11 It’s a really nice thing to do when you’re traveling, flying train to help you get to sleep as well. It can be really gentle, really. You feel, organizing. Yeah, but it’s where you’re on the edge of, I feel like a little panicky, but yeah, just go to that edge. You don’t go into panic.

1:34:27 You just go to the edge, like you’re really hungry for here’s the thing. In order for your oxygen to go into the cells, you have to have the release of CO2, so your cells can’t uptake oxygen if they don’t have the presence of CO2. So if you’re overbreathing and breathing too much, right, you’re not getting the O2 to yourselves. It’s called the Bohr effect. People go, oh, at home they can Google Bohr effect.

1:34:55 Be, Ohr Bohr effect. Okay, so you need the presence of CO2 to be able to use O2, so you don’t want to be overbreathing. You want to slow that down. Okay, you want to build up your sensitivity to the CO2, so that you’re not breathing so often, and the reason you want to breathe often is because you’re too sensitive to CO2. This happens early in life, usually kids.

1:35:17 It’s just poor habits, and then you can do things like breath-holding exercises and things just to get more used to that CO2 build-up. And what I test, that everyone can do at home, is they call the BOLT test, where you exhale, not like a complete, actually, I’ll just a normal exhale, and then pinch your nose and hold your mouth like this. Why? Your timer. So that’s the first hint that you want to breathe.

1:35:45 That first hint, you look at the time. It’s best not to just stare at the timer, because people get a little competitive, and they will hold it longer than they should. What you want is to know when your body has the strong urge to breathe, and that’s when you start to breathe again. You know you did the test right. If you don’t gasp, like, if you gasp you want to, you went too much of the stress.

1:36:10 The first sign of oxygen hunger, you stop the test, and you look to see what the time is. Everyone should have a BOLT score of about 35 seconds. That’s pretty good. 35 to 40 seconds, really good, and eventually you can build that up. I’ve had some people easily effortlessly exhale and just sit there, like, up to a minute, and usually it’s always surfers and swimmers, because they get very comfortable holding their breath underwater.

1:36:41 Okay, yeah. When you do that big-wave surfing, yeah, I tested this one guy. This guy was still going strong after like 80 seconds. I said, and I said, this is impossible. I says, surely you felt oxygen.

1:36:54 He says, no man, I practiced holding my breath every single day, and when I surf, they were during that crazy. I don’t advise this. They hold the rock, and they do sprints under the water. Oh, really? They hold the rock under, then hold the rock to keep, give them weight, so they don’t float.

1:37:12 Through this. All right, and they run it on the bottom. Well, that’s pretty crazy, because, you know, you screw up, you could drown. Yeah, if I don’t advise it, but they, the big-wave surfers, they do this kind of stuff. Yeah, I would advise that you have someone with a snorkel watching you in case you pass out.

1:37:31 Man, you can kill yourself doing that stuff. That’s an extreme, well, let Laird Hamilton, the big-wave surfer, has a pool in Maui, where he lives, and he does all of that underwater. farmers walk and all that stuff. You know, yeah, I think it’s done to challenge you on your breathing. Well, they have been, and they get drugged underneath you.

1:37:50 You got freaked out, man. Yeah, you could really freak out. Just where were you getting churned? I mean, they had that one. Why don’t one of my friends, when I was in Maui, took me to that place they called Jaws, not the shark with the wave.

1:38:04 Wave, it’s like, look, a three-story house, man. Wow, you get caught underneath that thing, you might be under there for a long time. You’re turning, water turning, and getting disoriented. You better have a good ability to hold your breath, but even for normal people, just holding your breath when you walk can build up, decrease your sensitivity to CO2, and it has a direct effect in jiu-jitsu. Okay, because you learn not to panic when you get a little out of breath.

1:38:30 I went running in today, and I just thought about, midway through, just a nose breathe only, and I tried to go as long as I could. When I hit the hills, I couldn’t really do it, but I found it an interesting exercise. Well, when you start to go through the mouth, then you know you’ve exceeded your breathing capacity. So I would recommend that you just stick with the nasal breathing, and if you start getting to the point where you have to go to the mouth, slow down.

1:38:52 Just slow down, so now, because you’re doing Niger going anaerobic, as opposed, I wrote it, and you see it in fighters trigger when they start mouth breathing, that usually means their oxygen deprived, and they’re, they’re gonna have a problem. They breathe it out too much CO2 and then they’re going to get really fatigued. So learn to breathe through your nose. One old, old-school trick is to hold a mouthful of water. When you’re wrong?

1:39:13 Oh, really? A mouthful of water? Yeah, force yourself to hold it. Okay, it takes a tremendous amount of this button. Don’t swallow it.

1:39:21 One of my friends that is in the Navy SEALs, he’s, he’s a commander of SEAL Team Six, Brian, muscleman from Virginia Beach. He’s out. I gave him a purple belt, actually, and jiu-jitsu okay, he’s got it. It is, they started those guys, is such a fleets man. This guy is just amazing.

1:39:38 Anyway, he told me that some of the SEAL team guys holding water in the mouth and running it. Was known, Apache Indian, true. I remember as a child reading about Geronimo and the way the Apaches trained their warriors I mean, they were renowned. The US government was basically committing genocide, if it gets those people, and they were trying to wipe them out, man, and they never defeated the Apaches. They never did, and those guys were so hardcore, they would run through the desert with a mouthful of water as a discipline, not to swallow.

1:40:11 They were taught even young, if they got wounded or shot or something, not to scream. If they took up like a bullet or whatever, they, they were just amazing. They were like tremendous warriors. Imagine, in the desert, with a mouthful of water, not swallowing. Hardcore.

1:40:29 I don’t know whether that’s true. It was a book I read as a kid, but it always captured my imagination. Mine too. Well, you know, it was like, wow, that’s really cool, man. That’s like hardcore, but you could just do it.

1:40:42 Well, I was training for the, you know, that my Iron Man, half Ironman, last year, and I was doing the whole heart rate monitor, and you work all these different zones but someone was saying that before you got the heart rate monitors, one way of monitoring it was with through your nose, and if you had to go mouth breathing, then you were through a different zone. Yeah, you know that you stay under so you can work that aerobic during the race. You’re gonna, you’re gonna do whatever you have to, to went right, but during training you want to stay aerobic.

1:41:07 You wanna, you want to keep it rubbing there. It’s actually real interesting, because there’s a lot of evidence coming out now on endurance running, and I like endurance running just as a mental discipline. There was a guy named Fred Rohe who wrote The Zen of Running back in the ’70s. Now I was like a hardcore wrestler, and I just passed it off as so much hippy drivel. Now I wish I would have paid attention, because this guy who wrote this beautiful kind of haiku poem about poem about running, and this Zen-like state always within the breath.

1:41:41 You can still download the PDF of that old book for free off the internet. You can find it. Okay, that arrived, so when you do Zen running, what do you think about, and what do you concentrate on? A moving meditation, and I’m really concentrating on my breathing, but well, I wanted to also add there’s a Japanese professor by the name of Dr. Tanaka, who is, he’s, I don’t want to say pushing what, but he’s representing this form of brain cart. He calls Niconico, very slow aerobic running.

1:42:18 Now you never, you just stand that lower end of your aerobic zone, and he claims that by running really slow you eventually start to get greater and greater capacity, and you start to finding yourself running faster and faster and faster by starting out real slow, always within the breath, always keeping your heart rate down to the very low end of your aerobic zone. If your heart rate goes up, or your respiration, you lose control your respiration. You know for a fact he’s going too fast, and you build up your time over time, and then you start to build up your speed, and he’s claiming you your your rate.

1:42:56 Anyone interested in endurance running and breathing, you should check this guy out. Niconico. Okay, it’s actually I’ve been doing it, and it’s really good. Now my Fitbit isn’t always the most accurate running watch. I’m thinking about getting a Garmin, which there’s an optional chest strap.

1:43:12 Yeah, it measures it from your wrist, but you can also pair that with a chest strap. Yeah, I want to do a little bit more accurately, because I don’t trust this Fitbit for exercise heart rate. Yeah, the Garmin is pretty good. Fitbit for activity is great. It’s great.

1:43:27 Yeah, but for heart rate I’m a little, okay, yeah. I’m here, naked. Check it out. I will I mean, I was so, for Trinity, I mean, last year I was running a half marathon every Saturday for a few months, and after the competition I kept running because I missed it. I missed the meditation, you know?

1:43:44 It’s like, object, my brain out. Afterwards I feel like I’ve just chased some demons. I’ve gone into places, it’s, I couldn’t think really. Good out there. I always think, wow, some of my best ideas.

1:43:55 I know, and also according to Dr. Tanaka, remember this thing about the runner’s high. Yeah, you know, for the longest time I never experienced a runner’s high. Me, there’s always freaking painful, dude. Yeah, it’s just like a cup to get this over with. You know, I wasn’t an endurance athlete, but I would run, but once he claims that you only get the runner’s high when you’re at the lower end of your aerobic zone, so it was obvious that I was running too hard, too fast.

1:44:23 So for the first time. Here I am in my 60s, and I’ve been training and running and doing all this stuff for my life, I experienced runner’s high, and it was tremendous, tremendous. It’s blasting on. It was a wonderful, man. I can get it like I don’t know.

1:44:39 Do you experiment with marijuana, THC? I don’t. I’ve been put CBD lately. It’s been, I’ve been on the CBD I have. I have been playing with THC.

1:44:49 Okay, guys, and I’ve moved to Washington State. I’m no longer, no, man, got to talk about this. Yeah, yeah. So I’ve moved to Washington. It’s completely legal.

1:44:57 You can just go by it like a candy store. You know, they have edibles. They have these really cool little pens. I mean, they have all this stuff, and they have all these different blends, different levels of THC to CBD. Yeah, at first there’s this going CBD, and that’s that.

1:45:14 Now let’s try a little THC, see how I react. I’m telling you, that Niconico, run at the lower end of my aerobic I thought, just like it was on THC. It was like a real true natural high that my own hormonal system produced. It felt great in the last, for 20 minutes or something. Yeah, I was running like, why don’t you get past like 40 minutes?

1:45:35 Your health benefits are running up, way down. Okay, way down, and the injuries crop up, and I just I guess the over used to wear and tear. Okay, 20, 30 minutes seems to be our deal. Okay, that’s what the research shows right now. Okay, yeah, I mean, you should be active all day.

1:45:50 You know, get it for sure. You need you need to be active, but you don’t have to, you know, pound the pavement to do that. You can’t walk. Tell me about the THC. Well, I started playing with it because it is illegal.

1:46:03 Yeah, that, and I never ever did this when I was in college. Imagine, you definitely, the sixties, in the ’70s, during the height of the hippie thing, I never did the mayor. I tried a couple, you know, joints, and I always felt sick and had a, you know, I hate smoke. Of my life, they hate it, all of it, right? You know, I hated drinking.

1:46:25 I hate it all. It I just never felt good on alcohol or marijuana in that stuff, so I stayed clear. Plus I was a clean-living wrestler, right? I was really driven to excel at my given sport, but now that I’m a little bit older, I heard all these benefits, you know, my friend Joe Rogan is really, really into so that, and I mean just a guy I know totally into it. They really are, and it’s weird for people to hear that, but a lot of jiu-jitsu guys will roll on THC, and they find that it makes them more creative, or it takes their mind out at the moment, and they flow now, yeah, but I’ve also heard that Joe, even Joe Rogan, said I wouldn’t take a class on THC because I couldn’t even focus on what the guy was saying, but when it comes to just rolling, where I can kind of check out on my mind and just go with the flow.

1:47:13 A lot of guys swear by it, right? Well, I don’t know about. I never have done, sighs. No, I just take motor skills and motor cars. Yeah, because my son, he’s kind of against all this stuff.

1:47:25 Exact. He’s a really high-class world-class jiu-jitsu guy, and he says, oh, I’ve wrestled with those guys that are all high. He says they think they’re doing better but in reality they suck. So I don’t know. Okay, I’ve never rolled high.

1:47:39 I don’t know anything that takes fine motor skills. Like I would never drive a car. Whoa, ha, no way, anything but I have run on THC, and that’s a whole different animal. But that I was telling about, that Niconico. Yeah, I did that with no THC.

1:47:55 Wow, it was almost the same. But I have been playing with CBD oil for pain relief. Yeah, I have managed to, you know, I had some old injuries to my neck, my upper spine, and this right shoulder that really bugged me sometimes, and I don’t, sit, the CBD oil was quite excellent for that. It was, oh, yeah, you putting some drops under your tongue? Yeah, I take the, I like to take the sublingual, yeah, because I know exactly how many milligrams, right?

1:48:23 Whereas with, if you smoke it or you use the little pens in that, like the little vapor pen, yeah, you’re never quite sure exactly what you’re getting. Okay, do, use topical stuff as well? I’ve used edibles too. I haven’t tried the topical. Okay, alright, but I have tried these.

1:48:39 Oh, I said, that’s not true. I got, you know, the ghee. It’s like, yeah, it’s like these solid fat from milk. Yeah, it’s like butter, but with all the solids taken out. I bought some ghee that had CBD in it, and you rub some of that ghee in your skin.

1:48:57 It’s very good for your skin. Yeah, I’ve been, I’ve been putting, I put it on my feet, the bottoms of my feet, before I go to bed, and I take some sublingually at first. I didn’t get it, and I didn’t, didn’t make any difference to me, and I had some, like, in the morning, and I didn’t like the way it made me feel, but now I swear by it. Okay, I’m a big fan, and I also think there’s a CBD and THC it’s not legal here. I don’t know how to get it, and I can’t.

1:49:20 Every time I take two, you see the psychoactive. I don’t know. I just can’t go there, but I hear that if you mix a little bit of the THC in the CBD oil, it can be a really good combination. Well, that eleventh old, low, very low THC and high CBD. Yeah, and I found that that worked really well for me.

1:49:40 I didn’t like the way I felt if the THC is too high. Okay, just, you know, like just to get sublingually, or you can take a subway. Okay, and then your forerunner, you know, take the little gummies. Okay, and suck on those, which is like sublingual. Okay, and then you go for a ride.

1:49:56 Okay, wonderful. Is good, huh? Oh, you feel fantastic. Interesting, really nice feeling. Okay, that would roll over, and in natural high I have not rolled with it, though, because I, I think you need your motor skills, and be a quick way to find out.

1:50:12 I could try this, about like I say. It’s a hundred percent legal. Teresa, my, my, my girlfriend, my partner’s, I love it. Yeah, she got her 83-year-old mother on this stuff, man. She likes it.

1:50:24 Yeah, THC. I’m telling you, my, my machine feels good, man. Yeah, my wife’s mother, we call it Baba. She’s grandma from Bulgaria. She loves it.

1:50:35 Danping you know, one of my guests in here, he likes it. I mean, a lot of people, people that, you know, have a lot of tension, fears, worries, get you really out of that mind, just kind of calm you down. Strange that way. Yeah, I always had this relationship with this plant, you know, somehow maybe inside us. So I, this is just recent experiments, but it’s really funny, because during the sixties and seventies, when it was all the Raylene cut guy, like instead of doing it in the 60s, I had to wait, ties in my sixties day.

1:51:08 Alright, let’s talk about you settling down, because, you know, the reason you’re here every year is because you are a nomad and digital nomad. Yeah, made my living on internet. Yeah, online training. Yeah, and I decided I had enough travel. I’ve been doing this almost.

1:51:25 Wow, I mean, I lost track of the years, but there’s been a long time, like 10 years, more than 10 years. Wow, it’s a long time, and give their safety net. Okay, no home, no home base, nada. right, and you used to have the big home and the school and everything when I was married to DC Maxwell. We had the very first Brazilian is just a school in the Eastern Seaboard.

1:51:49 We had a really nice personal training business with 11 trainers working for us. Four-story brownstone house, you know, the garage, everything, you know. It was, one point I had two cars, TV in every room. Yeah, the American Dream, but the two kids, you know, everything, but, you know, divorce does interesting things. At that point I decided I just wanted to just just give up on all the materialism, and I just condensed everything down to, there’s a little tiny house.

1:52:23 From that tiny house I moved into a little camper van, so I’m used to small spaces. It’s funny, because when I was a little kid I used to love to make little forts, and like these little spaces. I always felt my brother and I were always making little tree forts and getting in them, getting them in, and he always felt so good. I always had that feeling of coziness, so I looked at this camper van for three years, and then I started traveling so much, because at that point, after the divorce, I sold my jiu-jitsu school.

1:52:52 I sold my personal training business. I just realized that, wow, knowledge is worth money. People are willing to pay good money to get what you know. When I discovered that, it was like, wow, okay, let’s go. In the meantime I did have a certain amount of security in that I had my online clients, so I had to study steady flow of money coming in, to these monthly subscription rates, right?

1:53:20 And then we started going, and then setting up these little seminars, and we, we got so good that we were booked like a year in advance. Sometimes, like, we booked this last year. Yeah, yeah. So my whole schedule is already set like a year in advance, and that’s all Judith, Teresa. She’s so organized.

1:53:36 She’s like a genius with airline tickets and points, and you know, getting us the best hotel deals, and you know, so we were like these minimalists. I got rid of the van. We moved all our stuff into one bag, and we were just traveling from place to place, sometimes every week, sometimes we would stay in a spot for four weeks. Next, we were all over the world. You know, Russia, China, Taiwan, Australia, everywhere, not so much South America.

1:54:07 Haven’t been to India. Been all over the Middle East, by rain, Arab Emirates, you know, those places. And now you’re settling in town. Why? I’ve got a little burnout in the travel business.

1:54:19 It’s the God’s honest truth. I just felt like it was time to just stop. Too many hotels, too many hotels, too many, wants your own bed, flights, and I just really wanted, I had this urge to just have a home, and I didn’t know where. Teresa’s father passed not too long ago, and her mother’s living all by herself. There’s a huge house in Port Townsend, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula, and I checked for places when I was thinking about this, because, you know, I’m concerned, like many people, by our environment and global warming.

1:54:52 Port Townsend, that whole Olympic Peninsula, is one of the last places to be affected by global warming because of the trade winds or wherever it is. Why is it? Something about the, yeah, the way you thought about Hawaii, and you passed. I passed because, it’s that they were saying that Hawaii is rapidly changing. I don’t know whether you follow, you know, whether trends of the news, but they’ve been hit by three major storms this past season, and they said it’s gonna get worse for Hawaii, that, because of the way the currents are being affected by the global warming, they’re gonna see bigger and bigger storms.

1:55:29 It’s gonna be a real problem, and a, why, plus the heat. I’m not a hot weather guy. It’s gonna get really hot there. Port Townsend is gonna stay pretty cool on that Pacific Northwest for a while, it’s all going to get hit. I mean, I really, look, I don’t mean to get in a soapbox.

1:55:45 I’m not an environmental scientist. I only know what everyone else knows when I’m reading and hearing. I don’t know the answers, but I do know, as an individual, I need to do my part, and I decided to buy this little tiny house. It makes a very small footprint, so your carbon footprint is one of the things you’re concerned about. I am very, altered, traveling.

1:56:10 All the while traveling, the fights, dude. I’m contributing. Okay, so that bothers you that way? It does. Now, that’s not the reason I’m doing it.

1:56:17 I really wanted a home, but when I think about it, wow, I’m really one of those contributors. All those flights everywhere. By the way, we started thinking a lot of trains. Okay, cause of that, trains, smaller foot, we’re gonna take a lot of, much smaller footprint, also fun. Or trains, man, a lot of fun, old school.

1:56:37 Well, good on your trains and boats, ships, or boats? Yeah, we got train game in Europe. Yes States doesn’t, it, man. They don’t have the train that works in, so I’m going to move this little tiny house on this five-acre property out in the very rural area, and Teresa’s mom’s big house is there, and she wants to be near her mother. Her mother’s 83.

1:56:58 Something, you’re not gonna come see us every year. It might be every other year, maybe. You can come see me in Port Townsend, maybe, about going on the road. We can do some chips there. There’s a Straight Blast, Jim, I don’t know if you know what that is, and there’s a guy by the name of Matt Thornton, who’s one of the early pioneers of BJJ in America.

1:57:18 Okay, is this network of Straight Blast questions? Okay, it’s a very clever franchise. They teach Muay Thai and jiu-jitsu in the same school. Okay, and they give a lot of support to their instructors. There’s a young wrestler, a really sweet guy, a purple belt, who is running the Straight Blast gym in this little teeny town of Port Townsend.

1:57:44 So I go in and I teach some classes for him for free, and I’m gonna rent a space, a room about this big, maybe a little bit bigger, and I’m gonna set up an exercise studio. Okay, I’m gonna do rehabilitation and training. So you’re not travelling at all then next year? Yeah, not at all. No, I might go to Here Ons training camp down in Torrance.

1:58:10 Okay, and I may go to South Carolina. Well, I have some friends in Folly Beach. I have some little groups of people that I’ve been mentoring in jiu-jitsu that I give rank to, and you know, help with their jiu-jitsu. I have a guy in Philly, a police sergeant. Well, we’re gonna miss you if you don’t come back regularly and see us, so I may make an exception for you, Brian.

1:58:38 All right, I appreciate that. I really like, I get it. I know a few people like you that have been on the show. I mean, you’re the most extreme, and I always, I basically, maybe deep down inside I thought maybe it’s not sustainable, but you’re such a unique guy. Maybe it was for you, but I get the fact that you sometimes you want to just have a place and have some roots and have some.

1:58:57 I don’t like traveling personally that much. It drives me kind of crazy, hotels driving me crazy. So that was fun. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s almost been 14 years of that. That’s crazy.

1:59:06 Don’t worry, Bookman, but it was, it was good. I mean, I sure know the tricks. I’ll tell you, man, my girlfriend Teresa is like the, the, the points whisperer. Wow, the way she can juggle airline-sponsored credit cards and this hotel chain and this airline. I’m Tonya III.

1:59:27 I don’t mean to brag, really, but we fly, my first, our business everywhere with lie-down beds for the same price that you pay for coach, because the way she juggles the points. All right, give me her info. I’m gonna talk. I’m Chinese, man. She, she, we have some points that we buy tickets for, like, her family members.

1:59:45 You know, as soon as your Arbonne, the system, tell me a little bit about your mindset, Steve, because I mean, a lot of people talk about your physical, you know, acumen and all that, but most people don’t know there’s a lot also going on in your brain, and you have a lot. You have a real kind of Zen way of looking at things. You’re also a real spiritual guy, and you have this concept of an inner self versus an outer self, and how a lot of times your, your physical injuries or manifestations of your mindsets, and can you talk a little bit about that?

2:00:12 Yeah, I mean, this may sound really sensational, but I don’t believe there’s any such thing as injustice. I believe that everything happens for a purpose, and everything happens with mathematical precision. It’s like energy output. What you get is what you’re putting out. Mmm, you know, and there is such a thing as karma.

2:00:35 Really, honest to god, I believe that. Okay, you know, people talk about, well, what about the innocent children, or what about these poor people? And this is that they never harmed anyone, but there is such a thing as past-life karma. Yeah, you can, you can, you can generate negative karma from a past life. Some people, they think there’s all whoo-whoo, but this is something that sincerely, boy, certainly explains a lot.

2:00:59 But for myself personally, I use a form of philosophy called mental science, where I really try to carefully monitor, monitor my thoughts, so that I’m putting out positive thoughts all the time. Thoughts are like vibrations, and I believe in the universal law of attraction, and that whatever I’m thinking and putting out there into the universe, I’m getting like in return. And it’s really hard to actually control the thoughts. You’re going to have thoughts passing through your mind all the time, and not all the thoughts even are generated from within you.

2:01:37 There’s a thing called the collective consciousness, where other people’s thoughts are entering your mind just because we’re around them, because you’re around, we’re part of the same species, Mike. You know, here in London, it’s a city of millions, and I noticed I was getting a lot more negative thoughts than usual, because I was in some real isolated areas where it’s a little bit easier, and you have to play mental jujitsu with these thoughts, and some thoughts you deflect and cast off or throw, and other thoughts you retain, but you have to be aware of this continuous internal conversation and this constant thought process going on. A lot of people are unconscious.

2:02:20 They’re not even aware it’s happening, but you’re constantly thinking things, things are coming through your mind. You’re having these inner conversations continuously. Once you become aware of that, then you can start to monitor, and while you might not be able to control some of the impulses that are coming in, you can certainly deflect and get rid of the negative ones by through awareness. Okay, and I do that all the time. It’s like, it’s like playing mental judo.

2:02:47 You’re, you’re throwing out the bad ones and retaining the, the government’s. And in that way I’ve really managed to have very few negative experiences. It wasn’t always that way, by the way, and I’ve been able to use the same mental signs for, for for abundance and fulfilment and love, and those things about life are those affirmations. There’s the treasure. Well, one of the ways you can help program your subconscious mind is by making continuous daily affirmations, and rather than concentrating on what you don’t want to have happen, you pretty much put all your focus on what you want to have happen now.

2:03:29 I’m not omnipotent. I’m, um, you know, I’m just a normal human who makes mistakes. Sure, I allow things to slip in there. I get sometimes a little paranoid, a little fearful, but one of the ways that I really shut out a lot of this negativity, I don’t read the news. I refuse to look.

2:03:49 Half of it’s fake anyway, and the stuff that isn’t fake, it’s still twisted by the writer. These writers are so good, you know, the clickbait. So I just refused to follow politics or any of this stuff, because you can’t even be sure it’s even real. You know, things that people are saying, that this person said. You don’t know whether the words were twisted, reports and events that happened on the other side of the world, and the truth is none of it affects your life anyway, and you can’t do anything about it, right?

2:04:22 All I can do is be me. I tried to be the best person I can be. I’ll make the smallest carbon footprint. I’ll do my part for global warming, but I’m not gonna sit there shivering and shaking that the world is going all to hell. I can’t control that.

2:04:39 There’s no sense thinking about it. I’m not gonna worry about the migrants or this or that. I can’t control that, but I can control me, and I control my thoughts, and I can be the best person I can be, and I do my best to help people in the way I try to help people with their health and their diet and their exercise. I try to turn people on to fun things like jiu-jitsu. This is my way of, like, giving back, and that’s all I can do, and you can’t do more, and you’re going downtown and protesting and carrying on and riding and all that stuff.

2:05:09 It’s not really gonna change the powers that be. It really truly is. I don’t believe that that type of negativity is gonna create positivity. Positive things cannot happen from negative things. Hmm, so your own thought patterns, and then that way maybe I can help influence other people in a positive way, you know?

2:05:30 Right, maybe if they see Steve Maxwell and they think, wow, you know, the, I like the way this guy acts and the way he thinks, and I like the way this guy treats me. Well, well, maybe that will influence them to be a nicer person or to treat people a better way. And you know, of course I’ve, I’m human. I’m, I’m not always nice. I didn’t really mean to, people, in the, especially the past, before I became aware of this process.

2:05:57 You said you were eager to stick in the past, variance. I’ve come across, there’s a little arrogant, probably, in this show. I’ve never, I’ve noticed that I’ve said, I’ve said a few negative statements about, you know, different trainers or systems and things, and I think I’ve got people’s hackles up a little bit, but that’s because you’re passionate about what you’re passionate about, my belief system, you know, and we don’t have to agree on things for us to be friends.

2:06:20 Don’t like each other. You know, people can love each other without having to agree at all. Yeah, you know, it’s so clear, spec, teach other for sure, respect. Yeah, everyone’s certainly entitled to their own belief system. So that’s like my philosophy.

2:06:34 If anyone’s interested in this mental science, I recommend starting with this very simple book by James Allen, As a Man Thinketh. It was the first book I read. Like, oh, man, this is like probably about 40 years ago. I read Allen, As a Man Thinketh, as a man thinketh. There’s an old-school, button, these affirmations you do constantly throughout the day, or in the morning, do you do, you say all these affirmations about yourself continuously.

2:06:59 Okay, I do. I have a moment in the morning, Roger, visualizations, like a positive visualization okay, and make my affirmations. Okay, you know, are those long? Do those change? I have like, sort of like a, like one I’d like to use every morning.

2:07:14 You know, can you share any of them? Yeah, like for example, when I first wake up, today is the first day of the rest of my life. Only good comes to me, only good comes from me. I’m a son of God with all the powers of God. Money flows to me in great avalanches of abundance.

2:07:32 You know, things like this. It’s really nice. I like avalanches. Yeah, because you’re just like, oh man, wave after wave of the visible money supply comes to me. Now I’m able to afford all those things that might make a life worth living and make life interesting.

2:07:48 My bank account is filled with an all-sufficiency to meet every need. Visit for abundance, right? I have other ones, you know, for love and things. But years, I did the abundance thing in the morning, okay, and I give gratitude. It’s really important to be grateful for what you have.

2:08:03 One thing I did find, I wasn’t always so grateful. I used to kind of complain a lot, and then when you’re thinking about, like, the things you don’t like or things that are maybe bugging you, you’re creating more of a, saying. So you gotta find stuff to be before. Even if you’re in a bad situation, maybe you’re in jail, even, like, the worst situation. You still gotta find gratitude, because that can change your vibrational pattern, and then you can attract better and better and better things.

2:08:35 Now I don’t try to pretend I’m a master of the universe. I’m just a guy. I’m just a little PD from down the street. You know, I make plenty of mistakes. I allow negative thinking to come in some, but I’m pretty good at deflecting it with my mental judo, and I have really to tell the truth.

2:08:54 I mean, 14 years of travel now. Imagine hundreds of air flights, hotels, all that. I can only think of maybe a couple of times where things went awry. Everything has been smooth. One of the, after May, I flow through life with ease and effortlessness under grace.

2:09:12 Imperfect way I live above this crazy world, you know? Like an observer looking down. You know, I try, you know, III, don’t, I’m not in this world. I, I try to separate myself from, from all the goings-on about living above everything. I almost like an observer.

2:09:34 Yeah, I think it’s Star Trek, you know? Remember the non non in a fair instructive, oh yeah, yeah, you know, they weren’t supposed to interfere with the life forms and the civilizations. They didn’t want to influence anything. They were just there as observers. I tried to observe and not, you know, the only way I would, would not even interfere but influence is just by just being who I am.

2:09:58 Okay, and the gratitude, how do you do that? I just find at least 10 things every single day. I even write them down sometimes, right? But a lot of times I just listed. I used to write him, but now I just list them in my mind.

2:10:09 10 things to be grateful for every single day, and by finding those things, you begin to create more of those things, because, you know, you’re concentrating on the good and not concentrating on the bad, and this isn’t a hard thing to do, because negative thinking is the habit, just like positive thinking is that habit. You got to create new habits. But James Allen’s a good guy to start with, but there’s many others. You know, I like Florence Scovel Shinn.

2:10:32 I was raised in Christianity. Yeah, I’m not a Bible thumper, but I do believe the Bible has the answers, but the way that the evangelical people will interpret the Bible, they take it literally. I see that everything in that Bible is a metaphor of higher truth, and there are people like Yogananda who wrote The Second Coming of Christ. This is a yogi, now a Hindu, wrote one of the best books on Jesus Christ that I’ve ever read. I would recommend The Second Coming of Christ by Yogananda.

2:11:10 Fantastic book. It, it really brought me back to the Christian faith but not in the typical Bible-thumping. Yes, because I realized that those people didn’t exist. They’re just metaphors. Yeah, yeah, for higher truths.

2:11:26 Another guy is Neville. Neville Goddard was an amazing mental scientist who takes and interprets biblical passages for their higher truth, but even if you’re a Hindu or a Muslim or whatever, you can still get a lot out of this, out of Neville, out of Yogananda. And there’s others too. You know, John Randolph Price is one of my favorite all-time mental authors. He wrote some, he wrote this awesome book called The Super Beings, and I use a lot of that information I learned from these, barriers.

2:12:05 Okay. Oh, have you seen that movie called Gran Torino with Clint Eastwood? We’re dancing like this grumpy old man. You know, I had a flashback for a second here, and I thought, you know, Steve Maxwell could have been that guy, but instead you’re this guy, but all because you decided to change your brain patterns, you know, or you could be some grumpy old guy. Okay, drop hands.

2:12:24 I don’t know, grandpa. He ends up being a hero, but he’s sitting on his porch, and he’s basically gonna, grumpy, God. He’s the racist guy. He’s like but I mean, you could choose to be someone different. You choose who you are in this life.

2:12:37 You really do. You have more choice than what you think you can be. The captain of your own ship. You don’t have to just be blown around like fossum and just Jets Amanda under waves. You can rarely mentally start to control your environment.

2:12:51 You really can, even in the prisons, though. One guy that really influenced me was this guy Eckhart Tolle. He wrote some really good books. The Power of Now. Now yeah, you know, and he said there’s some of the friends, people we ever met, were people in prison, and that really struck me.

2:13:07 Is like, wow, how can that be? But their mind was still free from all this worry and fear and doubt and negativity. You can free yourself no matter where you are or what state you’re in, but what you’ll find is when you do, you start to attract better and better and better things. And I, I’m really grateful, because I’ve been incredibly fortunate. I mean, like I said, I’ve been traveling all over the world.

2:13:32 I got into some scary places. Commodus China is scary, dude. I’ve been, you know, Beijing and Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xiangjian? Oh, what’s scary about it? Well, just that you’re in this country where they can pretty much do whatever they want, and you don’t have any say about it.

2:13:53 But I actually did a seminar for the Shanghai police. Really great fellows. Yeah, I mean, you always think of the police, oh, the bad guys. Nah, man, they’re just like you and me. They’re just guys who, you know, I actually did a fitness center for the Shanghai Police College, where they trained, placement, probably all those guys knocking heads in Hong Kong came from the National Police Academy.

2:14:17 And how was it? The guys were wonderful. They treated me great. Yeah, that’s because your energy is wonderful too, but it’s like that law of attraction. If you’re a negative person, in a fearful person, you know, panicked breathing, worrying, you’re going to attract this kind of things.

2:14:32 Yeah, so I try to keep really positive, but yeah, um, there’s been some scary times, you know? You know, I’ve been in Bahrain when they had this big protest, yeah, against the crown. It got a little ugly. You know, Arab Emirates, that means very modern place, but, you know, you step out of line, dude, you know, that they can just shut you in a hole forever, and you can’t do nothing. They do that to their own kids.

2:15:01 Saudi Arabia, you know, a scary place. Yeah, you are there. It’s a bit, you know, you’re there as a guest, and you better, you know, so they’re very respectful. Any culture, we go, same thing. In Russia, you know, right now, with all the stuff going on between the US and Russia, never was I treated better than I was in Russia.

2:15:18 People really happy to see me. They wanted to practice their English. I was just treated so well by the Russian people. I, I was doing a little, I started delving into Systema, the Russian system of martial, yeah, it’s kind of interesting. Interesting, it’s not based on breathwork.

2:15:37 Yeah, and very flowing, isn’t it? very flowing. Well, and relaxation. A lot of people have seen some of the YouTube stuff that looks a little silly, but they don’t know what they’re watching. You know, they see this guy Michael Rapp go with his fists and do this, and guys fall down, and, you know, they’re talking about psyche control, and they think that the guy’s going woo, making you fall no.

2:15:56 Now they felt the guy’s punch before they’ve been hit by that guy, and I’ve hurt so bad that all he has to do is show you his hands, you’re already controlled. You already almost fall before you even hit, because it hurts, and that’s the second control. In other words, he’s already hammered you. Now you knew what the sting of that felt like. Now all he has to do is just show his hand, and you’re already juking, and he’s already controlling you.

2:16:22 That’s what they meant by psychic control. But there was that one video in particular that it looked a little sketchy, because guys were just like falling down. Like some of, there’s a key, their demonstrations, you know, for people flying through there. But I tell you, man, I’ve trained with a lot of Systema guys. That stuff is real, man.

2:16:39 Okay, yeah, I, I need to look into it more. I, I actually got my level 1 teaching certification from Colonel Alexander Maxime Soph. He lives in Tenerife. He’s formerly of the Ukraine. He was special police, and, and he was also in Russian military.

2:16:55 He’s a Russian military man that went to special police, and He, his system is amazing. Okay, he learned his Systema from a guy by the name of Alexey Kadesh, knockoff, and that guy lives in Krasnodar. I trained with both Alexia, knock-off, in the sun or Katie. I’ve also trained with Vasili F in Toronto, and I trained with his teacher Michael Rehab Go in Moscow, and then I trained with another excellent guy his name is Michael Gurudev, and also in Moscow.

2:17:26 He lives outside of Moscow, but he came in every day and trained me in the park there, Gorky Park. Yeah, I’ve seen you with your Russian video, and man, this guy’s good. He spent four years of Russian jail. That’s hardcore, dude. Rising jails are not pleasant.

2:17:43 I can, do not want to go to jail in Russia. I can, this guy spent four years but your Systema is a maze? Okay, I’ll check it out. And you have no problems everywhere you go? Yeah, my point is, yeah, you find your friends.

2:17:57 You find your friends wherever you go. You find your friends, you find your connections. You know, your friends could just be a nice Airbnb or a comfortable bed. You know, you find the, you know, the right grocery store to buy your stuff. I mean, you, wherever you go, you just immediately start fitting in, and through the law of attraction, you just get all your needs met.

2:18:20 Ya know? III think affirmations are super powerful. I, I do some, like, distinct ones every single morning. I say ’em. I’ve said them for so many years now.

2:18:28 I think I can almost know him by heart, but I’m a big fan of that. Another real good one, I like this woman, Florence Scovel Shinn. She was a disciple of Mary Baker Eddy. It was the Christian Science. Okay, person, Florence Scovel Shinn wrote The Word as You Want: how to use the power of the spoken word.

2:18:44 The word is your wand. What was the other one she wrote? They were a couple of early books I read. They’re a little simplistic, but it gets you started, and they’re quite effective. Okay, I’ve used her.

2:18:57 Was controlling your thoughts is really good. Just look at every single thought and just try to make it positive. If you just be aware that it’s going through, a lot of people are, no awareness, that they’re having these internal conversations. You can, those voices can drive you crazy. Yeah, well, though, will they’ll determine your life?

2:19:13 You’re the wife, though. We can’t, your thoughts, and you know, the thoughts, negative thoughts can be like demons. Really? I don’t, you know, it’s like the negative, the, the negative thoughts that plague people. You know, like a demon thought would be like, you’re in the middle of your triathlon, it’s like, what the f*** am I doing this for?

2:19:34 Oh my god, I’m gonna quit, or, you know, I mean, yeah, I’m sure you got those. That’s a demon, right? Cuz it’ll just, it’ll ruin your life, right? Yeah, I mean, if you want to quit in the middle of that arm and triathlon you would have never forgiven yourself. No, but I’m sure you felt like it more than once, probably.

2:19:51 Yeah, but I was never, it never entered my mind, but that’s a demon. Yeah, but maybe it didn’t enter your mind, but I bet you at least half those race, existed, but it sure did, but we have this kind of little demon voice with a jump in her mind all the time, and you gotta deflect his voices, you know. Yeah, no, definitely. I was out in Alcatraz a member of one another a few years ago, and I came back from seeing, you know, the prison, and seeing these solitary confinement, and I mentioned to a friend of mine who was out there, Tony Flo real, and I was like, dude, it’s such a danger, hardcore prison.

2:20:23 And he said, Brian, he said, but he said, Brian, think of all those people out there that are in prisons in their own minds, even worse in some ways, right? I know that are in these weird constructs, and they’re in their own bit of a hell, even though they’re walking around with freedom to do anything they want, and yet they’re in this little bit of a cycle, all because of some thought pattern in their brains that could be reversed with some intention. You know, now that I think about it, actually, I probably could have never done this nomadic continuous travel thing if I hadn’t had this.

2:20:54 You know, I don’t think it would have been possible, you know, because I hear these horror stories of people, you know, sitting for eight hours on the tarmac, and, you know, flights being canceled, and having, you know, you read these horrible reviews of people going on vacation, of these hotels. Dude, I’ve never had. I’m not bragging, I’m just saying I think that this mental science works, cuz I haven’t had any negative experiences, right? And I don’t intend it, man.

2:21:24 You also are a fan of forgetting about the past, even the good things. Explain that, because that’s kind of interesting. Well, I mean, I’ll hold some fun memories, you know, but I try to never have this technique of rewriting negative things in the past and putting a different spin on it, like maybe a really negative incident, and then you’ll actually revisit it as something that was really great. It’s like rewriting, so that you’re not holding on to that negative thought form, right?

2:21:55 Because the past can haunt you into the future if you keep dwelling on something that someone did to you. Some people don’t speak to their parents, or maybe they’re at war with their brother or their sister. They haven’t spoken for years, or maybe they’re, their daughter or their son, and they’re not on speaking terms, and they’re holding this grudge, man that just colors everything in your present life. But if you can give back and find forgiveness, and if you can rewrite whatever it was that set you off in the beginning, you can completely change the experience, not only in your mind, but for the future, because if you keep holding on to these negatives, all right, you’re learning like that.

2:22:36 Here, it’s gonna color everything that you do in the future. I’ve met people 30 years, their life, they’re still dwelling on something happening. This guy screwed me over. What, in 30 years of your life, you gotta forgive? Not only do you forgive, but you rewrite it like you see it, like he did it, right?

2:22:53 Like revisionist. Yeah, and it really frees you to go into the future without all that baggage, because when you’re carrying all the anger and resentments it weighs you down physically too, because negative emotions actually create disease, illness, and sickness in your body, and each part of your body is kind of like a symbol for some higher truth, and you’re into that Eastern medicine and all that stuff. You know, I believe that each ache and pain actually is like, like a little message to wake me up about something that’s happening with you.

2:23:28 And like, you know, like I have this shoulder that bugs me sometimes. You know, sometimes it can get pretty painful. This has to do with responsibilities, being weighed down with responsibilities, and then we even have a term. I’m sobering the responsibility. I’m putting the shoulder to the wheel.

2:23:45 It’s all about being overburdened and weighed down. When you have those feelings, you start to man up aches and pains in different parts of your body. Hmm. And the good things in the past, you also try to, to kind of forget about that to a certain extent, and not live in the past. Live in the past?

2:24:03 I’m not gonna live in my NCAA salad days, or, you know, back when I was competing in jiu-jitsu or not, and then it’s just, it’s gone. Yeah, so you know, forget the past, living the present, look forward to the future. I really do try to live. I’m really looking forward to going for Towson, settling down. You know, I’m really looking forward to having my little tiny house.

2:24:26 It’s a really cute little house. Everything I need I want to ask you about relationships, because I actually teach a course in our Academy called The Life Accelerator, and I feature you in one of the modules when I ask, because I ask. Wonderful. You know, because you’re an example, because you talked about how in the past you decided to say, start saying no to relationships in your life that started to pull you down, and it’s like, no, I don’t want to go to the birthday party.

2:24:49 No, I don’t want to go to the family room. You know, I don’t want to do this. And so many of my family’s Thanksgiving. Yeah, and you’re like, why do I want to go to that? And so many of my students are guilty and that emotion causes them to live these unhappy lives, because they feel like they have to do these things for whatever commitment reasons.

2:25:06 And I get people to purge negative relationships in their life, and I always quote you, because, like, you started living your life that way about, I don’t know, 20 years ago or whatever. Can you talk about that? Yeah, for sure. I mean, well, first of all, when we say relationships, I have failed three marriages and a number of girlfriends. I never was able to quite swing that whole marriage thing for now.

2:25:32 That I look back, I should have never been married. I wasn’t marriage material. It wasn’t me, but I kept trying to fit myself into this, this mold the society expects, because that’s the way I was raised. And then I realized, what the hell am I doing? And finally I met a woman who doesn’t want marriage any more than I do.

2:25:51 We have what we call a non-marriage, for an unmarried, yeah. She has her money, I have my money. She has her credit cards, I have my credit cards. She does what she wants, I do what I want. Now we have certain agreements.

2:26:04 I want to have sex with other women, she wants to have sex with other men, that we agree on, but that’s an agreement we made. We could always break that agreement, but right now we agree. Now we’re not into having kids, but if we were, we would decide who would take control of the kids if we were not to be together anymore, we don’t need a government’s permission to be in this relationship, and I don’t need the government’s permission to be out of this relationship, because anywhere in any country you could pretty much live with someone without government permission, but once you sign that paper and you make that contract, now you need the government’s permission to be out of that relationship.

2:26:42 Why do I want a third party sticking their nose in my personal relationships? So I call it a non-marriage, and you got to be really upfront with each other’s needs. It’s the first time I ever did this, and it’s been working out really well. And why wouldn’t you, marriage material before? What was wrong?

2:26:58 I was trying to do the whole Family Guy thing, and you know, I, I just was always restless, and you felt pressured. I thought things I didn’t want to do, certain things, and I don’t want to get it. Thanksgiving, and you know, I don’t feel like going to, you know, getting up at the crack of dawn and going to Christmas and spend it with your family, and you know, all this kind of stuff, but I would make myself do it. I was miserable, and I didn’t like it. And then I read, be resentful, and then because friction, right?

2:27:26 Yeah, and then you said it. You just say no, and I also had these weird ideas about what it’s like to be the male/female relationship, and then I started realizing, wow, man, you, you know, I was kind of controlling, actually, maybe a bit jealous. That was all like my own kind of maybe self-esteem, is one way or another. Okay, so I began to realize all this stuff. So what am I doing with this stuff?

2:27:52 Why am I putting myself out there? And then when I finally decided I wasn’t gonna do anymore, I didn’t care about any of this stuff, and I was actually perfectly content just to live pretty much as a single guy. That’s when I met Teresa. See, when he stopped caring about stuff is when you meet, right? the good things happen.

2:28:10 It’s like when Eckhart Tolle was saying he was this homeless guy living in San Francisco, not a pot to piss in, and when he stopped caring about all that stuff, all of a sudden became this internet, he claimed author and has all the wealth and money that he could, every one, and he doesn’t even care. It doesn’t even matter. You know, yeah, it was interesting. Let me ask you a few questions about you, Steve. What was the best day of your life, and then the worst day?

2:28:35 Wow, I can think of a lot of really, really good days. You know, it’s interesting, because I just made this big speech about being a family guy, but, you know, when my son was born, Zach, I was there for the birth. You know, that was a really high moment. I can’t ever remember being so high as I said, being present and having him delivered. And I was the first person to lock eyes with him, because my wife was in a lot of pain.

2:29:00 They had a C-section on her. She was kind of drugged up a little bit, and she wasn’t feeling good. She, she couldn’t have a natural birth he was just too big, and she was, like, kind of out of it, you know? They’re sewing her up, and they hand them to me, and I look, and there’s little human being’s eyes, and we still have this connection of this day. Those are like a room, psychic kind of, yeah, even though I don’t get a chance to see him that much.

2:29:26 We could talk on the phone, but it was like, wow, that was a really high, happy experience for me. Wow, like one of the highest. Okay, really sounds like it. I can’t say I was always the best dad, you know? That’s probably more like a kid that he was, but we had a lot of fun.

2:29:43 They being with me as a kid was a lot of fun. Maybe not always the most responsible, but we sure had a good time, and would, the worst day? Worst day, probably when I realized that my marriage to my third wife was over, and everything I had built. My jiu-jitsu school, my gym, my business, that I really struggled for. That the gym, Mac says, was why was my life dream.

2:30:23 I really was into this whole thing, but it couldn’t really be run without her, because she was really smart and really good with money, for the most part, and when she decided she just didn’t want it anymore, and she didn’t want the marriage anymore, that was almost like an earthquake came and completely destroyed everything that I liked. Just going home, and your business, in your houses, and total, total rubble. That was really hard, but then later I realized, no, I want, a blessing in disguise, but it took me a long time to come to that conclusion.

2:30:59 That freed me to go out and be the nomad and visit the world and travel, and man, I’ve seen some amazing stuff. So that would never happen. I would still be back there in Philly, you know, just trying to make it work, trying to make it work, you know? And it seemed like the worst thing. I mean, I just, my whole world just came crashing down, but you know, like the phoenix, phoenix rising.

2:31:26 A Steve Max re-emerged from the ashes, and I actually had a really great adventure. All is the result of that, but it took a while. There was a lot of pain involved with it. Yeah, because I actually loved this woman, but man, I, I wasn’t acting right back then. I wasn’t in my right mind.

2:31:44 Right, I was still practicing mental science, but I was missing a couple vital elements, and one of those elements, I learned later, was I wasn’t being grateful. No, and that can really, even if you’re doing a lot of other positive affirmations and thinking, if you’re, if you’re not expressing the proper gratitude, man, it can come crashing down, and that was the missing ingredient, and that’s what brought everything cool. But then I built another business.

2:32:11 I got my online personal training, I got my seminar business, and I I realized I really do like traveling around, but 14 years is enough time to play. It gets exhausting physically. Yeah, just talking in front of a group for six hours yeah, you’re giving your life, and you know, you’re a professional speaker, you’re basically giving your life force, your life energy to the people in the audience. You’re projecting this, you’re projecting your ideas. There’s a lot of energy.

2:32:44 It’s completing. I’m sure your acquaintance are. I am. Yeah, even for this podcast, as much fun as I’m having, I’ll be feeling it tomorrow. Yeah, flying is demanding.

2:32:54 It’s really hard in your body. I really believe that. I think you’re right. Oh, that’s your magnetic fields of the plane, the air, and that little tin can that you’re hurtling through space, the time zone differences. You know, I’ve been doing this a long time, and I travel every couple of weeks to a new place, new time zones.

2:33:15 Yeah, cool. 14 years, it takes a toll. Does I find shopping really exhausting? I don’t do it very often. Whenever I do it, a couple hours, and I feel like, you know, I kind of like it.

2:33:25 It’s like shopping therapy for me. I like looking at crap. Yeah, I’d like to go around to outdoor stores. You know, I can’t bring a pair alike. I love, like, all these high-tech fabrics and gear.

2:33:39 Yeah, but now it doesn’t matter anymore, because I’m not traveling, so I don’t need all that crap. I probably just wear the same pants and hoodie every day for a while, but when you’re traveling, I was always like switching outfits. You know? Yeah. What scares you?

2:33:55 Hmm. Sometimes getting old scares me. You know, I mean, I’ll be honest, I’m taking great steps to make sure that I age gracefully, but being old, like really dependent on other people, that is a fear, which I combat a lot. But like I say, I’m, I’m being really, really, really careful with what I do now, that’s why I’m very careful with my exercise, not to be damaging myself, my diet, all this kind of stuff, but there is a, there is a background fear in there.

2:34:31 I suppose I’m not so much afraid of dying, but I don’t want to be like an invalid, or helpless, or anything like that. But, you know, that being said, I have superb health. I’ve been sick in decades. I haven’t seen a doctor in 40 years, you know? Not, not to brag, but I just don’t believe in what they offer, but I do go to alternative medical people.

2:34:55 Huggers of Cairo’s, and I could puncture people, and, you know, there’s certain types of manipulation therapies and such, like Active Release Technique, or, maybe you’ve heard of it? Okay. There’s two, pi elements, but not doctors, nine typical Western medicine. There you don’t want to hear what they got. Us, I want you, yogi, Keeler, era, vet, ik doctor Okay.

2:35:16 Forty years. Wow. What would we be surprised to learn about Steve Maxwell, something we haven’t known about, or something that would just shock us? I was an amazing puppeteer at one time. Really?

2:35:28 Yeah, I used to like to play with puppets. Huh. One of the things that got me into wrestling, I used to make my own marionettes and hand puppets, and I was quite good at it, and I never really learned to throw my voice effectively, but man, I was so good at manipulating the, and making my own, you know, like the old papier-mâché with a light bulb, and you crack, and you shake all the glass of the light bulb for the head, making painting the faces, and also the marionettes.

2:35:52 Am I, my father, the tough old World War Two vet. He might have done it, this service here, but he pretty much accused me of playing with dolls like a [expletive], and that ended the puppet, but you know what I’m telling you, if I would have stayed with it, I might have been like Brian Henson, or somebody, you know, or like Walt Disney or something. Yeah, you know the guy that did the Muppets, the greatest things, but yeah, I loved hand puppets. Maybe a comeback.

2:36:20 I still have pie. Actually, bought a little squirrel hand puppet. Yeah, I take it with me on the road. I entertain Teresa with it. I make her laugh.

2:36:28 They’re fun, right? They’re fun. They’re goofy, but I like it, like, really responded, and I like little animals. You know? Okay, I like, I used to keep ferrets.

2:36:37 Okay, I love little fairs. I like there’s little creatures. I used to get my kids mice, and I had guinea pigs as a kid. You know, they’re really cute. I was like this little animal okay, but parents were really cool.

2:36:51 They were so much fun. I would have never thought that ferrets were really cool, and the pup. Nature’s little grapplers, by the way. Oh really? Laughter.

2:36:58 You can’t buy one because they get too long. Way, they’re they like to be with each other. They need to wrestle, on point. So you gotta buy two. New grappling partner, little grappling partners.

2:37:07 What keeps you awake at night? Not much. I sleep like a baby. Are we gonna make it in this world? Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna make it.

2:37:18 I think a lot of this fear mentality, you know, it doesn’t matter whether Trump’s in there or who’s in there. It doesn’t matter. It really truly doesn’t. Not gonna change that much. You know, I believe that everything’s gonna self-correct.

2:37:33 It’s gonna be fine. Your faith in the human race? Yeah, I really do. you know, there’s this really, really brilliant, smart people running the show, and it’s not necessarily the people running the governments. There’s people behind the people that run the government.

2:37:46 You know, the Illuminati, whatever. They’re not gonna let things go to sh*t. You’ll see everything will be fine. But I still think that as we still gotta do our part. So, you know, as individuals we got to contribute to the good of all by being the best people we can be, and not being wasteful, and, you know, being you know, trying to lessen our carbon footprint.

2:38:10 And there’s a lot of little individual things you can do on the personal level but you can’t do much more than that. Yeah, I agree. I think you’ve, everybody focused on what they could do, that even the thoughts they have every day and the way they treat other people, and what they can contribute. I mean, if imagine if everyone in the world did that. Yeah, I mean, imagine if everyone stopped eating so much beef, you know, I like a good steak now and again.

2:38:35 I’m not a vegetarian, but I do realize it’s probably a you know, it’s not a good use of the natural resources. So what if everyone just cut way down, start eating more fish or something, you know, or maybe go, even just, everyone in the world one day a week would go vegan. Imagine the resources you’d save, billions of people, one day a week. What if we all just started walking or riding our bikes and driving the car as little as possible. You know, what if we just all cut down on our use of water, electricity?

2:39:10 What if we would start taking more trains and less planes? Take the slow route to go to where we’re at. Just little stuff like that. You know, what put solar panels in her house, or a little wind turbine I’m gonna buy for my tiny house? They don’t get good sun in Port Townsend, but they sure get a lot of, a lot of wind.

2:39:33 So you know, get a little off-grid in the electricity thing there. You know? Yeah, so there’s, stuff like that. You know, what if you use a compost toilet instead of all that water and toilet paper and all that stuff? Just, what if ya just putting it out there.

2:39:47 Okay, I’m not saying that you know, I’m just saying there’s a lot we can do individually in our own homes. You don’t have to wait for the government, all this stuff, to do it. Let’s all do it. Let’s each, every individual, tried to take responsibility for ourselves. You know, I, you know, that I, I, I’m not a big group person you know, and all this protest, on this, I don’t think it’s really going to make a whole lot of difference in the long run.

2:40:16 I think you just got to start to just clean up your own backyard first. You know, I mean, it’s just my opinion. Yeah, but who am I? I’m just a little piddy from down the street. I’m just still kind of a big kid, really.

2:40:31 Yeah, in a beautiful way. Last few questions, Steve. If you could pick up a phone and call up the 20- year-old Steve Maxwell, who’s, I guess, wrestling the university junior year or something like that, sophomore year, and give him some advice. What would you tell him to face on everything, you know, and a lot of the stuff that you think is so damn important isn’t important at all.

2:41:17 You know, like that big bench press, it just doesn’t mean sh*t, and in like 30 years later you don’t care about that stuff, and it doesn’t mean one thing. But a lot of people risk their health just doing stuff like that. Just one little example. I would talk to Steve and just say, just chill, man. You know, take your time, don’t be in such a rush or such a hurry.

2:41:39 It’s a good advice. Second part of that question: best advice you have received, could have come from, remember, the Gracie family. He could have come from a coach or something you read, or your father. Well, one of the best devices was, start to breathe from your belly. Slow down your breathing.

2:41:56 Your breathing controls all your emotions. If you’re not breathing, you know, upper gym, and once I really learned how to breathe. And the other thing, I think I said this before, but I had a guy, like a high-level spiritual guy, he says, man, you eat awfully fast. He says, you really want to reach spiritual Heitmann. Chew your food really slow.

2:42:19 Down, share your food to liquid before you swallow it. It changes your whole demeanor. It changes your whole psyche. When you just stop, and you can literally just chew each bite, put your fork down, to liquid, and swallow it. It changes everything.

2:42:34 It’s such a simple act, it has such a big influence on just everything. It slows you down. You know, everyone’s in such a hurry, such a rush, all the time. I was maybe not everyone, but I certainly wasn’t. A lot of the people around me that observe, were, what’s the hurry?

2:42:53 It’s how. Right, yeah, yeah. And there’s a, nut pie for everyone. I believe in a limitless, in universe, you know, and I think there’s the pie so huge we all can get a piece. There’s no competition.

2:43:08 They’re buying, you don’t have to compete with anyone. Let’s see, abundance. I used to be very, very competitive. I’m really now, man, there’s enough for everybody. It’s a limitless universe.

2:43:21 I believe in God. God is limitless. God is my only supply, so because God is limitless, it’s impossible for me to have any unmet need or desire, and that’s for every person in the universe, but you got to be in tune to that. You got to get a really tune in deep, or that won’t be true for you. Right, right.

2:43:44 And then, you know, a lot of people, they’re listening to this, thinking what crap is he talking about? There’s no way, because, you know, there’s, they’re so caught up on surface stuff, ya know? I think you’re right. There’s enough for everyone. You can create new things when people work together, so last part of that question: to that twenty-year-old that’s watching, listening to us right now, advice to them.

2:44:07 You know, they’ve grown up in a completely different world than you grew up. Yeah, I’m a, like, baby boomer, and yeah, what were they, what do they call them now? I’m a little post-millennial, at emotional, honey, or something. Yeah, cuz like, well, yeah, if you’re, if you’re 20, you’re born right around the millennium. Well, first of all, guys, if you’re post-millennial, sorry, we screwed the environment up so bad, but you know, keep doing what you’re doing to make things right, do some of the things I’m talking about, because you can turn this around.

2:44:39 I really believe that the ship hasn’t run into the iceberg yet. We can still turn things around. I really, honest to god, do believe that, you know, but yeah, it starts with shows like this, the kind of information, kind of guest you have, man. I looked at, I was so humbled when I saw some of the amazing people you’ve had in this show, and all of them have some really good messages. I mean, you’re doing a hell of a service for people out there, and if the people listening here today to what I’m saying, but also listen to some of these other folks that you’ve had, and could, some of these old podcasts and things like that, try to, charge it and act some of the things that you’re hearing, listen to that, and, you know, everyone can work together to, to create, like, a much better place, much better world.

2:45:28 Yeah, yeah. I firmly believe that. To Steve, I just want to thank you for being you. I really appreciate you as a person, thank. I really do.

2:45:37 This has been, on my favorite conversation with you in five years. They’re all, they’re all great. Thanks, this was great, and I don’t, really, had a good time. I had so much fun today. That was fun, that was cool, there’s a lot of fun, people gonna love watching that.

2:45:51 But you know, the thing, the funny thing I just noticed, Steve, is that you’ve been telling me these things for years, but I don’t know if I was ready to hear him until now. You know, I think I’ve been evolving as well, and So now, yeah, but I like it now. A lot of what you say just makes so much sense to me. I’m just like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, whereas four years ago maybe is the first time I heard some of these ideas. So I just say for anyone listening, now sometimes are gonna hear you saying, what, this guy’s crazy?

2:46:18 There’s not abundance, you know, that, you know, your thoughts can’t control this. There’s no way, you know, none of this stuff that makes sense to me. But I’m just saying, just meditate on these ideas. You know, might not make sense now. I might be against everything you’ve been taught by the government, the school system, because it is pretty much, you know, where it’s limited, this and limited this, and you got to do X, Y, and Z, and you got to fit in.

2:46:40 But just got to go to school, you got to get your college education, you got to get your degree. You’re gonna get that wonderful job, and buy that little house with the picket fence, and, you know, have 2.5 kids. And I mean, that’s the, that’s, that’s what I grew up. That was the, ya know, I’m going message, but it don’t always work that way. Know, there’s a lot of different paths you can take.

2:47:03 A lot, and you’ve taken a crazy different path. Yeah, and you know, for a lot of people, this is the lifestyle. I’m not advocating for everyone. This is just a path I took. I would say this would not be right for most people.

2:47:15 You know, it wasn’t always easy, but I tell you, I always had everything I needed. Abundance isn’t about having millions of dollars in the bank or whatever, but I have to tell you, I’ve always had everything I needed when I needed it. And I remember reading here, and there’s another thing I would tell younger Steve as well: if your needs are simple, you’ll always have enough. It’s own, these people, they’re insatiable, you know? Cars and boats and private jets and mansions, and, you know, if you have that type of appetite, wow, that takes a lot of inner resources to create, but if you have simple needs, it’s pretty easy to be fulfilled, and I call that abundant.

2:48:03 Yeah, when you’re satisfied with, with little, you don’t need a lot. I feel better. Well, you live in proof, man, and you got the twinkle in the eye, which proves everything, you know? You can see that. And I always say that when I meet people, and I come back, still my guest, he’s got that twinkle.

2:48:19 So look, thanks for being a big part of London Real. Thank you, you know, really. So many people watch your videos, and so many different clips have just gone on to do amazing things. Some of them, our physicality, some of them about spirituality. You know, people recognize all that stuff about you.

2:48:34 So make sure you come back here on a regular basis, because we still ask for their, for them, for an invitation. Look, maybe I’ll feel like getting into the big city out of the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula. There, yeah. Maybe you need a break, need a little break, but yeah, come see us. It’s not one year, every two days, open invitation for you to come to Port Townsend.

2:48:56 We, it’s a cool little gym. We can, there’s a mat set up, man. It’s like a really nice little town. A lot of people come from all over the place to go to Port Townsend. Okay, there’s all sorts of wildlife, whale watching, orcas hunting.

2:49:14 Sounds just really neat. It’s the kayak capital of the world. Wow, sounds nice. Yeah, I’ve been up to Washington. Say it’s really nice, and people want to get in touch with you.

2:49:23 Website is Maxwell SC.com, right? And Steve Maxwell SC is your Instagram? Yes, and Teresa’s working hard on your Instagram. She’s pretty much helping me out with that a lot. Yeah, and you know, of course I have my Facebook professional page.

2:49:39 I I’ve got so many people that I couldn’t have a personal page anymore. They forced me into a Lexus Pro page. I do have a personal page, but it’s only just to follow a couple, couple little groups on there, but I don’t really do much with Facebook other than just my pro page, where you can see all my events and all the things I’m doing. I’m doing my last training camp in Europe, and then that will be it. It’s gonna be in Korea first of September, first two weeks of September.

2:50:10 It’s such, it’s, it’s for a lifetime. So there’s an opening there too, but you have an open invitation, it comes, my guess, if you want. Thank you. It’s a beautiful getaway, beautiful Greek island in the north, GNC. Okay, another tranquil, really chill.

2:50:26 It sounds, be, you’ll want to go back over here once you’ve seen it. I love it. Alright, thank you, Steve. Thanks for being you. Keep doing what you’re doing, and you too, man.

2:50:34 Well, show’s doing a great service. Thank you, man.