[00:00:00] Lucas Root: Charlie, thanks for coming and joining me. I have had a blast getting to know you over the past several months or longer. One of my favorite jokes to tell about you is when we first met and I first got to know you a little and the community. And then I called my wife and talked to her about it, and she was like, so how did you meet him?

[00:00:20] Lucas Root: And I was like, well, the same way anybody would meet somebody from San Francisco. We met through my friend in L. A. L.A.

[00:00:28] Charlie Deist: Luke. Such is the nature of the Twitter verse these days.

[00:00:32] Lucas Root: It is the nature of the Twitterverse. It’s actually a really good, yeah, that’s right, it’s X verse now. It’s a really good example of or illustration of how we can use the really extraordinary power of long distance connections to create more powerful, local, deep in person connection.

[00:00:57] Charlie Deist: Amen, no it’s kind of [00:01:00] fashionable to dunk on social media or to treat it like it’s, you know, the scourge of the earth, but there are situations and,

[00:01:09] Lucas Root: Wait, you mean it’s not the scourge of the earth?

[00:01:11] Charlie Deist: well, let me put a little more subtlety on this. Social media when used responsibly can be part of a balanced social diet.

[00:01:23] Lucas Root: There you go. Drink responsibly. Yes.

[00:01:28] Charlie Deist: Right.

[00:01:29] Lucas Root: I love it. You and I have had a really amazing opportunity to bond over a lot of things. We’ve bonded over our opinions on AI. We’ve bonded over our opinions on food. We’ve bonded over our opinions on movement. And I’ve enjoyed every piece of it. And I look forward to more.

[00:01:46] Lucas Root: Would you like to introduce yourself much more deeply to our audience?

[00:01:52] Charlie Deist: Yeah, sure. And I feel like whenever I try to introduce myself, it comes out differently and I never know what’s going to come out of my [00:02:00] mouth. But in this context, I guess I’d start with the fact that I’m a Californian and a Northern Californian by birth. I was born within a 15 mile radius of where I am now in Berkeley.

[00:02:13] Charlie Deist: I was born in Marin County and I came over to Berkeley to go to school. That was sort of my first exposure to the world outside of my bubble in Marin. And and in Berkeley.

[00:02:26] Lucas Root: The people here like to bubble.

[00:02:29] Charlie Deist: It’s true. And there’s beauty in a bubble too, just like on social media, you have to sort of find your niche, but without creating an echo chamber.

[00:02:38] Charlie Deist: And what I love about Berkeley is the eclecticism. It’s like, I found so many different kinds of people since being here. And each of those people has contributed to who I am. I picked up sailing after college, which has become a big part of who I am sailing on the bay. And there’s a whole subculture of the sailors in my world.

[00:02:59] Charlie Deist: There [00:03:00] are the people that I’ve gotten to know through the natural movement group that I run. And that’s another group, very eclectic, hard to sort of pin down with any sort of ideology or demographic attributes. It really runs.

[00:03:14] Lucas Root: There is “A” in ideology, the natural movement ideology.

[00:03:18] Charlie Deist: I suppose. Yeah, but it’s built around practices, not beliefs. And so, that’s been something that I’ve kind of tried to define myself more around my practices. I’m a big fan of outdoor natural movement of sort of hormetic stressors, things like cold water swims building up a solar callus by getting out in the sun a lot.

[00:03:40] Charlie Deist: We organize the 50 mile march through this movement group every year. So we walk 50 miles in a day and that’s kind of, questionably beneficial stress. Some people might say that it tilts over into into the non beneficial stress, but you have to find that balance. That’s what the idea of hormetic stress is all about.

[00:03:57] Charlie Deist: It’s like finding the dose [00:04:00] that makes you stronger rather than weakening your system. So those are just a few little vignettes from my world.

[00:04:09] Lucas Root: Yeah. Now, wouldn’t putting sunscreen on your skin also be a hormetic stressor?

[00:04:15] Charlie Deist: I would say no the chemicals in most sunscreens, not all sunscreens I think there’s no safe dose for those similar, like, you know, you hear about hormetic doses of radiation as well. And in some situations, if you have a cancer, maybe the radiation can target just the cancer, but but not kill the organism.

[00:04:39] Charlie Deist: So in that case, maybe there’s a hormetic dose. I don’t think sunscreen works that way in reverse though. So I feel like it’s one of these things that it’s more, it’s an accumulated stressor, it’s more like a chronic stressor in that it, you know, bioaccumulates in your tissues.

[00:04:55] Charlie Deist: At least that’s my understanding of it, or it’s sort of cumulative damage as opposed to [00:05:00] hormetic stress. But there’s a whole art to it. I feel like it’s not a precise science and maybe there is. And certainly if the alternative to wearing sunscreen is getting a really bad sunburn, you could talk about a trade off there.

[00:05:14] Lucas Root: Interesting note. I have had sunburns, but not really bad ones since I stopped wearing sunscreen.

[00:05:21] Charlie Deist: Huh? Good anecdata.

[00:05:24] Lucas Root: Yep, that anecdata, it perfectly stated.

[00:05:27] Charlie Deist: People are also explaining…

[00:05:28] Lucas Root: But I had really bad sunburns when I used to wear sunscreen.

[00:05:32] Charlie Deist: But is it possible that you also stopped eating seed oils around the same time that you stopped wearing sunscreen? Some are born in that.

[00:05:37] Lucas Root: Seed oils, greens, beans.

[00:05:40] Charlie Deist: So maybe that’s the true cause.

[00:05:42] Lucas Root: MSG, cut back on alcohol. Yeah. All that.

[00:05:46] Charlie Deist: Right. So it’s hard to tease out cause and effect with a lot of these things, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, I do think that we’ve seasoned so many situations, you know, the products or the medicines and treatments end [00:06:00] up inflicting the damage on us that they’re supposed to cure.

[00:06:03] Lucas Root: Yeah. That’s, yep. There’s a thing there.

[00:06:07] Charlie Deist: Iatrogenesis medicine that, you know, it’s one of the leading causes of death actually is Iatrogenesis, just doctor induced illness.

[00:06:18] Lucas Root: That correctly prescribed.

[00:06:22] Charlie Deist: Yeah. Thank you.

[00:06:25] Lucas Root: It’s important to know, and people don’t talk about this, but correctly prescribed iatrogenic deaths.

[00:06:32] Lucas Root: Huge number.

[00:06:33] Charlie Deist: Yep.

[00:06:36] Lucas Root: Thank you. And and welcome to the show. Have you ever done your intro that way before?

[00:06:43] Charlie Deist: No. And it’s sort of an abbreviated version, but yeah, that never has come out quite like that. Sometimes I talk about. What do I talk about? I talk about my strange bout of mono, which led me down the path of health and fitness. In college, I [00:07:00] was struggling for a long period with just chronic fatigue types and symptoms.

[00:07:05] Charlie Deist: I thought it was mono. I never got a concrete diagnosis, and after going back to my doctor, like three or four times, he gives me these words that actually kind of, you know, landed like a…

[00:07:16] Lucas Root: your life

[00:07:17] Charlie Deist: Yeah, saved my life. He said that sometimes his patients just sort of lose the will to live and you just need to kind of bootstrap, like pull yourself up, but you didn’t use these exact words, but he said, gradually increase your activity until you start to recover a little bit more stamina. And so that’s what I did. And I think now they call it a gradual exercise therapy or graduated exercise therapy, and it’s one of the recognized treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome. And I think I’ve extended that logic past the time when I was suffering from this acute illness.

[00:07:51] Charlie Deist: It’s like, well, if it works when you’re chronically feeling low energy. Could we expand this to become [00:08:00] chronically high energy? Like, could we keep increasing the stress a little bit push it, you know, past the point where most people would stop. And so that’s kind of informed a lot of my diet and exercise The whole mindset that I have around it, things from intermittent fasting, the cold exposure to endurance training, although I think there are limits to it, you know, you pass a certain point, there are diminishing returns and especially after this year’s 50 mile march, I feel like I really did kind of cross the threshold and into the territory where it’s like, all right, you know what, I’m going to step this back a little bit and see if I can find more energy by exerting myself a little less.

[00:08:41] Lucas Root: Or perhaps differently.

[00:08:44] Charlie Deist: Differently, yeah, there’s a sweet spot and I call it like, it’s the groove you get into the groove where you’re just pushing hard enough to without overextending yourself but pushing yourself just hard enough to make the [00:09:00] gradual improvement that’s sustainable over the long term.

[00:09:05] Lucas Root: Yep. I like it. So, tell me about your community.

[00:09:11] Charlie Deist: Well, my community here in Berkley is mostly centered around the natural movement meet up group and this started back in 2011. My friend and Co founder of the meetup group Chip Fernandez he actually, he’s the true founder because he put up the meetup page way back when this was right around the time that I was graduating from college.

[00:09:33] Charlie Deist: And I was looking for a new form of exercise because I previously, I’d been kind of a long distance runner, but with that chronic fatigue thing that I was talking about, I found that I just no longer had the lust for that sort of activity, but I could sprint down the street or I could find a log and lift the log, do kind of overhead presses with one side of the log.

[00:09:56] Charlie Deist: And so, then I found Irwan LaCour’s video, the workout, the world [00:10:00] forgot. And it was like, yes, this is exactly what I’m looking for, you know, free.

[00:10:04] Lucas Root: But Bit the irony is that’s probably around the same time I found that video. Although I was across the country at that time.

[00:10:10] Charlie Deist: Yeah, I think that was when that video got big and when Move Nat landed on a lot of people’s radars. So Move Nat is short for natural movement or movement in nature appealed to me as this, like recovering the lost paleolithic way of exercising, but it’s beyond exercising. It takes something that we’ve compartmentalized and tried to stick in a box, and allows it the space to breathe.

[00:10:35] Charlie Deist: And it was great to find other people who were doing this because I could get ideas from them on how to move. I could sort of share what I was exploring. And there was this fellowship aspect Chip and I got along swimmingly. We would add these long conversations that would sort of extend our meetups past the time when we said it was going to happen and people would kind of come in and out for those early years, there weren’t a lot of [00:11:00] stalwart members, maybe because Chip and I were just having too much fun in our own little world.

[00:11:04] Charlie Deist: But it really wasn’t until COVID, so 2020 that the group really coalesced and came together as a tribe.

[00:11:13] Charlie Deist: I had actually moved to the East coast for a couple of years, then came back. Maybe 2017, 2018 was when I reached back out to Chip and we started doing the meetups again regularly, but it still stayed small. There were a couple other people that started to come regularly, but during COVID something changed people recognize.

[00:11:32] Charlie Deist: One, this is a sort of safe space for kind of talking about some of the surrounding craziness that was going on and that we were going to keep meeting outdoors. Even maybe there were, we took a couple of weeks off when everyone didn’t know what was happening, but after a little while we were kind of reading the tea leaves and saying, okay, vitamin D seems to be a preventative factor, you know, quality time.

[00:11:56] Lucas Root: Always has been.

[00:11:57] Charlie Deist: Always has been right. It’s [00:12:00] quality movement, nutritious movement. These are foundations of health. And if we’re going to stay healthy throughout this time, boost our immune systems, you know, we’re going to do it together. And so then the people that found us, there was kind of this.

[00:12:13] Charlie Deist: Self filtering mechanism where the people that were, I don’t want to say cowering in fear because not everyone was cowering in fear but we’re herd animals and we tend to mostly follow what other people are doing. So the people that didn’t feel a strong enough motive to get out and find some physical activity wouldn’t seek us out, but those who did, chances are they were like minded people. And again, it wasn’t centered around an ideology, but it was centered around a vital practice of meeting up and just moving our bodies in person exchanging movements. It’s kind of like the movement potluck, everyone could bring a movement to share.

[00:12:50] Lucas Root: Oh, that’s nice. Movement pot lock.

[00:12:53] Charlie Deist: I think case might’ve come up with that.

[00:12:55] Charlie Deist: Actually the friend that introduced us Case Bradford came up with that wording in the [00:13:00] podcast that I did with him. So, you know, it comes full circle.

[00:13:04] Lucas Root: That’s pretty cool.

[00:13:08] Charlie Deist: Yeah that’s my community. Those are my closest friends. We meet every Saturday morning at the Marina and usually we meet a couple of times during the week. We’ve been doing that pretty consistently on Tuesdays at Berkeley’s campus. If anyone listening is in the East Bay wants to come out and check it out Saturday mornings, Berkeley Marina.

[00:13:26] Charlie Deist: And we also have a meetup page, I think its called, East Bay Natural movers. Although, the name has changed a couple times over the years and I feel like I never keep up with it. But yeah, we’re a natural movement group.

[00:13:39] Lucas Root: Yep. I also, I strongly recommend, so the people who are listening and want to show up definitely do. I’ve been to a few. I tend to have podcast recordings on Saturday mornings, so I also tend to not be able to show up, but.

[00:13:54] Charlie Deist: Well.

[00:13:55] Lucas Root: When I can, it’s a delight.

[00:13:57] Charlie Deist: We’ll welcome you with open arms, anytime you [00:14:00] can make it. And we’ll just have to increase our offerings during the week.

[00:14:04] Lucas Root: Yeah. Speaking of, why didn’t you choose Saturday morning for this recording? No, I’m just kidding.

[00:14:10] Charlie Deist: Yes, I have another obligation another appointment. Yeah, it’s really like, it’s part of my routine. And when I don’t do it, I feel that sense of like, ah, you know, something’s missing and it’s great to have that for workouts because sometimes like when you’re trying to motivate yourself to work out solo, there’s all kind of that can be that sense

[00:14:33] Lucas Root: It’s too hard.

[00:14:35] Charlie Deist: Yeah, right.

[00:14:36] Lucas Root: It’s too hard.

[00:14:37] Charlie Deist: But when you know that there are other people there, it kind of takes the motivation out of the equation, or it gives you a exterior source of motivation to complement whatever intrinsic motivation you might have.

[00:14:51] Lucas Root: Yeah. Nice. Tell me about how the elements of community are really showing up [00:15:00] in your community.

[00:15:04] Charlie Deist: Yeah, so I like this framing because we weren’t ever very intentional about structuring the community. It was just kind of, show up and see what happens. But one of the things very early on that Chip introduced to the meetup group was a special handshake where we would always rather than just shake each other’s hands, you know, the normal hand to hand, we go for the forearm using the sort of tribal warrior you know, tribal chieftains meeting each other and making sure that they’re not carrying a knife up their sleeve.

[00:15:39] Charlie Deist: And that became our groups go to our sort of default greeting. Nowadays, you know, you get that thing where, you know, when you go in for someone and you’re not quite sure, is this a handshake? Is it a fist bump? Is it a hug? COVID really screwed that one up too, because people were afraid of shaking hands and so now

[00:15:55] Lucas Root: And hugging.

[00:15:56] Charlie Deist: As well, right, and hugging but you never know, like, or is it going to be [00:16:00] kind of a half hug with a shoulder bump and a pat on the back, or a lot of times we just, you know, might go for the hug, but but that handshake did give us a bit of a sense of an identity. And it was a ritual. It was part of our language.

[00:16:14] Charlie Deist: So that would be one element, the language that we use around movements themselves to there are some words that show up that I think are probably unfamiliar to most people vocabulary, like, quadrupedal, morse or, you know, points of support your how many hands or feet you have down on the ground, moving from two points of support to four points of support. And then maybe going to a tripod type position, three points of support. And then things like contralateral movement.

[00:16:44] Charlie Deist: But the principle that shows up in all kinds of movements, but where you’re moving the opposite arm with the opposite leg. So, you know, the right arm tends to move with the left leg. If you’re crawling, you bring your left knee up to the left elbow, kind of moving contralaterally where the right arm [00:17:00] and the left leg are moving forward at the same time.

[00:17:02] Charlie Deist: And this mostly came from the move net curriculum, I think that’s one of the best things that move net has done for this space is defined some core principles of natural and efficient movement, because that’s really what it’s all about is moving more gracefully and being more capable in the real world.

[00:17:24] Charlie Deist: It’s not just about the aesthetics of going to the gym to get bigger muscles. It’s saying, there are actually principles of natural human movement, and we’ve lost those because one, maybe no one ever taught us, but maybe we never really needed to be taught. We probably, at some point in our life were very good moving naturally. But through years and years of just sedentary lifestyles, sitting in these desks that conform us to odd positions, wearing shoes that compress our feet into these unnatural shapes.

[00:17:56] Charlie Deist: So we have to relearn how to move naturally. And you know, barefoot [00:18:00] shoes is sort of a meme. I know you’ve been a fan for a long time. You wear the, you go full Vibram five finger, not just a minimalist view but the individual toe pockets. So, that’s hardcore.

[00:18:11] Lucas Root: Yep. And where appropriate, I’m 100% barefoot.

[00:18:15] Charlie Deist: Mad respect.

[00:18:16] Lucas Root: I love it. It feels great. You know, it’s funny. I actually came into Vibram five finger shoes through a dare.

[00:18:26] Charlie Deist: Really?

[00:18:26] Lucas Root: Yeah I grew up in Northern Vermont and as a child, I was just barefoot all the time, like all the time. There was really no reason to wear any shoes cause you know, out in the backwoods of Northern Vermont, the only thing you have to worry about stepping in that could hurt you is you know, blackberry bushes.

[00:18:42] Lucas Root: And yes, those hurt. Like, there’s no heavy metals. There’s no, you know…

[00:18:47] Charlie Deist: syringes.

[00:18:48] Lucas Root: Stuff about to worry about. Yeah, it’s not an issue in the backwoods of Vermont. And so you just pay attention to where there are brambles and don’t step there hard, right? Walk softly [00:19:00] where you might have an inch and a half long Blackberry spike go through your feet.

[00:19:05] Lucas Root: The rest of your life, you can just live barefoot. And then like everybody else, I went to school. I went to college. I moved to New York city. I guess not everybody moved to New York city, but you did.

[00:19:17] Charlie Deist: Everybody moves, right? I thought so.

[00:19:20] Lucas Root: Yeah. And when you’re in New York city, you wear shoes

[00:19:23] Charlie Deist: Oh yeah.

[00:19:25] Lucas Root: Like there’s all sorts of stuff you can step in there.

[00:19:28] Lucas Root: That’s not a good idea. And I habitually wear shoes. Yeah. Not just heavy metals but, you know, oil and petroleum products, and like in Northern Vermont, if you step in animal scat, the worst that you have to do is take out your hose and wash off your feet a little bit.

[00:19:50] Lucas Root: Here you might get all sorts of fun stuff from animal scat in your feet.

[00:19:56] Charlie Deist: Right.

[00:19:56] Lucas Root: That’s another thing I don’t want on my feet.

[00:19:59] Charlie Deist: The [00:20:00] human animal scat.

[00:20:00] Lucas Root: I habituated to shoes like everybody else that lives in big cities and and completely forgot their barefoot way of life. Like, I had moved on from it and I saw somebody wearing five finger shoes and I was so in the headspace of being a New Yorker.

[00:20:15] Lucas Root: That I snickered at it. This is a, I mean, I’m glad I remember this, cause it brings me back to home. Cause here I am now that guy that other people are snickering at. And my wife was like, listen, you don’t get to snicker at that. Like anybody can choose any shoes they want. And I was like, yeah, but they look so weird.

[00:20:36] Lucas Root: Like, look at that. She was like, that’s it. I don’t know what it was. Maybe I had been particularly judgmental that day. And she was like, you’re going to learn a lesson right now. This is true. So she dragged me to a shoe store nearby that had them. And she was like, go try them on. And it was one of those shoe stores that has a treadmill.

[00:20:54] Lucas Root: Go try them on, get on the treadmill right now. And I put them on, got on the treadmill, bought them on the spot. I was like, [00:21:00] what the hell? Like, this is amazing. Like, I was a kid on Christmas morning and I went out for a run that evening in them for six and a half miles. And I was a runner, so six and a half miles wasn’t out of my range of reach.

[00:21:14] Lucas Root: And I was disabled for the next four days, but not bone problems. It was all muscle. Like I was so habituated to shoes and my muscles were not used to working in that way. And I could not stop grinning, even when I was, like, hobbling my ass around the house, barely able to stand up, I was so filled with joy.

[00:21:33] Lucas Root: And 13 years later, I’m still using them.

[00:21:36] Charlie Deist: Yeah, I remember going a little more gradually than that, but I definitely had a few sessions with Chip incidentally, where afterwards, the other thing I remember is I would end the move net sessions, just feeling like I needed to take a nap because I assume what was happening was some sort of.

[00:21:55] Charlie Deist: You know, neurogenesis or new neurons being created or neural pathways [00:22:00] for all these ways of movement that had been dormant or that had never been exercised before even stuff like a contralateral crawl. We have to think about it when we’re doing it for the first time since we were kids. And there’s.

[00:22:14] Lucas Root: The second time, and the third time.

[00:22:15] Charlie Deist: Right, right. There’s a great progression that they teach or sort of, this is like the pattern of all progressions of in move net, they teach you the four stages from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence .

[00:22:29] Charlie Deist: So you first start off you’re incompetent and you don’t even know that you’re incompetent. You don’t know how to move. You don’t know how to crawl, and you’re not even aware that’s a thing or that it’s a problem. Then you realize there’s this other way of doing it. And you are conscious of your incompetence. When you try to do it, it feels very awkward, you have to really think about it.

[00:22:47] Charlie Deist: Then you finally reached the stage of, or next you reach the stage of conscious competence, where you still have to think about it, but you’re getting better. And then finally is unconscious competence [00:23:00] where you can do it without even thinking about it.

[00:23:02] Charlie Deist: And I like to be in that place of conscious incompetence. It’s tiring, but it’s it’s like the Zen mind, beginners mind, you know, it’s a good place to be being a beginner is it’s not always a bad thing, and if we avoid that state, then we’re missing out on a lot of growth. So I think this sort of, this might be a clunky segue into the purpose, but I think everyone that comes regularly to the natural movement meetup group is looking for some kind of a challenge, looking for new ways to test out their body, what they can do within the context of a supportive community, that’s going to be, you know, teaching.

[00:23:42] Charlie Deist: And sometimes we’re not really challenging ourselves some weeks, we might just decide to do, you know, the old familiar stuff and shoot the breeze most of the time, you know, while doing some gentle stretching, it’s not always a super vigorous workout, but usually there’s at least, you know, I rarely [00:24:00] leave having not tried something new, moving my body in some way that I’ve never moved before, just to get back to that state of innocence of conscious incompetence.

[00:24:12] Lucas Root: So, you’ve been doing this 15 years, and you haven’t yet, or you rarely can’t find a way to to challenge your body in a novel way.

[00:24:23] Charlie Deist: Oh, yeah, for sure. This is infinite combinations and we actually have a tree called the infinity tree. Which is thus named because there’s just always new possibilities to explore in terms of going over under hanging. I actually, I brought case out to it when he was driving up to Oregon and he came up with a brand new movement, which was hanging from his toes off of a branch.

[00:24:48] Charlie Deist: And I’d never tried that one, but didn’t last for long. The bottoms of my feet are very calloused, but the tops of my feet. Are are quite sensitive. So, I only hang for about a second.

[00:24:57] Lucas Root: His Twitter feed tells me that he continued practicing that [00:25:00] and is now good at it.

[00:25:01] Charlie Deist: Yep. There you go. Although he does it on the bar back down in LA. We won’t dock him for that. It’s

[00:25:08] Lucas Root: understandable.

[00:25:09] Lucas Root: Yeah. Yeah. I’m going to send him this segment right here. Be like, you wish you were using real tree bark.

[00:25:16] Charlie Deist: Yep. Yep. That’s why, you know, Northern California still wins out over Southern California in my mind. The beaches are much better down there, but the forests are better up here.

[00:25:27] Lucas Root: I’m not even sure the beaches are better down there. Warmer.

[00:25:31] Charlie Deist: Yeah, certainly warmer, I’m not a surfer, but if I lived in Southern California, I’m sure I would be.

[00:25:38] Lucas Root: The people who go to, you know, pilgrimage to Big Sur every year would argue that Surfing up here is the thing too.

[00:25:45] Charlie Deist: Fair enough. Fair enough. You just need a thicker wetsuit.

[00:25:50] Lucas Root: Yeah. So, Purpose, you’re sort of pinning it down as novel challenge for movement.[00:26:00]

[00:26:00] Charlie Deist: That’s a big part of it. I’d be reluctant to say that’s the one, certainly not the one and only but maybe we’ll even come back to that because I might need to think it over whether there’s something I’m blanking on as, as far as the ultimate purpose.

[00:26:17] Lucas Root: Yeah. That and Camaraderie.

[00:26:23] Charlie Deist: Yeah, definitely. The consistency of it has made it habitual. And I think that’s one of the things that if I were advising someone on how to start a similar group, my first piece of advice would have to be pick a location and a time where people know you’re going to be there every week, and try to get enough leadership that you don’t have to skip if one person can’t make it because we all have conflicts and things that come up.

[00:26:56] Charlie Deist: Chip’s been gone for the last three weeks, but the group [00:27:00] has never skipped a beat. And in some of those weeks I was gone too, but there’s always somebody who’s going to show up and lead it. But the balance that we have between structure and free flow flexibility is appealing.

[00:27:13] Charlie Deist: I think where people don’t feel like they necessarily it’s not like a follow the leader model necessarily. We might do some of that where someone’s leading a flow and other people are kind of following along, but that’s never the whole session. It’s not like someone’s just barking orders.

[00:27:29] Charlie Deist: A lot of fitness classes you go in and the instructors like they’re good at sort of kicking your ass, right? Like brutalizing you into doing the hard thing. Sometimes we need that. But it’s not so much our model. We might demonstrate things with an invitation to try them out, but often with a progression, if it’s something that would be more challenging, like with say handstands or I’ve been a big fan of the pistol squat and the one arm pushup as strength exercises, but there’s ways you can [00:28:00] modify that before you can do you know, even a single pistol squat. Cause there’s mobility constraints for getting into that position, it’s not just strength it’s really the whole, but I would say, I think that the challenge and the

[00:28:12] Lucas Root: There are plenty of people that can’t even do a full depth squat.

[00:28:16] Charlie Deist: Oh, true. For sure. For sure.

[00:28:19] Lucas Root: When I first started doing natural movement, I was actually following the coach Eric Orton at the time, a name you might have heard. And the first thing he says is do a full squat and see what your mobility is like. Can your ankles support you being in a balanced position all the way down in a squat?

[00:28:36] Lucas Root: And how long do your muscles tolerate you holding that position?

[00:28:40] Charlie Deist: Right. Yeah. The one thing that’s coming to mind for purpose is sort of a funny juxtaposition, but the purpose is play it’s an outlet for playfulness where, you know, you see kids at the playground, they look like they’re having a lot of fun. Why [00:29:00] can’t adults partake in that too? Well, if you go to the kid’s playground, then you look kind of creepy, but if you set up your own play.

[00:29:08] Lucas Root: You might actually get in trouble in the kid’s playground. But what’s cool is we have our own playground.

[00:29:13] Charlie Deist: That’s right. The whole world is our playground.

[00:29:17] Lucas Root: Pretty much the whole world except for that playground.

[00:29:20] Charlie Deist: Right. Right. Yeah. Parkour is a street running, you know, urban street running. We do parkour on Tuesdays on Berkeley’s campus and we get some funny looks, but no, one’s ever tried to stop us. We jump we climb, we run around on all fours, whatever, you know, not, I don’t lean into the, like trying to look weird kind of thing, but I try not to be self conscious about moving in the ways that feel natural and interesting.

[00:29:48] Charlie Deist: And if I see something that’s an obstacle to interact with, I’m going to try to interact with it, even if it makes me look like a fool. And that’s where I think having the safe space, so to speak, to borrow a [00:30:00] term from the Maoists or I don’t know, from the common parlance.

[00:30:06] Lucas Root: Yeah, well, and the purpose of play. Like, the agreed purpose of play. Like, we’re here to play, and play includes falling on our face sometimes. And that, that has to be okay.

[00:30:19] Charlie Deist: Right. Right. Exactly.

[00:30:20] Lucas Root: Yeah, cool. We also talked about two other sort of in the green room. We talked about two other elements that were of particular interest. We talked about value and we talked about the social contract. And I think these two are really actually quite interesting as they relate to your community.

[00:30:41] Charlie Deist: So in terms of value talking about, you know, what the bi directional exchange of value, right? We’re talking about what people bring, and what they take away. When we talked about the movement potluck, I think this is one of the ways that people bring value. They bring [00:31:00] new ideas.

[00:31:01] Charlie Deist: Some people might be a little more experienced in yoga. Some people might be more experienced in juggling or handstands, acrobatics. Some people might have knowledge of, you know, herbs and naturopathic medicine, things like that. So, even if someone’s a novice when it comes to movement, usually they can find something to contribute to the conversation and the conversation takes place mostly in person to some extent.

[00:31:27] Charlie Deist: We also have a signal thread. There’s another sort of beneficial use of a social media, a chat app. And beyond that kind of sharing, it’s a mutual aid network. It’s a support community.

[00:31:43] Charlie Deist: So let’s say somebody, recently, somebody was moving from one part of town to the other. And they said, Hey, my family needs help, you know, show up and move some boxes and it becomes not just a way to help that person, but it’s also, it’s an embodied practice. It’s like, [00:32:00] Hey let’s see if we can put into place some of the principles we use for lifting and carrying. And then maybe, you know, they’ll all share a meal afterwards.

[00:32:09] Charlie Deist: So, all these things they’re somewhat lacking in the modern world. We don’t have a lot of these 3rd spaces where people can come together and I think Alexis to Tocqueville observed that America was unique for the strength of its civil society and the informal ties, the kind of glue of society that is outside of governmental institutions, outside of families and outside of, let’s say maybe church organizing, although churches, I think in his view were maybe sort of part of the glue of civil society.

[00:32:42] Charlie Deist: And you know, not to say that this group is a substitute for a family or a church community, but it’s definitely a model that I think deserves a lot more attention and [00:33:00] whether that’s gymnasiums or, you know, brick and mortar businesses trying to grow out more of a community around there. Their customers or people starting these kinds of outdoor movement groups from scratch.

[00:33:13] Charlie Deist: I prefer the outdoor model just because it’s where I feel like I’m in my element. I like that. It doesn’t have any official structure or real like rules. But that I was also.

[00:33:24] Lucas Root: Which means that you need to cultivate flexibility as a strength. And by flexibility, I don’t mean your capacity to stretch, but rather your capacity to handle novel challenges.

[00:33:36] Charlie Deist: Right. Right. And that happens when, like, if someone comes and there are regulars, even who have pretty severe limitations in the ways that they can move, and we try to be aware of that, but without saying, you know, everyone has to go the level of their movement. And there’s one person in the group in particular, who’s made a good point.

[00:33:59] Charlie Deist: You know, she [00:34:00] prefers to invite people who are, you know, strong and capable because she views it as, you know, first and foremost, the purpose is to train is to get stronger. And and it helps to have other people who can kind of contribute that and like pull you up. But I always am inclined to, you know, be maximally inclusive.

[00:34:22] Charlie Deist: And so there is a tension there where it’s like someone who’s not able to run, let’s say, or there are any number of, you know, mobility limitations and things that can prevent, one of my favorite games is called tree tag, where at the infinity tree somebody charts a course through the tree, going over certain branches under branches.

[00:34:43] Charlie Deist: And you get everybody spaced out by about five or six seconds. So one person starts, they run the set course. Then another person starts five seconds later, and it’s very fast paced. It’s the ultimate lung buster by the end, like you just want to pass out on the ground and it’s, you end up exerting [00:35:00] yourself more than you ever would like running laps around a track because somebody is chasing you and you’re chasing somebody in front of you.

[00:35:06] Charlie Deist: So I love that game and like, I want to play that game with people who are fast and capable of jumping over branches and jumping under branches. But we usually do that towards the end after we’ve done stuff that’s more inclusive, the more gentle warmup flow. And usually after the first 20 minutes or so, people kind of break out into their own little separate pockets and and might be having conversations with someone who has a particular perspective that they’re in need of someone might be, you know, having some kind of a chronic illness and they’re talking to the herbalist or someone’s whatever it might be maybe people are even having a conversation about politics.

[00:35:46] Charlie Deist: It might be an argument, it might be a always a civil argument, but there might be some discussion happening with the movement. And I think the fact that we’re there for movement opens up. Kind of paradoxically, a wider [00:36:00] possibility for the conversations that can take place because the subject of the group is not the topics of conversation or the purpose of the group is not the topics of conversation, if that makes sense.

[00:36:11] Charlie Deist: So we can kind of explore different modalities. And I think this dovetails with the next one you wanted to talk about, which is the social contract and how, yeah, we’re not united in any kind of religious outlook or political ideology.

[00:36:25] Charlie Deist: Yeah, there are some shared values but none of them are dogma. And Throughout COVID, even there were, you know, lots of sort of lively discussions about all the usual suspects, masking, vaccines. And there was.

[00:36:39] Lucas Root: I’ve not moved up yet, so I missed those.

[00:36:41] Charlie Deist: yeah, well, there was a healthy level of dissent within the context of generally shared values and like a kind of common sense approach willingness to like look at all, you know, all the data that’s available and people could come to their own conclusions.

[00:36:58] Charlie Deist: I don’t want to [00:37:00] necessarily get into those unless you do, because I, you know, I could go off and, you know, get on my high horse and talk about why to me it’s important that at an outdoor meetup, for example, like we would encourage people to, you know, actually, I shouldn’t say this, people would show up wearing COVID and that was okay, but almost always by the end, the mask would be off.

[00:37:23] Charlie Deist: And that’s again, speaks to the herd effect where mostly what people are doing is just based on their observations of what other people are doing. And, you know, I we kind of all had the conviction that like, you know, your mask isn’t doing you any good if anything, you know, wearing a mask 24/7 is probably going to.

[00:37:42] Charlie Deist: I saw a headline this week about some sort of, you know, new studies showing the not noxious chemicals that people end up inhaling through their mask. And so, you know, that’s just one sort of example of, we didn’t.

[00:37:53] Lucas Root: What if I wanted to have my breath continue get worse and worse?

[00:37:58] Charlie Deist: You what.

[00:37:59] Lucas Root: How dare you [00:38:00] tell me I can’t have my breath, like, just geometrically implode.

[00:38:06] Charlie Deist: Well, I’ve had this conversation with some people and I’ve tried to have it with compassion and, ultimately, you know, I sort of feel sorry for people that feel this burden on themselves to continue to do this. And around here, you know, Northern California, Berkeley, I don’t know what like

[00:38:24] Lucas Root: still about bad breath?

[00:38:25] Charlie Deist: Yes.

[00:38:26] Lucas Root: Okay.

[00:38:27] Charlie Deist: Now we’re, but it’s coming back to some extent, just when we thought it was gone, just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. And so that was, you know, that is sort of a core value. And part of our social contract is like, no, one’s going to come to our meetup and demand that other people wear masks.

[00:38:43] Charlie Deist: If you want to wear one yourself, you can I might kind of, laugh a little under my breath, but I’m not going to publicly humiliate you yet.

[00:38:57] Lucas Root: Yeah.[00:39:00]

[00:39:00] Charlie Deist: Can’t make any promises. The world’s gone crazy.

[00:39:04] Lucas Root: Particularly those weird natural movement guys. They’re the craziest.

[00:39:09] Charlie Deist: Some would say, but in a world of universal deceit, moving around on all fours is a revolutionary act, Luke.

[00:39:16] Lucas Root: Now there’s a statement.

[00:39:20] Charlie Deist: Bookmark that one.

[00:39:21] Lucas Root: Right?

[00:39:24] Charlie Deist: You could take that, you could take that slogan in so many different directions. I think it was originally, it’s always attributed to Gandhi on the bumper stickers. In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act, something like that. I think the first time I tried to repurpose it, I said, in a time of universal deceit, buying a four pack of avocados is a revolutionary act.

[00:39:43] Charlie Deist: But now I’ve got another one and this one this one can apply to

[00:39:46] Lucas Root: Buying a quarter of beef?

[00:39:48] Charlie Deist: Buying a quarter beef. The one I was going to say was in a time of universal pasteurization making homemade raw milk, raw ice, raw milk, homemade ice cream is a [00:40:00] revolutionary act.

[00:40:02] Lucas Root: Yeah, no one we know does that either.

[00:40:04] Charlie Deist: No.

[00:40:07] Lucas Root: Yeah. That’s fun. Wow. I appreciated that. So, sort of diving down a little bit deeper into the social contract. It if the social contract is the way that we choose to engage inside the community the rules that we choose to engage in, and sort of our guidelines for that engagement, are you saying that inside this community, it’s not okay to tell someone they’re wrong?

[00:40:45] Charlie Deist: Tell someone they’re wrong. I would say, as a matter of tactics and persuasion, I’ve never found that to be a very effective method. I think things like social proof, you know, forging [00:41:00] consensus, that does most of the work. So we actually had our first tribal council a few months ago, complete with you know, some bongo drums and much pomp and circumstance.

[00:41:10] Charlie Deist: And the questions that we wanted to address. A lot of them actually revolved around the controversial signal threads. So someone had wanted to move over to Telegram because there’s the ability to have different channels. You can mute one channel, but a lot of us were having trouble with Telegram because there was all kinds of spam and we were kind of locked into the signal.

[00:41:32] Charlie Deist: And so that conversation unfolded. Very civilly, there were a few people who spoke with a lot of conviction saying, this is what I think I propose this and then using the, you know, Robert’s rules of order or whatever, you know, someone else would second the motion and before long, it was like, all right, do we even need to put this to a vote?

[00:41:54] Charlie Deist: Well, let’s just put it to a vote, let’s see what happens. All in favor, you know, and it’s everybody’s hand goes up [00:42:00] and then all opposed, you know, nobody’s hand goes up. So I think a lot of times you can reach consensus just by hitting that tipping point through common sense and open discussion. We never had those conversations around some of the touchier, like political conversations but I’ve had some of those offline with people or in smaller groups.

[00:42:22] Charlie Deist: And in one case there was someone who came to a function at my house, a potluck event. And I don’t want to, you know, I don’t think she’s going to listen to this podcast. So I guess I can tell you, and you could choose to edit this out later, but you know, she showed up wearing this big honking mask.

[00:42:37] Charlie Deist: And this is like two or three months ago, I don’t know, four months ago at a time. You might’ve been there actually. And it was to me offensive, and I did actually follow up. I had maybe even sent a message to her beforehand, which she didn’t see that it was my preference that if she wanted to come, that she not wear a [00:43:00] mask.

[00:43:00] Charlie Deist: And I get that people have different reasons for thinking that it’s more important for them to wear a mask, like in this case, she.

[00:43:07] Lucas Root: I tell you why. It’s because you have horrible breath.

[00:43:12] Charlie Deist: Maybe. I don’t know. And to be honest, I don’t want to harp on this story because it makes me look a little bit petty, but that was a case where I felt like, this we call it the social contract, call it just sort of manners are my preference for how people who are coming into my house, which was different than just the meetups in general.

[00:43:36] Charlie Deist: This is something where I felt strongly, like that’s not a culture that I want to be a part of or promote, or even act like, I just don’t want to have to like pretend. To me, it becomes sort of an elephant in the room and I don’t want to have to pretend like this is something that is normal and I’m talking to you and you’re eating and you’re taking your mask off to eat [00:44:00] and you’re fondling your mask and it’s just, it takes a huge amount of cognitive dissonance, I think, to keep up that ruse.

[00:44:07] Charlie Deist: And so that was a case where I said basically like, I think you’re wrong and I would prefer if you didn’t, but on the whole, if somebody wants to go through life with that cognitive dissonance and bring it to the move net group, we’re probably not going to pass a rule about it yet again, you never know. We’ll take it one day at a time.

[00:44:30] Lucas Root: For what it’s worth, my general opinion is if you want to smell your own breath while we’re out doing infinity tree, follow the leader, then, you know, have at it.

[00:44:40] Charlie Deist: Yeah. And that’s probably a healthier outlook, to be honest. I think, you know, I really do try not to concern myself with the decisions that other people make so long as they’re not hurting other people. And you know, I also have to remain humble to the possibility that I’m just wrong[00:45:00] that, you know, she is protecting herself and her immunocompromised client.

[00:45:06] Charlie Deist: That’s a possibility. So for the most part, I do try to remain humble on that and on most things, but I also believe in having some core convictions and leading with my values and and that mostly just involves, like I said, modeling the behavior hoping that the majority of people follow suit.

[00:45:28] Charlie Deist: And then from that social proof, it tends to tip people who are on the edge over into your camp. It’s like, I’ll give an example in politics.

[00:45:39] Lucas Root: You’re sure you want to do that?

[00:45:41] Charlie Deist: Yes. Let’s do it.

[00:45:41] Lucas Root: This is recorded. You can’t take it back.

[00:45:44] Charlie Deist: I’ll make it somewhat generic, but you know, every primary season, there are some people who are early on, maybe there’s a lot of hype around them, but oftentimes it really doesn’t take much for their campaign to completely fizzle out.

[00:45:56] Charlie Deist: And that’s not because everybody independently comes to the conclusion that person is a [00:46:00] loser. It’s that a small number of people kind of, and this is how a lot of times political parties can control the narrative and sort of pick their preferred candidate is if they can generate a sense of a consensus, nobody wants to root for the loser.

[00:46:16] Charlie Deist: Nobody wants to vote for the guy that’s running 2% in the polls. So yeah, I mean, I could get specific with stuff that’s happening right now in real time, but the principle is more important than the specific personalities. And this also.

[00:46:31] Lucas Root: Favorite example of that would be Ralph Nader in the late nineties and early two thousands.

[00:46:36] Charlie Deist: Oh yeah. Where he could have been more, much more popular.

[00:46:40] Lucas Root: He could have been.

[00:46:41] Charlie Deist: Right. But it, yeah, it became this thing of, Oh yeah. You know, a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush or something like that.

[00:46:48] Lucas Root: Yeah. A vote for Nader is a vote for the other party.

[00:46:51] Charlie Deist: Right, right. Yep. Right. Whichever side you are on. That’s a good point. Yeah. Well, the, and the other thing about social [00:47:00] proof is there’s this video of the guy dancing in the park and then one other person starts to dance along

[00:47:06] Lucas Root: I love that video.

[00:47:07] Charlie Deist: long, And everybody’s dancing. And I often refer to that in thinking about the movement group, because, you know, one person crawling around on all four is looks like a crazy person, but two people, now you’ve got a movement. Now you’ve got a real something happening. You’ve got a society of people.

[00:47:25] Charlie Deist: And so the third and fourth and fifth will all follow from that. So if it had just been me, the group never would have stuck. If it had just been Chip, the group never would have been stuck. But I think having both of us, you know, consistently trying to get it going. And it wasn’t even like we were trying to build a tribe.

[00:47:41] Charlie Deist: We just enjoyed hanging out. But from that a whole group of really amazing people who I love deeply have have come out and defined the group in a way that I never could have seen coming, but it’s beautiful.

[00:47:57] Lucas Root: Yeah. Love it. [00:48:00] Thank you, Charlie. I like to wrap up my interviews with three questions. First one is, for the people who’ve been really inspired by this and just have to reach out and get in touch with you, they want to follow you, what’s the one best way that they can find you?

[00:48:19] Charlie Deist: Probably Twitter at ChDeist, although I’ve been inactive on sub stack, which is just my name.com CharlieDeist.Com and my email address and all that is easy enough to find, but yeah, connect on Twitter.

[00:48:34] Lucas Root: At ChDeist.

[00:48:35] Charlie Deist: Excuse me X, Twitter X. Okay.

[00:48:37] Lucas Root: Right. I still haven’t made the switch in my own head either.

[00:48:42] Charlie Deist: Oh, and I feel like, I don’t know, I’m sure someday I’ll look back on it and be like, oh man, it used to be called Twitter, but for now, it’s still definitely Twitter in my mind.

[00:48:52] Lucas Root: You know, at some point we’re going to look back and say, you know, it used to be called Facebook, but that name switch was official quite some time ago and boy, it’s [00:49:00] still Facebook.

[00:49:01] Charlie Deist: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Right. Maybe someday we’ll look back and be like, it used to be called the internet. Now it’s just everything whole world, the internet of things is taken over. So it’s like, there’s no dividing line between the internet and reality anymore. That’s a scary thought. Or is it?

[00:49:19] Lucas Root: I mean, we’re not really too AR, augmented reality and like real serious, meaningful, like you walk down the street and the buildings are talking to you kind of thing, but we’re also not far.

[00:49:31] Charlie Deist: Yeah. Yeah. Life comes at you pretty fast.

[00:49:36] Lucas Root: Yeah in some ways I’m excited about that. In some ways I’m a little bit terrified, but, you know, that’s the way change is supposed to be.

[00:49:43] Charlie Deist: Right, right. The application I want to see, and I don’t know that I’ll be an early adopter for this, but like, I’d like to be able to walk down the street and see all the archived historical photos of what that place used to look like. I think that would be a very cool [00:50:00] augmented reality application.

[00:50:02] Lucas Root: That would be cool. Yeah. See, now that makes me more excited.

[00:50:07] Charlie Deist: Right? Yeah. The future is bright.

[00:50:11] Lucas Root: Next question. If there was one thing that you really wish I had asked you during this interview, what would it be?

[00:50:21] Charlie Deist: Give me the third question and then we’ll come back to the second one. Unless the order is important.

[00:50:26] Lucas Root: The order’s important.

[00:50:28] Charlie Deist: Okay. Well.

[00:50:29] Lucas Root: And that, by the way, is a great answer.

[00:50:33] Charlie Deist: I would say, what kinds of movements have been tickling my funny bone lately or challenging me, and.

[00:50:41] Lucas Root: Wait, why? Why that?

[00:50:42] Charlie Deist: Why that? Well, because it makes me think and it makes me want to be more intentional and maybe incorporate some new practices.

[00:50:56] Lucas Root: Now, why isn’t that the purpose that [00:51:00] you identified for the group? It makes me think and it makes me want to be more intentional.

[00:51:04] Charlie Deist: Huh, I see sort of the meta layer beneath the challenge that’s an excellent point. And that might be, I’ve been wanting to do sort of a small, you know, short interview series with everyone to, to find out what they say, what keeps them coming back. And I suspect I might hear something like that from people.

[00:51:24] Charlie Deist: It’d be an interesting null hypothesis and and see if maybe what they’re saying on one level sounds different, but then if you probe a little deeper, maybe it does tie back to the same thing. So you said, what did I say? I said to be more intentional about what was it? I don’t remember even what I said.

[00:51:44] Lucas Root: Yep. You said it. I asked why that? Right. Why is that the question? And and the question was, which movements have been tickling your fancy recently? Right.

[00:51:55] Charlie Deist: Right, right.

[00:51:56] Lucas Root: I said, why that? And you said, because it makes me think and it makes me want to [00:52:00] be more intentional.

[00:52:04] Charlie Deist: You can quote me on that. Yeah that’s a good one. I said that. Wow.

[00:52:10] Lucas Root: You said you did, you said that. Sometimes the darndest things, right?

[00:52:17] Charlie Deist: Yeah.

[00:52:18] Lucas Root: So which movements?

[00:52:21] Charlie Deist: Well, I’ve actually been rediscovering running in a new way. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to run differently and sort of change my approach. And I think it helps that I transitioned to barefoot some years ago, because running barefoot forces you to pay more attention to your form. And it makes it so that you can always unlock new efficiency improvements, and I’m playing around with, I mentioned the sweet spot and the groove.

[00:52:50] Lucas Root: You know.

[00:52:51] Charlie Deist: Finding, yeah.

[00:52:52] Lucas Root: When I switched to barefoot, when I switched back to barefoot as an adult, the thing that really turned me on the most, like, brought me home [00:53:00] grinning like a kid was quoting you. It makes me think and it makes me have to be intentional. Because when you take away the padding, your interaction with the ground becomes core. Like, it’s no longer just running to to fatigue your big muscles, right? You must be intentionally focused on your interaction between the foot and the ground.

[00:53:24] Charlie Deist: And it becomes kind of a visual puzzle too. This is especially true with trail running or like real barefoot running where you’re watching out for little pebbles, but you realize how your brain is tracking things in a way that you’re not even conscious of, like if I look 10 feet in front of me, my feet, remember what I saw a second ago, that was 10 feet in front of me.

[00:53:46] Charlie Deist: And that’s now immediately underfoot and they’re making these adjustments. And I have no idea what that.

[00:53:51] Lucas Root: You have to walk the consciousness ladder to get there, though, because when you’re habituated to clouds under your feet your brain turns that off. It [00:54:00] goes away. It’s not part of you anymore. And you have to go to barefoot and then become conscious of that as an incompetence and then learn to be unconsciously competent through the latter.

[00:54:13] Charlie Deist: True. That’s true. But I’m finding in running in

[00:54:16] Lucas Root: that.

[00:54:16] Lucas Root: Which is delightful.

[00:54:18] Charlie Deist: Yeah.

[00:54:18] Lucas Root: It’s delightful.

[00:54:20] Charlie Deist: Yep. I had really lost the lust for running for a long time and and it’s come back in waves, but I’m sort of enjoying a wave of it right now where I try to find that sweet spot, find the groove where I’m exerting myself enough to be challenging, but staying just below the threshold.

[00:54:38] Charlie Deist: I’ve been trying sort of nasal breathing techniques and things that limit my breath a little bit. So yeah I’m going to see how far I can take that, and the other one is going into the water, ideally down in the bay somewhere, natural body of water, and going about maybe waist deep or a little deeper, and then playing around with really [00:55:00] explosive jumps.

[00:55:00] Charlie Deist: So like plyometric type stuff where, because I’m in the water, one it adds some resistance and two,

[00:55:06] Lucas Root: it’s non standard resistance.

[00:55:08] Charlie Deist: Right, right. It’s, yeah, so that’s where I’ll come home. I’ll be tired in a different way. It’s like a regenerative feeling, and I don’t get, you know, super sore the next day, but I can feel that I built up some explosive power in a safe medium where, you know, if I were to jump like that on land I could easily hurt myself.

[00:55:27] Lucas Root: I mean, you’d be fine now, but you had to start somewhere.

[00:55:32] Charlie Deist: True.

[00:55:34] Lucas Root: Yeah. I love it. Third question. We took our time with that second question, didn’t we? Third question is do you have any closing thoughts?

[00:55:44] Charlie Deist: Well, I’ve got a a bulletin board with a map of Berkeley. Hang on one second. I’ve got to, got to pull this out. Maybe some people are just listening but this map of Berkeley [00:56:00] contains, it’s got a little post it note for each of the places that we do our workouts on a regular basis. And I keep this in my office.

[00:56:08] Lucas Root: Got five dots.

[00:56:10] Charlie Deist: There’s four. So there’s Saturday mornings, there’s Tuesday afternoons on campus.

[00:56:16] Charlie Deist: And actually, I need to update this because there’s Wednesday mornings at Ohlone Park, and Albany bulb has sort of slipped off as a regular but we used to do a Muay Thai session at Albany bulb. And I keep that in my office as a reminder that, well, and I also have a sticker on my computer that says, finish your work and go outside and kind of, you know.

[00:56:39] Lucas Root: That’s great.

[00:56:40] Charlie Deist: A lot of times I get into this mode where I start to think that my work is the most important thing that defines me.

[00:56:48] Charlie Deist: And it’s funny, cause we didn’t actually talk at all about that. Even in my introduction, I didn’t mention what I do for a living, and that’s great, we can just leave that, you know, leave that as a mystery. But I think how I want [00:57:00] to continue to define myself is apart from what I do in my office, some number of hours of the day, I’d much rather be defined by the things that I’m doing outside in the real world with other real flesh and blood human beings.

[00:57:14] Charlie Deist: And I think this is a beautiful model of community for it. Anyone to kind of get to know their habitat better and find the people who will explore that habitat with you and explore what it means to be an embodied human being.

[00:57:31] Lucas Root: Yeah. Go play on the grass somewhere in your city.

[00:57:34] Charlie Deist: That’s right. Finish your work and go outside.

[00:57:37] Lucas Root: Finish your work and go outside. Love it. Thank you, Charlie.

[00:57:41] Charlie Deist: Oh, thank you, Luke.