Diamond Dallas Page, a wrestling legend turned fitness icon, defies age and injury by pioneering DDPY—a high-intensity blend of yoga, calisthenics, and recovery tech like hyperbaric chambers—helping disabled veterans (e.g., Arthur Borman) shed 140 lbs in 10 months while ditching braces. His gluten-free, dairy-free, low-sugar diet, viral athlete success stories (LeBron James, Tom Brady), and military ties (Iraq/Afghanistan deployments) fuel his program’s adaptability, from "bed flex" for the immobile to elite training for wrestlers like The Miz. Page’s upcoming book, Positively Unstoppable, and documentary Relentless (covering his comeback post-Nash injury) showcase his mindset-driven philosophy: belief over excuses, proving even 84-year-old Ted Evans can thrive with modifications. [Automatically generated summary]
You're into yoga, and you're really, really into it.
I mean, you've got your own system of yoga.
I mean, this is for something that I think is very important for body maintenance and for keeping your spine healthy and mobility, which is one of the things that a lot of us ignore, especially big guys who like to lift weights.
62. Dude, if you folks saw what he just did with no warm-up, no warm-up, bent over, grabbed your ankles, fully flattened your body out, pressed your body up against your thighs with no warm-up, then he picks his ankle up and fully extends his leg over his head.
I mean, that is incredibly impressive for a 20-year-old person.
Going back to, you know, just my career, I mean, my career took off in 96, which was, I was 40 years old.
97 and 98, man, I was on top of the world.
Wrestling 270 days a year, every year.
And then I did The Tonight Show, Hollywood Squares, a movie called First Daughter was my first movie I did.
So, I mean, I was probably working 300 and...
20 days a year and the wear and tear on your body after a while like boom I took a power slam from or a powerbomb from Kevin Nash Kevin's legit 610 long way down and it wasn't that bump that blew my back out it was all of it and being almost 43 years old and when I ruptured my L4 and L5 and we have this amazing vertebrae that is what allows us to do all this crazy shit that we do but What really allows us is those shock absorbers,
those discs in between the vertebrae.
Well, think of a jelly donut and slap that jelly donut and now there's nothing there.
So I have no discs in between my L4 or L5. I was told by three different spine specialists, you're never going to wrestle again.
I just signed a multi-million dollar three-year deal.
So the guy who wouldn't be caught dead doing yoga would do anything to get back in the ring.
And I was married at the time and she kind of bullied me into it.
And once I started doing it, Joe, just like you know, I started to feel different, and I started thinking, wow.
You know, just different reading on different people and how they healed themselves and what people were saying.
And what I've found that a lot of people don't want to put the extra work in.
They could be the hardest workers ever, but they won't go that extra mile just to go get a bag of ice, fill it up, put it on your knees, put an A-span around it, you can go wherever you want.
There's something about the same type of guy that's so tough they could work 300 days a year is also the same type of guy that's gonna go, ah, I'll fucking just deal with it.
The guy was shredded, but that whole time under tension thing, something I call dynamic resistance, I hated that.
And like for the push-ups, you know, I would lower for three, hold three inches off the ground for three, come up for three, Lower for three, hold for three.
Then I'd go into Cobra and a down dog.
And in the beginning, I had to do them on my knees.
But then I built that strength to get off my knees.
And then three-second push-ups became five.
Five became ten.
Ten became sets of ten.
If you go to my DDP Yoga Facebook, you'll see a video up there of me doing on my 62nd birthday.
Well, actually two days after.
Ten ten-second push-ups.
At 62. So my core strength is at a different level.
I don't lift weights anymore.
I haven't really for 10 years because I really don't need it and I don't need a size.
I like being like 230. The bottom line is what today is called, I'm branding it DDPY. Why?
Because I want people to stop calling it just yoga because it's so different.
I do shit like when you take into a lunge and you throw your arms up, I go, superstar!
You know, when we're in like a lunge that we're folding forward and we're to explode into touchdown, I'd say throw a little Ric Flair on the end of that.
And as everybody explodes, woo!
You know, just having people having fun.
I did a big event.
It was this weekend.
It was called All In.
And it's Cody Rhodes, who's the American Dream Dusty Rhodes' son.
He's been in independent wrestling.
He was at the show, WWE, for 10 years.
And bottom line is he went away, left there, left guaranteed money.
Got to be like a half a million bucks.
Left it and went to follow the dream because he knew he was a main event guy.
And him and these kids, the Young Bucks, they sold out this arena that was 10,426 people.
Cody was going for the NWA championship against Nick, who was just one of the studs of our business.
They had a hell of a match.
Billy owns that title.
Now think about this.
Vince McMahon just, I want to say he was paid $1.2 billion by Fox for the programming for a live show on Friday nights.
I'm not sure what the deal is at six years or eight years, but $1.2 billion.
And then I heard there's another multi-billion dollar contract being out there, Comcast or something.
So that's like NFL stuff.
So when that kind of attention comes to wrestling, more people are going to be like, oh, I want to get involved in that.
And plus, Vince really has taken it mainstream at a different level.
Like back when we were killing it in the 90s, I mean, we had the highest rated show on cable television, whether it was WCW or WWF. Every week, we were one, two, and three, sometimes one, two, three, and four, top four shows.
But our dollars that we could get for the advertising...
Was nothing like they're getting today because they made it kids friendly.
They changed that and it was brilliant by Vince.
You know, it really changed format, but today it's about to go through another boom and this whole independent thing that Cody and these young bucks who are great kids did.
It really lit up that world.
And it's the same thing all over the country.
I mean, I should say world.
Japan's really big right now, and so is UK and Mexico.
Now pot's legal, and now the level that you can get tested for is so much lower than anything that he got.
But I think he enjoys it.
I don't think he's missing fighting.
You know, fighting is...
I know that pro wrestling is probably harder on your body doing those 300 days a year.
I don't think there's anything like it in all of entertainment.
I really don't.
I mean, it's crazy to think that you're getting body slammed and thrown into the ropes and forearms slammed and all that shit's going on 300 days a year.
It's really, it's not fair.
There really should be a way where you could take some time off.
Plus, I'm like, you know, again, I'm 62. They're 24, 22, 28. You know, so they grew up watching me.
So it's much easier for me to get them to pay attention.
All you have to do is look at Chris Jericho, who's one of the top stars in the world, and he is not with WWE right now.
You know, he comes and goes.
And he was at that show all in.
He did a run-in, a surprise thing, and blew the roof off.
He's going to be 48 in November.
He wrestles like he's 28. He's been doing my program since he did the same thing I did when he blew his back out and three doctors said he was not going to wrestle anymore.
Five weeks later, 85% pain-free.
Three months later, he headlined WrestleMania against Punk.
And when I wake up, my first 10 minutes, I call it wake up.
Man, I call it oil for the tin man and woman.
And the real proof of this for me, because I'm the first transformation, The bottom line is, they said my career was over when I was 42. I started doing what now is called DDPY. Three months, less than three months later, Joey, I was back in the ring.
Now, you know, I don't have any, I don't, if I don't do it, if I'm on too many planes, trains, and automobiles, you know, then I'm going to get released.
But I know what to do.
Like, I'd say to my wife, and I swear to God, because every morning I do, I roll out of bed some nights and you feel like you get hit by a truck.
You know what I mean?
Sleeping's the worst thing for me because I get in those positions that I don't know I'm in.
And when I wake up, I'm like, oh, Yeah, you'll nod it up.
But as soon as I do, within eight minutes, I feel like a completely different person because I know what to do.
But, you know, it's just, for me, it's, as you know this, repetition is the mother of learning.
The more you do something, the more you own it.
And on that clip, I want to show you something I brought with me because I've been waiting for For your show to release this, I've got a new book coming out.
On that note, Jake the Snake Roberts is working a deal right now with Hooters in Vegas, and they're talking about giving him a room, and he will do Monday Night Raw.
It says So for the people just listening it says for 15 years Doctors told me I would never walk unassisted again And we're seeing this gentleman with those crutches, those cane things on his forearms.
I accepted this as fact.
I was a 47 year old disabled veteran and I had basically given up.
I was injured as a paratrooper in the Gulf War.
Too many jumps.
Took its toll on his back.
Oh, man.
Watch it on his land.
And my knees, it says.
I gained weight.
We'll just watch an image of it.
All this stuff is available online at ddpyoga.com, right?
And that's really, like, it was crazy because, again, anybody who got my program 11 years ago, I, personally, there was no one else but me, I would send them an email saying, hey, man, I'm not trying to sell you anything.
You already bought the program, and I want to say thank you, and I got a couple questions.
If you would answer them, I'd appreciate it.
His answers were...
So good that I wrote him back and I'd never written anybody like directly that I didn't know at this time.
And I wrote him back and I said, sounds like you need some help, bro.
I said, what's your story?
Cliff notes, disabled veteran, morbidly obese, relegated to thinking of himself as a piece of furniture.
So I say, send me some pictures so I can see what I was working with.
And those are the pictures, those first two with the canes.
And I was like, fuck, man.
I don't know how I can help him because not so much the knee braces.
Hell, I wore knee braces my whole career.
I didn't realize it was strapped to a back brace and his wife, 20 minutes every morning, got to put her on the sleeve, put on the brace because he can't even bend over enough to do it.
And so she puts them all together.
20 minutes later, he's going to the bathroom with his canes.
So I sent him this food plan, which is like my phase three eating plan, which is for health, but I got it from a guy named Dr. Fred Bishy.
And at the time, Fred was 78, could still run 20 miles on the beach in the deep sand with my brother.
Like, that's his mentor.
He helped people with cancer and all sorts of shit.
This guy's like, he's just a different level of walking the talk.
You know, like, that's the way it's supposed to be.
I mean, when you look at just the...
The obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autism.
Like, how is it through the roof?
How are there 400-pound guys everywhere?
25 years ago, that didn't happen.
Right.
You know?
And then they changed everything.
And as far as I'm concerned, there's three reasons why it could have happened.
Because I don't know.
I'm not a scientist.
I'm a fucking wrestler.
But I know when I get people to eat what God created and stuff that's not genetically modified, I found that they get out of pain, and that's what I did with Jake and Scott.
You know, Razor Ramon also moved into my house, and when you get a chance to watch, before you have Jake come on, definitely watch The Resurrection of Jake the Snake, because I can set you up with that too.
But Jake, I got him eating real food, and Scott Hall, aka Razor Ramon, eating real food.
And within two weeks, they're already going to start getting out of pain.
Because I don't want to feel like I'm 82. I want to feel like I'm 42 at 62. Now when you talk about your food plan, are you giving them specific portions and what to eat?
That guy, I mean, two canes, giant belly, blown out knees, blown out back, veteran paratrooper, guy, I mean, jumping out of fucking airplanes over and over again, blows his body apart, and you fixed it.
Yeah, and I always say, but what the fuck did he ever do?
You know, what the fuck did he ever do?
But when he said, I can do it, I said, give me your number.
So I called him.
And I said, you know, we talked for about an hour.
Two weeks later, he calls me back.
The main thing I talked to him in that conversation, which is, again, what Positively Unstoppable is all about, As important as the workout is, as important as the eating plan is, that 10% of the equation, the 90% is right between your ears.
Right here, that six inch piece of real estate, the story you tell yourself.
And I said, if you can really just get past that story and start re- Telling yourself a different story.
An example would be when I went for my whole theme, induction speech, in front of 20,000 people and millions of people on USA and on the WWE Network, which is only $9.99, by the way.
It's like a rib.
I wasn't in the back going, oh God, I hope I don't fuck this up.
Oh God, what if I forget what I was going to say?
Oh God, this sucks.
What if I fuck up?
I wasn't saying that.
I was saying this is going to be the best thing I've ever done.
I'm going to blow people away.
I'm going to make them laugh.
I'm going to make them cry.
I'm going to inspire them.
And that was my inner voice.
I went out there and did the best thing I've ever done.
Like, it's the best thing I've ever done.
But it's about that story that you tell yourself.
And you get all this shit.
And that's why people listen to you.
Because they need to be reminded it over and over and over again, you know?
You can do this keto diet, whatever you're doing with that.
I try to say, if you're early on and you're young, you know, I encourage them to do calorie counting.
Calories in, calories out.
But a lot of people, that doesn't work for anymore.
So what I get them to do is go gluten and dairy-free.
And really, I started with gluten-free.
If you can go and people go, oh, gluten-free.
All I know is the people I work with get out of pain.
I'm one of them.
So I don't give a fuck if you eat gluten or not.
I don't care.
I'm not the gluten fucking Nazis.
I'm fucking like, hey, do what the fuck you want to do.
But this is what I do.
This is what him and her and him and her do.
And look at them.
And it just helps drop weight.
It's about inflammation in your body.
Go back to icing your body.
Sugar, which we're all at explored.
I try to get them to cut down as much as they can.
Some people quit completely, which blows my mind, which tells me they really have that substance.
My friend Stacy Morris, who lost 180 pounds in 18 months, she's actually on the cover of Women's Day right now, that big magazine for Women's Day of her transformation.
She wrote a book on it, like something comfort, eating comfort or family comfort.
You can catch it up on my site.
It's up there.
She wrote this book about eating without sugar.
And that's like, I'm not telling anybody to do that because I can't do that.
I mean, I'm an Irish-German-Dutch kid, but all my best friends were Genta, Cafaro, Rossi.
I mean, all my buddies were Gumbas, you know?
And so I love Italian food.
I fucking love it.
So there's a company called Tinchiata that has the best pasta I've ever had.
It's a brown rice pasta.
So there's always a substitute.
When you get that out of your body, In two and a half, three weeks, it's a different level.
You already feel better, you feel better, but it's got to get out of your body.
And then if you put it back in, here and there, you're going to feel it, but it's going to go way quicker because it doesn't have all that shit stored in your body.
I mean, it's one of those things where it's just, unfortunately or fortunately, there's just so many different requests for people to come on the podcast.
I had all these comic books that I collected from the time I was a little kid, and then when I became a stand-up comedian and I was starving in the early days, I sold all my comic books and just...
So the guy who owns the Power Rangers put a lawsuit on Adi and YouTube, and they had to pull it off.
Next thing you know, Adi's on CNN, and they're asking him about it, and he's like, fuck him.
He goes, he doesn't I mean, we're not trying to make money.
We're not monetizing this.
And next thing you know, he pulled the thing off, the lawsuit off, and now it's got like 22 million.
And this is something that he did because he's produced a bunch of movies, but they kept changing his shit.
Like, wouldn't let him do what he wanted to do.
And this last one was Judge Dredd.
And five years ago, or a little before that, he's telling me how he's going to do this shit on YouTube.
And I'm like, what the fuck do you mean you're going to put shorts on YouTube?
Well, he did that one.
He's got 22 million views right now.
And that really became like this underground, you know, Yoda-type person of the internet.
And he sent me a script about three years ago when we started it, and it's called Gods.
And it's kind of like, you know, all superheroes, as you know, they're all slightly different but the same.
And it's a very dark, dark superhero series that's, well, when you get to the fighting part of it, it will remind you of like, "FIGHT!" You know, from the 80s friggin' video game.
Actually, Mark Murrow is a four-time New York Empire State Games boxing champion.
Yeah, from back in the day when he was a kid.
But he's become this inspirational speaker to kids.
I've never seen anybody move kids the way he does.
So he was in Atlanta one day and I sent my crew down there because I got a whole production studio.
Like, Resurrection, we filmed it, we edited it, we did everything.
And I sent my crew down there to just go down and film them.
And Steve took this one part where he talks about his mom.
Now, no bullshit, Joe.
I can show you how this one four-minute clip that Steve produced has over a half a billion views on Facebook.
Like half a billion.
And now, Mark went from having trouble getting booked at high schools to being in such demand that he had 3,000 requests the month that that video went crazy.
And people keep taking it and putting it out there.
But he connects with kids.
It starts out with, I want to be rich.
I want to be famous.
And then he shows you, as you know, what can come with that if you're not frigging mentally prepared to handle that.
And I don't know how any fucking kid can be 18, 19, 20 years old I don't think they can.
And there's something I'm about to do off of my app that's going to be...
Life-changing for a lot of those guys.
I just don't have it all put together yet, but it's one of the things that I'm working on right now because I want to be able to give back to help them.
I do stuff with their organizations.
People start them.
I just did one with Ma Deuce Deuce in New Jersey, where I'm from.
I live in Point Pleasant, Bricktown's the next town over.
I went over there and I did one for the guys there.
I had like 75 guys there and guys in their families.
Every one of those to say well that's I've given the app you know because I just want you to do it because if you do it You're gonna feel better.
I don't know how much better How much work are you gonna put in you know, it all comes down to the work ethic like where you are how much work you put in where can you get right and where it I my program Meet you where you are.
And that's the whole thing with Jerry.
To watch where he is.
The last episode, I don't want to tell you what happened because I know eventually you'll get around to it and you're going to be like, wow, this fucking shit's crazy.
And to answer your question on the back, all I can think of I'm constantly lengthening and strengthening.
I stretched my whole wrestling, my whole athletic career, right up until I was 42 and three quarters when I blew my back out.
I stretched.
So stretching is great, but it's not the end-all be-all.
I'm stretching and strengthening the muscles, ligaments, and tendons.
When you use the resistance and the dynamic, time under tension, When you do that, it elevates your heart rate.
Think about this.
Laying down, your heart rate's the lowest ever, right?
Sit up.
What happens?
Your heart rate goes up.
Stand.
Walk.
Jog.
Sprint.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
That's what I'm doing when I had you flex your quads, flex your glutes, grab the ball, open those fingers wide, move with resistance.
I guarantee you your heart rate, if you started at 80, 80. It went to 105, 115, 120. I can take my heart rate from 90 to 140, well, 135, like that.
And I mean two minutes, standing still.
And that's not yoga.
That's DDPY. And I've been wearing a heart monitor doing this for over 18 years.
I've never done it, but I've heard amazing things from UFC guys that have fought and had pretty significant injuries, hand breaks, muscle damage, and had some pretty rapid recovery because of it.
My doctor, who she's my endocrinologist, when I told her I was doing it, she goes, I can tell you, I know it can only help you.
She goes, the only story I have about it, because I don't know enough about it, she said, I had a woman who had radiation therapy, so she had an open wound from her breast cancer, and it wouldn't close for over two years.
Send her down to Emory finally, put her in a hyperbaric chamber.
Three months later, 100% healed.
Same things happens with people with diabetes.
So I had heard like LeBron had it, you know, because I never saw an article on it, but I just heard some people talking about it, you know, in different areas, that he had one, Kobe had one.
So it got me thinking, and my house that I was just, I just left, it's called the accountability crib.
And I'm about to put this out there everywhere.
It's when I moved Jake into my home in Atlanta.
I just bought it.
And it was all about being accountability.
One of my friends, Christina Ann, sent me a list of names.
I want to call this something.
I put it out on the internet and she sent me like 22 names.
And one of them was the accountability crib.
So that's what I call it.
DDP's accountability crib.
And you got to be accountable for everything.
And the thing, I loved that home, but it was 22 steps, you know, to get to my bedroom, and my knees are bone on bone.
So going down was a drag, so I figured, fuck it, I'm going to buy a new home, master on Main, and I'm going to build this, you know, I have this place that I can bring in top-end athletes that want to be healed.
You know, so going back to the crib, I'm making that like an Airbnb now, and I'll have like the Jake the Snake Roberts suite, the Rachel Ramone suite, the DDP suite.
But mine, I would venture to say that he is not at 12 psi on that thing.
And what that means is pounds per square inch.
If you're like 10 to say 10 feet below sea level, that's about 4 pounds per square inch.
You know, it just goes up.
20 would be like 8 pounds per square inch.
At 12 pounds per square inch, The pressure is there and it takes like 10 minutes to get up there, like you're blowing your nose, like just get in the air, fix your ears and all that shit.
But what happens when you get to 12 psi, now it breaks the brain barrier and the oxygen will go to your brain.
So this is, I didn't know any of this shit till I sit next to a guy named Brad Campbell, who's like an angel, this cat.
And we just start talking on a plane.
And at some point I said, man, how old are you anyway?
It sounds like you do a lot of shit.
And he says, I'm thinking he looks at the max 45, maybe 40. He goes, I'm 57. I go, you're 57. I said, how the fuck do you look like that?
He said, I've been living in a hyperbaric chamber for the last 14 years.
He told me that when he gets a 12 PSI and it goes to your brain, and this would be layman's terms, okay?
Right.
Like when you get MS, it kind of like crystallizes on your brain, right?
And when the crystals fill up, where do they go next?
Down your spine.
Hence the cane, the walker, the chair.
So, what somebody, I don't know who the person was, who figured out 20 days in a chamber, and it's all about consistency.
You do it once or twice, you're going to feel better a little bit.
But when you do it like consistent, like 20 days, like they do there, take off five days, you do that four times.
You do your MRI on your brain before you start and after there's a kid named Daniel Bryan who is one of the biggest stars in professional wrestling and a couple years ago he had to retire at the height of his career and he was the hottest guy on the planet at the time and he wasn't a big guy but he was the number one guy in the business.
And he had to retire because of concussions.
Well, he's back.
And I haven't talked to him directly about this, but I did hear that he was using a hyperic chamber to help heal his brain.
Now, again, while he's telling me this story, I'm not thinking about MS, but I'm thinking, I've been hitting the head a lot.
You know, I've been knocked out a shitload of times.
I knocked out a shitload of guys by accident, but you know, they weren't trying to knock me out either, but it's not checkers out there.
So I've been hitting the head with chairs and all that shit.
So the guys who had those runs, they're pretty banged up.
And the other guys, I've just started, you know, I'm talking to Bart Oates, who is the president of the NFL Alumni.
And we've been talking about doing something for the guys.
And again, when I do shit like that, I just give it to them just to help them.
And I've talked to a few of the players.
I got a few guys, you know, loving it.
And so it's just, again, helping them with, because there's, you know, those guys are all weightlifting, running.
We can't do either now because you're so beat up.
So, you know, it was funny when we watched it, I know I'm sure you watched the Super Bowl when they had the 50th anniversary a couple years back, and all the MVPs that came out there, just, it was brutal to watch how beat up they are.
The only guy, of course, Jerry Rice looks like he could still play, you know, because that sort of a bitch is the greatest, he's just a freaking super athlete, and somehow, I don't know with all the crazy shots he's been hit with that he has survived, but there's certain people, I always say they could eat plastic.
Like, they can do anything.
And, you know, you said Herschel Walker before that.
And he was built like a fucking 20-year-old freak of nature, fully shredded, and then...
You know, I mean, you really have to stop and think, if that guy did fight when he was in his 20s instead of in his 40s, late 40s, he could have been a world champion, and I'm not bullshitting.
One of my claims of fame was His last big run for Dallas.
He caught like the ball and ran 67 yards into the end zone.
This is like 1997. And he put the ball between his hands.
Did the diamond cutter side and did the bang.
But you didn't know because he put the ball in there.
If it was that or he was doing something else.
And one of my friends who had a show, a radio show, Craig, he had it in...
Arizona, he called me up.
He goes, D, I'm having Walker on the show today.
He goes, do you want to sit in the wings?
I'll ask him if he did the diamond cutter or not.
And I just go, dude, I definitely want to hear that.
So he put me on the phone in the wings and I'm waiting there.
And he said, so what happened that day?
What was that thing you did with the ball?
He goes, well, you know, I'm a big WCW fan, and I really like Diamond Dallas Page, and I felt the bang, and I just did it and did the bang and everything.
And he goes, well, he's on the air right now with you.
What I think you're doing, and what I think one of the best benefits of yoga, and I'm sure the same with DDPY, is that you're connecting everything together, whereas yoga and sprinting and all these explosive exercises, it's building up to muscles, but what you're doing is you're tightening up all the joints.
You're tightening up the core and the joints.
And this is the thing that people are missing, that a lot of people are missing that are really into fitness and exercise.
They're doing all this explosive stuff, but what's connecting everything together is what blows out.
The knees, the ankles, the shoulders, the back.
And this is something that's missing from a lot of people's workouts because it's not as glamorous.
It's not like you do biceps, your thighs get all pumped up, you do chest, you get all pumped up, you look great.
It's a different thing.
What you're doing is for overall body maintenance and health and just connecting all these parts together in a way that makes the whole unit stronger and healthier.
2005. So I was interviewed by this guy from the Wall Street Journal and literally he quoted me saying when Kimberly had asked me if I would do the yoga.
I was like, fuck that.
I wouldn't be caught dead doing yoga.
And he put in there, F dash dash dash that, I wouldn't be caught dead doing yoga.
So that's in the beginning of the movie, right?
So the yogis like, hate me!
But by the time it gets to the end, where they see like, I'm just putting a different spin on it.
And I'm not trying to do what you're doing, but similar, getting, as far as I'm concerned, more benefits.
Bikram is, to me, first of all, I don't want to be that hot.
I don't want to be in a hot room.
I want to heat my body up in the cold.
So I don't want to put myself in a position where it's so hot that I can go farther than I've ever come before, because then I'm going to walk out into the real world.
And then I'm not going to get that.
I want to be able to get what I get in the real world.
And there's like, I want to say, I don't know how many positions there are.
Let's say there's 46 positions or whatever it is in Pekram.
But for me, what I do, like, one time Chris Jericho and I were, he came by my house in L.A. when I was living here, and we went out to the park, and he's like, so what do you do?
Do you stand up one day, you know, strength build it or next?
I go, Chris, I do it different every...
I do the same open and do the same close.
But all the middle, I go, it's like a match, man.
I'm making it up as I go along at times.
You know, and I'm improv-ing because I'm seeing what you can do.
And then I'm going to take it different.
If I see you can really go...
Well, I'm going to push you to a different level than I go to.
If you can't, then I'm going to back way the fuck off.
Because I don't want to burn you.
I want you to...
I did it with Tito.
Tito Ortiz, one time, he'd written something in Sports Illustrated, interviewed him.
And I had met him at a strip joint in Vegas.
And he was the man in UFC at the time.
They weren't making any money.
You remember back in the beginning when they weren't making any money.
And he wanted to go to where we were.
And I was like, dude, here's what I really feel.
This shit you're doing is building crazy momentum.
I go, we're at the top of where we're going to go right now, and it's so cyclical, at some point it's going to fall out.
I said, it's a whole different thing than what you're doing.
I know you appreciate it, which I'm super excited about, but bottom line is, man, stay where you are.
And he's saying this in the SI interview, right?
So I still had his number, and I called him up, and he answered the phone, like, hey, Dito.
Like, hey, DDP! I'm like, hey, man, I saw what you said, and you told the story exactly, because I talked him out of it, like trying to go, and told him, no, stay where you are, dude.
You're about to have a hell of a run.
And he put that over.
So I said, man, you remembered exactly the way it went.
And he said, yeah.
He goes, of course, that's what I'm going to tell.
What I found on the internet, there's few things that they really share.
Like when Steve first did that video, I looked at it and went, man, you don't have, back then it was still, we were just branding it DDP Yoga.
You don't have ddpyoga.com on it though.
No, bro.
He goes, I read a book.
And in the book, remember, this is 2011. And he said, I read a book that talked about if you want something to go viral, it can't be an advertising ad.
It has to be, unless it's super funny, then that's different.
He said, but if you want to, there's two things we can do here.
We can make it an ad.
We can inspire people.
He goes, what do you want to do?
I said, let's inspire people.
So then I watched it again, right?
And then I'm watching it, and I go, fuck, I'm a yogi in there.
So I called him up, and I go, bro.
I go, I don't want to be...
I mean, I love yoga, but I want to go for the people...
And we have some where people are just sitting down and we have like beginner, beginner, but by the time you come into my class, like when I'll do, I'll go do a class and I'll be back to let everybody know Tuesday of next week I will be doing a class at DDP Yoga Performance Center.
It'll be jammed.
You won't be able to fit enough people in there.
But there'll be people with chairs and there'll be people without them and the energy will be insane because I've got you counting and you'll see like, grab the ball.
Now grab a hold and work your back and bys here and pull.
Deep breath.
Three, two, one.
I'm engaging everything.
Now, negative rep.
So you're engaging again.
Again, I want to get your heart rate up there and keep it there.
First time Bruce Springsteen ever sang Dancing in the Dark was caught up with a band called Bystander and sang with them.
Because, you know, Bruce is down two blocks, one block away was the Stone Pony, where I watched him probably 18 Sundays in a row play with a band called Cats on a Smooth Surface.
You got to have nine guys, you know, at least seven, you know, they play with another seven or whatever.
Nine is what you want, of course, but whatever you can do to make it work.
For basketball, you just need one.
You need a ball and a hoop.
That's it.
In eighth grade, I sat on the bench, and I had never sat on the bench ever.
So I thought, that's never happened to me again.
And it taught me the greatest lesson.
It taught me, that summer, I played every day, all day long.
Five hours a day minimum.
You know, when you're by yourself.
Layups, hooks, foul shots, whatever.
And then the games pick up.
In the beginning, I didn't get picked up until the end, maybe.
And then as time went on, over that summer, it kept getting better and better and better and better.
My freshman year, I started, and we went undefeated.
My sophomore year, I was playing varsity.
So I realized that work ethic equals results.
So that was the huge lesson I learned from that.
So now I'm 23 years old, and I hurt my knee, and I'm going to take some time off away from the dream of being a wrestler, and I get caught in the booze, the prods, and the party.
And I was lucky that I had a way of parenting myself, like getting into that whole party scene, which I did, but slowly I kind of backed myself out a little bit each year.
And I've got this club in Fort Myers, Florida at the time, and this one I actually own a little piece of it with my buddy Tony Cafaro and a couple other guys.
One night I'm in the office and we had a camera at the back door and a camera at the front door.
This place would hold, legally, probably about 600 people.
We got a thousand in there.
And I'm looking at the camera as the person walks and looks just like Jake the Snake Roberts.
I'm a huge fan of Jake Roberts.
So I friggin' run outside the building, come around, because I don't want to walk through the people.
And I go to this girl, Judy, at the front door.
I go, did a guy just walk in here who looks like Jake Roberts?
She goes, yeah.
She goes, I think it's him.
So I practically go right again there, like a huge mark.
And when they're doing it, this TV, when I do the radio spot, they're filming me in my car, and ready to do a radio spot, I'm wearing a Wrestlemania t-shirt.
And I know because I have this footage still.
And I put it up on my Motivational Mondays for my very first one.
A power of what's possible.
And then they film me at my office, right?
Now let me just digress.
The week before, I'm going around at night and I'm grabbing the drawers, you know, like the money drawers.
And I'm watching video that's up on Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.
Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. - Look at this girl. - The diamond dollar satin This is an exchange here, you know what I'm saying?
You know what I'm talking about?
This man is loved by women all over the world.
They love to cuddle him.
He is the Teddy Bear.
If you wouldn't mind, take off that jacket there, Teddy Bear.
Show the fans what you got.
Show them what you got here.
Oh boy, Teddy V is going to be so excited to be here on Joe Rogan's show.
He is an unbelievable specimen, an unbelievable man here.
I get a phone call from the girl in the front desk.
She says, Paige, there's someone to call for Diamond Dallas Paige?
I pick up the phone.
I go, fuck you, Smokey.
And I hang up the phone, right?
Because I think it's Smokey ripping me, right?
He calls back.
She goes, it's not Smokey.
His name's Smitty.
He's got a radio show.
He wants to talk to you.
I go, hello?
He's like, yeah, we want to bring you on the show.
He goes, you know, I'm a boxer who has his own show about boxing, but I want to start doing wrestling.
I go, he goes, I want to have you on the show.
I go, bro, I don't really do it.
I was just making that shit up, you know?
And he's like, who cares?
It's radio.
And I'm like, man, I don't know.
He goes, I'm gonna have Captain Lou Albano on.
Like, what's the odds of that?
I'm gonna have Captain Lou Albano on the show.
I want you to be my co-host.
I go, do I get to talk to Captain Lou?
He's like, absolutely.
I go, I'm in!
So I do that show and I do another one with Sergeant Slaughter.
And he says to me, he says, you know, you got to do something with this Diamond Dallas Page thing.
You're a natural.
I go, Smitty, do what?
I don't know what the fuck to do.
I mean, it's just something in my head.
And he says, I got this friend of mine named Rob Russon, who's a boxing promoter who now is working for the AWA up in Minnesota.
I'll give you his address.
Send him a tape or something.
So I think about it and I write those storylines for those guys.
And then I make that tape and I send it to the AWA. No bullshit, Joe.
Two weeks later, I get a phone call.
Hey, is this Diamond Dallas Page?
And I'm like, yeah, this is Rob Russom from the AWA. We've seen your tape.
We want to bring you and your boys in for a tryout.
He goes, but we've got one question.
You know, we've shown the tape around and everybody kind of likes your stick.
You know, it's fresh.
It's got energy.
He said, but no one's ever heard of you.
Where are you guys working?
Well, Rob, we got one problem.
None of those guys can wrestle.
He's like, what?
He goes, why would you send us a tape?
I go, it's like a secret society.
Like, no one can figure out how to fucking get in.
So, you know, while they're training, I could, you know, manage.
And I'm like, ah, don't call us, we'll call you.
And two weeks later, God just aligned this for me for some reason, just to be where I am today.
But Paul Heyman, who's one of the biggest stars as, you know, a character on WWE television, was called Paulie Dangerously at the time.
He left the AWA, went to the NWA, which was gonna get bought by Ted Turner, left a huge spot open for a young guy that could talk.
They brought me in.
All those clothes you saw me in, I was wearing that shit in Fort Myers, Florida.
And I said to my buddy, Kurt Church, who was my head bouncer at the time, my head of the floor, and when this was starting to happen, I go, dude, can you imagine if I ever have a reason to dress like this?
You know, like, And if anything, I got way more tapered down.
You know, I wasn't living the gimmick.
But, man, it was the beginning of everything.
And then Dusty Rhodes had come into Florida for Florida Championship Wrestling.
And Dusty took me under his wing, man.
And he gave me every break that ever meant anything to my career early on.
That's why it was so important for me.
To be there for Cody because I'm not getting choked up just thinking about it.
Without Dusty Rhodes, there is no Diamond Dolls page.
He gave me every break I ever had and for me to watch his son do what they did last weekend.
And then I finally get the call because Dusty, who went to WWE... And he did his polka dotted gimmick with him.
He came back to run the WCW. He's NWA world champion.
He's like one of the smartest guys ever in our business.
And I developed a relationship that was super tight with him when we were in Florida.
But it was his wife, Michelle.
Who really kept it going when he wasn't, because when I'd call up just to check in with Dusty once in a while, she'd say, don't worry, Dallas.
Dusty will call you back.
And knowing how bad he is at calling someone back, I know that, that's why I thank Michelle in my Hall of Fame speech, because I know without her, I don't know if it ever would have kept going the way it did, but Dusty, you know, he brought me in and I managed the Freebirds, Michael P.S. Hage and Jimmy Jam Garvin, which was such an education, such a good time.
Michael's still one of my best friends today.
And I helped Scott Hall, who was Big Scott Hall, come in, changed his entire look from blonde hair and a big roll with mustache I had him dye his hair jet black and give him this brush cut beard that like nobody had the five o'clock shadow and no one knew who the fuck he was and I brought him in and what is happening as you see all the crazy clothes I wore Well,
five months in, Magnum TA, who's Dusty's right-hand man, comes up to me and he's like, listen, D, we're going to keep you at the color commentators box.
I'm also doing color commentating with Eric Bischoff, who would later run the company.
And he said, we can't let you manage anymore.
I'm like, what?
What'd I do wrong?
He goes, it's not anything you're doing wrong, bro.
He goes, with the hair and the wrap and the dolls and those crazy clothes, he goes, you're taking too much attention away from the boys and they're the ones who draw the money.
And I was like, so fuck, are you telling me, Magnum, that I'm too over the fucking top for wrestling?
And he goes, as a manager, kinda.
He said, but, you know, what we should have done is put you in a pair of tights and boots and see if you could do this shit.
I had seven months left on my contract, bro.
I said, fuck this.
I never got in this business to be a manager.
I wanted to live the dream.
Well, I'm gonna do it.
And I went down there and they beat the fuck out of me.
I'm here in LA. I'm living in Playa Vista before that.
All that shit blew up there, right?
I'm living there.
I want to say it's 2004 because I wrestled until I was 46. Then I took off two and a half years, came here, did the whole acting thing and put my dues and put the work in.
Now I want to go back and I want to show people what I can do with my DDPY program at 49. So I call up a buddy of mine named Rick Bassman, and he's got the UPW at the time, and he's got the own area, kind of like the power plant was, and the kids are training there whenever.
I said, do me a favor, send me over one of your boys and let him come by and get me, and I'll do what I want to do, and then I'll help work with him a little bit.
And so he sends me Mike the Miz.
And just the sweetest kid.
And we have a great talk on the way over there.
And I get done doing all my shit.
And then I say, okay, what do you want to learn?
He's like, you're going to work with me?
I'm like, hell yeah, I'm going to work with you.
You've got a great attitude, dude.
Of course I'm going to work with you.
And we worked.
And now he's taking me home.
And he tells me about how he was a real world.
He's like the original real world guy.
So I said, man, you've got that piece.
People already know you.
That's really worth something.
It'll really come back to help you later as you're going through this.
So we get all the way back to my place, and I'm like, you want to come in for a beer?
He's like, oh, absolutely.
So he comes in, and who's on the porch but Stone Cold Steve Austin, who I lived with at the time, and Kevin Nash are there.
So he's like, whoa, what the fuck?
And I was just at WrestleMania two years ago when I was inducted into Hall of Fame, and Miz was back doing one of his things.
Now he's got the reality show with his wife, which is super funny.
And there's times where I'm like, this is really real.
Because, you know, reality show, there's no such thing as real life and reality show shit.
But there's a lot of their stuff you can tell that they're like shooting on because they want like the real deal.
But he told that story.
Like he was backstage with one of his suits on and his wife there.
He goes, holy, come here, come here.
Let's talk about the story when we first met.
And I just knew that that kid, like...
He's hit a couple of roadblocks along the way that he could have quit.
He could have walked away from it.
He could have not.
But he had such a belief in himself.
I always tell people, never underestimate the power you give yourself by believing in you.
And that's who The Miz is.
And I think he's going to be a huge...
I love the fact, we get a whole different slant now because of the man, The Rock.
She's laughing so hard, but I'm laughing because I'm watching it and I know what they're saying or an idea of it, but when you got visual comedy, which you know, when you don't hear the words and you're watching like Buster Keaton and you're laughing, that's really good shit.
And it's super funny and seeing it killed it.
So, you know, he's a super A-list actor now.
He just did a Ferdinand movie and I mean, he's on fire.
Last time I saw him at the show, I just pulled him over for a second.
I don't really know him that well, but I wanted him to know that I was so proud of him, not for what he's done as an actor, even though I'm super proud of him on that level, but how he carried the company on his back for over a decade and still did so much work for charity.
It was mind-boggling.
No one has done more along that whole Make-A-Wish thing than Cena has.
But when I saw, did you see him when he hosted the ESPYs?
I don't know what the real story is, but I'll tell you what, of all the guys that I know, I'm super supportive of Hulk because he was super supportive of me.
Right now, he finally got back and they finally brought him back in to WWE, which I was super excited about because, to me, going into Hall of Fame without Hulk being in there, it was kind of like...
But Hulk, I mean, when I got to do my stuff with him, because we not only did the Malone stuff, you know, with me and Malone against Rodman and Hogan, but the next month, they come in, and because we shot that angle on The Tonight Show, and the next month, they go in, Hogan and Bischoff, and they run Jay off the set.
I come in from the wings, not Hulk on his ass, and it's me and Jay Leno against Hogan and Bischoff.
You know, what I love about Sly, like, you know, you go back to, and a lot of people don't know that story, I'm sure you do, you know, how he wrote that script of Rocky and would not sell it.
Let me give you a behind the scenes from Stone Cold Steve Austin.
He's a brother to me.
Like a real one.
We lived together.
We rode together.
One of my best friends.
And he's doing the first Expendables.
And he's doing...
We talk about...
I guess he's on the set for a couple of weeks by this time.
And he says, I'll tell you what, D... And you remember, every top alpha dog is in that first movie, because he grabbed the heavies of the heavies, the guys who had the biggest names.
And Austin said, in a world of alpha dogs, there is one number one guy, and his name is Sylvester Stallone.
And he said when he were doing the Hollywood fight in the back, Stallone was like, come on!
It doesn't come out until January, but here's my goal.
I had two books before this.
I didn't push them to be bestsellers because they weren't really worthy.
This is, because I know it's going to really help people.
And here's the hook that I want to do.
The reason I want people to get it, pre-order it now.
And this is what I'm going to give with this.
Anyone, and it's up on my site, if you go to ddpyoga.com slash positivelyunstoppable, And you order the book there, there'll be an address right there, the DDP Yoga Performance Center, which is 1239 Concord Road, Smyrna, Georgia, 30080. If you send me a self-addressed stamped envelope, we've got these book plates that random house, it's a random house book, and they send me these book plates that I'm going to sign.
And if you send me that self-adjust stamped envelope with a proof that you purchased the book, that you pre-ordered the book, I'm gonna send you my autograph.
Well, autograph in the book, when I'm doing a Comic-Con, I'm $40 for a picture, $40 for an autograph, $60 combo.
The book costs $24.99.
So if you're looking to get a DDP signature, Diamond Dallas Page signature, you got it for the book.
I will send it to you.
My goal is to make Positively Unstoppable a best-selling book.
And I think in my easiest, not easiest, the only way I'm really going to do it is by pre-order.
Because I don't have any machine behind me except for my own shit, you know?
And doing this the way, I just want to check one thing.
I'm not exactly sure how that works, but I just know if you go to ddpyoga.com, it's going to be cheaper, and you can get it for a month, three months, a year, whatever.
The deal is there.
They'll figure it out.
Maybe we can come back when this gets released and talk about this, but I've got a new documentary coming out.
You've already seen Jake's, and I know you're going to love The Resurrection, Jake the Snake.
If you want to see that, we just took it off of Netflix.
It's only on iTunes.
It's like 99 cents.
You're looking to inspire.
Everyone has some sort of addiction in their life, whether it's their uncle, their father, their sister, their brother.
They're somewhere around it.
I've had so many people come up to me and so many people have come up to Jake and say, that movie changed my life.
People come up and say, I'm three months sober.
I'm two years sober.
Like, that movie changed my life.
And Jake doing the program It gave him a way to get wins, meaning like going from 307 pounds to under 300, then to 270, and so forth.
But being able to move more and be able to feel better.
So resurrection gives you that inspiration.
And you just watched Arthur's video.
Well, Jake's movie, The Resurrection of Jake's Snake, you're going to laugh.
You're going to cry.
Most of all, you're going to be inspired.
So the new documentary we got coming out will be out sometime in 2019. I'll talk to you before it comes out.
And it's called Relentless.
And it goes from the day that Kevin Nash blows my back out.
And the other guy said he didn't do it.
It was my body just finally blew out.
He's always trying to protect me and vice versa.
But when I blew my back out to where we are today, We have actually take out the wrestling shit.
We have 16 years of footage of this entire journey up and down and up and down and how We became with the program at eight-year overnight success And this is one of the most inspiring movies.
I know anybody will ever see and that'll be out this year and um That's really it.
You know, the app is at ddpyoga.com.
If you want to get the book, if you want to pre-sell, go to ddpyoga.com slash positivelyunstoppable.