This episode is sponsored by TeamBuildr, yet another company that's doing great things for the first responder community.
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Now if you want to try TeamBuildr, they are offering you, the audience of the Behind the Shield podcast, a free 14-day trial to experience all of the features.
And if you want to take a deeper dive into Team Builder, listen to episode 1032 with Melissa Mercado, or go to teambuilder.com, and I'll spell that to you because it's not as you'd think.
T-E-A-M-B-U-I-L-D-R.com.
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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing, and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show, former UF football player and founder of TMAC Fitness, Todd McCullough.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics, from his journey into collegiate sports, his transition into the business world, personal training, his integration of yoga, training tactical athletes, faith, and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback, and leave a rating.
Every single five-star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find, and this is a free library of well over 1,000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Todd McCullough. Enjoy.
Well Todd, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thanks for having me, James. I look forward to it, man.
So where on planet Earth are we finding you this afternoon?
We are in Santa Barbara. Just finished a little trail run with the pup, had a little overpriced breakfast here in Montecito.
And yeah, man, so enjoy and just super blessed to be here. Love this part of the country and then obviously our brothers and sisters are hurting right now a couple of hours south down there in the Palisades, Malibu area.
So we were just talking about before we recorded, it's a weird time to be here, whereas you and I are enjoying this great conversation and a couple of hours south, like our firefighters, brothers and sisters are down there dealing with hell.
So you have an actual California news network that you're watching. What are you hearing as far as the impact and how close they are to actually having it under control?
Honestly, I don't watch the news. I don't have a news update.
I touch base. I found that, you know, over the years, that's just been so sensationalized and overtopped.
But I think this is probably one of those situations where it actually is as bad as people here.
I just check in with my people that are down there and unfortunately, I've got friends that have lost everything, their homes where the kids go to school.
Sometimes, you know, husband with kids, sometimes husband, wife, first house gone.
So I've just been checking in, seeing how we can help, how we can help with, you know, my online platform on the mental wellness and movement side.
But just checking in, just loving on people. I try to ignore the news.
I have like a little app that I keep up where the local fires are. It seems like we're pretty safe right now up in Santa Barbara.
But you never know these wins. I mean, these Santa Ana wins pick up and there's not much they can do.
Yeah, exactly. Well, speaking of Santa Barbara, one of the guys that became a good friend I've had on the show several times is Eric Goodman, who's the creator of Foundation Training.
He was based there for a while.
Yeah, I ran into him. He was great.
Did you ever cross paths with him?
I haven't crossed. Is it Eric in Hawaii or something now or someone said?
Yeah, he was Santa Barbara, then Hawaii. And now he's actually put his roots back in Florida.
So he's even got a studio now that he's working out.
Oh, nice. Where in Florida is he?
I think if I'm not mistaken, it's south of Daytona around that area, I believe, Melrose around there, I think.
Yeah, I mean, I'm always just trying to student and learn from other folks. And I have, again, I haven't met Eric in person, but I got his book Foundation Training, I believe it's called.
Yes.
And a lot of his poses, I have a, you know, L5, S1 issue of my low back and it's been very helpful. It seems that he's done a brilliant job of merging like it seems like he took a few foundations from yoga, which is where I have a background in and applied that to his stuff.
I heard he was talking in the book one time about how chair pose, right? How he's learning to breathe through his upper back and expand his diaphragm and how he picked up that in yoga and just been able to apply that to helping people with their low backs. And yeah, he's done an amazing job.
Yeah, I mean, it works. It saved my career, hands down.
Yeah, it really.
Yeah, I ended up becoming an instructor, which I don't really teach apart from the class that I do. The local gym here, I kind of put it into that hour. But yeah, I mean, I was
hurt my back. When you're a firefighter, the first thing I throw at you is surgery and pills. And I was like, yeah, that's not going to happen. So went down a path of PT paid for a chiropractor. And it was through the Cairo that I found the video of him doing on YouTube, started doing that.
And my recovery went from, you know, like 5% to a 45%. It was just amazing. And then after that, when I got back to work getting stronger and stronger, you know, getting back to fixing why you got hurt in the first place. So I can't talk highly enough about it.
Yeah, it's one of the it's we'll incorporate that some of my clients, we do some training with low back stuff. I like a little bit his work. I've been you know, some things over the years, you always try to piece together new stuff. I like the knees over toes guys a little bit.
His stuff, Ben Patrick, yeah, or yet far strengthening kind of, you know, tibia and those types of muscles help protect the knee. Yeah, both of those guys have been done a really good job. And it's been cool to learn online from those people.
Absolutely. Yeah, I interviewed Ben, I went down to he's in Clearwater, Florida. So I went to his studio, he put me through a session, and then we did an interview there in his studio. So another super, super effective system 100%.
So you mentioned Florida, let's start with your origin story. So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings?
Yeah, so raised in rural North Florida, little place called Baker County. So it's right there on the Florida Georgia line. If if you were to go up 95 to Jacksonville, go west kind of right between the middle of nowhere between Lake City and Jacksonville is a little town called McClunny. And so that's kind of where I'm from and pretty confident that I'm the only one doing yoga when I'm back home. But kind of grew up in that culture was either you get really good at hunting and fishing or football. And
my dad and them did more hunting and fishing and I love football. And so kind of dedicated the first half of my life, James to football and was fortunate, you kind of know the culture there in Florida at UF and was fortunate to play football at the University of Florida and get a scholarship. And that was, you know, kind of a dream come true from a kid growing up in that area. And the blessings of that came five surgeries, and a couple of knees, couple back a couple of knees, couple shoulders and some back injuries and neck injuries that I never got fixed.
And just found myself after playing football at Florida, just hurting in pain. You know, I'd wake up in the morning at five to go to the gym and you know, you're typically your cleans or snatches or squats, your bench press, and I would just hurt by 11am. You know, but being an athlete, like I needed that dopamine rush in the morning to kind of get my day going and was kind of lost. There was a girl I dated for like five years thought I'd probably get married. She played volleyball, I played football and that ended up having a bad day.
I had breakups, somewhat similar stories of you and your first marriage. And it was just kind of lost, hurting and lost. And then a guy played football with a Florida was in Ventura. At the time I was working in finance at Merrill Lynch. So I think this was as interesting, right?
On the surface level, you never know what people are going through, right? Cause on the surface, I'm a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch. I'm making good money. I'm a young, you know, I'm 15 years younger than all the other brokers, high net worth private clients.
And ultimately I was just kind of hurting inside and a buddy I played football with a Florida was from Ventura. He was like, dude, come visit out here. I think you'd like it. Came out and visited. And I was like, well, this is sure as hell different in North Florida, but anything's better than right now.
So I had Merrill Lynch transfer me out to LA. The market crashed. As soon as I got there, all those young brokers got laid off and had a chance to go back to Florida with like another financial firm and decided that I wasn't quite ready for that. So I took all my suits to Goodwill and started handing out flyers for personal training. And it's always jokes. I'm probably the only personal trainer I know of the series seven. So that was probably 14 years ago now.
So going all the way back to your parents, I know you have a first responder in your family. So talk to me about what your dad did.
Yes. So my dad did undercover work there in North Florida. He worked kind of with the there in Stark, Florida. And he did a lot of stuff with the DA, a lot of undercover stuff. So the way I always described it was if you ever watched that movie training day with Denzel Washington, you know, as funny as a kid, you don't know how crazy that was, but that's just kind of everyday life was pop strove a, you know, kind of a low rider profile gold rims truck, bald head, Fu Manchu, had a gun on the hip, a gun on the hip.
A gun on the ankle and another one in a black bag that every time we went to a restaurant or something, the black bag was there with the Glock in it. And it was just wild. Some of the stuff and the stories that we grew up with that was just everyday life for us. It wasn't until I got became an older man that I realized that some of it was a little crazy. And then I think a little crazy probably runs in our family. So my brother now does similar work. He's with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office in the gang unit. So they deal with the worst of the worst.
The worst of the worst in the city of Jacksonville and the gangs, which they just, I think this year they had the lowest. They've had an amazing sheriff there in TK Waters. They've been really preventive on the crime. So I think they've cut down their murder rate in Jacksonville now almost in half of what it was before. And I think that my brother and them and his colleagues with the gang unit have just been doing an amazing job. So yeah, we've got a lot of police officers in our families, my uncles, a lot of our close friends, we barbecue on the weekends, firefighters. My mom's a teacher.
So kind of grew up with that blue collar type service family.
As a child, what was the impact of your dad's profession on your upbringing? The reason I ask that, for example, being a firefighter, we've gone for 24 hours every third day.
So I think over the couple lessons, my dad, well, he intentionally was teaching, I think he wasn't teaching, was that fear was not tolerated. And I think some of his tactics probably were maybe a little frowned upon, particularly nowadays, but fear was not something that was tolerated.
Meaning like, for example, like as a young child, I can remember there was like a big bully in the school that failed a couple grades and he was picking on people in school. And my dad pulled me to side when he got home was like, if you don't kick this kid's ass tomorrow morning, I'm going to beat your ass.
And I'm like, dad, the guy's bigger, he's older, he's stronger. He's like, he may beat your ass, but I promise you when you get home, you don't have a chance against me. So I suggest you be at least fight against him.
Go to school the next day, the kids picking on people at the school ground. And then I beat the shit out of the kid at school. And the principal calls me and was like, Hey, Mr. McCullough, you know, your son said that you told him to fight a kid at school.
And I was like, yeah, good job. Way to go, son. Let's go. Just like little lessons like that as a kid helped me so much in football, right? Like where it's like, you're going against, you're playing football in the sec.
You're going against the biggest and baddest people athletically in the country. They're bigger, they're stronger, they're faster. How do you wear them down? All right. And what you find is that most people don't like get hit in the face.
No matter how big they are. And so I think my dad doing the dangerous job he did raising me and my brother where fear was not an option. And if you've been given God given gifts of strength, it's your job to protect those who are the most vulnerable women, children.
Those type of things. And so I think that that's, you know, again, probably my brother and it being a cop. Why, you know, football was something that came naturally to me was you're using these gifts to help people.
And that's just part of our upbringing of him being a police officer. I think that was nothing a lot of modern. It's again, his tactics may be a little rough, a lot worse than what I just mentioned. But I think that those things are helpful for young men in modern society.
I listened to you on do the hard things first podcast, you mentioned the the host has been going through some struggles with these fires himself. You just made a comment and this was obviously a few years ago that you that you did this recording, but you said that your dad had some struggles in his upbringing.
I think now we're really starting to understand that there's a kind of multi generational element, whether it's trauma, whether it's creating resilience. When you reflect now with this 25 lens, what kind of environment did your dad grow up in that made him a good police officer, but maybe, you know, like you said, some of this roughness as well.
And this is really kind of what excites me now about where my work is taking me is I just went down to the city of Jacksonville and did a kind of a movement and the mental wellness presentation to all their new police academy people and just getting them to understand that wellness is not just how many push ups you can do.
It's also your emotional wellness and go back to my father. So my father grew up really poor. I mean dirt poor like, you know, that they shit in the outhouse didn't have, you know, plumbing, they bathed in the river.
And so if you see pictures of my dad, his siblings growing up, they've got like funguses and stuff on their face in middle school or just they were literally bathing in the river.
And his dad, I didn't find out until later him. He grew up in a very violent home. Love my granddad, but I watched my granddad beat down my grandma.
And I'll never forget that memory. My dad saw that. That was a normal Tuesday for my dad. My grandma, you know, took a gun to my granddaddy in the house shooting at him.
Right. Like this was his everyday upbringing. And since they grew up so poor, my granddad used to take my dad, I found this again out later, to the neighborhood and make him fight all the bigger older guys, even if he got his ass kicked.
Just because there's a culture that people don't quite understand, but I've noticed here on the West Coast, people are really good intentions about helping people that are lower income in tough areas is that pride, when you have no money, pride is everything.
And so if you have pride, you have something to hold your head up to. And so my dad was raised in a culture where fighting just took place. It didn't matter if you won or lost. It was just, you were not going to back down if your last name was McCullough.
And my dad, you know, you're talking about the trauma of childhood and just upbringings. He instilled that in me and my brother, I think with good intentions, but I think there was obviously some demons that he still to this day has to battle. Right. So like you come home from work as a police officer or a firefighter.
Let's just say you're in finance, you've had a stressful day and you need a six pack or a couple of glasses of whiskey to take the edge off. How does that affect your relationship with your child? How does that affect your relationship with your wife?
And so my work has been, you know, I've been super blessed to have so many great teachers is merging when I knew as an athlete with yoga and helping people, you know, put together tangible ways to decompress before they come home at work to get their mind right.
So to speak before they go to work and not bring that shit home with you. So great question though, but it's something I think that hopefully first responders are starting to at least ask is what does wellness look like outside of the gym?
100%. Yeah. It's interesting with that punctuation of the shift. I just came across a technology about just over a year ago now called new calm and you see a LM and it's a, I'll give you the quick kind of clip notes formulated by one of the smartest people that we've ever had in the US.
He figured out the frequency that the brain would be at during stress flow, all these different phases and then figured out another 10 plus years to figure out, can you make the brain go into that stress state?
And yes, you can obviously with breath work and yoga. What he found is that through you're listening to music, but beneath the music of these undulations and it's not like something you can find on a Spotify playlist.
Each track is like a gigs worth of memory, but, and it's, it's passive. So this is what makes it so beautiful. And they've had people like monks that have used this and said that made that meditation even better.
So it's an adjunct to this as well, but it's passive. So if you have got that monkey mind and you're first entering, you know, the kind of what would be a meditation journey, it's going to bring you down, whether you like it or not.
And so they have one called power nap, which is 20 minutes. And to me, if you haven't got a diligent, you know, practice where you can, like you said, already go to the gym and wind down.
Another option is to find somewhere safe, you know, go back in the bunk room or, you know, in your police car within the pound, you know, the safe environment, put on a sleep mask, put the headphones on and just take 20 minutes.
And it down regulates and it gives you what feels like about 90 minutes worth of sleep as well. And absolutely incredible. So you were like your dad undercover slinging dope at 5am when you walk through the door at 9am.
Now you can be dad. Yeah.
Be sure and share that with me. I'm always fascinating to see what, what technologies and different things are out there. I think one of the things that we always have like, I try to build it into what's tangible. Right.
So two things that have helped our community is we always say, get your mind right first thing in the morning, which is move your body and do our meditation. Right. And so we make these 20 minute home workouts.
So it eliminates the excuse. I don't have time. Right. And then the mind right meditation, we basically, since you just worked out on the map, hey, why are you here? Let's do a little stretching, a little breathing.
And it's a very simple meditation. They do is one, it's a moment of gratitude. Right. Got a chance to move my body. Got a roof over my head. Just powerfully starting your day with gratitude.
Two, lifting up a loved one. I've got this little kid in this family. I want to make sure they're safe today. My wife is pouring blessings upon them. Maybe you have a friend going through a tough time right now. Just lost her home in a fire.
Three, visualizing success. Something I learned as an athlete, like seeing a great day happen, step into that moment. And then four, being present, being still, listen to the rise and the fall of the breath, the sounds around you, which is inspired by Psalms 46 10 in the Bible.
It says be still and know that I am God. And I think in today's modern society, more so than even fitness, I think the thing that we all struggle with is being still. Right. It's creating those moments of stillness.
Instead, we look at our phone on Instagram every time we get bored, take you to the bathroom. And so I think that's one thing we found to be helpful. Another technique you may find interesting, James, is something I've learned recently over the years.
I call it like a soul check-in. And so we'll have the police officers and people in our community, but just like you said, when they're making that shift after work, or maybe it's on their lunch break before they go home and see their kids, is simply placing one hand on your chest, one hand on your belly, sitting in your car, taking a couple of deep breaths, inhales and exhales, just really slow for a couple of minutes. And then just asking simple two questions.
What do I need right now? Maybe it's a hug. Maybe it's some validation, whatever it may be. And then what do you need to let go of? Which is typically the most powerful thing. I need to let go of the crap I saw today at work. I need to let go of my shitty attitude.
And just having that down regulation, as you said, before you walk in your home and you have your six-year-old kid there who just wants to play with his dad. Right. How do you bring that best?
And so we always like, to me, those are two ways we've found to have a little bit of success is the first thing in the morning, getting your mind right. And then we call it a soul check-in before you walk back into the house.
Love it. Absolutely love it. We're going back to when you were a child then. Walk me through your journey into football. And then what was it that you started seeing within yourself that made you an elite athlete at that sport?
Yeah. So I think that growing up again, it was either hunting and fishing or football. And we grew up just real like, I grew up on people talking about diet now and stuff. I grew up on a Mountain Dew and a Pop Tart with butter.
That was my breakfast. But we were outside chasing dogs, hunting all the time or shooting squirrels or rabbits or playing football. We were just outside all day, coming in for a ham and cheese sandwich at lunch and maybe a glass of sweet tea and then back out to the dark.
And so I think that rural upbringing got me naturally fit and strong. And then I was fortunate, like I had this opportunity to go to this prep school in Jacksonville called Bowles, which is about an hour away.
And it's where all these elite athletes from around the world, these countries would send their elite athletes to go train at Bowles. And I had an opportunity to go play football there under a legendary football coach.
So I left home at 15 with a very clear intention of I was going to play D1 football and lived on campus my freshman year and just kind of dedicated my life to that and was just super blessed.
My parents, again, my dad was a teacher. My mom was a cop. They sacrificed all. I mean, I lived on campus for one year, but during the summers when I was 15, didn't have a car.
They would drive me an hour each way to go work out at 6am before they go to work. I mean, who does that nowadays, right? Like drive your kid an hour just for the kid to go possibly have this crazy dream of playing college football.
So lots of gratitude, lots of very just fortunate being in the right place at the right time, having access to some coaches and trainers that really helped.
And then I got lucky. I ended up being 6'5", right? Like my best bud growing up was probably just as good of a high school football player as I was, maybe even better. But he was 5'10".
Right? Like I happened to be 6'5". There's nothing I could do to, you know, that just happened to be the luck of the lottery on that one.
When did you have that final growth spurt? What age?
So I think I was a tall string being like 15. I was probably like 6'3", 15.
And then even though I was as skinny as I was, like I was pretty strong. So like we grew up in that program where it was you were there to go to college, right? So like I can remember being, I don't know, I guess, a sophomore, junior in high school and been in like 335.
So, you know, this was back in a day where we didn't have, you know, all these sports programs for young kids. I was just kind of country strong and grew up in that world.
And so I was, you know, a tall athletic kid with probably too much anger and run around and hit people. And I got fortunate to leverage that in the best way possible, I guess.
But I was never, I was good enough to start at Florida, which was great, but I was never physically dominant. I couldn't dominate. Like I was an All-American in high school, but I was nowhere near an All-American in college.
Good enough to start in SEC, but I played with some dudes there that were just physically way more gifted than I was.
So you're obviously on this football track. In the back of your mind, was there also any other career aspirations or were you thinking about pro football at that time?
No, I was just, my dream was if you grew up in North Florida, it's not even about pro sports, it's college sports. That's the culture there. It's college football on Saturday, Jesus on Sunday.
Like that's that environment. You're either a Georgia Bulldog, a Florida Gator, or a Florida State Seminole. We don't think too kindly of those down in the South Florida, down in Miami for the Hurricanes.
That's a different breed. But no, it was just playing college football. I was probably short-sighted not to have aspirations more for the NFL.
But after five surgeries, I was so beat up, James. It was just like, I was happy. I mean, I was lucky to still start and play, but I went there running a 4-7-1 and left running a 5-flat. You're not playing in the NFL at a 5-flat.
Well, this is an interesting topic. Coaches, athletes, I had such an unusual perspective when I came to the States, and I've told this story many times, but it's important to kind of set up the question.
When I was here for a bit, I started hearing the same kind of Uncle Rico story from all these kind of deconditioned, you know, late 20s, early 30s dudes.
I could have, should have, would have if it wasn't for my ACL, my, you know, insert injury here.
And then, you know, it wasn't immediately, but as time went on, I'm like, what are they doing to their young people?
Because I'm used to, certainly in the generation I grew up in, I'm used to none of us really getting to a high level of athleticism in school unless you're an incredible rugby player or football player, especially.
The rest of us play, but then you leave school and then you keep playing. There's a lot of adult leagues, pub leagues, local leagues, all the way through to like, you know, 50, 60 years old in some places.
But I didn't see that in America. I saw a much higher level of performance in our youth and then a steep drop off when it came to wellness of the general population after.
So what is your perspective having literally been through this crucible and carrying the injuries of your professional, excuse me, your collegiate sports, that line between performance and winning, but also acknowledging the longevity and wellness of the youth athlete?
That's an interesting distinction you saw from the UK versus here. I haven't thought much about that on that side. I would just say there's two things.
And I would say that you're balancing two things, right? One, I was very clear I wanted to play Division I football.
I think if you have a young boy or girl that has a dream, you foster that. That being said, at that time period, you know, yoga wasn't even on the radar.
Like I could have played a lot longer if I would have known what I know now about yoga. Right. So one of the things I'm so passionate about young kids and even professional athletes incorporating at least one to two days of yoga into the routine.
Everything was just squat, deadlift, clean from the ground, right? Like most elite athletes now, they're not going anything from the ground. It's mainly hand cleans, right?
So again, I'll talk to you. I was 6'3", a 15-year-old, tight hip flexors. I'm doing cleans and snatches. And you know, I ended up having an L5S1 fracture, right?
Just because I didn't have the form to properly lift like I was. That said, like it takes a lot of commitment to play at that level.
And so I think that these kids that want to do that should do that. I think a couple of things I would think, you know, if I had a child now, people ask, like, would you let him play football?
The first thing I would put a boy and girl or girl into is jiu-jitsu. I think that makes the most sense as far as a practical thing, a boy or girl to learn tactical situations.
Once you're done playing football, you're done. Like the skill set's not very transferable other than the lessons you learn of working with people, which I think is a big lesson.
But actually, I think jiu-jitsu would be something I would put a kid in. And I don't like the specialization of kids too soon.
Kid needs to play multiple sports up until college, learn different movement patterns. You know, a lot of these parents now are wanting to make their kid the best 14-year-old youth, soccer, baseball, you name it.
And they're not developing them to a better human being. And I think that that's one of the things that I'm super passionate about is like, I think one thing we've lost in society is do we really have a Sabbath? Right?
Like if you're not modeling a true Sabbath for your child, how are they ever going to learn that?
So like taking, whether it's one day a week, whether it's Sunday or whatever it is, as a family where you're off the phones, you're off social media, you're off playing sports, you're not working.
You're actually just resting and enjoying your time with each other. I think that's another thing that's interesting now in today's world, because I see it now with these youth sports where these parents, and they're doing it for the love of their child.
I think, at least we'll acknowledge whether or not some other things underlying that is that they go these three hours for these soccer tournaments or baseball tournaments, softball, and the parents are both working full time.
They're tired, they're stressed, they're up at 5 a.m. driving three hours, come back home, go back on Sunday. There's no time to rest. And we need rest as a society to refuel.
And I think that's one of the things that's lost in modern society. I think just intentionally having a Sabbath is something that I'm consciously working on myself as a business owner.
I love that.
I don't know if that makes any sense or not, because it's like my default is to keep working. I could work on TMAC Fitness, my business, every day.
I love what I do. But intentionally having a Sabbath, I think, sets the kid up for being a better human and not just an athlete.
Because let's just say you get the luck of the draw and the kid's the 1% of the 1%, and he goes to play professional sports.
The majority of them end up broke and depressed, divorced, just mental issues because they were never developed as a complete human.
They were just taught how to play a sport and they don't know who their identity is. And so I think that's something that parents have to be conscious of.
It's so interesting. I watched the Weight of Gold, that documentary that they did on the mental health of some of our most elite athletes, including Michael Phelps.
And there were so many parallels between that and our military first responders and our identity crisis, especially if we get hurt or we retire, because it's very easy to just say you're a firefighter.
It's kind of a cool thing to say. A lot of people think, oh, wow, that's amazing. But then one day you're not.
And you realize that that's not who you were. It's what you did. And it's something you're proud of having done.
But there was always going to be an end point. And so whether it's an athlete who's trained and then he finally made it on that podium, the Olympics, and now they've aged out and they're like, now what?
Since I was three, I've been swimming. Now what am I going to do? Or since I was 18, I've been a firefighter. Now what am I going to do?
So I think whether you're talking about children or even adults, I love that idea of the Sabbath and certainly really kind of taking that time to step back and reinforce the fact that it's what you do.
It's not who you are. And being, I love that term student athlete. If you are in college, if you are in high school, student comes first, athlete is second.
Now you might be a diligent athlete, but you're not just an athlete. You're a student athlete. You're a rounded person.
James, how your transition in life and your journeys, how have you found identity outside of what you do for a living?
Let me tell you, there is no greater fall from grace when it comes to the ego to being, I used to be a firefighter paramedic and now I'm a podcaster.
To my, you know, born in 1974 years, it sounds so fucking ridiculous, but it's what I do. So there was a struggle. I volunteered for a heartbeat locally.
Didn't like it because I wasn't part of that team. I wasn't allowed to do X, Y, and Z as a volunteer. And so I see, I look back and go, yeah, that was from good intentions, but it was also me not letting go of that uniform.
But after that, realizing, I think the big takeaway is this, you're just doing exactly what you're doing now. You played football, you got to that level of athleticism, you got these injuries, you found your way to recover.
Now you're using that knowledge to help 20,000 people. When you realize that after you've done X, Y, and Z, that now you can become a force multiplier and that the mission was never to be a firefighter.
The mission was to help people to save their lives, to stop them hurting. That mission hasn't changed. Now I just do it from a microphone and through books.
So once you can reframe that your life's purpose really hasn't changed, it's just the costume that's changed, then I think it makes it more palatable.
I love that. I always go back to some of John Wooden's stuff. I think he's one of the greatest teachers. He's known as the legendary basketball coach at UCLA, but he always referred to himself as a teacher.
Right now you're teaching through a podcast. It's not necessarily working necessarily as a fighting fire, it's just through a podcast. I think that understanding being of service, one of the things that's been interesting to me that I've learned over the years that's helped me is that I have this online business and I've been super blessed and fortunate with it.
I did training in LA for 10 years, like seeing nine clients a day and running around. All you wish was to have this online business so you don't have to drive around in two hour traffic in Beverly Hills every day.
Then you get that and you're super grateful. Then I realized I was kind of down a little bit. I forgot what it was like to put my hands on people and to teach.
So twice a week I go to my local yoga studio. It doesn't make any sense financially how much time and effort I put into the class, the playlist, but I get to teach in person.
It reminds me why I got into this. You see people moving and listening to music and meditating. For me that's been super helpful.
I can't do it more than probably twice a week time commitment wise, but just being intentional and taking time to serve in a capacity reminds me of why I'm doing what I'm doing. If that makes any sense.
It makes perfect sense because I do it too. I teach a free class for first responders, military dispatchers every Monday at Iron Legion, the gym that I train at.
I've never been a full time coach, but I did it weekend warrior coaching. It keeps me fit because I do a lot of sleds and sandbags in that class, the tactical athlete stuff.
But then also it keeps me one foot in the door. So I am reminded, am I doing well? Am I evolving as the strength and conditioning world is? Am I falling behind?
So yeah, I think it's really important. And then like you said, it's just giving a little bit of yourself. And in that particular example, anyone locally that's in any of those fields, they can come and train for free for an hour.
But like you, that's all I can do is one hour because I got too much.
Yeah, but it humbles me. I guess I kind of learned years ago, there was a girl in LA and this is when I was training people all day. And a friend of mine was a physician, reached out to me and was like, hey, this girl just lost her leg.
And she was this beautiful model and got this horrible disease and infection and she lost her leg. And she can't pay you to train, but is there anything you can do to help her?
And I was like, you know, I was selfish at first. I was like, I'm giving up a couple hundred dollars an hour to come do this for free. Like, what is this?
And it ended up being such a beautiful experience of watching her journey of training and just the grit she had to get back.
Now I see her, she's in magazines again without her leg and stuff and giving hope to thousands of women around the world.
But I look back at my time in LA and I think that's one of the best things I did. I didn't make any money at it.
But I look back at it and I'm like, that was time well spent. Like you gave, God gave you some gifts.
You had some great teachers and you actually used it in service of your fellow brothers and sisters.
And so I'm always reminded that lesson. It's easier for me to be all about me. Like it's easy for me to be just selfish.
And so taking some time like you do once one hour a week, right? You can give one hour a week of service.
100%. Yeah, it's what I'm trying to tell the fire service at the moment. We're so, I mean, a lot of them are just so tired.
They can't even critically think. I mean, they literally just worked into the ground.
But we're also so brainwashed on the fallacy that we have this amazing schedule. And if you look at a firefighter schedule, it's not.
It's a 56 hour work week. But also, you know, when you see new union negotiations, they're chasing a pay raise every single time.
And I'm trying to get them to reframe like the most important currency is time with your family, not dollars and cents.
And when you can get away from that carrot on the stick and start really fighting for what matters because of the L.A.
firefighters are being heralded as heroes. I guarantee you three weeks from now, no one will be talking about them when they are saying, hey, we're understaffed and we need support.
And we need funding and we need to change the work week because our firefighters are dying of suicide and cancer. It's going to be on deaf ears again.
So getting people to understand what's most important so they start fighting for it themselves.
Dollars and cents rarely is the priority. Yeah, it's I mean, it's such a heroic thing to watch right now.
These just people that are, you know, not thought about as much as society with the firefighters and watch right now.
Literally, these people are saving lives and they're the people that run into a fire.
And I find that James is fascinating because I don't think the average human does that.
I don't think the average human wants to run into a fire. The natural instincts to run away.
And I watch these brave men and women do this. And it's just they're a critical part of our foundation, of our society and our local communities.
And I hope that this lesson reminds us. But, you know, our default is we'll forget about it in three or four weeks.
And then the damage will be done. Like, are these can we show up for these men and women to help them and their families outside of this?
Right. Because right now they're not with their families. Right. They're not at their little kids baseball game. Right.
Like, you know, can we really be of service past this disaster right now? I hope we can.
Yeah, I shared a video, I think it's about three or four days ago of a I think he was L.A. County or L.A. City.
Anyway, he was out there fighting the fires and his home was burnt down.
And so his crew were helping him sift through the ashes to find his wedding ring, which he's probably in trouble for not wearing from his wife.
I've got that vibe. But they found it. It was amazing.
I mean, it was all kind of burned out, but they found the ring and he put it back on.
But just think about that, you know, because we've had this too. And we have hurricanes here.
We go to the stations and protect strangers and leave our family to deal with the hurricane on their own.
So it's the families that pay the price, too. So we've got to really kind of reconfigure the hierarchy of needs when it comes to who's most important in society, not putting them up on a pedestal,
but understanding the sacrifice that these first responders and their families make, especially in these disasters.
How would you do that any different? I can't fathom that. Right.
Like you said, you're leaving your family at home in danger to go save strangers. Yeah.
Is there another way? I mean, I don't mean that's that is a tough fucking thing to do.
Or you do. I mean, you align hopefully where you've put them in a safer place with their family or with friends, which I've had to do further away from the coast or wherever that particular hazard is.
But there's a certain point where you have to you have to go to work.
You know, so yeah, and this is what's not acknowledged. So again, my whole kind of reframing is if we're going to ask them to do that, then we owe it to those those responders and their families to put them at home as much as possible as well.
When we're not fighting wildfires or hurricanes. I mean, it's a huge or bigger topic. Right. How do you define success?
Right. And it's success. I think that, you know, our generation's got easily I can easily default to this, too. Right. It's like, is it worth having the boat or the extra car garage, meaning that you don't make it to your kids little league baseball game or practice?
That's a conscious to say I don't think people are conscious of that. Right. They want to grind. They want to work hard. I love that grit. But there's a sacrifice to be made.
And I watched this in the college sports round. I think some of the younger coaches are maybe learning a little bit. But, you know, when I was at Florida, we had three head coaches, Steve Spurrier, Ron Zook and Urban Meyer.
I had three or four D coordinators, four different linebacker coaches. And these were all phenomenal, hard, hardworking, smart men that dedicated their lives to the profession.
And the majority of them did not know their wives and didn't know their kids. Their wives raised the kids. And we watch them on Saturdays and Sundays. And it's like this beautiful, awesome, there's probably nothing more fun in the world to do than be a college football coach.
I think I've got the utmost respect for it. But what is success? Is success maybe taking that high school football coaching job? Yeah. And still coaching your kids? I don't know. I think every person has to decide that.
And I think that the sooner we can ask those questions, the more happier the people be. Maybe it is coaching at the highest level and you can integrate that more.
But I don't know. I'm very cautious about when you see people have success at a high level, whether it's sports, entertainment or whatever, of the cost that's being made for that, the sacrifice.
And at least be conscious of it if you're going to make it. Absolutely. Well, you hear that so often in our professions, in the first responders, where by the time these men and women get out on the other end, you know, and the work environment is largely the problem when it comes to this.
Now they are divorced. So they've worked and worked and chased this carrot for this pension and maybe now half is going to the ex-wife and now they're in a one bed apartment.
They're not seeing their kids. And then we wonder why we have suicide problems when it comes to our retirees. Versus, like you said, and this is on us as well, making choices that prioritize being home with the family, which also includes addressing your own mental health.
Because there are some firefighters that sign up for all the overtime. And, you know, you got to ask yourself, why? Why do you not want to go home? There's something there that you're not acknowledging.
But yeah, advocating so that you're able to do both. Firefighters should be able to serve their community and still be home to parent, to be a loving partner and, you know, transition into their retirement healthily.
Do you know any stats on that? I'm super curious of like firefighters, first responders, police, they get divorced once they retire?
I mean, that our divorce or how to divorce?
Because I mean, I've recently learned that police officers are more likely to die of suicide than they are on the job.
Yeah, as our firefighters, it's more than double the numbers at the moment. And that's the one that we know about because there's a lot of...
I'm curious what the divorce rate is like once they retire. Like you said, they get that pension now. I'm making this sacrifice with good intentions for my family.
But not being conscious of what's like you said, why am I really not wanting to go home?
I think that's where the mindfulness piece of the emotional wellness that's hopefully the conversation going forward again, beyond just how much I deadlift or bench press of what's my emotional mental health.
And I don't know. So I love what you're doing, James.
Well, I mean, it's an interesting perspective. I've heard a lot of spouses when the firefighter finally retires, they're sicker than being around the house because they're used to them being gone.
So there's definitely a transition there. But I mean, yeah, most of us, you know, I think a majority have gone through at least a divorce. I mean, I did.
And again, you know, the background, I don't think there was really any way around it in that particular situation.
I think it would have happened if I was a plumber or worked in a coffee shop. But yeah, the fact that we're gone and then now we have this recruitment crisis.
So we have mandatory overtime. So now instead of being gone 56 hours a week, you're gone 80 hours a week because you're told you can't go home.
You know, now what is that doing to the family dynamic? Because it's so unfair to the spouse at home who's 24 hours being a single parent.
And now you're telling them to do it twice. Well, they've got a life. They've got a career. They've got, you know, they need to have their Sabbath, you know.
So, yeah, I mean, it's so important whether you're, you know, like you said.
And then imagine that again, what we talked about, right? You work those 70, 80 hour weeks. You're super stressed.
And then now all of a sudden your kids signed up for on a weekend, three hours away, where you're now up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday and Sunday and there's no rest.
And you're seeing these parents burnt out, right? And they don't get a chance to work on their marriage.
So I don't know. This is something I've just been thinking about lately is just like what happened to our Sabbath?
When did we think we were so wise that we didn't need a Sabbath?
I saw a thing on social media a little while ago and it said in the, I forget now, like 1500s or something,
peasants worked 100 and what do they say, like 180 days a year because the lords and ladies,
however it was, you know, wanted to make sure that they weren't burnt out.
And the department says, so, yeah, you work more than peasants.
It is true. If you look at European work weeks, if you look at how we used to work, there was a Sabbath.
You know, we did take time off the days weren't, you know, sunrise to sunset, you know, a nonstop work.
And we've devolved through the bad side of capitalism to kind of have this mentality.
I'll sleep when I'm dead. You snooze, you lose all this stuff rather than realizing that, yeah,
get what needs to be done and then go see your family and relax and recover.
Well, I don't know about you, but I found too that when my mind is right, so to speak,
in the mornings where I do a quick workout, I do my meditation.
And so right now we're running a challenge, right? And part of the challenge is you have to do that.
You have to work out and meditate before you look at your phone for work emails or social media.
James and people, every challenge, I always ask them, what's the hardest part?
And they would thought going into it would be the workouts or the diet.
The hardest thing, James, is for them not to look at their phones and check social media or work emails in bed.
Right? And that just stimulates you for a negative day, right? A stress response.
And I think in today's society, it's just so easy to get distracted by all that.
So we end up working, let's just say, a longer day when it probably could be cut by two hours
if we were very efficient and focused on what we were doing.
And so I know myself, if I get a good night's sleep, I can get more done in four or five hours
than on a bad night's sleep working seven or eight, as far as quality work.
Yeah. I had Kirk Parsley on years ago, a Navy SEAL turned physician,
and he became kind of fell into being a sleep expert because he was trying to figure out why his SEALs were so beat down.
And he realized it was because they were doing all these night ops and training.
And so he shifted it around and became kind of a guru in the sleep world on the tactical side.
But he was saying there's that mythology that if you stay up, you know, burn the midnight oil that you're going to get this work done.
He said, for every hour of sleep that you lose, you lose an hour and a half of productivity.
So it just underlines what you said. And if you look at Europe, which is where, you know,
trying to really make the case for the fire service, if you look at the progressive corporate space,
they're going to a four day, nine hour work week.
And they found that they're just as productive, there's more innovation and they're more efficient,
and you've got a happy, healthier workforce. So there we go.
I think for those listening to this, I'm sure in Florida, a cool story for people love for the football back there
was the first coach I have is a guy named Steve Spurrier, who's legendary for the football field named after him.
And then we had Ron Zook coming afterwards. And just to give you a little, you know, something I witnessed was
Ron Zook was his blue collar, hard work. And you said burn the night, can't know both ends, like up three, four in the morning, never slept, recruited.
I mean, he gave his life to the University of Florida, ultimately ended up getting fired for going eight and five,
which now Florida football be happy to do, but back then those standards were not allowed. Like eight and five, you get fired.
And then you had Steve Spurrier, who had my first there. Coach Spurrier was like a scratch golfer during the off season.
Right. Like he was always trying to make practice shorter so he could go play golf.
During some of the biggest weeks in our games, he would take his staff to the beach there in Crescent Beach and go hang out and catch some, hang out at the beach with their families.
And he is going to go down as one of the greatest coaches ever and coach into his seventies.
And you saw my senior year, we had Urban Meyer come in, very much gave everything to the University of Florida and his body ended up failing him.
He left Florida, like mentally broke down. Same thing at Ohio State. He goes to Ohio State, wins national championships. His body breaks down.
Coach Spurrier coached, I think, until he was in his seventies. You're not seeing these college football coaches coaching their seventies anymore.
Coach Spurrier had a life outside football.
And I think that when you, to me, that was just a lesson to learn was just because you're up, you know, there's this idea in football that if I'm up at 4 a.m. and they're up at 430, I'm winning.
That's not necessarily true.
100%. I agree. I mean, you're giving yourself sleep Sabbath in a way, you know, you're investing in that efficiency and that rest and recovery.
You mentioned Crescent. That's where I go. That's my happy place to me is the most beautiful beach on the planet.
I mean, there's more tropical ones. There's something about that beach. I adore it.
I need to get back there. It's I love it here in Santa Barbara. I love the mountains.
I was trail running this morning, love the waves and been able to go surf and camp. But the simplicity of Crescent Beach is a special place, man.
I understand your appeal there.
Absolutely. I think I wish I would have said the name of it.
I think it's I think what makes it what it is is there's no bars.
So it's still to this day, they even there was a restaurant on the sand that's closed down.
They put one on the road instead that for some reason is closed down.
So there's still like nothing around us unless you simply just want to go to the beach with no entertainment.
You know, everyone else is going to Daytona or wherever.
So I think Crescent still still retained a lot of its its soul hasn't been corrupted yet.
It is a great place. I love that whole St. Augustine area, too.
Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, we're talking about college football.
You mentioned about injuries. So walk me through that rehabilitation journey that took you to the world of yoga.
Yeah. So I think that two things come to mind on that, James, was what I didn't realize at the time was so I pretty much, you know,
earn a starting position, get an injury during the season, play all season hurt.
During the offseason, I'd get a surgery and we'd get a new linebacker.
Normally when you get a starting job, it's yours to lose.
At Florida, since I had a new coach every year, he would bring in his new all-American linebackers that he wanted to play.
So I had to not just be as as good as him. I had to be better than them.
And I'd usually miss a lot of spring for a surgery.
What I didn't realize at the time was it was actually preparing me for life as an entrepreneur in the sense that you have these highs and lows.
And every season you would have this low of like, I got to have another surgery.
And looking back now, I see these entrepreneurs that they'll have a bad quarter or two and they hang up the cleats.
Right. And it's just I think it trained me when I wasn't realizing it for life as an entrepreneur years later.
So I think unlike that side, the business side and the mental fortitude side, I think was really what it prepared me for was the mental.
But the actual injuries was I found this yoga teacher in L. My first time going to yoga, I was just going because it was a hot girl and I made a yoga class.
And it was the most boring thing I've ever went to in my entire life. It was like a glorified stretch.
I was like, this is a waste of time. But then I got asked to go to this other class where this guy who a lot of former athletes are going to in Santa Monica.
It's a good old Vinnie Marino. And it was the hardest damn thing I've ever done.
Like there were 80 of us in a room and I was physically looked like I was in better shape than everyone.
And I was the weakest person in class. So much isometric work.
Whereas I was used to fast twitch explosive stuff with football. And it humbled me.
But it was it was such an advanced yoga practice. I had no business being in there.
But the athlete in me was exactly what I needed because the gentle stretch wasn't enough to interest me.
And the day I'm the same, James, I was like, oh, my God, my spine feels like it's two inches longer.
My hips feel good. My shoulders feel good. My neck feels good. I actually didn't hurt.
And so I became addicted to that guy's practice. I would literally train my clients around his schedule.
And I trained under him for years and years. And so in the process of doing that, my body started to heal.
And I could actually start doing a few other things. And I noticed if when I just did yoga, I became like a little skinny bitch, so to speak.
Like my body felt better, but I didn't have any muscle tone. I was losing cardiovascular fitness.
And so I was like, how can I merge what I know is an athlete in a way that doesn't hurt my body?
And so I started playing around on a yoga mat, merging athletic training with yoga and then put that out there in the world.
Thought I created the next P90X only to hear that they love that type of training, but it was too long.
You started hearing a lot of people like, hey, I have get the soccer practice on the weekends. I have to get up at five to go to work, etc.
I don't have time for an hour practice. And so I took the best of that hour practice, which is the class I actually teach in Santa Barbara, and chopped it into 20 minutes.
So there's something psychologically people know that in the mornings they can wake up at 5 a.m.
Or on their lunch break and know that in 20 minutes they're going to feel better. We finished with a stretch and a brief meditation.
And that's it was basically just trying to help heal myself and then help give my clients other other workouts to do when I wasn't training them.
And by accident, it led to an online membership by accident, really.
So walk me through that, because as you said, you were doing this in-person training, you know, the way that we are sold social media, for example, and online is that if you just follow my program, then you're going to make a billion dollars in three days.
So 15 year old kid, he owns Venus now.
The most financially successful fitness people are the 15 year old kids who know how to make good TikTok videos, who don't know shit about training, but they're great at making videos.
Exactly. So walk me through your journey.
Yeah. So it was like it started as this hour long program. And I just wanted to share it with the world because it helped me so much.
It was like, basically, and it's what I tell people in class when I teach is like, it's everything that you would want in one.
If you had one class to do one workout to do for your entire life, it challenges your cardiovascular, their strength training, there's mobility, there's tapping into the parasympathetic with the nervous system, switch over with the meditation, all in one practice.
The challenge was bringing it to market. And I had to swallow my pride a little bit and listen to my customers.
They kept saying, we love this, we love this, but I can only do it once a week. I don't have enough time. Do you have anything that's 20 minutes? Do you have anything that's shorter?
I was like, I can't make a 20 minute workout to get any results. How do you do that?
And after six or nine months of me just being too prideful, I started listening to the audience of what they wanted.
And then it was my responsibility as a teacher to figure out a way to deliver it in a way that they could consistently go to work and get to, we always say, we want you to be able to take care of your body and get your kids soccer practice.
You shouldn't have to choose between going to the gym and your kids soccer practice.
And so it was just that journey of listening to the customer, understanding that this is what I want to get done.
People told me, you know, when I was doing this 12 years ago, starting this content, it was like, don't mix fitness with mindfulness because there are two different worlds.
I was like, I just don't have a desire to create something that's just burpees. I need people to connect to themselves more and have more meaning.
And so I was looking back, I was fortunate, I was rigid on that mission of helping people move their bodies and connect to their spiritual practice.
But then I was flexible enough to deliver it in a way that was accessible to people, if that makes sense.
So we still do what we do. We help people move and connect, but we delivered in a way that was accessible.
And then now you fast forward all these years, the popular word is mental wellness.
Right. And so now we're able to work in more of the B2B space with these companies and firefighters and police officers because they know they need something, some digital project on mental wellness.
And we just call it getting your mind right for a decade. You know, didn't think about we'd be delivering it to businesses, but that's just kind of how it's naturally evolved.
How did COVID affect you? When it hit, I was already doing two a week.
I put another one out because I was just sick of seeing the misinformation from both sides.
And to me, the middle truth was let's just make people healthier physically and mentally.
And so what I found was my actual downloads got a lot higher because everyone's relying on the virtual form at that time.
How did that impact you and how did you kind of move around that space?
COVID actually ended up being, I would say, a bad thing. It was surprising. Let me explain this.
We saw obviously an initial bump, right? People weren't going to the gym. So we saw our subscriber rate jump up.
But we end up losing a lot of organic traffic because what happened was the Pelotons, the Beach Bodies,
the billion dollar companies bought up all the eyeball space. Right. So like, I don't know, I've got a decent Instagram following.
And then none of my followers saw my content anymore. You basically had to pay to play.
So like Peloton, which is in Beach Bodies, both of them are financially, they created great products. There's great people there.
They're financially really struggling now because they would acquire a customer losing several hundred dollars.
Right. They would lose three or four hundred dollars trying to acquire James as a customer playing the subscriber game and then go raise more VC funding.
So all of the small mom and pops, most of them got put out of business because we lost our organic traffic reach.
So it really became going back and focusing on the community and really serving the community.
So we didn't see it actually end up hurting us for about two years, I thought, with COVID.
But what it did was it made us a better team and a better program.
So, for example, we were able to implement more behavioral techniques in our challenges with gamification.
Right. Probably would never have done that if I didn't, if I was trying to acquire more customers.
It was like, all right, let's go back, regroup. You've got X amount of members here that trust you.
Let's serve them better. And by doing that, we've been able to grow the business.
I had and we literally just reconnected on Instagram.
My previous one was shut down, had over 200.
I just saw. Yeah, I just saw that. I was like, how did I was like, did you start over a new one?
I couldn't figure out what you were doing. Yeah. Shut down. Shut down.
So I've I've been I think that account is as old as a podcast.
So I started it when I did the podcast. So it's nine, excuse me, eight years old.
I've seen that like nine thousand videos over that time, either clips from the podcast that are coming up
or usually kindness and compassion videos.
And for some reason, and I don't know because, you know, I support people.
So I'm, you know, helping the first responders who are trying to be terminated from the vaccine mandates.
And I'm speaking up again, not personally, but just showing the stories of what's happening in Gaza
to these women and these children, middle of the road, humanistic things.
But I don't know if that put a bullseye on my back.
But out of the blue, I got told I had copyright infringement and didn't get like a slap on the wrist or a weak suspension.
I got the posse. It might be six months because I remember it was one hundred and eighty day thing popped up at one point,
but it might be permanent. I don't know. We'll find out in April.
But that was it. So you've got all these pseudo porn sites, all this violence, all this hate speech on there that's allowed to be.
But a guy that shares kindness and compassion and has a free podcast to help first responders, we need to shut that motherfucker down.
So, yeah, that's where it went. I'm so sorry.
But I mean, they didn't shut me down, but I had an interesting similar thing.
I haven't watched the episode with Rogan and Zuckerberg, but it sounds like they're at least going to be open some of that stuff back up again.
During covid again, from the police standpoint, like I wanted to just simply share like for yourself.
I wanted a platform to be a place to bring people together to hear different stories.
And this was like during the heights of some of the social unrest and the George Floyd stuff.
So a good buddy of mine's African-American trainer.
I've lived, lived, dated, almost married an African-American girl for people that know me personally.
And a buddy of mine had been again, even it just hurt to hear as a as a son of a police officer, a brother police officer.
This African-American trainer had been profiled against, you know, and he I let him come on and share his story as an African-American man and have just an open conversation.
And then the next week, do you know, Ryan Tillman, he's had a great product, great Instagram, very breaker breaking barriers.
Yeah, I do. Yeah, I had him on the show.
Really nice African-American man. I swear to you, describing that someone like that.
But bringing the community together with law enforcement and I let him share from a police officer standpoint, a black police officer of what's really hurting these African-American communities.
And dude, that's when all my social stuff got silenced.
When I let an African-American cop share about what's really hurting that community, all my stuff got silenced.
Yeah, it went from like, let's just say a couple thousand people like three or four thousand people would see our stories if I linked to this overnight.
It was like 200. My Facebook to this day, I've supposedly this is my personal one, which is, you know, used to be friends and family.
And now it's obviously people that have connected through the podcast to I'll post a video on there and maybe seven people will see it.
Yeah, like seven plays. I'm like, how is you know, but again, I know how because you want me to pay to play, but it's my personal Facebook.
I'm not selling anything. I don't have a product. You know, I'm just putting out free information.
But I've said this many times recently, the common sense middle of the road voice is the most censored on the Internet.
Hands down, no question. Just what you said, right.
I brought on both sides of let them share a story and just let them share their stories, not telling people what to believe.
And like you said, like it's much easier in today's world to grow your social media following if one side is evil.
Right. If the police are evil or Joe Biden's evil or Donald Trump's evil.
Right. Like it's easier to rally that like we for whatever reason, the algorithm likes that hatred more.
But the middle of the road common sense conversation, it's there's nuance to a lot of this stuff.
And I don't know. That's one reason I do like podcasts is you can actually get a feel for someone and have an hour conversation like this and get a better feel for who they are.
Whereas a little clickbait stuff is what goes.
And that's usually sadly, I think not a helpful thing for society as a whole.
No, no. I mean, I hope it changes. I mean, there's obviously social media isn't everything and I don't pay for Instagram.
So I can't really complain. You know, and I think it's a great platform.
It's an amazing opportunity to do to share some really positive things. And that's the comments I normally get.
But yeah, the fact that they can just say, no, no, no, we're we're we're not going to talk about Gaza.
Don't talk about those babies and those ladies. You know, that's not our agenda.
That was very disappointing because I'm sure that's where it came from.
It all of a sudden came out and nowhere right around that time. So you pissed off the wrong person. Yep. Good.
Well, it's it's I think the beauty of the content of this open like if we're going to two things come to mind when I hear this or a couple of things.
One is our job as business owners to listen to what the platform is and to respond and adjust in a way that still stays true to who we are and the mission that we want to do,
but also delivers it in a way that's digestible for what the platform wants. I've yet to figure that out.
You know, I was thinking like I would teach live yoga videos on Instagram and to do this in person would be several couple hundred dollars.
I say I'm going to give this away for free. And then that doesn't no one sees it. Right. No.
But if I went on there and talked about vegans are evil and vegan because I eat more meat like that would go viral. Right.
I think being true to who we are, but also understanding what the platform is. And then from a business standpoint, I think maybe you and I mentioned this before.
Some of the best advice I got was build your email list because you own that asset.
And if we're building our businesses on these other social media platforms, it can all be taken away.
So I think that's one of the best pieces of advice I got over the years was really focus on your email list because that's one of the few assets you control in this digital world.
I was just told that recently, funny enough, by another former UF football player, John, after my Instagram was shut down.
So, yeah, I think I want to say John Edward, but I don't think that's his last name.
That's what he goes by on online. But yeah, he was also I think he was a defensive lineman as well, if I'm not mistaken.
But he was there around the T-Bow years. So I think that is that Tim was right after me.
OK, yeah. So I think he was he was that era. All right. Well, then you mentioned about Jacksonville.
Let's talk to me then about your exposure to training the tactical athlete and then, you know, what are the kind of
programming or the videos that they're accessing so that you can keep our first responders healthy?
Yeah. So we basically we make these 20 minute home workout videos that merge athletic training and yoga.
Right. And it's all digital. You can do it on your desktop. You can do it on your phone and app.
And then each workout ends in a meditation and prayer. And then so that's like our signature workout.
And then we have a whole yoga platform. So what I'm seeing, at least in the first responders world, is you have some people that just
this is an answer to the prayers that they don't have time to work out.
So they're doing our 20 minute kind of HIIT workouts to get a little bit of mobility training, finally learning about emotional wellness.
And then you'll have your people that are like your SWAT team members or your elite firefighters.
These people are already kick ass in shape. They've got a great routine.
They need to use our yoga videos one to two days a week for mobility training and injury prevention.
And so that's kind of how I'm seeing it on the actual platform itself.
And then I recently went back and talked at the Academy, introduced them to the program, did a conference on mental wellness with them for the new Academy members.
I'm going to try to continue to hopefully get in some continuing education for these people.
But basically the city of Jacksonville, the firefighters and police have access to our program for free provided to them by their insurance trust,
which is super grateful to serve those people.
So expand on that, because I mean, this is the barrier to entry for a lot of departments is the financial side.
How were they able to get financing through the insurance trust?
Yeah. So when you self insure drop, your goal is to get your insurance costs lower.
So you give money to that to lower your insurance. And our program is it addresses a few issues.
One, cardiovascular fitness, two, physical fitness.
I just saw where we just got a testimony from one of the police officers that they have a stress test every year.
And they just pat. They just lower their stress test time by two minutes by doing our program.
So it incorporates and they had a knee injury that they couldn't continue lifting weights and training without flaring up the knee injury.
So it's super special to hear that someone that was hurt and kind of left forgotten that person's would have insurance costs would continue to cause the health insurance trust to go up.
So now they're able to help on the physical side.
And then again, all these people are trying to throw money into the emotional mental health side.
But you typically have some California yoga guru floating on a cloud talking about meditation and you're not going to relate that to a damn dude in North Florida.
I promise you. Right. So I think that one of the things that people gravitate to our program is that we deliver this in a way that's approachable for the average person that aligns with them and fits in their busy schedule.
We don't have to do some hour long meditation floating on a cloud by some he him type she person. Right. It's like a dude from North Florida.
Just helping you connect your spiritual practice and breathe in a way that resonates with you.
And we do it right there after your workout. So it's a stack. I think one of the things James I've learned is that I couldn't get people to work out and meditate separately.
So if I James Clear has that book Atomic Habits, right. And it relies on doing this at the time. But if you stack the meditation at the end of your workout, you're able to make it a daily habit.
So I think that's kind of how we've been able to present this to the health insurance trust and then been able to see benefits already.
And, you know, movement, strength, cardiovascular mobility and then mental mental wellness.
It makes a lot of sense. There's a guy I refer to a lot, Tom Hewitt, who's an English surfer, and he lives in South Africa and he created a nonprofit called Surfers Not Street Children.
And long story short, he'll take these kids out that are orphans. They teach them how to swim. Then they teach them how to surf.
And then and some of them even run the World Surf Tour now for World Surf League. Excuse me. So some of these kids get to a phenomenal ability.
But that's great. What he would say is that they would do the surfing and swimming first.
And then after they would sit down on the beach and they would have a counselor and they would have an informal counseling session.
But it was after the exercise. If you hear about some of these, you know, like veteran, you know, rucking retreats and that kind of thing.
They'll rock and then they'll sit down and talk. So even in jujitsu that I do, there's times where we'll do, you know, so many roles and we might do a couple of calisthenics.
And then we'll lie there for two, three minutes. And you're absolutely right.
There is no better time to actually lean into meditation than when you're already physically tired. So it makes perfect sense.
Right. I love you guys do that after jujitsu. I think of it for me, what I think of it as a kid with a kint of a tinter tantrum.
You want to let that kid shake shit out. That's the movement piece. That's the rukkin. That's the jujitsu.
That's one of our team act 20 workouts. Once you get all that energy out of the body, hey, let's take a couple of deep breaths.
Let's go through this mind right meditation again, moment of gratitude. One, two, lifting up a loved one, two, three, visualize success for being present, being still.
And then when I find that once you do one, two, one, two, three, it kind of gets you out of the monkey mind and then you can drop in.
And that's when the magic happens. So the movement again, it's like that kind of shaking things up to get all the energy out and then drop it in.
Absolutely. Well, we talked about the younger athletes earlier. I love to talk about the aging athlete.
You know, so, you know, as we mentioned before, hit record, I'm 50 now the, the, the cop with the knee injury.
When I think about that and I think about knees over toes and foundation training, a surgeon is going to look at the knee.
You know, someone maybe a little bit more open lens is going to get, well, let's talk about your glutes and your hamstrings and your, you know, your calves and your,
um, the tibialis, I think it is the front muscle is that balance there is that causing the knee injury.
So on my own personal journey, um, I found myself going away from that kind of one rep max, you know, redline mentality, still doing a redline, you know, work out once in a while,
but now working on accessory work, you know, mobility, because I should be as fit and strong as I need to be at 50 years old.
To me, it's what is working against my physicality. And if I can unlock that, I will then be fitter and stronger and more efficient.
So what, what is the shift in your coaching philosophy with the kind of middle age and beyond athlete?
So I think that, so every day we have a daily workout calendar that people can follow or they can implement with their own program. Right.
Like back up real quick. If you're the fit SWAT guy, listen to this.
You just go do our yoga videos for the main part and you've got your normal routine. But for the typical people, we structure it where it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, what we call total body hit.
And then Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, what we call cardio flush. And then Sundays, that Sabbath, so to speak, or a yoga option.
The trick with hit training, and this is where the difference between men and women a little bit, is that hit training for the most, I found it from seven minutes to 25 minutes is the sweet spot.
Once you get, I've trained a couple of people in the Olympics. I could push to around 32 minutes, but again, these are Olympians.
Once you start getting north of that 30 minute mark and in that anaerobic capacity of 80, 90% heart rate max, you can start releasing hormones in the body that does damage.
And so our 20 minute workout, right. You may have a six to seven minute yoga warmup and you're really only doing a hit training for 14 minutes, 13 minutes or so.
And so we have that a couple of days a week. And then I always tell people, listen to your body. For example, I've had a couple of knee surgeries on this right knee. It's flaring up right now.
I may now just need right now two weeks of what I call giddy after hit training, right. And the rest is yoga.
If it's feeling really good after a couple of weeks of that, maybe I'll go to three days a week of the short hit training, right.
There may be a time where everything flares up and I just do yoga for a month. So I think learning to listen to your body is key.
I think that where you're at right now, James, maybe different five years from now, same thing with me.
I think learning to listen to your body. And like you said, I was like, all right, my knee is hurting right now.
Plyometrics probably don't make a lot of sense, but I can do yoga, right.
I think the key is shifting your thought process from not what you can't do, but what you can do. I think that's a key thing with injuries is shifting that mindset.
So, yeah, that's kind of how I look at it is like listen to the body. We've got joint friendly stuff with yoga.
If you want to burn as many calories as possible, get an aerobic zone, do our hit training stuff and the sweet spot again.
It's just that because there's some negativity now with hit training of actually messing up with hormones.
It's that we keep it short and sweet. I think that's the key. And we have a nice warm up.
So you're not just going a lot of the videos you'll see on YouTube, you'll go hit workout. You go straight into burpees, right.
You take a guy that's 50 years old, he's got a little spinal stenosis of his low back. 5 a.m. you start doing burpees. He's going to hurt his back.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's interesting. I think it was the man who I believe was a Japanese man that came up with Tabata.
Yeah, that's just what four minute workout on its own. It's 20 seconds on 10 seconds off. Yeah.
So it's eight rounds. That's just four minutes. Yeah. Yeah.
So and he proved that in four minutes you could have I forget what the percentage was, but a pretty impressive impact on your cardiovascular system.
So then when you start looking at the long drawn out CrossFit workouts, for example, which I've done many, there is a kind of law of diminishing returns.
At a certain point, your form is terrible. You're exhausted. And are you really actually gleaning the benefits or are you just learning mental and physical resilience?
And that's it. The suck. I always say do what you feel is great.
Like if you're doing CrossFit and you feel great, keep doing it. I have a bad back like I have a fracture in my L5S1. Cleaning, snatching does not feel good.
It flares it up. I did a trail run today and it was nine minutes and 13 seconds. That was it.
I climbed up a hill for nine minutes and 13 seconds. I did some yoga before and afterwards. Did a little breath work and meditation and that's it.
That's one of my right now. I'm doing two get after it days.
It'll be that on Friday and something like that on Monday where I'm getting the heart rate up.
But again, it's no more than 25 minutes. And then the rest of my routine is yoga.
And I think that what ties in now is if you're doing HIIT training for too long, and again, do whatever type of movement you love.
Right. If it's Orange Theory Fitness, if it's F45, Jiu-Jitsu, I think everyone should do Jiu-Jitsu by the way.
But do what you love. I always say start there, but you need to make sure your diet complements that.
And so one of the issues that I saw over the years as a trainer is you'd have all these people do these hard hour long cardio classes and they kept gaining weight.
Or couldn't lose weight. And what happens was their body and their hormones were such a wreck that ended up over consuming carbohydrates and sugars afterwards, which then spikes your insulin levels.
And they couldn't lose the weight. But if I could keep them to do a short, quick workout, we could then have them eat a high protein with a little bit of moderate fat in their diet.
Let's just say a couple of eggs with some ground beef and their insulin level stayed stable.
And they would drop the weight like that by working out less and then having them move throughout the day by walking.
So we have a concept we teach in our program called the 320. So we make these 20 minute workouts.
We always say on your morning on your day, knock out your 20 minute workout.
First thing, go for a 20 minute walk with your colleague at lunch before after dinner.
When you get home, take the pet for a walk, go for a walk with your spouse.
So it keeps you in a fat burning state. And by doing that, you're able to complement that with more of a high protein diet, roughly around 30 to 50 grams of protein, depending on how big you are for all three meals.
You do that and you'll get pretty freaking lean and you can fit that into your busy schedule.
What is your perspective on how much you should eat?
And the reason I say that is, you know, for the longest time I grew up with the bodybuilders, you know, and all that stuff.
And then here we are in 2025 with all types of diets that have kind of come and gone, as it were.
But observing myself, I seem to be just fine eating a lot less than a, you know, a strength and conditioning nutritional plan would tell me I should eat for the amount of exercise that I do.
So I can't help but feel, of course, if you are trying to gain weight, if you are training multiple hours a day, you're an MMA fighter, you're a football player.
There is an entire different nutritional program for you.
But I can't help but feel like, especially men, we're almost being told to eat too much rather than understanding.
And this is just my kind of the way I look at life, evolutionary, that fundamentally humans didn't have access to all this food all the time.
And that the human body actually can do a lot more with a lot less than we think.
Yep. So as an athlete at Florida, I was on a 6,000 calorie a day diet. Right.
But my life was training. I needed that at the time. Right.
I have no idea how many calories I eat now. None. I don't really count the macros.
I'll again try to aim for around 50 grams of protein, which is easily someone can put in the chat GBT and like I'm eating two burgers.
How many grams of protein and get a good feel for that chat GBT is a simple, easy tool.
But I'm not a huge calorie counter. I'm so much of what I think is intuitive. Right.
So you may feel James on eating one burger at lunch and you feel phenomenal.
For me, I feel great with two. Right.
I don't usually use a bread with it, but like two burgers. I say listening to your body, eat to your satisfied, not to your stuffed. Right.
And I think that people need to understand that certain people's bodies break down things more efficiently than others. Right.
So just being a master and a student of your own body of what feels good. Right. As far as diet wise.
So I think we do overconsume and I think most people overconsume though.
James is because they're eating non nutrient dense food. They're eating a lot of calories. Right.
So the breakfast, you know, my typical breakfast will be four eggs with some ancestral blend meat, which is ground beef, heart and liver mixed in that.
I'm full till lunch lunch. I'll eat say two hamburger patties with some sauerkraut.
And guess what? I'm full till dinner. So I'm not snacking dinner, maybe a steak and a potato and I'm full.
Like I'm I have no idea how many calories it is. You can easily calculate it, but it's like that's what feels good in my body.
I think that most people are snacking all day for two reasons.
One, they're doing too long of cardio, which again, their glycogen levels are depleted and they need more sugar and carbohydrates.
So they're on this sugar roller coaster train all day long.
And then the second part is they're not eating nutrient dense food.
There is a huge movement years ago on how great kale was. I'm not against kale.
I think vegetables are great for you. Some people do better on vegetables.
Some people do better on meat. But you take a piece of organ meat and look at the nutritional profile of a piece of organ meat that I put in those eggs.
Right. That ancestral blend first piece of kale. It's not even close.
And I think most people aren't getting good nutrient dense food. They're just eating a lot of calories.
Well, they say that a lot of the carnivorous predators when they attack some sort of prey, they're not taking the loin.
They're eating the organs first.
They always you'd watch any wild animal. They'll let the alpha eat first and alpha always goes for the organ meat.
Yeah, it's funny because that was poor person's food in the UK.
You know, but we saw a lot of our steak and kidney pie and some of the bread meats and stuff.
But I grew up on liver and kidney.
You know, take this from a guy who grew up on pop tarts and Mountain Dew for breakfast.
So it's been a hell of a journey. I promise you.
Yeah, I can imagine. Now, with that being said, so you touched on some people do better on meat.
I think that's a really important point.
You know, we have aboriginals living in the outback in Australia than we have in New York's eaten, you know, whale blubber up in the Alaskan area.
Clearly, you know, there are different humans that have relied on different kind of nutritional resources for a long, long time.
But there's an absolutism when it comes to the nutrition conversation.
I've heard, you know, people spend hours and hours on podcasts explaining why vegans are idiots or vice versa.
And to me, you know, the first comment that I'm going to make is if you remove processed shit from your diet, you're probably going to do pretty well, whether it's carnivore or vegan.
But what is your philosophy on on someone finding what works for them rather than shoving a specific nutritional kind of philosophy down their throat?
So people like you and I could go these deep dives into the very niches of it, right?
But for 90 percent of Americans, at least our philosophy and we teach them our program is if you can plant it, pick it or catch it, it's probably pretty good for you.
If man made, stay away.
If we do those things right there, you're taking care of almost all of the obesity crisis we have in America.
A lot of the type two diabetes.
If you're eating real whole food, like people want to have this magic bar, this just eat real whole food.
Now, I think from a bio like individual standpoint, I think some people will thrive more on meat and some people thrive a little bit more on plants.
And I think for me, I'm not married to any of it like a religion.
I'm going to do what feels good.
So I'll do it on all these little mini experiments.
I'll do a plate. I'll do a time where I'll eat mainly vegetables and see how I feel.
I'll do a time where I'll do strict carnivore for 30 days and see how I feel by running little experiments.
I have went from the thought process of three fourths of my plates being vegetables with a small amount of meat to now three fourths of my plate being meat with a small amount of vegetables or potato for dinner.
Right. My body, I just got lab work back, runs really well on high quality red meat.
Doesn't raise my cholesterol.
Any of those concerns, I do really well.
Some people it may raise their cholesterol a little bit.
I think it's a much more nuanced conversation than good cholesterol, bad cholesterol.
But that being said, I think there's an individual part where we all have to be students of our own body and not being married to a certain type of diet and understanding that, hey, I'm 42.
You said you're 50. Ten years from now, James, our bodies may change and we may want something a little different and not being married to that and seeing how our body feels.
Absolutely.
I think it was Jeff Nichols, who's a former SEAL Team Six turned strength and conditioning guru in a tactical space.
He was saying as well that as your body heals, if you've been eating a lot of processed food and you have intolerances, as your body progresses and gets healthier, you can then start factoring some of these foods back into your diet.
The healthy ones. So you're constantly evolving.
I think that what he's probably tapping into is healing your gut.
I think that if we can heal our guts with some sort of elimination diet, so a basic level elimination would be like Whole30, which removes a lot of the inflammatory type products.
I think a more aggressive form of that is carnivore.
Going carnivore for 30 days, I think you can help heal your gut.
And depending how much damage is done to your gut will be when you can reintroduce these other foods back in.
But I say run little experiments. Don't take my word for it. Don't take James's word for it.
Try this. See how you feel and keep what you like. Get rid of what you don't.
But I look at it like basically right now. And again, this could change in 10 years from now.
Nutrition in like basically three categories. I look at maintenance, right?
Maintenance from my clients and everything will be still a lot of high protein, right?
Still 30 to 50 grams mixed in with some overnight oats occasionally.
Those type of things, some vegetables.
I look at getting what I call a shred diet, which is where we remove the overnight oats.
It's just mainly protein and eggs for a short period of time.
And then I look at an anti-inflammatory or autoimmune.
The most effective thing I've seen for autoimmune is carnivore.
So I kind of put it in those three categories of like maintenance, get shred.
Most people come to us to lose weight. I'm going to meet them where they are.
And then I look at from an autoimmune standpoint of how I'm working with people, if that makes any sense.
I know that does. I'm glad we asked those questions though, because I think nutrition side,
when you just break it down to principles rather than what you should and shouldn't eat,
that's really, I think, is where most people glean, you know, are able to apply it to their own lives.
All right. Well, I want to go to some closing questions before I let you go.
The first one I love to ask, is there a book or are there books that you love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.
Interesting. I have to think about that. I would say one, I always say the most impactful book I've ever read is simply still the Bible.
I'm not someone that preaches religion or anything like that. I cuss like a sailor,
but I've read almost every self-help book there is and I still come back to the Bible and I'm blown away at the wisdom.
You don't have to be a Christian necessarily to pick this up, but if you pick up the book and you read the book of Proverbs,
you listen to King Solomon, there's so much wisdom on things you and I talked about, identity, right?
Like chasing the accolades of life didn't bring him happiness. Chasing women didn't bring him happiness.
Taking wealth didn't bring him happiness. There's so much right in there.
Then reading the Gospels, the love, how Jesus loved his neighbor, right?
Like if I'm a meat eater, I got to love my vegan brothers and sisters.
If I'm a conservative, I need to love my Democrat brothers and sisters.
I think that the Bible is such a beautiful book. I think some other great books out there,
Seven Habits by Stephen Covey, I think is a classic, kind of a dense read, but I think anyone on nutrition,
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price, I think is kind of what you tapped into.
He studied the Aborigines. He studied from people living in Central America and looked at all their different diets and their health.
The conclusion he came back to was they moved every day and they ate fresh local.
If you were in Arctic climates, you had more animal fat. If you were in the equator, you have more fruits and vegetables.
I think those are two good books. Gosh, I'm reading a great one now by this person that's a Buddhist teacher.
I can't think of the name of it. I'll show you the name of it.
This interesting thing in teaching Buddhism that I'm learning now, a lot of Zen in that.
But yeah, I think the same thing about that. I'm not really married to one type of traditional thought.
I'm open to learn from whoever's out there.
When you talked about the Proverbs and the kindness, this is one thing that I struggle with.
And this isn't aimed at just Christianity. It's aimed at faith based in general.
As we listen to the rhetoric and we see the divisive narrative and like you said, that kind of hateful clickbait that seems so popular from a country that predominantly is faith based.
Why is there a disconnect between the wisdom in these holy books and what these prophets are actually doing and that being applied?
Because when you hear about homelessness, people just want them shooed to another city.
The addicts, it's just a waste of Narcan. Why don't we just let them die and then they'll be gone.
Some very non Jesus like things being discussed by people of all religions.
But obviously we are a very, very heavily Christian nation. So where is that disconnect between the kindness and compassion that Jesus taught and where some people are in 2025, even though they may visit these holy buildings on the holy day?
Yes, I would say one, I'm a flawed person and I'd say my faith has evolved over the years.
Some people in the Christian world say I'm not Christian. I connect to God through Jesus.
That's how I connect. But I would say one, I'm flawed. Two, the majority of people that say they're Christian have never read the Bible.
They go to church on a Sunday and some guy who interprets the Bible for them tells them how to live their life.
And there's no application. I'm a Christian, so to speak. I don't even, right now I'm not even going to church. I take my Sabbath off.
I'll read, maybe it's the Bible on Sunday. Maybe it's something with Buddhism. That's kind of my faith right now.
I move and connect to God. I connect through Jesus, but that's my faith as a society as a whole.
I think that one, so my journey to find, I didn't grow up in a Christian home. I said my dad had some demons he was fighting.
I followed a girl I had a crush on in middle school and some sort of event that the church put on. I had no idea.
Fell in love with Jesus Christ. Felt like a true, true connection to God, my Creator.
Picked up the Bible, read it cover to cover at 12 years old. I would have aunts, uncles, whoever take me to church, drop me off, pick me up.
As I've gotten older again, experienced more cultures, different people from different walks of life, my view of humanity and the awesomeness of our Creator is much larger.
I go out there every Wednesday and paddle out on a surfboard, spin the board around and look at the vast Pacific Ocean.
The idea of trying to put the Creator of that in a box that fits my little pea brain, it's the most humbling thing ever.
I don't think I have the answers, but I would say people that claim to know, if we're speaking of Christianity as a whole,
say they're a Christian and they go on Sunday, but they don't live like it in business on Monday.
That's just a disconnect. I think truly, when you know the love of Jesus, you should take that with you on Monday just as much as you are on Sunday.
That for me is something that I really don't give a shit about what someone says they believe.
Show me how you treat others. I think the last couple years in our society really showed me, in my friend group, who actually knows God and who doesn't.
Because again, I don't think God just called... I mean, I lean more middle, middle right, just how I lean.
But if I can't love my people on the left, I don't think I know Jesus, at least in my understanding of the teachings of Jesus.
It doesn't mean I have to go with what necessarily their thoughts or beliefs are, but I felt that God has called me to love my brothers and sisters.
And so for me, that is what I would say how I view society as a whole.
But the thing I would say, James, is whether you find this through Christianity, you find this through Buddhism, you find this through whatever type of spiritual teachings,
I know me personally that when I don't put something above myself, I will feel that void.
I think humanity is created to know our Creator.
I think there's something inside us on a spiritual level that knows there's more to it than this earth.
And when I don't put something above me that's more divine, I will fill that with sex, I will fill that with alcohol, you could fill that with drugs, I'll fill that with status.
And I think that these... I mentioned the Bible earlier, I can go back to King Solomon.
Those were instrumental pieces of my childhood that at least when I fall off course, which I do all the time, it brings me back to that North Star.
And I would say society as a whole, we need that North Star.
However you get there, completely up to you.
But I would say as a society in America, we need that North Star.
I look at a lot of people jumping on board on the Ultra Maga train.
I'm excited about what the president's going to do.
I'm excited about... but my thing was if Kamala were to win, I would hope she was the best president ever.
I think that sometimes we jump on bandwagons and we forget the morality of what we say we actually believe, just to be a part of the in-group.
And so I think that's something as a country we have to be mindful of is knowing what our North Star is and continuing every day to humble ourselves and work towards that.
Absolutely. I love that.
Even with the presidential nastiness that was going on, just like COVID, let's make people healthier. To me, this last eight years, the question should be 340 million people.
How do we keep ending up with these people to choose from?
That's the real truth in all this.
No one was excited about any of these people as the country's greatest leader that will bring us all together and raise this country back up again.
So when you're arguing over people that really you're not, in your heart, you know you're not that excited about, then why don't we have a different conversation of bringing America together?
And so then you have two candidates and you might like candidate A a little bit more than B, and I like B more than A.
But whoever wins, we're both like, well, it's still a win.
They're both awesome. I just like them a little bit more because they like this issue or whatever.
That's what it should happen every election season is that we should have two great people so we're not disappointed when the other one wins.
And then hopefully in four years, my candidate will win.
That's where we need to get to come together and question the system rather than being drawn apart by a broken system.
I would love for us to get there. But you're mentioning good books. Have you read Why Good People Argue Over Politics and Religion?
I have not.
Fantastic. I was reading by a professor out of Virginia.
And it really helped me at least understand some of this because again, I grew up where I'm from. It's 99% Republican.
I've lived in LA that was 90 something percent Democrat, you know, and I would go home. It was almost like two different countries, right? I hop on a plane. I'm in two different countries.
And the majority of these people had so much in common. Sure, they had different ways of they would say organizing society, but the majority of them are great people.
There were some assholes that grew up in my small old town, but the majority of them fantastic give you the shirt off their back.
I met some of the most kindest people in liberal ass LA, right? And there's a lot of assholes in LA too, right?
But the people in California would go home and watch CNN and they would see the worst of society in the South. And then my family in the South would put on Fox News all day and see the worst of society in LA.
And if we could bring people together, like I brought my family out once, and they definitely did not fit in in California. My dad about went to jail. A couple cops got called on him.
That's a different story. And my dad barbecued. And we had people from all walks of life and they laughed. They still this day talk about, hey, how's your dad doing? Or how was this person?
My parents ask about Alex and these people. They got along great, but they'll go home and watch their news networks and hate each other. But they sit down and broke a meal and laugh together.
And I think we need more of that. And I think that's one thing that yoga and our mind right practice of getting my mind right, so to speak, every day, it helps me disconnect from the emotional pool of where I want to naturally lean.
Right. And what we said, like meditation lengthens the gap between stimulus and response. Right. So James has got this position. I've got this position. Well, fuck you, James. Right. That's my natural instinct.
That's so supernatural for me. Take a deep breath. Come back to it. I see James is a good dude. James cares about this issue. All right. Let me learn from James perspective and actually truly listen to him and not just try to respond and prove him wrong.
Can I truly listen to James? I think that's where yoga has helped me a lot. Yeah, I agree. I think that's why you saw such division during COVID because such fear was created.
I remember people pointing out that you can't critically think when you're in a sympathetic state, when you're in a fight or flight state. And this is what we saw rather than being calmed and brought together.
It was the perfect environment to divide. And obviously COVID and the George Floyd, you know, Black Lives Matter, all that division, you know, was right there. And then the tail end of that was the election season again.
You know, when I 100% agree, if you can actually do the work and calm your own mind, you're going to be able to mentally take a step back and go, wait a second, both of you are kind of crazy. I think we're going to stand here in the middle where the normal people are.
You know, the more of us to do that, as you said, with commonalities, what color, creed, sexual orientation, you know, you want, you want a roof over your family's head, you want food in their stomachs, you want them to be safe, you want them to be happy.
That's a universal feeling. All the other stuff is fluff. And a lot of the differences then you can celebrate. I'm Christian, you're Buddhist. Oh, cool. Tell me about, you know, some of your philosophies. Wow, that matches the Bible over here and here.
So yeah, I mean, finding, you know, that coming together is so important, but I agree, an understepped, overslept, over-stressed mind literally loses the ability to think that way. So that's why meditation and sleep are so important.
And we're all guilty of it. I say that, you know, there's a dogma about Christianity that's so rigid. But look, I did my yoga teacher training in LA, and you have to read the Yoga Sutras by Patiana. Patiana, how do I pronounce his name?
And it was pretty much Proverbs. And I brought this up to the yoga teacher and they were like, don't you bring Christianity in here. This is wrong. I'm just showing you parallels of like this book that you hold sacred,
this book over here that they hold sacred and showing you the similarities. I'm not telling you what to believe. And I saw it just as judgmental in the yoga world as I saw it in the Christian world. So I think that we're all tribal beings by default. That's why I go back to we need to have this north star that makes us less selfish and point to something that's divine.
100%. Well, that was books. What about films and documentaries that you love?
I just finished the Aaron Rodgers documentary. That was pretty good. I saw that on Netflix. Excellent. Yeah, one of the points you brought up earlier, he was saying that I just won the Super Bowl and I'm on this bus at 1am. There's got to be more to life than this. Yeah, right. I think that search for identity. I thought that was pretty good.
I just watched finished a good one on Netflix. Gosh, he's such a great actor. And it was a reason I bring up was because it was a British it was about I think took place in the UK in the 1800s. Gosh, he says Jujitsu guy and he's an actor. He was in Peaky Blinders to Tom something Tom Hart, Hardy, says Tom Hardy. Yes, thank you. Yeah, because he yeah, he does.
He's the ambassador for reorg. Yeah, great actor. He was in a documentary or not documentary, but a TV show on Netflix. I just watched it was pretty good. He's such a great actor. That's one of your UK films. Yeah, he was actually in the visit the bike riders is that was called. That was a good one. That just came out. I think it's free on Amazon. I think it is. But it was him Austin Butler. He's the guy that played Elvis in the movie recently. Really good film as well.
Hold up, I'm just texting a client. I'm going to call him some run a little late for no worries.
I went a little longer and I thought we're good. All right, go ahead. Sorry about that. No way. We'll be five minutes. We'll be done. All right. That was the next one. Okay. Well, speaking of great people, is there a person that you'd recommend to come on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the world?
I can think on that, but someone who just came to mind who's local and I don't know Carly that well, but Carly is a firefighter here in Santa Barbara and is maybe one of the best athletes I've ever seen.
We typically think of firefighters, women not being qualified physically to be a firefighter.
Because by default men are typically bigger, stronger, faster. Carly will humble you, James.
Lots of female firefighters and athletes that humble me. Carly, I don't know Carly that well. We've run in some similar circles in the athletic world. She competes in all these extreme games, but I think Carly is like 6'3", 180 pounds or 200 pounds of just pure athlete.
She's a local firefighter. There's a guy in our community who does our workouts. He's a firefighter down in LA. That could be a good one to talk to about what all they're seeing right now.
Those are two people in the firefighter community that come to mind.
Okay, brilliant. Yeah, I'll have to work on connecting with them. Thank you.
Yeah, happy to make those connections.
Brilliant. All right. Well, then the very last question before we make sure everyone knows where to find you and all the programming, what do you do to decompress?
I think for me, it's building systems, right? Routines. That's again, every morning I say that 99% of the mornings of the years, I move my body and do my mind right meditation. First thing, that helps me start the day.
Look at the life. Look at the day through a better lens. If I don't, then I'm cranky. I'm irritable. I'm a son of a bitch if I don't.
I'm trying to get better every day doing that soul full, what I call that soul check-in. Not as great with that yet, but I notice that helps a lot to decompress towards the end of the day.
Just a couple of deep breaths, listen to some music, and then I'll ask myself, what do I need and then what I need to let go of. That's been helpful.
And then lately, really trying to make an emphasis on getting to bed with no screens an hour before bed, at least 45 minutes.
And then stretching mobility. I've got some red light in the house or some dim lights. One of those, no social media, no TV, and just kind of stretching, meditating, and then I'll do some prayer.
I'll talk to God as I'm laying on my back and just kind of decompressing for the day.
Brilliant. Well, for people listening, where are the best places to find you and the programming online? And then what about social media?
Yeah, so just go to TMAC Fitness. It's one of the nicknames I got there playing football at Florida.
So I had to figure out a name to put on it. Good old LLC. So tmacfitness.com. You can get some free workouts. Check out our programming.
And then I'm on Instagram at TMAC Fitness as well.
Beautiful. Well, Todd, I want to say thank you so much. I want to be mindful of your time. I know you need to go coach now, but it's been such an incredible conversation.
I love these organic chats because they do go all over the place. And we've gone everywhere from generational trauma through to nutritional and religious philosophies.
It's been amazing. So I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
James, thanks for being a great guest and just letting the conversation flow. I really enjoyed this, man.
Like you said, we covered a lot of areas with not really any agenda and just how to open on us truthful conversation and hopefully it helps some people at home, gives them something to think about.