Badges of Busy and Certificates of Suffering - Max Shank

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, where we talk with entrepreneurs, researchers, and practitioners in fitness, wellness, and the health sciences. I'd like to give a big thanks to our sponsors, Level 5 Mentors, helping entrepreneurs achieve the highest levels of freedom in time, money, relationships, health, and purpose. Also, Certified Course Creation, helping entrepreneurs create accredited online certifications that are not only lucrative but highly scalable. Go to level5mentors.com or certifiedcoursecreation.com and learn more. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and once again, welcome to the future of fitness. We're live. Max Jank. Welcome back to the show. It's been a little while. A few things have happened since we talked last. So it's it's good to see you, man. How you been?

It's great to see you. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

Yeah. So uh I don't know. I probably should have gone back and looked at when the last time we talked, but it was probably, you know, on average, I think you come on the show about every year. Yeah, six months have been a little while. Um tell me uh now that your hair is longer, your beard is fuller. Uh it's been fantastic. Thank you. What else have you been up to besides growing hair?

Gosh, I released a new program called Primal Athleticism, which is a follow-up to Ultimate Athleticism, which has done great. I think that's one thing that I got really either lucky with or whatever, but I was definitely ahead of the curve on the uh online business thing. I'd been building that up for about 10 years, so that made it so my income has uh stayed pretty good, even though we were forced to close down the gym. But primal athleticism is really a good evolution of where I'm at as a coach now, where ultimate athleticism was really kind of reaching for the stars, like really high levels of athleticism in a lot of different areas, but I would say much pointier, if that makes sense. So much deeper on a fewer skills. And primal athleticism is kind of like approaching it from a bit of a different perspective, where you're looking at the connection of the experience, you're taking a little bit more of a broad view, things like vision and rhythm and coordination that I didn't really cover in ultimate athleticism because it's so heavy, heavily focused on the marriage of gymnastics and powerlifting and like athletic sprint training and things like that. And so I'm I'm really excited with that. It took me about four years to learn enough to put it all together, and that's just going great. And that's how I train now, too. It's more of a daily practice than a training program, and it it suits me really nicely, and people are really enjoying it. So that's the main thing that's new.

Yeah, man, I mean I feel like it uh just reflects your evolution as a person and a coach, right? What does your daily practice look like now? What are you what are you doing?

Oh gosh, well, I always do some breathing to get started. We do an ohm followed by a control pause, and then during that sequence, we do a little bit of gnarly, which is where you're actually practicing drawing the abdomen in and rolling the abdomen and waves and just building that core control. And you know, it's so funny. If you type in core training into Google, you'll probably see about 100 million results or something like that. But it's so uncommon for people to balance the tension in their stomach instead of just hold it really stiff. And of course, it contributes to breath holding. People suck in their gut and they can't breathe diaphragmatically. So always starts with breathing. There's vision and vestibular exercises, so we do something called palm fronding, which is where you rub your hands together and warm them up, place them over your eyes, and then while you're doing that, you do some balance swaying. So you're really stimulating your vestibular system, which is your inner ear, and building upon that, we'll go into some juggling, rolling on the floor, doing some shoulder rolls from standing if it's within your level, and combining some crawling, carrying, and climbing with some rolling, bouncing, and balancing. And there's a whole sequence on uh self-massage and isometrics and shaking to get that full spectrum of balance with the muscles and movements. So I always say if you know if you're hurting, just uh try to rub, squeeze, and shake. And that will that will likely be a really good start if you do that for a week or so. And it really, it's one of those things. It reminds me of that quote that's been attributed to all kinds of people, which is uh, I wrote you five pages because I didn't have time to write it in one page. And that's kind of the idea with this program is you know, at the end of it, you get videos and you get a daily checklist. And there's some philosophy and some ideas about life and training and creating that balance and seeing it more as a daily practice than uh training with some big ice cream cone in the sky that you're going to uh achieve someday. And then uh yeah, once you get those six-pack abs, you'll finally be enough, of course. So it's it's there's not much to it. And when you approach it with the idea of a nonverbal daily dialogue you have with yourself, your orientation is totally different. So you get to this point where you start to build a lot of trust and confidence within yourself, and within that daily dialogue, it's it's an ask and a response. So if you if you sprint, you know, your your brain uh or your mind, however you'd like to uh form that idea, is asking your body, hey, can we sprint up this hill? And if your body says yes, then you learn to trust yourself a little bit. If you do a backflip frequently, your body's like, yeah, we can we can do that. We we have confidence in that ability. And what you're doing is you're expanding your world by how well you can balance, how well you can move, and whether or not you can uh writing a check that your ass can't cash. So you basically want to do the opposite of that, and you want to make sure that you continue to build those abilities because otherwise what ends up happening, this is the saddest part, is the world starts to shrink. You know, a really simple test is to stand in one place and just see how far you can look behind you. You know, use your eyes, use your head, use your whole body, and just see how far you can look behind you in both directions, and you're like, wow, so that's that's where I have that like confident ability. And then you start to build upon it with a metronome, which my friend Anders jokes that that's that's my only coach is a metronome. And I'm just really yeah, well, and you know, it works for all kinds of things for music, for juggling. Uh I've done some firearms training as well, where precision and coordination is really important, and you start to groove these patterns to a metronome, and then you just slowly bump up the speed, and it kind of reminds me of that phrase, uh, slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Yeah.

And the problem is if you're in like a really hurry to be really fast, you end up missing a lot of those juicy gains that you can get from being really deliberate and slowing it down. I really pulled a lot of ideas from music and dance that apply really well to fitness.

You know, I think of you uh often, Max, because I think in our first conversation on this show, we we laughed about how we always feel like we're in a race. Like I'll be making coffee. I'm like, well, I want to see how fast I can put together my coffee. And I'll be like, why the fuck am I doing that? Like, why do I feel like I have to be in a hurry when I'm doing the most simple things, right? Like at some point I got really screwed up, you know, probably because I was erasing a clock for a lot of my life. But I think that happens so many times. I don't know, is it is it a lot of people? Is it just people like us? Like, I don't know. But I think about you when when that happens in my life, because it happens all the time.

Yeah, well, and you know, really, like what can you offer people? You can offer people better results, you can offer people faster results, or offer people a juicier experience. And that's kind of uh that's kind of the main deviation, I guess, between ultimate athleticism and primal athleticism. Ultimate athleticism is like minimum time, maximum benefit. We're gonna we're gonna get you to be this athletic beast so you can dominate your competition in the most effective form of uh in the most efficient way. So a very small amount of time, but huge benefits. And this is more like you have an appetizer and you have a glass of wine. It's it's more of like crafting this experience that you look forward to and leaves you feeling energized rather than just trying to maximize the benefit. But that's also so common in fitness, is we're chasing these benefits. And the way you differentiate yourself is you say that you're gonna give better results or you're gonna get faster results. And we can mostly only mimic. So that's that's what it all looks like. And you know, people love the word hack. You want to like hack your results, and you want to like dig in and get in there like much faster. And what's so interesting is you you will gain more results, but it may not satisfy you the way that you think it will. It's kind of like uh I always joke right now about setting up a meditation competition. I don't know why that's not like much. Uh I just uh, you know, we can have like standing in one place for time. And you know, it's like I think uh that that's that's just what I think of is I think like let's let's put on a meditation tournament or something like that so we can see uh you know who's the most enlightened of us all.

The most woke. How much time how much time during the day do you just think?

Do you just set time to just you know everybody's different, and in my case, I find that I naturally gravitate toward thinking about more or less left to my own devices, I'm very curious, and I'm always trying to think of where I can be the most useful because I it does feel good to help people, and I have uh certainly in my life had a very high bar for myself. And it's typical with people who are very self-critical to be very high achievers. Uh, because if you're not self-critical at all, you'll probably just sit quietly in the forest, and you probably won't really write a lot of books or build a lot of companies. So it's finding that nice balance, and that's actually one of the things I did with primal athleticism is I really emphasize activities that are going to bring you into a flow state. And I think that's for me, that's the bringing it back to being present, is being in flow. Because naturally, I'm very curious, I'm always thinking about things, um working on uh I mean, I have a really diverse set of interests that ranges from like I'm really getting into refrigeration and electrical engineering and all these different things, and really into Hold on for a second. Yeah.

Walk that back. What uh what sparked the interest in refrigeration and electrical engineering? Did your refridge go out and then you're like, you know, I gotta figure this out? What where did that come from? That's not normal.

Well, okay, so people don't really care about things like virtues, they just care about services. And they just care about the utilities that they have. And I had no idea how a refrigerator works. And I'm it's still like a very loose understanding. I mean, but the world that we live in is really only possible because we have these refrigerators running all the time. Like our whole society would totally crumble without refrigeration because it's so important to refrigerate food. And I was also interested in um designing and building my own cold lunch. I built one out of a deep freezer, and I was looking at all of the other different ways that you can cool things down. And what's interesting is there's actually no way to cool things down. You can just basically change the pressures of things and you can pass heat around. But there's no such thing as like a freeze ray or something like that, at least not in this uh particular existence that we have here. So it's just uh like fascinating thing because most of the world around us is black box algorithm, if you're familiar with the term. Familiar?

No. I feel like I should be.

Uh it's one of my favorite terms, it's super interesting.

Okay.

Black box algorithm is basically you use something, it works, but you don't know how. And so basically, somewhere around 90 plus percent of the stuff that we use every day, all the time, people we just don't know how it works. And myself included, and I've always been so curious that I just want to learn more about how all this stuff works. Like learning about uh transistors and logic gates for computer programming is like totally mind-blowing. The fact that you and I are talking in real time right now, I mean, think about all of the different processes that have to happen. You know, we're having our images be captured by a camera, turned into ones and zeros, sent through the air, like wirelessly, to some wires, and those things are flying close to the speed of light to have this conversation. I mean, it's crazy to think of all of the amazing things going on. And so this is how my brain kind of just gets down these rabbit holes because it's so I dig it. Yeah. So I'm I'm thinking about stuff pretty much all the time, and I'm always looking for those little margins of how to help uh people live better, because that's also the easiest way that I can uh have a lot of personal financial success and also that that that happy feeling. I mean, I've done the whole routine where I just bought myself a lot of toys, and I thought that would make me happy too. Like, oh, I'll I'll get rich and then I'll get all these things that I always wanted. And uh once again, that was not the big ice cream cone in the sky either. And it kind of came back full circle to just really enjoying the things that got me to that point in the first place, which is helping people find those enjoyable ways to improve their quality of life. And that's why it led me to this idea of a daily practice and doing like ohms and humming and different vision exercises and incorporating all of these things you don't really see because you know, from an economic standpoint, the term opportunity cost means basically whatever you do, you're sacrificing everything you could be doing otherwise. So when I think about exercise or movement or daily practice, I'm really pretty ruthless. I'm like uh I'm like Stephen King when it comes to writing, where he says you gotta murder your babies, you know? And I think that is what has led me to this pretty weird blend of different things from different areas that, in my opinion, is just uh so physically empowering, so psychologically encouraging, and and really just like a soul-nourishing experience, if I can get a little bit far out for a second, because you know, that concept of chasing uh happiness or like enoughness, you know, our our culture is very sick, is the reality. Um, you know, just to feel comfortable doing nothing, we need to call it uh meditation or go seek some yoga guru. It's like the the disease of the West. You got the uh the badge of busyness and the certificate of suffering, and then that's like the most surefire way that people will think that you're good, because you know, the worst thing you could do is do nothing. How how could you? How could you do nothing? And it's like, well, it's actually pretty uh pretty nice to do nothing sometimes, turns out.

It's it it I was so excited to get you on the show during this particular time frame of the year because it's so it's so odd things are going on. And even you know, I'm reflecting what you were talking about, like understanding refrigeration and how we got really close as a society to these things crumbling. Like this is the first time in my lifetime we're like, holy shit, like we may lose some fundamental, you know, supply chains, things like that. Like people may really get a dose of what life could be without all these conveniences. And it turned out it never got there, right? But we started to see it. I mean, toilet paper was the first thing, right? Like, well, we we're all gonna be fine without toilet paper, turns out. Even if we didn't have it.

Well, you know why that happened though.

Well, it's because one person actually I don't know exactly why that happened. Do you know?

Why why would that happen? I mean, if there was like some sort of like danger, people were afraid and like stocking up supplies. Like I remember going to the store and I saw the aisle of toilet paper just gone.

Yeah. Same thing.

And I was like, whoa. But then, you know, there are cases of coconut water and water and all these things that are ten times more important. But why toilet paper? And it's because toilet paper, it's huge. So you just can't transport a lot of it very easily, and it looks really bad on the shelf. So I think that was a totally manufactured scarcity because that's the easiest thing, and it's not like someone's gonna be like, oh, yeah, let's let's triple the toilet paper productions. Not like there are really that many places that are manufactured. I'm not a hundred percent certain of it, but it's just kind of the perfect manufactured scarcity because it's just the easiest. It would be way more difficult to uh and and once again it just doesn't make sense. So they told everybody, better get toilet paper now. So people went out and panicked bought, and yeah, I mean, it's it's really big on the shelf, so it looks really scary, but you know, the reality is we could all totally live without toilet paper. It's so far from necessary to our basic survival. And I'm just in the store, like laughing, you know, as I picked up a couple cases of coconut water, and just like, okay, like that's that's fine, like, you know, whatever you guys want to do. It's uh so what I'm saying is we're at this point where people don't think about the reality of the situation. And it's not really their fault because um people are trained to be dumb and follow the crowd. And that's all that also makes sense because there's nothing worse than exile. I mean, human beings are the most social creatures there are, so uh naturally we want to link up with a tribe and feel like some sort of camaraderie. It all it all kind of makes sense to me. It's really sad, um, you know, the way that fear is just being uh pumped into people's minds uh 24-7. But hey, it just is what it is, and you know, if people don't really have the tools to decipher between important and unimportant, well, I mean, that's also why people feel busier than ever, even though we have more tools than ever. You know, how how is it that nobody has any time? How is it that the government never has any money when we have greater technology that provides us leverage than ever before? And the answer is it's just never enough because the incentives are backwards.

So it's gonna be fascinating, Max. I mean, I don't know, I'm gonna give it a time frame, five years from now, when someone writes a book on all this, or multiple books are written about this phase of humanity and whatever the outcome ends up being after November and seeing what happens after you know the United States. I mean, I'm I talked to a lot of Canadian, I talked to a lot of people all over the world.

Yeah.

And uh this is I I've always felt that the United States feels that you know we have our own, um, that we're the most important thing on the planet, right? And yeah, it seems like now people really are watching. Like, what are they, what are they doing over there? You know, Canadians are like, I'm in Montana, right? Canadians like, mm-mm, no, you're not coming up, right? You guys deal with your your shit. And then, you know, maybe a month from now we'll let you guys back up. But it's it's really fascinating. I can't wait to see when the research is done and uh people we see where the the stimulus money went. We see like, well, what could what could we have done better? Like, was a lockdown really the right strategy? No one ever questioned that. We knew we had to do something because the numbers we were seeing were scary, right? But we know and ever questioned, well, is that the right strategy? We just went with it. And maybe there was other strategies that never came to light. There's things like that where we're gonna take a big step back. We're like, oof, wow, we could have done some things differently.

You know, my my trick is that I don't ask people their opinion. I just ask if they're willing to bet. Because uh people will talk out their ass all day long for Uh, you know, virtue signaling lights or whatever, but if someone really has conviction, they will be willing to bet. And so I don't waste time with people's opinions. Are you willing to bet or not? You know, I have I I put out a very unpopular bet many months ago. And I think it, you know, I I question whether it does any good. I mean, part of the reason I'm so quiet about all this is because, you know, I'm not going to put my neck out just so people will hate me for having a different opinion. And that's that's one of the problems with this like uh sort of cancel culture we're in, is there are a lot of people who may have something valuable to offer, uh, maybe myself, and and we just won't talk anymore because it's just not worth it. But I bet that more people would die of suicide than of this alleged very like novel um virus. And oh my god, that made people angry. I I would still make that uh bet with anybody. I'd bet a thousand dollars uh with anybody that more people will die of suicide. But you know, the question I I really like uh Thomas Sowell, who's an economist, studied under Milton Friedman, and um you know he always brings it back to the core question. It's it's not what will we do, it's who will decide what we do. And you know, we're getting into a bit of a different topic here, which is freedom. And, you know, right now in America, we don't really have governors, we have temporary kings. Because if you have the ability to make a new rule with a pen instantly through like an executive order, well, why do we have laws in the first place? Why don't we just call it what it is? That's a king who can do whatever he wants. And so that that's um that's that's the idea. And you know, when it comes to risk reward, the same thing is true with fitness. You know, should squatting below 90 degrees be outlawed because it's bad for your knees? Uh, you know, and and if you if you believe these things, then that actually creates what's called a nocebo effect. You know what a nocebo effect is?

I presume it has something to do with placebo.

It's the exact inverse. So if I give you a cup of water and I say, hey, this is poison, and I have a little like skull drawn on it, there's a really good chance that you're going to feel sick, even though it's just plain old water. So if you tell someone that letting their knees go forward of their toes is going to hurt their knees, then not only will they be afraid of that movement, which will create all kinds of dysfunctional patterning, their knees might hurt more because of that. So if you tell people that they're going to be sick, they're going to be more sick. If you tell people that they're going to be weak, they're going to be more weak. And what's really funny is I've been doing a lot of uh ballet classes recently. Uh yeah, it's super fun. Do a little ballet, a little African dance. I mean, my whole paradigm on fitness has shifted so much because I really was more in like the physical therapist uh weight training culture, and then the the same movement would be like a basic move in a dance class, but it would give a PT a fucking heart attack because it just looked bad for you. And so I just started to like rethink all of these different uh various myths, we believe, like, oh, gluten is bad, and dairy is bad, and gosh, can I eat an egg yet? I mean, first they were good, then they were bad, then just the yolk was bad for a while, and then it turned out like if you do some clever fractions, you can have one yolk and three whites, and I I mean, it's like, give me a break. And so when you try to decipher all of the probabilities and different risks, it's like, is red wine good for you or bad for you? It's like, well, how much? And, you know, all these drunks learned the word resveratrol so they could justify being drunks. And so it's like, uh, well, I mean, we'll find anything to justify the behaviors we like. It's like, you know, if you look at a cosmopolitan magazine, it's like three reasons why chocolate and wine is good for you. It's like, yeah, you're speaking to the right audience here. I think they call it preaching to the choir. So I I'm very cautious about uh the nocebo effect because I think it really damages people's lives. And, you know, anyone who's telling tales of your weakness is doing it to gain some control over you. Because the reality is there's nothing more frightening than there's nothing more frightening to someone who seeks to control than a human being because we're so crazy powerful. The fact that we have language and we have these pretty darn powerful physiques also, and a mind that can think into the past, into the future, and plan and do different things, I mean, that's totally terrifying for the people who really want to try to control everything. And that desire to control is very natural. And if you look at uh the word stock basically says it all. So you have stocks from stockpiling, it goes back to being able to plan for like the winter time, basically. So you stockpile food, you stockpile guns, and then even when we trade securities, we're trying to securitize the future, and those are called stocks too. So we do this stock trading, and it's all this attempt to bring order out of chaos. And the reality is there's there's no guarantee for tomorrow. Uh, but if you tell people that, it really frightens them. We would really like to know that not only will tomorrow be good, but next year will be good, next quarter will be good, five years from now will be good. I mean, you got people running around saying the world is going to end. And I'm just like, give me a break, you arrogant prick. Like, are you kidding me? Like, who would presume? So, you know, the reality is it's very difficult to attach a quantitative value to something like risk. Um, but we try to do it. So we say, like, uh, you know, uh alcohol is bad, but not too bad, and uh mushrooms are like really bad because I don't know, maybe you'll be kinder to people after. I I don't know. Like, you know, they're they're all so like you know, I think a lot of people are just getting ripped red-pilled super hard, and other people are going the other way. We're realizing the rules don't make a lick of sense, and they only grow. And if you have this belief that someone at the top of the pyramid should be making decisions for everybody, then I have a really good documentary that I would recommend from PBS called The Dictator's Playbook. And it is it is fascinating to watch the differences between like a Mussolini and a Kim Il-sung who founded what is currently North Korea. Although I think it's called the People's Republic of North Korea. Yeah, it's it's like the Democratic Republic of Congo and the People's Republic of. It's always the super totalitarian places that are like always the People's Republic. And I just remember this scene that like spoke to me so much when Mussolini was giving a speech, and he goes, one country, one decision, and this huge crowd goes, yeah! Like they are so psyched that he is gonna call all the shots from now on. And it just really spoke to me because that's what happens when you lose confidence and faith in yourself, is you look to answers from somebody else. So naturally, that's the that's the path to controlling a huge amount of people is make them weak so they need you. And I would say, I think it's uh see, they're like some German guy, my friend Frank will make fun of me for forgetting. Uh it's uh freedom is knowing the truth of necessity. So I try to tell people now that knowing the difference between a need and a want will lead you to the answer. And often what happens is people try to make their wants into your needs, and they'll tell any kind of special story to mesmerize you into doing that. And you know, this is just a natural extension of evolution. You know, evolution really uh does all kinds of interesting things. You look at a crazy animal like the anglerfish, where it's got like a little shining lure that brings you in, and then it has gigantic mouth that just snaps you up in one go. And so there's like speed and camouflage and thing poison and all these different things that animals use to you know play the play the game of trying to get an edge on each other. And with language, the same kind of thing is happening. People are just trying to control using language because it scales way better than like bullets or swords. Like swords just don't scale very well. But if you tell a good story, that thing scales really well. Um I've talked about that quite a bit, actually.

Yeah, me too. I think about a lot, actually. There's uh Adam Corolla came out with a new book. I've never read an Adam Corolla book, but I think it's like your spirit animal guide or something like that album. But just go look it up, people. And uh he's gonna say a lot of things that will offend most people in that book. But you know what? A lot of it's right. And I think today, especially, comedians seem to be the last bastion of hope and free speech and like cancel culture. I mean, you look at Joe Rogan, I was reading an article today that you know, Spotify employees want to walk out because they want him to be censored in his show. I'm like, I can tell you right now, Joe Rogan went to Spotify with a very specific agreement saying you will not censor me, right? Because that's not what he's about. But everyone wants everyone wants to control that, right? And it's this this crazy, crazy thing, and it's done by language. You know, I was we have guests here at the house, and I was joking with them last night. I've known him for a long time. I'm like, hey, remember there are specific words that you and we could say five years ago that were hysterical, but we can't say them now. I'm not gonna bring them up on this podcast, but I'm like, hey, let's make this a safe safe space for the weekend. If we want to use these words, we can use them. And like that's that sounds amazing. And we laughed. We're like, oh, well, that's you know, we use the words and and and it was hysterical. No one got hurt.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.

Yeah, no one got hurt, man. And I think you'll love this story because I just heard it recently. And I apologize, my listeners, if I brought it up again, and if you heard it a few weeks ago, but this it's an analogy, and someone sits down to this dinner, you know, it's a holiday dinner, and there's a there's a ham on the table, and both of the tips are cut off, right? And uh the person who's a guest asks the guy who cooked it, who's a friend, who's like, Well, why is that? Why did you he's like, Well, I don't know, that's the way my my my mom cooked it, right? So the mom's there and the mom goes, you know, well, why why did you cut the tips off? Well, that's the way grandma always made it. So you the grand great grandma's over there and they go ask her, and like, grandma, why why do you why don't you cut the tips off? So it could fit in the pan. And that was it.

Yeah.

And we're like, well, once again, why are we doing all these things? Why do we eat three meals a day? Why do we set up, you know, eight to five? What why why do we do any of it? No one really asked these questions, but we seem to go along with it. And we're picking up all these new patterns, and it's amazing to me how fast people were willing to give up freedoms of their thought, of their routines, of the things that they felt important, how quickly they were just washed away. It was it's it's astonishing. And um, you know, kind of circling back to what this show is about is the fitness industry took a really hard hit because someone said gyms are unsafe.

Right. This is controlling with language. And it's it's super, is what it's called. So there are two really good examples of this. One is the Skinner Box, and what they did is they, and actually I saw Vsauce did this with humans, or I guess it was Mindfield. It was that uh same guy from uh VSAUS, which was online, and they put people in a room with a little dispenser that would dispense a dollar bill on a timer. And so what ended up happening is a lot of the people, whatever they were doing in this room, when the dollar came out, they kept trying to do that thing to make more dollars come out. And they B. F. Skinner did it with pigeons at first. And so these pigeons would develop these weird superstitions, like if it was flapping its wings and the food came out, it would keep flapping its wings constantly because it thought there was a correlation. So it just shows that correlation is not causation, right? So that's how these superstitions start to perform, and it doesn't take very long. You know, humans are creatures of habit, and it reminds me of uh the third round monkey roll, which is they put a ladder in the middle of a room. I think it might have been in a Chaldini book. Uh they put a ladder in a room, a bunch of monkeys, and at the top of the ladder was a bunch of bananas like hanging down. And so what they did with this bunch of monkeys is if they tried to go up there, uh if any monkey tried to go up there, they'd spray all the monkeys with uh with a hose. And the monkeys just really do not like this. And so what ended up happening was they took out some of the monkeys and put in some new ones. And then when the new ones came in and tried to climb the ladder to get the bananas, or as a fruit bowl, I can't, let's say it's bananas, that makes it seem a lot cleaner for monkeys. Uh the other monkeys would actually beat up that monkey and not even let it get to the top because they wanted to avoid um getting sprayed with the hose. Then what ended up happening is they took out the original monkeys and put in new monkeys again. So now you have five monkeys in a room who have never seen the hose who will not climb the ladder because they were also viciously beaten by the monkeys who were also beaten. And I mean, when you look at the way our culture is, like you can try to put the blame anywhere you like for all the superstitions that people believe. I mean, when I really sat down and thought about it, my my training philosophy was pretty much just what I had been taught. You know, I had never really taken a wider lens perspective of what can a person in this modern mind and movement destroying environment really do to lift themselves up because you know it's it's not like uh, you know, seven sets of squats instead of four. Like, I mean, there are people on the internet arguing right now about how five by five is like the best thing you can do. And like these like these like strong cripples are teaching people fitness. And I'm just going, like, is this what you people want? Like, I know you're I don't think this is the goal. I mean, I think the goal for most people is to be fit enough to do anything without being afraid, to be springy and light, and um, you know, be able to enjoy um fun experiences and then also be ready to to handle emergencies. You know, that's really what will give you uh that confidence and joy and things like that. So it's uh it's really interesting when you kind of pull back the veil that has been created uh naturally because we need to like differentiate ourselves. Like, hey, look at me, I'm uh you know, I teach uh five by five powerlifting, and you know what? Gosh, I say this is the best thing you can do for fitness. And then you got the uh like the Barry's boot camp kind of thing where you got this uh motivational actress uh yelling cliches at you. Uh you know, it's uh it's it's just uh it's just funny all these different ways that we decide to do it. And there's nothing wrong with like doing any of that stuff if you like it. I mean, I'm I I recommend you try all kinds of things. Try try Olympic weightlifting, try powerlifting, try gymnastics, try try a dance class if you're uh courageous enough, fellas. There are also a lot of girls in there. I mean, it's uh just so interesting, to your point. Usually the reason we do things is because that's how the uh the guy before did them.

Yeah.

That's it. And I think a lot of fitness professionals and coaches kind of go through this this evolution, right? Where I distinctly remember being in a room of coaches, mostly CrossFit coaches, and uh I thought someone was gonna throw a chair across the room because we were arguing about whether or not you should call your clients athletes or clients. Like, no, they're athletes. Everybody's an athlete. Like, no, they're clients. Some people don't want to be athletes. This literally was the the devolution, de-evolution of the argument that got so heated, I was like, what is going on here? And I argued about the same thing. I'm like, obviously, this is a three by five situation. This isn't a five by five back squad. Are you kidding me? Like, what are you, an idiot? And then, like, and then you sort of all and now I'm like, you know what, I I just want to do things that I like. Last time we had a conversation, uh, afterwards, I texted you, I'm like, yeah, I don't know what I'm gonna do. If or no, at the end of the conversation, I'm like, should I go skiing right now or should I go to the gym? You remember this? And you're like, I think you should go skiing. And then I text you like an hour later, I'm like, I'm skiing. You're like, good, get on you. I'm having fun.

And that's that was it. I always love our conversations. I always come away with some great stuff. We should uh maybe even try twice a year.

Yeah. Well, now I think about that, must have been winter. So we're getting, yeah, we're about 10 months out. Um let's talk about the fitness industry specifically. And I'm I'm very keen on getting your book, man. I I think I'm looking for things. I tend to obsess over things. I don't know about you when it comes to my health and fitness.

No, not me, not at all.

So I'm always looking for things that I can really get into so that I I you know I look forward to trying it or trying something new and failing, and that whole process is now intriguing to me. But we're when this whole thing runs its course, what do you think is going to be one good thing that's gonna be come about for the fitness industry?

Um there will be less competition for gym owners because many of them will come out of business forever. Uh that's kind of a tongue-in-cheek positive thing. You know, it's interesting, I think, gosh, for the fitness industry, for personal trainers, um people are starving for connection. So if you can really connect with someone deeply, then you'll really never um you'll never be at a lack of clientele. And if you can make that person feel safe, I mean it's amazing how one story repeated has made an entire generation of germaphobes, but uh, you know, that just is what it is. I mean, my my personal opinion is like the best piece of training equipment you can have is another human being to dance and wrestle with and throw and catch a medicine ball. And you know, I think that's gonna come back uh slower for some people. You know, I know some people are just really deeply afraid um of getting even close to another person, and uh, you know how sad, but that's just the way it is. So people are definitely open to online coaching. Some people really like it, uh, some people really don't like it. Um a good friend Polly really likes coaching people online. I uh I hate it. Uh I you know, we we've been uh doing some Zoom classes for the gym, and you know, the maybe one of the secrets to happiness is just to know yourself. And I covered a few uh classes online, and as I was there, I was thinking, man, this is like just so not for me. This is like the last thing that I want to do. I mean, that's why I also don't do uh online coaching anymore, apart from the M3 Academy, where we do a a monthly program, and I talk about some big concepts and give some recommendations for meditation and other stuff to do. So kind of like uh a prescription of sorts this month uh I've been having people practice uh this really old uh board game to help them practice uh probabilities and risk and statistics. And are you familiar with the game Go by any chance?

Yeah, I've never played it, but uh I know how complex it is.

Yeah, it's for mental masochists only. Um a 19 by 19 board, there are more possibilities for how it can go down than there are atoms in the universe, which just shows you how complex uh probability trees can get. And that's why I also don't like um pay too much attention to like the expert opinions either, because you know the whole point of science is it's people disagreeing with each other constantly to try to find like the veterans. Um but this year I I heard the the weirdest phrase I've ever heard uh which was trust science. And I heard that phrase so much, and I'm like, how do you do that? The whole the whole reason we do science is because we don't trust. Science is about verification through experimentation. So I saw I'm like reading this thing like trust science. I'm like, this is the biggest crop shit I've ever heard in my life. Because it makes no science whatsoever. I mean the jury is still out on egg yolks, so we're just supposed to really what people mean when they say that is they they mean trust the scientist that I like who says this.

Yes.

Because science is all about verification. The whole point is you should not trust, you should verify through experimentation. But if you're pushing a narrative of super authoritarianism, you have to deify these authority figures. And you know, the truth is like we just don't know how it's gonna work out. I mean, nutrition is the perfect example. Some people take ethnicity into consideration when uh it comes to nutrition, and there's a lot of nutrition like plans out there, uh, very generic, and it's like, okay, you know, at 7 a.m. have a protein bar, an oatmeal, and then at 9 a.m. have 11 almonds and a half an apple, and it's like, we're all supposed to eat this? You know, what what if uh like a Swedish guy and uh Vietnamese guy are gonna eat like the same thing? You know, it it's just totally insane. And the reality is like, how are we all alive right now? We have gotten by on such garbage food. I mean, the potato bug caused a famine in in Ireland that almost like wiped out their whole population. So, like, you know, maybe if you've got an Irish heritage, you can live on mostly potatoes. If you've got a Russian heritage, you can probably live on mostly potatoes. It's like they eat potatoes, they drink potatoes, it's like it's like the freaking potato part. So, uh, the reason people make these outrageous claims with such authority is because that's what we get people to listen to them. You know, um my my uh my trick is getting people to try what I have to say while still being ridiculously wishy-washy. You know, I I don't uh I don't presume. I don't presume to know. I have some really good ideas. I think if you uh if you think that you don't have rhythm, that you're wrong. You know, everybody has rhythm, it's just whether you're willing to go through the pain of practicing it slowly. Most people are not. Same thing with music, same thing with juggling. Anybody can learn how to juggle. Uh taught people over 70 years old with not very good eyesight or coordination how to juggle. And, you know, there there are a lot of really good ideas, but I I don't presume to know what's going to work best for everybody. You can just uh I like to say I'm a professional suggester. That's all. Just try this out and see how you like it. But, you know, uh two weeks of juggling, you'll be you'll be good enough to uh juggle while balanced on one leg and find like some really good meditation flow state kind of stuff. And I think that flow state is probably the closest you're gonna get to to happiness. Because you know, we want to like lock in happiness. It kind of goes back to that idea of securitizing the future. You know, we want to get married so we have our romantic life. Like we want to lock it in. It's so, it's so, it's it's just too tempting. We want to lock it in so bad. Please just lock it in. I need to save three million for retirement so that I can like lock it in. And it's like, meanwhile, you're just like pissing the day away in front of you right now, uh, you know, suffering more or less. But if you can get yourself into a flow state, um, if you're good at meditating, kind of like that meditation competition, I'm guessing. I can't wait for that. Oh, dude, we're gonna crush it. I I think you're gonna win.

Yeah.

I think you're gonna win. I'll work hard. Yeah, I mean, you know, no question, I am the most enlightened one of them all. Uh and just through the nature of saying that sounds so funny, doesn't it? It does.

We should create an enlightenment assessment. Like a, you know, a board-approved enlightenment assessment where we can get ranked.

That is such a good idea. A global ranking system for how enlightened you are.

Yeah. For the wokeness of, you know, on a sc on a grand global scale.

So yeah, and it it does bring you back to the flow state. Um, a lot of things come back to that. There's a I think the book is like so dense. I recommended it to a lot of people, and they don't really read it because it's so dense. Um, that book, Flow, uh by Mihai Chiksef Mihai. Um but but that's the that's the bottom line is you know, you don't want to be uh bored. You don't want to be so overwhelmed that you're flustered. It's like uh if I get a good sparring partner in Muay Thai, I'm gonna be in a good flow. And if I tried to box Mike Tyson, I would just be like frantically trying to uh survive, and I would definitely not be in that flow state. And if I you know box box with some 80-year-old grandmother, I'd probably you know not be in a flow state either. So it's like right in between boredom and anxiety, and you know, the things that I recommend people do, like juggling and dancing and different, you know, coordinations, it's possible to get to that flow just through meditation. That just requires a little more skill to do, uh, interestingly enough. But I think that's you know, love is great, and that's that's probably the meaning of life, or at least close to it. Um but if you're trying to like chase like happiness, just realize it's not gonna it's not gonna come to you in a way that lets you put it in a bottle and save it forever. You know, it the the closest you're gonna get is just being really present and grateful and engaged with right now, and that and that's the real truth, and all the words we use pretty much obscure that truth, and in some ways it's much more apparent than others. Yeah.

I think that's a great place as we bite up on the hour to to hold. I it's it's such a great thing, and it makes me. I mean, the first thing I I've I'm probably gonna go today and buy a hang drum because I've have you ever you know what a hang drum is?

Oh yeah, I have one.

Do you have one? Yeah. I heard one once, I saw someone in person playing. I'm like, I think I can get into that. Like I can really get into that. And uh I realize sometimes like you know, um that when I feel like I'm missing something in my life, it's because there's not something like that that I'm getting into that flow state. And usually for me, I I meditate, I do all the things, I do the cold water plunges, all of the things, right?

How good are you at meditating? Are you like a seven, eight on the side?

Yeah, I'm I you know, um, can I be honest?

Yeah.

I have no idea. I don't I have no idea. I'm probably three then.

So I have a meditating program that could get you up to a seven and probably two or three sessions.

Yeah, I don't think I'm ready for the competition yet. You know, I feel like I'm training right for it. I have a competition schedule for February. But as soon as it is funny because you do I do hear people like, well, how long do you meditate for? Like, I don't know. Generally, like whenever I have time for or whenever I'm over it, basically. But some people are like, well, you know, I I do at least two hours a day. And then there's meditation camps too. That seems like competition to me. Like, who's gonna break first?

Well, you know, meditation doesn't count unless you do it an hour at a time.

Yeah. I didn't know that.

Same with exercise. If it's not one hour, then you didn't really, really exercise, right?

Right.

You're not you're not gonna get any benefit in just five minutes. So is that insane?

Well yeah. Just real quick, before before we get what what are you what are you doing in the mornings now? Walk us through that. Like what's your your morning routine?

Oh man.

Well because people get competitive about this too. I don't know if you notice like what's your morning routine? Well, I get up at 4 44.

So I I uh I took off my badge of busyness that I used to uh show people.

Show me the way.

Yeah. I I I well I I remember I was at a I was at a seminar that I was um giving a presentation at, and there were all these other speakers there, and I remember we're all talking about our schedules, and you know, I was right there with them saying, like, oh yeah, I just got back from Poland, and then I'm before that, and I'm just like it just like dawned on me while then we were talking about how many books we had read. It was just this like really weird dick measuring contest. And I I just remember thinking, like, what if I had just told these people I didn't really work that hard and didn't really read that many books and like had lots of free time. I wonder what they would think. So now that's what I try to do. I I I I think there's this weird shamefulness about uh it's like the badge of busy and the certificate of suffering. Like you need to be like constantly in motion and you need to like suffer for love because that's like virtuous somehow. And I'm like, that is total horseshit. We should be helping each other figure out the easiest way to thrive. Now, if I can get someone into a flow state with two minutes of paradidals, which is more than enough time, it's not just about like how much muscle damage you'll create to rebuild muscle. It's about if you can change your state. I mean, that can have a way bigger impact in a person's life. So just kind of coming back to that is you know, as soon as you stop attaching your personal value to your output or what people think about you, and kind of release that shame, uh, the world is really your oyster because uh the truth is, you know, we have internet access, we have all these different ways that we can learn anything we want to, and there are opportunities all over the place. And you don't have to suffer, you don't have to tell people that you're busy, and you know, when people say, Oh, you're probably really busy, I always make a point now saying I'm exactly as busy as I want to be. And here's the funny thing: so are they, and so are you, because you are choosing to participate in all of these experiences, unless you're like a literal slave, in which case you might be like kind of busy uh and not really have much of a say in it.

But we'll cut out we'll cut out the extremes.

Yeah, exactly. Like you choose how busy you are, you choose if you want to like wear this uh certificate of suffering, and it's so it's so common. Like these are the two things that it it's almost like like envy. It's like the worst sin because it's the only one that you can't have any fun at. I mean, slaughter, gluttony, lust, these are like this is my kind of art. This is my kind of party. But like uh, you know, there's there's something like really twisted about uh like envy and busyness and like suffering as virtues. So I think it has to do with self-image a lot is you think that you won't be like enough or good if you're not like really busy and like hustling and grinding and you know, uh it's just not for me. And I think if you if you like open your mind to a different way of doing things, that's why this whole concept of a daily practice with primal athleticism just like blows people's minds because they're like, oh, is it like an upper or lower spit? Is it a full body split? It's like, uh no, not any of those. It's like, well, are there any rest days? No. It's like sets and reps if you want. You know, it's just a really different thing. So it throws all of these like uh popular myths totally on their heads. And it's just so interesting how open the world really is once you start to shed away these like labels that we give ourselves. Because you know, the opposite of busy is lazy. So if you think you're busy and you think that's good, well then you're just gonna constantly be making yourself busy. And if you think that like having a really good time is like uh you're proud ways or something like that, uh, then you're gonna want to be like suffering also. So a lot of it has to do with your self-image and essentially just being afraid people won't like you. And maybe that's what I would leave you with is everybody is doing it for love. They're doing whatever they think will get them love. The reason those people are squawking at Spotify, number one, is because they're getting attention. They're getting attention, they feel like they get this like free psychic energy. So that's that's the only reason any of this bullshit is possible for people to squawk and get attention is because we live in a time of such abundance. Like we should all be dropping to our knees and thanking Ra, Zeus, Buddha, and Odin and all of them, like whatever tree spirit was popular 5,000 years ago for the fact that we have like indoor plumbing and electricity and internet, and we have this like crazy abundance rather than like just you know squawking for free attention, you know. Um so every everyone's just trying to get love or attention. That's the same that's the reason people complain also, because it's very easy to get free psychic energy without actually having to create anything, which is turns out pretty difficult.

Oh man. Max, where do people get the book?

Uh you can go to primalathleticism.com, and it's mostly videos. It's mostly videos.

Okay. Cool. Cool. I'm in it, man. I'm in. All right. All over it. Yeah. I love it.

It's a lot of fun. It's how I it's how I like to train now. Uh I'm I enjoy training more. I look forward to it, and I just feel lighter. And that to me is like really that's like the pinnacle of athleticism is you just feel light on your feet, but you also feel really solid, and you won't feel like a prisoner in your own body. You'll feel like the world is your playground, and that's really what it's all about.

Yeah, that's exactly what it's all about, man. Max, uh, thank you again. The perspective is always well received. Yeah, and I I think I mean I'm probably gonna call this episode the badge of busy and the certificate, certification of suffering, or whatever that was. I'll look it up because I think it's it's something that's people are gonna be like, shit, I've subscribed to that somehow. Some way along the along the way, I have subscribed to that. And uh, I mean, everyone I talk to, how you doing? Busy, man. Oh yeah. Busy, busy. So it's gonna hit home with a lot of people, and I appreciate it. And uh yeah, people know where to find you. You're you got websites, you got you're not hard to find, there's not too many max chanks out there, so people can search them.

Uh, if you Google me, it's like the first three pages, and then it's drilled it.

All right, man. Well, to the next time, we'll uh we'll be talking soon. I appreciate it. Stay healthy, man. Ladies and gentlemen, MaxChanks. Hey, it's your host, Eric Malzone. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Future of Fitness. If you enjoyed it, please do me a huge favor by going to the website and signing up for our newsletter. The website is futureoffitness.co. Again, that's future of fitness.co. We've got some big, big announcements coming down the pipe, and we want you to make sure that you are on top of it. Thank you again. Signing off.