Katy Bowman reveals her move to a rain shadow near Washington’s Dungeness River—where Indigenous peoples thrived on natural movement—and critiques modern environments as "human casts," deforming posture, fertility, and health through restricted motion. Her kids, raised without strollers or processed foods in a nature school, show resilience with just two fevers in four years, while she advocates for squat toilets, home births, and movement as a vital nutrient. Though not anti-vaccine, she delays shots to prioritize natural immune development via diet and biomechanics, sparking debate on parenting choices. Ultimately, Bowman’s work challenges the assumption that modern conveniences align with human evolution, urging radical rethinking of health through ancestral movement patterns. [Automatically generated summary]
I didn't want to talk to you too much before the show because we were talking about something that I'm very interested in, about how you live in Washington State.
You found some clever area where it's in Washington, but it's not rainy every day.
I'm not really concerned with it, but it kind of goes hand in hand with what I teach about natural movement.
I'm trying to put back these isolated pieces of how you eat and how you move and how you think and where you spend your time and even where you spend your money of going, well, if we all just kind of go spend a little bit more time out in nature, but I mean more than the park.
I really mean wild.
You can see how it's been done for a long period of time.
Trying to figure out how to get more movement goes naturally with trying to figure out how to acquire your own food.
So I thought, well, I'm a parent of two little kids.
I have a limited amount of time.
So what if our food acquisition is our movement, is our teaching our kids, is our family time, is everything, and it's the same hunk of time, and we're just out there in the wild.
You're in an area that's particularly dense with wilderness, with trees, with animals, and that whole area, the Pacific Northwest, it's such a...
We were talking about how you come to California and everything's so dry.
It's almost like, where's the life?
But if you go up there, there's so much life, it's ridiculous.
I went up there with my friend Duncan.
We were hunting for Bigfoot for a TV show.
And we went wandering through the woods.
But the thing that you...
Oops.
That's my computer.
Sound wasn't working up until then?
We got an issue with Ustream.
We have a totally new setup.
So we're in HD now.
So you look lovely in HD. We just got this new computer and this whole jazz.
Maybe we should just run the show for like a minute before we go live.
That's what we'll do next time.
But anyway, when we went up there, like when you're wandering around through the forest up there, the thing that is so shocking is how many animals there are and how much life there is.
You see elk crap everywhere and all these birds and rodents and just so many So much variety of life up there.
The infrastructure, the delivery system, because none of it is actually here.
Like, I'm just thinking of something like a power outage where so much of your water is dependent on it being cleaned and all of that is...
Depends on energy that requires a bunch of people like my in-laws who live here in California their house has been without power for like two weeks and they live in an area of Orange County and they had to bring a generator they brought a generator into a neighborhood because they're like well it's we gotta dig for it and frankly we don't have the manpower right now and like when I start here and stuff like that that's when I flee to the Pacific Northwest.
Yeah, that is nice if you want to get to nobody in 10 minutes But I find that like when you're in small towns and small areas the real issue is finding a cool small town Yeah with a good sensibility a nice intelligent small town because you can find some small towns like if you drive a From Southern California up to Northern California, you can drive through some spots where you have these giant Mitt Romney signs that are still up.
And there's the, you know, like, weird religious signs and these strange, really sketchy communities.
You're like, ooh, you know, boy, you got a pretty view, but fuck these neighbors.
It's a retirement community because it used to be a logging town.
So it's got this waterway there.
It's next to some ports.
And so they've been moving wood there and milling it up.
And there's some paper mills.
But a lot of that business has shut down as people are buying stuff from overseas.
And then, of course, as the wood is not being able to be replenished as fast as they've been taking it down.
So I think in Sunset Magazine, somebody wrote an article about this town that you could buy a few acres and that it was in this What they call a rain shadow.
So it's in the banana belt.
It's sunny almost every single day.
Totally different than any other place in Oregon or Washington.
And you could buy an acre for, I don't know if it was like $60,000 or $70,000.
So a whole bunch of people went out there.
There's no work or anything, but they bought their homes and they built them up, but they're all kind of dying now.
I took a photograph of an elk standing in front of a no hunting sign.
Because it was like right when we were driving, these elk were just wandering across the road and they were just standing in front of this no hunting sign.
I'm like, this is ridiculous.
That was the first elk I'd ever seen in a while too.
I might be butchering this law, but I remember there was some sort of an issue online with people debating it because people were firing off guns in their backyard, like shooting at elk and deer.
And they're like, this is kind of fucked up.
We're not really in the woods, man.
My swing set is 100 yards to the right.
So, but they have so many animals up there.
It's such a rich abundance of animals and the people that rely on them for a large part of their food, you know, moderate income or lower income families.
If they get an elk, like, boy, that is a year's worth of meat.
Like, you've got to...
1300 pound animal, you're gonna get 400 plus pounds of meat from that.
That's 400 meals.
You know, so for a lot of people, that is literally a year's worth of meat for your family.
So, they'll just shoot that fucker right in the backyard.
I actually went, we were just going down, you know, there was a dam up there for a really long time, like a hundred years that they've just taken down.
You can actually watch the deconstruction of this dam over a couple years.
And we were walking around at the bottom of what has been, you know, this dammed up body of water.
And some friends of ours who are biologists took us upstream because they're doing a lot of salmon restoration.
You know, they're trying to get everything.
Back to what it was a couple hundred years ago because it's very different because of this dam.
And he just, our friend Keith, he just reached down and he picked up the salmon like right out of the water.
This huge thing.
I mean, the thing was, I don't know, a foot and a half more.
It was 15 pounds and he just picked it right up and he was like, here's where the eggs are.
And then he, then it turned out to be a male and he just grabbed it and he just No, because they're spawning.
Well, they're just, when they're spawning, you know, they're trying to get to kind of shallow water, so a lot of them are just kind of, you know, they have to make it up through the river, even as the river changes in terms of volume, so where it's a little low, they just kind of walk up.
Well, I mean, I've seen bears pull them out on TV, like, in deeper waters because they're jumping.
These ones are actually on the ground, but they're just...
Sort of wiggling.
They're wiggling, yeah.
He said the females would be way more scratched up.
You can tell during spawning season, a male versus a female, because the female is just really desperately trying to get her eggs to some place, and I guess the male will just drop his load kind of wherever.
And what I find interesting is, so salmon that they're raising in, whatever they call it, like in the fisheries, you know, in the hatcheries, they identify them because they remove what they will call like a vestigular fin.
I think it's called an adipose fin.
So that they can recognize which ones are wild and which ones are introduced.
And I was talking to some biologists and Part of a lot of stuff that I do is kind of redefining what's actually vestidular and what's just, we don't know what it is, so it must, you know, not be necessary anymore.
And he said, well, it's interesting because he was explaining it's kind of like the appendix of the fish.
It's not really necessary.
And I was like, well, it turns out that our appendix isn't really as vestidular as it was once thought.
But I would say that the reason we moved up there is we were just unable to execute our life the way that we wanted here.
There's a physical blockage to moving in the way that we need to move.
And I was like, well, the only way to remove that blockage is to take ourselves away from the environment that's limiting this way of moving, which is larger than it sounds.
It's not like, you know, make sure you get these seven It's very broad and it has to do with the loads that your body experiences and that goes for light and noise and all the different ways your cells are deformed by your habitat.
When I talk about movement, I really liken the way that we move to be similar to Animals that are in zoos.
Like if you ever go to a zoo and check out that kind of unfortunate thing, you'll see these animals and they have movement.
You know, they have cages or habitats designed for them, but the way that they use them is pretty narrow and it goes for us as well.
So that's why the move.
I just wanted less people, more space, less rules, less noise, more water.
Well in the book the analogy that I use because I think it's easiest to understand is if you look at Orcas in a place like SeaWorld, have you seen their folded over fin?
That's the kind of deformation that I'm talking about.
I'm talking about like you are shaped really by the forces that you experience all the time.
Your mechanical environment is 100% of the time and so the resultant shape of your body Is based on this exposure in the same way that this orca was missing input.
It was missing mechanical input and it was exposed to high levels of mechanical input that, you know, gets this resultant shape.
You know, and the difference between with the orca is when you look at an orca, it's like clearly it's not supposed to be at SeaWorld and clearly that shape doesn't seem conducive to swimming.
You know, at least in a straight line.
So we don't see that in ourselves very well, though, because we are the orca in the tank, and everyone else is in the tank with us.
So it's really hard to see how you would have been shaped, and it's really hard to imagine what the resultant shape of us would be culturally if there were more examples of people who moved in drastically different ways, which there are not.
Well, I know posture is a big issue with Americans.
It's a big issue with anybody in all parts of the world that have to sit at desks all the time.
You know that expression, sitting is the new smoking.
We've tried really hard in this place to change that up.
We've got these desks or these chairs from Ergo Depot.
These are called Capiscos.
I had a couple different ones before.
I started off with regular chairs like that.
But by the end of the podcast, my back...
I've had some back issues with...
Jujitsu.
I had a bulging disc at one point in my cervical spine.
And that's all healed up now.
But if I sit in something like that and I kind of have that hunch thing that you get from a chair, by the end of the show, I just get stiff in my back.
But with these things, nothing.
So something that forces you to sit erect, you realize how few of us actually do that and how many people are like, Have that weird hunch spine thing going on which constantly puts pressure on your spine and I never thought anything of that until I started doing this fucking podcast and I'm like sitting down all the time all day and it just it really puts into perspective how many people are doing it not like me for three hours a day they're doing eight nine ten hours a day even more staring at computers all day
everyone's going blind early right you know I'm done my my vision sucks it used to be really good but now I need I need reading glasses to read stuff that's close up.
And I know it has something to do with age, but it definitely has something to do with staring at monitors, too.
You know, casts, when you break your arm, those are really easy to see.
There's like a physical structure that you can't move your arm.
It's really harder to see these invisible casts.
So the distance of something from your eye is a cast upon the lens.
So when you look at something, what allows you to focus on that is the distance that you're looking at, your mind, your musculature of the eye will change the shape of your lens so that that distance is what you're looking at.
When you want to see something farther, You look up and you look at it and then these muscles, these ciliary muscles in the eye will change the lens shape of the eye and allow you to focus that to that distance.
But humans, modern humans in the places where we live, very rarely look beyond 20 feet.
I mean, you're not looking at anything.
I mean, so like you can say that it's the screen because the screen is two feet away and there's certainly a much greater frequency of screen use.
Like by the time you look at your iPod or your iPhone and you're looking at your computer and doing whatever work that's on that, that number has gone up.
But what's always been high is that you don't see much beyond the walls of your house.
So that's another reason you don't have the ability to look very far.
Indoors does not allow you to look very far.
And so right now with that vision, with kind of understanding, like, why is myopia, which is that nearsightedness, coming up with such great frequency?
There used to be one kid in school with glasses, right?
And now there are You have one third of the classroom who can't see at ages six and seven.
Kids are starting now to be put in glasses like in four and five years old because they've been looking.
They don't even have outdoor playtime.
You know, they're not even going outside.
And so they know that outdoor time Is a factor in those that have less myopia.
So then they're trying to test it.
Like, is it the near work?
And I wrote a piece about this that there's a difference between going outside.
So they're like, is it the vitamin D? Is it the light exposure?
But they were able to figure out by isolation that it wasn't that.
And so then my contribution is, well, what about distance looking?
That distance looking itself is a different variable in something that you don't, it's not a load to the eye that we're very experienced with.
But if you had to, again, go out and get your food and you were moving around, it's not just that you're outside more, it's that you need to be able to see things kind of far away.
If you've ever gone hunting, hunting is, especially if you're doing like spot and stalk type hunting, being able to look at long distances and seeing and spotting animals, you know, before you make your way over there, that's a skill.
To be able to look 30 or 40 or 60 feet to the top of a tree to kind of see what's up in there.
It's a part of your workout that you're missing, so to speak.
You're not cross-training your eyes with enough types of exercise.
You do two feet and you do however far your television is and then maybe the bumper of the car in front of you.
I mean, we're not distance lookers at all anymore.
So have ophthalmologists and optometrists, have they sort of just accepted the fact that people, their eyes are just going to go bad because this is the environment we live in, so this is just an inevitable fact of aging.
And is that something that can be avoided by like spending a lot of time outdoors, looking at long distance stuff and looking at things that are 100 yards away, 500 yards away and focusing your vision on those things?
Yeah, well I don't think that they want you to accept it.
I mean it's not an inevitable thing, that's why they're working on the literature for it.
Actual researchers in eyes are trying to find like what it is.
Do we need more supplementation?
But clearly they're like kids really do need to be outside a lot more because the shape of your the size of your eye is changing and so when the eye freezes or is cast by something near and then your eye starts growing but the lens has to stay the same size then you have this mismatch between the size of your eye and the lens and so that's why this childhood Myopia kind of starts moving with you into adulthood and you become an adult that needs glasses.
So yes, they are calling for that intervention.
And then there's a lot of eye exercise programs, you know, people trying to create some sort of Corrective.
My recommendation is you got to get yourself near a window if you're an office worker and you have to just take an eye break.
You need to look as far away as possible just to, it's like if you did a bunch of curls, bicep curls, and you never ever put your arm down.
It's like you did them all and then when you were done, you tied it up there.
You can imagine what the shape of the bicep would look like and the function of the elbow and the shoulder and how eventually That bicep would not just pull your lower arm up to your upper arm, but would start to pull your shoulder in towards your upper arm.
Same thing goes with the eyes.
First, the muscles that move the shape of the lens do that, but then the tighter they are, the more they begin to pull the whole structure of the eyeball down itself.
And then you're starting to look at, well, how does that affect the pressure of the eye?
And so many things that occur in the body are Mechanically sensitive.
You know, all your pressures are dependent on all your pressures everywhere else.
And when you start deforming the shape of structures, it does start affecting those functions that are position dependent, which is almost all of them.
Louie Simmons, this guy from Westside Barbell in Columbus, Ohio, created this amazing machine that I have in the back now that I use almost every day.
It's fantastic because it offers decompression and this incredible strengthening of the back.
It's this amazing machine that as you're lifting up, you're flexing your back in this very unusual way.
It's really hard to work out any other way.
And then on the release, it's actually actively decompressing your spine.
So it's because of guys like him, Louis Simmons is this power lifter, genius, sort of biomechanic dude who figured out he had an injury and they wanted to fuse his discs.
And he was like, fuck that.
Let me figure out a way around this.
And he figured out a way.
And he fixed it.
And he fixed it through just using what he knows about exercise and the mechanics of the body and coming up with some sort of machine that would allow the decompression of that soft tissue.
And that's something that I think we all have to be aware of when it comes to posture.
Like, posture is a giant one with people.
I had terrible posture, like most of my life, until I started getting back issues.
And one of the things that I realized is even though I was healthy and strong, I was able to avoid a lot of pain that was associated with that bad posture.
The bad posture was still screwing me up.
And just being able to sit up straight, it feels odd when you do it.
But if you do it, it's like an active exercise.
You force yourself to do it.
You want to slump because you feel like you're using less energy.
But you're really screwing your body up when you do it.
I mean, using less energy is good in some cases, but I think it has less to do with good posture.
The thing with posture is posture is this modern construct that has arisen...
In a culture that doesn't move at all, right?
So it's really like, what's the optimal way to be still?
I was like, that's the wrong question.
We're asking kind of the wrong question.
Yes, that's the first question.
The first question is to assume that there's nothing you can change about your life, that you can't move to a wonderful place and cultivate a wonderful city to live in.
But right now, if you feel stuck in your job, the tendency is to make that environment better.
But I always like to point out that Posture isn't something that you would be as concerned about if you were moving a lot more in general, that the resting tensions of your body would be doing all the things that, you know, we're trying to do in small blips on different machines, in posture classes, you know, in posture books, that you just got to move more too.
And also, even standing up though, even if you are moving, like there's a lot of people that move and they kind of have that hunch forward thing going on.
And even if you're out there doing stuff, like especially like when you're exercising, you put a tremendous amount of pressure on your back in really weird ways if you don't use proper posture, like with squats and things along those lines.
If you do things incorrectly, you put a lot of load on weird areas of your joints and your hips and your back.
So many people want to be healthier.
So many people want to get out of this rut they're in and get there.
But it seems like just the modern life that most people either have found themselves in by circumstance, by lack of understanding, whatever it is, you find yourself in this way of life, which it almost makes it It's incomprehensibly difficult to be healthy, to be fit, to have a body that functions correctly.
If you're sitting in a desk all day, what are the things that people should be concentrating on?
If they find themselves stuck in a work environment, you're in a cubicle, is there a way to mitigate that?
I think one of the things that I'm known for most is that if you think about in terms of your exercise, a lot of people will try to figure out healthy to them is, what are you doing for exercise?
What are you eating for your diet?
So you're like, you're trying to maximize those two categories, but you've got all of this other time in which you are getting your work done and you can make that healthier too.
So like, you know, you were talking about your wallet, for example, and I was thinking, you know, you put this big hunk under one hip and so you take it out.
Well, a lot of people put two big hunks of wallet-ish type stuff under their feet every single day.
You know, like your athletic shoe could have an inch and a quarter is standard.
A man's dress shoe is almost two full inches.
It's just not thin and spiky and fashion-y.
But that is the equivalent to the wallet.
It's just...
Because it's symmetrical, we think of, well, it's symmetrical.
Your wallet under your hip, it's not just that it's asymmetrical.
If you had a wallet in each hip, the problems of having something underneath, under that soft tissue, would still be there.
It would just...
It would be more subtle.
You wouldn't have this big torque there as well.
It would just be kind of continuous pressure.
But people put stuff on their feet every single day that affects every other joint north of their ankle.
And then you compensate all day long.
Your whole entire life you've been compensating.
And over time you lose parts to your body.
You lose the little contractile components that make up muscle, like the sarcomeres that make up your muscle length.
Those just go away.
You cannibalize those, which means you lose range of motion, which means even when you go to move your parts during this part of your life that you've set aside to move, which is different than the rest of your life that you've set aside to not move, you're moving less.
You're moving less of you.
So that's always a huge one.
Like, what if I told you your whole body would work better if you fix what you were putting on your feet every day?
You're just going to put shoes on anyway.
Like, what does it matter what they are?
If you could put on a pair of shoes that allowed your whole body to function in a different way, it would be the equivalent to saying, I got this new workout, like this new cross-training piece, your workout is stale, you're not as strong as you should be or that you'd like to be for the thing that you're doing, that you can introduce whole new load spectrum to your body just by changing your shoes.
No, the class action lawsuit was that the woman who brought about the class action said that the advertising implied that all you had to do was buy the shoes, that you didn't have to figure out how to use your body differently.
So it had nothing to do with how they performed.
It was about their claim.
So the way she interpreted it was that she just had to put them on her feet and that she would be healthier and have less injuries.
If they do one day come up with something that you just put it on and it makes you a way better athlete.
Like a cape.
Yeah, it's like steroid shoes.
All of a sudden people are running faster.
Didn't that South African guy who shot his girlfriend, what's his name?
The guy with the blades?
Oscar Pistorius.
Pistorius, yeah, that guy.
Those blades, a lot of people feel like you can actually run faster with those things on because they offer some sort of a spring that you could with just your regular feet.
So if they get to that with shoes, then we've got an issue.
What we've discussed is not for those blades, but there's going to come a time where...
There was a guy that we talked about on the podcast once.
He had gotten his leg and his arm bitten off by a shark.
And he had replaced them with these really high-tech...
He had replacement hands that articulate and his leg was perfectly suited to his body and he walked around with no limp.
It was so strange.
And you see the guy's there talking and he's, you know, having a conversation and talking about and he's using his artificial hand and his real hand to gesture.
And you're like, well, they're going to get better at those.
Like the old days, I went to school with this girl and she lost her arm like really early on in life and it was always, you know, everybody was always weirded out by her because she had a hook.
She's a very nice girl, but she always...
Like, if she had, like, this artificial hand that looked exactly like a real hand, it was just a different color.
Well, how much different would people react to her then?
A decade later, if she has an artificial hand that has some sort of an artificial skin component to it that actually has...
I mean, they have some that allow you to pick up pieces of glass and not break them.
I mean, they allow you to feel pressure, like really sensitive ones that are developing.
One day they're going to get one that's better than your actual legs.
So if you have these regular legs, we can give you an operation and it'll make you run like Usain Bolt.
You're going to have some artificial legs.
You know, it's going to go through a rehab process.
You won't be able to walk for a couple weeks because we're going to cut your fucking legs off and stuff these carbon fiber jammies in there and put the joint endings in and fuse them with this new thing that we've created.
Someone's going to just suck your head right out of your brain right out of your head and stuff it into this thing, and boom, you're just going to be like piloting around this crazy body.
Well, I would say, I mean, I'm a biomechanist, so a lot of the colleagues that I work with are in orthopedic development and stuff that you're talking about, so it's...
Kind of my territory just to see what people are coming up with.
But the big thing that you can't really get around yet is that your parts are doing other parts and just moving you around.
That's always kind of the limitation.
If you lose a part, you know, that's the loss and you can replace it.
But to voluntarily take off healthy parts, those parts do things other than just be those parts.
They're participating in the system.
It's like kind of the same thing like you can't take an animal out of an ecosystem because all the other animals collapse without it because they're expanding out of control and something else is dying off.
It's the same thing.
The part has a role as a part but it also has a role within the system and so that'll be the backfiring on that.
There's a relationship between everything else that took a really long time to establish, and when you start messing that around, you're playing clean up for the rest of your life.
Now, when you think about human movement, besides the shoes that you wear, what are the other big issues that people have in how they get through this life with their body?
There's a whole group of people who don't eat any fat.
A lot of people who don't eat any fat as a whole category of a micronutrient.
And then they're slowly introducing it back in, and they're like, I had all these health problems because I was missing fat, or maybe I didn't eat any protein, or maybe I didn't eat any animal products.
They've got these big kind of voids in their diet, and then there are diseases that show up when you have some void, like vitamin C.
No one even knew you needed vitamin C until you have this group of sailors, in this case, population that went without it.
It's like, well, they had adequate food, so it's not calories that are missing, and it took 40 years before someone realized it's vitamin C.
We figured out that we can get their connective tissue to stop bleeding profusely if we give them oranges or lemons, and then it took another 60 or 70 years for someone to identify that as vitamin C.
Your body can't live without it.
Walking is really one of those things that your body can't function as it should without it.
There are these other byproducts that go along when you walk in a particular way.
That's where alignment comes in.
There's these series of loads that are created by using your body.
Walking would have been the thing that you would be doing most often.
Out of all the moves that your body has done through the millennium, walking is the load maker that you would do the most.
We don't think of movement as an input, but it's a squash.
Like your cells are squashed by the way that you move and then the way that the cells express themselves, their genetic expression comes about by the mechanical environment.
It's one of the important environments.
And right now, for a lot of people, it's walking free.
So just walking, it doesn't really have any purpose in our life any longer because you don't You don't have to walk anywhere to get anything done.
But like this orca fin, you know, the way that an orca swims in the wild is what maintains its structure.
There's nothing that the orca can do now with this flopped over fin.
It can't do opposing fin curls.
It can't foam roller out the floppy side.
The structure has been set by the fact it swims in a circle.
So it softens.
All fins soften as the Orca goes from its juvenile through its teenager to adulthood, but coupled, packaged with that is swimming in a particular way at depths where the forces are such that it maintains and shapes this structure, this end result that we call An orca.
So we are swimming metaphorically just counterclockwise all of the time.
And so our structure, our definition of fit and healthy is like the peak that this orca with the flopped over fin would ever get swimming in a circle at SeaWorld.
And you can see the vast difference between any possible swimming program he can be put on there.
Compared to how he would swim in the ocean, getting food every day, which is like 100 miles of swimming every day.
Fast, you know, sprints when they have to get something.
You know, there's mating, there's social time.
There's all these things that go on in the wild.
That is the necessary input for being an orca.
And then you just say, well, then what necessary inputs are we missing kind of as humans?
Because so much of our physiology depends on how we move and how we don't.
Well, they're supposed to be interacting with other animals.
I mean, there's so much.
There's isolation, not just the animal itself from its herd or its tribe, but then from other animals.
Again, this is a big system, and And zoo research is really interesting because it's covering everything.
Like, what happens when you put a zoo in a city, you know, and have light?
You've got light going on all of the time, so there's constant What they call night lighting, so light beyond the sun.
And then there's metal noises, the loud clanging, plus there's all these biological cues that if you ever go camping, you know, you hear the bugs.
The bugs let you know, the birds let you know where everything else is, and that there are cultures who understand, who have this input of noise.
And from a scientific perspective, you know, there's like these things, all of the data that we have on humans, Really comes from the last maybe like 60 to 100 years and so there's like these basic in psychology tests like you've probably seen them where they've got the arrows the outside arrows point outward on the tips and then on the other tip of the other arrow they point inwards like which line is longer and it's kind of an optical illusion and you get it wrong like everyone says that the arrows that point in is longer or whatever.
And it was like, so this is how the human brain works.
And there's all this data like that.
Only it turns out if you take that test to a culture that actually needs to judge distance for survival, they don't have a problem seeing.
It's not an optical illusion to them.
It's just poor skill when we look at it.
So there are all of these hypotheses on humans are studying College-aged humans, like you're looking at orcas with floppy fins and then are just making all these judgments on whales.
And so with this realization that so much of our, like your human physiology textbook, that's not human physiology.
That shape that you're looking at of a skeleton, that's...
That's modern guy who's worn shoes his whole life and walked on flat and level.
Flat and level ground, that's another cast.
You're not supposed to walk.
Like, flat and level is the most weird, abnormal texture for you to ever walk on, and yet you've probably only walked on flat and level for like 99% of your life.
Your ankle joint has a different shape than someone who has walked in the wilderness their whole entire life because they use more parts just to get walking done.
You use almost nothing to walk.
Walking is falling.
Like, that's our...
That's how we're saying.
It's like, sure, for someone who sits in the chair most of the time and walks on flattened level in shoes, that's falling.
The only variable that we have less to play with is like intensity.
Like, it's like, well, I'm walking on this, I'll have to go faster, I'll have to go harder, because that's the only thing that's left to respond to.
Like, that's the thing with casts, is if you've removed any other movement that would allow you to do any sort of cross-training or use new parts in different ways, then all you have left to do is the same thing, harder or faster.
But yeah, texture, for people who study, you know, the human kinetic chain, like things like walking and Like the foot skin, like you're going up hills in shoes probably, but if you didn't have shoes on, that first level of traction would be at the skin, which means your skin has to be strong enough to carry the load of your body.
Your hands, you know, people do a ton of work with their upper body, but they won't actually bring the hand skin along.
To the strength of the rest of their body because everything's a bar, right?
It's like this flat uniform level, never occur in nature bar as opposed to picking up things with texture.
In nature, there's texture that kind of bite in the skin and then your skin strengthens and then your arms are stronger because that first level of carrying or picking up or hauling out or doing anything is traction.
Traction between you and the earth, human and the earth, animal and the earth, whether it's a hand or foot.
Yeah, because what's happening is they can't get any stronger to carry that because, again, it's this limited flat and round thing.
Like, you know, you can pick up your...
Kettlebell or whatever, but as it's getting heavier, it's the same handle.
So there's parts of you that are left out of getting stronger because the environment is repetitive.
So if you go out and hang from a tree, if you were holding on to something that kind of bit in a little bit, then you would be able to Carry with your hands whatever you are also able to carry with for the rest of the body.
There's got to be some sort of cross training for the hands.
My friend Cameron does this workout, I think he does it once a week, where he takes a rock.
It's a 135-pound rock, and he carries it up to the top of a mountain.
And he does it one of two ways.
Like sometimes he throws it in his backpack.
He has like one of those big oversized Tenzing backpacks like with all the straps on it that you would use for like carrying game out of the woods.
He's a big elk hunter.
And to train his body to carry heavy loads, he just takes this 135 pound rock, throws it in his backpack and goes up hills.
Or sometimes he just picks this rock up and puts it on his shoulder and goes up hills and just rotates shoulders.
And I think in his eyes, like anything you do that's unusual or difficult and training your body and straining it in some way that's going to sort of mimic what he's going to have to do if he's hunting and carrying an elk out of the forest.
But he's also still carrying this awkward weight and doing things in a way that makes your body like compensate and But see, that's the thing with posture, why it's a modern construct.
To say that there's a right, safe way to carry a rock really means that if I'm only doing this one thing and then sitting down the rest of the time, that the only way that my whole body is going to be trained is if I do my training time symmetrically.
If you were just moving all of the time kind of in nature, you would balance out naturally because you'd never encounter the same load twice, really.
We've carried those 30 and 40-pounders exclusively, miles.
And so that was our big thing, right?
You know, so everyone's like, when you have kids, a lot of times your workout changes because there's just no more time anymore.
It's like, well, you carry them, and then they're dynamic, and they're moving, which means it's not holding a 30 or 40-pound ball.
It's a different load because their 30 and 40 pounds is distributed at their whim based on what they want to look at and where they want to go and they want to go to this side now.
So they are strong little shits.
Like they're strong.
They're really strong.
But they've been carrying themselves and we've been carrying them.
So it's like this relationship between I'm always strong enough to carry them five miles, no problem.
And the thing with the pitcher data, like in the CT scans, It's not just muscle.
It's easy to correct a muscle imbalance.
It's like, oh, clearly you can see that there's more muscle mass on one side.
The bone itself is torqued now, so that the reason that if you wind up, if you imagine winding up, there's this great need for range of motion behind you, and your body's very efficient.
If you're going to keep It's challenging the muscles to get longer to stretch to that position.
It will just move the bone there so that the muscles can go back to kind of their regular length.
You have the same range of motion in both arms, but the range of motion is in a different location on your pitching arm because you've twisted the bone there.
So that phenomenon of your bones being shaped by what you do is happening to all of us all the time.
People will say, like, I have tibial torsion, you know, like in my lower leg.
It's like, yes, your gait pattern has slowly wound your bones so that your foot is no longer in the same position.
Plain as it once was or would have been.
So you are an entirely different shape than you would have been had you been moving differently throughout your life.
You're not just like more or less muscle, like in shape or out of shape.
But then when you go from 5 to 15, probably all the way up to 20, then you are much more malleable than you will be after your bone.
We say bone density because it's easiest to measure, but your bone shape.
And all that it entails is set really for life at that point.
So, you know, if you would squat, so you probably squat a lot more, at least if you're in a martial art, a lot of times there's squatting put into it.
But if you take someone who's been sitting at their office, you know, using a toilet their whole entire life, their hips have never articulated to that degree that you're asking them to.
And in the tradition of the martial art, the people who came up with the martial art oftentimes live an entirely different lifestyle where there are shapes that facilitate And the shape that facilitates it tends to come from the areas that create whatever the sport is that you're talking about because anthropometric dimensions are the size and the shape of your body.
Sports and leverages that you create are heavily dependent on anthropometric dimensions.
And so your pelvis, you might not be able to kick because your pelvis is shaped by not kicking.
Like you have a not kicking pelvis because you are a non-kicker.
You can't just all of a sudden start to be a kicker any more than the pitcher can decide to not have a twisted bone in his arm anymore after throwing his whole entire life.
So if you develop your whole life as a non-kicker and then someone tries to show you kicking techniques, is there a way to open you up and make you more pliable and make your body adapt to those movements better?
I think that there is because you are malleable really as a structure throughout your entire life.
I just think that it's larger than do this kick over and over and over again.
There are ways to facilitate the mobility of the entire structure.
So if it were me and I was trying to teach a martial art, it wouldn't just be the kick.
I'd be like, what do these that are good at kicking, like what are the other lifestyle things?
It's about frequency.
It's not enough.
It's not enough load, like not kicking.
You're constantly adapting to not kicking.
So the amount that you kick is, I mean, how many kicks are you going to practice?
A hundred?
A hundred?
It's too small.
It's so small what you're asking to adapt to that there are ways to create change and shape in bones and there's evidence that it really does happen throughout a lifetime.
It's just the exercise paradigm is so small.
The training paradigm is so small.
It's like if you want to become more malleable, you have to change everything that you do all of the time and you will adapt to that.
Do people have a built-in limitation as far as their flexibility, or is it simply a matter of the amount of time and effort you spend trying to expand your flexibility?
I don't think humans have a built-in limitation from birth, but I think that your range of motion gets set really, really early, and we are in a mobilizing culture.
We immobilize our babies, really.
Our whole culture really doesn't work unless your kids are Quiet and still in some place at the time in which you're the most dynamic.
We used to roll around in the back of our station wagon, but now kids are locked in even more for a longer period of time.
They have more casts on them now, so they're very, very inflexible, extremely inflexible.
Or their ranges of motion are in way different planes than they would be.
So you can still have...
50 degrees of hip motion, but it's all in front of you instead of port of it being behind you.
I think the easiest way to say it is it's all changeable, but you have to be super diligent.
It's about the amount of time that you're asking your body to do something.
If you imagine the shape of whatever kick...
you can do now, like whatever small circle it is.
And then you imagine this kick that you want to have, your kicks just have to, you have to coax the edge of it.
Like it's like your, your body's like clay, right?
You're just a mat.
You're just doing the slow reshaping.
You're slowly reshaping and, and you want to just be imagining the shape that you're trying to make.
And you're just pushing the limits of the tissue because you, you've been doing it so long.
You have the parts.
You're Your muscle mass becomes longer and shorter as necessary.
The orientation of the bone in its socket and all the support tissues, it takes a while to adapt.
It takes a year.
It's not like, I've been doing this for six weeks, when is it going to get better?
It's like you've been not doing it for 40 years.
You just have to look at it more in terms of time, like realistic time in physiology.
I think anyone can really accomplish some serious physiological, physical transformations, but again, not in that one hour that they allow themselves three times a week.
But what you're doing by telling people that you can have a pill and lose weight, what you're doing is denying the reality of change.
And that change requires time and effort.
And you can't just pop something in there and get a shot and everything goes away and all your fat shrinks away.
There's this friend...
She got liposuction and didn't eat it.
I mean, she might have been 20 pounds overweight, like maybe, if that, like that's a few months of dedication.
That's it.
Just a few months of, let's watch our diet, let's, you know, and you know, she's got kids and blah, blah, blah, and she, you know, has a business and blah, blah, blah.
She doesn't have that much time, but You had a fucking vacuum stuffed under your skin and they sucked all the fat out.
And now you gotta wear a girdle and they gotta wear these compression shorts and shit and everything's all fucked up and lumpy and like, it's crazy.
Ooze and pus, she has a drain on her leg because the fat that they suck out of it, like everything gets infected and it's all fucking pussy and shit.
You're going to go through two months of rehabilitation.
You're going to recover.
It's going to take you, like, yeah, you look slightly thinner right away, but at what cost?
We're in a weird space right now where we want to be better in the very same habit, doing the same things that got us to where we are in the first place.
It's so weird.
It's like, when does that work anywhere else?
This is what has happened.
This is the ramifications of all those things that you did.
So the solution, the pill is really so that I don't have to change any of those things that got me there.
Everyone should take a class in human physiology or something.
That whole EMF thing, they wanted to put some EMF weapons up in our woods there, so that it's like, there's no literature that shows that they're bad for the body, so we're going to put some EMF weapons, and it's like, what?
That's crazy.
Yeah, I've seen some interesting studies.
Clearly, it's doing something.
So the easiest tissue to test is sperm, because you can get as much sperm to test, and you can It's ethical, I guess, to expose it to EMF. I'm just going to throw it away anyway.
So you can take two sperm samples and you can put one next to a phone or you can have a guy wear a phone on his hip and the sperm is different after having it.
So they don't know if it's the heat of the device because there's a device in your pocket.
A lot of people carry it right there in their pocket.
Or right there in their shirt pockets, you know.
Whether it's the heat or the EMF, they haven't really broken it down and I've seen some other smaller studies on fetuses, you know, where they make the mother have A device and wear a device to see what the cells look like.
The data is pointing that there is some sort of change.
With all that kind of stuff, it's like the dose that makes the poison.
How much?
Is the change significant?
What's going to happen with that sperm that's different?
Nobody knows any of that, so I guess just say, well, use your phone.
I turn my phone off.
I put it on airplane mode if it's going to be by my head when I go to sleep, and other than that, I don't keep it On my body or near my body.
I think like Sheryl Crow has brain cancer and she was saying that they were trying to attribute it to or possibly attribute it to when she was doing press for her first CD was the old days of cell phones and she did all of it through her mobile phone.
She had it up to her head the entire time and it's that side of her head that she has the issue with.
I think that we do a lot of stuff that we have no idea how it's gonna You know trickle down if you think about it like everywhere we go you're experiencing Wi-Fi signals radio signals You know I don't know how does the satellite thing work?
I mean you have to kind of like have a an antenna or a dish that points up to where the Satellite is sending the signal But I mean is that signal somehow or another getting here whether it hits your dish or not?
Is it getting to bodies?
It's we know that cell phone signals fuck with bees That's one of the things that they figured out when they were trying to figure out what's killing off all these honeybees.
Most things point towards pesticides and disease, but there's also some issue that we might be constantly fucking with their navigation and their ability to communicate.
It's almost like living next door to people that are just playing loud rock music all day.
Do you survive?
Yes, you do.
But does it fuck with the quality of your life?
Yeah, it does.
Because bees have this weird way of communicating with each other that seems to be interfering.
The cellular systems that we have seems to be interfering with that.
Well, there's a weird feeling that you get when you get to a completely deserted place, like a real wilderness place with total quiet, no cell phone service, no nothing.
The Bowman family goes dark two days a week and you just go out and spend more time outside than inside and that's the great thing about having the wilderness there is like huge trees, old growth.
Trees have been around for a long time and one time it was windy and trees were falling down.
But that reality that this thing has been there before Columbus ever get near America, I mean, especially where you are in the Pacific Northwest, you're dealing with, you know, some of those trees are like a thousand years old.
Well, almost the whole planet used to be wooded, right?
We've cut everything down.
It was almost all wooded.
You couldn't even walk.
Like up in British Columbia up there, it was so thick.
all of the trees falling down for years, all that moss and stuff that you're walking on is just old, mushed up, rotted trees.
But you couldn't even just walk through the woods.
There are just trees everywhere.
They've cut everything down.
And so much of the desert that's in the middle of the United States are from the fires, like when they started using lumber for ocean ships.
Like all of the British military ships came from lumber from the Pacific Northwest Once they realized that they had that commodity, they were using mink and otter furs, what brought everyone to the Pacific Northwest.
They cleaned all them out and they were like, what can we ship now?
They would.
And then they shipped it out and they were milling it.
So when you mill it, The mass of the tree is lost in between the boards, so it's sawdust.
And so sawdust was clogging all the rivers, and there was a big fire.
And then the fire just went across the United States because there was no natural water barriers anymore.
It just burnt it down, kind of like your cartilage, right?
You can use some cartilage, it grows back, but if you take it all the way down to the bottom to the base cells, no more is coming back.
There's this company, a bunch of companies make them, but one of them that I'm friends with is Green Mountain Grills.
And these pellet grills, they take hardwood pellets.
And it's basically sawdust, and they press it, and the natural sugars allow it to maintain this shape of like, it's almost like kitty litter.
If you have a cat, I have a cat who uses pine litter.
It looks real similar to the stuff that you, you put it in this pellet grill.
It's all digitally regulated, so it can keep the temperature like 200 degrees, can keep it for like seven hours with this like pot of of pellets and it's like super efficient and it's a smoker it's essentially a grill slash smoker but instead of like if you ever use an old-school smoker like one of those big barrel smokers those are pain in the ass like you gotta like regulate the openings the valves and make sure you get the right amount of temperature you gotta keep thermometers in there and in the old days it was super difficult to figure out how hot everything was you
know and then they figured out how to put meat thermometers actually in the meat and have digital ones that come outside and give you a reading but These pellet smokers, essentially they take all that hardwood sawdust that used to be just waste and compress it into these little pellets and then use it to cook with.
Yeah, there's nothing like being in those forests, too, because you really do get that sense that, wow, this was here long before the wheel, or long before, rather, the engine, or long before boats came over here.
But that's just being around something that predates most of human history.
Just...
Knowing that this thing was a seed and that seed became this tree and it's just seeing this entire world change during the time that it's been living and breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen.
It's very freaky.
That's something you get with old growth trees that you're not going to get with those cut blocks that are refurbished with these new little shitty pine trees that are little tags on them and stuff.
It's kind of fucked.
That's just a weird thing about people.
If we don't put regulations on stuff, that's why it's really cool.
Have you ever been to Boulder, Colorado?
They don't really allow people to build Like, you don't see any apartment buildings in the mountains.
You don't see, like, they have a very strict amount of construction that they allow in.
And they're very strict about it.
And they buy up space.
When people have, like, space, land that's for sale, like, Boulder County will actually buy that land and make sure that it remains open space so that nobody can ever build on it.
But you kind of have to do that to keep people from fucking the whole thing up, you know?
We went to the movies at midnight and it was bright outside.
This is fucking strange.
It was the middle of July.
It was really weird.
We did a comedy show up there.
We got out of the show.
It was 2, 3 o'clock in the morning.
Bright out.
See everything.
It's very strange.
And the people up there, they're so...
It's like...
There's a sense of community, even in a city like Anchorage, that you don't really see in a lot of cities down here because their reality is, yeah, well, every now and then a moose comes into town and kicks the shit out of some people at a supermarket.
Or a bear attacks someone that's in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Or, you know, it's just this is the reality that they live in.
They all have to kind of band together because every now and then...
If you see a car broken down the side of the road, you get out and help that person because that could be you.
Whereas if you're leaving here and you get on the 101, you see some guy broken down, you don't even think for a second.
Let me pull over.
There's a hundred million people driving by.
No one's thinking, let me go help that guy.
But if you're in Alaska and that's the only car you've seen for 20 minutes, you pull over.
Hey, you okay?
What's going on?
You need a call?
There's a sense of community because of their harsh conditions because of the environment they're in.
If you're spread out a little bit, you know, you have your claim or your space, but when you need help, it's going to have to be some other person that's going to have to come help you.
But don't you think it's kind of healthier to be in a place where there's like, you know the term diffusion of responsibility, the idea being that it's easier to attack someone in front of a thousand people than it is in front of one person, because one person feels obligated to help, whereas a thousand people say, someone should jump in and do something.
But nobody does anything because they don't feel like they have to because there's so many other folks.
Isn't that kind of like what you get if you're in a big city as opposed to like maybe where you live or maybe Alaska or just there's a number that's manageable?
I grew up in a small town and I was in Southern California for a long time and never really felt...
Connected is the easiest word, but now that I'm out there in a little bit more rugged or wilderness, you know, I feel safe knowing that there are neighbors or community members.
I feel more safe there, I think, than I feel in the big city.
Like, as far as population-wise, I mean, LA is kind of huge, but it's really spread out.
It's not...
I mean, it's a city, but it's a weird thing.
It's like a giant suburb.
You know, I mean, to look at the city aspect of LA, you've got...
Like, downtown LA is what we think of as a city, but because of the fact that there's earthquakes, everything's only one level out here, or two levels at most, except for downtown.
And you have a few office buildings here and there, but if you look at, like, the landscape, it's a lot of, like, flat things.
I would say probably the biggest is, like, Singapore or something like that.
I think it might even be less about numbers and more about how many people go outside or not.
Because it seems to me like in big cities, or even suburbs of big cities, everyone just pulls their car into their garage, they close their garage, and then they're in their house, and then...
If they're outside, they're in their backyard with their small family, that there's not these large communities of people that are interacting outside.
So maybe you could have that safety or everyone taking responsibility for people that you live with because you consider yourself living with them because you see them and you're next to them in some place.
But if you're in Alaska, I imagine that even if you Even if you're up there by yourself, you're still spending so much time outside because you still have to get so much for yourself, I imagine.
It's much more expensive to get things up there, get food and groceries and things along those lines, especially the more rural you get, the more problematic it is to get things delivered.
You know, when I say my neighbor's a douchebag, you know, he's not a bad guy, he's just kind of goofy.
But there's some people in my neighborhood that are very cool.
Like, you know, I see them, and it's nice.
It's nice to have a community where, you know, you go up the street and you see Bob.
Hey, man, what's going on?
What are you doing?
You still working on that?
Oh, that's cool, blah, blah, blah.
And it's nice.
You have this little sort of relationship with it.
But I didn't choose these people.
I just moved in and got lucky that some of them were okay.
Became friends with some of them along the way.
But it's like, ideally, I've always said, the really smart thing to do would be get together with all your friends and loved ones and say, hey, let's all live in this area.
Let's all move to this one street.
Is that possible to do?
Let's get together and...
But nobody ever really does that.
I've had 15 of those conversations with my friends.
And with my friend Brian, he just moved out in my neighborhood.
And I'm like, come look on my block.
And the fucking guy moved like 10 miles away.
I'm like, why'd you move over there, dummy?
Oh, my wife likes to be close to the grocery store.
Fucking grocery store?
You're going to get in your car anyway, dummy.
If you get in your car for 30 seconds or 3 minutes, is it really that much of a difference?
And maybe that was the idea, like with neighborhoods, that you would be living with people like you.
You're all going to the same place for work, and everyone goes to the same school.
But now your neighborhood is just full of all...
It's such a transient time.
And also big houses.
I think, you know, in New York, I have friends who, they go out to eat for most of their meals, right?
Their houses aren't large, and so they're forced by a lack of space.
Again, it's kind of one of those just space things where you have to go out and Commune with other people and you have your seven favorite places and then by default those become your little community, but here you can you can sustain yourself entirely within your Your house and your compound and just made it so we don't have to really interact with anyone anymore.
What is out here that people have known about forever that no one knows about anymore?
How many Irish people starved with the potato famine because no one knew anything about the plants that were sitting right there that they could have stained themselves on the entire time?
There was plenty of food mass there to eat, but if the skill set is gone, then it's really easy to kill yourself trying to figure it out for the first time.
Boy, watching that show, watching how easy it is to not get food.
Like you think, wow, the guy's in the woods, plenty of stuff to eat out there.
And you see him, like, foraging for food and trying to figure out how to, like, kill a squirrel with some sort of a rock that drops a little thing that, you know, he hits the switch and the rock falls on his head.
Is it John McClannis, the guy who went out in the woods and then died in the bus?
They made a movie out of it, Into the Wild, right?
And so everyone's, like, hypothesizing about, like, his, you know, his death and, like, oh, he must have eaten this particular plant and got poisoned.
And all the wild food experts are, it's like, he starved to death.
It's very simple.
He starved himself to death.
Like, one of the reasons humans have such a long...
Juvenile period compared to any other primate is getting food is hard and it takes a really long time to be taught how to get it like to have this information handed down into to get the skill the muscle if you will to be able to do it and you expend so much energy Trying to get it that you have to eat not only to cover that energy, but enough to go beyond that a little bit.
And then if you're, you know, making kids or whatever, then there's all this extra stuff and it's very hard and no one here has ever done it, ever.
That movie really pissed me off because they twisted the Into the Wild, they twisted the ending because in the movie he eats a poisonous plant and he gets sick and he dies.
He misidentifies the wrong plant and is liver toxic and he dies.
Like, if you've ever gone hunting, like, one of the things that my friend Brian Cowan and I first realized, the first hunting trip that we went on, lucky we went with this guy, Steve Rinello, this famous hunter, but we were like, Jesus, like, how the fuck did they do this before they had guns?
Like, we have guns, and it's hard.
We have guns, and scopes, and binoculars, and a trained hunter, and we know the territory, and we have...
We have tags, so they know there's deer in the area.
There's all these things that are on our side and still fucking for days with no success.
If you didn't have food with you and you were going on these days with no success, you would be fucked.
You would starve.
It could be really easy to starve to death.
And that's with a gun.
Like, with a gun, it's easy to starve.
Without a gun?
When you hear about someone that's, like, survived in the woods by themselves for, like, 20 years, like, eating frogs and shit, you're like, what?
How did that guy do it?
Like, that had to be, like, touch and go almost every day.
Very few stockpiles, like, very, I mean, how much could you store?
You could only store, like, a couple days' worth of vegetables or plant matter before that starts to go bad.
Meat, depending on the temperature, usually only good for...
Unless it's freezing cold out, it's not good for more than a couple of days.
You have to constantly be on the move, which is why cities weren't really figured out until we figured out how to stockpile shit.
Once they figured out how to stockpile shit and...
Like, okay, we have a grain silo.
We have enough food for a week.
Hey, somebody should invent a way to make music out of a box.
It's like you need society and culture in order to figure out how to make a computer which allows you to learn about how to live in the wild.
You know, I mean, you need education in order to figure out what's going wrong with the human body by living in this sedentary lifestyle that you have to go through this sedentary lifestyle to get that education to figure out that it's not good for you.
And now we've got to figure out a way to distribute it.
So it requires a whole new, I mean, society.
That's part of what civilization is, too, is someone knows something that you don't know and that you might want to know that you find valuable so you can go do some of his work for him so he'll tell you.
Do you think that ultimately the pattern that most people have chosen, this like 9 to 5 in a box and then sat in a car, is that going to be, do you think we'll realize somewhere down the line that that, like smoking, is like really bad for you and we should try to phase that out and try to, or do you think we're so caught up in this idea of achievement and our momentum is so in that direction that we'll never pull away from it?
I mean, I think that with European countries playing around with things like four-day work weeks, It doesn't take as much time as you're going to work.
You're probably not working.
At some point, someone, I hope, is going to stand up and say, I could do my job in three hours a day.
I think as businesses are laying off people or doing enforced furloughs, where they're saying, well, you now have four days to get the same job done, and you're going to have to take a 20% I think people are accepting that because now they get this extra day.
They're actually better for it.
They might have less money, but I think that if you've had some health issues, you usually end up valuing your health a little bit more.
It's always after.
I don't know if the up-and-comers will see it that way, but then for the up-and-comers, there's not a lot of jobs for those up-and-comers.
There's not even the option for 9-to-5 work for so many people now who Did what they were supposed to, you know, and they went to school or whatever, and they got a trade or a job.
There's no place for them.
So then they're going, well, I'll go back to school and try to get a better job.
So I think everything, I think everything, we're in a transition.
A lot of things are going to change.
And I think the work day in general with the commute, with the like digital commute, people being able to work from their computers, wherever they are, eventually corporations will see that it's cheaper, the cheaper for them to still make the same products.
Paying people less, but people get more free time.
Yeah, well, I think that that person, though, who said I could do it in three hours a day is going to be replaced by someone who does.
Like, you'll just keep working.
You'll find someone who can do the job faster and for less.
And the only thing, keeping people who don't do that in their seats is maybe the law at a certain point, like who you can fire and who you can't fire if people are tenured or whatever.
Hasn't that been the transition for, like, the last 30 or 40 years where you're just paying people less?
Relatively speaking, you know, the dollar is different than what it was, but aren't we paying people less who are working way, like, who doesn't work like seven days a week?
Who goes home and doesn't still have their email on and still answering emails?
I think that they're getting a lot more work out of people for what they used to pay and that, in fact, they are paying people less.
Has a company ever come to you and said, hey, we would like to ultimately, from the beginning of our company, we would like to engineer this thing to be a healthier environment for our employees?
What is a way we can get the most amount of productivity but also keep people as healthy as possible and give them an environment that's more conducive to just being an active, healthy person?
I mean, there are simple things that people can do, employers can do to provide their employees with a healthier version, I guess, of the 9 to 5. You don't have to sit, like, roving desks.
That was a big one.
Not having everyone at the same desk.
It's like, going into the same desk every single day is...
It's an environmental killer.
You're looking at the same walls, you're looking at the same...
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But I've got a picture of my dog up here, and I've got my wife on here, and there's my golf club, I've got my thing I put here.
I wore regular shoes my whole entire life, and then you switch to something minimal, and you didn't even know how they...
How your feet were feeling all day long.
It's very hard to sense how something is limiting you until you take yourself out and away from it.
It's like going camping.
Everyone feels better when they go camping and they're out hiking.
It's like, I feel so good.
This thing that I had, this chronic headache, this vision problem, this irritation with my family or whatever it is, when you go outside and you camp, all of a sudden it's different.
You've changed it up enough where It's so different.
Well, I feel like that indoors now, after being outside so much, after spending so much time, like I can feel this chair right now.
I haven't sat in a chair continuously in probably two years.
You can find just about anything that you want to watch.
But, you know, I don't...
I'm a worker.
Like, I work a lot.
I'm very busy...
I participate in society.
So it's like, how can I do all those things and keep the pelvic shape and the low back shape that I wanted and the strength without having to go to do those things separately from my regular life?
So I just sit on the floor.
I mean, you've outsourced the work of your muscular system to your couch.
Yeah, and it's because I don't think that we're, you know, we say we're too sedentary, and it's like, I would say that you have too much repetitive geometry, which is different, you know, so it's like, you got to get out of your couch and exercise, I would say, maybe you just get out of your couch, maybe you keep watching Netflix, just sit cross-legged on the floor.
Just put your legs out in front of you because that is movement.
That is exercise.
It's just not in a special clothing, in a class, in a gym.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think it all just depends on how your state.
Like, I'm looking for really strong cells head to toe.
So, like...
It just comes from the loads that you expose them to.
If you think of what is the natural environment for your body, you go to a massage therapist to push on you and give you pressure because it's an input you are missing.
Well, I get it every night on the ground, so I'm not missing all of that movement and helping those tissues become unstuck because the floor does that for you for free while you sleep.
That's what makes sleeping on the floor so uncomfortable.
Have you ever gone camping and slept on the ground and everyone's hurting the next day?
You don't have the strength, really, to do that.
You don't have the suppleness of the tissues.
And so you stiffen and react to it, kind of like if someone...
Pushes on you really hard, like too deep at first, you tense your muscles in response, but with time, the way, how you're probably imagining sleeping on the ground feels is not how it feels to me anymore.
It's how it felt to me at the beginning, but not how it feels to me anymore.
Well, I've camped a bunch of times, especially over the last couple of years.
I've done it several times.
Five, six days in a stretch and it sucks.
It's just not comfortable.
But it doesn't feel like deep tissue massage.
The difference between massage, especially sports massage, is you're kneading out knots and different scar tissue and blockages that have happened from strenuous exercise.
I just don't see how laying on the ground would do that.
Yeah, you'd always be seeking something comfortable.
It's just that your bed is so comfortable, what it does is it doesn't reveal your discomfort, so you just assume one position, again, the same geometry, almost all night long.
So in that way, your movement is less.
Where I move much more during that eight hours.
So that eight hours, my cells have a different experience than someone who's sleeping in a bed and on a pillow.
And when I'm uncomfortable, I change position, which is movement.
Even though I did all the same neck mobilization and got massaged all the time, the bulk of my day was doing the same thing.
How often do you have to turn your head and look up or look down?
There's no need for actually using the muscles of your neck.
Anymore.
But finally, I was like, you know, after doing the stretch, I was like, where, why am I doing this stretch?
Like, where would this stretch happen naturally?
It's like, okay, well, if I was laying on my side curled up, you know, if you look at your dog or your cat sleeping there, they're like doing these weird positions and poses.
And then I found the literature on it in, in the journal.
It's like, yeah, we think that a lot of low back pain is coming from these repetitive sleeping positions on, on beds.
And here's how all these humans sleep.
Here's how all these other primates and other animals sleep.
There seems to be some weird way about the way we sleep, so I just cleaned up that environment for myself.
If you have a soft one now, a hard one would Give you more pressure.
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely gradual.
You know, it's not with a pillow.
I took my pillow size and then over a year just came down to a smaller and smaller pillow and eventually a t-shirt until I didn't need it.
And with the bed, the bed was more organic because we had little kids.
And so it seems like you're never sleeping in your own bed.
Like everyone's always moving around beds.
And I slept in a different mattress like this mattress sucks.
And then I was like, that's ridiculous.
Like it's mattress.
My body should have enough give where, you know, a slightly different Baby pressure isn't stressing my body out and then that's when I just started to explore this kind of stuff.
You don't have to give up your couch, but how about just sitting on the floor instead of it?
With the sitting is the new smoking stuff, the thing that that research really showed is that you can be this really great exerciser, or it was a new category of sedentary active, that all of the active, the fittest people within our culture are still sedentary.
They're moving like 4% of the day.
And since your body, again, is movement-dependent, they're systems in the fittest people, Are like 4% better than the people who don't move at all.
So there's like all this space to get better physically.
And again, when I say better, I'm really talking about basic biological things like procreating, digesting food.
Some people can't even go to the bathroom.
Like their guts and their bathrooming doesn't work.
And like these are again basic human functions.
They can't sleep well.
And like, their humanness is impaired in the same way that you would see, again, like in zoo animals, like just pacing and their bio rhythms all messed up.
So I thought, well, I can get myself back on track.
I don't need a couch.
It turned out to be better.
And all these other things that we're talking about, like consumerism for our family and space and having little kids, you know, and run around and less to clean and just less.
Do you have any issue or any worry or concern about your kids catching measles or mumps or one of these dangerous diseases that have had a resurgence because of a lack of vaccinations?
I mean, that's a big issue on the East Coast is the measles and mumps and things along those lines that used to be kind of knocked down.
Now, because a lot of people don't want to vaccinate their kids, you're seeing this make a resurgence.
Yeah, well, I mean, like I said, I'm not anti-vaccine.
The reason that you're really vaccinating is for the benefit of weaker people, for the most part, because measles as a whole is not something that is that dangerous.
I mean, there are very few incidences, even when it was really bad, that it would cause death or whatnot.
So they'll be vaccinated.
At a certain point for the benefit of the community, I just am not loading really their systems with anything.
I'm not particularly worried about exposure.
You know, they don't go to places where Measles, I mean, excuse me, where measles occurs, like they're not in doctor's offices.
But, I mean, as far as I spend time detecting, like there was someone who was exposed to measles in Washington who came from Disneyland.
So I got a notification saying this person went from Disneyland to the SeaTac airport, who then went to This place, if you've been at any of these three places, which is what our, you know, the government put out.
I look at all the foods and all the sitcoms that I watch as a TV and it's constantly, you know, as a parent, you're going...
Am I going too far with this a little bit?
Do I want my kids to have...
I really liked my childhood.
My childhood was awesome.
The only thing that I was just playing with here is biological function.
Because I think...
The difference between our kids and us is that we grew up in a different time.
There were no computers.
I didn't really sit down in front of a computer until I was maybe...
20. You know, I had a typewriter and, you know, I did typing in high school, but You were running around, you know, after school for the most part, and now, you know, my one-year-old had my iPhone, and she's just swiping through, picking the game that she wants to play, and you're like, God.
She is going to be casted so much earlier by this, because zero to five is so important, and it's going to be interesting that it's going to be more than what we think it's going to be.
It's going to affect more than her eyes.
It's going to affect more than Than her hips, you know, it's going to be really how she thinks, how they both think is just going to be so impacted by the age of information.
So it's a model that they've had in Germany for a long time.
They've had this kind of what they call forest kindergarten for maybe 10 years.
So it's popular in Europe.
It just started coming over here.
There's probably, if you look online, you could find maybe a hundred schools already operating like this, and they're just outdoor preschools, although they're starting to go up higher, you know, where they're doing the curriculum just based on child-led interests.
My son came home and we're just like taking a hike sometime and he was telling me the names of the trees and stuff, like stuff that I didn't even know.
And so it's not like doing block.
You're not sitting out in the forest, you know, stacking blocks.
You're not coding colors or you're not doing any...
I think they call them schema.
Like you're not doing any sort of structured...
But it happens all very organically.
You just start to notice, you know, I think it definitely lends itself to a scientific kind of outcome because, you know, my son's like, hey, look at the frost patterns on this versus this.
Like, here's how you can tell, you know, where it was frosty and, like, this is clearly underwater.
So they're just starting to recognize and observe data and details about things.
So I like that.
You know, I'm a scientist, so I like that.
I see things that way so you know I don't know if it'll work for both my kids but it definitely works for my son who's more kind of like me.
I'm fascinated by the fact that you, as a scientist and as someone who is an expert in human movement and biomechanics and all that, you've decided to try to engineer your children from the jump.
I don't know anybody that's done that.
It's done that to such a degree that you've done it where you've gotten rid of your couch and you sit on the floor and you've got your kids in some fairy wood school.
Well, I've always wondered about people that need cesarean sections, like women with very narrow hips and, you know, they have a large husband and the baby's got a giant fucking head.
Your baby is not this arbitrary size that just pops out in its DNA. You're going to be 8.8 pounds or whatever.
It's not like that.
There is a relationship in gestation that has to do with...
For a while, they couldn't figure out, what's the signal for a woman to start giving birth?
And they're like, oh, it's got to be something to do with the size of the head and the pelvis or some signal in the lungs.
They're trying to figure it out.
We still don't know a lot of basic things.
About how this species works.
We've kind of gone right out into advanced technology and no one's really done a lot of work just going, how does this species work before we go over and look at other animals?
How does this one work again?
And so the big thing was narrow hips.
Narrow hips is one of my pet peeves.
Telling women that they're too small to give To give birth, but then they look at data of women who are up and move more through their pregnancy and head circumference.
You know, that the shape of the baby, again, is based on movement of the vessel in which it's in.
That it's becoming more understood to be very mechano-regulated.
Mechano meaning like any sort of mechanical forces on the embryo.
And the embryo is sensing movement and there's pressure on the And that's an environment.
It's in a mechanical environment.
It affects foot position, the ability for it to move and twist and to start that developmental phase.
And there's a lot of things that we do that limits developing human movement because we are so still.
So the more active your child is, or the more active you are, rather, it changes the shape of your child in the womb, the size of your child, rather, in the womb.
And how does that affect a woman having narrow hips?
I mean, is it possible that a baby would be small enough that it would pass through if she's really active, whereas if she's sedentary and she has narrow hips, the baby's just going to be too big and fat?
I mean, narrow hips, like your hip, the obstetrical conjugate, the space, you know, where the baby is coming out is not a set structure.
You have hinges in there where things articulate and become bigger or smaller as needed, but those hinges being able to articulate depends on how fluid you yourself, how much movement did you do?
Were you squatting for a long period of time?
So squatting is something that's totally natural for humans, and humans would have to do it You know, a few times a day to bathroom, but also getting up and down off of the floor.
So you imagine what the shape of the pelvis would be and the mobility of the hips and the sacrum and all these joints that play a role in birth.
And then you go, but how natural are they not when you want to take them to something like birthing that everyone does?
So I'm a natural birthing advocate, but at the same time, I'm more an advocate for like, if you want to have like a vaginal delivery instead of a cesarean, There's work to do in the same way if you want to do a certain kick, you know, for your martial arts class it takes training to re-establish this shape and mobility so that you don't have too small of a space.
Your core muscles are working, so the baby's getting bigger, but you're on the couch, so even though the baby's getting bigger, that weight's never put on the muscles that hold the baby, so then you have to start tucking your pelvis under or wearing a baby support belt because you're not training your muscles relative to the natural mass accumulation of having a baby.
You have to be up and moving around with that weight in order to adapt to it.
You can't put a kettlebell in your lap Right.
And train to it.
You have to move it and swing it around.
You got to move and swing around your pregnancy weight to adapt to it.
There's a lot of factors that affect the birthing process, and I don't think that there is as much evidence for space being a factor as it is used as a casual reason.
If you're at the point where you've tried to labor, And it's not happening.
You move to a cesarean.
That's pretty normal.
But the situation in which that labor has happened is usually in a position where The forces aren't necessarily in your favor, right?
Like, if you're on your back the whole entire time, it's like the baby's not moving down.
It's like, well, what could you do to help bring it down?
Like, you could be more upright.
There's so many things you can do, but they don't necessarily happen well in a hospital that have their own set of rules and equipment in which they have to be monitoring you with.
So a lot of the trade-off for constant monitoring and emergency care is The optimal process is sometimes compromised.
Well, but because they've been doing it for a long time, there can be something that's consumed in that movement or in that choice of doing so that comes along with it.
In biology, there's a lot of naturally occurring byproducts.
just because of the relationship of how something's been done for a long period of time.
So like I use bees pollinating as an example.
It's like bees aren't, they're not actively pollinating.
They're just eating.
But their structure is pollinating by default just because it happened to be the right structure that had some static electricity because of the way that the wings flew around.
And then it happened to be hairy instead of smooth so that the pollen could stick in there.
and then it just brushes up against it and it becomes this vessel...
But that's a byproduct.
The pollination is just something that occurs because of a structure.
So if you eat something To keep a predator from coming up, but you've always done it, then there can be some sort of compound that triggers milk production.
So when you look at a population of people who are having kids, and it's like, wow, there's a very large percentage of this population that's struggling just after having a baby.
Could we be missing some sort of naturally occurring nutrient?
And I think that's why people take The placenta is because they're just trying to hedge their bets.
Maybe inside the placenta is something that keeps me from feeling whatever issue they're diagnosed with.
If it plays some sort of role in hormonal regulation afterwards, is it part of the input that changes how your physiology starts going back to what it was before?
There's so much that we don't know.
That things are very easily dismissed as like we know the reason or that's no longer a necessary structure just because it doesn't fit into our tank.
And so you don't really want to approach biology and physiology and anatomy with that heavy bias that the way humans are doing it right now in LA is really an indication of what humans need to be doing.
Is that sort of like how people have a natural instinct to suck on wounds?
Like if you cut your finger, you naturally do that.
And then people would tell you not to do that for the longest time, but then they found out that no, saliva has actually very strong healing properties.
Just get your hips and your knees to a different joint angle because it turns out again that the tubes of elimination line up better when you do that, that it's part of the system.
And without that, then you have to start bearing down and adding forces into the system.
That aren't so good for you.
They're good to accomplish that task, but they're not good for maybe the whole structure, like all that intra-abdominal pressure over time, if that's how you're forcing it to get out, moves things in other ways.
Well, I think that, you know, with civilization, part of another inherent component of civilization is you have to be better than someone else, you know?
And so a lot of the things that we do...
Our ways of delineating ourselves from what we would call savages or more primitive people.
You wore shoes.
You didn't want your skin to be too dark or tan.
You wanted to show that you had more affluence, that you weren't as barbaric.
You didn't have to poop on it.
You could just poop it and push it flusher and it went away.
Well, gosh, I mean, I think medicine is beneficial.
I mean, I think everything is beneficial.
It's just that what I'm more concerned about is what is no longer needed that is still essential.
So I don't have really an aversion against civilization and technology.
It's just that vitamin C is still necessary.
Like, we can't get around the fact that vitamin C is still necessary.
So I'm just trying to figure out So when you're trying to figure out diseases, you have to kind of boil down to, could this disease be arising because of some non-input, some essential input that we're not getting?
And so as people get more and more advanced, our health, again in the terms of biological sense, isn't getting better with us.
And so what happens to a species that advances itself right out of being A species.
Like, the things sound radical, but again, as far as humans on the planet right now, they're really not.
So they might be more radical because they're decidedly non-American, but I don't think I'm really going out of my way that much to be more animal-like.
It's just, like, I don't feel my life is enhanced with a bed.
I don't think my life is enhanced with, like, I'm obviously letting go of the things that I can't live without.
There are certain things that I, you know, I still have a car.
Yeah, well, I think that brings up that notion of alignment.
An alignment is when you're moving, you know, alignment in your car is like when the relationship of all of the parts are where they should be and then the way that you drive.
It optimizes the longevity of the structure of the car as a whole.
Like you don't have any one wheel getting its job done as a wheel is wearing down the brake on that side where it's costing you something that it shouldn't.
So it's the same thing with the body.
You're trying to figure out your alignment, which is how can I be using my arm without wearing down my shoulder prematurely because the muscles between the two are tighter than they should be because I always do the same thing with my left arm.
So I think it's less about, I mean, muscle balancing is one way to look at it, but also just look at what are the movements you do in your life.
Like if you had to make a list of the top 10 moves you do in your life outside of your exercise program, like what are they?
It's sitting from like getting up and down out of a chairs is a thing that you do most often, but we don't do very much with our body at all when it's not exercising.
None really in that I have really eliminated structured exercise time out of my life.
But if you plotted my body on a graph, what you would see is probably five miles of walking a day, almost carrying something almost always while doing that, but you know it's in different arms all of the time.
Working on the house, my stillness is on the computer time, but really it's just that, getting up and down off of the floor, sitting on the floor in different ways, which would look like stretching, I would say to most people, right?
So I'm always working on some sort of stretch, but it's really just to get something accomplished.
Again, one of the reasons you do cardio is you do cardio because this idea that you want to keep your heart strong enough to do what?
It's supposed to be to distribute oxygen.
Your cardiovascular system distributes oxygen, but just because it's beating faster, working harder, it's not accomplishing Whole body oxygen distribution.
In fact, it's pulling blood away from anything not doing that thing that you're doing in the moment.
So even that idea of cardio comes from being still all the time.
What can I consume in a short period of time that keeps my heart muscles strong?
Instead of going, how can I take the resistance away from my heart and distribute my oxygen all the time?
Like, my cardiovascular system is working all of the time because I'm moving all the time.
I think what we're talking about are probably two different things.
I'm talking about what you're trying to accomplish, whether or not you're trying to push your body to an optimum state.
If you're looking to optimize your body's performance, you're really not going to get that just by carrying kids and sitting down on the ground.
Your body, like the difference between exercise, a lot of people are thinking of exercise as being something where I guess you're just trying to lose a little weight or stay active or sweat a little bit.
What I'm talking about is like optimizing your physical body.
Strengthening your body, strengthening your cardiovascular system, strengthening your physical structure.
I'm a big believer in especially resistance exercises.
I think that it's very important for bone density.
It's very important to resist the aging process and muscles, keeping muscle density, keeping bone density.
Well, again, I think it's about how you're using the word optimization.
So optimization, to me, if you're optimizing the fitness performance tests, like one rep max or a strength goal, whether it's aesthetic or a physical performance, like how much weight can I move with this body part and can I get more and more?
That's fine as long as your body is also being successful at getting biological tasks done.
And I think that in a lot of cases, people can have very high levels of this fitness optimization for performance, for athletic performance, but not be performing 100% biologically speaking.
In the book, I use cycling as an example, where you can have people who have huge VO2 max capacity because they're doing a ton of endurance training, but the bone density in their hips in most competitive cyclists is lower than what it should be.
They actually have the hips of an 70-year-old woman with osteoporosis.
Because they've isolated the variable that they're training for.
Bone density is not necessary.
It's a waste, actually, of bone density.
So there's a lot of health trade-offs.
That occur when we train for performance without keeping our eye constantly on biology.
So I would say that my bone density, the bone density of hunter-gatherer populations is way higher than it is in even heavy lifters because bone density is a whole head-to-toe phenomenon.
And...
People who've worn shoes their entire time, the bone density in their feet is pretty low.
The size and shape of your bones is small already.
Even if you do a lot with it, the size and the shape is limited by the fact that you don't move all the time.
Even though you do a ton of work to optimize your fitness level in that hour, You're sedentary 96% of the time so that the physical cap for optimization is just different.
It's just different.
It's just a different set of variables by which to assess yourself.
So again, in the birthing community, there's this thing of, you know, why are women who are doing a lot of exercise, like their muscles get to the point where the tension, their resting tension is higher than what it should be, like say in their pelvic floor, and then they're having to generate Way more force or their tissues will tear or give because the tension is greater than what is natural.
Because you can get stronger and stronger and stronger, but at what point is your tension higher than natural because of the context of doing nothing else the rest of the time?
Like, we'll carry our kids, but then there's this huge, very fit guy, and he came up to us and he's like, if I had to carry my kids, there's no way my back could tolerate it for more than 20 minutes, and I've been following you guys around all day, and you've had these kids for hours.
He's like, I couldn't even do it, so who's stronger?
Yeah, I mean, I'm fascinated by your approach, but I just wonder how practical it would be for the average person.
You seem to have engineered your life in order to do it this way, and it's great, it's wonderful, but I just wonder how many other people could sort of apply that to their lives, unless they had some sort of...
I mean, you have to have a lot of freedom to do what you're doing, you know?
Well, also, I bet that sitting down writing all this, he's probably really aware of what you're talking about and the issues that people that do that kind of thing face.
It's probably attractive to him to sort of pursue what you're advocating.
Yeah, it's a hot topic in terms of criticism as well.
People love to jump on people that aren't vaccinating their kids, or jump on anyone who's trying to connect any vaccinations towards any sort of ailments and diseases.
I've talked to many doctors, and That are pro-vaccine, that think that the protocols that we instill, as far as everyone being subscribed to the same protocol, that's probably not the best way to deal with anything biological because people have so much biodiversity.
There's so much difference between one thing that will make someone terribly ill and the same exact substance won't affect someone at all, whether it's allergies or...
Sensitivities to certain medications, and you're going to run the risk, especially when you're introducing a lot of chemicals into a very young immune system, a very young child.
There was a timing issue for us in the way that we wanted to do it.
I don't really believe that the vaccinations are tied to any I think it's just a load to the body as a whole and watching.
Wanting my children to process and develop certain things first where, you know, the risk of any overload or mismatch, as you call it, like in terms of biology and medicine, where it's just less of a new thing.
You know, the structure is a little bit more formed and more able to process anything that you put into it.
And they do it either because they don't like the way it makes them examine the way they're raising their kids, so they do it defensively, or they're judgmental, or everybody thinks they're doing it the right way and everybody else is doing it the wrong way.
Do you face a lot of that?
Because this is a very unconventional way of raising children.
And I think if I got any criticisms, it would be for that, for the way that we want to raise our kids.
And I don't have any problem with the way anyone wants to raise their kids.
This is just what we're doing.
This is what we're trying.
I just happen to be in a more public format.
And I'm writing about it.
There's very conscious biomechanical choices of why I'm doing this.
What I'm doing like I go here's the process of mechanotransduction and here's the list of diseases and here's here's the known environments and so here's the environments that we're changing so in that way it's kind of like a an experiment in in current process right that word that we're doing but yeah it's I think the worst thing I was ever called by someone you know in a comment section and I don't spend I spent almost zero time reading It's not my thing.
Even that, then all of a sudden you're interacting with some person, and what's lacking is the social cues.
There's things that people will tell you things online that they would never tell you, just looking at you, in front of you.
And if they did, they would be completely socially retarded to do that.
But there's no consequence.
You're just typing something shitty.
And the one thing that you can get from that is that all those people are socially retarded.
Anyone who does that.
Like, okay, your input is not valid.
Because your input, like this insulting thing that you've written, you've written that because you're an idiot.
Like, that's it.
That's the only reason why you do it.
If you're a sensitive person or if you're a person...
That considers that person on the other end, unless that person obviously is doing something horribly racist or sexist or whatever, in some way that victimizes other people.
You're just talking about someone's opinions and ideas, and you're doing so in a very insulting way.
You're doing so because you're an emotionally stunted fuckhead.
That's what you are, and so that's why you're drawn to this anonymous contribution in the first place, whereas the large majority of people when they watch a YouTube video will not leave a comment.
The large majority.
And the people that do, the overwhelming number of negative comments.
It represents way more than I think the average population because you're dealing with a sort of a stunted group in the first place.
I've had it since 1998. There's always going to be assholes.
There's a certain amount of assholes you're just going to get.
There's a certain amount of people that just want attention, so they just want to be shitty and insulting.
The intelligent discussions, the large majority of intelligent discussions and interesting different viewpoints.
Once people get away from this idea of just demanding attention by just being just shitty, which is like what a lot of people do in these social network forums, whether it's Twitter or Facebook.
You get more attention by being shitty.
But once you get past that, you can find communities.
You can cultivate communities.
But it's hard to do without some form of regulation.
And when you regulate, you censor.
And so it becomes like, you know what's going on in France right now, of course, right?
With this cartoonist, these people that were killed.
Well, now France has arrested like 60 people for making Facebook posts that they thought were either in In support of terrorism or criticizing their government.
They arrested a comedian recently for some comment that he's made about the relationship between terrorism and this This horrible tragedy.
It's really kind of fucked up because it's kind of counterintuitive to the whole idea that you're supposed to be supporting in the first place.
But the communities that we have online right now, I think a big part of it is they don't feel the interaction.
They just send it out there almost like a message in the bottle and you're on the other hand receiving it.