Steve Maxwell

00:03And we're live. Mr. Maxwell, how are you, sir? Mr. Rogan, always good to see you, brother. Yeah. And you brought your bag of all your belongings. All my goodies, man. Everything I own in this world. I'll show it to you. People are always curious about this. This always comes up with my wife whenever I say Steve Maxwell is going to be on the podcast. That's that guy that lives out of the bag. Yeah. Look at him. Pretty crazy. This is everything I own in this world. That's insane. Fits right in my back. He has a um I mean that's not even a really large backpack. Like if you brought that elk hunting people would be upset with you and then a little a little man purse, you know. So a man purse in a backpack. I carry my cords and my iPad and stuff like that stuff I need in that plan. And uh I travel all over the world. Wow. And uh pack really carefully as you can imagine. Yeah. Wow.

00:51Three t-shirts, three pair of pants, three pair of shorts, a rain jacket, uh, two lightweight hoodies, a long sleeve t-shirt. I could pretty much recite. I never felt more liberated than when I got rid of all my stuff. Wow. And I'm in a different country every couple weeks. A lot of people say, "Hey, why not the roller bag, Steve?" If you travel in any kind of third world country down cobblestones, uh, I I actually had a roller bag, but I ditched it my first trip to London. I changed trains like four times going up and down those damn stairs with the clunk clunk clunk or roller bag. I said, "You know what? This really sucks. I'm gonna carry it on my body." So, that's um I don't get any money from these guys, but it's a Tom Bin BN. Fantastic travel bags. Uh so well configured, you wouldn't believe the stuff I get in there. I even have my whole workout gym

01:41in that thing, man. Really? What What kind of stuff's in there that you carry around with you everywhere? Now, this uh Tom Bin, is this for hiking or is this just primarily a travel bag? It's a travel bag. I want to take a serious hike with it, but um it looks like it's pretty sturdy. Very sturdy. Um I use packing cubes. There's different packing ways. Uh a good resource for your your listeners that travel full-time, go to onebag.com. He has many recommendations for various bags and uh where you can just basically one carry-on bag and travel anywhere in the world for several weeks at a time. If you want to smell one bag, well, just kidding. A lot of this stuff is high-tech. I just wash my t-shirts out in the sink, you know. Well, if you It was if you wear um one of the things that I found um from hiking and camping for long periods of times. Wool. Wool was great. There's a great company

02:33called First Light, First Li that um a buddy of mine's a part of, my friend Ryan Callahan um out of Montana and actually Katchet Idaho. uh met them in Montana, but they make like wool outer gear and inner gear like um um long johns, stuff along those lines. Wool is fantastic. A lot of a lot of hunting gear and you can wear that stuff for days days. Days and it doesn't smell. A lot of this stuff is this stretch polyamide. It's like a little elastane uh a nylon type material which real stretchy. It's uh silver impregnated. silver uh helps stop the the bacteria from moving. So, you can get like three or four days out of this t-shirt. Really? Yeah. And doesn't stink. Maybe you could. Well, I stink. I'm a stinky person. Here's my gym. Check this out. I can train rubber band doing isometrics. I can do good mornings. What is the amount of tension on that rubber band? Uh they

03:32just say heavy duty. But remember, the further you stretch it, the you know, the harder it gets. It gives this old man plenty of uh stretch. Maybe not you. I have a bowling ball bag that I bought just so that I could take on the road with me so I could throw a 50 lb kettle bell in it. So yeah, that works. Although I tried not to check, but I never used it once. This is uh my cardio obviously. Little jump rope. You can jump rope anytime, any place, anywhere. If you can't run, I like to still do a little running. Best self-defense ever, right? Sprint the hell away, man. Yeah. If you could run further than the person trying to kill you, you and I I don't want to be I don't want to be like one of these old guys that can't run. So, comes in handy. That's great. And this is a little homemade uh suspension device. I can set this any length. Um a suspension device. Yeah, I use it for

04:21isometrics, bodyweight rows, chin-ups, basically. Do you know your knots? Not really. I used to be a boy scout back in the day. I know a couple fishing knots. Bow line, right? Used to know that one. PVC and then uh this is called a uh a prussik knot. So I can slide this right up and down the handle. But if you would grab that handle and put weight on it, see it doesn't move. Oh, I see. So it's instantly adjustable. Huh. That's interesting. Yeah. Press knot. It's climbers. How do you spell that? Press. Uh P R U S I K. Okay. Uh if you go to an animated knots, it's like a little app you can throw on your iPhone. And it shows you how to do like what's the app called? What is it? Animated knots. Animated knots. You can uh you uh shows you every kind of knot. So I can just uh throw this over a tree, do chin-ups, body weight rows. Oh wow. But if I want, I can stand on it and I can do

05:16isometrics. I'm really into isometrics these days. Yeah. You showed me a lot of those the last time we worked out together and it was really interesting what you're trying to do now. Isolation type movements. I can do deadlifts. Uh just absolutely incredible what it the kind of work that you can get like 15 20 minutes. Great for you. You're on the road doing your comedy act all the time going to the UFC's and I'll tell you kettlebell it's it's good but it is a pain in the ass to lug around. Yeah, man. You can just in your hotel room literally in 20 minutes your tongue will be hanging out. shockingly metabolic, uh, amazing cardio. At the same time, you get every every muscle from your head to your feet. Really good stuff. I knew about isometrics back in the 60s when, uh, as a young wrestler, our coach used to use a lot of this stuff. So, anyway, that's

06:05the workout gym. Wow. You know, Bruce Lee was really into isometrics. He was, uh, he was into what they would call dynamic tension, which is essentially the same thing. The great Charles Atlas, Charles Bronson. Well, Charles Atlas, those comic book ads that they used to have in the back like becoming you were a 98 pound weakling and becoming like a big stud, that was like what he was advertising, different dynamic tension exercises so uh the father of modern uh ice metrics was a guy by the name of Alexander Zass who was a Russian circus performer and he was traveling around doing wrestling and bending steel, breaking chains over his chest. He's just a little guy about my size and he was captured by the Germans during World War I and imprisoned. And Zass uh in order to get a little extra food because he's worried about losing his physique, he offered to train the commodance dog

06:54for extra food. So meanwhile, he's practicing his isometrics on the cell bars every day. And he eventually bent the bars and escaped. Went back to the circus, got recaptured. This time they put him in in in chains. He bent the bar he broke the chains and bent the bars and escaped. Not just twice, four times he he escaped from the Germans. What? It's it's all written in his biography. U verified. Has anyone ever Wikipedia this gentleman? Uh back then they couldn't you couldn't verify. He might have just told a bunch of goofy stories. He told but uh there's no doubt that this guy was strong. There's actually an old old old black and white YouTube of him breaking chains and stuff. Jesus. Alexander Zass. Another proponent of isometrics was the fame Henry Wittenberg. Pull up. See if you can pull up a picture of that guy. ZS. His his biography is uh How big was he?

07:52Uh probably about 160 lbs. 165. How the did he bend chains? Well, he started as a kid in the forest. He he actually went to That's him right there. Yeah, there we go. when he was when he was a young boy, he was really really u I I'll tell you something. I've lifted beams like that. That that beam is really heavy. He's got a beam wrapped around his neck. Uh actually, he's lifting it with his teeth. Oh my god. That's what does it? Yeah, it's a a teeth lift. He has a special mouthpiece where he's gripping it with his jaws. Oh my god. And using his neck. Imagine how hard it would be to choke that guy out. Yeah. With that kind of neck. That's insane. And uh he he would bend saplings in the forest because he couldn't afford steel obviously and he would bend trees to get his strength. Wow. These guys were the real deal back in the day, man. They were uh pretty amazing. And it's funny, too. No

08:45supplements, you know? Yeah. No designer whey protein or BCAAs, you know. It was none of this like uh dude, I'm going anabolic or catabolic. It's been 15 minutes after my workout. you know, they just ate good food and just trained, you know, a lot of meat. They were also closer to monkeys cuz it was like not it was a long time ago. A long time ago. They hadn't evolved yet. Hadn't evolved yet. But these these people back then, they also didn't really understand like the modern principles of of strength and conditioning. Like I I don't even think they knew exactly. No, I mean I'm not saying it in a bad way at all, but I don't I don't think they necessarily had like an understanding of all the mechanisms involved. They just knew you train hard, you get stronger. Yeah. Cause and effect. Train hard, get stronger. This guy knows what he's doing. Go visit him. You can actually

09:35buy uh his book on Amazon. It's pretty interesting biography. And uh I found it fasated from uh Russian to English. It translates kind of funny. The one of the confusing things is uh in Russia they use different names for the same person. So they keep Yeah, I know. It's weird, man. And like how so? Um he they just called him by four different names. It was like are they nicknames or Yeah, like nicknames like Christiey's a uh from the Ukrainian, right? Don't Don't they use different names? Yeah. Yeah, you use your father's Unfortunately, you're off camera, so we're not going to be able to hear you. Yeah. They uh they they use different names, like little pet pet names. Huh. And so so as I'm reading, I'm thinking, who the who the hell are they talking about? Right. And then I'm reading back, oh, they're talking about Alexander, but they referred to him with four different

10:27names in in the text. It's it was just a kind of a weird translation, but absolutely fascinating about his life. That's so weird. You know, it's it's really interesting when you see those old school strongman type characters and because there's there's some people that were doing things back in the day like you one I always bring up is the catch wrestling pioneer uh Farmer Burns. Farmer Burns who used to do these he used to hang himself by his neck. Like pull this up, Jamie, because there's there's actually photos of this guy. This guy had a neck like my waist and he only weighed about 165 pounds. And he used to drop like a hangman's drop and catch himself by his neck. Look at him here. And he was he was actually uh beating heavyweights back in the day. This is a this is a day where it wasn't just for the pin. He could do submissions in order to force a guy into

11:18his shoulders. And uh people could also tap. This is rough tough American martial art. Yeah. This is what what's now known as catch wrestling or catches catch can. And when you would get someone in a submission hole, they would call it a catch. And there were a lot of submission holes that they had back in those days that are still super effective today. And if you go back over the old rule, old old uh depictions and old images of submission moves from Farmer Burns. There's stuff that's still completely applicable today. That stuff is awesome, man. I actually had his original mail order course back in the day when I was a householder collecting stuff. I actually had his original home training course. Wow, that's amazing. And I had to keep it in plastic and stuff like that. Yeah. Like look at this uh neck crank he's got going on here. He had a lot Nelson, man. Mhm. There's a

12:07lot of moves that they had that they used to use back then that are absolutely effective today. But just ask Josh Barnett. Yes, I was just going to bring him up. He really surprised Dean. Dean's a hell of a black belt, you know, really well-trained black belt. And I think even he was surprised with that headlock. Uh yeah. I mean he caught him in a scarfold too which is like about as old school as it gets. Old school as they get. So some of these things are so old they're new. A lot of the younger guys, right? I mean when I was coming up the great in Gracie jiu-jitsu there were so many different defenses against the headlock. We just basically just kind of gave up on using it. Mhm. But if you don't practice that stuff, you get some wrestler, catch wrestler, judo guy, some rough guy, it gets you in one of those headlocks unexpectedly. Wow, he can really hurt you. Especially a really

12:54strong guy. Like one of the things that's coming into play a lot is that bulldog choke. You you you rarely see it. You see like every couple years someone will get one. Last one being Raquel Pennington got it on Ashley Evan Smith. And Ashley Evan Smith was kind of known as being like the grappler in that matchup. And Raquel Pennington was more of a striker, but she caught her in that bulldog choke and put her bulldoch. Um, someone's like you got it's like a schoolyard headlock. Okay. They're on their knees or whatever. Yeah. And you're right right in front of them. But the thing is when someone's head is here and you get that forearm under the choke and you clamp down, man, there's not a lot that guy can do. There's not a lot. When the head is here and if you're a strong person, you're fully locked in, you're sitting on it, there is not a lot. There you go. Right there. You see

13:36it right there. We used to refer to that as the rodeo chuck because it's like a cowboy taking down a stair almost. It's a good way to put it. Yeah, actually, you know, got a good grip on that really really early was um Bruce Lee choked out Kareem Abdul Jabar. He did in the same That was Game of Death. Game of Death. One of my favorite movies. He also had the first MMA gloves in that movie. First MMA gloves. And well, that was what Enter the Dragon. Oh, that was Enter the Dragon. That's right. Remember he did? He did the arm bar. Uh was it an arm bar or was it the u it was a neck crack? What do they call that neck? Was it crucifix? Crucifix. They were Yes, that's right. So, he was pretty early. Oh, he was, you know, I mean, as far as like being open-minded, he was so far ahead of his time with combining martial arts. I mean, he truly was the original mixed martial artist

14:26because in the time, like even when I was starting out in the 80s, the early 80s, you really weren't supposed to train anywhere else. Like, I would get the stink eye if I would go to a boxing gym and and try to learn some boxing. You know, they would say at my taekwondo school that you basically could learn everything you want here. You didn't need to go anywhere else. And you definitely didn't want to learn Muay Thai or any of those other techniques. You just would. It's taking time away from your practice here. And this is what you really need to do. Well, that's martial arts teachers trying to protect their turf. They, you know, they're worried uh about losing income if the students are going from this to that to the other thing. Well, you see it from even jiu-jitsu instructors unfortunately where jiu-jitsu instructors who only train with the ghee start saying

15:06terrible things about people who train no ghee. And the reason being is because they have too many techniques that rely upon handles. On handles. Yeah. And as soon as they roll with a grappler and they're they're going no ghee and they roll with like a a really good solid college wrestler, they're going to get smoked. It's pretty tough, I'll tell you. Yeah. They just can't they can't deal with someone who's just really good at manipulating bodies that are sweaty and with gable grips and over hooks and under hooks and they're used to those collars and they're used to like grabbing sleeves. It's a whole different game, man. Being a former NCAA division one wrestler, I hated the ghee for my first three years of jitsu. And then finally, as I started getting a little older, getting close to my 50s, I started loving it because it does slow that game down. And yeah, completely

15:51slows it down. And so if you're smaller and weaker, you can you can the the ghee definitely gives you a chance to even the odds there a little bit. Well, it allows you to control people. And I think one of the things that's really good about the ghee is people that live in cold climates. If you ever get in a self-defense situation with someone wearing a jacket, like I had a conversation with a friend of mine and I said, "If you are go if you are in some sort of a street fight with a jiu-jitsu black belt and you have a leather jacket on, you might as well be a dead person because if that guy just grabs your collar, all he has to do is get inside your collar, grab a hold of the back of that collar and you're you're gone. He's going to just clamp a hold the other side and he's going to choke you to death. Like you have a weapon wrapped around your body. It actually is, man.

16:31Or a judo person. People always think like u like in a straight fight, you know, you're going to be using all this fancy stuff, but uh it's going to be the most basic stuff you learn is a white belt and a blue belt. You're going to fall back on that stuff. Most likely. Yeah. I mean, and you know, you have to think like lay like, you know, like a person you're fighting probably is not a trained martial artist. No. Most likely. A buddy of mine got in a street fight with a trained martial artist once. He told me uh that these two guy, he and this other guy were like yelling at each other or something on the highway and they decided to pull over. So they pulled over to the side of the road, they got out and they started duking it out and he threw a leg kick and the guy checked it and the guy shot for a double and he stuffed it and they're both looking at each other like, "Oh shit."

17:13Oh And he said they went at it for like 10 minutes and then high-fived each other afterwards and got back in the car. Well, that that had a good outcome. Well, they realized they're like, "Oh, okay. We thought a fight another trained guy." They thought they were each guy thought they were going to get out and beat the out of some guy who didn't know what he was doing. And they both got out and they moved around like, "Oh, look at this motherfucker." You know, and then and then after a while they they thought it was funny. That is Well, I have used I have used jiu-jitsu a few times, you know, in a fight. In a street fight. Yeah. In street back when I had my school uh in Philadelphia. Oh. When crazy people would come in the gym or something. Yeah. Well, we had gym fights, but a couple times even on the street, you know, really just crazy stuff, man. Had a cab driver to run me

17:54over one time and I was furious. I was I used to commute by bike quite a bit and um when I went by I was so mad I I hit the side of his cab and you know just gave him a couple uh my express my opinion and then the guy pulls over and jumps out of the cab. Yeah. Starts coming at me and I you know I just used the inside control and just laid him over the top of the cab and it was over before it started. You know he he gave up and just got back in. But thank God for basic standup self-defense. Well, also thank God for him that you're a nice guy. You didn't decide to smash his face in. Well, nowadays, man, you smash someone's face in, you're gonna have all sorts of lawyers knocking on the door. And if there's a video of it, you got to wear a disguise. There's always a video of it now. Got to wear disguises, bro. You got to go out of the house with like a mask on. That's the move. How do you

18:43do it, Joe? It must be tough. Got to wear mustaches and Yeah. I don't know. Street self-defense is like obviously last alternative. Like you would most likely never use any of the techniques that you learn. If you're lucky, you could live your whole life and never use any martial arts if you're lucky. If you're lucky. Yeah, absolutely. I always go I I personally like to run not because I think running is such a good workout. I like to run for the skill of running because if you don't run, you're not good at running. Most people don't like it. I I do it more as a martial art because I want I want to run away. Right. But when you run you and old people can't run, you know, you see the way most people move. I don't want to be one of those, you know, mid60s, 70 year old guys that, you know, can't run. So, I practice sprints at least once, sometimes twice a week

19:34just for the skill of being able to run fast. Well, sprints are really good for your system, too, right? Your They can be very good systemic wise. You know, it was a real interesting study done in running. They found that people that run in the zone that like do 10ks, 5k, you know, competitive running, uh, marathons, triathlons, and such, actually have shorter life expectancy than people that don't run at all. I was really surprised. They claim it's the oxidative stress. My theory is people don't use the lung apparatus properly and breathe properly. They found that people that lived, all of them were the people that run real slow, just nice, leisurely, like zen running. They they live longest. They live longest. Well, have you ever heard the theory that there's only a certain amount of heartbeats that you get in your life? I have heard that. Yeah. I

20:21mean, it kind of almost makes sense when you look at the age of professional athletes, like how they die young. They burn, they flame out and die pretty young. Yeah. Um, now that's something that you have been really a pioneer in avoiding, like keeping your body healthy, like deep into your 60s and 70s. And I know you have a whole program about that, about with Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Yes, I do. Uh we call it Jiu-Jitsu for a lifetime. We're actually going to do a uh a training camp this next spring in April in Maui. What a good place for a training camp. Hey, how would you like to come? I would love to if I Why don't you come as my guest? I would like to, but I'm busy as dude. Man, just it's hard. It's hard for me. Just just tell all those guys, hey, I'm just taking like a week off and going to Maui. It's hard. I would have to, you know, it's like my time off is

21:10most of the time if I actually have actual time off, I spend it with my family. Well, bring your bring your wife and your uh young daughter. Maybe they would love it. They can take paddle board lessons while you come up and uh do paddle board lessons. I do. Maui's nice, but man, every time I'm there, somebody gets bit by a shark. I don't know what the is going on. I don't know about that either. I have that morbid fear ever since I saw that movie Jaws. It's like, forget it, man. Yeah. While we were there, we were watching TV and there was a newscast uh about this kid who got his leg mauled and uh my my kids were just in the pool or just in the uh the ocean rather that day. We were just uh snorkeling and then we came back and we were watching this thing about this surfer who just got mangled and you know they had him all stitched up and he was up. It's just such

21:56a primal fear. I don't know what it is. I I know it's irrational because my chance of being eaten by a shark is way less than being in an accident in a car and I you know I rent cars and drive. People always say that but that doesn't make me feel any better because the also the odds of you being eaten by a shark when you're on the shore radically decrease. That's true. If you ever go in the ocean, there's zero chance. The the ads increase when you get in the water. So if you don't go in the water, you won't get bit by a shark. That's just a fact. When I go this last week, this is uh Sunset Beach, I believe is what it's called, which is just south of LA. Oh, Christi, what are you going to show me? Breaches the water. You just sealed it. I'm definitely not going back in there. Oh my. Right off of Huntington Beach. Yeah. Good. Oh my god. This is insane.

22:44Giant shark. That is one big ass shark. That's got to be bigger than 8 ft. Woo! It was so far. I don't think they know cuz they just randomly caught it cuz they were doing some other stuff and they So, he was filming something else and the thing just breached the water. Oh my god. Show that again. Could you imagine? Look at the size of that thing, dude. That's a big shark. That's not a 7 foot shark. Now, can you imagine some kid on a surfboard and it just comes up underneath there? And that's how they stun those seals if you've ever watched sharks hunt. Yeah. The way they hit and knock it kind of unconscious almost. And then did you ever see the film that they put um that they got off of right off of Fisherman's Wararf in San Francisco? Some tourists were out there and they were just filming the water, taking pictures of each other and seeing all these people

23:30hanging around by the water's edge and a great white this sh seal up in front of everybody, like right in front of everybody. And we think it was probably two different seals that it killed because it killed one and there was just like this big bloody puddle and then it seems like it got a hold of a second one. It's hard to tell because, you know, you're just looking at the surface of the water, but massive red. And I mean, these people are 30, 40 feet away from this thing as it's tearing the seal apart. It's really pretty crazy. That is crazy. There was an awesome picture of a uh orca hunting with its calf, a great white. Oh, yeah. Or totally the great weight up. Yeah, they it stunned it and it used jiu-jitsu, man. It basically grabbed and turned it over. And if sharks don't keep moving, they basically drown. It held it till it basically drowned and then it

24:17ate its liver. And the the uh the people that analyzed the video uh felt that the mother uh orca was teaching the baby how to uh how to hunt, how to kill a shark. Yeah, sharks, they're not nearly as agile as an orca and nowhere near as smart. I mean, they're really dumb. They have a tiny brain. They just eat and swim around. But um the uh orcas when you see that video he when he flip it up upside down something about flipping a shark upside down also kind of like knocks it out. Yeah. They just go passive. Yeah. I've seen people actually do it, you know, like in shows and stuff where they'll just take and just flip it and rub its belly. Bizarre. It's pretty bizarre, man. There's a lot of weird like flaws in God's early designs. It's almost, you know, like designs like that. Like the design of a shark. It's like what? It has to keep swimming. So, here's here's that footage off of San

25:07Francisco. Is No, this is a different one. It's the same one. Is it? Well, why is it so close? I This is a little bit later into as it got closer. It starts off a little farther away. Oh, I see. Okay. No. Well, let's go further away then because the further away you get to see it. Back it up from the beginning because you see that these people just kind of This isn't the one though, Jamie. Really? Yeah. The other one it's from a distance and you actually see the shark, the orca, you mean? Well, which one is this, Jamie? This is a shark attack. Oh, this is a shark. This is a shark eating the seal. This is right off of Fisherman's Wararf where all the restaurants are. People are walking around. Yeah. See? Okay. This is more than one Great White, too. But there's more than one footage of this apparently. Obviously, this is a big deal and everybody has a phone. True. But to be

25:55watching this, I mean, these Look at that. That's like what is that 30 feet? That's pretty intense, man. Yeah. The there's a better footage though, a different angle which is a little bit further off where you actually see the shark breach the water with a seal in its mouth. It's like, "Yeah, I'm going to stand a shore." Yeah, I think I'll stay short. No, Nick Diaz, he swam from Alcatraz five different times. Five different times that guy swam from Alcatra to shore. Well, you know, one of my one of my heroes, Jack Lane, used to swim that while pulling a boat full of people while shackled. Yeah. He did it like as an annual birthday event. Yeah. What a man. He's an animal. Like the guy was still, you know, doing all sorts of crazy exercises right up until his 90s. Yeah, he was a crazy man. He he really a real pioneer of uh health and fitness and wellness and and juicing, you know.

26:44Yeah, he got into juicing. You know, I always tell these kids, you know, don't be listening to these trainers in their 20s, their 30s, or even their 40s because they haven't been over to the other side. They don't know what's sustainable. They don't know, you know, they they just don't have the long-term experience. All my mentors were guys in their 80s. They're the guys I want to learn from. Guys that went to the other side that are super fit, really healthy, you know? They're they're the guys I've been looking at, you know, to put my own program together. I don't want to listen to these young guys. They have no idea, man. I didn't I was a lot of the I did when I was even in my 40s and even early 50s. I had no clue. Yeah, there we go. Well, he would tow not just a boat, he would tow like seven boats or something crazy. I mean, like 70 people. He I think he towed like a

27:32person for every year of his life. So, here he's towing like a whole stream of boats. Like, how many boats were back there? The guy was an amazing swimmer. That water was cold. And it doesn't look to me like he has a wet suit on. It looks like he may just have like a a singlet type. It's hard to tell. It looks like a wet suit there. Okay, there's a wet suit. It's hard to tell. Um, but either way, got savage. That guy was amazing fitness guy. There he is. And he's handcuffed. Pretty amazing. Yeah, he is. But here's a guy that stood the test of time. He got to his 80s and 90s. Another guy was uh Master Elliot Gracie. I mean, that guy, I actually had a jiu-jitsu with lesson with the guy, you know, when he was in his late 80s. Wow. And you know, okay, he's not going to beat anybody, right? Doing competitive jiu-jitsu, but you wouldn't want to go up and mess with

28:27that old guy. He he would he would mess you up. He had some thick ass hands. He had big hands, big forearms, and he, you know, he he would just slap it on you. I used to hate to be the guy that he demonstrated stuff on cuz he would just really put it on you. I felt damn near injured, you know. Yeah. Well, he was a pioneer of no holds barreds fights like way back in the day. I mean he was doing that in the 1940s right? Yeah. And even before him his teacher uh he didn't learn directly from this guy his brothers did was that guy Asa that little Japanese guy. Yeah. Uh he I had heard he won over 800 no holds barred fight. I don't know whether that's true or not. Well it's like the Hixon 400 no number. Exactly. you know, but he did he did a lot of no hold bar type type deals and he was one of the guys that really really developed that uh guard because he was finding that big American

29:23wrestlers and football players uh were putting him on his back and he became deadly from the from from fighting from his back. He kind of specialized in in that particular position. That's so fascinating because that was a big part of Helio's game too with keeping he's so Yeah. Yeah. I mean he was like 140 plus pounds. Yeah. When uh he was competing and fighting against much larger men. Much larger guys. I uh I lived with him for a month down in his ranch in uh Terzopoulos. And uh I used to get daily lessons and his favorite thing was to have you put himself in just a really bad position like mounted or whatever and they just basically defy you to do anything to him. And it's a it's a great game that you can play well into advanced age. You know, you just let the kids work on you a little bit and just play defense. And there was nothing I could do. Wow. I mean, he just, you

30:11know, he basically knew everything I was going to do before I did it. You know, he'd give his back, you know, let let you mount and, you know, he he basically his defense was just so superb. You would have either had to use an unusual amount of strength to do anything or I mean, there was no fool in him. Let's put let me just put it that way. Well, Hixon used to let guys start on his back with a full rear naked choke, fully locked in. That's how he would start. It's pretty amazing, aren't I? Yeah. I mean, but if you could develop that kind of defense, then you're if you're safe from there, you're safe from everywhere. Like, one of the big parts of jiu-jitsu, I'm sure you'll agree, is the ability to be safe in any position and the ability to understand what it takes to be safe in those positions. And the best way to do it, like Eddie Bravo did that when he

30:54was training for Hiler, one of the big things that he did was he had people start off in bad positions. He would have people start off mounting him, have people start off in side control. He never started out just facing a guy, you know, where where it's an equal neutral position. Every position, every role started with him on his back. Every role started with him in a in a compromised position. It's such a great way to work if you're working with people that don't have the same skill sets as yourself. Mhm. For example, Hixon was in America for years and years and years, and he only had white belt, blue belt level guys to work with, but this is the way he kept his sword sharp. Yeah. He would put himself in these bad positions, partially closed triangles, maybe a partially closed um plata, uh you know, on the back with maybe a partially closed choke or whatever. And he just

31:42was just a genius at getting out of those positions. Yeah. And if you can show your training partners what to do, you can actually make it more difficult for yourself. If you tell them what they're doing wrong, and I mean, Hixon didn't just develop uh his own jiu-jitsu skills, obviously. He had a lot of great students as well. A lot of great students. And a black belt under Hixon to this day is one one of the most prestigious black belts. Oh, absolutely. Uh I would say probably the closest thing you can get to Hixon is Luis Heredia in Maui. The guy's unbelievable. I love training with him. And we were talking about Lu Luis gave me my very first private lesson at Hixon's old place on Pico. That was before I didn't know like that there was a difference in the Gracies, you know, when I was starting out. I was like, "Oh, this is Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. Okay, this is just

32:28like the UFC." Like, who's Hixen Gracie? Oh, that's the brother. I mean, I didn't even know that he was the man. And so Carlson Gracie School was closer. It was off of Hawthorne, like right off of Sunset. That was closer to where I lived by like 20 minutes. And you know, especially during traffic, it was a nightmare to get down to Pico. So, I was like, "Oh, I'll just go to this place instead." So, I up and stopped training at like the best place in the world. Like, I didn't even know. Well, that's how it was when I first started. Uh, you know, I didn't have a clue how Well, I mean, I just didn't appreciate how how good these guys were. But I got lucky though. Any given day I could have a lesson with any of the brothers. They were one big happy family. Yeah. And they were always there, too. I mean, always there. I got lucky though that when I came to Carlson's, Mario Sperry

33:15was there. Um, Carlos Betto was there. Um, I got to watch those guys roll. I got to watch those guys compete. Vtor Belelffort was there and it was when Vtor was call they were calling him Victor Gracie. Do you remember that? I do remember that. Yeah. They they would spell it with a K. Like I don't know what happened. They changed his name. I I really don't understand what happened. They were calling him Victor. I know in Brazil a lot of times the women are able to keep their their original name. So they don't always take the name of their their husbands. H well he was taken Carlson's name. I mean he doesn't he didn't Belelfford is his real name. Like he doesn't have like a Gracie background. Like he was taking So he didn't have a mother that might have been a Gracie. No. Okay. But there's some people that do that. Like doesn't doesn't um who has that going on? Angela

34:02Gracie. No. I mean, some someone has that going on. One of the men has that going on. Roger Gracie. His father. Yeah. Yeah. Hodger is uh what? His father's Gomez. Yes. And his mother. That's one of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I think Caesar, too. Doesn't Caesar have a situ similar situation? Caesar that I I don't know. But I do know it's not uncommon for the uh a married woman to keep her maiden name. That's interesting. Mhm. But um anyway, so like I used to I everybody called Vtor Victor back then and like if you like look at the early UFC's I'm pretty sure I even called I remember someone pulled me aside and said you can't call him Victor Gracie at UFC 12. You can't call him Gracie because Hian was suing Carlson. Oh, I remember that. Yeah. Like Hian was suing all the other Gracies. They couldn't even use their last name. Meanwhile, Carlson Gracie is a legend,

35:02like a real legend in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and in MMA. And he was a guy who came in and beat the guys that Ilio couldn't beat cuz Carlson was a bigger, tougher, stronger guy. I mean, he was like more of a bulldog approach, which is why it was perfect that he had that. He pretty much brided the gap between IO's young sons. you know, Elliot was getting a little up there in age and, you know, and was starting to fail physically a bit and his own sons were a little bit too young still. So, Carl, you know, Carlson Gracie was like the one to defend the family honor up until the point where uh Hixon and Halls Gracie got, you know, into the young man. Yeah. And he had a fantastic group of uh students, too. He was an unbelievable teacher. Marilo Bamante, Mario Sperry, I mean, he had some really amazing amazing students as Well, they said his ability to go out and recruit

35:53talent was just incredible. You know, he just knew how to do it. He had an eye for guys that were going to be really good. Yeah. He also had like a great family environment. Like that Carlson Gracie team, like they were very tight-knit. It's it's a fascinating time in the world of martial arts. If you go back and look at that, the early 90s and what happened to this, you know, to to jiu-jitsu in America and how it just sort of exploded and changed the face of martial arts. It really did. I I had my first experience in '89 and uh I just made up my mind I wanted to learn it. I I went in as a NCAA Division One wrestler. I had a really good record. Um I you know I was like most wrestlers kind of hard-headed. What are these skinny Brazilian guys going to show me? You know, right? And then I'm I'm tapped like a typewriter by Hoer. I'm like, "Oh my god, what is this that he's doing to

36:40me? I got to learn this." And uh I asked Coran, "How can I learn this martial art?" And he said, "Come out to Torrance. It's the only game in town." At that time, that was true. And I So, you went from Philly all the way to Torrance to train. And I would stay for a week, you know, I I'd have so much money. I I was a former school teacher and I had like a little retirement account set up, you know, some money set aside, you know, after I quit teaching and money I'd set. So, I used that to uh uh fund my jiu-jitsu education. In the meantime, I would open up Maxis was a personal training gym. I put some mats in the back, you know, and uh I would usually uh go and take like a thousand bucks and when I run out of money, I would go back to Philly again. Since it was my business, I could just take off whenever I wanted. Oh, that's great. And then I had mats at and it was the first

37:27gym of the Eastern Seaboard. I would just get all my old wrestler friends, Philadelphia Judo Club, you know, Aikido guys, and just go in there and just work with these guys and practice my jiu-jitsu. And then another, you know, a couple months later, I'd go back and spend time again. Then I got smart. I started bringing the Gracies to my place and then they would stay with me and I had stay with me sometimes for a couple weeks. Hoist actually lived with me for a month one time. Well, I think Hoist and Hiler, they don't even have schools anymore. They just travel and do seminars and they find that that's more lucrative and they get away from the hassle of like having to pay rent and employees and all the other nonsense that comes with schools. And you know, they're just welcomed with open arms these weekend seminars. And I mean, if a guy like Hoist or Hiler or Hixon wants

38:11to do a seminar, like who's gonna say no? Who's gonna say no? Well, it's kind of what I do myself. You know, I I just go around showing the Gracies off the bench. And uh the other thing that I'm really into these days is just basically how can you keep your body still in the game? Because I mean, it is fun to roll. It really is. It's something that you can do into advanced age, but you got to be careful and you have to be very careful with the preparation of your body. And what are the what are the keys to a person that's like, you know, entering into their older age? What are the keys to maintaining the the the body's elasticity, your your your your strength and vitality? Well, one of the main keys is joint mobility. Every single day, you got to do some type of mobility. People get confused between flexibility and mobility. Mobility has a connotation of strength. You want to be

38:59able to voluntarily go in and out of the movement. Uh I give an example being being a grappler and a striker. I've seen your devastating kick that spinning roundhouse thing you do. One way that like an difference between mobility like flexibility would be you maybe doing a split or putting your foot up on elevated surface and just holding it and stretching. Right. Right. That's flexibility. But lifting your leg up slowly under control and extending it out and holding it like the old Bruce Lee movie, you know, that is mobility, right? So practicing moving through the full range movement regularly is extremely good for the joints and you keep your ability to move. The other advice I have these young u these guys out there, tap early and tap often. Don't be a fool. Mhm. And this whole concept that you can't tap to a lower belt, that gets so many guys hurt. I

39:52can't tell you how many purple belts or brown belts get really poed because some really big, strong or technical blue belt gets them in a bad situation. They feel they can't tap and they'll literally risk injury. That's insane. Yeah, it is insane. Why in the very unfortunate it's I don't know how that ever started that you can't tap to lower. Well, the problem is if you feel bad about tapping, that's one thing. But if you get injured, you're gonna feel so much worse. So much worse. And it's going to take you so much longer to recover. You like if you get if you somebody catches you in a guillotine, you're like, "Oh boy, this is tight. You know what? Let me just tap. I'm an idiot. How did I get caught in that?" That feeling that you get is actually good for you. It's good for you because that way you'll realize, you know, you can't just let your neck hang out there.

40:36You can't not defend. You can't think about those potential steps. And I see in a lot of jiu-jitsu situations, I see when when a a higher belt will go with a very enthusiastic and a very ambitious lower belt, they often times disregard the possibility of getting tapped and that's how they get tapped. Whereas some higher belts I've seen, they they'll roll with a purple belt or a blue belt or a white belt and they'll roll with everybody like that person's a ninja. that will roll with every every single person like that person is like the greatest grappler that they've ever faced in their life. And if they do that, I'm not talking about like going hard and being like really physical and hurting them, but but being aware of all the possibilities and being on your toes and being at 10 at all times. If you do that, you're going to be fine. Or purposely just put yourself in dangerous

41:24positions and get caught just, you know, just to practice. But what I think I think it was um Hansen's boys uh either Hen or Heron or one of those guys. They they uh they mentioned a guy that worked in their school, a black belt in his 50s who was really uh down in the dumps over been having been roughed up by a blue boat. And they were saying, "Well, how old was the blueout?" You know, and the guy was like in his 20s and he outweighed him by about 30 pounds. And I think they were the ones that came up with the idea that like for every 10 years of age and for every 10 pounds of weight, that's like the guy having an extra belt on you. So if he knows how to use it, for sure. Yeah. I mean, just a big, let's just say a big strong athletic white belt that's 20 years old, you know, and maybe outweighs me by 40 pounds. That's going to be like me fighting a guy, you know, like a much

42:16higher skill level. Yeah. what he what he lacks in skill and technique, he's making up for with hustle and youth and, you know, he's not going to get tired and strength. Well, I I also think it's very dangerous to roll with people that are much larger than you. I mean, I think there's there's lessons to be learned in it and I certainly did my share of it, but man, there's a lot of times rolling with much larger guys where you come off and your neck is just up or your back is crack making weird noises. It's like Jesus, is this really worth it? If you roll with someone that's really really technical. Yeah. Well, if someone's really really technical then it's completely different. But if you like I could roll with you and we could have a great time. You wouldn't try to kill me. You wouldn't try to crush me. Maybe you'd sweep me and come on top. But you know

42:59the smart big guy if he's rolling with a smaller guy or you know an older guy, he's going to put himself on the bottom again or let you sweep me or whatever and just practice his defense in the bottom. Well, I would way rather roll with a larger than me black belt than I would a larger than me purple belt. Well, good point. Yeah. I mean, it's just it also like if you roll with a larger than you black belt, like a hydra or something, they don't have anything to prove. They're not going to hurt you. You know what I mean? Like they they've also been doing it for their whole life. It's like they know how to do it correctly. Like you can get away with so much with physical strength and explosiveness and and and just weight and power, but that doesn't make you any better. It's one of the reasons why I always tell people if you want to learn jiu-jitsu properly, learn it from a

43:41little guy. From a little guy. Yeah. learn it from like a Barrett Yoshida or a Hoer Gracie or an Eddie Bravo. If you learn jiu-jitsu from a smaller person, you're going to learn like really technical jiu-jitsu where they're not like Master Ilo, you know, his self-defense still stands the test of time, man. Sure. That's that's another thing that makes me really uh pleased to see that it's kind of gone full circle. You know, jiu-jitsu was kind of going the way of a lot of other martial arts like judo became like just a form of jacketed wrestling really and you know, taekwondo, tangudo, you know, they they were at one point deadly martial arts, but now they're, you know, they're a lot of the martialness has has been lost. Yeah. In a lot of these different especially if they go Olympic, but that was happening to jiu-jitsu. You know, people are just basically shaking hands

44:30and jumping on their ass, right? And it was like what? You know, and that's a fun game. I'm not I'm not deriding it. I'm not saying that the guys are not formidable athletes. They're amazing. But, you know, for the average guy, they're never going to be really great. You know, they're just going to be so so they're doing it for fun. I think it's important that you back yourself up with the self-defense. And and I see now a big trend to going back to the origins of the the self-defense has been really big. Guys want to know the basic standup street defense. It was extremely welldeveloped in the old Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It It was very welldeveloped. Gun, knife, stick, club, you know, all kinds of clinches, uh defending yourself against a guy trying to ground and pound. U it was all there, but it was lost. It was lost. Well, it is unfortunate when people are just trying

45:19to chase medals and win by points and in doing so they they become like extremely unrealistic in the actual application against a a fight or a fighter rather uh who who knows what they're doing. But one of the things that's really exciting right now is um no gee competition. That's kind of cool. Yeah. And what Eddie Bravo's done. Did you see the Eddie Bravo Invitational which was number six was yesterday? No, but I heard heard about I heard some of the results and it sounds like a very good way to contest skill versus skill. Yeah, it's it's amazing what Eddie's done is he's figured out a way to they have it's submission only. So, they go after it, right? And but it when it reaches a time limit, if it reaches a time limit and there's no submission, then what they do is they start off in compromised position. Sort of like wrestling, you know, in wrestling, one guy would start

46:04down, one guy start referee's position. Yeah. So, in you have the option of two positions. Either you take the back with overunder, just overunder, you know, not a choke locked in, but just the back with the hooks in and over under or spiderweb control, meaning uh arm bar, the other guy, the guy's defending the arm bar on his lying on his back, you're in side control, and you have the arm hooked and your legs are across and you start from there. And so either the person gets a tap or the person on the bottom escapes the position and then you count up the amount of time. So you do it in like you have I think there's three rounds of this and um if someone taps then the other person has an opportunity to tap that other person and whoever taps the quickest like if one person taps the person within a minute and a half the other person does it in you know 30 seconds that person with the

46:5330 seconds person would win and if there's no taps in the I think it's three rounds three rounds of of these submission attempts then they count up the amount of time it took the person to escape. So if one person escapes like 30 seconds quicker, you know, than the other person, that person would win. That's how Gary Tonin w up losing yesterday. What a what a fair way to do it. Yeah, it's a smart way to do it, too, because it ensures that you're going to have exciting situations because if two guys are just locked up in front of each other and no one ever gets to a bad spot, you're not going to see any action. But if a guy is on a guy's back and he has overunder and they start from there, that's a dangerous spot. And so you're going to see exciting stuff. So it ch it changes grappling from being this thing that can really wind up like Polaris, you know,

47:38they had those matches like Gary Tonin versus Husamar Paul Harez. Great matchup, but it went to a draw. You know, AJ, I don't know how to pronounce the audience wants a winner. They want a clear-cut winner. Plus, it gives the athletes a chance to showcase their skills. Yes. But that's what people want to see. They want to see the skill sets showcased. And you don't get to see that because sometimes these guys are so damn good that they neutralize each other. Yeah. It doesn't always make for a great fight. Two really good fighters. I mean, we you've seen this in the UFC many times. You think, "Oh my god, this is going to be so good." And it's like, "Oh man, this is really boring because the guys just basically neutralize each other because they're just so good. They're so good. They cancel each other out. They cancel each other out." It's that is a that is a problem. And I think

48:24Eddie's come up with a perfect solution with this format of uh putting guys in bad positions in the last stage of the match. And sounds like a fun thing to compete in. It's excellent. And it's on uh Fight Pass now. It's on UFC Fight Pass. So now, you know, a lot of people are getting a chance to see it. And they put the videos on YouTube and all that jazz. So this this is at the pro level pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. $25,000 for the uh Might be kind of fun if they just did like a grassroots thing. A grassroots thing. Yeah. You know, just for like, you know, amateurs to go in. Yeah, it would be a great program. Blue bout, purple bout. I don't know how I don't know what the logistics of a tournament like that might be, but it man, I'll tell you it'd be fun to compete in something. Yeah, Eddie's done six of them and they've gotten better and better and yesterday's

49:06was the biggest one and uh especially because it's on Fight Pass now, but uh he's really figured it out. You know, he's figured out how to make this uh an exciting thing to watch for people who are on the outside looking in. Well, you know, speaking of that cast wrestling, a lot of people don't realize that pre-ivil war and just post Civil War, wrestling was the most popular sport in America. Really, people used to sit outside the telegraph offices to listen to the results of a lot of these old school wrestling matches. It was way more popular. Well, first of all, baseball was in its infancy. It was like a Civil War era sport that was invented. Uh, basketball was still only like two schools, I think, were playing it. They actually used real like peach baskets. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. It was a a physical education guy came up with a a way just to, you know, like a

49:54game. So, just a conditioning game. Wow. That was the origins of basketball. Did he know football was sneakers and Yeah. football was like this big watermelon looking ball, but wrestling was the most popular sport in America. And it was real wrestling though. There wasn't catch. Yeah. you know, guys like uh George's Hackin Schmidt and uh Frank Gotch and you know, yeah, Farmer Burns and you know, even up to the era of Strangler Lewis, you know, they were still doing real wrestling and then of course they started getting into more of the entertainment business. How did it go bad? Because it's it's really fascinating to me that wrestling itself is such an unbelievably difficult sport. Like if you watch amateur wrestling in the Olympics at at an Olympic level, it's unbelievably difficult and it's exciting and fun to watch, but there's no professional venue for it. No prof

50:47Well, until the UFC came along, right? But that's fighting though. It seems like for people who just want to wrestle, they can't. It is a great basis though for a lot of different things. It certainly is. No doubt about it. But it's just to me it sucks that there's not a professional avenue for actual wrestling. Actual wrestling. I mean, think about all the things that are on television, golf or whatever, where there's this massive professional venue for it. It sounds like Eddie Bravo, though, was given one for jiu-jitsu, but jiu-jitsu is obviously very different than wrestling. I mean, just wrestling itself, getting the pin and scoring points for takedowns and all those different things. I mean, there's something to be said for that as a sport. Maybe not it's maybe some of the best as a martial arts for completing a fight, for finishing a fight, wrestling

51:31with the rules that are involved in amateur wrestling. But to me, the guys who get really great at wrestling, like I would like to see them have a professional avenue, like a way to go from college and then compete as a professional wrestler. And so, not there's anything wrong with WWE if you're into that but I would love it if it was an actual competition, you know? Yeah. An actual real honest to God, not choreographed, nothing from they there was there was an attempt for a while to actually come up with a professional wrestling leg. couple attempts. Yeah. But it kind of fell by the wayside. Could you imagine if that was the case with basketball? If you played basketball in college and basketball is like really like people watched on ESPN was this big deal was in the Olympics and basketball. But then when you went to pro, everybody had to dress like a vampire and you threw

52:18glitter onto the thing. You know what I mean? Like you have music when you introduce you have matches in a cage. People like what the happened to basketball? There are some countries where they actually do have real pro- wrestling based on basic uh not not exactly Olympic rules but like uh u you know each each country has their own little uh native martial art folk style wrestling. Uh some of the African countries do this. It's uh it's huge in in countries like Somalia and and u what was the other country? I met this guy that travels the world for uh the international uh Olympic wrestling federation and he he was just doing like just looking at all the different aspects of wrestling all over the world. I met him when I was in Turkey. I went to the uh Turkish national championships of oil wrestling. These guys are all pretty much like professional level

53:12dudes, man. And uh this is the one where they wear these buffalo hide trousers that are tied off at the knee and then they they basically just pour a bucket of olive oil over themselves and then they go out in a grass arena and they just wrestle and it starts out with like 50 dudes and then you know half of those guys lose and then they just keep going till there's like two guys standing. Yeah. Why oil? What happened there? Uh where'd that go wrong? During the Ottoman Empire they had a standing army. Basically the Ottomans pretty much conquered the world. So they had all these young soldiers with nothing to do and these guys were getting into some problems. You know, you got to keep young men occupied. So they came up with this but but at the same time, you know, these are ferocious warriors. You don't want your guys hurting each other. So they came up with this idea of coating

54:00themselves with oil to make themselves slippery. So you can go after each other, you know, like a rabid dog, but no one really gets hurt. Wow. And also it helps build heat tolerance because these guys were wearing armor in the freaking desert, you know, hundreds of degrees. I mean, like 100 degrees. And it it really builds up a tremendous uh heat tolerance, you know, when you get used to training like that. So training covered with oil heat tolerance. You can't the skin can't breathe, man. It's pretty brutal. Oh, wow. Okay. I see that way. So like you just like your your pores really can't sweat that good. Nope. And those guys and they were able to keep themselves in tremendous shape. Guy's got to work on his technique. What one of the things uh they do is reach inside the pants but hole and it looks a little gay. You think? But I'll tell you something. I actually put on the kisspit

54:53and the oil. And I wrestled with the former junior national champ. Dude, he was almost breaking my ribs with the with the lever. Uh he would come inside the waistband of your trousers and put his elbow in your spine. And see the idea is to flip the guy over and expose your belly button to the sky. If you turn the guy over, you win. Yeah, but the guy on the bottom this is a terrible look. Uh it looks a little terrible. He's he's like literally waiting. Let's Let's put it this way. It would never fly never fly in America. Well, why is the why is there a gap between the waist and the you know and the body? It doesn't it doesn't start that way. It's really tight, but the oil over time. But these guys are unbelievably strong. And you can see the physics in these guys are like, "Oh my god." And they are national heroes. They're rock stars in their country. But they're grabbing each

55:44other's packages. No, no, no, no. There's no sexuality at all. Allegedly. Well, listen. There's no way you can get your hand deep in there like that and not have some shenanigans. He's looking at his friend going, "My whole hand has escaped me." You see how he's holding the uh the leg and the the pant? That's uses leverage to flip the guy over. So, it's it's almost like jiu-jitsu in a way. Or he's making sure that the guy can't get away while he's got his hand. Yeah. Well, that's part that's part of it. But, uh I I tell you, come on, man. This you can't have this. I developed a keen respect for it, though. Yeah. Oh, I I get it from the guys are definitely when it fly in a western culture now, right? But you've done this before. But the these are strict Islamists too, you know, and any kind of homosexuality is punishable by death in these countries. So, but you also know that that doesn't

56:33stop it. Like people that have gone over to Afghanistan have talked about men love Mondays or whatever the they have over there where there's a lot of the mambber, you know, man love. Uh yeah. No, super common, you know, that they have gay relationships. Like, uh, there was an article that was written about one of those gay websites, uh, like an app, like a Grinder or something like that, and this guy went over to some forbidden country where, you know, some Islamic country, and fired up the app, and was just getting pinged left and right by all these gay dudes are trying to hook up. Get out of here. Yeah, that's forbidden fruit, my friend. Oh my god, that's You know how it is. I mean, I I'll I'll get oiled up and put on a buffalo hide and and wrestle, but uh that's about as gay as it gets for me, man. Yeah, but if you were gay, you'd be psyched. I guess that spot, you

57:22know, like if you were gay and somebody like, put it this way. All right. Being a heterosexual man, uh if uh a girl wanted to get all lubed up and wrestle and you could stick your hand down her pants, dude, I'd be there. Exactly. So, matter of fact, after the show, honey, you got that coconut oil set up. What What's up with the tarp? Nothing. Nothing. Don't worry. Just lay it down. Bring out the roll out the vat. You got a vat of oil. Put your Lululemon tights on. Yeah, those uh those pants look like they're sturdy. At least looks like it's difficult to They're a little hot. It took me 15 minutes to get them on. Really? Cuz they they're so stiff. They stand up by themselves. It's almost like armor. And I literally had to oil up my balls and my abs and my thighs just to slide in that thing, man. But again, there's some things See, come on. This is not good. Uh that that's called a

58:14waist drag. He's actually grabbing the front like grabbing the jiu-jitsu belt. That's what you could call it. He's going to pull him down into a uh into a a takedown. It's called a holster in my world right there. Look at that one. Boom. Look at that. That is That is outrageous. Yeah. He's lucky he didn't break his neck, man. Yeah, for sure. Well, I'm sure when you're dealing with people being real slippery like that, that's part of the problem with actually grappling. Look at this. Hey, my friend. He's my friend. That's like the c that's the the version of like in prison. They hold on to your pocket. That's what it is. These guys looking at each other. There are no girls. What do you want us to do? That's what they're saying. In in my country, there's no girls. We just oil up, throw down. But it, you know, it is a very difficult way to grapple. All

59:00jokes aside, that's really hard. And in doing so, like you you have to develop like you learn that about no ghee as well. And especially if you try to do no ghee with no shirts on. There's a big difference between no when you're in Abu Dhabi. It was like crazy. Uh the the thing also about that was it it was very safe for the soldiers to go full at it. I mean, what do you do with a standing army with no war to fight? What the hell do you do with these guys? But at the same time, you know, you can't have them hurting each other. That was the that that was the so-called origins of the whole sport. Yeah. There was an NPR um podcast on Radio Lab about the origins of football and how football was created. And that was one of the reasons why it was so appealing. It was like a way to compete in war without actually having war. I mean, you had objectives, you have goals, and instead of bullets

59:49and bodies, you had a football. It's like team wrestling almost. Sort of. Yeah. In a lot of ways. And in a way like if you think of the uh let's say the rugby scrum it's kind of like the old shield wall isn't it? Yeah. When they when they form the the shield wall so I mean it's it's basically work learning to work work together u and and and and there is grappling. I mean you're basically throwing guys down pretty hard too. Yeah. It's I think whenever you have young men and you have competition there's there's always going to be this desire to dominate. like young men always want to dominate other men and that's just always going to be the way it is. So they they figured a way to have these workarounds that are acceptable by society and then in fact it became the biggest sport in the in the country. I mean team warfare man the team warfare like the NFL is it's the

60:38biggest sport in the country. But you know it's interesting in the early football days you know you just didn't see the injuries like you do now. I mean there would be elbows, knees, shoulders like always like all tough boy sports where you're throwing people to the ground. you're gonna get hurt, but you didn't get the concussions, right? And one of the theories I had was, and you don't see it in rugby or rugby union or Gaelic football or any of that. You don't see it as much. Not as much, but you do definitely do see it. You definitely see it, but it's not epidemic like in the NFL. I think the helmet became a weapon. Yeah. And they start using the head as a weapon. Yeah, definitely. And you know, it'll be interesting to see what the NFL does now with uh, you know, all these lawsuits and all these all these injuries. Did you happen to see Will Smith in that

61:22movie? Um, Concussion Concussion. No, I didn't, but I keep hearing great things about it. Yeah, I got to check that movie out because I I heard he did a hell of a job. I don't know what they can do to mitigate it. Well, they they do have a new kind of helmet now. I heard that just came out that really reduces the sloshing of the brain. How does it do that? Uh, I think it's some kind of gel or something in the helmet that like kind of like a soft kind of thing that takes the absorption. You know, the helmets are hard. Yeah. So, when you get hit, your brain still sloshes. It's just like um, you know, when you get hit with headgear on, it doesn't really stop the brain injury. No, you just take more hits because there's no surface injury. Well, not only that, a lot of people think it actually accentuates the movement of the brain because the fulcrum effect like

62:05you catch someone with this larger object and the head twists. I believe they've take Yeah, there's a new helmet now that supposedly is gel-like that it takes the blow, but you know, it it saves the Yeah, we're seeing in here. Jamie pulled up this video. It says 01 believes it can reduce the chances of a player sustaining a concussion. And this is interesting because the the helmet itself sort of gives and expands. And I would love to see that happen because I love pro football and I I would be thrilled to see it uh that they come out of a way that these guys can still play the game without suffering those horrible injuries. I agree. But honestly, I feel like the real option is probably no pads, no helmet. The same thing with MMA or like the original football in in the US. Well, I think with MMA, one of the things that saves fighters versus boxing is that you

63:05really can't tee off on someone the way you can with boxing gloves. With boxing gloves, you almost can have no concern whether or not you're going to hit a forehead or you're going to hit an elbow unless you have small hands or weak hands. Like very it's it's much more rare that boxers break their hands than MMA fighters. But even MMA fighters, I think they have an unrealistic amount of protection on their hands and it's just to protect their hands. Like I still to this day I'll get interviews like I got interviewed after that uh the the guy died uh overseas really recently and they were saying do you think that they may maybe should have bigger gloves or maybe we should make people wear headgear. The I think the real answer is no gloves. Not only no gloves, no wrist taping cuz I think that one of the more difficult uh aspects about punching someone is that your wrist joint moves

63:54when you hit things and it makes it way harder. I mean, you have to really concentrate to keep your fist completely tight. Make sure that your wrist doesn't move when you make impact. And you have to make impact with the first two knuckles primarily, otherwise you could break your hand. And well, like the original UFC, I I was one of the original veters. I told you this. I actually threw my a little bit of money in there and uh was Hoist's uh conditioning coach for those first three. What did you have him do back then? Uh, I was actually trying to build his strength as much as I could because jiu-jitsu provided all of the conditioning that he needed. He was doing a lot of work with, you know, just bringing in fresh partners and, you know, and he wanted to stay a jiu-jitsu purist, although, you know, he used some kicks and so so forth just to kind of close the distance, just close the

64:40distance, fake the guy out, make make the guy wonder like what's he doing so that he could get the clinch and so you would smack guys too to open up things where you don't run the risk of breaking your hand. But in all those original UFCs, the strikers all busted their hands. A lot of them did. There was like, I think, three broken hands in that first the first one. Well, that's realistic though. And that's realistic. And ground and pound would cease to exist. You can't just sit there and tee off. Well, you could elbow people for sure. You could elbow people, but imagine hitting someone in the elbow with your fist or the top of the head. Ah, yeah. So, that that whole ground and pound thing would pretty much go away. Well, just reckless punching would go away. You would have to have precision punches. You'd see a lot more open hand strikes. You would see uh grapplers able

65:26to secure holds if they can't hold. Yes, it might be boring for the public because I think you would see grapplers win a lot of fights. You might, but I think you would also see a lot better Muay Thai. You would see people would have to develop their Muay Thai because you don't you wouldn't see any change in the weapons, the knees, the kicks, the elbows, all would be exactly the same. The only difference would be the punches. So, I think a really high level Muay Thai practitioner would probably have Yeah, they'd probably have a really good advantage if they can keep the fight on the feet. If the fight went to the ground, you definitely see a big advantage for grapplers, especially in securing chokes cuz you've tried, I'm sure, to uh to grapple with MMA gloves on. Oh my god. It's just like wearing ovens or something, especially like rear nakeds. If you try to get a rear naked

66:09choke, try to get the hand sometimes it's really hard to get it underneath the chin and stuff. Yeah. And and especially if you like pretzel grips or something like that, it's it's just there's so much padding. There's so much you create a good solid two to three extra inches of space that you don't want with all the padding on the gloves and it just gets in the way. And it's also it's easy for your opponent to grab them and pull them off. Pull them off. I would love to see a return to the gloveless MMA. Yeah, I would love I think it would be really interesting. I'd like to see a league somewhere where maybe on Indian reservation or some place where they didn't have all the, you know, boxing is the reason why they put the gloves on in the first place. Sure. The boxing commissions all wanted, you know, they Well, actually, it was Tank Abbott. You know, Tank Abbott was

66:53the first guy to wear those gloves. Tank Abbott wore the Chuck Norris MMA gloves, which was before anybody had them. I mean, this was Tank wore them like I want to say like, oh man, it was like early early UFC's because Tank was a power puncher and he was smart enough to realize, you know what, I'll just tape my hands up, put these these small padded gloves on that are going to protect my knuckles and just mollywop these dudes. Was that was that before they went to the gloves? Tank Abbott was before they went to the gloves. The first UFC that I worked, they didn't have gloves. I was at UFC 12 and they still didn't have gloves. They did not have gloves. It was not mandatory. You It was optional. Vtor wore gloves, but he didn't have to. I believe he also wore shoes. No, he didn't wear them in those. He wore them when he fought. Some of the guys are still wearing the

67:39wrestling. He was barefoot. He wore him when he fought Vanderlay. That's him versus Oleg Titarov. Okay. See, so Oleg has no gloves, but Tank has gloves on. Interesting. Yeah. Tank was I'm I'm pretty sure Tank was the pioneer of wearing those kind of gloves. And I think that they would call those I don't think they called them MMA gloves back then because I don't think they had the term MMA, but the original gloves were century gloves, you know, the century martial arts supply company for hitting the heavy bag or the speed bag, something like that. Yeah. And that's what the design came from. Like the design of MMA gloves didn't come from someone sitting down and saying, "We need the perfect glove for mixed martial arts." No, they had they already had a model that was really not really necessarily designed for MMA and they just sort of applied it to MMA and it

68:24became the standard. There's a lot of like really sloppy that's in MMA still to this day that shouldn't be there. That's only in there because it was in there in the beginning. The 12 to6 elbow, which I harp upon all the time because I think it's so stupid that if you go down from 12 on the clock to six on the clock with an elbow, it's illegal. Even if you hit someone in the thigh, which is so stupid, it's illegal. And the reason why it's illegal is because the the commissions, the athletic commission saw people breaking bricks on those karate demonstrations. You can't do that. You would kill people. So that's why that's illegal. Not understanding that they weaken those bricks. Well, and also the reason why gloves are mandatory is because somehow or another they erroneously believe those gloves protect the the fighters. They don't. And so, but not but knowing

69:13that knowing that you I mean I think if we got a room full of athletes and fighters and and martial artists and we all had the discussion, we said, "Let's just have a show of hands." How many guys here think that the gloves protect the opponent? Everybody have their hands down, right? So, everyone who knows, everyone 100% I think across the board. I mean, there might be a contrarian or two that would step in and say, you know, "Hey, personally, I'd rather get punched by a guy with a glove than no glove." But most people would say, "Fuck that." Most people would say bare knuckles probably safer for everybody involved. Safer. Uh, am I am I correct? Did they not take the head gear off uh Olympic boxing? They did. Yeah, they did. Yes. And I think that's a good move. I think you don't get hit as much when you not have headgear on. I used to hate headgear sparring because your peripheral would

70:01get screwed up. Especially kickboxing. It was really dangerous because you would, you know, you'd get hit with a jab and you wouldn't even recognize the kick was coming because they're coming over your shoulder until wamp, it's catching the side of the head. It your peripheral would get all up. You would it would close your peripheral quite a bit. And I just always felt like I got hit way more when I had headgear on. And you know, it's interesting uh the the little bit of boxing and that I did do, I always noticed I always kind of had a dull headache after boxing with headgear. And when I didn't have the headgear, I didn't have that same headache. It was It was weird. Even back then, I could never understand why my head always hurt more after boxing with the with the headgear on. Cuz your brain's squishing around more. Well, now I know. But I mean, at the time, I

70:46didn't put the cause and effect together. I just know I I all I knew was intuitively I hated wearing headgear when I when I was trying. Well, what's interesting when I've brought up this to people uh in in in high places, they always have the same thing. The public would never go for it. The public would think it's too brutal. People would think it's too brutal. Like, I don't know, man. Like, what what have we created? What have we created? Because we've created something in MMA, not not me. I obviously didn't have anything to do with it. But what what MMA is is we have a completely new sport over the last few decades. And this completely new sport has redefined the way people think about combat sports and fighting, right? Okay. Well, why don't we be honest about what what's happening? And why don't we be honest about how come you can shin kick a guy

71:27in the face? I can shin you in the face full blast, but I can't punch you with a bare knuckle. Do you know how stupid that is? Because a guy like, you know, take, you know, someone who's a power kicker like a Vtor Belelfford or something. Oh my god. The amount of power they could generate from a kick to in that raw shin to your face. It's so much more than anyone can ever punch. I mean, like multitudes more, three, four, basically like a baseball bat. But we don't have to wear shin pads. How come we don't have to wear shin pads? because the public's not used to shins being covered. It's all it is. I I really honestly think that the smartest move would be to ban tape. Don't know, you can't tape your wrists and bare knuckles. I think so, too. Well, if you go back in the early era of boxing where it was all bare knuckle, you rarely saw knockouts, those there those fights used

72:18to go so like 30 rounds sometimes. All those, you know, like Jack Johnson and those guys. Do you think that's why they used to fight like this, too? They like smack each other with the knuckles like that. Or do you think they just didn't know any better? I think they knew better. I I I don't think uh the mighty men of old uh there's not too much we could probably show those guys. Imagine if we went in a time capsule back to Sparta, the first professional army, the eur in Europe, right? Do you think we could actually show those guys anything about fighting or warfare and stuff? I'll all those dudes up. Send me back. No, no. Honestly, martial arts, I bet they'd get up. I really do. I because when I look at the martial artists from 1993 that were competing in the UFC and then I look at the martial artists of today in 2016. Look at Jon Jones. Do you know what the Jon

73:04Jones would do to UFC 1? I mean, you know how ridiculous it'd be if you send Jon Jones into UFC 1. He'd be like, "Get that guy out of here. This is not fair." Like, he's doing a totally different thing. I think the martial artists of today, like Demetrius Johnson, who I think is the best ever. But we're still talking modern, modern, modern. Let's go 2,000 years ago. You put Jon Jones in the gladiator arena. Do you don't think he would those guys up? I think he'd be a hell of a gladiator. You know, I don't think anyone would have a chance. I don't think they would. I don't think they would know what they were doing. I think they knew what they were doing. Really? Yeah. I really Well, how come they didn't know in 1993? A lot of this information had been lost, right? But even jiu-jitsu, which jiu-jitsu, this was like a resurgent of like old stuff. I mean, right. Okay, I

73:45see what you're saying. You know what I'm saying? It's like the dark ages, you know, where they, you know, like in medieval times, but they didn't have the ability to share information like they have today. No, no, at all. There's no internet or anything. Yeah. That's one of the reasons why jiu-jitsu is at such a high level today. Like there's all these like viral BJJ, which is one of the ones I follow on Instagram. There's a bunch of them that I follow on Instagram where they'll they'll have like moves of the day and they show these moves and you just I've been doing jiu-jitsu for a long time and I'll watch something and I'll just go like the Home Alone guy. I'm like, "Oh my god." Like, "Look at this move." Like, every day these kids are coming up with new moves. Every day I saw somebody figured out how to go some some dude went from being in a heel hook to catching a guy

74:28in a kamura and and spun out of the heel hook into a kamura. And I was like, "What? What did you just do?" Like you you watch like how did you and you just got to replay it over and over and over again. There's so many of those now. But let's go back to what we were just talking about. In ancient times, your your ability to fight was a life or death thing. You know, you were actually fighting to the death, right? We don't have that. True. Unless you, you know, but usually in the military, it's with all, you know, shooting and guns and stuff like that. You don't see guys fighting. Well, I mean, it could be hand to hand, but for the most part, these guys were were trained warriors that would fight handtoand. That's why I say when you're fighting to the death, you're damn good at what you do if you live. If you live, but if you don't live, you don't get to

75:19really learn anything. Yeah. But, you know what I mean? But there's plenty of guys that did live. Yeah. And so, my point is that they were well trained and they really knew what was going on. I think there's some good points on both sides. I think uh there were certainly some incredibly tough people back then for sure. Oh my god. I'm sure the pain threshold was unbelievable. But I think there's also this longing for nostalgia that a lot of people like to apply to like the ancient martial artists and the ancient fighters and they like to look, oh those guys, boy, if they could fight, you know, today like if you could get this guy. I look, Jack Dempsey, who's a hell of a fighter and a an amazing boxer and just a unbelievably tough man, wouldn't last one round with Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson, his prime, would have ran through Jack Dempsey. He would have ran

76:05through all of them. He would have ran through Jean Tunny. He would have ran through all those guys course. He ran through everybody in modern age, too. So, I mean, is that because he was Mike or is it because those guys were really that bad? was also the because he made a lot of modern guys look pretty shitty. He certainly did. But he had the benefit of having all of those guys on film. So he had what his version of the internet. What he had is his version of the internet which was customo. And custom I mean you might not have got him on Reddit or you know showed him all the funny memes on Instagram. But what he did do is he played him these films these black and white films of Sugar Ray Robinson, of Jersey Joe Walcott, of Rocky Marciano. He got to watch these old school Jack Dempsey tapes and he got to emulate their techniques and understand and custom would go over them

76:53meticulously different positions and different ways to encounter uh different styles and different ways to move to get better angles for counter shots. And he learned from all those techniques in a way those guys really didn't have the opportunity to do. They had to train. They had to learn from trainers. They had to watch other people do it. But they didn't have the benefit of having a library of films that span dec. make a very strong point. Uh, did you happen to catch him in Itman 3? What is it? Itman 3. No. What is that? Uh, you know the Wing Chung guy. It was one of those crazy kung fu movies. Yeah. Yeah. But Mike Tyson had a Oh, that's right. I saw the previous Dude, he looks scary as He sounds scary. Even to this day, he looks like he could still, you know, if he just trained for, you know, 6 months or so, he looks like he'd still step in there and take somebody out. Well, he

77:42definitely looks like he's still somewhat active. There was a video of him hitting the bag recently for some shoot for something that he did. And uh you know, he starts it starts off slow, starts getting loosened up, and then he starts teeing off in the bag and you're like, "Oh Jesus. Oh my god." Like he still people up. He would still people up. Joe, you would still people up. I'm trying. I'm still I'm still I still haunted by that spinning back kick you did in your garage that time. Your freaking banana bag bent in half, man. My ribs just hurt just watching that, man. Well, kicks are always going to be more powerful than punches, you know, and I think that kicking technique is one of the few things that is a little bit behind in MMA in comparison to some of the traditional martial arts, especially like the spinning kicks and straight kicks. Like the round kicks are pretty

78:29simple. It's pretty straightforward. If you look at the round kicks of like the best Muay Thai fighters and the round kicks of like the best jiu-jitsu guys like an Edson Barbosa, I think Barbosa is right up there with pretty much anybody. And as far as far as like kicking technique in the world, but spinning techniques, straight techniques like turning sidekicks, there's a little bit of lost knowledge in those. Not too many guys know that, man. Yeah. Matt Sarah used to have that awesome spinning back fist, man. Yes. Wow. That caught by surprise. Am I correct? You were the one that taught GSP that spinning back kick. Am I Well, he knew how to do it. I I helped refine it. He He actually came to me. John Donner, who's like one of the best jiu-jitsu coaches in the world, who's he's the guy who's in charge of this they call the Donaher death squad. He's all all these guys out of Henzo

79:13Grac. He's like Gary Tonan, Eddie Cumins, all these animal talk. And the young man that won yesterday, uh I think his name is Ryan Gordon Ryan, I think his name is who won uh EBI. U can you find out who what his name is? Young kid. He's 20 years old. He won the EBI tournament yesterday. But Donaher and I were having dinner and GSP wanted um he asked me if I knew anyone who um because he knew that I came from a taekwondo background. He's like, "Do you know anybody who's a really good taekwondo guy that can show GSP the uh fundamentals of uh the spinning back kick or turning sidekick?" Yeah. Gordon Ryan, young kid, 20 years old. Wow. Won the EBI. 16-man tournament. What's the stand for? EBI. Yeah. Eiational. Invitational. Okay. Um, and so Don her asked him and I said, "Uh, well, I could show him some shit." Like, I know it's gonna sound ridiculous being a comedian

80:03and, you know, just a commentator. You're just come to That's just your disguise, man. Well, it's just it's it sounds even to me ridiculous to me to say to John Donner, who's one of the best jiu-jitsu teachers in the world, you know, hey, um, I there's a guy that I know, his name's me, you know, it's just yourself short, Joe. I'm not telling myself. I've been to your house and trained you a few times. You're a beast. Had had it been another uh time. I think you probably would have been a hell of an MMA fighter yourself. People ask people ask me that all the time. I say, Joe, probably I mean, you you're a superior athlete. There's no doubt about it. You got the fast twitch muscle fiber. You got the power. I think uh ha had you had a chance, let's say maybe 10 years prior to when it started, you know. Well, that's very nice of you. I don't know. I'm not I'm not being

80:58nice. I'm I'm being honest. You you know, you're really athletic, strong guy. Well, I certainly would have competed, you know, in MMA like I did in kickboxing and taekwond do. But I totally honestly though, I've always been terrified of brain damage. I knew too many people when I was young that I knew were punchy. It It scares the out of me. It still to this day scares the out of me. That's one one of the reasons why I tell anybody if they're even thinking even they even have one foot out the back door. They're thinking about getting out, get out. Just get out because there's going to be some animal in there that's not thinking about getting out. There's going to be some some craz young psychopath who's only thinking about putting his shin to your face and he's probably going to do it. And he pro well sooner or later it's going to happen. Yeah. You know I lived

81:43in u Philadelphia for many many years and Smok and Joe Fraser used to be down in my neighborhood sometimes. The the poor guy could barely put two words together. He would say hello to him and you didn't even know what he said. It was just really sad. He was gone. It happened to a lot of those guys. I've seen it. I've seen it in my time in the UFC and uh I I saw it in my my kickboxing days. I saw it with guys when I, you know, when I went from taekwondo to kickboxing, I spent a lot of time in boxing gyms and um I got to watch a a lot of guys get beat up in training and over the course of just a few years, like three or four years, I could see deterioration. And see, that's that's why jiu-jitsu and submission wrestling is so much fun. Yeah. Because you can pretty much go full tilt, really spend yourself, get a nice workout. No one ne necessarily needs to get hurt, right? If it hurts,

82:36even if it's highly uncomfortable, you just, you know, y that's it. Y, you know, I mean, provided your guy lets go. You always have to have trust with your partners. But, um, that is one thing you can do well into advanced stage and it is a great anti-aging tool if you go at it in the right way. Yeah. And I think one of the things that you brought up earlier when it comes to joint manipulation or um joint mobility and um just flexibility and mobility, it's it's I think it's very important that people realize that if you want your body to be healthy, you have to use it all the time. You can't have any excuses. Like old men have actually have to work out more than young guys. I got to work out every day, even a couple hours every day just to maintain. Yeah. Seven days a week. Yeah. Now, it's not hard, right? I'm not uh doing high intensity every day. You know, high intensity twice a

83:27week so I don't burn out. Uh even younger guys, especially if you're involved with any kind of sport, you got to be really careful that you don't overtrain. Overtraining is epidemic amongst grapplers, jiu-jitsu guys, even MMA guys are just chronically burning burning out. But, you know, two hard workouts a week is enough. And every day you got to do plenty of mobility. And I I like to do plenty of uh breathing exercises, walking, cardio, and I do some static stretching, but it's enabled me to still, you know, I can still hold my own in the mat. I surprise guys sometimes when we get on the mat and roll around. You know, at first they start babying me, and then they say, "Oh, well, old Steve, he's still got it going there." And then they start upping the ante a little bit. Of course, you know, in at the end, I'm I'm usually the one tapping. But how is your shoulder? I

84:16know you were having some shoulder issues for a I still got some issues with it. But did you ever get it looked at by a doctor? I did. There's a big old bone spurr there just from doing silly stupid not tapping quick enough. Had a couple injuries to it. You know, it started back in college actually. So, I don't do any overhead pressing or anything anymore. I can still do Hindu push-ups and things like that. I can still do dips. Well, you still do those shield casts with uh with kettle with clubs? Not so much cuz I I can't travel with that stuff. So, I I pretty much went to body weight and isometrics and so forth, you know. a lot lot of a lot of mobility stuff. But uh I would uh here here's a good resource for your listeners, any of you guys out there listening that have shoulder issues, go and buy the book Shoulder Pain, its solution and its prevention by Dr. John

85:01M. Kersh. He was a former orthopedic surgeon who used to do surgery for a living. That's how you know a doctor can either cut you or give you medication to mask the symptoms, but it can't do anything to really help you. Well, Kur found that hanging with a brachial hang cured almost every type of shoulder ailment would get people out of pain. Well, explain a brachial hang because you just made it's a pull-up with the palms facing away shoulder width. You know, I usually don't use my thumb or finger. Okay. Uh I mean my u my thumb just a you don't grab it like you would grab a baseball bat. Yeah. Just like a monkey grip we call which is what you would do for a grappler anyway. You never really grab it like a like a Americana holder, right? and you just hang and it stretches out the corocoid bone and then the the humorus has a little bone is that uh it's like a

85:50little bone in the shoulder that that what happens is as you get older it starts to in fact bring it up that book uh shoulder pain and solution make a t-shirt that says bring that up Jamie there we go this book is shoulder pain ass shoulder impingement uh rotator cuff tears uh uh laboral tears you Four and a half stars on Amazon, 135 customer reviews. That is a strong endorsement right there, dude. I'm telling you, man. Uh when of course part of my problem is it's hard to find a a horizontal bar sometimes when you're traveling. You know, they take all the pull-up bars out of the the playgrounds. Why? I don't know. Maybe, you know, poor Johnny's too obese to pull himself up. We, you know, god forbid he'd feel bad about himself, you know. Does it have to be this way? Yeah, it got to be a break hang. So, it has to be palms facing forward. Yeah. and you let the shoulder

86:43let the shoulder come out of the socket and you just hang passively until your grip starts to get tired. You can do it multiple times. You would be absolutely amazed how good your shoulders will feel from doing that. So full arm strength or full arm locked out. You just completely Yeah. And you just completely So not like this like you were doing before. No, no. Completely relax. Okay. So you just hang just hang and just let the shoulder let the u humors come out of the socket and hang. So is it what is it doing? It's just like relaxing impingements. opens up the joint and gives the humorus more ability to move. Even with the bone spur I have in the shoulder. When I hang regularly, I have zero pain. Whoa, that's crazy. And this guy stopped doing surgery. This is a guy that made his living doing surgery. Now he doesn't advocate show. He says this works better. Wow. This is an orthopedic

87:31board certified orthopedic guy. And he shows the uh quiri study where he did a a study with old folks. I'm telling you, it feels really, really nice. Really, really, really good. So, pull this. Uh, I use this for all my clients. I do a lot of online personal training, fat loss diet programs and such. And, uh, all my guys that have shoulder issues, I get them hanging and Yeah, there he is. Interesting. I'll tell you, Joe, if you having any shoulder stuff going on right now, just start hanging every day, even multiple times. Your shoulders feel good. That's I know it sounds counterintuitive, like it's too simple to be true, but it's one of those things that is true. Well, I had some tears in my shoulder and uh I got uh I was having some pain, so I finally went and got an MRI. Apparently, it had been dislocated and I never even knew it had been dislocated, you know, from jiu-jitsu. I

88:22don't even want to see the damn pictures, you know. And I had a I had a laboral tear. I had a torn biceps tendon. And I had a um what is it? um laboral and rotator cuff. Rotator cuff tear too. You have any uh spurs in there? Any got a bunch of going on in there? Well, and anyone that's played hard boy sports like we have all our lives, you're going to get that Yeah. But I'm telling you, uh what Kur found it didn't matter what the source of the injury was, the relief is profound when you do that daily hanging it. It's just that amazing. Well, why I done what I have done is um get stem cell shots. I got stem cell shots in in the shoulder and it it's incredible. I mean, what did the healing first? I had all this clicking and weird that was going on there. All that went away. Wow. Well, you throw you throw the hangs in there. Yeah, I'm in. I'm in. I'm hanging. I wish I could hang right

89:15now. I'd like to do it right now while we're doing the podcast. I like to hang. I I I need to find some kind of portable device that uh What about one of the ones that goes in front of a door? Like those those ones that you do in a door stop? That'd be great. But, you know, I'd have to buy one in each city and then just dump it. That's annoying. You're committed to this or you were you were saying before that you might be thinking about Maui as a base. Well, I am slowing down just a little bit. You know, I've been what doing this since about 2005, I think. I Well, when I met you, you had a truck. Yeah. I was living in a van, a camper van, and you're like, I can't be bothered with this truck. And I I really liked it. But then I started traveling. What the hell do you do with your your RV, you know? You can't just park it somewhere store it. You got to

89:59find somebody who you like and leave it. Yeah. You got to turn You got to turn the engine over. Uh you got to maintain. You know, mice get inside a lot of these RVs and eat the electrical wiring up and you know, totally destroys your electrical system. Really? Yeah. Abandoned vehicles, uh, you know, if you just sit it, little critters get in there. Wow. Yeah. It's not not uncommon at all. So, what the hell do you do with it? So, I finally just sold it. Talk talking of the power of the internet. I sold my camper van to a guy I had never seen. I was in Germany. He was in um San Diego and the the van was up in uh in uh Seattle. I sold it to him sight unseen. Just sent him pictures. I was very honest. I had a bunch of wrong with it. I told him every single thing that was wrong with it. You know, we agreed on the price. He wired me the money. I mailed him the title and the key because

90:48I traveled with, you know, I kept the key and I I had the title with me. I mailed that to him. He went up and got it and drove it back down to San Diego from Seattle. Wow. The power of the internet, my friend. That's amazing. I put it on Craigslist and uh boom, I got a you know, I had a little a few people bid on it and uh if you would have told me oh even 20 years ago that I' I'd be making a living on the internet, you know. Well, essentially you make a living doing not just seminars, but you do have a lot of online stuff you do. A lot of online stuff. Yeah. Well, once I uh understood the uh um the power of the internet for doing online personal training, uh wow. Well, a lot of people found out about you and me included because of the internet. I mean, I found out about you from researching kettle bell exercises and that's how I got some of your early stuff. Also, I knew about

91:38you because I knew that you were one of the first American Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belts. One of the first. Yeah. Helen Grace is first to be sure. But that um I think there was a bunch there was a couple guys the machados given but I was like that first tier of actual Gracie jiu-jitsu guys and then Han and Master Elio had the uh Gracie instructor training program. They were concerned that you know of of the teaching quality. There was a lot of guys out there teaching that probably shouldn't have been teaching. Yeah. So they wanted they they had a specific educational style like how to teach the moves. And I was the first person to graduate from that instructor training program. It was really good. Well, you I'm sure you're aware now the controversy of uh this Gracie University, the thing that they're doing online. They're doing Yeah. The Suns got a little carried away

92:25with that blue belt. Uh I I'm not real thrilled with that. I'm Well, there's one guy who's giving away brown belts online. Get out of here. Yeah. Do you mean a Grazy? No. No. I don't even want to say his name, but he's a pretty respected guy. And I I read on the underground that he's given away up to brown belt online. How could you possibly respect that? I mean I the only way I would think unless he came and tested physically tested and proved himself. That's what I was going to say. I I have seen guys that have trained pretty much from the internet. I went to Tahiti. I was hired by a group of grapplers to prepare them for the Societ Society Island Championship. It was very popular. Uh, grappling is a traditional sport amongst the Polynesian peoples. And I went to Tahiti. I stayed there three months. I trained these guys for the Society Island Championships. And

93:15the guy that was running it was still a white belt. And he was a prison guard there in Tahiti. Big guy. And uh, unbelievable grappler. He outweighed me probably about about 50 pounds. Yet he was very soft, relaxed, technical. He had never actually had a teacher. He learned it all watching online on the internet. speaking of the power of the internet. Wow. And I love the way he trained with me. He was very respectful even though I was, you know, like 30 years older than him and and much smaller. We had some good training. I I just gave the guy the blue belt right in the spot. Wow. I mean, there's no way that that guy was a white belt. You know, I've done that at different places where people don't have a good instructor where they are underpromoted. And I get on the mat with them. I see what they can do and I see, wow, okay, this guy is underpromoted. He just

94:02hasn't had a chance to have a legitimate guy give him a promotion. I have Who's that guy rolling with? Did he have He had a whole group of uh students and he was the teacher basically because white belt teacher. Wow. Yeah. White belt teacher. And his guys were good. They were really really good. Well, if you just really pay attention to the fundamentals and you really understand the principles behind each individual technique, you can learn a lot online today. You can learn a lot online. But not brown belt. No. I just feel like this I think it's a little you need someone there right there with you. Blue belt almost anyone can get that agree. I mean, I heard a really funny analogy one time from I think one of Carly Gracy's black belts or maybe it was a health guy, but he said basically a white belt is a sperm, you know, just the seed, right? You know, by the time you're four

94:48degree uh white belt, you're like like a little baby that was just born. And then the blue about is like a little toddler, like just a little little kid. Doesn't even know what he doesn't know yet. But by the time you're like a fourderee blue about you're like a child. And then the purple bout is like a teenager. dangerous teenager. Yeah, you're a little, you know, you got the technique, but you just, you know, little They're starting to know that they can do it, too. Purple belts, I feel like, is like some of the most dangerous. That's a dangerous guy because a lot of times he's still using a lot of power, but he got the technique, too. And then, of course, by the time you're a brown belt, you're like a young man. And, you know, basically a brown belt is a black belt in disguise. It's just once you make brown, you're going to make black belt unless you just outright quit. Yeah. and

95:33you know and and then a black belt's like you know a grown man but for me I don't know about you but once I got the black belt I felt like a whole new layer of learning was taking place at that point well you never stop learning in jiu-jitsu as long as your body still works like we're talking about these new moves that are constantly coming out but then you know John Jacqu Machado has this really interesting take on things he said the more you know the less you use the less you use he goes I might know 10,000 and techniques, but to win a match, I might use two. Yeah. Well, Solo said that one time. He says, "Look, I know 30 ways to pass the guard, but I only use two. I have a, you know, backup move A and then back up plan B in case it doesn't work." And I think that's just the way it is, man. Solo game that that intense pressure solid top game. He uses body weight so well. You know, when

96:24I used to train with Solo, he could tap me out on the cross side without even putting a submission hold, just crushing me with his weight. And he's not I mean he's heavy but he's not that heavy, right? He just would rob your breath. It was just the most horrible feeling. It's like being waterboarded or something, man. It was like, oh my god, the intense pressure. He learned to do that, you know. But yeah, uh the I I think for um as far as moves and so forth. Probably one of the most outstanding clinics I've ever witnessed was when Jean Jacqu Mashado was in the second Abu Dhabi. I actually went over to the Arab Emirates and I wanted to support Solo and Her at that time and I couldn't believe the clinic he put on. All closed guard, too. That's another lost art. You don't see too many guys use it. You know, Kron uses a good closed guard, but John Jacques put on a clinic.

97:18Unbelievable, man. He had that super fight with Mario Sperry. I never saw such He almost put Sperry out, man. Yeah. John Jacques is no joke, man. He's always been a beast. He's is really brilliant person too. Like a like as a human being. He's a great guy. On top of being this amazing jiu-jitsu practitioner. He's just a a beautiful human being. And from that closed guard, he only used four basic moves. Triangle, arm lock, um plat uh guillotine, and of course, you know, some sweeps to back it up. That was it. Yeah. And he the way he put them together was like a machine gun attack. Bup. It was like the guy in the guard was working so hard just not to get caught. Never saw anything like it. It was like wow. Just goes to show you that the basics done well. That's all you really need. Yeah. Well, you know, Hixon and Cone, I mean, Cone to this day still just uses the basics.

98:10Unbelievable. I mean, you know, and but that's it sounds derogatory almost like someone like Minotauro once got upset that Vinnie Magal Vinnie Malace was uh talking about his um his jiu-jitsu and he said it's very basic. Mhm. But that's not bad. Basic is not bad at all. Someone said that about me. I'd take it as a compliment personally. You know, basic is is best. Just hone to a razor sharp edge all the basic techniques that you know. I think there's like Hodrick Gracie is another example of that. Another example, one of the best jiu-jitsu artists in the world, but very basic. What year was that where he he won his division and then he tapped everybody in the open division with an X choke from the mount? I don't know. He used that one takedown, that one throw he does. He mounted every single and these were all professional level best black belts in the world. He tapped

98:57every single guy with the basic X choke from the map. Crazy. That's the first thing you learn, right, as a as a uh Yeah. Your first first couple months in jiu-jitsu, you learn basic X choke. The guy tapped the best in the world just doing basic stuff. Well, there's such an advantage in jiu-jitsu to being tall and long. Oh, what a nightmare. It's a giant advantage cuz the tall and long guys have so much leverage. So much leverage. And also the ability to get techniques and lock them up where a short stubby armed person like me just doesn't. My arms don't connect in spots like with dar chokes and things along those lines where you just you can't they have more space like their arm goes deeper. They can. But you'll see people with every type of physique type do well in jiu-jitsu because, you know, speaking like fireplug kind of build. I mean, no one was shorter and stubbier than Solo,

99:46right? Yet he's like one of the most winningest jiu-jitsu guys ever in the world. True. Wow. You know, he just maximized he he adapted the jiu-jitsu to his physique. Well, who's Paul Harz? Another perfect example. Yeah, exactly. Tank. That's the cool thing about the game, you know. It doesn't matter how you're built, big, tall, short, you know, uh whether you carry a little extra weight or you're really skinny, you can adapt this jiu-jitsu to your your own body. So, we were talking about you moving to Maui. Yeah. We got we got off track a little bit, but yeah. Um why why Maui and what what makes you uh Well, you're going to laugh at this because it's not scientific, but but it is. Uh I use an astrologer. This guy is amazing. He used to be a Stanford professor. Can I say his name? Sure. Okay. His name is Robert Cotch. Uh his his website is starcenter.com.

100:34I've been using this guy for a few years. When I first heard about it, I thought, "This is such I'm never going to do this." You know, I the person that turned me on to it was my my girlfriend. And she says, "Listen, man. Just do a reading with this guy. Just do a reading." And I'm saying to her, "You mean you take advice from a guy you've never met and you're going to listen to this guy?" So I gave him my birth date, the time of birth, where I was born. That's it. plus my name. He read my life to me. I was like, "How are you doing this?" Well, maybe he got on Wikipedia maybe. But this was an impromptu call. So, I don't know. All I know is that it's based in mathematics. He believed, you know, like uh the Pythagoreans, you know, they believed everything can be explained in numbers in mathematics. He was a a former uh Stanford professor. He came from academia and he gave it all up

101:25to basic do this basic astrological but even more important he's like an old philosopher he's read all the ancient Greek philosophers and he's also uh have you heard of this mental science mental science mental science basically your your your reality is based on your thoughts and your your current reality is based on the sum total of all your positive negative thoughts thoughts are a vibrational pattern and the vibe you put out is the vibe you attract. So, if you're like a real negative person, always, you know, think saying negative statements and and feeling a lot of negative emotional things, you're probably going to have a pretty shitty life. And if you're thinking like a higher thought, high higher, of course, the highest would be love. That would be the highest vibration. You're going to have good things happen to you. That's the basic, you know, in a nutshell. It's

102:12much more complicated than that. So, like the secret essentially, like the secret, right? Which is a great little book. Well, anyway, uh Robert developed his u his astrological uh uh based on on on mental science as well as uh basic physics. And so anyway, he read my life. He looked at all the places in the world because you know you put off a vibration like like an energy vibration. It can actually be measured, right? your yours would be as identifiable as your fingerprints or you know like an eye reading iridology or whatever and uh there's places on the earth that put off a vibration also and the place that vibes best with me is anywhere in the South Pacific but in particular Maui and he really he really honed it down to the the town uh Lahina did he try to sell you a house there I know the spot 67 Clover Lane yeah there we go man let's go online look at that the house is for Damn.

103:13Damn, Robert, you're amazing. No, but um so anyway, Maui is supposedly the best vibration for for me. For you. For me. So, explain to me how this guy goes about. So, he finds out what your address or what your your date of birth is, what part of the world you're born, what time you were born, and then he has he has some kind of computer program with all his charts and numbers, and he plugs all this stuff in. And then I asked him like,"Well, what is it you're actually looking at the computer?" And it's it says it's just basically he says, "I I can't make exact predictions." He said, "If I could make exact predictions, I'd play the stock market and you know, but I you know, I I can come up with high probability for certain things happening." And also, he he's looking at, you ever hear of the collective consciousness, you know, you have your higher consciousness, you have

104:03your subconscious, but then there's a collective mindset. It's like everyone's emotions and moods and thoughts, right? Right now it's one of fear, you know, everyone's so afraid because, you know, I'm traveling all over the world, so you can literally feel the fear. Right now, Europe is all up in arms because of the terrorist attacks and things and people are really scared with the ISIS and all this. There's like a real fear mentality. The problem is if you give into that fear mentality, you actually create the very thing you're afraid of because you're basically concentrating on them, right? It's like a form of visualization, right? If you're always like it was like the shark thing we were talking about. I probably would create a situation where I'd meet a shark if I went swimming in the ocean cuz you know I I put too much energy into that. Yeah. Me too. Whenever I stick the snorkel the

104:48goggles underneath I'm like where is he? Yeah. Exactly. For you and I, we we would probably possibly actually attract a negative situation like that. Just saying. Okay. But anyway, there is a collective mindset. You you can even feel like different countries have different moods. When I get off the plane, I can actually feel that I'm pretty sensitive to this. Like in Russia, it's real somber, kind of almost depressed. You know, a place like Maui, it's like, "Oh my god, I just feel so happy because they're so lucky. They're in paradise. They're in paradise." Yeah. You know, the mood is much higher. The lowhost spirit, as they say, so he told me that was the single best place. Other places were a place in Alaska. It's a place near u where was it? A little town. I I can't even recall. And then another place was what part of Alaska? Near the coast. On the coast. The coast

105:35is not bad. Like near Anchorage. Yeah, it was near Anchorage. It was a little town just You'd be amazed at how like moderate the climate is, too. Everyone says it's quite nice, though. So, you know, but still Alaska, Turkey, Maui. Alaska, Tur. Uh, I think I'll go to Maui. Yeah, it's not a bad choice. It wasn't a hard choice, you know. Well, it's a very relaxed environment in Maui, too. Like, the place is relaxed. It's a relaxed place to live, you know, as far as like the people that live there. They're really cool and chilled out and totally chill, man. My web master lives there, Chris Crook. Awesome guy. So, I, you know, I always have business to do with him. He's been doing a great job for me. You know, my wife, what if the guy told you you need to live near like oil mines in South Dakota? Would you be like less reluctant or more reluctant rather? That would be

106:22interesting. Oil mines near South Dakota. You know what I'm saying? Like someone that sucks. You live right outside of you like some fracking compound. Yeah, that's an interesting point. I think someone with a really negative mindset might you know be attracted to a place like that. And I try to keep the vibe heavy and I mean uh light and at a higher higher level and uh you know you can attract goodness and abundance and in in your life just like the secret that's a that's a good book for people to start that US Anderson uh was was quite an interesting guy. Yeah. The power of positive thinking for sure is real. I mean for sure there's a lot of good that can be done in your life if you look at things if you have a positive approach. You you can you could look at things in a good way and have those things have positive attributes, have have benefit in in those things or

107:13you could look at the exact same thing, the exact same moment in your life and just decide that this is the end. Life is terrible. You're a loser. And people have these deeply grooved patterns that they've carved out in their consciousness over years and years of approaching different situations um with very similar reactions. And it's almost like automatically like something happens to you. Everything always goes wrong for me. God, my life sucks. I'm such a loser. But if you compared your life to someone who's born in Bangladesh or Ethiopia or some some place where people are like really genuinely unfortunate, they would they'd be laughing at you. They'd be like, "You live in America and you're white and you don't have cancer. Will you just shut the up?" You know, like what's wrong? Example of that would be uh George Castanza's character right on on

108:00Seinfeld. Right. Right. the guy that no matter how good he had it, he always would manage to screw it up somehow and things would always always turn bad. But we've all had the experience, right, of being in a room and someone would come into the room kind of a dark vibe mo and the whole room vibe would go down. Sure. But then we've also had the experience where a guy god would come in who was a real bright positive thinking person and everyone's mood would just that's that collective conscious you got to be so aware of because not every thought that a person has is their own you know it can come from the outside. We don't manufacture all our own thoughts. You can be influenced by negative thinking from other people or positive thinking from other people and you got to start to be very conscious of the kind of thoughts passing through your brain and

108:46reject those those negative thoughts and it's not easy. It's it's like a discipline like working out. It really is and it's also one of the more important aspects about surrounding yourself with positive people. When you surround yourself with positive people, you find them to be inspirational. You get excited. You all think along the similar lines. You support each other and help each other. And it benefits everybody. and you you devel you develop like a real keen sense of like love and community. Whereas if you're around people that are constantly negative, like you're you're in conflict all the time and all the time you're wearing out. You're constantly getting exhausted too by the stress of and I I have a theory in that too and it's not just my theory. I mean it's part of the mental science we were talking about. Um I believe that those people are the ones

109:26that attract all sorts of uh uh degenerative diseases and and and uh you know they bad things happen. Well, it certainly can play a factor, especially stress. You know, stress has been shown to be devastating to your immune system. People that have really stressful lives and don't get enough sleep and are constantly negative and thinking about things. Sleep is more important than diet. You know, people that are overweight, uh, man, I'll tell you, you could be in the best diet in the world and still having a lot a lot of struggle with weight if you're missing your sleep. I've seen that many many times even with my own clients because I do a lot of fat loss programs and you know guys will be eating pretty decent and not losing the weight and then you know I'm looking they're only getting like five and a half six hours a night and they're really stressed you know you

110:11have a tendency to really hold on to water and and and uh your body will hold on to that body fat it's it's hard to to lose. Yeah that is an interesting aspect of a lack of sleep is that your body holds on to fat. It really holds on. And also fluids, you know, what they call false fat. It's it's not even fat. It's just like all this fluid just gets trapped in the tissues. It might as well be fat because it just is unattractive and just is uncomfortable, you know? So, did you bother investigating what this guy is doing about this astrology stuff? Did you bother looking into it or just like listen to him? Well, his his website is quite interesting. His rating list is like fantastic, you know, for people. But what is the astrology itself based on? It's based on the position of the stars, the time you were born. Yeah. Helios, it's a heliocentric. The old

111:00astrology was earth-based because they believed the earth was the center of the universe. He created his own heliocentric, you know, with the sun is the the center. And then it's just basically this guy created his own astrology. He did. How does one do that? How does one create their own astrology? What what I couldn't I could almost and I say almost almost understand how someone could imagine that if you looked at you know thousands of years of data you could figure out that people develop certain personality traits if they were born during certain times and you could sort of try to align those times with the constellations in the sky that are moving and the you know just the way the earth wobbles and where the the stars are in any given moment. That kind of almost makes sense, but this guy doing it on his own. Like, how's he doing that? You know, I don't even pretend to

111:55really understand it. What's No, what sold me? I didn't have to. He said Maui. Yeah. No, I I He said Maui. Uh he did I I didn't have to understand it because he he basically read my life to me like a book. Yeah. It says there's no freaking way that he could have known this information. Like, what kind of stuff could he not have known? Uh just the way my life went, man. You know, like my relationship with my parents and the relationship with my ex-wife and the way my marriage went and the way my marriage dissolved and like, you know, just all sorts of stuff like that. Like sort of like a tarot card reader. Yeah. But a tarot card reader is Yeah. Exactly. And this is not I I don't I've Let's put it this way. He's told me not to do stuff and I've done it and it never has worked out for me, man. Right. But isn't it possible that it one of the reasons why it didn't

112:51work out is because he told you not to do it and that you thought about it and your negative thinking and I had a negative thinking just like we talked about. Yeah. Like uh in the brain all I know is every time I go against him, it does it usually doesn't work out. And when I listen to the guy, right, it almost always works out, right? But this is this sort of contrary. This goes along with what you just said like you're almost not giving yourself advice. You're not following your own advice. You you literally were just talking about thinking about things that thinking like like things are predestined. Right. So this guy has sort of created these scenarios that you shouldn't you shouldn't engage. Here's an interesting thing. Like he's told me something on my chart, right? Uhhuh. And then I'll call him a day or two later and it's completely changed. Your

113:34chart's changed. Yeah. Like something changed. And I says, "Well, wait a second. two days ago you said I shouldn't do this. Now you're saying it's okay. He claims like quantum physics, right? If you change your thought or your vibration level, he actually sees a change on his chart on his computer. What? Yeah. Okay. This makes zero sense. Well, I'll give you another example of how this might work. I had I had this guy that was a uh a bio a professor of uh he was actually a PhD in biochemistry and board certified nutrition. His name was Dr. Gregory Ellis and um he used to take hair samples, right? And he would test these things out for like various deficiencies, this that and the other thing, right? And he he he was into this um uh electric um basically I am attached to that hair forever and as my body would change the hair sample would change even though I was no longer connected to it.

114:35change how it it would no longer show the deficiency when he would retest it. What? I know, man. It's pretty crazy Not buying it. He was a hardcore scientist, man. Ph. Maybe he just had a tumor. That this doesn't make any sense. I just I don't buy that. That doesn't make sense. Like your your physical hair is not going to change. What actually changed? What actually changed? I don't believe it. Well, I I I had trouble believing it myself. But did you see it? Did you know for a fact? Have you read into it? Have you looked at data? Have you seen it tested? You really actually understand the process? Right. But but I knew him not to be a liar. He was I'm sure he's not, but he might just be delusional. See, look, looking at something like that, you're talking about something that defies physics. It defies science. Quantum physics that completely threw physics on its ear. We know that

115:25electron can occupy more than one space, which now opens up the whole door for parallel universes. all sorts of stuff. Stephen Hawkings just recently uh claimed that the black holes are like a door from one uh universe to another. So, there's all this crazy stuff that just put everything on end what we know about physics and medicine and everything else. I believe there's an actual book called vibrational medicine that they actually talk about this. Check out that book. Right. But see, here's the problem. You're not testing subatomic particles when you're testing hair. When you test someone's hair and you're testing hair for various mineral deficiencies and vitamins, those things aren't flying through the air and going back and forth. So if your hair is he was actually he was actually testing it the the vibrational level of the hair. What? Yeah. Like what does that mean?

116:17Like it you know like everything puts off like a like an aura. You can photograph it with curillion photography. You can actually photograph the energy. You know everything has an aura. Even this cup, this table, your body, an aura that you can actually prove, a real aura or an aura that someone who believes in crystals. They've actually taken pictures of it. You've heard of the Corrillian photography? No. How do you spell that? Oh, How do you spell that? Corrillian photography. Corrillian photography. Photography. They actually have taken pictures of this and he he can actually measure right the energy coming off this and it matched me. Well, Jamie's a photographer. Jamie should know about curillian photography. You ever hear about that Jamie? I can't say I've ever heard of it. If you ever try to bang some chick who's really into crystals, I bet she'll talk to you

117:01about it. Yeah. Yeah, man. Check it out. Anyway, that's it's pretty some uh some But listen, it works for me, man. Well, I understand that it probably has its applications. The power of the mind, right? The power of the mind. So, but is it a big giant placebo effect? I don't know. I do know this. In a recent study, they found that placebo drugs work about 40% better than real drugs. What test is this? H there was a there was a thing that I didn't give them placebo mushrooms. I I read a whole they they they were giving people like regular medication you know from pharmaceutical stuff and they found the placeos worked way better. Well for okay for what application though you know what I'm saying like when you say that the placeos worked way better for for pain relief and you know stuff. Well pain relief makes sense because a lot of pain relief you can actually do with your own

117:51mind. I don't take pain pills. I I got knee surgery and I I didn't take a damn thing. I I just I didn't I've just read so many negative side effects of, you know, the ibuprofen and the this kind of stuff. Well, ibuprofen is probably the safest of all of them and it's still not good for you. But my fear was always I just knew too many people that got addicted to pain pills. And I'm like, well, what's what's the worst part about pain? It just doesn't feel good. Well, isn't that just okay? Can you just deal with not feeling good while you heal? Like at least now I know I'm in pain because I'm healing. An awful lot of pain is you know a a mind thing like how you approach the signal. Yeah. Like uh that that back pain guy U Stu Miguel. Yeah. But also that Steuart McGo they they were looking at X-rays of people's backs and you know people with chronic back pain a lot of times would not have

118:44any physical reason to be in back back pain right and then they were looking at you know um pictures of guys that were active like us and their backs are a mess all sorts of slip distance and the guys are not in any pain at all I must be afraid to look at an X-ray of my back you know. Yeah right they they tell you to feel bad if anybody Yeah. Right. If anybody would have a messed up back, it got to be me. All the falls and throws I've taken over, you know, 45 years of wrestling in jiu-jitsu. Little tiny micro injuries constantly. But yet, I'm not in any pain at all. Yeah. Well, pain is an interesting thing in that I think the mind can regulate pain. So it well that's what I meant by the by the pharmacy but it doesn't make sense with other applications where we you know we find like anti-epileptic medications or things along those lines where you you

119:31just know for a fact there's a physical effect on the body that these drugs have and that they don't understand placebo effect. You know that's one thing for sure. They they know that placebo effect is real and it does work in certain circumstances. Really really the power of the mind. Well, especially dependent upon who is receiving that effect and you know how much the person believes in that this thing is going to heal them and if people you know uh what I find a lot of people are really into the body but they're not really working with their mind or their thoughts or or anything like that you know it takes a lot of discipline. It does, but it also you really have to clearly establish what's woo woo, what's nutty, crazy crystal and what is an applicable modality. Like what is what what can you really do as far as meditation, as far as things that are

120:21repeatable, things that people have shown to have a beneficial effect on your consciousness, a beneficial effect on the way you approach life and um and and that is pretty much individual. It is. You know, you really have to, like you say, do self experimentation. Like the one I just talked about might sound pretty damn weird to a lot of people, but so far it's been working for me. Well, as long as it works, and I feel good about it. Yeah. And I don't feel it it it diminishes my life in any way. No one's taking advantage of me. Uh, you know, um I I feel like confident and and really good about the this the type of information I'm getting. And I and I found it work. And like you say, power of the mind. Well, if you if you just approach it on that level, if you say, "Okay, this guy's going to give me advice and I'm going to find this advice to be beneficial and I'm going to follow

121:11through with it and I'm going to use that as a guideline and I'm going to have good confidence in that these choices are going to be correct because of this guy and his knowledge." And it my problem is I've just I've seen too much And so I ju I'm whatever beliefs I might have had like even six years ago before I started this podcast, a lot of them have eroded just under scrutiny. Just understand. Yeah. No, I hear you. I always advise people give the guy a call. The first session is free. If you think he's a crackpot, never call him again. Yeah. But I mean, what I would want to do, my problem with someone like that is I want I would want to go down the rabbit hole. I would want to find out, okay, how are you making these distinctions? Like what what how did you devise this method? What's going on behind the scenes? What do you base this on? How do you know? What are you

121:55saying? Like, what are you saying? When you tell someone, "Hey, don't take that flight to Germany because something bad's going to happen." Like, who the are you? How do you know that? You don't know that. And that's the re the reality is you tell someone don't do something. If you tell someone, "Hey, Steve, I really don't think you should go to Florida. Oh, The guy says I shouldn't go to Florida." You're already starting a cascade of negative thoughts. And that to me, well, that is a very good point. And I have thought about that, you know. Yeah. Well, there's not a person in the world that can tell you that uh if you uh pick up your car keys and drive your car to Minnesota, something's going to go wrong. So, if this guy's telling you that, I call Not only do I call but I think that that kind of stuff is kind of dangerous because you what what he's looking at is

122:37like, you know, we're really influenced by the collective a lot, you know, like people's general moods and so forth. He gives me like a little heads up. He's able to see that. How so? It helps me. Like if I want to do a seminar on a certain date and he'll look at the charts and he'll just say, "Ah, energyy's pretty off that." Okay, but what does that mean? The energyy's pretty off and looking at the charts. What does that mean? What does that mean by looking at He can kind of predict that I might be tired. I I don't know. I haven't seen these charts, but I hear him clicking in the background of the computer. That guy's on Facebook. He's He's looking at pictures. He's going on you porn. He's checking out girls ass. Just give him a call. I mean, no way. It's free. Yeah. I don't care. I've got Time is not Time is valuable. I just I don't think there's a guy in the world

123:18that can look at a chart and tell you where the energy of the world is. I think there is, man. Really? I've experienced it. So, you think that this guy can look at a chart? I do know you. Yeah. That's why I'm questioning this. You're a little wacky guy who lives out of a suitcase. Yeah, maybe that's enough to I think you're a beautiful, brilliant man. But if I was your friend, and I was I am your friend, but if I was there while this was going down, I would be asking this guy a fuckload of questions. I do find he's uh a really good guy to talk to about stuff too. He's almost like u kind of like a psychologist or psychiatrist in a way is like in ancient times the scientists were philosophers and all the great even Alexander the Great and you know uh all all the great Roman emperors you know uh they would have their own private philosophers to advise them on on things Marcus Aurelius

124:09for example and they would listen to these philosophers. I kind of look at this guy almost as a a philosopher. As an adviser as an adviser and I listen I can buy that I haven't always taken I have gone against the guy like in what way? I just didn't listen to what he said. You know how he gave my advice. Don't do the seminar this weekend. Why would he tell you not to do a seminar? This is It would be a better day to do it on this day. Oh Why? You know voodoo. Cuz you threw some chicken bones in the ground and one of the sticks was pointing south. I have done I have done it and it would be not such a good one. Maybe it's because he told you that it was going to be a bad one and you had it in your head then you went and did it. Maybe. Has he ever told you not to do something you did and it worked out awesome? No. That's what made me think. Well, it's because you're

124:56thinking about it. I mean, this is what we talked about with negative thoughts. Maybe. Maybe more likely than a chart that they can tell you the energy of the universe doesn't want you to fly to Miami. That's crazy. There's some pretty brilliant guys out there that that know stuff that we don't, man. Um, yes, there's definitely some brilliant guys out there that know stuff that we know. But this one guy that's got a computer that can tap into the collective energy of the universe and tell you where the where the energy is and what you should definitely not go to Ohio. I've looked at your charts. you. That's what I'd say to that guy. you. you, crazy man. Haven't you ever gone and done a set in your show and it just kind of bombed? You know, it just didn't work out that well. If anything ever went wrong, there are a bunch of reasons why it went wrong and I

125:45could look at all of them. I could say maybe I was tired, maybe I was overworked, maybe I didn't prepare well enough, maybe I have new material that's not worked out, but it's not because I shouldn't have gone to Ohio. You know what I'm saying? It's not because some guy shows me a chart and the collective energy of the universe is off. But but just maybe there are people, this guy in particular, that could potentially, right, have seen that for sure. What the the set going back, but wouldn't you want to have a a meth hold on a second because this is very important. Wouldn't you want to have a method that you would clearly understand how this guy's making these arbitrary decisions and choices? Cuz you're you're talking about You're talking about like voodoo. All right? And if you're talking about if it's not then it's science. So if it's science, it's repeatable and you should bring it to

126:36people that are experts and they should analyze it and study it. But for this guy to just sit there and click on some things and tell you don't go to Ohio, that's Well, all I can say is it's worked for me so far. The proof is in the pudding as far as I'm concerned. Okay. If you your mind decides that something will work out well and you have full confidence and your plane doesn't get hit by a meteor and everybody gets out alive and at the end of the the the seminar or the end of the the trip that you took, you say, "Hey, that guy's advice really turned out well. It really did." What you've do you've done is you basically give yourself a little mental shield to go into battle with. Well, there we go. Well, that's what it is. But it's not real. Do you know what I'm saying? You can have that mental shield, isn't it, though? Well, it is. It is real. It is in the sense that it was effective

127:23because you had confidence in it and because you approached all these events like you had confidence in it. But is it real in that there's a guy who actually can look at a computer and tell you whether or not you should go somewhere based on the energy of the universe? No. No, that's not real. It's definitely not real. I will tell you with 100% confidence that's not real. Do you know how I know it's not real? Because there are millions of brilliant people out there, millions of scientists and and you talk about quantum physicists and theorists and all these different people, they would have heard of this. If you're talking about a guy who's making a computer program, they would analyze this. It would be something that people would be talking about. If this guy really believes it, he wouldn't just be holding on to it in Maui. He would be telling the world, listen, there is a

128:04way where you can accurately predict events. There is a way. And he it would be up to peer review. People would be studying it. They would be putting out papers on it. It would be something we would understand. We have figured out a code whether it's like the Fibonacci sequence or something like that. A code to the universe and if you follow this code you have predictable repeatable uh events. How do we know that though that there aren't a lot of people doing it? This is the problem. This is a problem. This phrasing that you're using, how do we know? It could be. It could be it. That's not enough to base your life and any decisions. And this woo woo that comes along with tarot card reading, with palm reading, with all that stuff. It's all the same. And it's all one person telling you. First of all, he's telling you stuff you already knew about your life. Okay? This is the

128:50strategy of charlatans. I mean, this is what tarot card readers do and palm readers do and fortune tellers do. They tell you they are that you already know and they tell you it through leading questions and they tell you it through a bunch of signs that they can tell from being really good at reading people. Then they go on to tell you what's going to happen or what you should and shouldn't do. And in doing that, you can plant some thoughts and seeds of doubts into people's head. This is the reason why people used to think that someone could put a hex on you. Because if I put a hex on you and you believe I put a hex on you and you leave this room and you're like, I am Joe just put a hex on me. And you run around in life, that will be overwhelming your thoughts. And if you allow that to happen, it will be true. You you can manifest bad things by having bad energy and bad ideas. This is

129:41exactly what you were talking about earlier, but this is done through like a strategy and in a in a repeatable pattern. Well, all I can say is maybe it works. Maybe it works. Come on, man. This is crazy talk. Nah, not as crazy as you think. Um, it's definitely crazy. Okay. Well, I'm I'm certified crazy. Well, it's just if if there's a method to it. Like, if this guy says, "Oh, here's the reason why." The reason why is, you know, there's a like the golden sequence of the universe, and you can tap that golden sequence into a computer, and it's based upon all these different factors. If that guy has information like that and he's he's just holding on to it in Maui or wherever the he is and he's no he travels like I do. Yeah. He's he's kind of a a no man. By the way, someone who went to Stanford and he's a professor. It doesn't exclude them from being out of their

130:31mind. Dr. Oz is on TV and he's telling people about weight loss medication. That's a miracle. And that guy had to go to Congress about it. Guess what? He's still on TV. The guy's on TV telling people about miracle weight loss berries. Crazy It's He's a He's a charlatan, right? Tons and tons and tons of guys out there selling, you know, this this this kind of stuff. As you know, I'm pretty much an anti-supplement guy, you know? I just Well, you used to take a lot of them and then you $320 worth of supplements a month and I didn't notice a damn thing when I stopped taking all that Not one thing. In fact, I felt better. Felt better. That's interesting. And and you know, once again, you know, a lot of this is placebo. You know, there is some that's placebo effect, but there's also some that's been proven by science to have beneficial effects on a lot of

131:19different factors. But, you know, you're a guy who's a healthy, active guy who's constantly eating correctly and you don't allow yourself extremely strict with the diet, you know, how do you do that on the road? Like when you when you're in in these different places and like say if you're traveling to countries and you might not even speak the language, how do you make sure that you get the right food? Well, I try to always keep the quality as best I can, but as you know, being a frequent traveler yourself, you know, you can't always get the best quality stuff. Talking about placebo effect, I won't let it get me bummed out. I I won't start thinking negative thoughts. Let's say, for example, I have to eat uh oh, I don't know, a bag of pretzels or something. I believe I can sublimate any ill effect of that food, you know, just just by being grateful just by

132:08visualizing my body being able to respond well to the food. It's just calories, you know. I see myself digesting it and assimilating it and I won't let it negative negatively affect me. You just look at it as raw calories. Yeah, it's just raw calories, you know. So, it's some starch. It's not the best stuff in the world. It's not like I'm going to be eating that as a habit, right? And I I'll I'll be fine because you can work yourself up into like a, you know, a real negative thing. I'm gonna give you an example. When I was younger, I had a friend that was u uh taught me a lot about higher mind science. And uh we were in a restaurant one time together, and this is I guess maybe in the late 70s. And there's a guy smoking. This is when people could still smoke. And uh this guy's blowing the smoke on me, and I'm getting madder by the minute. It's really pissing me off.

132:54So, I asked the guy if he would, you know, if he would please not blow a smoke over to me. And the guy started doing it even more. And I I wanted to punch the guy right in the face. And uh I'm looking at my friend Tim and he's totally relaxed, you know, about the whole thing. And I says, "Doesn't that bother you? Doesn't that really aggravate you?" He says, "Steve, you're getting yourself all worked up." He said, "I can supplement the the bad effects of the smoke by not letting it get to me." He says, "All those negative emotions and the anger and upset you're feeling are 10 times worse than any amount of cigarette smoke blowing on you." He says, "You're actually doing harm by the way you're thinking about it as opposed to the actual harm the smoke's doing." And wow, that blew me away. And I'm seeing him so relaxed. And I started thinking, well, that's probably everything in life. So, I

133:43started looking at food the same way. You know, if you if you eat something that maybe, you know, isn't the best quality because there's just no other thing available, well, so what? You'll be fine. You know, you just go back to eating a really really, you know, good quality stuff after that. It's what you do most of the time is is the key, you know, not what happens upon occasion. But I will say this, as a as a full-time traveler, I will pack my own food as much as I can. I always carry like a little grocery bag. Yeah. I was following your Instagram and uh your girlfriend got her food confiscated at GSA. What did they confiscate? Uh a lot of times you can't take anything that looks a little liquidy through the security. Sometimes they'll grab fruit, you know, like going from Maui back to the mainland, all the fruit and stuff, any fresh produce they won't they'll

134:35take. Uh for example, I had a salad, right? Uh, the lettuce was fine, but they wanted the tomatoes and the cucumbers off the That wouldn't pass. What? Yeah. The Department of Agriculture guy, speaking of voodoo, right? It was just the craziest thing. Did they ask Did you ask why? I did, but you know, he had no real firm. They never have an explanation for any of this stuff. It's just banned or what? I don't know. Well, certain flies, fruit flies, I guess. Well, they're attracted to liquid be attracted to the to the stuff. But uh yeah, usually I don't have too much trouble getting stuff through. And it's funny, some countries are so amazingly lax. Like where was it's Australia, you can take liquids through the security. You can? Yeah, you can take water and all sorts of stuff, but you can't take a dog to Australia. Did you see what happened with Johnny Depp?

135:23Johnny Depp Johnny Depp and his girlfriend. He's still in trouble with that. Did you see his video that he made? I haven't seen it, but it's hilarious. It must be really funny. It's hilarious because he mocked serious talked through his video. Like, you know, he's an actor, so he made it look like he was being serious, but did so in a way where it's pretty obvious to anyone watching that it wasn't serious. Like, it was so subtle that one of the politicians, one of the main people in Australia, actually had a comment on it. You know, how it's pretty obvious that he wasn't taking it seriously. He made this video. It's really weird what will go through security and what won't. Yeah. For example, in China, they were absolutely scrupulous. I couldn't believe how good this girl was in that screen. She got all my little secret I like, you know, because I do all carry-on now. I don't check bags

136:13anymore. Um, I had a little key that's actually a knife. It opened up into a little knife because you do need a blade, you know, to, you know, you always could use a blade no matter where you are to cut stuff or whatever. You just always have a need for it. She found that key. I don't even know how the hell she knew that that was a knife. They um I carry like little survival tools with me. I have like a little flint steel fire starter sometimes. When are you starting fire? The zombie apocalypse, dude. I Does that ever come up? Does your astrologer tell you that you need to carry that around? Yeah, but I watch The Walking Dead. There's a, you know, fear of the Walking Dead. Speaking of, you know, creating a mental, you know, but I also have like one of those little drinking straws. Well, you know, I'm in a lot of filter. Yeah. U you can actually drink uh 250.

137:03Yeah. Well, you know, when I saw that um remember the tsunami that hit Valley, that resort, you know, I'm in places like that, right? And I just figure better safe than sorry. Yeah. I I do believe that you know this my astrologer will keep me safe from these things but but let's just say we would have a situation where the water would be really shitty like I've been in like places like U Novacy Beers Russia dude that's like in the middle of absolute nowhere you know if there would be any kind of natural disaster or something at least I know I can drink right right and you know I have like a little thing I can make fire I mean you never know plane go down and I'm surviving in the Andes or something. Have you ever made a fire with one of those things? Yeah, I have actually. Really? I practiced. Yeah, I just wanted to see if I could do it. Do you bring kindling with you as

137:49well? Well, you Yeah, you get, you know, there's like a whole little art to doing uh fire from. It's fun to try those. They call them earth skills or, you know, ancient ancient uh skills. Well, a lot of people bring like steel wool or something like that. Steel wool with batteries works really good. I also have a little magnifying glass thing I travel with. I always have a compass, you know. You bring a compass? Well, you know, as old school, I I learned how to use a map encompass when I was a kid. As a boy scout, you do uh orientering, right? So, I knew how to do the uh the knots, you know, my little thing. So, when you're going to these places, like say if some you get an offer to go to some strange place in Siberia. Are you reluctant to take any of these or you just like anybody wants to do a seminar, I'm open for the journey. I'm pretty much open for the journey. I like to go to

138:34different places, you know, but in China this last time, my god, they were taking my freaking nail clippers. They want nail clippers. They found that little key. They took my little fire starter. How she even knew what that was? I have no clue. They must be well trained cuz she nailed me for everything, man. Wow. You get in trouble when they nail you for that stuff. They just take it because none of it could be uh considered a weapon. However, I was arrested in Switzerland one time. I had been traveling by train. I had one of those uh Gerber um or was it Cold Steel? It it was like a knife that was spring assisted. Rock climbers use it because you know if you're rock climbing and your harness gets tangled, you may have to you have to hold on to cut yourself free from your harness, right? So you need a knife you can easily open up with one hand, right? So I just liked it. It

139:24was a great little knife. And uh I had been traveling by train and had it in my little car my little man purse carry-on thing and forgot about the damn thing. Ooh. So it went through and they pulled me aside and they they they pulled that knife out there and I was like, "Oh shit." And they said in Switzerland, a assisted opening knife is considered a weapon. And the police took me back. I sat there. I almost missed my plan. They, you know, they they obviously were, you know, going on Interpole and, you know, doing all this to find out who I was and what I'm doing with this knife. Wow. To add insult to injury, I also had like a little credit card thing that also had like a little teeny blade in it. It was like one of those u multi-tools in the shape of a credit card. So, they found two blades in my freaking carry-on. I could have got away with a credit card because they wouldn't

140:18have even looked at that. But once they found one thing, they tore my apart, man. They looked at everything and oh my god. But it's weird, you know, like Australia, China, you don't even have to take off your shoes. And most places you don't have to take off your shoes, but US you still do. But you know, fingernail clippers, all that stuff goes through. Even small, even small knives, you know, they don't even bat an eyelash. Multi-tool you can take through TSA, but they're looking for stuff like liquid and, you know, any kind of shoes, uh, electronics a lot of times. I saw them this past time, uh, making them uh, making people prove that their computers could turn on. I saw a number of that uh cuz you know that one dude tried to slip a bomb through u the in a laptop. Yeah. And recently have you traveled lately? Mhm. Uh did you find the security lines were like crazy

141:06internationally? You mean or local? No. Just even within the US seems normal. It's always it's always and now it was ridiculous and LAX was absolutely awful. Uh that that lady got through security and actually boarded a plane with no credentials or boarding pass. When did this happen? Uh this just it was just I read like uh Bing News. I usually read the I don't like to read the actual news because it's always talk about negative mindset. I just look at the headlines just to see like just give me a clue like what's going on. What should I be scared of? What new virus? Well, yeah. I never read that But I do like to read travel stuff just to see like what the latest and greatest is, you know? And uh anyway, there was a new it hit international news. Yeah, there we go. She actually went got the whole way through and the word came down because TSA was already under fire basically

141:57just for being incompetent. So, uh they anyway this woman got through and now all of a sudden now this will be going on for the next month or two. They're just oh my god it's the travel is so delayed. That's interesting because I've been traveling a lot. It seems totally normal. It always sucks. Well, I I usually go pre uh th this last time I took the budget uh Spirit Airlines. They don't have any uh contract with TSA, so everybody goes through like the long ass security lines. But one of the best things I ever did, I I did Global Entry and I I can just walk through like a freaking rockstar when I come into, you know, JF. Yeah, Global Entry is nice. Oh my god, it's so nice. But along with it, you get the pre. And I usually fly business or first class these days, especially for the really long flights. Man, that pre is so nice. You know, no shoes off. U

142:47don't have to take off your your your jacket. Uh yeah, it's interesting how that's like changed, you know, how that's changed over the course of our lives. You know, it used to be you didn't even have to have an ID to get a plane, get on a plane. You used to just hand them the ticket and you could give a ticket to a friend. That friend could go on the plane instead of you. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that was the old days. The old days, man. You could just drive through Canada, no problem. You know, come back. I mean, it was none of that kind of stuff. So, this astrologer told you to move to Maui. Are you going to Are you going to follow his advice? You going to go there? I'm going to uh I'm I'm setting up u a little home base to work out of. I I'll still travel somewhat and do some uh seminars, but I'm going to set up a shop in in Maui. Yeah. Cuz I was thinking for a guy like

143:30you, a lot of people would come to you. Like it might not be a bad idea to just Well, Maui would be a damn nice place to attract, right? Yeah. And not only that, but you could set up seminars uh on a weekly basis and do them literally from the comfort of your own home. You could just have a program where you run people out of Malibu and make a great living or Maui rather and uh and go back and forth if you so choose. You could kind of go anywhere. If you did do that and you could establish your own gymnasium and like have like a real gym there, would you start changing your own training because I know a lot of what you're doing now is mostly I probably go back go back to like some of the things that I really really enjoy, you know, like what? Uh I I like the clubs. I like club swinging. I like swinging the light clubs, you know, just as a mobility thing. It makes my elbows and shoulders

144:18and wrists feel good. You know what I'm talking about? The little onepound Indian clubs. I used to be the wooden ones. Yeah. I used to be quite the expert. You know, I actually learned that as a physical education major in college. Really? As a freshman, uh, as all PE majors had to learn the basic old school physical culture systems, and one of those was the old, uh, wooden club system back in the day, huh? Yeah, that was uh, 1970 when I went through the uh, school of health and physical education at Westchester. That's interesting that now 40 plus years later, those sort of training modalities are coming back. Well, yeah. Well, so old is new, right? Yeah, that's Well, kettle bells is a perfect example of that, right? Perfect example. They, you know, that was an old school training tool. Um, and they came from Germany, by the way, not not Russia really. Yeah. The Germans were the ones

145:02that actually established they called them ring weights in those days. And a lot of the old German strong men used them and it looked the same like a cannonball with a handle. Uh, kind of. Some There was a lot of really weird designs. Some of them really like circle just on a cannonball, you know? I mean, they used to use real heavy ones in the rack. A lot of them were hollow and you would unscrew it and they would put weight inside and screw it back on. That was kind of interesting. Oh, so you could adjust it? Yeah. Like adjustable weights and so forth. If you had your own gym and you you could li do whatever you want and lift weights and you know what would you like how would you set it up? Would you do like standard like Olympic style weightlifting type exercises? I've never been a real fan of Olympic weightlifting. I don't believe that it's the most efficient way to

145:48train athletes. There's an awful lot of NCAA uh uh strength coaches and um uh NFL strength coaches are shying more and more away from the Olympic lift. They're finding their athletes just getting too busted up and hurt. You know, even just doing a front squat. Why would I risk a million-doll athlete, you know, to teach them the, you know, Olympic lifting is a hell of a sport. I mean, it takes a lot of coordination to do Olympic lifts. Yes. And as you well know, one sport doesn't make you better at another sport, right? It really doesn't. It just causes motor learning confusion. There's no doubt that Olympic weightlifterss are incredible specimens. They're strong. They're fast. They're explosive. But it doesn't follow that doing Olympic lifting will make you stronger and more explosive than fast. It's like self- selective. The guys that already have those attributes do well at Olympic

146:38weightlifting. So, if I take a slow twitch wonder and give him Olympic lifting, I can't selectively recruit those fast twitch muscle favors and make him a a fast twitch guy. I'm probably just going to get him hurt. If I was a wrestling coach or MMA coach or a football coach, I want to be spending most my athletes time out practicing the skills of the sport. That's the most important thing, the skill of the sport. And most of your sports specific conditioning comes from the practice of the sport itself. Aside from that, I want a general strength training program to make his skeletal muscles as strong as humanly possible. So, I'm going to use modalities to do that. And the idea is to keep it as as as safe as possible. And I see Olympic lifting is pretty dogone dangerous. I've seen a lot of guys bust themselves up, hurting themselves, you know, trying to

147:31do it. So, I'm not a big fan. So, you're saying motor learning confusion. Is that what the the term you use? Yeah. Like sometimes people think that a power clean is like the snap uh finish off a double a pickup throw something, but it's a completely different skill set. One isn't going to make you better at doing the other. Do you think though that strengthening your muscles and having more explosion and more the ability to close the distance quicker from box jumps and sprints and things along those lines can directly translate to things like martial arts? Like I I don't think so. It's very specific. Yeah, doing a box jump is a whole lot different than shooting a double leg throw, right? Way different. The best way to get guys really explosive at doing that is just do those things over and over and over again and get really good at it. That's very controversial,

148:17isn't it? Oh, yeah. There's uh there's many guys that uh talk like me. There's just as many guys that would argue to the death the other way, right? But I've done both. You know, as a young boy, I learned Olympic weightlifting from the last Olympic world champion, Robert Bernarkski. My dad used to take me down to York, Pennsylvania, when the United States was still the mecca for Olympic lifting. And I actually learned Olympic lifting down there at the old York gym. Wow. Yeah. And I used to lift in my basement. But what I found even when I was just in high school as a wrestler, that it wasn't really helping that much. And even then I just sensed like a real danger to my body. Mhm. And wrestling is a tough sport as it is. Right. What your your training should prevent injuries. If a person needs to foam roll and do massages and is hurting themselves in their supplementary training, there's

149:14something wrong. If it's really a good training modality, it should pre prevent injuries, not cause. So, I I'm a firm believer in getting rid of all of the of the dangerous stuff out of your training because you know what we do, you know, martial arts is dangerous enough as it is. That's really controversial though. I mean, there's a lot of like high level strength and conditioning coaches that think that strength training and power training and things along those lines actually improve all of your skills, your skills as a martial artist. I've been strength training for 53 years. I didn't find that myself. Right. But based on your own body in your own life, right? Yeah. But also with clients, remember, I've trained literally hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of people over the years. I didn't find a good correlation. It's just interesting because in was it men's

150:04journal, there was just an article by a guy who is like one of the leading uh experts in speed training. and he he found that the thing that correlates most to your ability to run fast like in a sprint uh was the trap bar deadlift. He tried leg presses, cleans, front squats, all this stuff. The thing that had the greatest transfer into um improving your your your ability to sprint was the trap bar deadlift. Why is that? uh just the way it positions the hips and the way that the weight is centered, you know, like instead of out in front of you where there's a lot of spinal shearing, the your hands are at your side. So, it's like you're almost inside the weight. Yes. Uh and the the way you hinge out in that trap bar deadlift. I'm a big fan of that that type of deadlift. That's the only way I do them now. They always felt just intuitively like such a damn good

150:59exercise. Well, anyway, it was just in this month's issue. uh I think it was men's journal. My only fel feeling on trap bar deadlifts is I always felt like I didn't get deep enough because the 45 pound plates were so large. Well, he he was saying that it's not necessarily get that much range of motion for for sprinting, you know, because your legs aren't really bent that much anyway. But there's a lot of strength uh and and speed coaches like really well-known guys. They're now going against power cleans, front squats, and all that. Joe DeFranco is really famous strength coach. He he he won't risk the uh injury to his athletes anymore with this stuff. He's finding guys who are messing up their elbows, their wrists, their fingers. I mean, if if you have a guy that's like, you know, top level into doublea, you know, u you know, wide receiver or something, you do not want

151:46to use risky modalities and risk hurting this guy because what they do as an athlete is risky enough. you know, out there, the way they run and sprint and cut and, you know, so forth, the kind of collisions that they have. You want to make that training as safe as possible. You want to make it as general as possible so they get as, you know, as much strength transfer. It doesn't have to be fancy exercises. You know, basically squat, hinge, push, pull, horizontal and vertical, some type of rotation or anti-rotation. And then work the ancillary muscles of the neck, the fingers, the hands, the forearms, the grip, and obviously the feet, calves, and ankles are really neglected in a lot of people's training. Weak feet, weak ankles, and weak calves. A lot of guys leave that out. And of course, the neck, man. I You know how many guys I know that don't train their neck. It's crazy,

152:36man. Even your jaw, you know, I can remember watching Muhammad Ali, uh, you know, the old videos, you know, they do like these little snippets of his training. He used to do a lot of jaw training. He had this really cool thing where he would take like a sling and hook it onto a uh you know like a pull down and then he would open his jaw against the resistance. I thought that is freaking brilliant dude to strengthen the muscles of the jaw because you know it's a well-known fact that if your jaw is stronger u there's a lot less chance of knockout. Yeah. A lot of guys used to chew beef jerky just to strengthen their jaw. They used to chew bubble gum all the time because you know how your jaw gets tired when you have bubble gum and it gets the bubble gum gets old and you just keep chewing on it and they would do that to keep their jaw strong. You know it's funny they show you remember

153:21when we brought up the um Alexander's ass with the teeth lifting with that beam. I used to actually have a mouthpiece and do teeth lifting when I was a kid. Really? Yeah. It was uh it was very popular back in the 60s. You know teeth lifting for your neck and your jaws. I used to lift my little sister up. She used to lay down and I put like a little sling and I I do the neck work with my What are you feeling on those like neck harnesses with the chains? Fantastic. You like those? Yeah. Yeah. But you know that's controversial too because my trainer hates them. Uh you have to be careful and some of them are really crappy design man. They hurt your ears and you know I already have qualifier ears. I don't need to make it any worse. But uh they can be good. I think one of the best things ever invented were was the old Nautilus four-way neck machine. That was a damn

154:05good piece of equipment. And later the hammer strength four-way neck. See those things? That's like Kelly Starret. I talked to him about those things. Those neck machines and he's like, "Those are terrible for you." Yeah. That's man. Really? Yeah. How do I know who to believe? Yeah. Well, you got to try it yourself. I I tell people to experiment. But you know what works really well that I don't think would be too controversial for anyone? Neck isometrics. Yeah. You showed me those with a belt. They are fantastic. You know, Hixon used to do a lot of neck isometrics. He used to use that rubber band and then he would well he would walk back and just hold it. Yeah. You know, it's almost like someone tried to pull you down into a front headlock or a front guillotine. Yeah. And then, you know, you go from the with it on your forehead and on your side and you develop tremendous stability. I

154:50don't think you know the other stuff I could see where it could be controversial because it all comes back to your technique, your form. You know, if you're an idiot and you're using a lot of momentum and you know, you're you're you're you're using poor technique, I can see where you can really mess your neck up. But isometrics, they're pretty safe. Okay. But excluding isometrics, those neck machines, like moving your neck with those neck mach neck machines, where do you think the problems lie? You think the problems lie in people using momentum too much? Too much weight, too much momentum, and not using good form. I mean, okay, we know that you can get really strong and really fit using shitty technique and form, right? You see it all over the gym. You see huge guys, really muscular dudes just throwing the crap out of the weights. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the

155:35best way to go, right? Many of those guys don't stand the test of time. Remember earlier I was saying, you know, anyone under 60 h if they haven't passed over, of course, that's pretty convenient for me now, right? Saw you smiling there. But no, seriously, if you haven't been to the other side, there's a lot of stuff that I did in my early days, no way that I would advocate that stuff now, man. Right. But I was always a firm believer in working the neck. And I use neck harnesses successfully using really good strict form, not necessarily heavy weight. If you put yourself in a biomechanically in efficient position, you can really work those muscles really hard with very very safe. Now, when you talk about neck those uh neck harnesses and you lift your neck up and you can lie on uh a bench and put a plate on your head and lift your head up. Uh what about side to side movements? You can

156:28also do it on the side. Mhm. And you're you're cool with those. Yeah. Another one. Well, remember too in in in violent context sports, someone's going to put your neck in some pretty weird positions whether you want them to or not. So, you got to kind of endure yourself to, you know, uh those those basic positions. And what kind of repetitions are you talking about when you're doing neck exercises? Pretty high reps. I always like Well, it depends on the speed of movement, too, you know? I mean, like I I I like a slow high tension speed of movement to really fatigue the muscles. So, it just depends how fast you're actually slow. Usually, I go by Tom under load. So, somewhere between a minute to 90 seconds, Tom underload is good for the entire set. Yeah. For the set. Like a 90 second uh set. One of the things I've gotten into over the last year or so is uh long negatives. Like I

157:15like long negatives. Exploding on the initial movement, the power of the out movement. Like say if I do a chin up, exploding up and then a very slow, maybe like four times as long, maybe even more more than that on the way down. They give emphasized training. Yeah, it can be very very good. It's it's been used for a while. One of the big proponents of that type of training was the famous Mike Menser, the only guy ever to beat Arnold Squashgger. We're talking about bodybuilding now. And it's real interesting because Mike used to use these very intense brief uh exercises. The year he beat Arnold in the uh in the Mr. Universe show, uh Mike was only training about 90 minutes a week and Arnold was training about 26 hours a week. How is that possible? Because of the highintensity training. 90 minutes a week. Yeah. He was very much into uh highintensity training like 30-minute

158:04workouts. his disciple Dorian Yates. But that's three 30 minute workouts a week. That's right. Go check him out. He he has a whole website called Heavy Duty. Uh he was a real pioneer in the uh high tension. Uh he used a lot of negatives. Oh, for the he was doing a lot of experimentation with isometrics towards the end. That's that's crazy though that he could do just 90 minutes a week. And of course they're all using steroids, you know, obviously, you know, so that's with you know that's helps. Yeah, that's without a given. But you know, people can't say it was just the steroids because Arnold was using steroids, too. Um, we were talking about Pavle before the podcast. Pavle Tatsuene is how you say Tatsuline. Um, and he is a proponent of low reps of doing things like under five reps. Five reps or under. Well, remember his sport is his strength. That's what he does. He's not a fighter.

158:57He's not a martial artist. He's not an athlete. His sport is weightlifting. If your goal is to lift as much weight as you can, his system works extremely well because that is the sport. Right. If you're an athlete and you want to use strength training to better you in your sport, the majority of your time should be spent doing your sport. Right. Right. So you the the amount of weight isn't the most important thing necessarily because an athlete is not a strength specialist. So once you can deadlift or press a certain amount of weight, it's it's pretty much you're going to get diminishing returns. I mean, how how strong do you need to be, right? You know, in a weight class sport, I mean, if you're if you're able to do a double body weight deadlift, how much stronger do you need to be, right? In order to get stronger, you're going to have to specialize, but that's going to take me

159:48away from the skills of my sport. And also, a lot of the uh low repetition stuff, you know, that's comes from the field of of of weightlifting. There's no doubt it's it's a strong dude, but it's not necessary for me to do that low of repetition when I'm just training for general strength. Well, his philosophy or his claims are very interesting because what his claims are was that people doing these low rep uh exercises like five reps or under, they experienced benefits in all of their sports. and that that it it translated to all the different that that that power and strength translated to gymnastics. And all all strength training is going to translate into sports to an extent. Olympic lifting works, powerlifting works, you know, low reps work, high reps work. I I I know many guys that did nothing but super high repetitions. You know, been plenty of guys like that. It all works one way

160:42or another. it. What you want though is to get as efficient as possible and you don't want to be beat up for days after your workout. Obviously, that was one of the reasons why he liked the low rep stuff, you know, because it it doesn't seem to beat you beat you up quite as much. But I found that doing short, brief, intense workouts, usually even single sets, translated just as well as as as anything. I'll give an example of u you've heard of the 1973 Miami Dolphins. No, they were the only They were under Don Schola. They were the only team ever to go undefeated and win the Super Bowl. No other team's done it before or since ever in the history of the NFL. They use cocaine. Well, they're in Miami. But you know how they train? They train on Nautilus machines with single set training. What? Yeah, there we go. So, it all works. It all works. You can get in great shape no matter

161:37what you do. It's just what works best. What works best. I personally believe for a lifetime, and believe me, I have a lifetime of injuries. If you're getting hurt in your strength training, you're doing something wrong. Strength training should prevent injuries, not cause it. So, there's something wrong with your technique and your form. Me being a wrestler and a jiu-jitsu guy, I can't afford to hurt myself. And of course, at my age now, you get hurt. Oh my god, it takes forever to get back. We know that fast explosive training works, but we also know there's a much higher chance of injury. So for me, I like slow high tension reps, really controlled, and like you discovered that slow negative. Yeah, slow negative seem to be having a really positive benefit on my training lately. And I found that that uh doing my exercises fasting explosively did not make me faster on

162:32the mat. I had to selectively pick the the movements I wanted to be fast and explosive on and do those fast drill and drill the crap out of them until I was like a freaking machine. One of the things that I've gotten into also over the last few months is uh grip strength. You know those captains of crush I have a 167 lb one that I keep in my car. I just smash that I do it for three reps and then I throw it down. Well, thanks for taking it easy on my hand when we shook hands this morning, man. Well, I started with a 120lb one and then uh I got a 167 pound one that I use now, but I have a 200 something pound one that I'm saving for when I get tired of the 167 lb one. But it's like uh there's a rabbit hole with that because I I I'm I'm like I'm into squeezing things now. I'm It's really weird. It's like ju just make sure it's not people's hands when you Well, I just

163:23have gotten excited about the idea of strengthening my hands because my strength handing has all been accidental all for my hands. It's all been just attached to deadlifts and kettle bells and chin-ups and all the different stuff. And that's how my hands got strong. But I've never just actively trained my grip. So, in doing this, I've been doing it like I'll say like four or five months now. Just been just smashing these things all the time. Well, you know, there there's different types of grip strength. You know, there's that crushing strength which the captains of Crush would give you, but there's also like endurance strength, which is really good bars for grappling. Well, just hanging off a high bar. Mhm. you know, either one hand or two. Well, that's one of the things we found on Fear Factor that was interesting. We did this thing where um we had people hang over water

164:06on a bar just hanging by their body weight. And the women all beat the men. We had these really strong men, really like big yolked up guys, but they were too heavy and they uh strength to weight ratio and they probably just did curls like bunch of Yeah. Well, the grip is uh really a lot of it uh people just don't pay enough attention to it. Yeah. Uh, one reason why rope climbing has stood the test of time as a grappling modality is it's a very specific vertical type grip like you grab a hand or a neck or a wrist or forearm or even an ankle. Uh, really good for grapplers and man, it takes tremendous grip to climb a rope. There's a lot of stress on your joints, too. Well, there can be you have to know how to climb, but it's it has been an exercise been around forever. Yeah. I've got a big fat rope in my garage. You know, you've seen the gym that I have set up in my garage. I got this rope

164:54that like I can't even get my hand all the way around it. It's like one of those uh ropes that would tether off an ocean ladder. That's what they're for. Yeah. I mean, that's where they get them. But I'll tell you, just hanging on that or squeezing it, you know, just not even climbing, just hanging till your hand gives out is a tremendous grip exercise. Oh, for sure. But um yeah, for jiu-jitsu and wrestling, I found that captains of crush don't translate as well as doing things like towel, chin-ups, you know, obviously uh climbing a rope. A lot of guys will throw a ghee over a chin-up bar and just pull pull themselves up with fantastic sports specific grip strengthening. Uh, also just hanging for time like we talked about for shoulder health. Awesome grip exercise. And there's a very interesting correlation between uh biological age and chronological age.

165:42You know, old people have really weak hands, you know. So, well then I'm like 20 cuz I smash There you go, man. Um, I have a friend who um does these scapula exercises. He's an archer and uh he hangs the the way you're talking about and and then um when he gets to the hanging position, he just lifts himself up like this. Fantastic exercise. And holds it. He's like pinching his shoulder blades together just pulling his body up slightly, but his arms completely locked out. Those upper back muscles are so neglected. And it's good for posture, too. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll tell you, I like to superset that with a set of regular pull-ups sometimes. Woo! Do you feel that upper back because, you know, usually when you do pull-ups, your arms uh get tired first, right? But by pre pre-exhausting, you know, the lats and the rhomboids and, you know, your terries, you know, all those back

166:36muscles, uh, when you do your pull-ups, woo, man, you really feel your back. Like, so you do pull-ups, do all your sets? I well, not all the time, but I would do the scapular retractions first, jump down, shake out my grip a little bit, and then jump up and do the pull-ups. Wow, what a great little back workout that Oh, so you do the scapular exercises first. First to pre-exhaust those those muscles because they're bigger and stronger than your little teeny grip forearm hands. So, usually what gives out first in pull-ups is the hands, the forearms, sometimes your biceps. Mhm. So by pre- fatiguing those upper back muscles first, they get much better workout when you add in the arms. Ah, that makes sense. You temporarily fatigue those. So when you do these sets of uh when if you do like those scapula contractions, what would you call those? Is that I call I always call them

167:27scapular uh retractions. Retractions. Yeah, retractions. Um how long would you hold that position for? I usually like 2 seconds up, 2 seconds down. Oh, short. Yeah, it's a short little movement. He's he does it for 15 seconds two. You could I've actually done static contraction where I just pulled myself up and held it so I couldn't hold it, you know, like a like 30 to 40 seconds, you know, just depends. That was another thing that Pavo was talking about with planks. He was talking about like doing a plank but contracting every muscle in your body and holding that position. It's an isometric. It's called a uh overcoming isometric. There's two types of isometrics. One is um I'm sorry yielding isometric. Uh one is where you have a measurable weight. It could be your body weight. Let's say you hold a chin up at the top with your chin over the bar. It's a classic exercise called the

168:15flexed arm hang. Okay, you have a measurable weight there, right? The other version of that would be you just grab something and just pull as hard as you can. No way to measure it, right? Both ways will get you strong as as can be strong as a beast. So that plank that you're talking about, it's it's like a yielding isometric in that you have a measurable weight, which is your body weight. And rather than just hang out to see how long you can survive, what happens is you start to let the back collapse a little bit, you start to relax certain areas of your body. And now it's just not nearly as effective. But if you're really trying to shorten the abdominals and really squeezing and creating this tension, you create a tremendous amount of muscle fatigue. That should be the true purpose of exercise to create that that overload that muscle fatigue and allowing your

169:03muscles to recover from that recovery new base of strength. Yeah. Um I have a friend and a lot of jiu-jitsu guys are getting into this now where they're doing super slow sets. I love super slow sets. I was one of the original super slow trainers back in the day. I still do them. And as a man ages and you have all the dings in your shoulders and elbows and stuff, you'll find that you'll be drawn more and more to nice slow high tension sets. Really very safe way to train. Um, how many seconds up and down do you suggest? Like say for something like a chin-up. Well, Mike Mener, you know, for bodybuilding hypertrophy, he found like 424 where you would like 4 seconds up, pause in the contracted position and 4 seconds down. The contracted position of the push-up, the hard part would be the bottom part. So you would hold just off the four on a chin-up. It would be the top part. So

169:52for a push-up, say, you would uh you would slowly go up for four. Like one, two, three, four. Then turn around. No, you would then turn around or just slow. Then I would go back down and hold at the bottom one. Okay. One, two, three, four. And then how long would you hold at the very bottom? 1,00 1,002. And then just two seconds and then back up one. And that's surprisingly difficult to do for some someone who thinks of a push-up as being a pretty mild exercise, dude. You can just sand blast yourself with just about five or six reps if you do it right. Yeah. I I've even done them slower. I've gone like, you know, 10 10 15. Try doing u try this if you're like negative accentuated. Sometime you're in a hotel room, you want to get a quick pump for your comedy act. Do start at the top. You want to get pumped for a comedy act. You got to stretch out. You're you're a dude. Yeah, you got the

170:43rep, but uh probably the fittest com comic out there. Don't you find that comics in general are pretty bad life? A lot of alcoholics. Yeah, smoking. Yeah, a lot of smoking. Yeah, it's the nature of the business. It's nightclub life, you know. It's very unhealthy. It's also there's this uh false correlation that you have to be an abuser of your body to be funny. Really? Wow. I never knew. Well, that uh vanity and um taking care of your body are connected and that vanity is ego and then having a big ego and being vain like it's anti- comedy. But I just think I don't think it's vanity to take care of your body. I just think it's intelligence. I think it's foolishness to not take care of your body. And I just know too many people whose bodies are literally falling apart and who are my age or younger who have like massive issues. I've seen it myself, man. It's really scary. Yeah.

171:34and they realize with time the error of their way and it's usually too late. If you start a a rigorous physical fitness program by when you're 45 like boy you got a kind of an uphill battle there. You got an uphill battle. It's not impossible. Well, you know Anthony Bourdain. You know what's going on with him. Yeah. He's a jiu-jitsu guy now. Got he started at 58. A lifetime of drinking and smoking and even a problem with heroin in his youth getting himself cleaned up. I heard I heard his voice into it, too. Oh, she's way beyond. She's actually pretty good, man. She's very good and she's obsessed and that's one of the reasons why he got into it in the first place is cuz his wife is a maniac and he didn't want to get choked out anymore. Well, no. I mean, she talked him into it because she she loves it so much. And then once she actually bribed him with narcotics. Whoa. That's

172:18how she got him in. Yeah. She told him she gave him Vicodins and so uh she she got him into it. And then once he got into it, he's uh he's a very uh and I say this in a good way, he's very obsessive guy. He gets obsessed with things. You know, that's why he's such a great chef and a great writer and he's great on his television show. And he got obsessed with jiu-jitsu. He travels everywhere. He brings his ghee. He trains every day. He trains twice a day. He'll do a private and then he'll do a class every day. Every day. He trained with uh Chris Crook, the guy I was telling you about in Maui, my my web guy. Yeah. Uh he trained with Anthony. He said it was really fun. That's awesome. Uh oh, back to that push-up. So, try starting at the top, right? You very slowly use your iPhone like a little timer on there or something. I use one with a metronome, you know, so I

173:04can hear the tick. And I go on down in 30 seconds and when my chest just barely grazes the ground, I do a slow what we call turnaround where you change direction. Very slowly come back up in 30 seconds. I don't lock out of the top. There's no resting at the top because the top is just too easy, right? You could hold it forever, right? So I keep my elbows just a little unbent. And then 30 seconds back down. Dude, you have the pump of your life. 90 seconds time under load. It's like, wow, what an amazing workout. One freaking rep. Actually, one and a half reps. Negative, positive, negative. Just negative, positive, negative for 90 seconds. So, do you set it like a timer for 90 seconds? Wow. Well, no, not for 90 seconds. Just the running stopwatch. I I use like a little thing on my iPhone that goes tick tick tick. So, what is it? Is it uh what is it? I don't know. It's just one of those

173:57many apps, but I I wanted one that had an audible tick. So, if I can't actually see the iPhone, at least I can listen to the the seconds. So, it's really easy to fool yourself when to go on too fast. Now, do you do the same sort of technique for squats or for any other exercises, man? I have this one body weight squat where you face the wall where you you can't unload by leaning forward, you know, letting your torso lean forward. Man, what a killer. You face the wall. I face the wall. Great for your posture, man. your toes against the wall. So, what are you doing? Like you're facing the wall and how close are you to the wall? Uh, my toes, nose, everything's touching the knees. My hands are my hands are out to the side. I slowly lower down and you keep your face on the wall. So, your nose is just barely skimming. And it's great for posture because your back is really

174:42arched. So, your back's working isometrically. And I don't do the top third of the movement with a body weight squat because it's just too damn easy. I I would recover. You're so mechanically efficient at the top that there's no work. So So you get to the top there and then you go back down again. Back down. Sometimes I use that 30 30 for that one. It's absolutely killer. When you're done, you just basically your legs are just crippled for for a second or two. I've been doing slow Hindu push-ups and I'm just amazed at how tired you can get. You know, like a set of 20 slow Hindu push-ups and your heart is ready to explode. It's amazing, isn't it? You don't have to go fast to get a good cardio metabolic workout. I'm a big fan of that Hindu push-up, too, just for the range of motion. It's such a wide range of motion in that in that really good uh spinal mobility. Yeah, I would say

175:30arguably that might be the only push-up uh a person would need just for fitness, you know. I mean, really, it's a hell of an exercise. It's basically upward and downward dog of yoga combined with movement. Yeah. And I do it with a 40 lb weight vest sometimes. Dude, you're a beast. Well, it's just such a great workout. Try slowing it down even more. Try doing 10 seconds down, 10 seconds up, just so you don't have to keep adding more weight to your vest. Mhm. Yeah. Also, remember, time under load is really important. I'll give you an example. I went to the gym one time. I saw this guy just jacking off pull-ups like crazy. He was using a lot of momentum. It was basically one second up, one second down. The dude did 25, which is impressive, you know, but he was pretty much yanking up his joints, you know, right? So I had my CL client do a set of six, but he was doing 424

176:18each one. So the guy that did the 25, his time under load was only 50 seconds. My guy did six. His time under load was a minute. My guy actually did more mechanical work and was physically in some way stronger, better strength to weight ratio. So well, what do you think about those CrossFit style put chin-ups? Absolutely insane. I mean, well, we we talked about this last time. That guy, the Greg Glassman guy. Yeah. I mean, the guy's an obese man. Well, he's got health issues. Let's I mean, and I know that he kind of younger than me, man. It's like, what the I could have I could have had health issues. You should the injuries that I've had. If anyone has an excuse for not training, I'm not I don't mean to toot my own horn, but man, I never missed a training due to an injury. I always man if you hurt your shoulder you got your other shoulder and your legs that you can work in your core

177:10right you know I I busted up my foot one time so you know I was able to work you always work around it there's something to do always something to do you know not training just because you're injured I blew out L4 on my spine one time just doing the stupid abdominal rollouts from the feet what's an abdominal roll out oh I saw this Jackie Chan movie and I was really you know you use those ab wheels you And there's little wheels and from your toes you roll the whole way out, whole way back. I was pretty good at that at one time. From your toes, you roll the whole way out and whole way back. Yeah. Which I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Can you? Yeah. Ab roller, Jackie Chin. This is pretty inspiring. So, you mean like you make like a scissors and then like like an inchworm? Oh, okay. And you blew your back out doing Well, I left my back. This guy This guy's doing it. Oh,

178:01here we go. There we go. I could do that. I probably still could do it, but I'm just too afraid to do it. Is that hard to do? yeah. It's unbelievable, man. Try to Well, no, don't try because I don't want you to hurt your back. But you got to really really brace your abdominals and keep your glutes tight because the shearing force on the lumbar is really high. As I found out, I don't do those, but I do do a lot of ab wheel stuff, but I just never do it like that. You could do it off your knees. Uh, do you know what the same movement is? Hanging leg raises. Very safe. Some people call it toes to bar. Try doing it with no momentum. Slow up. Touch your tippy toes to the bar. Pause for a second. Slowly lower. If you do three or four, wow, you're pretty strong core. So, it's with the legs straight. Yeah. With your legs straight. Like try to almost like you're touching your

178:50toes. Toes to Yeah. Not not the ankles or shins. That means the person's too tight in their their hamstrings. But but yeah, I blew my back. Uh, I had an L4 uh, subluxation and spondiothesis and uh, I was told I might need surgery. I was told you have like a bulging disc. Oh my god. I had sciatica so bad, y'all. I couldn't even walk. When you were here, did I have the reverse hyper machine in the back when you were here? Yes, you did. Yeah. What do you think about those? Have you used those at all? I have, but the strength curve, I think I told you, is off because right where your your glutes and your lower back are in the weakest part of the curve, the resistance is at its highest. Right. I see what you're saying. Yeah. You know, you'd almost be better off putting ankle weights on and just doing u reverse leg raises. Man, I just love it though for uh decompression of the spine and

179:39strengthening the the lower back area. I mean, my whole back area is just so thick and strong from doing that that exercise. It gives me a lot of relief. I'm I'm a big fan of that machine. Yeah. I mean, I'm not against it, per se. I think there's just as good, if not better, exercises that you can use because I mean, you know, in my case, I I I can't travel with a reverse hyper, but yeah, you'd have to hard time checking that thing. I'll tell you what I do enjoy is the u uh 45 degree uh back extension bench where you do back extensions. Fantastic exercise. Is that called a Roman chair? Is that what it's called? Uh not quite a Roman chair, but it's kind of along those lines. I'm not talking about the glute ham raises. I'm actually talking about 45 degree back extension, right? Um I I was at Arthur Jones ranch when he was doing his experiments with Medex, which was a uh a

180:27machine for back rehabilitation. And in the Medex studies, he's doing it with this Dr. Wayne Pollock from University of Florida Medical School. And they found that people's backs are pretty undeveloped and pretty weak and it can cause a lot of problems. So they were trying to invent a machine to work that area, but the freaking machines were like $50,000. It was ridiculous. You know, you're getting all these electrical feed out and all this stuff. So I said to Arthur, I says, "Surely there must be a very simple exercise that you could do that would give you really, really good results because he was basically poo pooing most back exercises. It's not really working the back. Most of them work the glutes and the hamstrings like kettle bell swings or deadlifts. More glute than hamstring." So he said the back extension, he says that would come as close. And I

181:14started religiously practicing back extension. And man, I'll tell you that's one area of my back that was always strong right up until that point where I did those abdominal rollouts. That was the first back injury I ever had. How'd you get over that? Well, I went to a uh Ralpher. I had this woman that was actually a professor at the Ralph Institute. You know, they they they do circuits. Really good hands-on Ralpher. She was the one that I heard the word surgery come out of her mouth because she was pretty much anti-surgery. That was the first time I ever heard someone say, "Oh, Steve, you really did it this time. I don't know whether I can help you. Really? You really messed your back up. I'm going to try, but I can't guarantee anything." So, she would put me on their table like in a tent position where the table goes like this with my, you know, so it's bent

182:05or listening. literally taking your fingers and trying to rotate that vertebrae back into position. And then I was going to this uh guy for pain. I didn't want to take painkillers. This Dr. Frank Goo in Philadelphia on Art Street. Um he was shooting me with the uh needles, acupuncture. Acupuncture for pain relief. And I would walk in there in absolute agony. And I would walk out probably 60 to 70% reduction in the pain. And it would last for a day or two and then it would come back of course. But I was just doing it just to get out of pain, right? And over the course of let's see how many sessions was it? It was like eight sessions. By the eighth session, all of a sudden I woke up one day and the pain was completely so slowly relaxing and the disc was going back in. Finally squirted back in there. Uh stretching anything like I was sitting in a back chair. Uh, I used to

182:57be the uh trainer for the owners of the Philadelphia Eagles, the uh Jeffina or they're divorced now, but Jeff still owns the Philadelphia Eagle team. He used to have all these really cool nifty devices because he suffered a lot from back. It was a chair that you sit on a sling like like this playground swings with these two clamps that grab you underneath your armpits and clamp, right? So, you're clamped. You can adjust it and then you slowly release the sling. So, you're just basically sitting with your your back completely just hanging there from your armpits. Huh. And I would sit there and watch TV for an hour or so with my back in this traction. That really gave me a lot of relief. Yeah. The spinal decompression is gigantic. Yeah. The back chair. It was a really expensive thing. I just borrowed it borrowed his for like a couple months. Man, that thing really

183:45helped. What do you think about those uh like were you those hang-ups where you like those? I do. Uh, I didn't have the table or the room for it at the time, although I do like it. I did have inversion boots that I used to hang off my pull-up bar. Uh, my problem was with the seatic, I I couldn't get into the position. It was just too painful. I had to, you know, I was in too much trone. Everything was killing me. But once it went away, it was like it never happened. Never happened. But, you know, despite that, I didn't stop training. I was still doing super slow uh machine work. pull downs and chest presses. And interestingly enough, with that injury, riding the Schwin Aerodon, you know, those airbikes with the handles, that didn't hurt. It actually felt good. I would feel good for like 30, 40 minutes after that workout with zero pain and then it would slowly come back on me

184:37again. Those air dye machines seem to be like a really um popular exercise for strength and conditioning for fighters. A lot of wrestlers use them because I'll tell you, man, the faster you go, the harder it is. the air displacement. The thing that's so cool about it is you're getting both upper and lower body like together. So it's not just lower body aerobics. Your whole body is involved in like a strength endurance. Do those bother you with your shoulder with your shoulder being Yeah. No any kind of vertical movement. I mean horizontal movement. No problem. It's the overhead press that u but interestingly enough I can still do Hindu push-ups. That is interesting. It's the angle, you know, I can angle it. And also, you know, corkcrewing the hands, gripping, uh, activating the lats, and all that kind of stuff can really keep you out of pain. Steve, we just did three hours.

185:22Holy Flew by. Wow, man. It's over. I know you have this video, though. Tell people about this video, your isometric video. Well, I just came out with my second isometric because I was so thrilled with the first one. Uh I started looking deeper into isometrics and I found these old school techniques that I made an advanced isometric uh video. So is it a work a full workout like you go through it? What I did was in the first one I had either yielding or overcoming isometrics here for advanced guys that are really strong like yourself. I combine yielding and um yielding and overcoming isometrics in the same exercise. And boy, I'll tell you, even an Olympic athlete could could uh get a full workout in a hotel room with virtually no equipment. Just your jiu-jitsu belt is all you'd really need, dude. You would know you had a workout. Very safe. No chance of I mean, of

186:15course, some idiot could screw it up and get himself hurt, but the chance of hurting yourself with isometrics is virtually none. Good way to also work around an injury. You know, if you have a foot, ankle, knee, elbow, you can still do isometrics. Uh you could even potentially do isometrics if you were uh in bed. You know, let's say you had an injury in car accident where you could actually keep uh your muscles in shape laying in bed. Whoa. It's pretty cool stuff. Where can people get it? How do they get it? Uh the website is maxwellsc.com. Uh S is in strength, C is in conditioning. maxwellsc.com and uh I think yeah uh oh yeah there's a link to the page uh let's see maxwell yeah training is that what you say maxwellc.com yeah maxwellc.com really good uh video I I put a lot I did I shot it in Maui jiu-jitsu and it's really really uh uh one of the best ones

187:19I've ever done all All right. Beautiful. And people want to get a hold of you on Twitter. It's uh Twitter. Steve Maxwell SC. Yep. Steve Maxwell, Snapchat, all that jazz, Instagram. Feed the media machine, baby. The media machine. You got it. Thank you, brother. Appreciate you being on, man. Thanks for having me again. Appreciate it. All right, friends. We'll be back tomorrow. See you soon. Bye-bye.