Mark Divine [00:00:57]:
The best place.

Henry Abbott [00:00:58]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:00:58]:
Strongest part of the body.

Henry Abbott [00:00:59]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:01:00]:
But it broke into 18 pieces. Broke a ribs, pneumothorax. Oh, my gosh.

Henry Abbott [00:01:04]:
So your lungs messed up or. No.

Mark Divine [00:01:06]:
Well, yeah.

Henry Abbott [00:01:08]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:01:08]:
I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I was. I’m pretty damn healthy. Even the doctor who was out. I made it home to Chicago before my body said it. It. I need to.

Henry Abbott [00:01:18]:
Oh, really?

Mark Divine [00:01:18]:
Yeah. You need to get surgery. I was trying to make it back to here to either LA or ucsd.

Henry Abbott [00:01:22]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:01:23]:
And they ended up at Rush Hospital.

Henry Abbott [00:01:25]:
Okay.

Mark Divine [00:01:25]:
Which is a pretty good sport, you know, Orthopedic.

Henry Abbott [00:01:28]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:01:28]:
Like really good. A lot of pro athletes from the Midwest go there, and the surgeon was a New Zealand guy because they had to, like. You should see the scar. It looks like a shark bit my whole shoulder.

Henry Abbott [00:01:40]:
Oh, my gosh.

Mark Divine [00:01:41]:
Pulled all the. All the muscle out and put. Rector set in to put all the pieces back together.

Henry Abbott [00:01:46]:
Oh, my gosh.

Mark Divine [00:01:48]:
And so that part. The trauma from the surgery and the repair was big, but the lungs and the. All the internal organs just had this like, blast trauma.

Henry Abbott [00:01:58]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:01:58]:
And it fucked up my voice. And I’m like. I get really tired.

Henry Abbott [00:02:02]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:02:04]:
So I’m going to. I’d be trying to project my energy.

Henry Abbott [00:02:07]:
Have you done voice training?

Mark Divine [00:02:09]:
No. I’m considering needing to do it because it’s been two months and it hasn’t Come back. I just assumed it would come back.

Henry Abbott [00:02:14]:
Yeah. I think it’s like. So my daughter did it. She was a singer. And it’s like, crazy how they changed her voice. It’s like. It’s a workout. It’s muscular workout.

Henry Abbott [00:02:26]:
You know, it’s muscle control. I don’t know. It’s probably your third lesson.

Mark Divine [00:02:30]:
Just brought that up the other day, like, wanting to find someone because.

Henry Abbott [00:02:33]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:02:33]:
It hasn’t come back.

Henry Abbott [00:02:35]:
I know, I know. I don’t. I think he’s still doing it by Zoom. There’s a guy. He was. So my daughter went to this thing on Broadway in New York, and they had this guy who was like, unbelievable voice teacher. And my daughter was like, can we. He’s just like, she’s even going to voice lessons for years without these results.

Henry Abbott [00:02:50]:
She’s like, this guy’s amazing.

Mark Divine [00:02:51]:
He’s the guy.

Henry Abbott [00:02:52]:
And then he went for the pandemic. He moved to, like, Coastal Carolina University. So he’s down in. I think that’s South Carolina. But he. They had lessons over Zoom all through the pandemic.

Mark Divine [00:03:02]:
I could see that working.

Henry Abbott [00:03:03]:
And I don’t know, you probably have a million grade. You’re close to la, but if you ever want to meet that guy, I’d be happy to connect you.

Mark Divine [00:03:08]:
He’s.

Henry Abbott [00:03:09]:
He’s brilliant.

Mark Divine [00:03:09]:
How much does he charge? Not that it matters.

Henry Abbott [00:03:12]:
I think it’s. I think we were paying him, like, a hundred dollars for an hour private lesson. And I think she did, like, maybe. I don’t know, she did like three a month or so in the pandemic. And her voice just went from. I mean, she sounded like an angel. You know, I was like, this is.

Mark Divine [00:03:28]:
Like, that’s pretty amazing.

Henry Abbott [00:03:30]:
Spend 500 bucks to, like, sing like an angel. I can’t sing.

Mark Divine [00:03:32]:
So they work on your. How you project. Yeah.

Henry Abbott [00:03:36]:
He just listens to you and it’s like, okay, we’ll do this and try this. The next thing you know, you’re, like, controlling muscles you’d never thought you could control before.

Speaker C [00:03:43]:
I like that.

Henry Abbott [00:03:44]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:03:45]:
Let’s get that notes.

Speaker C [00:03:46]:
I can’t hit singing.

Henry Abbott [00:03:47]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:03:47]:
I would love to see it, like, because I’ve never. I’ve never been able to. And I took voice for years as a kid.

Henry Abbott [00:03:53]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:03:54]:
And I had speech therapy, too, which is. Might be what you need to do because, like, I had to relearn how to train.

Mark Divine [00:03:58]:
Yeah. Is voice training the same as speech therapy?

Speaker C [00:04:01]:
It’s a little different, but for me, it was around the damage on the vocal cords, which Is what I think you have.

Mark Divine [00:04:07]:
I think, I think I might have some nerve damage.

Henry Abbott [00:04:10]:
Oh, the nodules.

Mark Divine [00:04:11]:
Some of my vocal cords might be, like, paralyzed.

Speaker C [00:04:13]:
Yes.

Henry Abbott [00:04:14]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:04:14]:
That’s where they teach you how to breathe and then they, like, teach you when you’re speaking, how to, like, let the exhale out. Like, I spent, I think it was two years. I did that, that as a kid because I had such bad damage on.

Henry Abbott [00:04:29]:
My vocal cord from what were you in, like a thrash band or something? I wasn’t, I was, I think seven or eight.

Speaker C [00:04:39]:
I don’t know. My voice, I sounded like I was a heavy smoker at like, you know.

Henry Abbott [00:04:45]:
It’S kind of a cool. That’s kind of a cool. Like, hey, how you doing?

Speaker C [00:04:47]:
I mean, I really was like. And it’s. And it’s still raspy, but it’s nothing like it was when I was little.

Henry Abbott [00:04:52]:
I do love it when kids talk like that, though. I’m always like, it’s like a. Yeah.

Speaker C [00:04:56]:
But I, I, I would be really interested. Like, you said that man’s in la.

Henry Abbott [00:05:01]:
No, he’s on the East Coast. He does zoom. Yeah, he totally does zoom. Information. Remind me when we’re done and I’ll get on my phone.

Speaker C [00:05:09]:
It might be worth it for you, but either way. Yes.

Mark Divine [00:05:12]:
Yeah, I would like that too.

Mark Divine [00:06:08]:
Super stoked to have you. We were talking about my voice and you know how it could be either just internal shock or even the nerves, maybe paralyzed. But it’s been two months since that accident. I haven’t, it hasn’t come back. And I appreciate you telling me about voice therapy. I think that could be helpful.

Henry Abbott [00:06:27]:
I, I am increasingly understanding that, like, you know, there’s Like I think there’s 600 muscles in the body.

Mark Divine [00:06:32]:
Yeah.

Henry Abbott [00:06:32]:
And you know, our brain is very flexible and how it can control them and like you can train so many things. I didn’t think you could train.

Mark Divine [00:06:38]:
It’s like neuroplasticity is a neuromuscularity. Right.

Henry Abbott [00:06:41]:
It’s the coolest stu in the world. It’s hard all. It’s weird and it feels hard. And these exercises that don’t like when if you go to some voice coach, they’re not going to give you something, you’re like, oh yeah. It’s like doing a push up. It’s like, no, it’s going to feel weird. Right. But if you’re willing to indulge in this weird stuff, you can.

Mark Divine [00:06:57]:
Let’s just say the human body mind is just extraordinary.

Henry Abbott [00:07:00]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:07:01]:
You know, I was blown away recently and I want to come back to the voicing. Reading about. I don’t know what the exact term is, but it’s something about encephalitis where the brain ends up becoming like water. There’s these patients who have this something encephalitis. So they don’t have a brain structure.

Henry Abbott [00:07:19]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:07:20]:
And yet they develop full functionality as a human being.

Henry Abbott [00:07:25]:
What?

Mark Divine [00:07:25]:
Kid, I know, I kid you not. Full functionality with the iq. There’s many cases like this with like.

Henry Abbott [00:07:32]:
A normal iq, we just gotta like, like.

Mark Divine [00:07:35]:
And they don’t have a brain. Like if you give an mri that’s basically water with a really thin, you know, white matter on the outside. I mean it just doesn’t seem possible. But that just shows you the mind is not the brain.

Henry Abbott [00:07:48]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:07:48]:
Of course the brain will affect how the mind functions in a normal adult. But the power then of the brain to heal and then the muscle in the body really will respond. Right. So this is like the key to longevity. Everyone’s trying to jack themselves up with, you know, all these longevity pills and supplements and this and that and the other thing. And really the key to longevity is movement and your mind. And those two are the same actually. Right?

Henry Abbott [00:08:12]:
Yeah, totally. So one little thing that I learned in writing this book is like the part of your brain that manages language is complex and big and the heart of everything in academia is Shakespeare and all this. Right. But that’s like a little tiny little backpack on the system that manages movement. Right. They’re tracked together, they work the same way and they have the same.

Mark Divine [00:08:35]:
Why you memorize things better if you move.

Henry Abbott [00:08:37]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:08:38]:
Or you think better. Like walking. Like Einstein used to walk while he was thinking.

Henry Abbott [00:08:42]:
Right, Right.

Mark Divine [00:08:43]:
That’s interesting.

Henry Abbott [00:08:43]:
I had a period.

Mark Divine [00:08:44]:
You know, here’s the other thing. If that part gets damaged, a different part of your brain will pick it up.

Henry Abbott [00:08:48]:
Oh, yeah. Like these people who. There are humans who can echolocate, right. They like. Like, can you freaking imagine? Like, people are worried about learning.

Mark Divine [00:08:56]:
What does that mean? Echo locate. So know what that means?

Henry Abbott [00:08:59]:
Click. They click and then the sounds. Like there are people. There’s like a guy. Like a bat. I can almost. Daniel Kish is his name. There’s a guy named Daniel Kiss.

Henry Abbott [00:09:08]:
You can look him up. He lost his sight when he was a child, but. So he was. His brain was used to seeing. Right. He wasn’t born blind.

Mark Divine [00:09:16]:
I see.

Henry Abbott [00:09:16]:
Right. And then his brain rewired. So his ears have nerves that. I’m not a doctor.

Mark Divine [00:09:24]:
The ears start to see the part.

Henry Abbott [00:09:25]:
Of the brain that used to feed his eyes. Right. And. And now he can click. And like, if you. If they put a. Put him in the MRI machine and he listens to the same things we hear, like music or whatever, it acts just like our brains. But if his click bounces off, like, it can be something like this or that friend or a tent pole or whatever, it comes back and lights up the visual section of the brain.

Henry Abbott [00:09:45]:
And he can ride a bicycle, he can play basketball, he mountain bikes. Like. Like, he’s.

Mark Divine [00:09:51]:
He’s got his own internal radar or sonar.

Henry Abbott [00:09:54]:
Yeah. So if I’m like a. Occasionally in my life, I’ve had to learn some new movement or some odd thing like I’m describing, you know, I don’t. I’m not good at how I use my hips. I was born with hip dysplasia, and I’ve had a lot of problems from that. Like, so they’re telling me, like, oh, you know, make sure your hips are level when you’re standing on one leg in this position. And it feels weird and difficult, I’m like, this is child’s play. Easy compared to what my buddy Daniel Kish is doing.

Henry Abbott [00:10:17]:
Right. Like, we can learn so much.

Mark Divine [00:10:18]:
It’s fascinating. Well, you know this. I was telling my wife that with this accident which shattered my scalp, snowmobile accident, shattered my scalp in 18 pieces and broke eight ribs, punctured my lungs. And all of this stuff is healing up. I mean, it’s going to take a while for the muscles to remember what they’re supposed to do and then everything to work. But it was like the blunt force trauma shock to the overall system, which has really been hard. And because, you know, your energy system Just is everything is going to work to try to heal all of that, whatever that is. Right.

Mark Divine [00:10:58]:
Because you. You smack a tree going 40 miles an hour, a lot of little micro traumas are happening, macro traumas. And so this is why the voice is gone. And my internal organs are a little bit whacked and all the muscles of my upper body are still sore two months later.

Henry Abbott [00:11:12]:
Do you feel like you have a little ptsd?

Mark Divine [00:11:16]:
It’s interesting. I was wondering about that, and I did a whole discussion about PTSD with my clients the other day. It’d be foolish for me to say that I don’t, but I haven’t experienced any mood disorders. I haven’t experienced any depression or anxiety, the usual symptoms. And I attribute to that to like pre resiliency. You know, I’ve been having breath work, practice since I was 21 and meditating since I was 21 and therapy, all sorts of modalities because that’s what I teach. So it’s kind of like what I do when I. When I train seals.

Mark Divine [00:11:53]:
I train them to be resilient before the crisis so they bounce back really quick after combat or whatever’s happening. So that’s what I attributed to. But you never know. Pay attention.

Henry Abbott [00:12:05]:
Yeah, yeah. How would you. I mean, I don’t want to. Like, I’m not going to psychoanalyze you.

Mark Divine [00:12:09]:
Like, please do. But, like, for a great episode, if I.

Henry Abbott [00:12:13]:
If I ask you to jump on a snowmobile right now, do you want to join me in that.

Mark Divine [00:12:16]:
That I’m never getting on a snowmobile again in my life? Or a motorcycle?

Henry Abbott [00:12:23]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:12:24]:
These things are evil.

Henry Abbott [00:12:25]:
They’re pretty tough. Well, it’s kind of dumb. I feel like, you know, you’ve done. I can only imagine how many dangerous things you’ve done that were like, for a big cause. Right?

Mark Divine [00:12:34]:
Yeah. I was getting paid for it too.

Henry Abbott [00:12:36]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is just like this one.

Mark Divine [00:12:37]:
I paid this. This little trip cost me about 20 grand when you added all the.

Henry Abbott [00:12:41]:
Oh, for sure.

Mark Divine [00:12:42]:
The motorcycle or the snowmobile damage and the airfare and the.

Henry Abbott [00:12:45]:
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Divine [00:12:46]:
And the medical bills, and it was.

Henry Abbott [00:12:47]:
Just to be a little more fun than if you’d gone swimming that day. Right.

Mark Divine [00:12:51]:
You know what I mean?

Henry Abbott [00:12:51]:
Like, that’s the. Anyway, Yeah. I feel like this at this age. When I was young, I did every fun thing I could do. Right. But now I’m like, no, no, it’s gotta be like, you know, it has to be really fun for me to accept that much danger.

Mark Divine [00:13:03]:
And our definition of fun is different than what we get and the wiser we get. Right. For me, like, it’s fun hanging out in the beach and medit or going for a walk or being in nature, you know?

Henry Abbott [00:13:13]:
Sure.

Mark Divine [00:13:13]:
I’m not. I don’t need to chase something outside of myself. You know, I’ve done podcasts with tons of people and I’m sure, you know, tons of people who are always trying to do that next greatest thing. And I don’t mean just like exciting, like speed, but like, well, you know, let’s see. I did six marathons and six continents on six days now. What can I do?

Henry Abbott [00:13:34]:
Right.

Mark Divine [00:13:35]:
Right. Oh, I’m going to do seven triathlons and seven. I don’t know, me.

Henry Abbott [00:13:39]:
Maybe not many as you want. Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:13:45]:
And then I’m going to climb all seven sisters, you know, of the mountains. I remember asking Don Mann, who’s a good friend of mine, I said, what are you running from, Don? Like, I stopped him in his tracks, you know, he’s like, people are praising him and everything. I’m like, don, what are you running from?

Henry Abbott [00:13:59]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:14:00]:
Or running toward. Like you’re running toward your death or you’re running from some sort of childhood trauma that says, the last thing I did isn’t enough. I have to do something more.

Henry Abbott [00:14:09]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:14:10]:
It’s not enough that I was an abc.

Henry Abbott [00:14:12]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:14:12]:
And it’s not enough that I climbed Everest. I feel that I don’t have that need anymore. Maybe when I was younger I did.

Henry Abbott [00:14:20]:
I’m fascinated by those people and I’m a fan of like, just, I like to move. I like to do stuff I don’t. You know, I like adventure. Right. But it is curious to me. I’m like, why can’t you go home? Like, what’s the problem?

Mark Divine [00:14:31]:
You’re doing for the right reason, like, shackled. And someone said, why do you. Why are you climbing Everest? And he’s like, because it’s there.

Henry Abbott [00:14:37]:
Right.

Mark Divine [00:14:37]:
You know what I mean? I get that sense of adventure.

Henry Abbott [00:14:39]:
Yeah. Like, I’m gonna go. I.

Mark Divine [00:14:41]:
But back then, it wasn’t like he wasn’t trying to be. To beat himself, you know, or it was. I don’t think it was ego.

Henry Abbott [00:14:48]:
True.

Mark Divine [00:14:48]:
It was the spirit of adventure and.

Henry Abbott [00:14:51]:
Just like the joy of movement. Right. Like, I. I think I interviewed Marcus Elliot 44 times for this book and almost all of them. He just isn’t a guy who wants to sit inside and talk, like. And so to get the book done, I rented a high end mountain bike every single time I went to Santa Barbara, interview him. And I Would put my phone in his pocket with, like, the, you know, the. The corded earbuds that come with their phone in his ear.

Henry Abbott [00:15:18]:
And then on my handlebars, I had the questions, and then we would just do whatever crazy thing and that. And I have all these hours now or other times we would hike and go jump off waterfalls and stuff. But that’s how I interviewed him. I mean, a couple times we played backgammon or something, but I don’t remember a single time we just sat in two chairs and I interviewed him like that Interesting. And so. But that was about, you know, we, like, hanging out.

Mark Divine [00:15:44]:
Right?

Henry Abbott [00:15:44]:
He sent. The hills above Santa Barbara are, like, heavenly. Is every.

Mark Divine [00:15:49]:
Yeah.

Henry Abbott [00:15:49]:
Turn. You’re like, what a great thing to be alive and to be here with this view and these, like, grackles and this juniper smell and these, like, incredible. I think it’s called, like, a. There’s some plant that only blooms, like, once a century. You know what I’m talking?

Mark Divine [00:16:02]:
Right?

Henry Abbott [00:16:02]:
And that thing’s blooming, and we’re going to jump off this waterfall. Like, I. I almost actually, I went enough times and was just, like, ecstatic enough. I live in New Jersey, right. We don’t. We do have more of this than people think. But, like, I, like, just out of guilt, I brought my son because, like, he needs to. He’s just gonna love this, you know, Again, so for the last couple trips of the report in the book, he came with me just to, like, bop around in the woods and jump off things and just be like, wild animals or whatever.

Henry Abbott [00:16:30]:
Like.

Mark Divine [00:16:30]:
No, I think you’re right. I think humans are happiest when they’re. When they can move and play.

Henry Abbott [00:16:35]:
Totally.

Mark Divine [00:16:36]:
You know what I mean? And that, like, the best form of exercise is play.

Henry Abbott [00:16:39]:
Yeah, totally.

Mark Divine [00:16:40]:
Like, move. Nat. You know what I mean? Like, I think I did a podcast with the founder, movenet, Move Nation.

Henry Abbott [00:16:44]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:16:45]:
Or Move Natural Move N. And in animal fitness.

Henry Abbott [00:16:48]:
Right.

Mark Divine [00:16:49]:
Things are just super cool. Are you just playing?

Henry Abbott [00:16:52]:
Yeah. Yeah, just playing. And you have to know what you love. Right? Like, Right like you. This is the problem with everybody doing the same workout. I mean, I go to the gym and I do the same workout, but, like, the problem is that, like, I might really enjoy this one thing and you might enjoy the other thing, and there no point in us pretending that we’re each equally like. But, you know, I. When I drove here today, intentionally, a little bit early, and there’s the ocean, and I just want to jump in it, you know, it’s just like, how I Am.

Henry Abbott [00:17:19]:
It kills me to go near an ocean and not jump in it.

Mark Divine [00:17:22]:
Yeah.

Henry Abbott [00:17:22]:
So I put. I put a towel in the car. I spent an extra half. I left half an hour early and just jumped in. It’s cold. It’s cold.

Mark Divine [00:17:30]:
Wasn’t it?

Henry Abbott [00:17:30]:
But I love that feeling afterward. Right. Like, by the time you’re walking, I’ve noticed this. We did this cold water thing with some friends near our house. Like, it’s like almost like a ritual we keep doing. And we jump up this waterfall into this cold water. And when we’re going out, everybody’s anxious, right. Everybody’s like, oh, maybe I won’t do it.

Henry Abbott [00:17:44]:
I’ll see you. Like, and then we go back, everyone’s.

Mark Divine [00:17:47]:
High as a kite.

Henry Abbott [00:17:47]:
High as a kite. No problems. And we’re all bonded. Everyone just loves it. And then you go eat delicious food and, like, people are just. Yeah. High as a kite, as you say. Like, it’s just a great thing.

Henry Abbott [00:17:57]:
Yeah. Look, I’m getting goosebumps. I know.

Mark Divine [00:18:00]:
I was thinking about that. Like, you’re bringing me back to my experiences. Upstate New York. I’m from east coast as well.

Henry Abbott [00:18:05]:
Oh, where upstate?

Mark Divine [00:18:07]:
Winter, we wintered in kind of like Syracuse. Utica region.

Henry Abbott [00:18:10]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:18:10]:
So central Leather stocking region, they call it. Went to high school and college up there, actually. But summertime was up in the Adirondacks on Lake Placid.

Henry Abbott [00:18:20]:
Oh, cool.

Mark Divine [00:18:21]:
And had this kind of geographically idyllic in the family. It wasn’t so idyllic.

Henry Abbott [00:18:27]:
There was a lot of shit going on there. Comprende? Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:18:32]:
But in terms of like. Like being able to just be outside and play.

Henry Abbott [00:18:36]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:18:37]:
This. This place my parents had was on the west shore, Lake Placid. There’s no road access.

Henry Abbott [00:18:41]:
Oh, cool.

Mark Divine [00:18:42]:
So we had a small fleet of boats. You know, we had a Boston Whale to ram around the lake anytime I wanted to go. And we had, of course, the Adirondack guide boat. We had the canoes, kayaks, sailboat. We had a ski nautique, you know, for water skiing. So slum skiing, barefooting, you know, tournaments. We’d made all sorts of toys that we would just test underwater. Like, I remember creating this underwater sled, right.

Mark Divine [00:19:11]:
And I would hook it to the end of a ski rope, and you kind of porpoise this thing. And I would just go down, you know, and hold my breath. It was like an early SDV seal delivery vehicle, you know, and so I would just cruise.

Henry Abbott [00:19:21]:
And you’re like. You’re like Superman, basically.

Mark Divine [00:19:24]:
Exactly.

Henry Abbott [00:19:25]:
Oh, my God. That’s so cool.

Mark Divine [00:19:26]:
That was great. Until it hit a rock.

Henry Abbott [00:19:29]:
That kind of shocked me.

Mark Divine [00:19:31]:
Took the pun out of that.

Henry Abbott [00:19:32]:
Oh, my goodness. Yeah. The danger level on that thing is ridiculous. You’re basically blind, Right. You can’t see anything.

Mark Divine [00:19:39]:
Well, the lake is murky at that depth, and you’re not really able to see much.

Henry Abbott [00:19:44]:
How old are you?

Mark Divine [00:19:46]:
I was probably, like, 15 for that one.

Henry Abbott [00:19:48]:
I can’t. My kids like to do adventurous things, but I can just, like. I can just imagine. They’re like, hey, mom, what we did is we’re in a weighted device that we’re gonna tow behind a boat that’s gonna drive me like. Super.

Mark Divine [00:20:00]:
You could see why I was a good navy suit because I got really good at holding my breath.

Henry Abbott [00:20:05]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:20:06]:
I really comfortable in the water.

Henry Abbott [00:20:07]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:20:08]:
Doing dangerous things.

Henry Abbott [00:20:09]:
Yeah. And then how long can you hold your breath?

Mark Divine [00:20:12]:
Four to five minutes, easy. But, I mean, now I now know that’s barely anything.

Henry Abbott [00:20:17]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:20:17]:
Back then I thought it was a lot. You know, six minutes with. I’m really pushing it.

Henry Abbott [00:20:20]:
Yeah. This is in the water.

Mark Divine [00:20:22]:
I did a podcast with a guy named Stig who held his breath for, like, 22 minutes.

Henry Abbott [00:20:25]:
Oh, my God.

Mark Divine [00:20:27]:
It’s impossible. Does it?

Henry Abbott [00:20:28]:
I did a little thing once where I had never done any kind of breath holding with the clock and this, and I was first. I went to P3 that the manager of one of the parts called Alex, and he’s like, oh, this guy from Stanford was just here, and he’s a breath holding thing. We could run through it if you want. I’m like, all right. So we lay down on the floor, and he’s like, how long can you hold your breath? I’m like, I don’t know. 90 seconds. I really had no idea. And so I held my breath for 90 seconds.

Henry Abbott [00:20:52]:
And he’s like, great, why don’t we do this now? And he just. I have it all recorded. He just talked through a little bit of clearing the CO2 or whatever that thing is, and then told me to picture a flickering candle. And he said that if I wanted to, they would put a pulse oximeter on my finger. He wanted me to know that, like, that feeling of needing a breath is like a pregnancy contraction. And it passes. Right.

Mark Divine [00:21:14]:
Passes.

Henry Abbott [00:21:15]:
And then.

Mark Divine [00:21:15]:
You got another 40 or something.

Henry Abbott [00:21:17]:
Yeah. You don’t need. That’s not the sign of. You need oxygen. You’re gonna die. He just said that. And then he talked a little bit through the thing, and I did. I think I want to say, like, 3 14, 309, something like that.

Mark Divine [00:21:28]:
That’s pretty good.

Henry Abbott [00:21:29]:
And he’s like, let’s do one more. This is a good time to do another one. And I did 409. This is like 10 minutes after I first got any coaching in this. And The Marcus did 459. Right then I think the numbers are in the book. But I was like, man, this is just from a dude talking to me for three minutes about my body, giving me a little confidence that I’m okay. Like, there you go, buddy.

Henry Abbott [00:21:51]:
You’re okay. And suddenly I went from 90 seconds to over four minutes. I was like, yeah, I love that kind of stuff. That’s what we’re talking about to begin with. Right. You can. You can improve these things.

Mark Divine [00:22:00]:
That’s right. With the use of the mind. And, you know, running around in the mountains, too, one of the. I think that’s what taught me to be comfortable a. It taught me to be kind of a hybrid athlete. Right. So, for instance, we would run up. My friend and I, who is a Harvard guy, we would run up to the top of the mountain, white face mountain.

Mark Divine [00:22:25]:
And then we would put knee pads on and we’d wrap our ankles and we played tag on the way down.

Henry Abbott [00:22:30]:
Oh, my gosh. And you’re carrying packs, too.

Mark Divine [00:22:33]:
Yeah, like packs, water, you know. But if you ever hiked in those mountains, like, it’s all rocks and roots.

Henry Abbott [00:22:40]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:22:41]:
And like ankle breaking. There’s not very few, like, straight, flat paths.

Henry Abbott [00:22:46]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:22:46]:
And so we were like, just tumbling and I mean, it was just a shit show. All the way down.

Henry Abbott [00:22:51]:
You’re bloody at the bottom.

Mark Divine [00:22:52]:
Bloody. And having a ball.

Henry Abbott [00:22:54]:
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Divine [00:22:55]:
And so we had to become very body aware. We were talking about in this. My snowmobile accident. Like, how was it that as I exited this snowmobile going 40 miles an hour in a tree, which is probably 10ft away or whatever, I was able to pivot my body and roll to take the blow on my shoulder blade instead of my head, which would have killed me.

Henry Abbott [00:23:13]:
I just love that skill set that’s called proprioception. Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:23:16]:
Isn’t it? And so that’s what that type of training leads to. And it’s also ballistic. So we can tie this into your. Into your philosophy later. Like, you’re like bounding and bouncing and jumping and leaping and it’s all plyometric sprinting. And that developed like this tremendous athleticism that I never was going to get. Just swimming back and forth in a.

Henry Abbott [00:23:38]:
Pool and you get, you know, you have real stakes. Right. So every. All of us athletes are wild animals. Right, right. And they’re life or death.

Mark Divine [00:23:45]:
That’s right. Real stakes. The risk is high.

Henry Abbott [00:23:47]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:23:47]:
So that’s.

Henry Abbott [00:23:47]:
They have to learn.

Mark Divine [00:23:48]:
That means you have to be very aware, very present, focused. You can’t be distracted.

Henry Abbott [00:23:53]:
Like you’re running down a rocky mountain. Right. You’ve got a really. You are. I know that feeling of like.

Mark Divine [00:23:58]:
Yeah, I think it’s game on.

Henry Abbott [00:24:00]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:24:01]:
When I go to like YMCA or a normal gym, which is very rare, I haven’t been in years, but. And I see people like standing on a treadmill reading People magazine, I’m like, that’s not really exercise. I mean, it kind of is, but it’s like so monochromatic, so one dimensional and like you’re missing such great opportunity.

Henry Abbott [00:24:23]:
Immobility is the fourth leading cause of death, according to who. Like, part of. There are a lot of reasons for that. Right. Well, one of them is moving like that just isn’t fun enough.

Mark Divine [00:24:31]:
It’s not fun enough.

Henry Abbott [00:24:31]:
It’s not fun enough. Like you.

Mark Divine [00:24:32]:
Well, you’re not developing anything but maybe some cardiovascular health.

Henry Abbott [00:24:36]:
Yeah, it’s better than sitting.

Mark Divine [00:24:37]:
Better than sitting. But you’re not developing your mind like that type, type of ballistic training we’re talking about or fun training or outdoor where the risks are high. Especially if you do it with a team or at least one other. Yeah, there’s a lot going on psycho. Emotionally.

Henry Abbott [00:24:51]:
Right, Totally.

Mark Divine [00:24:52]:
You’re developing your mind, you’re developing awareness, you’re doing concentration, focus, attention, control and, and you’re getting in attunement with your partner, your teammate, which has gotten that kind of heart or empathic connection. So you’re developing your heart, intuition. Right. I mean it is a multi dimensional developmental practice as opposed to just standing on a treadmill.

Henry Abbott [00:25:13]:
Yeah. And it’s not the same as like, I don’t know if I’m like liberal or conservative on like jumping off cliffs. Right. Like I, I love to jump off cliffs, but I’m not gonna ever jump off a cliff. That’s stupid or dangerous. Right. Like, like, you know, I’m gonna inspect the hell out of the landing. I’m gonna talk to people who know.

Henry Abbott [00:25:33]:
I’m gonna care, you know, if there’s a.

Mark Divine [00:25:35]:
By the way, that’s pretty dangerous too. We had a friend who killed himself jump off a cliff and Hawaii down there.

Henry Abbott [00:25:41]:
Was he trying to hit the water or what happened?

Speaker C [00:25:45]:
It was called Thread the Needle.

Mark Divine [00:25:47]:
Oh, Maui.

Speaker C [00:25:50]:
And it’s a place that the locals do jump, but it, it’s a, it’s a super narrow.

Mark Divine [00:25:56]:
Yeah. He missed it.

Speaker C [00:25:58]:
And it was a nighttime jump.

Henry Abbott [00:25:59]:
See, I would not do that one. Yeah, that’s not.

Mark Divine [00:26:01]:
That’s excessive risk, because I used to.

Speaker C [00:26:03]:
Jump off the side on anymore, but, like. Like, one of my friends early on told me, just let someone jump first.

Mark Divine [00:26:09]:
Right, to test the water.

Speaker C [00:26:11]:
It’s like, when you do this, it was like my friend’s big brother, because we were all like. I was 15. I think he was, like, 23.

Henry Abbott [00:26:17]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:26:17]:
Always don’t go.

Henry Abbott [00:26:18]:
Don’t go first. Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:26:20]:
But, yeah, that’s what we learned in the seals. You have to have a solid assessment of the risk, and then you mitigate the risk.

Henry Abbott [00:26:26]:
Right.

Mark Divine [00:26:27]:
And then you train for it, and.

Henry Abbott [00:26:28]:
Then you just go.

Mark Divine [00:26:29]:
And then you. Once you’ve done all that. Yeah, then you go.

Henry Abbott [00:26:32]:
Yeah. There’s, like, a part that’s super sober, right? You got to prep. You got to know. You got to have the technique. And then it’s like, wow. You know, at some point, like, it’s.

Mark Divine [00:26:40]:
You know, my friend Andy Stump, Navy seal, is a wing jumper. He held the world record for a while. I don’t know if he does anymore. I think he flew, like, 17 miles overland.

Henry Abbott [00:26:51]:
What?

Mark Divine [00:26:52]:
Isn’t that crazy? So that’s like, jumping out, and he’s falling 120 miles, but he’s got a wingsuit on. He’s flying. He flew 17 miles.

Henry Abbott [00:26:58]:
So what altitude is he starting at?

Mark Divine [00:27:00]:
That’s a good question. I’ll be 20,000. Pretty high.

Henry Abbott [00:27:03]:
Yeah, yeah, That’s. With oxygen, or.

Mark Divine [00:27:05]:
No, I don’t. I have no idea how high they jump.

Henry Abbott [00:27:09]:
That’s wild.

Mark Divine [00:27:10]:
I should check. But anyways, he said that. I don’t know what it is now. We could probably ask, you know, chat GPT, but. How many people die in wingsuit jumping? But at the time, it was like 40amonth. We’re dying.

Henry Abbott [00:27:23]:
I actually looked at this list. There’s a list of. There’s a guy. You probably know who he is. I forget. But he was, like, this French guy who was the. The wizard of precision stuff. Like, he would set up little targets, and he’d swing by and, like, hit this foam target or whatever.

Henry Abbott [00:27:37]:
And he taught classes, and I think his name was, like, Pollen or something. He was like, the Great Pollen who would teach everybody. And basically, if he was on the project, people felt like it was a safe project, right? He flew into a tree and died. So it’s like, all right. And when I did a little homework on it, there’s a little part of. In the book, actually, about this, but the Problem is that, like, you can predict the weather, but you can’t predict like the micro. Like you can drop 10 times on the same day over the same course. And when you come over that lip, the next time there might be a little micro current where now you’re 10ft lower.

Henry Abbott [00:28:06]:
Right. And nobody. There’s no science to know about.

Mark Divine [00:28:10]:
The same jump is never going to be the same.

Henry Abbott [00:28:11]:
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Divine [00:28:12]:
I mean, that sounds silly, but it’s so true.

Henry Abbott [00:28:15]:
Yeah. I’m not doing that either.

Mark Divine [00:28:17]:
The same job’s never going to be the same. But. So I said, well, why is that? And he says, proper prior planning prevents piss por.

Henry Abbott [00:28:27]:
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Divine [00:28:28]:
Execution. So they’re not, they’re not taking their risk seriously enough and they’re not practicing enough. And he would spend hours and hours and hours planning every single jump.

Henry Abbott [00:28:40]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:28:40]:
And he had like 17,000 or 20,000.

Henry Abbott [00:28:44]:
Jumps, but he didn’t have my wife.

Mark Divine [00:28:47]:
Didn’t have your wife.

Henry Abbott [00:28:48]:
Yeah. At my funeral, being like, he just did a really stupid thing. I don’t know why he did that.

Mark Divine [00:28:53]:
That’s right.

Henry Abbott [00:28:56]:
That’s a bummer.

Mark Divine [00:28:59]:
Oh, man.

Speaker C [00:29:00]:
It’s about an average of two people a month.

Henry Abbott [00:29:04]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:29:05]:
I don’t know where I got 40. Just me making up again.

Henry Abbott [00:29:08]:
They just don’t have it together.

Mark Divine [00:29:09]:
Maybe it really was just a craze at one time. Yeah.

Speaker C [00:29:12]:
I might have slowed down.

Mark Divine [00:29:14]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:29:14]:
Because like when something’s the fad and then.

Henry Abbott [00:29:16]:
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C [00:29:18]:
People get like, okay, it’s risky.

Mark Divine [00:29:21]:
Right.

Speaker C [00:29:21]:
Taking the risk. That’s one reason I don’t jump off posts anymore.

Henry Abbott [00:29:25]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [00:29:27]:
Plus the impact of the water.

Mark Divine [00:29:30]:
Well, I think we just landed. One of the rules for living long is don’t do stupid things. Right.

Henry Abbott [00:29:35]:
Smart. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I can see the logic in that.

Mark Divine [00:29:41]:
Snowmobiles.

Speaker C [00:29:43]:
Something stupid. Do it wisely.

Henry Abbott [00:29:45]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:29:45]:
Plan for it.

Henry Abbott [00:29:48]:
I mean, it better be your thing, I think. Right. Like, this is, this is. To me, it’s like, oh, he died doing what he loves. Different from like he just tried some weird thing and you know.

Mark Divine [00:29:57]:
Well, that’s my great example. That is Big Dave, man, who was at Seal Team 3 with me. Like, Big Dave, what a, what a beast this guy was. So before he became a seal, he was a saturation diver, commercial sat diver, like for the oil and gas industry. And he’d been bent a couple times and that’s really painful on the joints. And so to alleviate the pain, he would, he would lift weights twice a day. And this guy, this guy would be lifting weights. He would eat like just a can of tuna.

Henry Abbott [00:30:26]:
I know these people.

Mark Divine [00:30:27]:
You know, this is what you know. You know that exercise where you just like the evil wheel and most people do the evil wheel from their knees.

Henry Abbott [00:30:35]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:30:35]:
Well, he would have a barbell that he would use as an evil will. And he’d go from standing to full extension, back to standing 100 reps. Wow. And this guy’s stomach was just like a freaking climbing wall. Right? Like you could see, you could literally grab on each one of his, his abs and hang off of it. That’s how strong he was. And the funny couple stories and I’ll tell you or one story and then I’ll tell you what happened. Back to our point, you know, don’t do stupid things.

Mark Divine [00:31:03]:
Or is it your passion? Because he had such a strong core. And the Navy back then, you know, would do this fat test where they just kind of like measure your neck and measure your waist and compare it to an average scale.

Henry Abbott [00:31:18]:
Fail this test.

Mark Divine [00:31:19]:
He failed every time.

Henry Abbott [00:31:20]:
That’s so stupid.

Mark Divine [00:31:22]:
Every time. And finally he literally got an administrative discharge order. Like you’re, you’re being administratively separated from for being overweight. And he had about 0.5% body fat. And he got so pissed that he just.

Henry Abbott [00:31:36]:
I’m mad for him.

Mark Divine [00:31:37]:
He stormed into the admiral’s office. This is back when you could, you know, Admiral’s like right there. Stormed in the admiral’s office, took his uniform and just ripped it open. He goes, does that look like fat? To use her was like, he knew who he was. Like, Dave, I’ll take care of this.

Henry Abbott [00:31:54]:
I’ll take care of this Sign, this simple form. Put your shirt back on.

Mark Divine [00:32:00]:
Anyways, Dave, he loved diving. And so he created a lot of the diving protocols for the seals for combat swimmer. He worked with the German comp swimmers and a lot of the diving SOPs and protocols and everything came from him. And he was also a tinkerer. And what he is, he built a dive rig that had a 12 hour. A mixed gas dive rig that had 12 hour underwater duration. Think about that like an open circuit rig. The bottles are depleted in what, 45 minutes.

Mark Divine [00:32:32]:
Closed circuit rigs that we use to this day were German Draegers and they have roughly a four hour duration depending upon your uptake of the oxygen. His Device had a 12 hour duration.

Henry Abbott [00:32:45]:
Yeah. That’s crazy.

Mark Divine [00:32:46]:
It’s crazy. And so he had been testing this for years. And this guy Dave would go in at Point Loma here in San Diego, go underwater, and he wouldn’t surface until he got up to Marine Corps Based Del Mar boat basin.

Henry Abbott [00:33:02]:
How far is that?

Mark Divine [00:33:03]:
Miles.

Henry Abbott [00:33:04]:
He’s wearing, like, flippers.

Mark Divine [00:33:06]:
Well, he just got his fins. Got a little weight vest.

Henry Abbott [00:33:08]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:33:08]:
He’s got what we call an attack board, which has got his navigation. So everything is by dead reckoning. He’s got compass. He’s got a depth gauge and a watch. But his guy is so good that he can just. He can look at the way the currents are flowing and the, you know, the sediment and everything, and he can give you set and drift and current and everything. And that’s so amazing. And so he also.

Henry Abbott [00:33:29]:
He’s a dolphin.

Mark Divine [00:33:30]:
This is really funny. He is basically a dolphin. In prior life.

Henry Abbott [00:33:33]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:33:33]:
He used to bring these rubber fish with him. And you’re thinking, like, why would he bring rubber fish with him? Well, because every once in a while, he’d come across a fishing boat, Right. And he would find. He’s just having fun with himself. He would find their lines and start tugging their lines, and they’d slap a rubber fish on and they’re like, yeah, get a big one. They pull it up and there’s this rubber fish. And they’re like, what?

Henry Abbott [00:33:54]:
They’re never gonna understand.

Mark Divine [00:33:55]:
They have no idea.

Henry Abbott [00:33:56]:
It’s never gonna make sense. There’s no explanation that works. Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:34:01]:
Anyways, one day he just never came back. Oh, no. And we, Seal Team 3, literally shut down operations because they knew he was out there.

Henry Abbott [00:34:11]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:34:11]:
And went diving for him.

Henry Abbott [00:34:13]:
How do you even know where to look?

Mark Divine [00:34:14]:
Well, they knew the route. I mean, the team always knew. Because he would do this on the weekends.

Henry Abbott [00:34:19]:
Yeah. And it’s a giant.

Mark Divine [00:34:21]:
That was his. That was his mental training. That was his. That was his time in nature. Underwater for six to eight hours, just having fun.

Henry Abbott [00:34:31]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:34:31]:
And he didn’t come back. And so we searched at the most likely places, you know, time that probably would have entered, and we didn’t find him. SEAL teams didn’t find him, but a father and son who are diving found him.

Henry Abbott [00:34:43]:
Oh, wow.

Mark Divine [00:34:44]:
Off of La Jolla Shores.

Henry Abbott [00:34:46]:
How old was he?

Mark Divine [00:34:47]:
He was 40 years old.

Henry Abbott [00:34:48]:
Oh, wow. Young guy.

Mark Divine [00:34:49]:
And he was still floating. Still had his regular. In his mouth, still his rubber fish. And he had just had a massive heart attack.

Henry Abbott [00:34:55]:
Oh, my gosh.

Mark Divine [00:34:57]:
Probably from all the sat diving he had done.

Henry Abbott [00:34:59]:
Yeah, I guess so. I guess so.

Mark Divine [00:35:01]:
So is that doing stupid or is that being passionate and dying doing what you love? I. I put that in the ladder.

Henry Abbott [00:35:07]:
I mean, he was doing it every weekend. I’m thinking he loved that.

Mark Divine [00:35:09]:
He loved it.

Henry Abbott [00:35:10]:
Yeah. Yeah. I’m Sorry that happened that way, though. That’s like, oh, what a bummer.

Mark Divine [00:35:14]:
I know. He’s so young, too.

Henry Abbott [00:35:16]:
So young. Yeah. I thought you were gonna say he was like 60, you know, but no. Yeah. Wow.

Mark Divine [00:35:21]:
Minus your time. It’s your time.

Henry Abbott [00:35:23]:
That does sound fun, though, to be honest. Like, I think that’d be fun to go horse around in the water and rubber fish on the fishing lines. Like, I feel pretty cool.

Mark Divine [00:35:32]:
A lot of people think diving is just like going to a wreck or going to a reef. Some pretty interesting things happening in the dive world, you know, especially when it. When it comes to, like, the secret side. Right. Like, what’s happening. Like the Nordstream, for example. Like, that was some divers.

Henry Abbott [00:35:50]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:35:51]:
Who went down and, you know, blew that thing up. Like, what a cool op. Regardless of your geopolitical.

Henry Abbott [00:35:56]:
Got away clean. That’s pretty cool. Yeah. Do you know Jack Ramsey? You know who he is?

Mark Divine [00:36:01]:
I do, yeah.

Henry Abbott [00:36:02]:
You know, he was frogman. Do you know this?

Mark Divine [00:36:05]:
No. Right.

Henry Abbott [00:36:06]:
Okay. So I. One of the blessings of my weird career is that I spent a whole NBA Finals, which is like three weeks with Jack. With Dr. Jack Ramsey. No, I’m kidding. We were doing the NBA Finals together on some. On ESPN’s, like, digital.

Mark Divine [00:36:19]:
What was his. What was he. Tell me about Jack.

Henry Abbott [00:36:21]:
So he was. I mean, he, He. Well, he’s alleged being a frogman because I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and in 1977, the Trailblazers won the NBA championship Coast coached by Jack Ramsey.

Mark Divine [00:36:31]:
Okay.

Henry Abbott [00:36:31]:
So he’s like. He was the coach that wore like, plaid bell bottoms. He coached, like, you know, all these legends. He was around the sport forever. He was, you know, people call him Dr. Jack. He was a sort of legendary figure. And he died unfortunately, a few years ago, but.

Henry Abbott [00:36:47]:
But we spent less time together. And he was basically the. The great disappointment of his life is that in the earliest days of U.S. special forces, they had these, as he tells me, UDT. Okay. You know more than I do. But he was in Hawaii training like a mofo to like, swim and plant bombs on the bottom of ships in harbor and then swim away. And he never got deployed.

Henry Abbott [00:37:07]:
And he’s still pissed. Like, he was like, he’s ready to go, you know, like. And then when he was 70, when I was. When I knew him, nobody knew this, but he was like a top length, top ranked national triathlete.

Mark Divine [00:37:18]:
Is that right?

Henry Abbott [00:37:19]:
And he would just go on his own time and nobody knew this and, you know, just kick ass. And one of my little favorite stories of him was which his son told me was a transition to the run at the end. Right. And. And he’s got two problems on the run. One is his watch is gone. Somebody stole his watch. And two is his shoe is super on wrong, super uncomfortable.

Henry Abbott [00:37:39]:
And I think he’s running a 10k or whatever. And. And he’s in his 70s. And then after a while he’s like, oh, my watch is in my shoe. That’s what’s going on. Did he stop? Like, no. Yeah, just Kevin Ramsey. That’s how he finished it.

Henry Abbott [00:37:54]:
But I would be like, honestly, we had a bunch of great times.

Mark Divine [00:37:57]:
I kind of think you would figure that out as you put your shoe on.

Henry Abbott [00:38:01]:
You would think. You would think. But honestly, this is how much she meant to me was one morning I went down to the hotel that we were all staying in and went to a little buffet and I got healthy. I got like, you know, fruit, yogurt, granola, nuts. And I turned the Corner and there’s Dr. Jack and he has the exact same breakfast. And I’m like, I’m so proud. He’s this like lean 75 year old and he’s eating like I am.

Henry Abbott [00:38:28]:
And I mean, like, he is. And that makes me feel good. That’s awesome.

Mark Divine [00:38:32]:
How did you get into that? You know, important for the NBA. Yeah.

Henry Abbott [00:38:37]:
So.

Mark Divine [00:38:37]:
Because, I mean, it doesn’t look like you were a professional basketball player.

Henry Abbott [00:38:40]:
Come on, I told us so. Roll the tape. Okay. So I went to NYU and I did a semester in Tibet.

Mark Divine [00:38:52]:
Nice.

Henry Abbott [00:38:52]:
So I was gone. That was when you’re supposed to declare your major. And I came back and they were like, hey, you’re a junior now and you haven’t declared a major. You have to tell us right now. And I was like, can I have an hour? And they were like, no. I’m like, come on, please, can I have an hour? And so like, okay, you have an hour. So I called my high school buddy and he was like, well, it seems like you kind of like journalism. Maybe you should do that.

Henry Abbott [00:39:09]:
So I’m like, great idea. So I called him back. I’m like, journalism. And then all through journalism school, people, there were a few dudes who were like, I’m going to be a sports journalist. And I was like, that’s not a real job. You can’t. That’s not a. They can’t do fun.

Mark Divine [00:39:22]:
You get paid doing this.

Henry Abbott [00:39:23]:
Yeah, I just. I was like, I’m suspicious of that. So I just didn’t do that. And then so I did Real News and I worked at cbs. News. And I worked for a bunch of magazines and stuff and then.

Mark Divine [00:39:32]:
Used to be real news, you mean?

Henry Abbott [00:39:33]:
Yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was hard when you had to tell the truth, man. That was a really hard job.

Mark Divine [00:39:40]:
I remember those days. Yeah.

Henry Abbott [00:39:41]:
I’m telling you, we worked that hard at it. I literally had the job of like, ma’am, did the plane hit your house? Like, no. Do you happen to know the number of those people? Like, are they available? Yeah, I was like a desk assistant at CBS Network Radio News. Anyway, then. Then I went to a little high school reunion thing, and there was a woman there who was the managing editor of Slam magazine, a basketball magazine. And. And I love basketball. I grew up watching basketball, watching the Blazers.

Henry Abbott [00:40:07]:
And few months later, she got a new job. She and her boss got hired away. And they learned from the lawyers they weren’t allowed to use any of the freelancers they used to use. And they had a magazine to close. And so she called me, like, begging, like, would you please go and interview this NBA player for us? Like, I know it’s kind of slumming for you, but, like, we’d really appreciate it. And I was like. I mean, I guess, like. And so then I went and it was like, the greatest.

Henry Abbott [00:40:27]:
I never had more fun talking to NBA player than that first one. And I was like, oh, I want to do this right? So I just started covering the NBA for. First for magazines, then I started a website, and the. ESPN bought that website, and I was ESPN for 10 years, and I managed this huge team of 60 people. And. Yeah. And then eventually I. They gave me back the name of my website, so it’s true.

Henry Abbott [00:40:47]:
Hoop. And. And we’re running it now as a email newsletter.

Mark Divine [00:40:50]:
Okay.

Henry Abbott [00:40:51]:
And a podcast. And. And then in the middle of that came the pandemic. And I was. I. I literally was like, I wanna. I wanna work on something inspiring.

Mark Divine [00:41:01]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [00:41:02]:
And nothing was inspiring in the pandemic. Right. Like, I was. I have a nasal office in my attic, and I was up there just like. And I come down like, I’m about to be, like, kind of a boring, crappy dad, you know? Just like, usually I would be, like.

Mark Divine [00:41:14]:
Lively, but a lot of people had that experience.

Henry Abbott [00:41:17]:
Yeah. And so I literally do something different.

Mark Divine [00:41:19]:
To pull myself out of this funk.

Henry Abbott [00:41:21]:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s how a lot of people wrote.

Mark Divine [00:41:23]:
Books or started businesses or moved, you know, to different countries or whatever.

Henry Abbott [00:41:27]:
Yeah, yeah, I get that. I totally see, like, Mexico City may be really fun, like, whatever. Yeah. I literally just kind of brainstorm, like, what’s the most kind of uplifting, inspiring, like, authentic thing I know of that would make a book. Right. And then.

Mark Divine [00:41:40]:
Yeah, well, so you obviously got interested or learned a lot because, I mean, as soon as I read your bio and your background, I was like, oh, yeah, ballistic. That’s exactly how basketball players train. Yeah, like it’s all ballistic training and they and their bodies show it. And I was, you know, talking to Catherine on the way over here, like the difference between a, like a marathon runner or even a triathlete and a sprinter. Yeah, right. And the sprinters are just like these really like tightly wound, very muscular, explosive athletic beasts. And long distance runners can be kind of frail even. You know, it’s one dimensional fitness.

Mark Divine [00:42:18]:
Anyways, so. Because you didn’t mention through this journalism about your passion for training.

Henry Abbott [00:42:26]:
Yeah, right.

Mark Divine [00:42:27]:
So the whole time those two intersected somehow.

Henry Abbott [00:42:30]:
Yes, very much so. So I had been a runner in high school, cross country and track and that kind of stuff. I did a bunch of sports. I was on the ski team, I played some soccer, I did all that. And it wasn’t on the basketball team because you had to pick basketball or ski team, but I loved basketball and I would be sure to like take opportunities on playgrounds to like wax those dudes. There’s a guy, there’s some dudes out there and like, you know. But yeah, I played a lot of basketball. Then I got back into running in my 30s and became one.

Henry Abbott [00:43:04]:
You know, I was forever training for the next like Half Marathon, Marathon 10K or the best was this relay. I was part of these seven guys and we would routinely win or close to winning this relay across New Jersey where you finish at the ocean. And, you know, I like to jump in the ocean. That was great just being in the van with the camaraderie and you support each other. Right.

Mark Divine [00:43:24]:
My legs are hollow, long with the legs.

Henry Abbott [00:43:26]:
So everybody does two legs that total probably 20ish miles. Your two legs endurance relay.

Mark Divine [00:43:34]:
It’s not like a sprint relay.

Henry Abbott [00:43:36]:
Yeah. And then there’s a thing called the wild card, which is. Used to be. Everybody hated this. And when I first did it, I got the crappy assignment of the wild card, where it’s two people run 14 miles. You just switch off as much as you want.

Mark Divine [00:43:47]:
Oh, cool.

Henry Abbott [00:43:47]:
And I was like, I love this. Let’s just switch off like fast. Right? Let’s do it fast. Let’s do. Let’s run three quarters of a mile or. And there are rules about where the van can stop, so you have to kind of Run to like. Like.

Mark Divine [00:43:58]:
Yeah.

Henry Abbott [00:43:58]:
You kind of got to hang on till they can legally stop. Yeah. But. But I just. The wild card became my obsession. It was be 95 degrees and super hot and I’d have some partner. One year, my sister was my wild card partner. But.

Henry Abbott [00:44:10]:
And you’re. You and that person are just like. You’re trying to save each other’s lives out there. Right? Like, this person is cooking. It’s your second leg and your core temperature’s up, but you’re like, I got you. You know what I mean? Like, you’re in. There’s a traffic jam. So it’s like, okay, I’m gon on for a little longer if I can.

Henry Abbott [00:44:24]:
And people are. It’s like the killing fields out there during that thing. And I developed a new running habit actually during that exact leg where I’m steaming past this guy. Oh. It’s one of those things that’s like a staggered start. So the fasting start last.

Mark Divine [00:44:37]:
Yeah.

Henry Abbott [00:44:37]:
So you’re catching people all day. Right. And I, I get like. I’m just the sunniest out there on the course. I love everybody. I’m like, the endorphins are flowing. Right. I’m just.

Henry Abbott [00:44:47]:
I’m nice to everybody, and so I’m going to. But I want this guy to know.

Mark Divine [00:44:50]:
I’m there the rest of the time. You’re not nice to everybody?

Henry Abbott [00:44:52]:
No, I think I am. But like, I’m never. No of me is like, I ran faster than you. Like, there’s none of that. Right. I’m 100% just like, great job. Right. And.

Henry Abbott [00:45:01]:
And it’s a. It’s open to traffic, though. There’s no closed roads on this thing. So you’re a little. It’s a little bit dicey at times with like, crossing streets and stuff. So I want this guy, everyone I’m passing on to know I’m there so they don’t like, veer out and we all get hit by cars. So I’m. There’s a little dip.

Henry Abbott [00:45:18]:
I can just picture this perfectly. And there’s a guy who’s feeling it. He’s. He’s. He’s not running fast anymore. And I’m like smoking past him and I’m like, like, good job, buddy. And. And I can just hear him behind me go like.

Henry Abbott [00:45:31]:
He’s like, good job, you. So I, I have a new thing now is if I’m going to pass somebody, I just give him a. Give a thumbs up. No one gets mad at that. Just give him a thumbs up. Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:45:51]:
That’S funny.

Henry Abbott [00:45:52]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:45:52]:
Because people think it’s psychological warfare. You’re like, no, really, I’m actually wishing you.

Henry Abbott [00:45:56]:
I’m just full of love out there. I just am. I’m like the sunniest, chattiest, loudest guy. Like, I just. I think it’s great. So I. But I started having. Well, turns out now I know in hindsight I was born with hip dysplasia.

Henry Abbott [00:46:07]:
And I did all this running, all this training, and every decade or so I’d have like a back spasm or some kind of like, you know, pain, some hip thing, and I’d go to PT and it wouldn’t really.

Mark Divine [00:46:18]:
What is it?

Henry Abbott [00:46:21]:
I honestly only know it as like a dog term. I know dogs are born with hip dysplasia. I don’t know, it’s a malform. Malformity of your hips in some way. But like, I. The upshot of it is that, like, every step that I would run, you know, the force of landing, this is. This is a ballistic movement, right? You’re airborne. That’s the definition.

Henry Abbott [00:46:38]:
And then you land and there’s massive forces, even at a jog. And that force is supposed to go into your glutes, right? Supposed to flex your hips and then your glutes absorb a ton of force.

Mark Divine [00:46:48]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [00:46:49]:
But a lot of us have oddities where it doesn’t happen that way. I have in just poor form. Poor form. Yeah. And so, you know, there’s. One of the big research findings from this book is, you know, they do an extensive biomechanical examination of people who end up with bad lumbar pain. Like NBA players who miss games with lumbar pain and they don’t. If they don’t bend their hips when they land.

Henry Abbott [00:47:19]:
Interesting because they’re. The force that’s supposed to go into their glutes is just being passed up into the lower back.

Mark Divine [00:47:24]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [00:47:24]:
And so, like my MRI looks like I was in a massive car crash. Like, I’ve just like jacked up all.

Mark Divine [00:47:29]:
So you’re supposed to like land in a little bit of a shock absorber crouch. Right. It’s like.

Henry Abbott [00:47:33]:
Yeah. Do you know the physics thing where you drop the egg in physics class and you have to make a contraption out of like pipe cleaners and duct tape and rubber bands. So it’s. I didn’t actually do it either, but it’s a common thing. So you, you know, they’re just going to hand out, everybody gets a raw egg, and then they’ll give you like construction paper and rubber bands and plastic Bags. You just have to, like, design something so that the teacher can drop the egg off the top of the ladder or out the window, and the egg will drift to the ground in some way that it won’t break.

Mark Divine [00:48:02]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [00:48:03]:
So this is how I’ve come to think after all this research for this book. This is the egg. Your torso is the egg.

Mark Divine [00:48:09]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [00:48:10]:
And the contraption to keep it from breaking as it lands with every step is the three stack joints. Right. Ankles, knees, hips. And it’s beautiful. It’s a very good system. Right. It’s the best in nature. But they have to work the right way.

Henry Abbott [00:48:23]:
They have to be synchronous and inline and strong and, you know, but they can attenuate tons of force. Right. And if you do it right, the force is your friend. Right. You can carry a lot of force from one step to the next. Faster.

Mark Divine [00:48:34]:
Parkour.

Henry Abbott [00:48:35]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:48:36]:
It’s unbelievable.

Henry Abbott [00:48:37]:
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Divine [00:48:37]:
But these guys can do.

Henry Abbott [00:48:39]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:48:39]:
This is neural because they know how to use that shock absorber.

Henry Abbott [00:48:42]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:48:43]:
And to displace the energy and, you know, like the jump and roll and.

Henry Abbott [00:48:46]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:48:47]:
You know, it’s crazy.

Henry Abbott [00:48:48]:
And I think the variance in running is like, some runners carry 90% of the force from one step to the next, and at the other end of the spectrum, it’s 40%.

Mark Divine [00:48:56]:
Interesting.

Henry Abbott [00:48:57]:
So, like, you know, this is the point of plyometrics.

Mark Divine [00:48:59]:
Where’s that force going?

Henry Abbott [00:49:01]:
Oh, it’s such a great question. No joke. Like one of the. If. If you’re wearing a squishy shoe, right. It heats up the shoe. Like, that’s where the force is going. It’s heating the sole of your shoe.

Henry Abbott [00:49:12]:
So you’re paying extra money for this heavy thing that you’re going to carry around. It doesn’t do much to absorb force. It’s a tiny fraction of the force of you landing. And then you’re just like, I don’t. I made a little joke in the book that it’s like a Formula one car having a toaster oven, right. You’re just like. You’re just grilling bagels in the back with, like, wasting energy, Right. Um.

Henry Abbott [00:49:30]:
Or it’s going in a damaging place, Right. So if you’re using springs, right, Your. Your Achilles, your quads, your glutes visually land. You’re. You’re stretching those springs, and then they’re going to spring you forward. Right. But if it’s going into your lower back vertebrae, it’s just.

Mark Divine [00:49:49]:
Yeah, it’s just shock is building up until something breaks.

Henry Abbott [00:49:53]:
Yeah, yeah. It’s unusual. There.

Mark Divine [00:49:55]:
So if you’re carrying 40, that means 60 of the shock of the force is being absorbed by your body or.

Henry Abbott [00:50:00]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:50:00]:
Or your shoes. But that’s.

Henry Abbott [00:50:01]:
And this. You can turn an ACL with that force being misplaced. Right. I think the. The way I’ve come to think of it is kind of like. Like if a semi drives on a interstate, it doesn’t damage the interstate much. Right. And like the interstate for the big forces of landing are like your Achilles, your quads, your glutes.

Henry Abbott [00:50:15]:
Right. And if you keep, you know, there’s some biomechanics in getting that right. If. If you don’t have that biomechanically sound. Now the semi is driving on the little back roads.

Mark Divine [00:50:26]:
Right?

Henry Abbott [00:50:27]:
Right. And this is where your ligaments are. Right. And like, you know, one of the forces is, you know, this tibia bone. If you land with a lot of force. Well, if you land a very common thing happens. Toes down, and then boom, your heel comes down.

Mark Divine [00:50:40]:
Smack.

Henry Abbott [00:50:40]:
That’s a bone. This bone is shoving the force like a pool cue, right up into your knee. Right, right. Massive common cause of knee injury in their, you know, giant database at P3. Like this is, you know, that toes down, smacking thing is. Well, they measured an NBA player landing with 11, 000 newtons of force. And I don’t know what I didn’t know before this book, what that number means, but I will tell you that I can show you an academic study, or actually a bunch, that to fully sever a human cadaver spine only takes 3,000 newtons of force.

Mark Divine [00:51:13]:
Interesting.

Henry Abbott [00:51:13]:
Like the punch of a pro boxer. 100 newtons of force. This guy’s landing with 11,000 newtons of force, which to me just tells us like, yeah, you’re counting on the contraption of your three joints to like perform.

Mark Divine [00:51:25]:
Right?

Henry Abbott [00:51:25]:
Right. It’s got a. These are your friends and you want to treat them right. They’re saving your life.

Mark Divine [00:51:30]:
Is your book a sciency book or a training book or like, what’s. What is it? So I haven’t read it, by the way, because I didn’t have a copy.

Henry Abbott [00:51:40]:
This is a difficult. You don’t have a copy?

Mark Divine [00:51:41]:
No.

Henry Abbott [00:51:42]:
You take a second.

Mark Divine [00:51:44]:
Let me read this real quick.

Henry Abbott [00:51:46]:
Okay. So it’s hard for me to make it succinct, but I’m trying to get better at this, so.

Mark Divine [00:51:53]:
New science of Injury Free athletic performance. I think I just answered my own question.

Henry Abbott [00:51:57]:
So there’s. So here’s the deal. This guy, Marcus Elliott towards ACL on his 17th birthday. Football practice. And he was like the freest moving kid, kind of like your childhood. He grew up on like 600 acres in Marin county, like, where his main supervision was from a dog. He was jumping off cliffs and throwing rocks at things and just like, super wild, right? And he loved. Then he eventually found sports.

Henry Abbott [00:52:19]:
Loved sports, thought he maybe would play, you know, college football. And then he tore his acl and then he got depressed and was in his bedroom for six months, and he missed his high school graduation. And, oh, my God, His. The offense was designed to throw the ball to him. And then his friend got that job instead, and then his girlfriend left him for that friend. Like, bummer, right? It’s not good.

Mark Divine [00:52:41]:
That’s not good.

Henry Abbott [00:52:42]:
So. But he’s like, no, I think I’m going to, you know, my life plan is over what I had. But my new plan is I’m going to try to solve this so other people don’t have to go through what I’m going through. Like heart attacks. We treat 10 years before the heart attack now, right? We didn’t. We used to just think it was God striking you down. Right? That’s. That was literally in the academic literature of like 200 years ago.

Henry Abbott [00:53:04]:
Was like, this man thought evil thoughts, coveted someone’s wife been struck down. That’s a heart attack, right? And then they came up with the electrocardiogram and echocardiogram, and then they would see the arterial blood flow slowing through the years. And they realized that, you know, in the years before the crisis, yeah, you can intervene with diet, exercise, medicine. And so Marcus wanted to do that for ACL tears and Achilles tears and all this kind of stuff. He went. He paid his way through Harvard Medical School. He doesn’t like me to tell this part, but the fact of the matter is he pays way by modeling. He’s like, he.

Mark Divine [00:53:36]:
It’s a legitimate career.

Henry Abbott [00:53:37]:
He’s a very serious doctor, and this is a very serious profession. He feels like it’s undermines it, but that’s. That’s how he pays way. And. And then he worked for the New Patriots and the Seattle Mariners, and he’s like. Like pioneering sports scientist. Then he started his own place called P3 in Santa Barbara.

Mark Divine [00:53:51]:
Got it.

Henry Abbott [00:53:52]:
And eventually they came up with. And this whole. If you keep trying to put injuries, like, do you do blood tests? Is it brain scans? Is it like, what field do you even study physiology? And so he studied all this stuff. He went over all over the world, and eventually they came up with force plates in the floor, these markers all over your body and infrared cameras in the ceiling. And then they’d have the best athletes in the world do like a 40 minute rigorous movement assessment and they end up with like a million data points per assessment. Then all that goes into the servers where they have 134.4 terabytes of data and they can start doing relationships of like, if it ends with an ACL tear, what was it a year before? Right. They have like.

Mark Divine [00:54:35]:
And try to reverse engineer it.

Henry Abbott [00:54:37]:
And it’s now it’s getting like they’ve been doing it. They have this full data set for a decade of thousands of athletes. Add AI to that, and man, they got that going. So, so now it’s like big study with like a. You know, most of these studies in active journals are like seven athletes scanned, but they have like thousands. And so on that ACL question, which is like a real. It’s maybe the most researched injury.

Mark Divine [00:55:00]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [00:55:01]:
And they have a set of factors that no one’s ever heard of before.

Mark Divine [00:55:03]:
Isn’t that one of the most common injuries for females?

Henry Abbott [00:55:06]:
Like soccer players, 8x men. Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:55:08]:
8 times men.

Henry Abbott [00:55:09]:
Yeah. And so in the men, their database that they study, this particular one is NBA players. So this one’s all men. But 100% of the people who ended up with torn ACL land on the outside of their foot and have their weight roll to the inside.

Mark Divine [00:55:21]:
Interesting.

Henry Abbott [00:55:22]:
And so your shin is going like a windshield wiper.

Mark Divine [00:55:24]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [00:55:24]:
Which sets up your knee in like a very bad way. Right. The next most common factor is as you’re squatting to land your upper leg bone, your femur rotates like this rotates internally. And if you think about that action, it’s kind of like taking the turkey drumstick off the turkey. Right, Right. You twist it off. It does. That’s your acl, Right?

Mark Divine [00:55:46]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [00:55:46]:
Um, I could keep going, but those things are super trainable. Right. This, they call it, translation, this thing, the windshield wiper thing, um, it’s about the musculature of your lower leg. You can train it. There’s a million different things they throw at it, but, you know, you can train it. You can absolutely train it. And this one, you know, your femur has trochanters, little notches with muscles attached to them that keep it stable. You can train it, right? You can, you can stop that from rotating.

Henry Abbott [00:56:11]:
And these are these, like, factors.

Mark Divine [00:56:12]:
Taking notes, by the way.

Henry Abbott [00:56:14]:
It’s all in the book.

Speaker C [00:56:14]:
I’ve dislocated my knee twice.

Henry Abbott [00:56:16]:
Oh, okay. Sorry to hear that.

Speaker C [00:56:19]:
No, it’s okay.

Mark Divine [00:56:21]:
In CrossFit, we used to talk about dysfunctional movement patterns.

Henry Abbott [00:56:25]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:56:25]:
Who doesn’t have some dysfunctional movement pattern?

Henry Abbott [00:56:28]:
It’s cool to have them. Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:56:29]:
I mean, they’re all over the place. Yeah.

Henry Abbott [00:56:31]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:56:32]:
You know, I, I’ve probably like you. Whenever I see someone running, I analyze their gate. It’s a bad habit.

Henry Abbott [00:56:37]:
I try not to, but especially when.

Mark Divine [00:56:39]:
I move my wife. Like, I’m not looking. I’m looking. Yes, you are.

Henry Abbott [00:56:47]:
I’m like, I know what you’re doing. Yeah.

Speaker C [00:56:51]:
When you said the foot thing. I did that.

Henry Abbott [00:56:54]:
You do. I was like, oh, yeah, we can talk about this. You can.

Speaker C [00:56:58]:
Sprained my ankle. And then I decided to go backpacking on the sprained ankle when I was 19 with, like £50 on. So I overextended the ligament and so it was loose. So just like for the rest of my life, you know, there was that tendency to, like, do exactly what you’re saying.

Henry Abbott [00:57:14]:
I know.

Speaker C [00:57:14]:
Because my shoe wears out that way on the side.

Henry Abbott [00:57:16]:
Oh, wow. Wow. But you do CrossFit stuff, right? Used to, kind of.

Speaker C [00:57:25]:
Yeah.

Henry Abbott [00:57:25]:
Yeah. So you still do a little bit.

Mark Divine [00:57:27]:
Of high end, you know, medium intensity?

Henry Abbott [00:57:30]:
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C [00:57:32]:
And I do a little weightlifting and I cycle. The cycling is helpful.

Henry Abbott [00:57:35]:
Yeah, well, I think so. One of the muscles that comes up a lot is like kind of almost magical. It’s just like an under appreciable is the soleus. I don’t know if like, this is the.

Mark Divine [00:57:47]:
I’ve never heard of this. I’ve heard of the. So as.

Henry Abbott [00:57:49]:
But that’s, that also comes. That’s another one, right? Yeah. There’s a whole chapter on the psoas. Okay. So this is the gastroc, the, like the calf muscles down here. The soleus is underneath it and it’s wide and it does a lot of stuff, including pump blood back up your leg, which in NBA players is fascinatingly important because they’re very tall. And so, like, when they have a foot injury, it’s very far from their heart. And so that deals, like, it just gets less blood flow than most of us.

Henry Abbott [00:58:15]:
Right. And so the soleus is like, interesting just for that, but it’s also one of many. But it’s like maybe a key one in what you’re talking about where you just want to, you know, the, all of the causes of this thing. I, I, they spoke frankly to me. They were much nicer with the clients. But one of the traders, I was like, what, what’s causing this? You know, why, why would, why would this do this? And he Was like. It’s just sloppy and basically like they would. They have a pretty robust program with little dowel hops and jumping rope and a bunch of weight things and stuff like where you stand on one leg and then pass a kettlebell back and forth.

Henry Abbott [00:58:52]:
And there’s all these kind of training things to just like really beef up those muscles.

Mark Divine [00:58:56]:
Getting that neuroplastic. Neuromuscular reconditioning.

Henry Abbott [00:58:59]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:59:00]:
How long does it take to recondition? Let’s say you’ve had a dysfunctional movement pattern like that for 10 years.

Henry Abbott [00:59:07]:
So they’re dealing with the best athletes in the world. It’s almost all pro athletes in P3. So they’re a little bit accelerated. Yeah, but.

Mark Divine [00:59:15]:
And they’re. They’re training every day, probably.

Henry Abbott [00:59:17]:
They’re training every day. They go hard, but it’s. You know, they love to have you in there for like seven weeks. Seven weeks.

Mark Divine [00:59:24]:
They can do it.

Henry Abbott [00:59:24]:
But I think they’d love to have you for 16. But what? No, pro athletes come in for 16 weeks. Right. They’ve got, they got to go do their appearance in Japan. They got whatever. They got to go do stuff. But, but yeah, they have a. Right now is the time of year when the NBA pre draft guys are there and they have this deal with wme, William Morris endeavors.

Henry Abbott [00:59:41]:
All of their people have like exclusive thing to go train there. And they’re there for seven weeks. And it’s pretty awesome because they come in with a bunch of issues and they leave like superhumans. Right.

Mark Divine [00:59:51]:
They’re like, you know, it’s, it’s not just fixing something, it’s making him better. It’s not just about injury prevention, in other words.

Henry Abbott [00:59:59]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [00:59:59]:
Because all of those micro adjustments are going to make him a better athlete.

Henry Abbott [01:00:02]:
Yeah. And you know, everybody progresses differently, but the majority of them will leave doing these like giant line jumps, they call it. So they’ll like put a row of tall boxes and then you’re get. You get your spring so good that you’re just like boing, boing, boing like over that line, which is. They won’t let you do it if you have bad ground contacts or bad hips. Right. If you’re moving unstably, then. But if you can move like that, then if your, if your body’s well designed and moving well to take that landing.

Henry Abbott [01:00:31]:
It’s awesome training. Right. For the reasons you’re talking about. The neurodevelopment to put these massive forces. It’s kind of like their secret sauce. Right. They’re. They’re putting armor on you so you’re ready to go drive the lane in the NBA, get a little destabilized and then while you’re still looking at the rim, stick a foot out in a really well managed way and have a good landing that won’t destroy your career, right? And so they’re working on that.

Henry Abbott [01:00:52]:
They’re drilling that. They’re reading you ready for really big like car crash level impacts. And it’s pretty fun to watch. It’s pretty fun to watch. Like they, that’s what they’ll be doing. They’re probably doing that right now as we speak.

Mark Divine [01:01:05]:
Do you think that basketball players are the best athletes in the world?

Henry Abbott [01:01:09]:
They say that. I mean, the NBA says that all.

Mark Divine [01:01:12]:
Around in terms of their athleticism.

Henry Abbott [01:01:14]:
So I’ve had this. So they have data, right? And so I had. There’s a guy named Eric Ledersdorf who’s the head biomechanic guy there. He’s amazing, super brilliant guy. I went to Stanford and Columbia and blah, blah. And he’s like, look, you know, in a way it’s unanswerable because if you were to put them in the hundred meters or the decathlon or whatever, they are not trained for that, right? So we can’t know. He’s like. But every now and again a player comes through.

Henry Abbott [01:01:38]:
Anthony Edwards of the Timberwolves and in his prime, Zach Levine, who’s now a Sacramento King. He’s like, I think Zach Levine could have won Olympic gold in the high jump, right? He’s like. And Anthony Edwards may be in a lot of things. Anthony Edwards is like, interesting. He’s a pretty big strong guy who can fly. And they have, they have a little chart of like lateral explosiveness versus vertical explosiveness. And they have all the players they’ve ever scanned like a th. NBA players on this little chart.

Henry Abbott [01:02:04]:
And Anthony Edwards is like up in the very tippy top corner. He’s like the best at both, right? And interesting. That’s not, that’s not normal. They have a slow mo video, I can share it with you. Of Anthony Edwards just going through like a, a test where he runs up and then like plants one foot and then jumps as high as he can to like swipe that. It’s called the vertex, the little device that measures your vertical. And if you play it at like quarter speed or eighth speed with a little dramatic music, it looks like he’s flying. Like he just runs in and the frame is like set for like you and me, you know, and he just goes like.

Henry Abbott [01:02:39]:
And at some Point. Like, you just. His legs are like dangling, like, literally.

Mark Divine [01:02:44]:
How high off the ground is the bottom of his foot when he’s doing that?

Henry Abbott [01:02:47]:
I don’t know, but it looks like he’s jumping over me, you know? It does. Like, I don’t. It just. At some point you just go like, you stop being like a sports writer and you start just being like a.

Mark Divine [01:02:57]:
In awe.

Henry Abbott [01:02:58]:
Yeah. You’re just like, it’s so. And then when he lands, he’s wearing the little sensors. He lands so hard that like four or five of the sensors just go like, like off his body and like shake across the floor. And like, just like, God has spoken. It’s just like, I don’t know. Good job, man. Nice job.

Henry Abbott [01:03:15]:
No notes, you know.

Mark Divine [01:03:17]:
That’s awesome.

Henry Abbott [01:03:18]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:03:19]:
What two sides of this question. What surprised you about writing this book? And then what. What was like, the biggest thing you learned? Like the biggest. Aha. Maybe that’s the same question, actually.

Henry Abbott [01:03:33]:
Yeah, I. A lot of this is my first.

Mark Divine [01:03:39]:
Book and that could be about the process of writing.

Henry Abbott [01:03:41]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:03:42]:
Or about what you learned.

Henry Abbott [01:03:43]:
It’s all kind of rolled in one big ball for me. So I wanted to write a book because every other thing I wrote before writing my whole adult life had a deadline. And I always felt like I couldn’t quite go all in. I couldn’t quite do it the best way. And so I wanted to have a project where I just was like. I literally spent days learning about owls. There’s quite a lot of wild animals in here because they’re such good movers, owls.

Mark Divine [01:04:07]:
So who would have thunk? This is surprising years, but I thought owls would have been good athletes.

Henry Abbott [01:04:12]:
Let’s talk about owls for a second. Okay, first of all, they don’t build nests, okay? They steal them all. Or they just have their babies on the ground and steal their nests. They literally will take an osprey’s nest. And then they might. If the osprey gives them guff, they might kill and eat the osprey, which is bigger. Oh, they’re total badasses. Like, and.

Henry Abbott [01:04:30]:
And they. There’s a. There’s a little BBC video of these owls. Had the. In Arctic. Had their babies on the ground. And these wolves come along and are just like, oh, like the babies are pretty big. It’s like a decent meal.

Henry Abbott [01:04:39]:
Right. And you can see the wolves and the parent owls are like, oh, we gotta deal with these jerk offs, you know, And. And so the wolves are talking over and the parents, just because they’re literally silent, like. Like they have every other bird makes a little sound as it flies, but owls have some crazy feathering, and so they. The wolves have no idea. And these parent owls have really vicious talons, and the. They just go, like, you know, just attack from behind and just. And you can see the wolf was like, ah, come on, man.

Mark Divine [01:05:06]:
Like, don’t do that.

Henry Abbott [01:05:07]:
And the wolf kind of makes one more attempt, and, like, one more parent hits it. He’s like, all right, never mind. And they just, like, jog off. Like, owls are ruling the roost out there. So. And then. Okay, wow. To the neuroplasticity thing.

Henry Abbott [01:05:16]:
I realize I’m a little off target here, but, like.

Mark Divine [01:05:18]:
No, you got me on that one. That’s good. So I’m now thinking about owls. Like, don’t think about owls. Now I’m thinking about.

Henry Abbott [01:05:24]:
Owls are amazing. So they put. So owls. The. Some owls have eyes that are 30% of the weight of their head. They have these, like, giant. Like, some of the best eyes in nature and, like, really good nervous systems. And, you know, they can see in the dark and they can hunt in the dark.

Henry Abbott [01:05:40]:
And then, you know, so hard to catch a mouse on the run in the dark. Right. But this is what they do every day. So. And they have some little things, like their ears are, like, offset and in the front of their face so they can, like, kind of echolocate differently Anyway, so they put prisms over the eyes of juvenile owls to see about neuroplasticity. So they’re depending totally on their vision. And now it’s messed up. And it took them, like, a few days before they could catch a mouse again.

Mark Divine [01:06:12]:
That’s it.

Henry Abbott [01:06:13]:
That’s it.

Mark Divine [01:06:15]:
Fascinating.

Henry Abbott [01:06:16]:
That’s like your encephalitis guy a little bit. Like, it’s like, oh, yeah, we’ll just do it a different way. Like, I love this. So, yeah, anyway, that we talked a lot about Al. I did, I think.

Mark Divine [01:06:25]:
And that relates to ballistic training, so.

Henry Abbott [01:06:28]:
Because we’re.

Mark Divine [01:06:31]:
Oh, that’s right.

Henry Abbott [01:06:32]:
Well, so now that I’m fully in it, it almost feels like.

Mark Divine [01:06:37]:
I love this. I feel like I’m putting.

Henry Abbott [01:06:38]:
I’m on drugs, right?

Mark Divine [01:06:39]:
I feel like you’re on drugs. And I feel like I’m putting, like, a puzzle piece together.

Henry Abbott [01:06:43]:
I’m not coming together for the record, but, like. But when I was writing it, I would spend, like, three days with, like, loud music. I would. Like, if someone had a house I could take over for a few days. I was just like. I would go. I’d be alone because you got to be alone, to write, basically. And I’d like loud music on.

Henry Abbott [01:06:57]:
And I’m just like, whoa, Owls. Right? I’m really getting into it. I’m getting kind of weird, you know, and. But it is exactly how we’re training, right? So this is the way that the owl is moving its, you know, neurons of its brain is exactly what you have to do if you want to change. Like how in the middle of your crash, you’re going to pivot and put an ideal part of your back into the tree instead of taking it on your head and dying. Right? Like, this is exactly like you learned an owl thing.

Mark Divine [01:07:23]:
Right?

Henry Abbott [01:07:24]:
And so this is why, ultimately, all of the training they do there, they see it as neurological training.

Mark Divine [01:07:32]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [01:07:32]:
There’s a video. I talked about those line jumps.

Mark Divine [01:07:34]:
A hundred percent, by the way.

Henry Abbott [01:07:35]:
Yeah. Like, the ultimate video that they show. I mean, it’s really. Actually kind of cute. NBA players are these big, strong guys, but they just get so excited about what they learn there. They’re getting, like, a new owner’s manual for their bodies.

Mark Divine [01:07:45]:
That’s cool.

Henry Abbott [01:07:46]:
And one of the. There’s a moment where they’re all crowded around a phone, and the trainer guy is showing everybody something on the phone, and they’re all like, oh. Oh. They’re, like, so fired up, you know? And I’m like, what are you showing them on the phone? And it’s this guy. His name is Sanford Spivey. And now he’s a venture capitalist. But at that time, he was a BU soccer player. But he grew up at this place.

Henry Abbott [01:08:06]:
He grew up in Santa Barbara, and he started training when he was 14, and he just learned how to jump perfectly. There’s no flaws. He just has a perfect ability. It looks like a sand flea. Just like, ding, ding, ding. And he jumps over these in slow motion, this line of boxes. And now the players are, like, a month in. They’ve learned a lot about what good biomechanics look like.

Henry Abbott [01:08:25]:
And when they see this guy, they just.

Mark Divine [01:08:28]:
It’s perfect.

Henry Abbott [01:08:28]:
It’s perfect. It’s perfect. You can play it. I’ve tried. We played it at a conference recently. You can play for third graders. You can play for anybody. And they’re just like, how is he doing this? Right? And.

Henry Abbott [01:08:38]:
Yeah, so that’s. And that. That video, as it’s posted online by P3, is called Neurological Training. That’s what the video is called. Right. Cause that’s what they see happening is this moment that you land is way too fast for you to consciously manage. You gotta. You Gotta have your snappy systems together.

Henry Abbott [01:08:54]:
And it’s almost like dancing or speaking French or being a giant squid or an owl or these other animals. I learned about. You know, like, it’s a. It’s a. You gotta learn how to really move. Like. Like in italics move. Yeah.

Henry Abbott [01:09:09]:
There’s some big cats in the book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. There’s another. I got a. This is the problem. The, The. The answer to your question is 50 things.

Henry Abbott [01:09:17]:
Right? I learned so many things, I never got bored. I could wr. I could start over today. Right. There’s so many more things to do, so. All right, this is a true story. James Harden is about to. He’s the highest scorer in the NBA and he’s.

Henry Abbott [01:09:30]:
The following year, he was going to win mvp. And he comes in for an assessment. And this guy Eric I mentioned earlier has a gym full of entourage, people from the ad agency, people from the sneaker company, all this stuff. And he’s promised them he’s going to give them a little preview of the results. They’ll get the full results in a couple days. And everybody’s expecting good news because he’s a great NBA player. But Eric’s looking at the screen and he does not jump particularly high and he does not cut particularly hard, and he does not running particularly fast. Like it’s kind of a bummer.

Henry Abbott [01:10:02]:
And there’s like a party atmosphere in the room. And he’s just got this like, bunch of people waiting for him to report on how incredible James is. And he’s not incredible, except he notices that he’s really good at stopping. And in fact, the way he plays, he does like, like he will run a couple steps toward the hoop and then stop and then pull back. And he’s like the best ever at that, basically. So he tells him that this is what he’s like, hey, you know, you’re really good at stopping. And actually Adidas kind of liked that. And they integrated into promoting his shoe and became.

Henry Abbott [01:10:33]:
It was a thing in the Wall Street Journal for a while, but they got excited about it. So. But since then they were like, well, this is like, we actually don’t know why he’s the mvp. Like, it’s weird that a guy who doesn’t run that fast or cut that hard would be MVP when he only has this one thing. Like, maybe it matters more than we think. So they started looking at other people who move like that at the same time. A sort of overweight 17 year old visited from Slovenia with his mom and got tested. And he was like, Elite like James Harden at stopping.

Henry Abbott [01:11:03]:
And they’re like, well, if this is an important thing, that kid will be really good. And his name’s Luka Doncic and now he’s like the star of the Lakers and one of the best players in the world. And. And then they started having a bunch of other athletes in other sports would show up with this quality. And I’m going to tell you now, based on your big cat question, I think I know a reason why it matters more than we think, which is there’s slow mo video of cheetah running full speed and everything’s a blur. The background’s a blur, the feet are a blur, the hips are a blur, the tail’s a blur, but the head is absolutely still.

Mark Divine [01:11:40]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [01:11:40]:
Because it has to not just catch the gazelle, it has to find this spot that is going to bring it down. Right. It has to see the gaze.

Mark Divine [01:11:50]:
Got one shot.

Henry Abbott [01:11:51]:
The eyes need to be like a marksman. Right?

Mark Divine [01:11:53]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [01:11:53]:
And I suspect that this stopping biomechanical measurement is a marker for holding your eyes still, which is why James Harden can see the rim. Right. He doesn’t just ditch the guy.

Mark Divine [01:12:06]:
He’s not yet.

Henry Abbott [01:12:09]:
And like there’s actually towards his eye.

Mark Divine [01:12:10]:
On the rim while he stops. Stopped or while he’s stopping.

Henry Abbott [01:12:12]:
Yeah, because he has, you know, it’s mostly posterior chain stuff. Like you can, you know, he can manage that system really well so that his head can be useful. Right. Which is what the cheetah is doing as it’s playing. You know, the cheetahs hitting the ground with a lot of force too.

Mark Divine [01:12:24]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [01:12:25]:
But not shaking him around, you know, that’s interesting. Yeah. So anyway, I think that big cat.

Mark Divine [01:12:31]:
I think your theory has some legs to it, so to speak.

Henry Abbott [01:12:35]:
We should just stop it right there. We’re not going to top that.

Mark Divine [01:12:41]:
You remind me. This is a little bit related, but not entirely. But you mentioned the giant squid. Fascinating animal, right?

Henry Abbott [01:12:50]:
Totally.

Mark Divine [01:12:50]:
It’s got hugely well developed eyes but no brain.

Henry Abbott [01:12:53]:
Yeah. But the nerve cables are like.

Mark Divine [01:12:56]:
Yeah, but like who’s seeing?

Henry Abbott [01:13:00]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is your encephalitis guy again. Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:13:04]:
Like where’s the brain that is seeing through that eye?

Henry Abbott [01:13:07]:
It was kind of like.

Mark Divine [01:13:09]:
And check this out. So this is going to like sound a little bit spiritual here, but.

Henry Abbott [01:13:12]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:13:13]:
Squids operate at every depth of the ocean and they’re ubiquitous.

Henry Abbott [01:13:17]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:13:17]:
There’s billions of them.

Henry Abbott [01:13:18]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:13:19]:
They all have this extremely well developed eye, but like it’s basic nervous system that does have no ability to process what they’re seeing.

Henry Abbott [01:13:26]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:13:28]:
So maybe it’s like a closed circuit system for. To observe the ocean for consciousness.

Henry Abbott [01:13:36]:
Go on, say more.

Mark Divine [01:13:39]:
Isn’t that cool? I’ll stop right there because people are gonna be. Their heads are already scrambling, right? What do you mean?

Henry Abbott [01:13:45]:
Well, like ants know how to make an answer.

Mark Divine [01:13:47]:
Well, that information is going somewhere. Yeah, but it’s not going into the brain of that individual squid. It’s a collective consciousness to observe the ocean. This is my thinking. And who’s observing? Good question.

Henry Abbott [01:14:00]:
They’re like little like security cameras.

Mark Divine [01:14:02]:
God.

Henry Abbott [01:14:02]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:14:03]:
Consciousness, awareness.

Henry Abbott [01:14:05]:
So.

Mark Divine [01:14:05]:
So like a good mental yogi trick would be to like tap into that and we’d be able to see the ocean.

Henry Abbott [01:14:11]:
Dude, get on it. What are you doing? You go to figure it out.

Mark Divine [01:14:14]:
Takes a little bit of training. I’m working on it.

Henry Abbott [01:14:18]:
You can be the squid, Daddy. Yeah, I don’t. Okay. Ants can make. Or bees can make a beehive. Not a single bee.

Mark Divine [01:14:30]:
They have no idea what they’re architecture.

Henry Abbott [01:14:31]:
Right. Everyone has a little impulse, but together it makes a thing. Right. I feel like we’re not designed that way. We are the big brain creatures, so I think we are.

Mark Divine [01:14:40]:
But we have been trained. That’s been trained out of us.

Henry Abbott [01:14:44]:
Right.

Mark Divine [01:14:44]:
It’s one way to look at it.

Henry Abbott [01:14:45]:
In the animal world, we’re at the big brain end, right. So I think maybe we are a little biased in thinking that our own internal processing is central. Right. But there seem to be like a lot of animals are just like, no, they have a little impulse and I follow the impulse and marvelous things emerge. Right. Like the squid’s amazing at evading the shark. Right. Really hard.

Mark Divine [01:15:07]:
Humans follow their impulse and we get war and violence, environmental degradation.

Henry Abbott [01:15:12]:
Yeah.

Speaker C [01:15:13]:
The only animal besides termites that destroy their habitat.

Mark Divine [01:15:17]:
Well, and it’s not all humans, Right? Think about it. It’s only the modern variant. So maybe, maybe there was something that the modern man got spun off evolutionary into a kind of a negative direction because, you know, all the natives live in total harmony. And with that collective consciousness we’re talking about.

Henry Abbott [01:15:37]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:15:38]:
They don’t lose their individual sense of individuality, but they also are tapped into the universal, so they understand the unity consciousness. But the white. Seems like the white man has forgotten that or is. I don’t know.

Henry Abbott [01:15:51]:
It’s funny.

Mark Divine [01:15:51]:
I know everyone’s gotta come back. That’s a big part of my teaching, is that we’ve got to get back, and I know Catherine’s as well, to where we merge that kind of native with the best of kind of the Western approach, because it’s not all bad, but it’s destructive when it’s all ego. So to bring that back, the wisdom of the native cultures and even the Eastern culture. Eastern cultures are much more aligned with the native cultures.

Henry Abbott [01:16:16]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:16:17]:
And you’ll find balance. It’s like bringing the yin and yang back in the balance. We’re very young. And when you’re all young, all do, all action, then you get destruction because you don’t have that receptivity, the regeneration and the respect. Right. That you’re looking for.

Henry Abbott [01:16:32]:
There’s like, you know, none of this.

Mark Divine [01:16:33]:
Is anything to do with your book or with sports.

Henry Abbott [01:16:35]:
You’d be surprised. You’d be surprised. Like, it’s more than you’d think. Like, it is kind of. Again, I wrote the book sober, but it’s kind of trippy, like. Like just the. The nature of the man. The book is about Marcus and these topics.

Henry Abbott [01:16:49]:
Like, we’re kind of trying to be like squid, you know, and it’s a lot of selflessness in that. There’s a lot of, like, egolessness. Right. It’s just. There’s, you know, we’re looking to move freely. Right. And with joy. And what’s stopping that? Well, you know, for modern people, a lot of times it’s the stuff we’re talking about.

Mark Divine [01:17:10]:
Dysfunctional movement, sedentary lifestyle.

Henry Abbott [01:17:12]:
Yeah, right.

Mark Divine [01:17:13]:
Not being trained, lack of wisdom.

Henry Abbott [01:17:15]:
Or there’s anxiety. Right. Like, I think a lot of people have, like. Let me think of a good example. Well, actually, like, one of the things they literally train there. I did it. I was bad at this. So they have a device called an impulse box that they custom built.

Henry Abbott [01:17:30]:
And it’s like 45 degrees of plywood. A little platform at the bottom of plywood, and then another 45 degrees. And it’s simple. You just kind of. You hop on one leg in the middle with, like, a bare foot or a socked foot, and then you, boom, kick the one over here and then that leg, and then you switch it and you just. Just dance. You just go, like.

Mark Divine [01:17:50]:
And that would take a little practice a bit.

Henry Abbott [01:17:53]:
And it’s mimicking, like, sprinters all know that, like, to run your fastest, you have to relax, Right. You cannot run your fastest like, in the Olympic level. Sprinters, like, if they get. They put a lot of effort in slow day, right? This is the device to sort of just get you feeling bouncy and natural on your flow. And so. And you do it to oblivion. So you just go like, 10 seconds of acceleration until you just lose it, and you’re going to keep practicing your new maximum. Right? And I was a little short time.

Henry Abbott [01:18:23]:
I think I had a plane to catch that day, but I wanted to try it. I never tried it. And Marcus is a little taller than me, and he loves to spin thing. It’s like his baby. And so he does it, and it’s like he’s older than me. You know, you’re not used to seeing a man his age. His feet just like. I mean, it’s just like, I couldn’t even begin to count how many beats per second.

Henry Abbott [01:18:44]:
Just like, just cruising on this thing. It’s awesome. And it’s my turn. Like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then Mark is just like, relax, relax. And his face is right here. Like, why wouldn’t I be relaxed? Of course. But it ends up.

Henry Abbott [01:19:02]:
It’s the only thing it says, the only thing in the gym that gets better without the music on, because you just. It’s the way that I got from totally crappy to, like, sort of. Okay was you just think of nothing but the sound of your feet.

Mark Divine [01:19:16]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [01:19:17]:
Just going. And it’s like. It is all gets to be like dancing. You know, it’s. It feels like you’re dancing, but that kind of. That’s the training. That’s the kind of stuff. So anxious people, people who want to get an A on every test, people who are like eager beavers.

Mark Divine [01:19:28]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [01:19:28]:
They can’t do this. Right. If you’re worried about the outcome and how the world’s going to see you, you can’t do this. Right.

Mark Divine [01:19:34]:
Instead of getting the flow.

Henry Abbott [01:19:35]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:19:36]:
It’s got to be playful. It’s got to be relaxed.

Henry Abbott [01:19:38]:
Yeah. Jump in.

Mark Divine [01:19:39]:
But it’s also got to be challenging.

Henry Abbott [01:19:41]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:19:42]:
Right. In athletics, there’s the risk there. It’s not risk of, you know, like, we’re talking about with, you know, wing jumping or snowmobiling at 80 miles an hour.

Henry Abbott [01:19:51]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:19:52]:
But the risk of not meeting. Not being your best.

Henry Abbott [01:19:55]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:19:56]:
Not meeting your potential.

Henry Abbott [01:19:57]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:19:57]:
That’s a risk for pro athletes.

Henry Abbott [01:19:58]:
They’re vulnerable in there. Yeah, they’re vulnerable, but it’s also beautiful. Like, there’s this Korean volleyball player who’d been. She was like the Michael Jordan of Korean women’s volleyball. And she was 34, I think, and had had four significant injuries that all kind of coalesced, and she just, like, wasn’t herself and hadn’t played for a while. And so she came for, I think, seven, eight weeks. And with her particular set of targets in her Assessment. They just needed her to get much more stable hips and stronger hamstrings.

Henry Abbott [01:20:26]:
That’s kind of stuff. So the trainer guy, who’s pretty experienced, he took a risk and he was like, before you leave here, you’re gonna deadlift a hundred kilograms. And she’s like, six, four. And she was like, no, that’s crazy. I’ve been a pro athlete. I’ve never deadlifted anything close to that. And he was like, well, we’re gonna work on it, you know. And I happened to be there for her last day.

Henry Abbott [01:20:43]:
And she’s got a flight back to Korea that night. And there’s, I don’t know, six, seven NBA players in there and like a Stanford volleyball player or whatever. And now it’s time. And so she does a test with 90 kg with the trap bar. And she does it. It’s okay. And then she pulls on the hundred. And her strain, she’s just kind of dignified, like, lean muscle athlete, right? And she strains on it.

Henry Abbott [01:21:08]:
And he’s like, oh, you know, get your hips down. And so she kind of resets. And then just like. It’s just not clear she’s gonna do it. She’s just slow. Like, way slower than. She just stands it up. And then the whole place, everybody in the place, you know, the people who you didn’t think were watching, the guy behind the desk, the people on the couches, like, this guy Greg Brown is like a borderline NBA player.

Henry Abbott [01:21:29]:
He runs across the gym. You know, he’s like this six, seven guy. Just to, you know, give her a giant hug, right? Everyone’s just losing it. And then it’s time for her to go. And she. And. And there’s a great little moment where this guy’s been training her for seven weeks. And.

Henry Abbott [01:21:42]:
And he’s like. He’s like. He’s like. He’s like. He’s like, wait a second. Like, you don’t cry. And she’s like. She’s got a little tear.

Henry Abbott [01:21:51]:
And she’s like. She’s like, women don’t cry, John. She doesn’t speak a lot of English, but she had that. You know, and she kind of goes.

Mark Divine [01:21:58]:
Korean women don’t cry.

Henry Abbott [01:21:59]:
Yeah, off she goes. And she had a killer year. I followed her online that year. She had a. She. I think she was MVP of the league that year.

Mark Divine [01:22:04]:
No kidding.

Henry Abbott [01:22:05]:
Yeah. It’s pretty awesome.

Mark Divine [01:22:06]:
34.

Henry Abbott [01:22:06]:
Yeah. Yeah. Pretty great.

Mark Divine [01:22:07]:
Impressive. This is a fantastic conversation.

Henry Abbott [01:22:11]:
I took it to some weird places. I feel.

Mark Divine [01:22:13]:
No, thank you. I appreciate that. I was a co. Conspirator. True.

Henry Abbott [01:22:19]:
That’s true. That’s true.

Mark Divine [01:22:20]:
Yeah, man. The book is out.

Henry Abbott [01:22:23]:
The book is called ballistic. It’s out May 6th. I. I don’t know what the best way is to order it, but I know if you go to. My name’s Henry Abbott. If you go to henryabbott.com there’s like, you can click a button to get it from your local bookstore or from wherever your favorite place to get is. There’s a bunch of. There’s all the vendors on there.

Henry Abbott [01:22:40]:
But I think it’s like, this is a really hard thing for me to explain, but like, like people who have read it and I’m sorry you didn’t get a copy, like, are having a weird experience where they’re.

Mark Divine [01:22:51]:
You feel like they’re doing psychedelics.

Henry Abbott [01:22:53]:
Well, like, I mean, just an example. My father in law’s been making fun of me for like going for like all these crazy workouts and outdoor things I’ve been doing forever. I’ve known the guy since I was like in college. And he also thought that was kind of. He read the early draft of this book and like, he’s working out every day.

Mark Divine [01:23:10]:
That’s cool.

Henry Abbott [01:23:10]:
He’s going all. Now he feels like his body is a well designed machine that can do incredible things. And he like, never thought that before, right? And he like, if you look, I guarantee anywhere online where there are like reviews of this book right now, you’ll see Jeff Goodwin. He’s in there hammering away with like, this book changed my life. Everyone, like, like people are having this kind of big. It’s a very. Like, like, this is not me. All right? So these people, these geniuses have been in my mind cooking up a big pot of Stew for like 35 years of research.

Henry Abbott [01:23:39]:
Are going into like.

Mark Divine [01:23:40]:
And doing it quietly.

Henry Abbott [01:23:41]:
Doing it quietly. I’m the ladle. I just came in, I took a scoop and I’m ladling it out, you know? And everyone’s like, this too is amazing, right? And like, it’s not a. This whole project has been wildly authentic, right? Marcus’s work and my work and our friendship is like, nobody’s trying to make a buck here. We’re just like fourth leading cause of death is immobility. Everybody’s in pain. Like, we gotta do.

Mark Divine [01:24:03]:
They probably can’t take any more clients.

Henry Abbott [01:24:05]:
They’re literally. They don’t have a product to sell you. Like, like they, they say that their main business is P3, which is basically invitation only athletes. And then they have a side business called the lab. And yeah, if you’re local in Santa Barbara, you can go see them.

Mark Divine [01:24:18]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [01:24:19]:
I recommend, it’s great. But like they don’t, they’re not selling you. They don’t have like a drink, they don’t have a bar. Like there’s, there’s nothing for them to sell you. Right. They’re just trying. His parents are both artists and he like thought that like he was raised that business is like suspicious.

Mark Divine [01:24:34]:
Yeah.

Henry Abbott [01:24:34]:
And he just wanted to create beautiful things. Right. He’s like just trying to create this like better understanding of the human body.

Mark Divine [01:24:39]:
I love that.

Henry Abbott [01:24:40]:
Yeah. That’s all he wants. He just wants us to move better. Right.

Mark Divine [01:24:42]:
And he’s got a great lifestyle and he’s passionate about what he does.

Henry Abbott [01:24:45]:
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Divine [01:24:46]:
Doesn’t need to scale it and franchise it.

Henry Abbott [01:24:48]:
Exactly. Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:24:49]:
I love that. Yeah, we need more of that. What’s next for you?

Henry Abbott [01:24:54]:
I really like this book writing thing.

Mark Divine [01:24:55]:
You do.

Henry Abbott [01:24:56]:
Yeah, I really do. Yeah. We’re working on. Actually there’s a docu series in discussion out of this. So I’m participating in that as much as they want me, of course. But yeah, this, this diving deep down the rabbit hole. I, I got some, I got some, got some conversations going about what’s next, but I have to get through the next few months of kind of getting this, getting this baby born.

Mark Divine [01:25:21]:
You’re not done until.

Henry Abbott [01:25:22]:
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Divine [01:25:22]:
Until she’s out of the nest.

Henry Abbott [01:25:23]:
Yeah. But my wife will tell you that she’s like, oh, what a shocker. Henry really enjoys going down the, deep down the rabbit hole of a book project. Like, who knew?

Mark Divine [01:25:32]:
Give yourself like a six month break.

Henry Abbott [01:25:34]:
I don’t think I’m going to do that. I think I’m going to, you know, I’m the guy who looks at the ocean, wants to jump in. Like I’m looking at my next project.

Mark Divine [01:25:41]:
You might follow the wrong strand, you know, give yourself some time, the dust to settle and then time for that next thing to emerge that says this is what has to be done, not just something I’m interested in.

Henry Abbott [01:25:52]:
No, I think you’re exactly right. But in fact, I’ve been done writing this for six months already because it takes forever to print and whatever. So like I’ve been.

Mark Divine [01:26:00]:
You’ve already improved.

Henry Abbott [01:26:01]:
I gotta, I mean, I could tell you right now, but I would ruin it. Like I do feel like I kind of have what I want to do next, but it’s basically this for the brain, basically is what I think that way.

Mark Divine [01:26:11]:
That’s what I do.

Henry Abbott [01:26:12]:
Oh, I’LL think of something else.

Mark Divine [01:26:15]:
Come and interview me for six weeks now.

Henry Abbott [01:26:18]:
You do that. You got the, you know, you got to do your squid daddy thing. You’re gonna be busy.

Mark Divine [01:26:21]:
Yeah, I think that ship has sailed for me.

Henry Abbott [01:26:26]:
Okay. Okay.

Mark Divine [01:26:28]:
Henry, man, this has been awesome. Appreciate you coming here in person and great conversation.

Henry Abbott [01:26:32]:
No, I love it. Thank you, Marcus.

Mark Divine [01:26:34]:
Good luck with the book. It’s gonna be awesome. Ballistic. What’s the tagline again?

Henry Abbott [01:26:38]:
Here we go.

Mark Divine [01:26:40]:
The New science of Injury Free Athletic performance. Great title. Ballistic Henry.

Henry Abbott [01:26:45]:
Henryabbott.com Henryabbott.com is where I’m putting all the, like, that’s right. All the links, all the stuff. If somebody says something really nice about my book, I’ll put it on there too. This show will be on there when it comes. Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:26:58]:
And Abbott is two Bs. A B, B, O, T, T if you’re driving.

Henry Abbott [01:27:01]:
Henryhabbott.com yeah, people don’t want to give you that last T. They’re like, I can imagine.

Mark Divine [01:27:05]:
That’s easy to drop that off.

Speaker C [01:27:07]:
I didn’t want to give you the.

Mark Divine [01:27:08]:
B. Yeah, I would have probably, but then it would be Henry Abbott.

Henry Abbott [01:27:13]:
Yeah. It’s not, it’s not like mean. I’m not insulted by it, but it’s not going to get you the right website, you know.

Mark Divine [01:27:20]:
Do you do social media and stuff or.

Henry Abbott [01:27:22]:
Not as much as I used to. I really don’t. Honestly, I do very little. I have this. I made a, A newsletter of things around this book which is@writing activity.com. you can get there from Henry Abbott.com but.

Mark Divine [01:27:36]:
And, and the basketball thing.

Henry Abbott [01:27:38]:
The basketball thing is true. Hoop. I’m barely on. I’m not on Instagram other than I have like a little shadow account just to follow people I want to learn from.

Mark Divine [01:27:46]:
And if you want to sell books, you’re not to grow that.

Henry Abbott [01:27:49]:
Yeah, I guess you’re right.

Mark Divine [01:27:50]:
I interviewed a guy I’m on last week or two weeks ago. I know it’s not enough. I’m hiring this guy, this 28 year old genius, runs a company called Media Scaling and immediately showed me like, wow, we’re. We’re completely missing the boat.

Henry Abbott [01:28:04]:
Okay.

Mark Divine [01:28:06]:
I got a podcast. Mark Devine. This show, this, this. Our conversations we have like this are awesome. You can delete that part. You know what I mean?

Henry Abbott [01:28:15]:
I didn’t hear it.

Mark Divine [01:28:19]:
But how are people gonna find it? They’ll find it if I’m on another podcast. Yeah, it’s your social media.

Henry Abbott [01:28:25]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:28:25]:
He said just take the word social off it, it’s now media.

Henry Abbott [01:28:29]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:28:29]:
People are finding you on link, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok.

Henry Abbott [01:28:36]:
I’ve been, yeah.

Mark Divine [01:28:36]:
I mean, so you don’t have to do it yourself, but you’ll have to pay someone to do it who knows what they’re doing.

Henry Abbott [01:28:42]:
Do you want to launch into a long conversation about this right now? I’m down if you want.

Mark Divine [01:28:45]:
No, I gotta get going actually.

Henry Abbott [01:28:47]:
Okay. It’s late. I just made you late for something, I’m pretty sure.

Mark Divine [01:28:53]:
Well, I’ve gotta call it three.

Henry Abbott [01:28:54]:
Okay. Okay. I’ve been working in digital media since like 2005 full time. And it is great for short ideas. Yeah, check out my new outfit.

Mark Divine [01:29:09]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [01:29:09]:
But like this is very complicated. No, it’s the wrong place.

Mark Divine [01:29:13]:
It’s just to get them to then go learn more or to buy the book.

Henry Abbott [01:29:17]:
Right, but it’s like, it’s a front door. But like I, I, in the end I only want people who want to spend eight hours with this. It’s an eight hour project and like it’s a.

Mark Divine [01:29:27]:
So out of every hundred people, maybe you’ll find one to three. Yeah, but if you’re only exposing it to 100 people, then you get one to three. But if you’re exposing it to a million people, then you’ve got 10 to 30,000.

Henry Abbott [01:29:44]:
Okay, I’ll take this really fast. Okay. I ran a team at ESPN that shattered all the records for traffic. And everybody fights over the front door. How do you, where do you get it on the site? How long is it leading? Page one. But none of the, not one of the big hits comes, has the traffic come from there? A hundred. So our traffic, our median story had 23,000 readers. Some stories had 5 million readers.

Henry Abbott [01:30:06]:
Like 5 million unique individuals came Reddit. Every one of the ones that had huge traffic. The traffic, it came like day 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. It wasn’t even on the site anymore in a prominent way.

Mark Divine [01:30:19]:
It just shared.

Henry Abbott [01:30:20]:
It’s a hundred percent people. It’s like the, does it spread like a virus to the people who get to the end of it? Are they so emotional about it that they go find somebody else? Right. That’s how the mega hits come. Like, yeah, there’s a lot of, there’s like 10% margin in like where does it get placed? What’s the front door? Right, but like, like the marketing comes from people turn into raving evangelists after they consume it.

Mark Divine [01:30:45]:
Right.

Henry Abbott [01:30:45]:
Like, I think that’s the, really, that’s, that’s what I was thinking about. And I set a Hope, a whole team to test this. Eight writers, four editors, and like, just making media this way. And we didn’t. We did okay on placement on the site. But we like, like people who’ve been averaging 50,000 readers. We’re getting like 2, 3 million.

Mark Divine [01:31:03]:
That’s amazing.

Henry Abbott [01:31:03]:
And like, with just this approach of just like. Anyway, so that’s. I’m betting. I’m betting the farm on that.

Mark Divine [01:31:08]:
Did you read the audiobook?

Henry Abbott [01:31:11]:
No. We hired a professional actor. Yeah, I offered to, but they were like, we love your enthusiasm.

Mark Divine [01:31:21]:
That’s unfortunate. People really want to hear the author’s voice.

Henry Abbott [01:31:25]:
They said in memoirs it makes a big difference. But that in almost everything else. I did research just a little bit. I went to, like, people who love audiobooks and I’m like. And mostly they love actors. Yeah. But I mean, I was down to do it, but I this. I did listen to all the auditions and I actually, I’m usually like, sounds great, but honestly, the first like six or seven, I was like, no, no, no, not this guy.

Henry Abbott [01:31:50]:
And if I heard this one guy, I’m like, I love it. I love it. He did a great job.

Mark Divine [01:31:55]:
I actually, I think you. I agree with that because I. I don’t. I would love to listen to your book, but a lot of times I get bored listening to like, sciency stuff.

Henry Abbott [01:32:05]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:32:05]:
But I love space operas. I wouldn’t sit down and read a three or 400, 200 page sci fi book. Not.

Henry Abbott [01:32:13]:
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Divine [01:32:14]:
But when I listen to it, because I have such a vivid imagination.

Henry Abbott [01:32:16]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:32:17]:
Just comes alive for me.

Henry Abbott [01:32:18]:
Like, what’s an example of a space opera?

Mark Divine [01:32:20]:
Like, expeditionary force.

Henry Abbott [01:32:22]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:32:22]:
There’s like 18 of them now.

Henry Abbott [01:32:23]:
Oh, wow.

Mark Divine [01:32:24]:
Guys make millions of dollars.

Henry Abbott [01:32:25]:
Wow, wow, wow.

Mark Divine [01:32:26]:
But what’s unique is the voice actor.

Henry Abbott [01:32:29]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:32:29]:
I buy it for the voice actor. In fact, it was so good.

Henry Abbott [01:32:32]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:32:32]:
R.C. bray.

Henry Abbott [01:32:33]:
Okay.

Mark Divine [01:32:34]:
And he plays all the characters.

Henry Abbott [01:32:35]:
He’s just awesome at it.

Mark Divine [01:32:36]:
Male, female, alien.

Henry Abbott [01:32:37]:
Yeah. It’s an art form.

Mark Divine [01:32:39]:
Nominal art form. This guy has probably earned a ton of money off those books.

Henry Abbott [01:32:43]:
Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:32:44]:
But then I started looking at other books that R.C. bray was the voice actor. I didn’t give a.

Henry Abbott [01:32:49]:
Who wrote it, really. That’s. That’s respect. Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:32:52]:
Yeah. So it’s kind of validating what you’re saying. If you get a good voice actor and they’re. And they can do the intonations and kind of like take you on a journey and make it come alive, it’s well worth it.

Henry Abbott [01:33:03]:
1. This book’s. It’s Got so much passion in it. Like, there’s just, like, it to be really in love with, you know, if you want to be an owl, like, you got to really want that mouse. Right. And, like. Like, the first couple guys, I was like, this isn’t. This is nice.

Henry Abbott [01:33:16]:
Like, you know, it’s. You’re saying all the words correctly, but, like, you don’t give a shit about you catching the mouse or not. I could just tell. No, but you got it. Like, ultimately, that’s what I was saying.

Mark Divine [01:33:27]:
You know, you would have been a great reader because you’ll throw your heart into it.

Henry Abbott [01:33:30]:
Yeah. I’m all.

Mark Divine [01:33:31]:
Maybe I’m all in your voice. I don’t know. I thought you had a great voice.

Henry Abbott [01:33:34]:
They didn’t even really. I didn’t really audition. Mostly they just find that, like, they have. The author always wants to do it, and they have the author in, and then the recording takes, like, forever, and it’s a nightmare, and the author’s upset.

Mark Divine [01:33:43]:
First time?

Henry Abbott [01:33:43]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Divine [01:33:44]:
Five of my books now.

Henry Abbott [01:33:45]:
And how did you find it?

Mark Divine [01:33:47]:
I like doing it.

Henry Abbott [01:33:48]:
Yeah? Yeah, yeah.

Mark Divine [01:33:49]:
And I’m good at it.

Henry Abbott [01:33:50]:
How long does it take?

Mark Divine [01:33:51]:
Three days.

Henry Abbott [01:33:52]:
Yeah, that’s not too bad.

Mark Divine [01:33:54]:
Yeah.

Henry Abbott [01:33:56]:
Yeah. I thought I. I studied radio and.

Mark Divine [01:33:59]:
But you’re going to find a lot more people buy the audiobook than the hard copy.

Henry Abbott [01:34:02]:
Really?

Mark Divine [01:34:03]:
Yeah. Audiobook sales are through the roof.

Henry Abbott [01:34:06]:
I wonder why that is.

Mark Divine [01:34:08]:
People don’t have time to read anymore.

Henry Abbott [01:34:09]:
Yeah. Yeah. I never used audiobooks, but lately I. I did listen to a few, and it’s kind of great.

Mark Divine [01:34:15]:
You’ll earn way more money from the audiobook sales, I bet.

Henry Abbott [01:34:17]:
Interesting. Hope you’re right.

Mark Divine [01:34:19]:
Yeah.

Henry Abbott [01:34:20]:
Okay. I’m glad we got a good guy doing this.

Mark Divine [01:34:22]:
Yeah, me too. All right, brother.

Henry Abbott [01:34:25]:
All right. This is super fun.

Mark Divine [01:34:26]:
So glad you came down here and did this. Appreciate it.

Henry Abbott [01:34:28]:
It’s beautiful down here. It’s like last time. I had recently had a girlfriend in La Jolla, and this is in high school, and she was a little sadistic, though. She, like.