#448 The Art & Science of Human Connection w/ Michael Trainer

We'll go back to the podcast.

We've got my good buddy, an old friend,

Michael trainer in the house.

Michael trainer was on this podcast many years ago.

When I first got to on it, I believe,

out of Venice, I think he was living.

So really good crew out there back in the day.

And I think Michael's coming to here.

So we rehash.

You don't have to go back and listen to the old podcasts.

I'm like, give us the quick report

of what your life's work was.

And we go freaking deep in this podcast.

His story and what he's been up to

has been absolutely incredible.

He's been on one hell of a journey

since we last spoke.

And I can't wait to see what this dude has written

as an author.

I mean, I'm literally chomping at the bit

as a guy who devours books.

I have had a lot of friends write books.

And fortunately, they've been pretty damn good books.

At least not boring.

They've been informative, and they've been funny.

This one, I think, is going to hit.

I think it's going to strike the heart like an arrow.

So super, super proud of Michael.

He's an awesome person.

Tall, too.

Tall than I am.

Just a great guy.

Great guy, all the way through and through,

and he's doing great work in the world.

Share this with your friends, and enjoy.

Michael trainer.

Let's go.

Michael trainer, the return.

Thank you for coming on the podcast.

This is so cool getting you heavy here at the farm

for the first time.

Man, I've been hearing about it,

and I'm honored to be here, I'll say.

I love seeing you deeply immersed in nature.

Is there no better place?

There's no better place, you know?

It's church.

Yeah, I mean, even here, like in the office,

I love this office.

To me, it's a library, more than it's an office.

You know, it's like this study.

Yeah.

Called the office, but it's the study.

You know, if we were playing Clue,

but you see the plants in here,

or just like, I just love these guys.

I had these vines for some of the first house plants.

We got, we moved to Texas,

where these guys right here.

Yeah, they're super healthy.

I mean, I think that's, that's the thing, right?

These are like plants, and I think we as well.

We're kind of like thermostats, you know,

for our environment, and it's like,

when you see this plant, and it's shiny and happy,

you know, it's in a good place.

Mm-hmm.

I feel like with people, unfortunately,

I don't pay as much attention,

but this is well maintained and well loved.

That's for sure.

Yeah, well, the nature piece is the best part of it.

You know, I think that's what I've get into

is like even in a, in a office space,

or whatever you want to call it,

bring a nature in.

Yeah.

It's such a big component to my sense of well-being,

getting to hang with these little guys.

They're here working with our heart chakras

about right now as we're shooting the shit

and catching up.

Yeah, it's amazing how,

it's amazing how much plants just affect our overall,

I feel like psychology,

but also just our physiology, right?

We were talking a little earlier about allergens.

Like, I just escaped part of the reason

I left Los Angeles was because of the mold,

and the plants were what saved me.

The plants were, you know, kept me in a good way.

Yeah.

But without that, I was stuffed.

So you just moved here?

Is that correct?

Yeah. Okay, in the process?

Yeah, I'm in the process to be frank, actually.

This is quite beautiful

because I've been in the proverbial cave,

not a literal cave,

but proverbial cave for the last few years,

writing this book.

And so to me, I've been in my own little space.

So I've gone like deeply internal,

done some deep work as well, some medicine work.

Oh, yeah.

But yeah, this is honestly seeing you

is kind of my first little coming out of the cave.

Bob, so it's like an honor.

Yeah, man.

It's great.

Well, I just feel like you're such a heart-centered,

beautiful human, you know?

Thank you, brother.

Yeah, it's always an honor to be in your presence.

And I was like, all right,

you know, if I'm gonna come out of the cave,

let's go see Kyle.

But yes, long story short,

I've been on a bit of a walk about.

Like, that's fantastic.

What a dive into that is like the meat and potatoes

of this podcast, but give people a,

Europe, it's kind of hard to say what you do.

It's kind of hard to say what is in the LA sense of like,

oh, what do you do?

You know, it's very hard to say like what you do.

I know some of the viewer accolades

and things that you've done and I can say,

well, like, well, you know,

it's the Dalai Lama, you know, it's this and that, you know?

But it's kind of hard to say like, what do you do?

So tell us what you do and then tell us like,

where did that start to shift

where you wanted to give birth to this thing?

Because that's really what it is.

It's funny.

It is not the same as giving birth to a child.

Nothing could be the same as that.

However, writing is,

I'm creating a business,

creating any of these things can be the microdose

for a man of what that takes, right?

That level of commitment, that level of nurture,

that level of time and energy and resources

being devoted to one thing, right?

It's like, well, it's not the same.

It is similar in that it requires many of the same things, right?

And it can take you on a ride in many ways the same way, right?

Where like emotions run high and holy shit,

I don't know if it's gonna work

and second guessing yourself and all that.

But I'd love for you to break down for people.

What have you been doing

and then what led you to the impetus of,

hey, I have to give birth to this thing.

I gotta get this out.

Yeah, it's a beautiful question.

I think I'll give you the sort of the top line

and then I'll go into the nuance.

The top line is I feel like I've been

in a process of initiation for the better part of my life.

I was invited into a very rare mentorship

by seven generation healer in Sri Lanka

when I was 19 years old,

after being jumped by a gang at 12 years old

and developing some neuroses.

And the challenge was how can I go as deep into my fear

as possible to transcend the neuroses of the fear

that became the great medicine of my life,

which is the thing I love the most are people

and how we connect beautifully.

And adventure, nature, travel, being of the world.

My top line I would say is I'm a bridge between

what I've been fortunate enough to bear witness to

and to participate in through this initiatory process

from doing men's business with Aboriginal elders

in Australia to studying with a seven generation

your healer in Sri Lanka

in a secret form of Ayurvedic shamanism

to the honor of hosting the soul in this dilemma.

If I were to give the professional context

the thing that I'm most known for

is starting a music festival called Global Citizen,

which hosts 70,000 people on the Great Law and Central Park.

We've had everyone from Beyonce to Coldplay

and raised now to date over $40 billion

for programs serving the world's poor.

And I can obviously go deeper into detail there,

but what I've been doing for the last,

I would say five years is making sense

of the early formative experiences I started sharing,

but being jumped and being invited into these circles

that I didn't know why I was being invited into.

Well, let's unpack that a little bit too.

We're to describe the setting.

Because when I was young, you know what blew my mind

when I made it to the UFC.

How many guys didn't fight growing up that were in the UFC?

I was like, you gotta be fucking kidding me.

You didn't fight, you never fought growing up

until a pro fight or until an amateur fight.

That was, it wasn't everyone,

but it was a way or higher percentage

than I ever would have thought.

And I was like, damn, what drew you here?

Like you guys didn't fight growing up, that's crazy.

And now you're here, this is awesome.

Tell me about that, you know?

But I bring that up because even in that sport,

not everybody fought growing up, right?

And so like, there's plenty of people on this planet.

So when I thought it was speaking directly to me,

a Chuck Palnuck and a fight club

has never been a fight before.

How do you know anything about yourself, right?

And I was like, man, so many people.

When I watched that, I was 19 years old.

I was like, so many people have no idea.

Yeah, they remember how that.

And getting jumped is a completely different experience.

I got jumped when I was 17.

I still have a scar on the back of my head.

I show my kids.

Cause like, oh, daddy, your hair doesn't grow there.

I was like, yeah, that's sort of a beer bottle.

I get smashed in my head and having like 12 dudes

kick the crap out of me on a bush

and I just covered up and ate it.

Yeah.

It's like, why didn't you get him?

And I was like, well, daddy was drunk.

Daddy couldn't fight back and there was too many guys.

I just had to take it, I had to take it

and thankfully they didn't go extra.

You know, they could have done a lot worse.

But they beat my ass and I went home

and because I had been drinking,

the beer bottle cut was deep enough.

Like it wasn't going to heal on its own.

So I got up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom

and I leaned down over the thing.

I'm super lightheaded and while I'm going pee,

I can see blood dripping from my head.

You know, the toilet and I was like, oh no, that's still going.

It's been like four hours later.

So I was like, mom, she's like, huh?

What's up, boy?

I was like, I think I got to go to the hospital.

She's like, what'd you do?

I was like, well, she felt terrible.

You know, I was like, I was an idiot

and got smashed with the beer bottle

and I need stitches.

Anyways, lesson learned there.

But I'm curious to see like for me,

the fight was something that drew me into it

because it was my first experience of flow.

It was my only experience that I could access no mind.

Right, and there was no names for flow

or anything like this growing up.

But it was just like, oh, I feel peaceful.

I remember telling a therapist this one, I was seven.

I was like, I feel peaceful when I'm fighting somebody

because nothing else matters.

Nothing else in the world is happening.

Nothing else is more important.

Only this.

Only survival is the thing that I focus on

and I'm 100% in that moment

and there's nothing else on our thing.

Give me that.

And so I always track that I remember stealing fire

and I was like, that's why I fucking loved fighting.

It was the quiet button, right?

It was just like 100% presence, 100% now.

Nothing else matters.

And it was something that drew,

but because I had that relationship with it,

I drew me back like I wanted to.

I wasn't trying to go pick fights with people

but I was raised, you know, if somebody picks a fight

with you, you can stand your ground if you want.

And it was always like, all right, let's go.

You know, I'm happy time now.

You're taking me to my happy place,

getting jumps a little different, right?

And what that can encode in you, right?

Especially as a young person is incredibly different.

Incredibly different in how your sense of safety,

your sense of, and free, you know,

we're just listening to this right now.

There's no video here, Michael, you're a big dude.

You're as big as me, right?

You're a big fucking guy.

And it's taken me a lot of work, medicine work as well,

to be able to relate to someone like my wife,

who's, who's 13 inches shorter than me

and weighs half my weight.

And it's like, oh, dude, her experience in the world

is way fucking different than my experience in the world.

Her experience in the world as a woman

dressed up dancing in a pre-bay or something like that

in Vegas and then trying to make it to her car at night

is 100% different than me leaving the club

going to my car at night, right?

Fucking world of difference.

But having this piece, you know, at 12 years old,

that starts to encode differently as well.

Unpack that.

Yeah, I mean, I think what you said is powerful, right?

I mean, there's so many layers.

Totally interesting to think about how our trauma,

like what you said about fighting and being present

will really stuck with me.

Because I think there's something about,

and this is now over years of reflection,

but the actual essence of the story was,

I was 12 years old, it was my first time leaving home.

So it was my first time away from the proverbial nest.

And I went to Spain, I remember the last thing they said

is we're getting on the plane,

was don't get in any trouble over there

because things work differently.

Were you in Europe already?

Like where did you go?

We flew into Spain.

I went to a language academy.

So I grew up going to a public school.

I grew up in the city of Chicago in the heart of the city.

And I studied Spanish from kindergarten.

And so it was our first, my first experience ever leaving

the country.

I was in Micas in the Costa del Sol, in the Southern coast.

And it was the first night out and we went to a club.

And my host brother was,

they were drinking, I wasn't drinking, but they were drinking.

He went out, he had a coke,

and I saw him getting accosted by this guy.

And I basically went to go have his back.

I didn't know the guy, of course,

but I was staying in his home and basically went up.

And there was this guy basically

costing him for his drink.

And I stood up basically for this guy.

And what I didn't know is the guy that was accosting him

wasn't one guy.

It was 30 guys.

He was the town, I don't know if it was a gang,

I don't know what you'd fully call him,

but the next thing I knew,

I got a right hook to the jaw.

And then damn, like I was just being jumped by 30 guys

in a country I'd never been to first day in.

It was so intense that they actually forbade me

from actually going to school

because this guy was like so feared that they were like,

even though I was there on a study abroad program,

I couldn't even go to school.

And then he found me again down at the beach

and they threw you, got a bottle.

I got a rock basically taught, threw a rock in my head

and then had a bunch of people come chase me and beat him.

I actually held my ground and was okay.

And then the shopkeeper kind of stopped it.

But in essence, what he did was it made me,

it deeply imprinted this notion that travel

and other people were not safe.

And what wound up happening was when I kind of got

to the latter part of high school,

this kind of switch flipped and I developed basically

an obsessive compulsive personality.

I was like checking doors,

I was checking to make sure the burners were off.

And in Western psychology,

they were like, you have an obsessive compulsive disorder,

take this medicine, what have you.

And I was like, okay, yeah,

if I want to actually get rid of this, what do you do?

And they were like, well, what you do

is called exposure therapy.

You basically slowly confront the things that scare you.

So if you were scared of a snake,

instead of getting 10 feet away, you go nine feet away.

And you slowly try to get a little closer

and confront your fear.

And this is not dissimilar from initiatory practices

that boys have had,

as they've been shepherded in a manhood

for since time immorial,

but we just don't have those rights of passage.

And so that's been part of my deep inquiry over the years.

But in essence, what I did was I said,

all right, if basically exposure therapy's the way out

of this fear or this neuroses or this unwellness,

how do I do that?

And not being, I think you and I are probably

still in this way, not being much for the little

by little, I was like, all right,

well, how can I take this all out of once?

And basically I wound up, I was like, okay,

I grew up in Chicago, where's as far from my reality

as possible?

And I wound up going to Sri Lanka,

which is literally on the longitudinal line,

other side of the world,

a place where you and I, six foot four,

not small men stand out like a sore thumb.

And I lived in a village amidst the Civil War.

So the country was at Civil War at the time.

So you have this paradox of a Buddhist country,

predominantly Buddhist country,

amidst the Civil War.

So like on the end of every corner,

there's pillboxes, sandboxes with, you know,

guys with AKs, large caliber machine guns.

Was this a religious conflict?

It was without going to great detail.

It was religious, it was basically the legacy of colonialism.

When the British were there,

they exalted the minority, which was the tomals

into positions of sort of the middle class

to manage down, which they did across a lot of the empire.

And then when they left, they left the legacy

of democracy or voting,

but then the previously suppressed majority,

there was now tension after that.

It makes sense.

That's the vacuum.

And so it led to a Civil War far more complex than that.

But in essence, it kind of mirrored the paradox

that I felt within myself, right?

There was this element of like a deep peace

and yet at the same time, this tumult.

And so I wound up going to this place

because it felt like, it felt like the snake.

And I was like, okay, I gotta go dance with the snake.

Didn't want to, but I was like, that's what I gotta do.

That's what I gotta do.

And I wound up going there and Kyle, it was,

I mean, I haven't really shared much of this.

I mean, I'm still processing it now 20 plus years later,

but I saw things and witness things that you cannot.

I mean, you can proximate,

and you've dealt deeply in the medicine world.

There's lots of worlds beyond our world,

but I saw things that, to this day, I cannot explain.

People in Trans speaking languages,

they should not speak, know how to speak, you know.

Literal magic, and I wound up going to the,

my very first day, going to the ocean.

I was 18, 19 years old.

I go to the edge of the ocean.

It was like something on a National Geographic,

this 16 year old, brown, beautiful brown,

kind of Sri Lankan young man with a spear

and an octopus that literally look like a tiger

comes out of the crystal blue turquoise waters.

And he's got nothing on, but shorts and some goggles.

And he hands me the goggles.

And I was like, all right, so I guess we're swimming.

I don't know where we're swimming, but we're swimming.

And we swim out to this island.

And it was wild because this was technically a Buddhist temple,

but on the island, you enter into the liminal space,

and it was where they practiced,

certain practices that weren't,

that were pre-buddhist, shall we say.

And I climb out of the water with this boy,

with a spear, and a tiger octopus.

And there's a man basically crushing garlic and chilies

and a woman literally shaking,

like condom blay, like in trance.

And she's a Tamil woman speaking classical singles.

It's like if I came into your house

and I all of a sudden saw you shaking and invoking

and speaking fluent like ancient Greek or Latin,

or some language you've never even studied.

And the reason I know that is because there happen to be

like one of the foremost linguists on that island with me

that I was studying, they took the boat out.

And right after that moment,

where I was introduced to what's called Behoot the Video,

which is the occult form of Ayurvedic shamanism.

I wound up being invited to study with this man.

I wanted to study mask carving

because my great grandfather was a woodcarver.

And so for me, it was like, okay, I'll do like a week.

I'd love to do an apprenticeship with this guy

around studying masks.

And lo and behold, the mask was just,

it was the tip of the snake.

I had no idea what I was getting into,

but basically when, so in their worldview,

there was no word for privacy

and there was no word for possession.

So what happened when I got jumped was

there was a fundamental break from me

in the usness of life, right?

It was like now me, and I've never been in an octagon.

I think there is something I would imagine

deeply present, ladies you shared about that confrontation,

that existential, you know, there's a brotherhood

but also an existential confrontation.

And for me, it was like I got stuck.

I had gotten stuck in the existential confrontation.

And I needed to find the usness again, right?

And in Sri Lanka, amidst this civil war,

what I found with this man who invited me,

he was a self-generation healer.

He didn't have a son, he had two daughters.

And it was like, when I say that this is unusual,

like I've met people who were like,

and I didn't even know unusual it was,

they were like, you studied bhutavity

and I was like, yeah, they're like, how did you find it?

So it found me, they're like, oh, I've gone.

I spent 10 years looking for, we couldn't find.

I mean, real people, right?

And I was like, wow, okay.

And it's basically like the seal team six

of when you need to bring shit back together.

Like when the containers getting real fucked up

and you need like the real ones to come in,

that's what he was, that's what this man was.

You know, like we would say someone's a master,

something he was a master of like 17 things,

not egoic at all, because but that's what it took

to keep the container, you know?

And so when someone was out of balance,

which is for them, health was, or well being,

wellness was balance.

It was his role to spend weeks

preparing the space.

They would literally talk about plants.

They would build an entire, basically city

out of palm fraud.

They would make elaborate structures, flowers everywhere.

It would, you know, and they would put that person

in the center of the circle.

And then from sunset to sunrise,

they would create a whole ceremony

where that person was brought from the fringes, you know,

the outer lands, you know, where they were lost.

They would literally, spiritually and physically bring them

back into the heart of the circle

and seal their collective usness together, you know?

Like that was, that was the medicine of this place.

And by the way, no enviagians,

but people were deep in trance, like a level of,

a level of wizardry, a level of magic

that I still can't do justice to.

But somehow in the two years that I live with him,

I went from a dance with the snake.

I was no longer, I was no longer afraid in that way, right?

Like I had, I think, you know, since time immemorial,

young men have been shepherded into manhood by other men,

often through this existential confrontation, right?

Like the kind you may have had in the octagon,

for me, it wound up materializing in different ways,

but I was taken from boyhood, confronted

my greatest existential fear,

and through that was shepherded into a manhood,

a different, a different initiatory aspect of myself.

All right, guys, quick break to tell you about my brand new

community that is launching this year, the Kingdom Within.

This has been many years in the making.

I've had a lot of iterations of the things that I've learned

about and wanted to teach through Fit for Service

for six or seven years, coaching one-on-one clients,

literally thousands of people that have come through

my coaching and been shaped by me and who have shaped me.

So what is it about?

It's about the body, the body is a doorway,

it opens up all systems, the body is the temple.

It's about the mind as a system.

How do we categorically learn how to use the mind

so it can sit in the passenger seat, not in the driver seat?

And then how do we connect to ourselves, right?

How do we connect to each other?

How do we connect to our parents?

How do we connect to nature?

How do we connect to God in a safe way, right?

All of these things are critically important,

but the starts of the body and then we lead in with the mind

and then we dive into connection.

And the community is a field.

It is a container actively that supports this.

Everybody who joins this community

is going to be thinking along the same lines.

You will come there for your own reasons,

but everybody is coming with a willingness to grow

and a willingness to learn.

And with that, you have a container

that leads for potential transformation.

At the very least, the knowledge is going to be palpable.

And so I'll be teaching once a month on their webinars

on some of the most important potent things

that I think working from body to mind, to connection,

and beyond.

And of course, every other two weeks there'll be a Q&A

that will go, which will just answer each

and every one of your questions.

A huge resource list of every book

that I've ever read, the why behind it,

and where I think you should start

because a lot of times people get overwhelmed,

you get recommended two different books on sleep,

two different books on health, whatever the thing is,

where do you start?

Well, that's an important piece that only you can answer,

but I can help you with that.

And through a little Q&A and active back and forth,

you will have all the help necessary to launch yourself

into the best direction you've ever been

from a health standpoint, from a mental standpoint,

and from a life standpoint, because life is about connection.

It's about relationship and how I relate to myself

as well as others.

It's the name of the game.

All right, please join us at the kingdom within.

All you gotta do is go to Kingsboo.com

and you can sign up right there,

and I look forward to seeing you guys.

You wanna learn more?

We'll link to it at the top page of the show notes

and now back to the podcast.

Yeah, I'm just picturing like you.

You, your soul called you to like Dr. Strange.

You know what I'm saying?

Totally.

It is training, you know?

Dude, it was, I mean, one day I'll tell you more, man,

but the things that I saw with this man,

I, yeah, even now having been very fortunate

to sit in some pretty rarefied circles,

I still cannot believe.

Like it's, it was, and that's unfortunate,

I think, what we're losing, right?

Those, that occult, like that occult,

there are masters around the world

in all these different traditions, right?

And they still exist.

Do you think there's a good question on that?

Is this guy not gonna pass on his legacy

because he has two daughters and no sons?

Well, okay, it's more nuanced than that.

He's, it wasn't like, by the way,

I don't wanna paint a picture that he wasn't,

like we traveled to India.

His daughters went deep into dance

and they were, they were,

they were still absolutely part of the tradition.

I see.

But, you know, then I won't go too far field.

You know, there was a lot of existential forces,

which we're seeing around the world now.

His mother, for example, forbade him from dancing.

Like his father was the foremost,

one of the foremost dancers in the country.

And he had to teach himself dancing

by watching his father teach other children.

His mother actually burned.

So the traditional scriptures in that tradition,

like the traditional writing

was all these beautiful palm-fraud manuscripts.

They would take from palm trees and they would hand-write.

Like the Manastrichters, you go to Tibet now,

you know, and there's these ancient scriptures, right?

She literally burned them

because she was so entrenched in the colonial mindset.

She wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer.

She wanted him to go into a Western verified, you know,

you know, something that would be appreciated

by colonial society.

She didn't want him to be, you know,

she, in this Ayurvedic shamanic lineage.

Yeah, she didn't think much of it.

Correct. So he had to, his, he was also a defiant.

So his defiance was in spite of that resistance

initiating in that path and, and, and, and going deep down.

That's the soul's calling.

I mean, you hear the same story with, you know,

our Lakota elders, you hear it with, you know,

people in the Amazon, you know,

if you're fortunate enough to make it down there,

that like, in, and most of the people

that I've worked with in the Amazon

come are generational healers, right?

So it might skip a generation like this guy

I met, the youngest ever worked with as a guy named Laynaught.

He was only 25, but he started with tobacco at five years old.

His parents weren't into it, but his grandmother was.

And so, you know, grandmother, parents are out hunting,

doing their thing, and then grandmother saw

that he had a knack for it.

So she started working with them in tobacco

and the, the parents didn't squash it.

But by 21, this guy was one of the best shaman in the world.

To, to this day, I've, I, there are,

I wasca ceremonies that I've had, and there's a three with him.

Like the three with him were on just a whole different

wavelength.

And I mean that from the songs to the, to the instruments

to like, what this guy could do.

He had never seen, he said, as a gift,

brink, so he was somewhat non-traditional

for a, for a Pucalpa Shapivo shaman.

And that, he said, bring him me every instrument you can.

And so like that was the deal.

If you wanted to bring him a gift,

bring in an instrument.

And he played each of them at different times

when he was called to in the three nights.

He had only seen a drawing of a harmonica.

And this dude on the harmonica made Billy Joel look

like it was his first time.

It was fucking unreal, dude.

And you'd never, I could never think like harmonica

during a ceremony, it trusted me like it was perfect.

It was flawless medicine.

And that just came through him.

He was such an incredible person,

but he would say a lot of people that are younger,

because I see this dude, he's in Levi's,

and like a t-shirt.

And I'm like, oh, you're dressing like us, man.

Is that how it is?

And he's like a lot of the young guys dressed normal,

they dress like Westerners.

And a lot of them want to leave the area

and to get wealthy, because there's no real wealth there.

Unless you have, I don't know, it's kind of like

fighters wanting to start a gym,

but not having the money to start a gym.

The only people making money in the Amazon

are the ones that have like retreat centers

that are decked out for the most part

or people like Eleanor who get flown around.

But I could see that.

I could see Chase Ironizer's been on this podcast

and been here to pour sweat for us.

His uncle was the main medicine man for the Lakota

when JFK and Bobby Senior were working with him

on some different things from an environmental standpoint.

And so when RFK ran for president,

Chase tried to get him to come out,

but he couldn't do it, he was too old.

He said, I'm not going to come out, but you are.

Because Chase had followed, his nephew had followed.

His son did not.

His son decided to go to college and do something else.

Chase got a degree as a law degree

from a major university and in addition to that,

like wanted to hold on to all the medicine

he could from his medicine people.

So he's a unique blend of both.

But yeah, more and more, the attraction of doing

with the old and not really.

And the problem too with colonialism

is one of the main problems is that you don't see

the reverence and the respect for those gifts

that these people have, right?

You don't understand that there's a medicine there

that's far beyond anything alopathic and touch.

It's far beyond, I mean, if anyone I had a serious cancer

with the last place on earth that I'm going to fucking go to

is some hospital figure that out.

The last fucking place on earth.

Now I would take any shaman from around the world

and test to see where, who has had success in this arena

and I have seen people, cure cancer.

I have seen people that for legit nasty stage four stuff

come back and are perfectly cool

and it took them hard work.

It took them dig and deep into themselves

with the right practitioner, but they are free of it.

But buddy, Dr. Nathan Riley, the holistic OBGYN,

he's a huge Steiner study and studying antipersophic medicine

and he's also got his Western education and degree

and his MD and he said, the more he looks into it,

the more convinced he is that there's no such thing

as an only physical ailment, that everything is tied

to the emotional body, the astral body,

the aetheric body, the spiritual body,

that whatever layers beyond our physicalness exist,

that these are the originating points, right?

If we want to root something, it's not rooted in the body.

It is expressing in the body and we can take things

to help with that expression and changing and healing,

but ultimately healing must come beyond the body.

And so that to me really, really resonates

in things of that nature.

100%, I mean, this is going to seem far afield,

but I've just been going deep into oral health, right?

Which is like, no, I hear no one talking,

but it's not a sexy topic.

But lo and behold, realize that periodontal disease

has profound consequence on our heart health, right?

An incidence of heart attacks on brain health.

And also, obviously our mouth metaphorically,

the entry point from the outside world to the inside world,

it's in many ways our closest proximity to nature, right?

Because it's how we put our food, our medicine

into our bodies.

It's also how we speak out our words to the world, right?

And the last year, I'd say the thing

that I've focused on the most is his oral health.

Dude, West, West and A Price, you've heard of him.

You know, he wrote nutrition and degenerative disease.

He was a dentist who went around all over the planet

in the 1930s and he studied indigenous cultures.

You put his books right next to you.

You would probably love that book.

And so in reading, you know, Paul checks one of my mentors,

he quotes him all throughout how to eat moon be healthy,

shows pictures, you know, so these indigenous cultures

who had not been introduced to modern food,

had perfect teeth, they didn't have a word for cancer,

they didn't have a word for heart disease.

None of those things existed, right?

They didn't have high cholesterol,

they had none of that existed, right?

They didn't need those names because they just didn't happen.

And as soon as you introduced, you know,

the four white devils, which were refined sugar,

refined table salt, pasteurized homogenized milk,

and refined flour, that changed everything, right?

And how their teeth expressed,

they're all health problems, right?

Even in cats, they had a price did a thing

with the Francis Pottenger.

You can look it up, it's called Pottenger's Cats.

And as soon as these guys go off raw meat and milk

into homogenized cook stuff and cook food,

like they're within three generations,

they can't see, they're blind, they have,

you know, all their teeth fall out, like they're fucked.

That's just with cats, right?

And so, you know, something that's complex as a human,

you know, like how far can we go?

You know, in wondering about our fertility,

how far can we go down this road

without before we catch it and see what the issues are here?

But any price was on in this a long time.

He's actually in the Price Institute,

which is mostly about food and the medicine of nature

and ancestral wisdom, was birthed

out of this guy's understanding of that.

And he said, it didn't matter if you, you know,

you were an Inuit, living on 80% fucking fat,

and maybe only had blueberries once a month

in a whole year, or a pygmy tribe that was 80% yams,

but then had grubs and different things and worms

to get their protein, different sizes,

different parts of the planet, perfect health

until you introduce the standard American diet.

And that, the pictures don't lie.

I mean, that's something that like imprint in your mind,

seeing the importance of that.

And it was really cool that it was a dentist

that exposed that.

But yeah, I've been big and I've had a holistic

biological dentist, you know, that I work with,

that I've had on the podcast,

even just bring, you know, get into like the breathing

mechanics and things like that.

So much of our American faces are distorted

because we weren't given the right foods at a young age.

We weren't taught how to hold our tongue

to the roof of our mouth like we wouldn't meditation,

like sit properly.

And that affects your airway, it affects all sorts of shit.

You know, and there's cool workarounds for that, you know,

but it's, you know, books like Breathe by James Nestor,

James Nestor, Oxygen Advantage, Patrick McCown.

God, it was the other one, the jaw was another one.

I think they got into like all this therapy

that you can do or fall on a guy now that does like,

these own manual presses into the roof of his mouth

to try to space that.

And you can see his before and after in six months

of wild dude, how manipulatable that is.

Dude, you do jaw work, I don't know if you've ever done that.

That's it'll make you cry like nothing else.

It is unbelievable.

Yeah, I went to the human garage and cats

and did like an eight week protocol.

The first one was, was the jaw manipulation

and they put the gloves on and went to work for like an hour.

I mean, I mean, tears just flow.

Exactly.

Right under my eyes, like, I don't really like, you know,

I'm trying to keep it together and trying to breathe

and just tear, just running like water works, turn on.

That's right, unbelievable pain.

Yeah, because you said, you know, the body keeps score

and it does and we are obviously spiritually,

emotionally, all connected biologically.

There is no separation, right?

That's the great fallacy.

There's a great a text that I think you would love

that it just came to mind, which is the jewel net of Indra.

And it's an ancient, why-end Buddhist text

and it talks about the interdependence of all things

and how the world is a cosmic web.

And at each node of the meeting is kind of a gem

and that gem is the reflection of all things, right?

So that notion of the microcosm is the macrocosm,

which can be articulated in many ways

in many traditions is 100% the case.

And so we, whatever microcosm we choose to look at,

whether it be, like you said, like Samburu,

you can see like the, you know,

the generation of grandparents, perfect teeth, like you said,

and now with the introduce, it shifted, right?

Like we can see, and that's the physical change we can see.

The inquiry that I've been on even lately

is looking at the social and sociological impacts, right?

Because the piece that I saw, for example, in Sri Lanka,

or you see in the Amazon, you know,

I meant, well, I just hosted the Noke Koi

and it was their first trip ever out of the Amazon.

And I hosted them in Venice.

And I remember them talking about homelessness, right?

Which is wild, because you traveled other places,

like I was just in Indonesia and Bali,

there's no homeless, that concept doesn't exist, right?

And in these traditional and tribal cultures,

there was no homeless, because,

and that's what I learned in Sri Lanka, right?

If one person's out of balance,

the entire collective, the entire community is out of balance.

And so what the Noke Koi said that was so powerful,

and I remember asking him a question once, you know,

because obviously, you know,

walk around Venice, you're seeing,

we were there, we were there a few years back.

You know, you're seeing people who were on

met that in all kinds of, you know, mental illness, et cetera.

And basically, he was like, yeah,

there's a lot of people here with their spirits

moving outside of their body.

And it was such a profound and simple,

but powerful articulation.

And that's the piece now where it's like,

I've been an inquiry around is like,

how do we get back to re-appreciating

and reconstituting the whole that is the collective,

that the whole that is our social health?

Because just as we as individuals, right,

it's our mind, body, and our spirit are all,

there's also then, as you scale out, right,

as you go in the jewel net,

then it's also our family unit, right?

Like, so beautiful to see you and your partner

and your children, right?

And then you scale out, then you're a farm,

the ecosystem that you're a part of, right?

And then, you know, the community.

And we've had, we're in like the brave new world

in that regard, right?

Because since time immemorial,

we've been a tribal culture, right?

Like our well-being, our wellness,

has been oriented socially.

And I think it's Terence McKenna, who had a quote

that since 1992, our world has changed more

than it did in the previous thousand years, right?

But biologically, we haven't,

and psychologically, we haven't caught up to that, right?

Like, you get up in the morning

and read the newspaper all the,

I mean, we won't go into it, but all the,

no matter what day you're listening to this,

you know, all the crap that's happening around the world,

right? And there's a lot of it.

And it's deep, man, it's heavy.

And we also don't have containers for grief, by the way,

that's a whole nother conversation, right?

Like traditionally, we had a place where grief could live

and being born witness to.

There's a fantastic book real quick on that

from Martin Pregtl.

Yes.

The smell of rain on dust.

I've got it on my phone.

Yeah, I just want people to have that resource,

because Martin is like one of my greatest teachers

from afar, right?

They have never met the guy.

I've done deep work with him.

Dude, fucking, I'm not surprised.

Yeah, he is such a special human, though.

My favorite from him is the unlikely piece

at Kuchama Keek.

My boy turned me on to that one.

Christian, pity, shout out to you buddy.

Unlike the piece at Kuchama Keek,

I've listened to multiple times.

And it's a fucking,

there's so many gems baked into that book

that I grab something new each time.

But his understanding on grief and how to work with it

was what I brought him up, was like,

in the smell of rain on dust.

It's like, to me, it felt kind of elementary.

You know, and then I was like,

well, why everybody's hyped about this book?

It was like, oh, most people haven't grieved.

That's right.

Most people haven't come into contact for that.

And thankfully, the plants helped me

to recognize like, oh, if I need to move something,

I have to move it.

I can't fucking constipate myself emotionally.

I have to let that flow,

whether that sadness anger any of these things

in a constructive way, right?

Doesn't mean like, you did this to me,

like none of that shit,

but like letting those emotions come up

and feeling all of it, not chewing them away,

not saying I'll deal with it later,

but actually dealing with it as it arises

and letting that move.

And then it's like,

oh, now the fucking rainbow comes, right?

There's the light at the end of the tunnel,

but I had to go through that whole process

to get to the end, right?

And if we have forgotten as a culture to allow for that,

through all kinds of conditioning, men and women, right?

But the importance of that cannot be overstated.

And it's so beautiful you bring that up,

because I actually saw,

I had that on my phone.

I've been listening to it, the audio book.

And Martin Proctel came to me

during one of the most pivotal moments,

my dark night of the soul ostensibly.

I had moved across the country with my girlfriend

at the time, we've been together two and a half years.

Without getting into the depth of the narrative,

moved literally left everything my community

talked about social.

I was performing a couple of weather.

I had like my deep social bonds.

I was exhibiting in a gallery.

I had a great job.

My family was there,

left all that to be with this partner,

moved us across the world to a place I knew,

or across the country, a place I knew no one.

And within two weeks, she didn't come home for three nights.

She basically was cheating on me.

And that led me into this deep depth of darkness, right?

Like, you look under my sink,

the number of beer bottles, you know?

Like, anything I could do to numb myself,

basically I did.

And two things happened that were pivotal.

One is my father saw what was happening.

And grace of God took me through an initiatory weekend.

Where?

How old were you when the seven?

This was, I was probably 24.

So I'd come back from, that was the other piece.

I came back from Sri Lanka after having this incredible

mind-bending experience.

But like, psychological is like,

I had swam in the deep, you know?

It's like, I was, and I didn't yet have the full, you know?

I had some, I had some tools,

but I, you know, I was still contending with, you know, like,

it was like, on one level,

I had been thrown into like the maximal training, you know?

And I'd say still in some ways I'm processing that,

but in essence, that relationship was the grounding force.

And then I lost that ground.

Right.

And so my father, who had done early men's work,

actually did something called the New Warrior Training,

which was based on the sort of mythopoetic men's movement,

which I highly recommend.

I think now it's called the mankind project.

But I've been like, guys like Robert Bly.

That's right.

That's right, that's right.

And for me at the time, it was integral

because it was exactly what we're talking about.

So I did two things.

I did some deep work with Martin Proctel,

so I did some ceremonial work with Martin.

And he said to me, I went,

which I want to share on this podcast,

because because you invoked it,

and I think it needs to be shared,

he said to me,

pain is the horse that beauty rides.

Pain is the horse that beauty rides.

And for those who don't know,

Martin went through like,

he literally bore witness to genocide.

Like he lived in Guatemala.

He was researches story,

but he had gone through it.

Like, and the other thing he shared with me,

which was super powerful,

was he talked about sort of revolutionary work

and the impetus to want to change systems, right?

Because he was also a deep activist.

He was a spiritualist,

but he was also an activist.

And he said to me,

before I wanted to confront the forces,

you know, like,

I don't know, the vision I have in my mind

is like a Brock Lesnar just coming at,

you know, like all in like a Guns of Blaze.

And, you know, like,

but he's like,

and we had this notion of that's how we confront,

you know, we go after the forces, the evil forces.

He's like, now I wanna be the grass

that grows through the cracks in the concrete.

And I was like, wow, you know, like, okay.

So he was giving me little pieces

that I've held to this day.

And he said that the shit in life

of things you're experiencing right now,

if you process through the pain,

if you ride that horse that beauty rides,

that is the compost for the garden.

That is the compost for the garden.

And so my father,

seeing what I was going through flew out

and a group in that context of that training,

he was the only father there.

And he only father of men

who were going through that initiative where we can.

And he paid to volunteer to be there.

The degree to which that inspired other men in the work

was not to be underestimated.

And you know, he grew up basically, you know,

supporting, like he had guys in his group

who were in Vietnam and like witnessed, you know,

grenades being thrown in their helicopter

and watching either their best friends do.

I mean, like, talk about deep grief, you know,

and like shame and some of the deepest emotions, right?

And in that context, I finally had a container.

I won't go into the specifics of what we did that weekend,

but a container to confront that pain

and be witnessed in the grief, you know, naked, like exposed.

And to do that work and having now witnessed, you know,

been with the coast of South Africa,

literally men covered in white powder

about to be circumcised in the Netherlands, you know,

like by the, you know, the elders of the community

to be shepherded into manhood, you know,

being witnessed to other processes of individuation.

I think one of the things that were so lacking

and we now either have the grace to find in ourselves,

which I would argue you've done beautifully, you know,

from my knowledge of you, from your confrontation

and courage both externally and your courageous acts,

but also internally and your courageous acts.

But if we don't have a community or a place

where that's celebrated and born witness to,

I think what we find then is culturally and socially

is we have a lot of manboys.

We have all these like unindividuated men that are,

and by the way, you know, this context of course

exists for women as well,

but I'm speaking in this personally that are lost, right?

They're still in the hinterlands.

They haven't been brought back as I saw in Sri Lanka.

They haven't been brought back through the gauntlet by the way,

right, like being brought back is not a gentle process.

You've got, it's an existential reckoning.

Like you've got to confront your greatest fears

and potential death.

But on the other side of that gauntlet,

like you shared earlier, right,

there is that rainbow,

but in my experience, if you don't ride the horse,

if you don't ride the pain,

if you don't actually look at it,

like squaring the eyes and not existentially numb out, right?

Not spiritually bypass, not, you know,

as I was doing at that time, you know, drinking or smoking

or whatever it is, whatever you're,

preferred numbing agent is,

then you're stuck, right, you're,

like you body keeps squaring,

you're proverbialistic,

maybe that materializes as body ailments,

overweight, you know, like you said,

like the materialized, metastasized as a cancer,

socially you've got discord in your life, right?

Like in my view and what I learned from my teacher, Sri Lanka,

right, he said basically that health is the rhythm of the heart.

It's the heart rhythm, right?

And all of our hearts, right, from the moment,

from our mother, with the first nine months, right?

All we know is the beating of the heart, that's the drum.

That's the existential drum that we come into being with, right?

And we're in the darkness, right?

We're in the darkness, all we have is the beat of that heart, right?

And the beauty of when you, you know,

ceremonial work, like you're sharing, right?

Like you're reminded of that beat,

you're like brought back into that,

or deep, large work, right?

Like you're brought back into that womb into that darkness

and you're reminded of who you the fuck you truly are, right?

All right, guys, quick break to tell you about Lucy.co.

Lucy offers 100% pure nicotine.

As always, tobacco free.

Lucy breakers are nicotine pouches with an extra surprise.

Each pouch holds a capsule that can be broken up

to release extra flavor and hydration.

Set yourself up with a subscription

and have Lucy delivered straight to your door.

My favorite Lucy product is the bangers,

what I like to call them,

but the mint pouches throw that in.

I like the 12-meg,

but I started with four megs and worked my way up.

Don't be a campus hero and buy that more than you can chew.

I feel like you've been on the merry-go-round too long,

if you know what I'm saying.

So just work your way up slowly over time.

Nicotine is fantastic.

It switches the brain on like very few other things can.

And I absolutely love it.

Lucy is the only lasting pouch

that gives you long lasting flavor whenever you need it.

Get 20% off your first order

when you buy online with code KKP.

And if you don't want to wait,

just head to Lucy.co-slash-stores

to find Lucy near you and grab it today.

And here comes the fine print.

Lucy products are only for adults of legal age

and every order is age-verified.

Warning, this product contains nicotine.

Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

All right, it's addictive because it's awesome.

It is fantastic.

You will love it.

I promise, Lucy.co KKP, check out.

Unless we're willing to courageously,

you know, large work's not easy, you know,

like unless you're willing to courageously confront

the things that are your greatest pain,

then you're forever stuck in that stuckness, right?

You haven't, you haven't metastas metabolized it

as Martin says into that compost, right?

It's still the shit that you're carrying on your shoes

or wearing on your jacket or whatever.

And so I share that to say,

whatever you can do in my experience for those listening

and Martin Proctel's a great resource.

I love that you brought up.

The other two other books I would recommend

if is that I love Secrets of the Talking Jaguar.

And there's a my ancient Mayan text called

The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun.

I've got that one too.

That was awesome.

Yeah, what's up?

It's so good.

It's so good.

And he, at some point, you know,

he actually has like a mystery school

called Bolad's Kitchen in New Mexico.

If you, at some point you get a chance

to do ritual work with him, I highly recommend it

because to sort of bring this, that aspect.

So I did this deep mens work with my father.

And then I filed that up with four years of integration.

So for four years I got together with five other men

once a week and we witnessed each other

and our deepest shame, guilt, grief,

and it was free.

The commitment was to each other.

And for me, it was a sea change.

Like in the four, that four-year process,

that dark night of the soul lost boy Michael

to, you know, that's when I wanted

getting a full ride to Columbia, moved to New York,

launched Global Citizen, you know,

hosted all these incredible, you know, figures

and world leaders, presidents, prime ministers.

That would never have been feasible

if that four-year arc of deep confrontation hadn't happened.

And Martin was a huge reason for that.

But both in terms of intellectually but spiritually like,

we actually literally created offerings, right?

And there was a place where he talked about going

to a place where the river meets the ocean,

which for me is, and I imagine for many

is a deeply sacred place.

But I've had several of these synchronous experiences,

and I'm sure you have as well, Carl.

But I remember going and placing my spirit house,

this thing I've made through the course of the weekend

that was made to live through my tears, right?

It was an offering of all that I had let go and released

and also all that I was stepping into.

And I went, it was in Northern California,

in Mendocino, I went to this river as a sun was setting

and I placed this spirit house.

And as soon as I placed on the ground,

I kid you not, Carl, not a foot in front of me,

a sea lion came up, poked its head up, looked at my house,

gave me what I perceived to be a smile,

but just been the expression on its face.

But like, kind of gave this kind of popped up, witnessed,

and then went back through the river to the ocean.

And I've had a few moments like that,

but you're like, wow, okay,

when it more sover into the animal kingdom

and you're like, okay, all right.

Yeah, those things to me, I can count on one hand,

and they're some of the most special synchronicities possible.

You know, I call those a god nod, right?

Like that, when you get a god nod like that,

it's such a deep verification of the presence of spirit

and that you're held and that you're getting the nod.

Like, yeah, you're doing it, right?

You get the fucking thumbs up, dude, you're doing it.

Like that, that is, it's incomprehensible

to the non-believer, right?

It's just a coincidental type thing,

but it's like, there's no such thing as coincidental.

Like, you know, tell me the timing of that

with everything that Vlaiga went into it, you know?

And how many other times you've been in places like that,

where you didn't have a sea lion,

pop its fucking head up right next to you, you know?

Like, that just, like, it happened at that exact time

because it was that exact time that it was supposed to happen.

100%.

There was one, I'll share this also with you

because I think you'll appreciate it.

There's a group that you were talking about,

Chase Iron Eyes, and the sort of, which I have a deep,

I like when there's the bridge,

what I would call the bridges, right?

They have deep training in Western culture,

but they haven't, they're still deeply in reverence

for their indigenous roots.

Is it a friend of mine, who's Comanche?

And I got in the mail in Eagle Feather,

which is the most sacred, an invitation to the birthday,

50th birthday of the chairman of the Menominee people,

which is actually where I come from, from the Midwest,

where I live in Chicago.

That used to be Menominee land.

And at his ranch in a place called Sia in Cyril, Oklahoma.

And again, it was kind of this magical thing.

I don't know why I was invited, but I was invited.

And I showed up and had this incredible gathering.

I mean, like, there was,

Will Man Killer was there.

I think I might have conducted the last interview

before she passed into the spirit world

of her, and I was just volunteering,

helping him out, doing some media stuff.

And at one point, I had no intention or, you know,

like it wasn't there to do necessarily ceremony work.

I was just there for what I perceived to be a birthday.

And this man who holds the space in at Sia,

he's Comanche, but he went to Cornell and he's a scientist.

So he literally ships the plumage of all these birds.

And he single-handedly reintroduced the golden eagle

into the Smoky Mountains.

He's a eagle whisperer.

He breeds birds, literally like Javier Bardem

and Penelope Cruz reached out to him

to introduce the Spanish imperial,

maybe not reintroduced, but strengthen population in Spain.

So like he has literally on property, harpy eagle.

Like, so he has, so he's a scientist.

He literally has figured out how to breed birds

and reintroduce them into their native ecosystems

where they've been lost.

He's also fought the government.

He now is the repository for indigenous people

to hold their feathers because some ceremonies

were interrupted violently a hundred years ago

and that ceremony needs to close,

but they don't, it used to be the indigenous

had the literally petitioned the US government

to get the plumage for the feathers

necessary to complete that ceremony.

Now, outside of eagle feathers,

he holds the rights to ship those feathers

to whatever indigenous communities needs them.

He also holds the medicine bundle of Kwanaparkar

and is, holds the spiritual tradition,

he's one of the guardians.

And I knew a little bit of this,

but I wasn't fully familiar.

And there was a moment where I was,

I was creating some contents just to help them out.

They're non-profit and for whatever reason,

he had his bundle with them.

And the thing that I've slept under

for many, many years of my life,

I was gifted a dream catcher with three red-tail feathers.

And I share that because I'm surrounded by these eagles

and I was also given a golden eagle feather

outside of Temescal in Mexico.

So again, following these synchronous signs,

but I get stepped to with the medicine bundle

and he just starts to stoke the smoke

and he starts to bless me with the bundle.

And I kid you not call a wild red-tailed hawk,

flew five feet above my head

as he approached me with the bundle.

And again, no empty of gins,

it was literally just a prayer and a blessing with the smoke.

I couldn't talk for at least now,

I literally had to be walked to integrate.

Like it was one of the deepest medicine experiences

of my life and there was no exogenous substances consumed

like this was solely blessing prayer

and this man's medicine or for his connection to the lineage.

It was one of the most special experiences of my life

and it was so powerful because it was bearing witness

to those who have the wherewithal

to know how to work in this world

but are still alive and well in the next, in the other worlds.

And bridging those two and I think we need more of that.

Yeah, masters of both.

That's incredible.

Yeah, man, that's because he chills.

You heard me say that.

I just got my first red-tailed feather

for starting the vision quest here in the farm

from my brother, Ken Conti brought us something.

So I got on my walking stick right behind you

and talking about the red-tailed red-up top there.

Amazing.

Yeah, at least for me, that's a deep messenger.

Oh yeah.

Humming birds, I'll see out here or if I'm back

to help certain places with the red-tailed,

I take a pause.

It's like moment to pause and reflect on

what's wanting to be shared right now.

Absolutely, brother.

That's incredibly, incredibly beautiful.

Take it continuous on your journey

then I'm just popping, I'm like, remember.

Humming birds' stories are coming to talk to me

when my son was born, just all sorts of fun shit

that people probably think I'm a psycho for,

but it's like, there's no question.

100, how does it have, there's no question.

Continuous on your journey.

And I'm gonna lead to the imponence of writing this

and then talk about what this is all about.

You know, I love you.

Yeah.

So this is the first time speaking about it.

So I've consolidated some of these stories

and honestly, it's been my best attempt at taking the medicine

of this, you know, first 40-something years of life

and some of the extraordinary experiences

and processing them, you know, kind of in the kitchen

for the last five years and trying to cook something

that would be nourishing, you know, for the people.

And I wrote a book, it's called Resonance,

the Art and Science of Human Connection

and it's about the music that wants to live

in the space between us

and how we've become instruments for that song.

And that, what I just shared, for example,

though it's not the book, that story of the space being,

you know, what happened with me with the red tail

was the space between was respected.

It was, and it was danced with.

And that, that, what happened was

what I call in the book, the more was made present.

And the more is that existential possibility

that I believe is possible at all times.

Within each of us, but I think,

and this is especially relevant in this day and age,

but also in the medicine of us connecting, right?

In the medicine of human connection and the collective.

And what I've been gifted with is rare insight

into these cultures and societies,

which I know you have a huge shared reverence for as well,

wherein the integrity of the collective is still whole.

And unfortunately, I think many of us,

including myself in predominantly Western cultures,

are now deeply lonely, you know?

Deeply, deeply lonely.

And I've gone from moments of feeling

profoundly connected to dark nights of the soul, you know?

Like really confronting some heavy shit

and feeling totally alone.

And this is kind of a road map, you know?

I think there's a lot of writing out there about

why we're lonely.

This is a how, and not like a prescriptive, like,

do XYZ, and for 1090, not like, it's not like that.

It's using music as a metaphor to call you home.

You know, it's like you talked about the harmonica.

I know that song, I've listened to it.

And it's like, there's certain resonances,

there's certain frequencies that speak to us.

And so what I share is how we listen to the music

that wants to live through us,

and how we listen to the music between us

to know which songs are meant for us.

And who is our band, right?

I'm now in your band.

I'm, you know, I come in your house

and I'm embraced by your beautiful daughter,

greeted graciously by your beautiful son,

your incredible wife, right?

You have, which I deeply long to call into my own life,

but you've created this beautiful family, right?

And there, that's, that's your band.

That's, and you have multiple bands,

but that's your band, right?

And there's also your symphony, right?

Like there's, there, there are,

how do you find the people that are,

that are, that are, you know,

a grounded for a moment?

Think about the Beatles, right?

Just because everyone knows the Beatles.

John Paul Ring, they're all incredible musicians.

They all had, like, you know, they all could have been

incredible solo artists in their own right,

or chairs, they were.

But somehow the alchemy of their song together

created something more, and that more is the Beatles.

And all of us have been touched by it.

And I think there's something undeniable,

whether you're a Beatles fan or not.

You think of the music that is most resonant to you.

And when you're, and I created a music festival,

see 70,000 people, you know, all enraptured

by an incredible artist,

whether that be Coldplay or Beyonce,

all deeply present in that moment is something

you can't approximate, right?

One of the beautiful things about music

is it transcends all boundaries, right?

It's like, we can all appreciate a good song.

And with the Beatles, they created,

they were listening, what I talked about in the book,

is they were listening.

They were in the listening for the more, you know?

Miles Davis has a beautiful quote, which he says,

music is what lives in the space between the notes.

And in my belief are people, the people that are meant for us

are the people that listen to our music.

They're the people that are present for the space

between our notes.

And when we synchronize, like a great jazz musician,

we can improvise and create something beautiful,

something more, you know?

And it also depersonalizes,

because I think the other thing that's not really talked about

is some people aren't meant for us, right?

Like a lot of times, you know, people are like,

oh, that person doesn't like me.

I think now in the age of which we can go down that road,

but you know, social media, all the highlight reels,

all the proximate connection,

the artificial sense of, which only furthers

that sense of loneliness.

There's this, there's a lot of noise.

More noise than we've ever faced,

essentially as human beings, right?

What resonance is about is finding signal, right?

And holding to signal and not being distracted

by the fray of the noise that's trying to throw you off

your signal and finding the others, finding the others,

because it's literally physics,

and I actually break down just like we talked about

the deep indigenous stories,

but also the research on the science, right?

And how they come together, right?

Cochearance, how are nervous systems,

what do I have a breath word?

How are nervous systems literally come into syncopation,

how they sync?

You know, resonance in physics on a bridge,

if soldiers are actually locked up on a concrete bridge,

and all marching in exact synchronicity,

they can actually break and collapse a concrete bridge, right?

Like, that is an example of the more, right?

Like, it's not just, it's not one plus one equals two,

it's something exponential.

And to me, a Beatles is a great example of that, right?

Because those four created something more

than either one of them individually.

And it's my belief in what I write about in the book.

I think each of us, just like our fingerprint,

has a unique song that wants to live through us.

Not everyone gets to that song in this life, you know?

It's like the saying, you know, everyone dies,

but not everyone really lives.

And so what I dedicated the book to was,

how can you as an individual realize that fingerprint,

that song that is uniquely your own?

And how can you sing it such that the symphony

that is meant to support you beautifully,

can find you and that you can find your people.

The people that are, that truly see you,

the people that truly appreciate you,

the people that, like Miles talks about,

can listen to your notes,

but also the space between and find ways

to dance beautifully with those notes, you know?

And to create something together, that is more.

And I know I'm speaking kind of musically or mythologically,

but what I then go into is sort of the micro to the macro.

So how does one first tune their own instrument individually?

And then from a place of tuning individually,

how can we then slowly move out?

How can we start our band, you know?

How can we, from a band,

how can we move into family relationships, work relationships?

So, and to the point of symphony,

like what is our unique contribution?

What is our, and it goes into purpose, right?

Like that idea of how do we,

how do we step into that thing that is the more

that wants to live through us, right?

Stephen Pressfield, Elizabeth Gilbert,

Pressfield actually, who doesn't even read

other people's work, read it?

I was shit, to be honest, shitting myself.

He agreed to read, and he, so he's the,

he actually, he said it was outstanding,

he said I wouldn't change a word,

and that's my favorite living,

he said it's my favorite living author on the planet.

So that to me was like, okay, I can share it now.

But yeah, but basically it's,

it uses the metaphor of music as a way

to help you sing your unique song.

No, that is absolutely incredible.

I mean, I'm juiced to get into my hands on a coffee.

They're coming off the printer, brother.

I have, do you see, I just got to launch the May 5th,

and of course, can link to it,

but you can find resonance.

It's on Amazon, on Barnes & Noble, whatever.

I'll get you one for sure.

Thank you, brother, and I'll happily buy some support

because that's, you know, get you,

and then I can make a review.

Help, help, help you, help you in the game.

Dude, so much what you've covered is stuff

that's resonated with me over the years

and thinking of how I think about

kind of the larger game at play.

You know, coaching and fit for service,

it was almost always like, hey,

you're the most physically fit of all of us.

You know the most on the body.

You're gonna teach this shit, you know,

and that's where that'll be your corner.

And I got to teach plenty of other things

and the things that I'm drawn to are far beyond the body, right?

They're the conversations that we're having.

They're the exploration of consciousness,

the exploration of indigenous wisdom and practices

and how do those practices help us

make communion with God and make communion

with nature on a regular basis

so that the eye self is expanded in a different way.

The eye self can relate in a different way.

But to your point, you know,

I've always said the body is a tuning fork.

And until you're tuned correctly,

you will not interface with the external

in a way you want, right?

I mean, same thing, different language

at a buddy, Mark Englandon, who's an MLP guy

and he was just saying that, you know, in the NLP,

anyone who perpetuates the idea of being wronged

will remain the victim.

Their life will continue through law of attraction

or whatever you want to call that,

continue to bring them back up against victimhood

by giving them new reasons to be a victim still, right?

Until they transcend that and move beyond it, right?

I talked about this before,

but like, you know, everyone knows the story of,

you know, a woman who dates guy after guy

who's the same guy, different avatar, always abusive,

you know, and it's not,

it's only when she changes herself, does she transcend that

and then doesn't have that experience again?

She doesn't fix those guys, right?

She fixes herself and it's not that she had a problem,

like, right, I'm gonna be honest,

like it wasn't her fault for getting any of the shit

that happened, but as soon as she levels up,

that's no longer a part of her experience, right?

And again, that just goes back to like,

what is ours versus what is theirs?

If it's happening to me, I've called it in.

And if I take that level of responsibility for it,

then I'm not a victim, I have the power to change it, right?

I have to power the change it

through working on changing me.

And then in that of changing me,

I have the ability to create new experience in my life

that is more in alignment with what my thinking might

would say, that's what I want to have, right?

Yep.

And that goes into manifestation and all the stuff too

on in terms of like wanting something versus believing it

as if it is already there.

And, you know, taking that in, like when you change your,

what that actually means is,

I'm changing who I am internally.

I'm changing my frequency to abundance

or to happy, I'm changing my frequency

to being fulfilled in relationship,

even if I don't have the relationship yet,

because then from that place, I call in the partner

who mirrors that and says, oh yeah, you're my person

and I'm your person, right?

And it asks me how I know that, you know,

like, that was one of the biggest pieces

going through to spend this work

was calling in my amazing life.

Yes.

And, man, perfect medicine for me,

we've grown so much together, you know?

I bet.

There is so much together in 14 years,

it's fucking wild, but yeah, you know,

I think about like the heart coherence

from heart math and, you know,

butchenko breathing, you know,

it's equal parts in, equal parts out,

we'll raise HRV and you're like,

well, what's HRV?

Oh, fuck HRV.

That raises heart coherence, right?

That means that field is going to open.

That's it.

It's going to expand and when I'm around people

and I want to have this nice expanded field,

it's going to interact and engage

and bring up other people to have

that open expanded heart field.

That's it, right?

And that's something that's such a cool thing

to think about.

Last podcast I was talking a bit about,

is it Veda Austin?

Oh, the water is from the water.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

Yeah, you know,

Alex Zeck turned me on to her work

and I was just blown away,

but we talked about, you know,

the photographing of frozen waters,

nothing new, right?

That comes out of Japan,

but what she was doing is she was taking that

to living things, like you can freeze egg white, right?

And so as a farmer here with eggs,

and I just told this story,

so I apologize and for bringing it up again,

but she found, you know, an egg,

a factory farm egg that had never seen real sun

and photographed that after four hours,

they egg white.

Then she found like a pasture raised happy hen,

she got that egg and she showed that

and they were completely different,

no different than the original photos of water

that were the waters hated or the waters loved, right?

That level of difference between the indoor egg

versus the pasture raised outdoor egg.

What's cool is she takes the one egg

that is the higher frequency

and puts it next to the other egg overnight

and then in the morning, both of them

have now raised their frequency.

And she sees how far couldn't this go.

She puts the one pasture raised egg in the middle

and 12 factory farm digs on the outside.

And the next morning, all 12 on the outside

are as good as the interior

and the interior is actually improved

because of the feedback of helping everything around itself.

It has improved itself even better.

That's right.

And like that's the fucking game, dude.

Now, Zach told me that, I was like,

damn, dude, that is the game we're in.

It is the game we're in and there's a lot of things there

like when you, it resonated too

when you talk about like some people aren't your people

and Paul Selig would say like,

we're totally allowed to have preference.

Let go of judgment, but absolutely have precedence, right?

That's a part of our personality.

It's a part of what we're drawn to naturally.

There's nothing wrong with totally.

And as Selig said, anyone you hold in the dark,

a part of you must stay there holding them in the darkness,

right?

If I can dem somebody, if I won't forgive somebody,

if I say like that guy is X, Y, and Z, and it's dark,

part of my consciousness remains in the cave

holding their hand there, right?

And so like forgiveness is about me,

more than it's about letting someone off the hook.

It's about relieving me of holding someone in the dark.

You know, so so many of these things kind of thread together

when you think of the game being played and heart coherence

and still having a choice in the matter

of what we prefer and what we wish to call in,

but also, you know, what resonates with us.

What is playing on the, you know, hand pans?

Like who's got two C note hand pans, right?

Can't play an A and a D, right?

We got them, they need to match.

If we're going to play together.

And it's like that makes sense too,

even from a sound perspective.

Tom, I'm just stoked, dude.

There's so many points you brought up there.

I was like, oh, this is fucking right.

I'm like, this is awesome, this is awesome, this is awesome.

Yeah, I think what you just,

I mean, you nailed it.

I'd be talking about simatics, right?

Like with the notion of frequency

and that being visualized in water,

which is life force, but yes, absolutely.

Across all biologicals, now the research,

which I talk about in the book,

but like the research around coherence is profound, right?

Like we know we've heard the research, right?

Like the equivalent, loneliness is equivalent

of basically smoking 15 cigarettes a day, like health wise.

Like there are profound consequences to our loneliness.

And unfortunately we're living, I think,

you know, not to get into whatever we just went through,

but I think the true pandemic that we're living through

is this epidemic of loneliness, right?

I think people feeling surrounded, more connected,

like theoretically, like in terms of social media

than ever before, but actually more disconnected

than we've ever been ever in the history of humanity.

And of course there are, you know,

there's great resources now,

especially around biological aspects, you know,

you can hear them on down, you know,

in terms of things we can do.

And there's still an assaults, obviously,

which we could talk about on our biology,

but there are things we know to do, to preserve,

to, you know, I don't love the word biohack,

but to hack our biology such that we can be resilient.

What I don't think people are talking about enough

and I hope resonance is the medicine for

is how do we socially approach that disease?

And that's what I saw with my teacher in Sri Lanka.

That's what I've seen, you know,

in terms of the success of global citizen

and how we were able to create a collective

and witness across all these wisdom traditions, right?

Is what are the ways that, I mean, you look at Annie

and I know you and I shared deep reverence

for, you know, authentic ceremony.

You look at Annie's ceremony,

what is the heartbeat of that ceremony?

It's the music, you know?

And it's, it's, it's, it's, again,

it bringing it back to my teacher shared

and also, you know, what we go back biologically, right?

Our connection, fundamental connection,

the first nine months of our life is with our mother

in the womb and it is, it is guided by that heartbeat, right?

And what I realized was in the dis-ease of the mental illnesses,

the imbalances, the loneliness that is also part

of, unfortunately, our modern society,

we've got to find our way back to that rhythm,

to that music, right?

To that heartbeat that, that brings us together

and recognize also what is,

and I think that's the other piece, right?

The discernment, like you said, beautifully, right?

Like, some people are, are, are not gonna be in resonance.

Sometimes you're gonna hit dissonance, right?

Like, and how do we at,

but how do we like, Marching Proct,

tell you, you know, share with me,

how do we turn the dissonance into resonance?

How do we, like you said,

how do we not stay holding someone in the dark

but actually move into, as the ceremony does,

move into the light of the morning

and actually be back in the grace of our song.

And I think that, that's the piece, right?

Is, how can we not just see ourselves as islands

but see how we exist with the entire geography around us?

And be, you know, I'm mixing metaphors now,

but we're, you're beautiful form, right?

One of the things I love was the phase of my life

where I studied permaculture and, and, and,

and Bill Mollison and, and, and closed loop systems, right?

The corn's beans and squash and how,

when we're in right relationship, when we're in the places,

I mean, even just being here, man,

like my nervous system,

if I actually think about it, like I woke up,

I feel, I feel exponentially better,

one connecting with you, just,

I think connecting with true friends,

two connecting with two friends,

true friends in, in, in nature, right?

Like, that's one of the principles I talk about in the book too,

is, is where the places where you can find your center.

Because it's only from our center

that we really truly can hear that,

which is meant for us, right?

And I myself have lost my center.

I'm multiple occasions, you know?

But like, I know from me, exactly this,

connect with the real ones,

connect with the people who, like,

you feel seen, heard, love, depreciated,

like people, like you,

also you're so, which I want to just acknowledge you,

you're such a, yeah, you're a big fucking dude,

but you're also such a, your heart is so huge,

you know, you, you're, you're super smart, but you,

but what I love about you,

if someone asked me one word to describe

Calcansbury, I'd say heart,

because you've got to such a big heart for the world, you know?

My father had that, and it's why I had such a deep,

deep, deep, deep, have such a deep, deep love for him, right?

It's like people would just light up around him,

like he was just, like, kids, animals,

like they just, he had resonance.

He was carrying that signal,

and he showed up for me when I was out of tune, you know?

When I was in, when I was in dissonance,

and he reminded me of the music,

and that's the thing that a true people do.

That, I call him the true people, you know?

It's like, and the true, I don't love the word,