Become The Strongest Version of Yourself with Elliott Hulse

Elliott Hulse is a strength coach, author, mentor, and spiritual teacher whose work has impacted millions of men around the world. Rising to prominence through his YouTube channel, Elliott pioneered a message that fitness is not just about building muscle, but about the process of transformation and “becoming the strongest version of yourself”—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Drawing from strength training, bioenergetics, the work of Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich, Christian mysticism, and depth psychology, Elliott helps men integrate body, mind, and soul. He is known for Grounding Camps, where collectives of men explore masculine initiation, rites of passage, and embodiment He is known for his uncompromising emphasis on character, courage, and surrender to divine grace.

In recent years, Elliott has shifted much of his focus from fitness content to wisdom teaching—speaking on the integration of faith, embodiment, family, and leadership in a rapidly changing world.

In this episode, I sit down with one of the most influential figures in my life, Elliott Hulse. I found Elliott’s YouTube channel at the age of 19, a few months after my father was diagnosed with cancer.

In desperate need of male role models, I watched every video on Elliott’s channel, completely swept away by the depth of his perspectives on physicality, emotional wellbeing, relationships, surrender, God, entrepreneurship, and family.

In this episode, Elliott and I explore:

• The body as a blueprint for the soul
• Fitness as a spiritual path
• The mother wound and father wound and why so many men feel uninitiated
• The tension between doing and surrender, ego and grace
• What it really means to trust divine providence in a collapsing, rapidly evolving world

Along the way, I share some deeply personal stories—losing my father to cancer, a near-death experience in the ocean, and years of wrestling with dissociation and embodiment—while Elliott brings in Christian theology, Jungian psychology, Reichian character structures, and raw, lived wisdom.

If you’ve ever been touched by Elliott’s work—or if you’re a man (or love men) and care about initiation, courage, and spiritual maturity—this conversation is for you.

Thank you for tuning in

Links

Forrest Wilson Instagram

Forrest Wilson Website

Luminous Labs Website

Elliott Hulse Strength YouTube

Elliott Hulse Wisdom YouTube

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Hey everybody. Welcome back. It's good to have you here. I am honored and grateful to introduce you to our guest for today, who is none other than Elliot Hulse. What's up, E? Good to have you here, man. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_03 0:16

Yeah. My pleasure. Thank you, Forrest. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

So, on a personal note for everybody listening, Elliot's, I put Elliot in the top five people most influential in my life. Um, Elliot, I found your YouTube channel when I was 19 years old. My dad had just gotten diagnosed with cancer, and he was a college football player and a coach, was a weightlifting coach for the Olympic team, and he had given me a five by five uh weightlifting protocol. And so I had gone on YouTube and looked up five by five weightlifting, and I found your YouTube channel. And man, to say you changed my life would be the understatement of all time, man. Like I can't give you enough gratitude and appreciation for the impact you've had on me. I mean, I just was I think I watched every YouTube video you made at some like between 19 years old and 25. Like I just took it all in at the deepest level and you inspired the heck out of me, man. Like I just was looking at you and going, oh my God, look at this guy. He's making money, he's taking care of his family, he's helping people, he's in great shape, he's doing transformational work. Like, you just like I I literally can't put it into words the impact you had on me. It's crazy. I mean, I I feel like which it altered the trajectory of my life. You you were actually an embodied example of so many of the things that I wanted to be. And and of course, you read that uh Emerson quote that changed my life, right? Who you are speaks so loud, I can't hear a word you say. Man, that quote fucked me. Yeah, that quote fucked me up, man. Like because I was a philosopher at the time. I could have given you a really beautiful story about how people ought to live, but I didn't live like that. I was totally full of shit. And I had to take a deep look at myself and really, really come to grips with who I am as a person and do some deep inner work to make some changes. So thank you. I want to express my appreciation. It's an honor to have you here and deep, deep welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_03 2:07

Yeah, I receive it. Thank you for sharing and praise the Lord.

SPEAKER_02 2:11

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, I at that time, you're I the biggest message I would hear you say over and over again is become the strongest version of yourself. Uh, you were talking a lot about transcendent reps and working working out as a as an excuse to become a different person, like actually working out as the the altar or the the context for which we can transform and become a different person. So I just I I know it's a a vast opening I'm creating here, but I just want to share share this as a way to open and let you take it wherever you want in terms of the work you've done in the body, the psyche, the energy, and helping everybody, but specifically men, uh through transformational processes. Like I just want to open up a vast space that you can take it whatever direction you want to go.

SPEAKER_04 3:09

Yeah. So fitness is a means for personal development because it doesn't just build your body, it builds your character. Right. And in our culture, we have a tendency to separate body from mind, right? Like, so you go to school to develop your mind, or you go to you go to church or the temple or meditation group to develop your spirit, and then uh we go to the gym to develop our our bodies. But I just had a way of seeing it, mainly from good mentors I've had, but also just a being drawn towards this idea of a whole. Like we're integrated, we're not separated. I like to say that the body is the is the mind. And in fact, it is a thoroughly Christian idea that the body, particularly Catholic, that the body is the blueprint for your soul. This is why you know we're said we're to have a light body, right? Like you're gonna, you're gonna when you die and you're resurrected or reborn, however, you know, people imagine it is when you die. But the concept is that like you're gonna get back your body. The blueprint, it's a it's the light body, it's not the flesh body, but it looks the same. And of course, it's I don't know if it's true or not, but they say that it'll be your body at your peak, like at your best. And with that, as a as a as a just a paradigm for life, you realize that like nothing that I do to my body doesn't affect my mind and my soul physiologically, energetically, spiritually. It's all one thing. So getting into lifting got me into spirituality.

SPEAKER_02 5:07

There's a I'll I'll just tell a quick story that comes to mind as you're sharing because one of the deepest mystical initiations I've ever had in my life. Um, I broke my leg surfing a few years ago. And when I was in the hospital, I took my consciousness into my leg. I'm like, I need to check out what's going on here. And I saw my light body, and I saw, oh, my physical concrete 3D body is not in alignment with the deepest dimension of being where we're already healed. And so I came out of my leg and I knew it's an instantaneous knowing. It was like a clairvoyant kind of knowing. It wasn't thought or anything, it was just I don't need to have surgery. And if I have surgery, I'm gonna hold in place something that's incongruent and out of alignment. I need to stay in the place in the location in our being where we're already healed and allow my 3D physical life to come into alignment with this dimension of being. And so I literally just took three or four months and sat there. I felt clear light coming into my body all day long. All my clients left, my girlfriend left, the guys who I was living with mailed me all my shit. Like my whole fucking life ended. And every day, day by day, I could feel the bones in my body coming into deeper alignment. I kid you not, man. If I got on the phone with someone and I said something from fear or from doubt or from hesitation, I could start to feel the bones of my leg separate again. I swear to God. Wow. Really? I swear to God. And I went to the doctor after three or four months and they took a picture of my leg, and he was like, dude, this is a miracle. You look like you never even broke your leg in the first place after everyone told me I was never gonna be able to walk again and all this shit. And I was like, Of course I know it's in alignment. I felt it every moment coming into alignment. It was the deepest fucking initiation into actually like living life from the dimension of being where we're already healed. It's like healing's trying to happen all the time and we get in the way of it, like awakening's trying to happen all the time, and we get in the way of it. But if we can allow it to happen, we can come our like physical 3D life can come into congruence with our light body, as you're saying. So I have I yeah, I just have to share that here in you.

SPEAKER_04 7:12

Yeah, that's an experience that exemplifies this idea that I've been really embracing or like wrestling with and trying to understand and see it. And obviously, you saw it, and that is that there is no power in created things, and that there's only one power, there's only one truth, and it's wholeness, it's health, it's abundance. Like that's really what exists, and everything else is false conception projected upon a false, I can't say that life is a false reality, but a reality that has no power. Like, that's like the the power of an architect. I don't know if this is a good example, but the power that the architect has is in developing the blueprint, and the blueprint is perfect. Where things can go wrong is when we put material pieces, created pieces together, and then try to recreate what is actually the truth, which is the blueprint. Pieces will fall apart, pieces will deteriorate, some pieces won't fit. There's gonna be something that's a little bit off kilter, just by mere virtue of it being in the third dimension. Like, I think that's what it means in the Bible when it says that we like in the garden, we fell. Right? We fell into a dimension. We may have been in a higher dimension with the where like the garden is perfection. The garden, and I don't I can't think in terms of physics what dimension that would be, but it's definitely not the third dimension. It's a higher dimension where perfection is, and then to like fall means to like become more concrete. Like you ever like um my kids used to make like uh slime, and the slime starts out as like liquid. It's first liquid, right? Like think of spirit, it's more like liquid, right? It's you can't grab it. It's just but then over time it falls into its squishy form, and now it's like I can break it up and I can turn it into pieces and I can do stuff with it. It's almost like that happened. Like we were in this formless perfection. And then because of self-awareness, really, self-awareness is such a trap. It's interesting because everybody's about being self-aware, but like self-awareness is is a trap also. And then out of that self-awareness, that self-consciousness, we like time and space just collapsed. And then we just like now we're, I don't want to say trapped, but now we're like experiencing this time space continuum with like feel feelings in pain and things can break, but it doesn't, it doesn't take anything away from the truth of the blueprint that's above us. I mean you I've been saying this a lot in videos lately, moving chairs around on the Titanic, right? Like the Titanic is going where the Titanic's going. And I'm not saying our lives are going to be, you know, underwater, but it's like the thing is going, but yet you have people running around uh frantically trying to manipulate created things that are ultimately going. It's just where's it going? All created things are going down. As we come here, we're dying. So it's like if we give our power to created things, we're essentially doing what Jesus says when he says, you can't have two gods. I think a lot of people get this messed up, right? They're like, they think that he's talking about, like, you know, the devil with a pitchfork. Is that he's saying you can't have two gods? And he says, he uses this term, and of course, I'm not a theologian, but I think these words are fascinating. He says, you can't worship mammon and God the Father, the creator, the pattern, right? Mammon sounds so much like mammary, which is where we get mammary glands, also mommy, also matriarch, right? And a mammon, matriarch, material, right? Matrix. So I think he's essentially saying you can't worship, in other words, worth put worth in and attribute power to and project power onto material things, and rest in the truth of the blueprint that is true. You can't do both. How can you rest in the blueprint of truth, our creator, which is omnipotence, omnipresence, eternal, but yet be like, I gotta fix this thing, I gotta mend this bone, I gotta, I gotta heal this thing, or I gotta like make this happen.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Right.

SPEAKER_04 12:02

Those things happen in this concept, and I'm working it out. Uh I don't have it nailed, but in this concept, these things have no power whatsoever. And like Christ says, seek first the kingdom, and then all these things will be added to you. We usually seek the kingdom second. We say, I'm gonna do everything I can over here to make things happen, and then when I'm like, I can't do it, I'm frustrated and everything's going wrong. All right, God, what do you want me to do? How should I handle it? Or he's saying, no, no, don't even look at don't look at creative things at all. Just look at the perfection, the the the wholeness of the blueprint.

SPEAKER_02 12:44

Yeah, it's it's beautifully said, and you know, the number of, and I've been this person, so I'm not casting judgment, but uh the number of people that I meet who are like once I get one, two, and three, like these are my conditions upon whether it's enlightenment or just resting in being or whatever. Um, and you know what you like a lot of my personal journey has been first of all, I'm gonna I'm gonna cut off my own sentence here. I think it's we're talking about wholeness, right? So there's nothing that's not included in wholeness. And I always invite people to self-include. It's like the original sin is separation. Like the reason, the reason we fight so hard to try to survive is we think we're separate from something. Wholeness, we're in an interconnected reality. All manifestations are manifestation of the one, the one God in this example. It's and all like the many are all expressions of the one, right? And so we're all manif we're all children of God, we're all manifestations of the one intelligence, so the one source, and we lose that, and so we fight and we struggle and we wrestle, even while the whole time we're still we're still interconnected with the larger happening that's going on here.

SPEAKER_04 13:59

Yeah, and and coming back to the body, right? Like the the body is a part of that, not just the mind, not just the soul. There's this like, you know, there was a manich, I think it'd be called the manichan heresy, where essentially they were saying that the body's bad, the body's evil, it's filthy, it's no good. There's pain there, there's desire there, there's sin there, and we need to transcend the body and only live in spirit. But the church deemed that a heresy for a number of reasons, but mainly because of the fact that Christ is God incarnate, right? And by becoming human, the idea, anyway, in Christianity is that he redeemed the body. The body is now redeemed, and we are included in the resurrection. So it's not like the spirit gets to go and do like spiritual things and it's gonna be great because it's all spirit and doesn't have these grubby, nasty bodies that poop and fart. It's like no, no, no. The body is actually redeemed and integrated up into that wholeness.

SPEAKER_02 15:07

Yeah, yeah. And just so you know, um, I I've never been a uh religious person or a church person. I I feel like a very deeply spiritual person, and and with Jesus specifically, I've had shamanic journeys, like not on psychedelics or anything like that, but just altered state experience, like meditations, you could basically call them, where I've experienced Christ and had had experiences with Jesus. So I feel this like very deep, very deep relationship with Jesus. I always feel him around in every moment, but I I'm not like a religious person. I've never read the Bible, I don't go to church, so it's an interesting thing for me. I feel I have a very deep relationship with with the divine. I mean, how can you not? Like there's it's like I said, all manifestations of the one.

SPEAKER_04 15:51

So it's a weird thing because you know, on one hand, we're made in the likeness and image of God. And Jesus reminded us that the that the kingdom is within. But then specifically in in in religions, all religions, but I'm talking about Christianity in particular, we then turn the the focus away from the self towards a transcendent other. So it's like I felt Jesus inside me, or I had an experience with Jesus where on one hand, on one hand, it's weird. It's like, what are you talking about? Where is he? He's not there. But on the other hand, according to Robert Robert Moore, he talks about the and and this is from Carl Jung also, the importance of um making the removing the focus of attention from the ego and placing it on a transcendent other. And so I that's why I think it's it's logical and important, like it's it's good practice to have Jesus. Because it it takes the focus away from my lower S self, right? My problems, my hopes, my fears, my dreams, and places it on a on a capital S self that is transcendent. Because if Jesus is eternal, he's living in me, he's living in you, he impinges upon our world in every way, shape, or form. So it's like it's me, but it's not me. And I think that's I think that's a health. Robert Bly speaks about or Robert Morse speaks about how it's like it's healthy to have an avatar. So regardless of you know what religion it is, usually there's going to be and there has to be some avatar. I think the only one that doesn't have some form some form of avatar is Buddhism. But I and you know, they have Buddha, but he's less of an avatar in this case. Maybe he is. Um But I don't even know if most Buddhists even consider that consider it a religion, you know, it's kind of like a way, it's like a practice.

SPEAKER_02 18:06

Yeah. Well, and we all have a multiplicity of of selves, right? So the there's there's a Christ consciousness that we all have access to, and there's also places in me that have been addicted and uh depressed and not Christ-like in very much. But it's it's like you know, if you get all the way to the essence of anything, you find the essence of everything, you find the one that we're talking about. And so a lot of like one of the challenges that I had was I actually had a lot of this peak experience. Like I had an experience where I'm like, God, I'm having the same experience that Jesus had. Like I actually, I actually went there, right? And then it's like, well, maybe something in me is having an experience like that, but I've also got all these other places too. And so we've got the ascending and descending path, which I hear you talking about a lot, which is there's all these, like, there's all these places in us that are waking up to our true nature. I have places in me that are uh more awake than others, right? And and the descending path is allowing spirit or allowing that Christ consciousness into the deepest dimensions of our being that don't feel that way. I mean, there's still to this day places in me that are in pain and that are struggling and hurting. And it's like the places in me that have access more resource and access this perspective we're talking about can help parent and grow up those places that are still hurting and in pain. And that's just, you know, going on inside this forest guy. We also could could like zoom out and look at that in the world. Like in a lot of ways, that's what those of us who've done this work are called to do in the world is show up and help help the world grow up, right?

SPEAKER_04 19:43

Yeah, expansion. Expansion, expansion is the nature of God. So when you say like the world, like the world is expanded, like for all the things that you could say are going wrong in the world, and you know, who's using the technology, where it comes from, and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. If God, if there's only one power and God is in charge and all things are come to good for those who are in Christ, then like the whole planet just got a brain with the internet. It's like, you know, just around the whole planet, like just this web of a brain, which literally the planet is the same size, but consciousness just expanded. You mentioned how like finding my videos on YouTube and what it did to your life, like it's sure it was me, but at the same time, it was like the brain was activated. And so parts that seemed divergent just came together. So it's no longer just my brain, it's all of our brains, and we're all expanding now at a more at a more complete, a more uniform rate. Like if you in, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, when you found my videos, you were, I don't want to say a part of a small group, but you were compared to who's who's watching videos today. Like back then, maybe, maybe there were four million people on YouTube, right? I don't know, four billion people maybe on YouTube. I have no idea, right? But like today, there's twice that. Way more. So the brain was it was literally like a spark, right? The early internet was a spark, and like it woke up a certain amount of people, and then and then you, now you, you're doing the same thing. You're waking people up with embodiment work and you know the the work that you do. So it's just like the whole, like we're at a at a place of rapid expansion on the planet. That's pretty crazy to see.

SPEAKER_02 21:43

It's amazing. Yeah, it's like I in physics, you have like speed, and then you have the derivative that is acceleration, and the derivative of that is velocity. It's like we need a term for the derivative of evolution, like the pace at which evolution is evolving because it's growing like exponentially now. Like Evolution is evolving faster than it ever has, and it's gonna keep being that way.

SPEAKER_03 22:05

Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder. I mean, we live, what was it, George Orwell, the best of times and the worst of times?

SPEAKER_04 22:11

It's very interesting because depending on who you talk to, also, like these are these are really bad times. These are really dark times. You know, all the things that are happening geopolitically, and you know, the Epstein Island stuff and like all that, you can argue that like things are things are getting worse if that's your perspective, if that's what you choose to focus on, if you're like Christ says, like worshiping mammon, right? Looking rather than transcending and seeing like the pattern that's evolving rather than the material that's being presented to us. In fact, like you got to break stuff up in order to grow anyway. So I think a lot of this stuff that we're seeing are just like the the last kicks and screams of a consciousness, a paradigm, um, uh a world order that is just it's lived its time, it's over. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:08

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it makes me think of, you know, again, I'm remembering what it was like to be a 19 or a 20-year-old and see you doing um like Wilhelm Reich type work and bioenergetics and the bow and deep breathing and all these releases. And it's like, you know, if you zoom out and hold planet Earth, like I oftentimes use this metaphor of like, you know, the body of Christ, right? Like every human being is a cell in the body of a superorganism that we call humanity. Got eight billion cells in it. That's our body. Developmentally, we're like a 17-year-old teenager, we're trying to develop, we're trying to transition into adulthood. We got a fuck ton of trauma. Like, there's some fucked up shit that's happened in our past, and all of it's bubbling up to the surface. I mean, all the stuff as it does, right? When we start growing up, it's like, damn, we got to look at the experiences we've had and how is humanity gonna transition into a healthy, happy, fulfilled adult being with eight billion or so people in it, right? So, like the perspective of Wilhelm Reich, the perspective of our unconscious bubbling up to the surface and things having to break down to break through. Like you have to things have to fall apart for a new uh system to emerge, for a new ego structure to emerge, for a new way. Like, think about the breakdown that happened at these evolutionary inflection points in history, the agrarian revolution, the industrial revolution, the invention of the internet. Like we're going through another inflection point right now. And it'll be, if you look at the time between each one of those, it keeps decreasing. So I often point to people and say, we're gonna go through like we're going through one now, it'll only be a couple of years before the next one. Like, we need leaders who can navigate when the the realms of samsara, like you're pointing to, are collapsing. Like, reality is gonna be falling into and out of the of the formless, out of the one. It's we're we're gonna be like re-emerging realities all the time, like in every breath ultimately. So I feel like you know, obviously, you have such a deep wisdom on like how we actually can embrace letting go and embrace the dissolution, embrace the falling apart of what isn't working. Like right now, I feel like we're just fighting like hell to keep what isn't working going instead of embracing embracing the breakdown and celebrating going, at least we can be grateful it got us to hear, right?

SPEAKER_04 25:18

Yeah, yeah. I mean, whenever we're in separation consciousness, fear dominates. And like you can choose to be afraid, and you could have all the logical reasons to be afraid, but just remember that's this that's the spirit, that's the sentiment from which you're coming from. Like with AI right now, like we're there, like the next one is is here, of course, and it's AI, you know. And on one hand, barring you know, entrepreneurs and coders and people who like geek out on this stuff and they're using it, there's a lot of fear because people are legitimately losing their jobs. Like, you know, the it's wiping out massive industries. And although that's uncomfortable in the acute, ultimately, my I've got some, I don't know, these are these are I don't say controversial, but like I'm I'm playing with these ideas, right? So all these jobs are being wiped out, and of course that's bad. So there are a couple of revolutions that are happening right now at the same time. Of course, there's technology, but there's also currency. Like the dollar is collapsed. Um these global um uh what do they call them? Like uh digital currencies, they're coming. And universal basic income is is coming. It's coming. I you could don't like it all you want. Ah, I'm a conservative and I don't like socialism, that socialism stuff. It's like, yeah, well, you know what, social security, you you bank it on your social security, you should check that socialism too. Like you you're just being, you're being the the the flame is being turned up very slowly so that the the boils, so the frog boils. So it's like, dude, you're you're gonna you're not even gonna notice it and you're actually gonna like it. Like Klaus Schwab said, uh you'll but what do you say? You'll own nothing and you'll be happy. I don't think I know he's they you know they make him out, and I don't, I'm not saying I love the guy. Um he definitely comes across as like an evil villain, but I don't think he's lying. I think we're gonna move into, I think we're moving. I know we're moving because I see it um in the character and the behavior and like the zeitgeist and what people are interested in. We're moving into an era where we will have more opportunity for spiritual transcendence, for spiritual growth. We're gonna grow in our uh in all of our supernatural powers in the coming season because all of our natural powers are being thwarted or beaten by technology. And that you could say that's a bad thing, but actually, in my opinion, it's a good thing because now we're no longer valued like in the industrial revolution, we were valued for our man hours. We're going to a place where we're gonna transcend hours, we're transcending time. I I believe that there will be a future where the technology is spiritual, like spiritual healing. Like we're we're bridging the gap there with like bioenergetics and stuff like that, but like the age of cutting the body open and and and giving doses of toxins to rid the body, they're they're going away because we're gonna be tapping into the one power. And in that one power is only wholeness. And once like that paradigm starts to sink in, and and I think it'll come both by I see it happening, like God is doing it through us, but also we're being forced into it and we're being like shocked into it also. Just think about like vaccines, for example. Like vaccines have been a staple for 100 years that no one ever questioned, ever questioned. We my parents came here from other country, they got stabbed with all kinds of vaccines. As a kid, you know, they stabbed me with all kinds of vaccines, and it just kept getting more and more and more. You know, as a kid, I had maybe 12. The kids today are getting like 24 or 36. But at the same time, there's a shocking awakening that like Satan always plays his hand too hard. And now everybody, after COVID, everybody's like, wait a second, you mean I can question this thing that we took for granted for so many years? My daughter is 21 years old, never had a single vaccine. Because, you know, back then I got hold of the internet when I was 22 years old, found Dr. McCollum, and I was like, whoa, okay, this is a paradigm that no one's ever heard or seen before. But now it's trendy. Like nobody, like people are not doing it like they were doing before. They're fighting back, they're leaving, they're doing home births instead now. Like that's that's not just trending, it's not just spiritual, it's a reaction to how dark it's gotten. Like I said, Satan has played his hand so hard that everybody's like, whoa, okay, you just went too far. And now I'm questioning everything. Let me see what the Epstein stuff and you know, Hollywood is collapsing, like all these institutions that we took for granted for generations, three generations specifically, right? Past 100 years. Sexual revolution, like Gen Z is not even, they're not into that stuff anymore.

SPEAKER_02 30:27

Like all the things that were like Gen Z doesn't even really drink at all.

SPEAKER_04 30:32

They're going back to church and they're making families. So we're coming, we're going, I think we're good, we're moving into a far more spiritual and whole uh world.

SPEAKER_02 30:57

I'm working with a group right now that we just question the assumptions deep enough. I mean, like I told you, my dad died from cancer and he got chemotherapy and radiation and surgery, and it was absurd. I mean, my dad was six foot, played middle linebacker in college, he was jacked, and he looked like a Holocaust victim by the time he died. It's like there's no possible way that this is healthy. And chemotherapy was discovered as a byproduct of creating the nuclear bomb. It's the same consciousness. You're just nuclear bombing someone's body. Like, imagine if the US government was like, we need to kill a terrorist in the Middle East, we're just gonna blow up the whole world. Like, that's what chemotherapy is. It's absurd, right? And so anyway, that's that sparked a deep passion for well-being in me. And and now I'm with a group. Um now I'm with a group that we're saying, hey, why is it that human beings only have a dollar sign next to their name if they are sick or have a symptom or a disease? They only have a price tag next to their name if there's something wrong that needs treatment. What if we changed that? What if we created a valuation system? What if we went deep enough in the architecture of the way that we construct our systems and said, let's actually value well-being? Well, that changes everything. And it even evokes, you talked about universal basic income. It's like, what if people actually got paid for being well? Like, what if we went that deep? What if we valued well-being in people, in relationships, in families, in communities and collectives, and as a whole? And so that's a lot of my work now. I've built a platform called the Pulse where we're able to actually keep a pulse on the on our communities and the people we love. And ultimately, we're looking at currency. Like you said, we have to have a currency because our currency, it's like, what the heck is the dollar anyway? And that's the backbone of the whole global financial system. I mean, it's low-key pretty terrifying. Um, but it's like, what's really valuable? Well, well-being is really valuable. And the deepest form of well-being, I'm not talking about I make a distinction between wellness and well-being. I'm not talking about going to the sauna and working out and sitting out in the sun and doing peptides or drinking protein, like all that stuff's amazing. We love all that stuff to the moon and back. I'm talking about the well-being that comes from our interconnectedness, from our deep alignment with the divine, from happy, from having, you know, a big-hearted, principled life, from having a happy, health, healthy, fulfilled existence, like that kind of well-being, the well-being that comes from being itself, uh, and being well. So, like, what if we could actually value that and emerge a currency from that? Like, what if we could emerge a currency from well-being that's the emanation of well-being and value well-being? Like every time well-being is um generated as a byproduct of relationship, like right, like here, you and I are having this great dynamic, people are listening. People tell me all the time, I listen to your podcast, I have a big emotional release, I get clarity on what I'm doing in my life. I enjoy sinking into the field, and my nervous system and my psychoenergetic system gets more attuned to what it's like to be in well-being just listening to the podcast. It's like, well, what if people got paid for that? What if they got paid for listening? What if I got paid for you and I got paid for sitting here generating well-being, just being in connection with each other? Like, we're not generating the well-being, but well-being is generated by the dynamic that we're having and where we're coming from in connection with each other. Like, what if we valued that and a currency emerged from that abundance that you were pointing to at the beginning of the recording? Like, that to me is the that's that's the world I want to live in.

SPEAKER_04 34:22

That's definitely an interesting concept. Getting paid for your well-being. I don't know. I need to rest, I need to digest that one a little bit. But I see why you're saying what you're saying, because we're we live in the complete opposite world of that.

unknown 34:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:40

Yeah, we have a sick care system. We don't have a health care system, we have a sick care system. You need to be sick to have Oh.

SPEAKER_04 34:46

Think about the fact that like prison inmates, you know, in these federal and state prisons, like it costs like a thousand dollars, a hundred thousand dollars a year, yeah, in some cases, to feed and to and to and to care for these guys who are literally just caged animals. They're just they're they're they're living in confinement. But that is that I think they refer to that as the prison industrial complex.

SPEAKER_01 35:12

Right.

SPEAKER_04 35:12

Right? We have the medical industrial complex, we have the um the military industrial complex. These are all complexes that are set up in order to like, what's the word? It's like uh a racket.

SPEAKER_02 35:25

That's right.

SPEAKER_04 35:26

Yeah, it's you know, it's it's all made up, it's all fake in order to like there was this. I remember reading in in social studies when I was a kid that the broken window theory, right? Like, in order for windows to be sold, well, you need broken windows. Right. So it's like, is it better to have a neighborhood that has broken windows so that you can sell them windows? Uh you know, that becomes the question. Like, you will the economy won't work if there are no big uh uh broken windows, but you want to go around breaking windows?

unknown 35:57

Right.

SPEAKER_04 35:58

That's kind of where we're at. The food makes us sick, and then this is all Rockefeller, right? They own the processed food industrial complex, right? Processed, and it's funny because once again, like everybody's waking up. I remember, you know, it was 20 years ago when I learned about hydrogenated oils, basically seed oils, you know, man-made oils. But like all of a sudden, now I was driving, uh, you know, I was in Tennessee last week and driving the highway 90 95 down my house, and I saw uh a big sign for steak and shake now has tallow fries.

SPEAKER_02 36:31

Awesome. Heck yeah. Like, where the hell did that come from?

SPEAKER_04 36:34

Like that's a brand new thing, given that people like just woke up. Like, wait a second, you mean these margarine isn't better than butter? Yeah, yeah, no, in fact, that's why we have heart disease. In fact, that's what's been killing us the whole time. Yeah, and people are privy to it because the brain woke everybody up, the internet woke everybody up, and now it's like we're demanding something else. Yeah, yeah, going back to what's natural and what's real.

SPEAKER_02 37:00

I'll have to send you. I my my buddy and I made an app, it's called Clean Cart, and we literally just built Instacart and it and it integrates into Instacart. So you order everything through Instacart, but we put a filter on the front end. So if it has food dye, PUFAs, or high fructose corn syrup, it doesn't show up in our app. So the tagline is there's no crap in our app. So if you order groceries through our app, you can't fuck it up. But it's the same exact thing, but it's like taking the whole grocery store and only having two or three aisles. So anything you order through our app is just called clean card, and you just anything you order through there, it doesn't have any of the shit in it. And it's like, why I always joke, I'm like, why the hell did we need to make this app in the first place? Like, we literally took all the stuff with poison in it out of Instacart, and now we have an app that people want to use because they don't have to think about diets and blah blah blah blah and stuff, and it's like duh.

SPEAKER_04 37:48

Yeah, it's like it shouldn't need to exist. It's a byproduct. The world that we live in is I'm just thinking in terms of like an entrepreneur, right? Like they like to say scale, like we got to scale up, scale up, scale up. The economy and the world that we live in is created such a scaled up version that everything is completely diluted and only gets worse. Like everything, what is that word as things get worse? Like uh entropy. Like everything is just it's it's being diluted and getting worse. Like you just see it with like restaurants. Like I grew up going to like I grew up going to Pizza Hut. And like back in the day, Pizza Hut, like it was a big, the nice house, right? Like they bought their own property, and the and the pizza was like good.

SPEAKER_02 38:30

Right. Right.

SPEAKER_04 38:31

But now it's just you know, this shitty pizza thing, and they don't even have like nice pizza huts anymore. All the ingredients have gotten cheaper. I saw this happen with like a local mom and pop restaurant in St. Pete when I was living there. I was like, oh, this is nice. The parent, you know, the parents came out, the kids were working, they all used all good ingredients, but then they scaled up and opened four other restaurants, and it was and the food went to shit. Everything goes to shit the more you scale up. And in order for the globalists, right, for there to be a global power dynamic, everything has to be um uh standardized and diluted.

SPEAKER_01 39:14

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_04 39:15

They want every even you, because we're a product. So they want us, that's why schools started. Let's standardize their education with the TV, let's standardize their their their uh propaganda, their training, right? Their conditioning, even with the fact that they put us all in grades with with the idea of grades where we're all the same age, is so that they can manipulate generations. This idea of generations didn't exist. Before that, it was you were influenced by your parents and your grandparents. And that was older people, so people were more mature faster. Now it's like you're around all standardized leveled 19-year-olds listening to the same music, wearing the same clothes, having the same styles, speaking the same way, so that we're more easily manipulated. I think the future that we're proposing, right? Let's see, actually does this. Of course, I say we go in, but I think you saw it during COVID. It's interesting. Like Donald Trump, whatever you make of him, one of the good things that he did during the pandemic was he removed power, centralized power from the federal government and gave it to the states. He's like, Well, you guys do what you want to do. And it was like this grand thing because living in Florida, it was like, oh, good, we're not under federal mandates. Our governor says no masks. We're opening up. And so, like, the power then goes back to the state. And now, I don't know, you know, I'm not too much into politics, any kind of politics, but I know that there's a movement towards now county. And like there's a there's a big push around county um elections. And like people are realizing like the sheriff in your county is far more important in making certain decisions than even the mayor or the um governor. The sh the buck stops with him. So you you we stopped thinking from this fully expanded, you know, puppet master world to where we began, community. We didn't prior, what did we do prior to prior to the uh department of education? You trained your kids at home with other kids. There are other kids in the neighborhood, you know. Maybe there was one parent that was like good at subjects, and they did a co-op. That's what I do with my kids. They have a co-op, and the parents help, teach, and the kids are all familiar with each other, they're all from the same neighborhood or have the same value uh system, whatever it is. What do we do for hospitals? Right? What all the things that we've outsourced to federal, state, you know, bigger powers, we used to take care of. Like we didn't need welfare. You didn't need welfare. Why? Because your welfare was in your family and in your neighborhood. Like I hear stories about like what would happen, right? Your church, what would happen like during the uh the the uh depression? Like of course it was a tough time, but everybody came together because they supported one another. Neighborhood, church, right, community. Where post the world wars, when you know a lot of this social experimenting, I guess you could say, went on. It was no, we need a department of education to train all the kids. We need a welfare system that's gonna give to everybody, and then everything just slowly and surely got usurped by the monster, which is government.

unknown 43:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:04

Yeah, and there's a massive takeback of personal responsibility that's happening and then needs to happen in what you're saying. Like, I oftentimes invite people to consider like, what if you were your own doctor and your own healer and your own bank and stuff? And it's like, and then you build a support infrastructure around you. Like the metaphor I use is a professional athlete. Like professional athletes have an agent, they have a chiropractor, they have a nutritionist, they have a lawyer, they have your whole team. So I help people build out their support infrastructure. Like they get their shaman, they get their nutritionist, they get the person that they have, and you have all of a sudden you have a whole team, and now you're not in your separation anymore. You have a neural network of relationships and a interdependent support system.

SPEAKER_04 43:47

And it builds more love, it builds more community, right? Like the whole idea of being, you know, it's very sexy, uh, America in particular, and in the West, to be like a lone wolf, right? Like, I don't need anybody's help. I can do everything on my own. Um, yeah, maybe to an extent, but like, but where's the love? Where's the community? Where's communication? Where is where are the people that you could actually lean on when your will is not strong enough? In many instances, they don't they don't exist because we live in a world, man, and it's just gotten more and more isolated. That's why, like I was saying before, like, I think I don't know where it says this, I don't know if it's in scripture or what, but like when when when darkness rains, light shines even brighter, right? The light shines brighter in the darkness. So it's like they're both coming up at the same time. I forgot what I was gonna say, but I was just talking about how you know things are are weird, but they're getting better. They're bad, but they're the best of the times or the worst of the times. It's just that sitting in that tension.

SPEAKER_01 44:55

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 45:04

Homesteadings making a comeback. Oh, people want to homestead, they want to grow their own vegetables. Like that was nobody would ever thought of that in the 80s. What are you, a fucking farmer? Why would you want to do that? Like, no, you it wouldn't even be a thought.

SPEAKER_02 45:18

Well, come at home. Sometimes now I joke with people like I I help build lone wolf packs because all the lone wolves figure out that it doesn't work, and so then they find each other and create a new collective, which I feel like is what we're talking about. It's like all the guys like you and me who've lone wolfed it, then you're like, well, what if I found some other lone wolves and we made a lone wolf pack and did things differently in a way that actually works?

SPEAKER_04 45:40

Have you ever read that book, um, The Way of Men? Uh the Way of The Way of Man by Jack Donovan.

SPEAKER_02 45:47

No, I haven't.

SPEAKER_04 45:48

He does a really good job, I mean, anthropologically, uh, but you know, he explains how men are designed to be in gangs, right? Like, in other words, like we evolved as as small groups. And because as primates, we have our eyes at the front of our head, we're very vulnerable to what's going on around us. So we literally needed someone else to have our back when we're hunting or we're trying to protect ourselves. So in groups of four, you would you wouldn't go anywhere without your group of four because you need guys that have eyes this way, and you need a guy that has eyes that way. And we're much more effective when we're in these, of course, you know, you would call that like a gang or a crew, and then you know, platoons, and then it grows. But ultimately it breaks down to the small unit that is not a unit of one, it's a unit of four, because you got four directions, and you need somebody to have your back in every direction.

SPEAKER_02 46:44

Wow. Yeah, so there's been this background uh in our conversation here today. There's um I'm taking a little bit of a different direction here, but there's you've talked a lot about Christianity on our recording, and there's one of the core assumptions in Christianity is that God is a male, essentially, right? It's a it's a masculine God structure. And I'm curious, I want to actually bring this into exploration with you now because I'm curious. Like, I guess I could just ask you off the rip like, do you experience God as a man, or can you share share with me more about your relationship between like patriarchy, God? Uh you've talked, yeah. Does that does that question make sense?

SPEAKER_04 47:27

I'm I know I kind of have it makes a lot of sense, and it's something that I've spent some time thinking about. So I'll be happy to address it from what I what I think.

SPEAKER_01 47:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 47:36

So remember earlier I talked about I'm gonna close my shades because the sun's about to hit my eyes. Give me a second.

SPEAKER_02 47:41

Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_04 47:43

Well, this is cool stuff. I'm excited to talk about it. So remember earlier I talked about the matrix and mammon and material existence all coming with the same prefix or like I don't I don't know if the etymology of the word is there, although I have heard that it is. I just haven't done the research. That basically it's maternal, maternity. What do we call earth? Mother Earth. Why is the earth not male? Why is the mur why is the earth mother? Mother material matrix matter, right? Matter is almost sounds like mother. So if you've got matter, and we spoke earlier about like creating a building, right? It's made out of matter. For the matter to take form, you need a pattern. Pattern is paternity, patriarch, uh, patriot, father, father, patriot. So what I I think it makes sense that God, the pattern, the father, imprints matter, which is mother. And so we're literally, and we are literally the pattern in the matter. God the father, the pattern, the transcendent quality, where the mother is the earthly quality, impinges upon matter and moves it. When you when your parents conceived you, your dad was the pattern, the pattern is in the seed. When you when if I plant if I plant two different seeds, they have two different blueprints. For one, I'll get an oak tree, for the other, I'll get a magnolia. They say that you when a man blows his load, a man's essence, they call it. His essence. What is the essence of a thing? The essence isn't the thing, it's the blueprint of the thing, it's the spirit of the thing. Your father provides that pattern, he provides the essence, your mother provides the soil, provides the matter. And you see this in Christianity also in its traditional form, because a lot of Protestants will really rail against this and they argue because I think they just don't understand that Mary, Mary, matter, right? Ma, Mary is the mother of God. In order for God to incarnate, he needed flesh. He didn't just show up as Jesus. The pattern didn't just beam down. So he had to take on matter. He had to take on matter, which means he needs a mother. And so in traditional Christianity, there's Mary is highly revered as the queen of heaven. Femininity, true femininity in traditional Christianity elevates women. It's the first to actually do that because of Mary, the material, the woman, the mother who clothed the pattern, God, the Father, in the flesh of Jesus Christ. So it's not like this, you know, there I think there's a lot of um misconception, and I think there are a lot of people that on both sides don't see it the way I'm seeing it right now, or the way I'm explaining right now. And there's a tendency to like think that father pattern is it's first. It is first, but it's not best, it's not better than because if the father doesn't have a place to imprint its pattern, then there's there's what good are you? What good is a man without a woman? What are you gonna do? You can you have a pattern, yeah, right. You have a seed, but where but you have no place to put it. So there's a lot of on one hand, like, well, God's a man, and that means men are the best, and you know, and women gotta follow us or whatever. However they describe it, but there's just like overlording. And then on the other side, there's well, screw men, screw the father. It's all patriarchy that's been uh it's oppressive and it's uh you know aggressive and evil and that. And we need more mother. But that's that's missing the point as well. And that is a that that's a mind fuck, also, because look at what we're doing in the certain in the name of Mother Earth. Think about how many lies and things that we're we we just ascribe to and believe and go along with, all in the name of saving this um single mother. Because most of the people who are worshiping the earth don't they don't believe in God. So earth quickly becomes like uh a single mother. There's no there's no father.

SPEAKER_02 52:54

We don't that's fascinating. I never heard that before.

SPEAKER_04 52:57

Yeah, mother earth, the single mother, the poor single mother that we need to save.

SPEAKER_02 53:01

Wow, I've never heard that. I'm kind of mind blown just hearing you say that. Well, wow, yeah, wow, but it's we take it for granted, but that's how we're thinking. Well, obviously, we have a massive father wound. I mean, this is a generalization, but like as a culture, we've got a massive, massive father wound. Um, we've got mother wounds too, for sure.

SPEAKER_04 53:25

Um but I first wound is the mother wound. The first wound is always the mother wound. The first wound is the mother wound because when we come into the world, when the pattern meets the matter and we're in utero, we believe that we're only one. There's no separation. I and my mother are one. Her blood is my blood, or or or her food is my food, her breath is my breath. And the first wound actually occurs, it psychologists call it um love object relation loss. When the baby first discovers, oh, wait a second, I'm not my mom. That's the first e because the e that that formulates the ego. So in order for an ego to be born, that separation must happen, but that's a that's a um that's a it's a trauma in a way. It's a trauma. Whoa, I'm not my mom, my mind is blown. Happens once for for women, and happens at the same time also for men, but men have a second one. This is where the father wound shows up. The second wound, which is is is present in in men, is that oh, not only am I not my mother, but I'm not even what mom is. I'm not a woman. The girl that the little girl doesn't have to do that, she only needs to do it once. But there's a double, there's a there's a second wound that the young man has to uh endure when he realizes, oh, like I am not only not only my mom, but I'm not what she is now. This is where like the wound really gets tough, like really bad with the father wound. And of course, I'd love to go into how he got here in the past 100 years, but if there is no father to pattern himself after, then he's he's gonna struggle. He's just gonna and that's where 80% of us are. Either we if we have a father or we don't have a father, there's always a rejection of the father in some way, shape, or form. Oedipul, even uh, was it uh Shakespeare that wrote Oedipus Rex? He even pointed it out, so it's an ancient wound. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there, but like that wound thing is awesome, ever present.

SPEAKER_02 55:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've read Oedipus Rex. That's like one of the weirdest stories of all time. Like it's about sex with his mom, it's very strange. Um, but also like Iron Iron John and and Robert Bly's work, right? And the initiations of uh of men and how we how we try to get that now through rock bands and fraternities or joining the or something, but we don't actually have guys like you, for example. Like I'm 34, you're what 10 years older than me?

SPEAKER_03 56:00

Something like that 46.

SPEAKER_02 56:03

Yeah, so 12 years older than me. But it's like, you know, when I was getting to be right around the age and earlier than 19, like I found you when I was 19, and and you helped me grow up through YouTube in a lot of ways, but like I lost my dad at that time. So I lost the number one guy in my life who was my model for being a male, and then I was desperately going around trying to find male mentorship from guys who are like, hey, come over, we'll watch the game. You know, you want to drink an IPA? And I'm like, fuck, man, like I'm pounding the table, like this is not working for me. Like, I can't just I can't do this. Like, I need real shit, like I need sustenance at the soul level. Like I really do. And we, you know, there's there's a lot of things, Mankind Project and and Sacred Sons and other groups popping up now who are doing this kind of work. I still think we're starving for it. Um, in terms of like I had a 19-year-old come spend a month with me this summer, and and he and I were talking about this because he was negotiating whether or not he wanted to go to university and his his dad's not in the picture, he lives with his mom, and so I was just sharing some of these things with him, just going like, I mean, my mom would never kick me out of her house, you know. But if I if I if I had a son right now, which I haven't had kids yet, I I will at some point, but you know, if I had a kid who was 19 years old, I'd be going, like, hey buddy, I'm here for you, and I'll I'll show up and I'll show up and and spend time with you every single day and help you navigate your life. And you need to find a place to live and make some money, and you might need to go struggle and get stronger. Like, you know, those three concentric circles, the comfort zone and the growth zone and the danger zone. Have you ever seen that? It's like no, it's a great little, it's just the simplest model in the world, but it's like, you know, too far in the comfort zone, and we become uh um blobs, basically, and too far in the danger zone, and we can't. It's actually it's like trying to squat 400 pounds when you can't. It's just too much. So, like, you know, how do you find the growth zone where we can have a healthy enough amount of stress to grow without overwhelming our system? And and that's what what I need, and what what I mean, I'm you know, young men need. Like, we need to be able to have this. Is why I think progressive overload training is so helpful. It's like having appropriate amounts of stress and learning how to add little by little so we grow in our capacity. And you can use that as a metaphor for our relationships, for our business building, for our capacity to be in leadership situations where we're making important decisions. Like it's a it's a great metaphor for getting stronger in in all areas of our life.

SPEAKER_04 58:31

You read Iron John, so you're familiar with the concept of masculine initiation, rights of passage. And our ancestors just knew that boys couldn't be left on their own. And it wasn't like maybe there was a father, maybe there wasn't, but there were men, there were mature men, there were older men, there were elders. Like, where are our elders today, right? Like there are no elders, and to be an elder doesn't mean you're old. We got a lot of old people, got old people, we got old people, but we don't we don't have elders, yeah, yeah. And it's you know, it's part of the way that we've been conditioned in this world to basically worship and strive for perpetual youth. So you got like grown men, like you said, they're just they're so shallow because they've never been initiated into mature masculinity. It's just this perpetual childhood, pleasure seeking. And of course, God has his plan, and you know, you we will probably most of us at some point confront an initiation just because, just like God is gonna do it. If we don't do it, our ancestors knew that we have to do it so that we can facilitate it. But if if not, you're gonna get it. You're gonna get it either way. You're gonna break a leg, you're gonna uh you're you're gonna have a heartbreak, um, you're gonna get cancer, whatever it is, that something is coming to like, all right, well, now you need to be challenged. Now you need to be shaken up so that you can transcend the boy ego. That's right.

unknown 1:00:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:10

Yeah, if we don't create the conditions for it to happen in a ritualistic setting, then life will take care of that in some way.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:16

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:18

It's gonna happen. And if you have no context for it, it could just seem like tragedy. Yeah. But if there's proper context for it, then you realize, oh, this is what's happening. And you can actually just relax into it as dark as it gets. God's turning you into a man. It's gonna, it's gonna hurt.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:44

Yeah, I still I still notice um these places in me that are pleasure seeking, like it still comes up, like like it'll be like, oh, I just want to whatever, like watch Netflix and eat ice cream. And it's like, this is so fascinating. This is still going on. Uh so I don't think it goes away. Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:03

There are so as long as we have a body, here's here's a here's a concept like that I just started I was playing with when that book, um, Ego is the enemy came out by Ryan Holliday. And I was getting into bioenergetics and character structure at the time and starting to realize like, oh, the body is the mind, but the ego is a necessary interface with the world. And in fact, I think it was, I think, I don't know, young or right claimed that the body is the subconscious. The body is the subconscious. Where am I going with this? And as long as we have a body, we're going to be confronted with the things of the body. Like you can't be here without a body. And if you have a body, you have an ego. And to your dying day, you're gonna be battling, you're gonna be you're gonna be challenged by it. You mother Teresa of Calcutta, right? You probably have heard of her, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She was the lady in the 80s who was feeding all the starving children in in India. She's probably the 20th century's most famous saint. She's a canonized saint. But um, a friend of mine gave me her biography, uh, or yeah, it was a biography, a story of her life. And I remember watching documentaries about her and stuff too. She was severely depressed and felt abandoned by God to her dying day. But she remained vigilant in her faith and in her the divine action that she was doing. But she lamented because she there are those that will say that God does that because he's trying to purify, like those he loves the most, he puts through the darkest seasons because he's trying to purify your character of all attachment to the body, to ego. And to find that a saint, right, who Catholics believe is a person who has died in a state of grace, meaning there's no stain of sin on them. Right? They she's free from sin, but she still every day had to battle to maintain that. We don't get away with it. I think Jesus Christ, I think, I think it maybe it's a Buddhist saying, or maybe Jesus says it somewhere. I get these all mixed up. But he's there's a saying where you don't get out of here without paying every penny. That's awesome. You gotta pay every penny to get out of here. And Catholics and Orthodox have this concept, right? And they pull it from biblical references and tradition that there's a purgatory.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:52

And so purgatory, like the word sounds, is a purging. So if you die in a state of grace, but yet you still have a lot of like addictions or you have attachments, um, you have emotion, hang anger, whatever it is, right? Maybe you're you're you're you're a good person, but you're not you're not perfected while living here. You haven't been perfected by living here. Maybe you didn't even know that was an option to reach for that type of perfection by creating some sort of distance between the the watcher and the you know the world. But out of God's grace and his desire to be with us, that's the whole story of the Bible is God's desire to be with us. I want to, that's why it's called the mystical marriage and all these things. God wants to be with us. And in his love for us and his desire to be with us, even if you die and you still have those hangups, those addictions, Netflix or whatever, his grace provides that your soul will go through like a car wash. It's gonna go it now. It they call it the the flames of purgatory, because what do flames do? Well, flames transform. It's not the flames of hell, which is torture, it's the it's the transformative flames of per of purgatory that burn off those attachments so that you can, because if God is is all good, all omnipotent, omnipresent, um, pure being, if God is pure being and we're supposed to merge, right? Our spirit merges with him after we leave his body. Something that has stain on it can't merge with something that's perfect. And it's not like God's punishment, it's just physics. You can't be with God if you got if you're carrying. I remember watching this movie, I think it was like Ghostbusters when I was a kid, and uh there was uh a ghost, but he was holding on to like a physical thing. I don't know, it was a weapon or something like that. And the ghost moves through the wall, but the thing couldn't move through the wall, so the thing falls. I don't know if that's a good analogy, but ultimately it's like you know, you can't pass. Through because you're holding on to this thing. And so this needs to be knocked out of your hand before you can actually pass through.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:10

Yeah, yeah. I feel like you're you're writing the meta story for my life right now. Like I feel like I feel like I've just hit a place where it's like there's nowhere to go, there's nowhere to get to, there's not anything to do. It's just sit here while all the like karma just gets burned, burned up, and just like just chilling. Like just like it sucks so bad, and there's nothing else to do except for just feel it all and be present and stick with it. And like that's that's what's going on.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:39

And it may be the most important thing that you do.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:41

Yeah, could be, yeah. Well, there's nothing else to do because all the action comes from non-action these days, anyways. It's like when you like, I feel like I tell people all the time, like when you hit when you hit rock bottom, that rock bottom is the ground of being, like that's the ground of well-being itself. Like it's a good thing to have happen. You totally let go, you stop trying. We could quit trying to create from create from creations, right? It's like, and I I used to have years ago, I had this practice where I would like I called it deep, deep, deep. And I would sit down and I would like drop deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into the depths of my being, right? Like just sink deeper and deeper. And these impulses to do things would come up. Oh, I need to make a cup of coffee, I need to do this, and I would just breathe and burn through all those impulses. And at some point, some impulse would come, it was so strong, it didn't matter how much I would sit there and breathe, it would take me anyway. And I would call somebody or I'd write pages of my book or I would podcast or I would do whatever. And it's like, damn, this is what's like when creation itself moves us, it's doing from non-doing. It's like, yeah, dead. And so, you know, years of playing with this, it's like more and more refined, nuanced noticings of like, because I've just completely given into that. It's like, okay, at this point, there's it's not even worth creating from creation or from creations, like that's just that's just a waste of time because it creates karma and you have to deal with it. So it's like I'll just chill here until some shit happens. And when it does, it doesn't have any residue, it doesn't have any residues, you know, it's just clear. It's like so the Buddhists say it's like painting on water, there's no, it's just clear. So I'm not claiming that I'm perfect because I still got a bunch of crap going on, but there's a process that's going on where it's all getting cooked up, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:23

Yeah, yeah. Painting on water.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:26

I mean, we're just spinning our wheels. I don't know how far I can take this, but it it just resonates so deeply for with me, especially over the past year, but this idea of abandonment, total abandonment to divine providence and everything we do. But I actually just read a book last week called the Um Surrender Experiment by um Michael Singer. You read it.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:51

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:51

How crazy is this guy's life?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:53

And he didn't do anything with the mailbox, the cash in the mailbox. That was so nuts. All of it. Yeah, all of it.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:01

All of it, his whole story. I mean, even just going into the woods to meditate, and then all of a sudden people started showing up. And he was like, didn't even want it. Yeah, he's like, Why are you guys here? I just want to be by myself. Next thing you know, it's a freaking temple. He didn't do anything, he just allowed the flow of divine grace to carry him to the place he was supposed to be. No karma, yeah, no residue, yeah, no mess. Ease. Yeah, that's um it's a lovely concept. And I I feel it unfolding in my life, but does not come easy. I want to do it. You know, yeah. What is it you want to do? Oh, anything, anything and everything. Just like you said, like just sitting there and impulse. I'm impulsive. Impulses come and I'm like, an idea comes. I attribute a lot of my early success to that because I when something comes to me, I just do it. Right. And so it creates a lot of momentum, but also creates a lot of karma. When I was a kid, you know, they said I had ADHD, and but really my teachers just hated me because I was so impulsive. And like I would speak out all the time, right? Like I didn't wait to raise my hand. It was just like, oh, this thing, or I'd get up and I'd go do something. Very it's just my nature. I'm just very impulsive. And um to work with those impulses, like you said, like you sat there and you just noticed them. Uh I wouldn't say it comes natural to anyone. But I I don't know if it's out of fear, I don't know what it is. Novelty, but like my natural tendency is to take action. I'm taking action on anything in everything, everywhere, all the time. I had to learn, and it's been a long time coming, decades, to notice the impulse without engaging it. And it seems like that's where God's grace comes in. That's the work, the work is the non-doing, like you said.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:13

Well, in my experience, it feels like God starts creating through us when we do that. So it's like it's kind of like an impulse, but it's not like that because it can't not happen. I mean, shit just comes and takes me now. It's like there's no yeah, it's just like it's so much more vast and so much more powerful than any like there's it's just like okay, this is happening. But it's like it's like, you know, I feel like it's also what a true flow state is. There's manufactured flow states, like we can hack our way into flow states, but that's that's still a gimmick at the end of the day. This is an actual flow where you know it's like the self and the selfless like become non-dual, like the the observer and the experience become non-dual. There's a deep union that's that that mystical marriage you were talking about, where it's like yeah, uh we call it grace, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:12:08

That's what that's what Christians call it. I call it grace. Now you're living in grace. And when and what is grace? Like, think about somebody who's graceful. They're not trying, they're just flowing. You use the word flow. I always I I often think about like there's a couple, there's a couple sayings in the Bible, but one, Jesus says, very simply, I am the vine, you are the branch. Without me, you can do nothing. So he's talking about that in terms of like, you know, his presence within us. But then he goes on and also says, It's not I that it's not my will and power that does these things, but the Father who's acting and willing through me. So it's like, I can't do anything, and you can't do anything. We're not doing anything. We need the divine, the divine impulse. And it's always been the case. Paul even goes off, he goes even further in what I don't know. One of his epistles, Paul's like, only all your actions are dirty rags. I don't know where he comes up with dirty rags from, but like that's what he's saying. He says, anything that you do is dirty rags if it's if it's not God doing it. Oh, there's a psalm also that I love, and I'm gonna get this wrong. I get them all wrong. There's a psalm where the the psalmist writes, he says, um, unless, unless God builds the house, the builder builds in vain. Unless God watches the the tower, the watchman watches in vain. So it's like what he's basically saying is like, if you build the thing, you're doing it in vain. You do you try to do the thing, it's all in vain. Unless God does it through you, well, you're wasting your time.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:53

It is this simple. Like, I when I when I have people who are like, how do I get into flow? I offer them an action, an action invitation and a receptivity invitation. The action invitation is find something really simple to do, like take out the trash or clean your dishes, and just do that and get present. And and it'll you can get into some flow, like it'll take you right in your next thing. The receptivity one is sit down, be quiet, and wait, and flow will come and get you. Like God will come and get you and start doing stuff with you.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:22

Yeah, He will, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:27

So and you got to take action. Ralph Aldo Emerson says um he says uh God will not make manifest his work through through um lazy men, something like that. It's like God will find he's his will will be done, and if you won't do it, you'll find somebody else, either because of your resistance or because of your laziness or whatever it is. He's acting, he's producing, he's creating. He can use you as a vessel, as an instrument, but if not, he's just gonna move right on.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:58

Yeah, it's like there's a distinction to be made between impotence and relaxation. Like impotent impotence or collapse is not acceptance. That's not patience and relaxation. Like relaxation, I'm sitting there, but I can get erect or I can get I can respond to the moment from relaxation. Impotence or collapse or um, yeah, impotence or collapse is not the same thing. Like just being there, like we could be getting an invitation to respond to something and not move from it. That's I think that's what Emerson means by lazy in that scenario is basically he didn't say lazy.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:31

I remember it now. He said it will not make his work manifest by cowards.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:36

Okay, wow.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:37

Not laziness, it's cowards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So being afraid, right? Like I just had a guidance call with a young man, and he was explaining how, like, when he was younger, he had this call to adventure to go teach English in a foreign country, and he never took it because he was afraid. Now, 10 years later, he's kicking himself. And I'm like, I had to explain to him that, like, yeah, there's you know, you can't kick yourself about that. That was a long time ago. But God was making his work made manifest, but it wasn't through you because you were a coward. You felt the impulse, you felt the divine action, but you didn't take it.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:14

So all we can do is get in the way.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:16

I always tell people courage is a quality of our true nature. So I just I just share that for anybody listening in the sense of like it's a muscle that we can build, it's there, it might be there latent, but it's it's in all of us, it's part of our oh yeah, it's part of our innate constitution.

unknown 1:16:34

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:35

Doesn't courage come from the word core where we get, you know, oh I love that heart, yeah. I love that. Way to go. I'd love that core zone, yeah. Yeah, core, courage with heart. We all have a heart. I gotta tell you one more short story because it's coming to me so strongly. Can I tell you one more? Absolutely. I was in Mexico at the end of last year, and I had just finished writing my book and sent it to my book editor. Like, I kid you not, you can't make this stuff up. I sent my book to my book editor of like, okay, I just finished this. It was my last day in Mexico, and I go out in the ocean to um swim before I'm leaving. Like, I'm literally it's my last couple of hours, and I run sprints all the way down the beach and run sprints all the way back. This is kind of my thing that I do, and then I go and I jump in the water, and I got sucked out by the tide past the place where your feet are can touch the ground. I'm six four, I'm pretty tall. I'm usually able to touch the ground, and I got sucked out past the cliff under the water, and I got I guess in a riptide, but I sat there for like 20, probably 20 or 30 minutes, just one wave after another pushing under the water. Um, it was the closest I've ever come to dying in my life. Like I was just like cooked. I mean, I had no energy. I just run all these sprints. I got sucked out, I can't touch my feet on the ground, and I'm just gassed. Like I'm trying to swim. The ocean is way too strong. It's just kicking my ass. And I had an out-of-body experience. I popped up and I'm like looking down at my body in the ocean. And it's interesting because I had this kind of awareness that I had been sort of living dissociated. It's like, wow, I've had so much access to these like bliss realms and grace realms and stuff, and like um zooming out that I've I'm sitting here right now feeling like no matter what, everything's okay. Like I feel this deep fundamental well-being and everything's okay. But here's my human down here having like a panic attack and freaking out. And it's like I I'm living like two clicks above reality, like I'm slightly dissociated all the time. I'm like living out here, and I'm not fully in my body, I'm not fully in my life, I'm not fully in contact with the ground. Like that's not happening. And so I went, you know, it's like at some point I come back into my body and I'm like, I swear, man, I'm like sitting there going, I'm I'm not gonna make it. Like there's nobody on the beach. It's completely just I'm just completely by myself. And at some point, this guy runs along and I can tell he has headphones in, and I'm like, he's not gonna be able to hear me. But I I have to I have to call for help. And I kid you not, I've been out there drowning for 20 minutes, and my ego, this voice in my head, kicks in and goes, Man, I'm a 34-year-old man, I'm strong, I can figure this out. I don't need to call for help. I don't need to do that. And I'm like, all right, you know, shut the fuck up. Like, we got to call for help. So so I go to yell for help, and I realize in the moment as I'm yelling for help, I've never yelled for help in my life. I've never ever yelled for help. And it was like, you'll you'll get this, right? It's like the architecture in my esophagus, in my throat, didn't know how to flex in the shape of help. Like I had never done it before. So I literally went to yell help as loud as I could, and it sounded like like that was the best my system could do because it had never just done that gesture before. And so I'm like, okay, reload, like take a deep breath. And I'm like dropping into the most sincere, the most genuine place in my being. And I yell for help as loud as I can, and it comes out. And the moment I did it, I got a wave of grace. The ocean literally picked me up and threw me on the beach, like in the moment that it happened. And I walked out.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:28

You yelled help and the ocean pushed you out.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:31

Threw me out on the on the beach in the in the same moment. In the same moment. I got, I literally got a wave of grace. And I walked, I walked out past, I'll tell you one more thing, which you'll appreciate. I walked out past this wall that I had walked by every single day, multiple times a day for weeks, and it was just this sand-colored wall. There was nothing on it. And I had walked by it that morning and there was nothing on it. Somebody while I was out running sprints and in the ocean had spray painted the word Genesis across the wall in blue spray paint. And I walked by that after the thing, after almost drowning.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:09

Oh, what do you make of that?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:12

I mean, I just connect Genesis to the beginning. Like for me, that was like a death and rebirth. Yeah. It was like I had I'd literally finished a book of my life, not just a chapter of my life, but a book of my life, and then went out and had a death and rebirth, and then it was, and then it's Genesis.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:30

Here it is. The Genesis of the New Forest. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy experience. Yeah, I can't say I've had too many of those types of experiences in my life, but uh so fascinating to hear. Just shows you how the divine is at work. You uh you're so you're special.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:53

I was to say it. You're special in that, but it I think it probably has a lot to do with your character structure. And I don't know why your structure, how why or how you have this structure, but if you're familiar with Wilhelm Reich, right? He talks about character structures. And a lot of the things that you're describing are consistent with the schizoid character structure. Living in a sort of out-of-body, that's what schizoid means, separate, right? The head, even the fact that you you you couldn't produce the word is like you're living above, you're rising above, you know, you're above it all. And so then there's a separation between what you perceive in your consciousness and then the body itself. So there's a lack of reality. You're in a different reality. There is definitely a reality there, but it's not this one.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:44

Yeah, that resonates. Interesting stuff, yeah. I have to look into that one more. It's interesting. Whenever I studied the character structures, that was the one I was least drawn to checking into. So it's kind of funny. I probably need to spend more time looking into that.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:01

Yeah, Denial of the Body, I think is his one book that's all about the uh schizoid character structure.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:09

I think it's denial of the body. I have all my loan books out there because I've been reading them again, so I don't have it right here. But yeah. There's a lot of um, there are a lot of spiritual qualities to the schizoid because they're literally living in like a another dimension or they have access to another dimension. That's why a lot of them are usually artists, you know, inventors, creators, you know, because they kind of are tapped into the divine in a way. But it also they can suffer as well because of the lack of embodiment.

unknown 1:23:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:47

Yeah, it's interesting. You would think you'd come out of a experience after almost drowning with like a lot of gratitude and appreciation and awe and stuff, but I was literally just fucking pissed for like three days. I was just full of rage and anger, and I'm like, what the actual fuck? No, no, no. It was like all this, all this stuff that I had actually been carrying around for quite a long time that I wasn't connected with and feeling, and I was just bypassing and hanging out in these spiritual realms, like you were talking about. Um, and so my path has been, you know, deeper into the body, deeper into the body, like like essentially clawing my way back into the body and being really honest about the places that I'm hurting and pissed off and in pain, and where shit just like I was violating my own boundaries I didn't even know I had. You know what I mean? Like I'm like interesting, oh shit, I've been overextending myself. Like, I actually have needs that I'm not aware that I have. Like, it's been a very like I've had a lot of the mystical. I feel like right now is a lot of the most human, like the most basic, basic, basic shit of just like, is there reciprocity in this friendship? Like, you know what I mean? Just like basic, almost like second grade level things.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:00

It is, and you're right, it is like a lower grade, right? Because you're living in like when we're in the dealing with the spiritual, we're not in the third dimension per se, right? Like that's this is where quantum leaps happen. Like this is where miracles happen, right? Right. So it's not governed by physical law, but the body is, and so the work that you're doing requires a lot of courage because, and I don't know your history or or again why, but what's consistent with the schizoid character structure is uh fear of annihilation and feeling unsafe in the body. So it is like all psychopathologies, if you want to call them that, it's a defense against a perceived threat. Yeah, and so the body is perceived as a threatening place, and I just need to get away from it. So for you to be doing the work to like uh come back into it, it takes courage because it's a it's a scary place to be in the third dimension. There's pain here, there's heartbreak, you gotta like eat. There's all kind of shit that you gotta do here.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:15

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it's and it's ultimately, I think, having the exact experience that's the root of the fear, which is annihilation. It's like the I that I claim to be is not gonna make it through this journey. So just really embracing the like like I'm just gonna stick with it and see it through, and and there might not be anything left of me at the end of this, but you know, I can I can breathe, I can stay I can stay here, I can keep with the sensations and just sticking with it. Well, maybe this is a good point for us to pause it for today. What do you think?

SPEAKER_03 1:27:29

Yeah, I've enjoyed this.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:30

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:32

Yeah, you're a lot of fun to talk to. You're a deep thinker.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:34

Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate you, man. I I want to give you a space to plug anything that you have going on or any any ways you want to offer for people to engage with you and and your work.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:46

Yeah, if you like this kind of conversation, it's what I talk about on YouTube. So you can find me. I have two channels. I haven't uploaded on my fitness channel in almost over a year. But I have a wisdom channel where I upload regularly again.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:00

These are the kind of things we talk about.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:03

I'll link them in the show notes so people can have them. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I just, you know, more than anything, I just want to say thanks, man. As as I mentioned at the beginning, you know, you've um had a real big impact on me. So it's a it's a privilege to have you on the show. And just thank you. Deep, deep, deep, deep gratitude, man. Appreciate you so much.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:26

Yeah, yeah. Praise the Lord, man. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not doing anything. I'm just abandoned. Whatever the fuck is happening is happening.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:36

That's a take it does through you.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:40

Yeah, me too. I like it. But man, like I I would I I would hate to call it like false uh piety or force, false humility, but it's not. It's literally like logical. I didn't, I didn't, I didn't do it. I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. Yeah, I was making videos and whatever happens happens. So totally unconscious, unself-conscious. So I'm happy what the Lord has done, and it's been an amazing ride, but you know, surrender experiment, right? That's basically what got got got us here.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:14

I didn't know what I was doing, you didn't know what we were doing. Praise the Lord.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:17

Yeah, yeah, it's good. It's good to it's good to not know. Yeah, sometimes it's a lot better. Yeah. Cool. All right, thanks everyone. Appreciate having you here, and we'll see you next time.