How would you react in the midst of a crisis? This week on The Unbeatable Mind, comedian, Crossfit affiliate owner, and leader of the successful men’s group ‘ The Treehouse’, Kenny Kane, shares his personal tale of losing his home to the recent fires in Los Angeles. Kenny recounts the harrowing moments of urgency as he and his family confronted the blaze, and the profound impact it had on their lives. Delving deep into themes of leadership, community, and the essence of human connection, Kenny details the importance of having a clear vision and purpose, especially when faced with volatile and uncertain situations. Kenny explains his commitment to nurturing resilient leaders through his men’s group and the gym community, emphasizing physical training as a conduit for life preparation.
Kenny Kane is a life-long performer and coach who is fueled by improving quality of life for people in principled ways. He bought CrossFit Los Angeles in 2014 with a vision to build a unified coaching team and the business to support it. The business rebranded in 2017 as Oak Park, a nod to the Kenny’s roots in Santa Rosa, CA as well as a symbolic transition to something evergreen. His dream has always been to create an environment where he can be a student and learn entirely new things from the people within it. As the Oak Park coaches and community continue to evolve, that dream becomes more of a reality.
Kenny has an extraordinarily diverse background. He grew up in a family fitness business with a mother in the Swimming Hall of Fame and a father who was an officiant at the Olympics. At 15, he earned his Black Belt and began his coaching career as a martial arts instructor. Kenny attended UC Davis where he played soccer, ran track, and competed in triathlons. He then went on to teach physical education and drama in his hometown while training for the Olympic Trials. A career ending running injury pushed him to shift focus to standup comedy and private training. Kenny spent 14 years splitting time between training clients and touring the world. He performed standup and gave motivational talks while simultaneously transforming people as a coach. Kenny retired from performing in 2013 to do what he loves. He now dedicates all of his professional time to coaching and the business endeavors that support it.
“Breakdown can lead to breakthrough if you let it.”
-Kenny Kane
Key Takeaways:
Sponsors and Promotions:
Marley Spoon:
Seed:
Qualia
Defender
Talking points are in Airtable.
Kenny’s Links:
Body of Knowledge https://thebodyofknowledge.com/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaYi-zzTBsYYLR-qvwIS_X8AJvTzPRcn92ydWzeDYOkh3q1qnexVORV3CU0_aem_AvT2YUXooXMSSPVti0PhSw
Oak Park: https://www.oakparkla.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thekennykane/?hl=en
Timestamped Overview:
00:00 Trapped by Fire with Children
07:46 Fire Evacuation Crisis
15:04 “Devastating Fire Destroys Neighborhood”
17:39 Embracing Life’s Uncertainty
22:39 Nose Breathing Amidst Chaos
27:31 “Lead: Exploring Purpose and Roles”
34:58 Navigating Business and Home Dilemma
39:55 Emotionality and Unavoidable Fires
43:01 “Shifting Realities and Human Connection”
49:32 Embrace Difficulty Together
55:05 Five Tenets for Business Harmony
58:07 Defining Purpose and Connection
01:03:40 Inflection Point in Bit-Based Reality
01:09:06 Misunderstanding Freedom and Connection
01:17:03 LAUSD Relocates Students Successfully
01:22:48 Balancing Nesting and Financial Stability
01:25:50 Crisis Scenario Planning Exercise
01:34:19 “Divine Inspiration & Seal Fit”
01:34:53 “Support Global Change Together”
Mark Divine [00:02:10]:
Welcome to the Mark Divine Show. I’m your host, Mark Divine. Super stoked to have you here today. Where we explore everything around resiliency, vertical development, consciousness, spirituality, mental development, meditation. Resilience.
Matthew Barnes [00:02:31]:
Did I say that? I think I did 2x. Anyways, lots of stuff. The fact that you’re here is a great honor. So thank you for being here today. I’ve got a good friend, Kenny Kane. Kenny is a comedian. He is a one of the longest running CrossFit affiliate owners.
Kenny Cane [00:02:49]:
Year 21.
Matthew Barnes [00:02:51]:
Number 21.
Kenny Cane [00:02:52]:
No, year 21.
Matthew Barnes [00:02:53]:
Oh. Year 21.
Kenny Cane [00:02:54]:
2004.
Matthew Barnes [00:02:55]:
Wow. Okay. He also runs a very successful men’s group. He’s just all around amazing guy. Jack of all trades, master of one, I think.
Kenny Cane [00:03:06]:
0.55.
Matthew Barnes [00:03:08]:
So, Kenny, super stoked to have you here today. And one of the things, obviously I wanted to. To dive right into is I’m sorry to hear about you losing your home in the fire. What a tragedy. I mean, I can’t even imagine what you and everyone else up in LA has endured in the last three weeks or whatever.
Kenny Cane [00:03:27]:
Two.
Matthew Barnes [00:03:28]:
Two weeks.
Kenny Cane [00:03:28]:
Two weeks today.
Matthew Barnes [00:03:30]:
Well, just walk us through your experience, like, from hearing about the fire. Did you think you were at risk right away? Because these things can happen pretty fast.
Kenny Cane [00:03:38]:
They can give us your story. There’s layers of story.
Matthew Barnes [00:03:44]:
Start with the outer layer.
Kenny Cane [00:03:45]:
Yeah, I was. I was with the clients who. I own a gym, and I work with people in a variety of ways, one of which is what you refer to as the physical mountain. So we do physical training. So I was with a client about an hour from where it took me about an hour to get back once I got news from my wife. But I felt my phone vibrating and it just was not stopping once I got to my client’s house and finally picked it up. And my wife’s like, you need to come back immediately. And, you know, there was some concern in her voice, and I don’t even think she quite understood what was happening at the time.
Kenny Cane [00:04:30]:
She just knew that she needed to, at that point, go get are two boys who go to Marquez Elementary School, which was the first school that caught fire. Oh, wow.
Matthew Barnes [00:04:41]:
Wait, it caught fire while they were at the school.
Kenny Cane [00:04:44]:
By the time she got there, the fire had come up the hill and was cresting the campus.
Matthew Barnes [00:04:48]:
Good Lord.
Kenny Cane [00:04:49]:
And so she got the kids into the car. All the other kids were then, like, right after her, got put on the buses, and she got on Sunset Boulevard, not far from where Marquez elementary is, and was stuck because down the road there was a lot of people who had to abandon their cars because the fire was surrounding them and they had to get out and move so traffic wasn’t moving. And she as. As a mother, you know, was thinking, okay, I’ve got my two children, but the third are. We have an infant who’s 8 months old who was with the babysitter while she, you know, and so who’s about a mile and a half away. So she just stuck in the car watching the fire jump from tree to tree and house to house close to her it was surrounding her.
Matthew Barnes [00:05:42]:
Holy shit.
Kenny Cane [00:05:43]:
And so she pulled her car off because it wasn’t going anywhere. Pulled off in the side street and just told the boys to run with her. And so she ran from the houses were catching on fire, the trees were catching on fire. And she just ran and she ran a mile and a half to back to her house. And it’s good news. The good news is that we’re running family. She was a Swedish olympian and our 9 year old just ran a 22 minute 5k and her 7 year old runs a 27 minute 5k. So they’re like uniquely fast and weirdly fast.
Matthew Barnes [00:06:13]:
Thank goodness.
Kenny Cane [00:06:14]:
Oh yeah, thank goodness. And you know, she properly recognized that they’re going to be better on foot and, you know, and physically capable in that moment. And so she made the decision to, you know, and I, I, I still, it still kind of breaks my heart to just know that she had to go through this decision making. Like, I got to go pick up my kids. Now I’m stuck in them away from the baby. And she’ make a, she’s got to make a terrible, you know, like she split. The baby was safe because she was with the babysitter. But Char didn’t know that, you know, the fire’s just jumping around Windsor 70 miles an hour.
Matthew Barnes [00:06:48]:
The babysitter lived in the zone of danger.
Kenny Cane [00:06:50]:
No, she, she was at the house. My, my wife was at a dental appointment. She came out of dental. Yeah. And she, and then it was chaos, you know, so by the way, did.
Matthew Barnes [00:07:00]:
You ever get that car back?
Kenny Cane [00:07:04]:
We did.
Matthew Barnes [00:07:04]:
Not that it’s important. Stuck in my head.
Kenny Cane [00:07:07]:
No, no, no. So this is the indiscriminance of fires. Right. She went back three days later to see her burnt down home. And then the weird victory for the moment was I’ve got my car, you know, or she, that’s what she went through. I got the car and the back rear bumper light was melted. And then part of the frame between the passenger front and back doors was also kind of dented. But she, you know, she got in not realizing that you probably shouldn’t get in a vehicle like that, given that, you know, 11,000 Teslas just burned.
Matthew Barnes [00:07:45]:
Right.
Kenny Cane [00:07:46]:
I think that that’s one of the things that is like, really concerning about this particular fire is, and I say this from experience because my hometown of Santa Rosa burned down in 2017 and I lost like, where I grew up, you know, and so this is, this is 2.0. And anyway, so she, she ran back, got with our, our baby Freya and the good fortune I had. One of my employees, Jamie Silber was at the nearby. He came by and got the dog, the four of them, and got them to another one of our clients houses for safety. And then I eventually made it back in rendezvous with them. Once I rendezvoused with them, we kind of situated in a house and we were watching like everybody was on the news. Which is weird because I never, I haven’t watched the news. I can’t remember the last time A major crisis.
Matthew Barnes [00:08:42]:
That’s for you.
Kenny Cane [00:08:43]:
Yeah. And so, you know, we’re just kind of watching the news, just sort of going at, you know, what’s getting damaged, what’s. Is our home on fire, like all these things. And so my friend Nick and I decide to drive back into the neighborhood and we found a, like a secret route that could get back to my house. And you know, and that’s where I start to be able to really observe this sort of distal end of the human condition. Because as we’re driving into the neighborhood, there’s two looters who were doing alley oop dunks on a child’s basket. And we drive past, you know, we don’t do anything to stop them because we’re just trying to get to my house to grab.
Matthew Barnes [00:09:27]:
Right. They’re playing basketball.
Kenny Cane [00:09:28]:
They’re literally alley ooping each other. And you know, so, so there’s this, the sinking feeling that’s happening for our human condition as a, as, as I’m witness to that, you know, so that’s one part of this, this, this thing. And then we get to my block and sure enough, there’s two looters directly across the street from our house taping the ring doorbell for a neighbor’s house, getting ready to go inside. Good fortune is, is now I’m 54 and I’ve lost a lot of hair. My buddy’s driving a Suburban. So I get out and I look and sound like a cop and I am physically prepared for moments like this. You know, we, we, you know, as a martial artist, I didn’t, I could have miscalculated. I, I, I didn’t have a gun.
Kenny Cane [00:10:22]:
But at that moment. But you know, very forcefully got these guys out of the neighborhood and, and then went into the house after we kind of shooed them away. My, my buddy was standing guard, just making sure that they didn’t loop back for whatever reason so I could get into the house and kind of into your house, into my house and so.
Matthew Barnes [00:10:46]:
So your house hadn’t burnt?
Kenny Cane [00:10:48]:
No, not at that point. But there was a house. Eight houses from Mars, completely combusting.
Matthew Barnes [00:10:52]:
I think it’s crazy how. Just indiscriminate it is.
Kenny Cane [00:10:56]:
Oh, it’s so.
Matthew Barnes [00:10:57]:
You know, it’s. Imagery I saw is like, house burned, house not touched. Right. Shopping mall burned, church.
Kenny Cane [00:11:06]:
Yeah.
Matthew Barnes [00:11:06]:
Not touched. Like, so strange.
Kenny Cane [00:11:08]:
It’s so. It. You know, that. That’s been my personal experience in both fires. Just. It’s very random and very indiscriminate. So I get in the house, and this is one of those, like, very human moments between any couple. You know, my wife is having her experience.
Kenny Cane [00:11:25]:
I FaceTime in her, and she’s like, okay, go to this drawer. Get this. Go to the. Go upstairs. My buddy outside is now shouting at.
Matthew Barnes [00:11:31]:
Me, do you have a plan for anything like this happening after the Santa Rosa? Did you have, like, a checklist or. Well, you know, things to get out of the house in a crisis?
Kenny Cane [00:11:42]:
Yes and no. We. We had. You know, we needed our. Our birth certificates and. And passports and those kind of things.
Matthew Barnes [00:11:48]:
So you thought of those first?
Kenny Cane [00:11:49]:
We had those. We. We had those secured. My wife had some stuff for the baby, some clothes for the kids, a couple of other things, but she. She realized there was a bunch of stuff that she wanted me to get, and so. And that was the mission. Our mission was to go back in and grab stuff. But now there’s secondary conditions that we weren’t prepared for.
Kenny Cane [00:12:06]:
There’s looters. And then as I’m as. As my wife is like, hey, can you grab this? Can you grab that? My buddy’s yelling from outside the house, kenny, the house next door’s on fire. The house next door. And I’m trying to tell Char. I’m like, babe, I gotta go. There’s a situation. And she’s like, okay, just go into the kitchen and grab.
Kenny Cane [00:12:26]:
I’m like, no, no, I gotta go. He’s still giving me instructions. I’m like, I know you can’t hear, Nick, but the house next door’s on fire. I gotta go. And so get off the phone with her. We go out. It’s a brush fire, so his bushes are on fire. Get our hose, put out that fire.
Kenny Cane [00:12:41]:
He’s stomping on it. Go back in. And at this point, Mark, you can see the. There’s just the. The toxic fumes that are. They look like you’re watching a Harry Potter movie. You know, there’s, like, when the bad ghosts turn into spirits, like a swirling. The swirling.
Kenny Cane [00:12:58]:
And it’s dark. And there’s certain parts of it that are darker, then it’s right in front of you, and there’s layers. There’s, like, light gray, dark, and, like, black. And it’s all moving in layers.
Matthew Barnes [00:13:07]:
Interesting.
Kenny Cane [00:13:07]:
And you just kind of, you know, and all this is so surreal because many things are happening.
Matthew Barnes [00:13:11]:
Like, did you have a mask on or anything to prot.
Kenny Cane [00:13:14]:
No, no. We weren’t prepared like that. It was just taking as much carcinogenic as I could, you know, I mean, I’ve got my nose breathing. Practice. Took a few years off your life, but you’re happy to be alive, right? I sure did. I was like, like, let’s lop two off, you know, so. So then we put out the fire, and then we just think, hey, we’re pretty successful with that. Like, let’s do our amateur firefighting.
Kenny Cane [00:13:37]:
And so we, like. We wet my house. You know, just sort of like, we’re thinking, this will do.
Matthew Barnes [00:13:43]:
You gotta try something.
Kenny Cane [00:13:44]:
We did, and we did. And. And we. We did the best that we could with the tools that we had. And, you know, so then we. We get out of there. So when you ask the question, like, what’s on the checklist? You know, there were things that Char, very concretely, was going to walk me down. Personally.
Kenny Cane [00:14:04]:
For me, I lost so much in the fires in 2017. I didn’t have many material things that mattered to me that much.
Matthew Barnes [00:14:10]:
Yeah. I mean, that’s the way to really crystallize what’s important.
Kenny Cane [00:14:13]:
Yeah. And so the only things that I would say that, like, I really wish that I had had is that, you know, I’ve been journaling for 29 years as a daily habit. All my journals are gone. I have one that’s sitting over.
Matthew Barnes [00:14:26]:
It’s like. We call it fire puja. Eventually, you got to burn that.
Kenny Cane [00:14:29]:
You gotta burn it.
Matthew Barnes [00:14:29]:
Well, the universe did it for you.
Kenny Cane [00:14:32]:
And so, you know, and so there’s something like, even in the middle of all this, I was at ease about, like, I. I’m gonna get this stuff.
Matthew Barnes [00:14:43]:
That my family’s all fine and get.
Kenny Cane [00:14:45]:
The stuff that she wants as best as I can. But then we really did recognize. It’s. It’s time to go with the. With the ember starting the fire next door and us putting that out and the fire starting near. It’s like, man, we. We got it.
Matthew Barnes [00:14:57]:
At that point, you knew you’re gonna lose your house.
Kenny Cane [00:14:59]:
I didn’t know that.
Matthew Barnes [00:14:59]:
You didn’t.
Kenny Cane [00:15:00]:
I was like, I was really optimistic, as my default setting is.
Matthew Barnes [00:15:04]:
Yeah.
Kenny Cane [00:15:04]:
You know, I’m like, I fall on that side of it. Like it’ll be there tomorrow, you know, you know, it’s gonna, you know, I put water on it. And we didn’t know until about 48 hours later. My neighbor got back and he called me and he’s like, yeah, both of our homes are gone, our entire block. And we were in the ABC streets. And so that. That region was just obliterated, just knocked out completely. Except for the two homes right next to ours.
Kenny Cane [00:15:40]:
Hundreds and hundreds of homes in a perimeter around ours. Gone. And then two houses, like on our street, the one that just finished getting built.
Matthew Barnes [00:15:48]:
Here’s a question. This is like jumping ahead a little bit, but are those houses even livable given what’s going on around them again? So I’m not even sure I’d want to move back in the house that’s surrounded by.
Kenny Cane [00:16:00]:
No, I mean, look. Yeah, exactly. And then it’s going to be construction site for ever, forever. I mean, you’ve got all these like crazy homes to rebuild and it’s going to take a minute. And they had a. Our neighbors had a one year old. Like, you don’t want your one year old in this stuff.
Matthew Barnes [00:16:16]:
And so even if you didn’t lose your home, you probably lost your home.
Kenny Cane [00:16:21]:
Yeah.
Matthew Barnes [00:16:21]:
Sense. Like, how are you going to rent it?
Kenny Cane [00:16:23]:
Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Barnes [00:16:24]:
I mean, can’t collect insurance. You don’t want to live there. That, that’s just as bad.
Kenny Cane [00:16:27]:
Yeah. And so I think in some ways, in some ways that can be worse.
Matthew Barnes [00:16:32]:
Right.
Kenny Cane [00:16:33]:
Because it’s.
Matthew Barnes [00:16:34]:
You got no safety net.
Kenny Cane [00:16:35]:
Yeah. You’re in, you’re in between things. And it’s, you know, it’s going to be very hard to decision make, you know, in, in that context. And it depends where you fall on the scale, like what your financial resources, what your resources are and where that falls. And it’s, it’s very split. Like there’s a lot of people like us who like we were working as hard as we could to be in that neighborhood so we could send our children to the public school. That was incredible in the neighborhood. And we built this like, really amazing.
Kenny Cane [00:17:04]:
My wife just cultivated this like, really loving space in our home. And I hosted my men’s group multiple. Every Monday different groups would meet and my wife would train clients there 80 to 100 hours a month. You know. And so we had just so much built in infrastructure to our home. Our home was a community. It was a community to the community, you know, and my wife with the women and me to the men. It was just like our home was like a Central place for 50 or 60 people.
Kenny Cane [00:17:39]:
And, you know, and again, like, I think that the lesson that I got, the lesson I’ve learned many times, you know, when I was doing, you know, the Mastermind crew back in 2017 with you and. And the cohort that you had then, like, you know, that was a particularly rough year because I had lost a lot of people that were very close to me and the fires happened that year. And. And, you know, and I think the lesson for me is just like, there’s the lesson that you’ve talked about and taught me about, like, the volatility, the uncertainty, the complexity, the ambiguity of our existence is like the moment that we can actually embrace that and be with that, then, you know, we can just sort of like, honor this stuff as it comes and.
Matthew Barnes [00:18:34]:
Right.
Kenny Cane [00:18:34]:
You know, as I sit with you right now, it’s. I’m so appreciative of that which you gave me. You gave me a lot of tools for a moment like this, and, you know, I’m able to, in real time deploy those.
Matthew Barnes [00:18:52]:
Yeah. So let’s kind of double tap on that. What was your. So when you realized that there was a major crisis and you’re, like, rushing from the gym, like, what was your mindset and what was your internal dialogue? How are you using the tools that you learned to, you know, to manage the situation? And what did you see around you? Right. And that juxtaposition.
Kenny Cane [00:19:19]:
Yeah. As I was moving back towards the Palisades, I mean, first of all, there’s so many fire trucks going that direction. You know, even as I was driving east away from the Palisades prior, there was just a lot of fire trucks that I was passing. I’m like, man, something’s going on. Right. It was definitely abnormal. And. But, you know, we talk about the OODA loop, so just being able to observe what you can observe and then orient as you can.
Kenny Cane [00:19:46]:
And as I was driving back, it’s funny, like, one of the guys in my men’s group, I have a. I have a. I had a scheduled call with them. And so once I knew that my wife was secure and she was getting organized, I jumped on that call and, you know, had the call with him as I drive, driving back into my community.
Matthew Barnes [00:20:09]:
Right.
Kenny Cane [00:20:11]:
Interestingly, he’s very east of us. He lives in Silver Lake. But his ex wife and his daughter lost their home in the. In the fires that were east of ours. And so. But I. But I, you know, just said, I’ve got a scheduled call now and this is what I can do. So it’s like front side focus, frontside focus.
Kenny Cane [00:20:30]:
This handled it. This is, you know, what, what, what’s on the, on the map for the day. And then, and then the inventory is very immediate. Once, you know, you kind of transition. Okay, wife safe, kids safe. Were at our friend Nick’s incredibly safe, very benevolent family. Just, they totally took care of us. And so, you know, at that point, you know, because I’ve been through natural disasters and murders and all sorts of crazy stuff, like, I know from experience, just like, you know, don’t get caught in the spin at this moment because the energy is going to be elevated and decision making is going to be kind of skewed at this moment.
Kenny Cane [00:21:17]:
Whatever the decisions are, it’s, it’s going to be skewed. And so, and the decision making at that point gets pretty simple. It’s like, okay, well, got to make sure that we’re going to be in a safe space. And so it gets, it’s, it’s very simple at that point and at the location that we were at originally, we thought we were going to be okay, but the fires, I mean, that thing was moving. It was moving. It was, it kept just chewing acres and acres of land so fast. Those first, this first few hours just, was just a hummus.
Matthew Barnes [00:21:53]:
The wind was, the wind was whistling, wasn’t it? Like 70 miles.
Kenny Cane [00:21:56]:
The thing. I mean, you’ve got giant tree branches moving 400 meters that are on fire just across valleys onto the next thing. And it’s decorative trees and it’s highly flammable. It’s a dry neighborhood. You know, all the, all the great sort of California conditions for fires. And so, you know, then, then, and then the other, the, the other piece of it is just to try to relax into it rather than to resist, you know.
Matthew Barnes [00:22:28]:
And so how is your breathing at that point? Solid, Calm.
Kenny Cane [00:22:31]:
Solid. I felt very calm. I felt my breathing. I got great breath practice and I have for a long time. And so that’s integrated. It’s not.
Matthew Barnes [00:22:38]:
It was natural. You didn’t.
Kenny Cane [00:22:39]:
Very Natural nose breathing. 3160 box, you know, all different breath techniques and didn’t even really needed to deploy them. I mean, it was just, it was, it was there. And even when we were, you know, when it was upregulated with the, you know, with the looters and all this stuff, there was still like a sense of like, you know, there, there was, there was enough of a calm there. And so, you know, I think at that point, then as a sheepdog, you, you start to Be a caretaker for those that are spun, you know, and everybody was kind of handling it in a variety of ways. And so with the family, there’s like the immediate ones. My, my 14 year old daughter who’s in Minnesota full time, but she’s out with us and has room in the house and kind of check in with her and she’s pretty distraught and you know, just keep going through the checklist of the family and. And then you got, you got a 9 and 7 year old who ran through fire.
Kenny Cane [00:23:37]:
And they’re also kids, so they’re. It’s this bizarre thing for them. They’re both traumatized in a different way, but it’s also like crazy because suddenly we’re in a hotel that night. And our kids love hotels. You know, they love hotels because they just think it’s the coolest thing to be in a hotel. And so there’s like, they’re so present. They’re so present. Like there’s, the food’s different and you know, daddy never lets us have french fries now.
Kenny Cane [00:24:02]:
French fries are for dinner, you know, and it’s just like, and we’re winning the pizz and like it’s whatever, you know, there’s ice cream and they’re just stoked and then, you know, and so.
Matthew Barnes [00:24:14]:
Sometimes there’s a fire, they’re gonna be like, can we talk?
Kenny Cane [00:24:17]:
They’re just like, you know, now we get ice cream and fries, you know, and so, and so we moved and so we went to the hotel and you know, our, our friends again, very benevolent, very capable of, of taking care of us in that moment. And just really, and this is to my point, what I was trying to get to a little earlier, I start to see just the enormity of the goodness in humanity starting in that moment and just being present to that.
Matthew Barnes [00:24:48]:
But you see, you see it all, right? You see the depravity, all of it and all the goodness, all of it. And so you’ve got to recognize that they all coexist.
Kenny Cane [00:24:57]:
It’s this coexistent truth that this is part of the human condition. And so, you know, it begins with that first wave of caretaking that he allows us. And my wife and him. My wife and I are caretakers for them. Like he calls me his Sherpa, you know what I mean? And so, and then his wife just adores my wife and so. And our kids really like each other and so. But they have the resources to put us up in this like incredible hotel. And it’s also, as we’re in this like, amazing hotel and the kids are eating fries.
Kenny Cane [00:25:35]:
We’re watching the hillside because we’re three miles from it. And just watching the. I mean, the fires were gigantic. They were covering the mountain.
Matthew Barnes [00:25:44]:
Saw some of the imagery.
Kenny Cane [00:25:46]:
It’s great. And we’re just watching from, from this like, super fancy hotel that people from around the world fly in to stay at. And we’re, we. My wife and I’d never be able to stay overnight there for six days, but like, they put us up and concurrently, we’re watching the fire. It was just such a binary where.
Matthew Barnes [00:26:07]:
People freaking out that the fire could, you know, kind of head into downtown la, like where the, you know, the commercial center.
Kenny Cane [00:26:14]:
Yeah, I, I think, you know, there’s this, I mean, not a lot of.
Matthew Barnes [00:26:19]:
Fuel down there, but if it’s hot enough.
Kenny Cane [00:26:20]:
Yeah, it’s. If hot. And the fires. And it was, it was spreading over those first days. It was, it was all over the place. And so we, you know, we had, we had the front row seat to that, you know, to that fight. And it’s just like, you know, fire was the, was the champ.
Matthew Barnes [00:26:38]:
Yeah, fire wins.
Kenny Cane [00:26:39]:
And fire wins.
Matthew Barnes [00:26:40]:
Fire one.
Kenny Cane [00:26:41]:
Yeah, it was just like, I’ll whoop your ass.
Matthew Barnes [00:26:44]:
I mean, while we’re talking, it’s still not 100% contained. It’s like 40, right?
Kenny Cane [00:26:48]:
Or something. Yeah. And so, you know, one of. One of our gym students, a Kokoro graduate as a firefighter, he lives close to us. So from my Gym, I have 18 people that had homes burned.
Matthew Barnes [00:27:02]:
Good Lord.
Kenny Cane [00:27:03]:
Another 18 are in the. In homes that are in the conditions that we spoke of earlier.
Matthew Barnes [00:27:09]:
Right.
Kenny Cane [00:27:10]:
They’re not in the home.
Matthew Barnes [00:27:10]:
Probably not gonna go back to anytime soon.
Kenny Cane [00:27:12]:
And so, in fact, the family that I’ve been speaking about, the McCutcheons, they’ve left for Dallas. They’re gonna move to Dallas. And so we’re not. We’re really unclear as to what’s gonna happen with that. That part of the community. Like some, some of the people are going to stay and just relocate. Other people are just going to be off to wherever they go, you know.
Matthew Barnes [00:27:27]:
And you’re going to stay in la, you know, change your thinking at all.
Kenny Cane [00:27:31]:
So it’s really interesting. You know, several years ago we, we got exposure, we, meaning you, me, to some of Ken Wilber’s work. I mean, is this like quadrant sort of thing that, you know, I’ve taken and tweaked a little bit, but in that upper life, left quadrant, you know, you’re always kind of like looking at Your purpose, you know, and then what. What actions and behaviors follow that, what relationship follow that, and what environment do you want to be in? And all that’s some of that you have conscious choice on. And from a purpose perspective, what I’m just trying to sit and be present to right now is, you know, I play a lot of roles in my life. I’m a husband, I’m a father, I’m a business owner. I’m a leader amongst extraordinary humans. And, you know, the one word that right now sits with me above all other words is, is lead.
Kenny Cane [00:28:43]:
And when I think about leading, I think about the complexity that lays in front of us to make that decision. Because when we talk about the five mountains, there’s a lot of things at play. Like, you know, got the mental, got the physical, got the emotional. You know, I’ve got good attunement to those things. Intuitive also have strong. And so now I look at this kokoro, this heart, mind thing, and I am so committed to the kindness and the love and the enormity of humanity that’s come from my gym community and from the tree house, which is my men’s group. I mean, there’s just so much humanity in these groups. And those groups look to me to hold space in a big way.
Kenny Cane [00:29:51]:
And I know you know that because you do the same thing. And I. And that’s been my job, is I have this amazing huge, giant container where I can just hold so much for people. And I’m very committed to that. And I’m committed to my children, and I’m committed to my wife. And my wife is Swedish, and she just, you know, she’s got the kids in Sweden right now to get fresh air and be with the grandparents, you know, And Sweden’s just a. It’s currently a much calmer place. They have their issues because of extreme extremism is everywhere and people’s attentional capacity is getting more distal.
Kenny Cane [00:30:38]:
You’ve got all the immigrants that came up from the Middle East. It’s. It’s complicated. And then Putin wants Gotland, which is their naval sort of position for the Baltic. And, you know, depending on what happens in Ukraine, that’s it. Like, it’s like. And knowing my luck, really, we’re moving to Sweden. Great.
Kenny Cane [00:30:56]:
Putin’s our neighbor. No, he’s.
Matthew Barnes [00:30:58]:
He’s our commander in Finland or. Where is that?
Kenny Cane [00:31:01]:
No, Gotland is just off of. It’s off the Eastern.
Matthew Barnes [00:31:05]:
But it’s still. It’s part of Ukraine.
Kenny Cane [00:31:07]:
No, it’s part of Sweden.
Matthew Barnes [00:31:08]:
It’s Part of Sweden.
Kenny Cane [00:31:09]:
But Putin explicitly wants Sweden next if Ukraine drops. So if he gets, if he gets Ukraine. Yeah, you know, he, he, the defense minister in Sweden is really clear on this is. And it’s the perfect position because he can command the Baltic. And so if he gets Ukraine and gets Sweden and sweet. And he’s very.
Matthew Barnes [00:31:25]:
Sweden’s on its way into NATO though, isn’t.
Kenny Cane [00:31:27]:
Yeah, but that’s also why he wants to like push the buttons.
Matthew Barnes [00:31:30]:
Yeah. Before. Before that.
Kenny Cane [00:31:31]:
Exactly.
Matthew Barnes [00:31:32]:
That’s fascinating. Plus a separate subject.
Kenny Cane [00:31:34]:
So it’s a. Yeah. And that’s a whole. But it’s interesting because Realpolitik place into. And then I look at the, you know, sort of. We were talking about Catherine’s brother who has like, you know, he’s the pre disaster guy, I’m the end disaster guy. So like, I feel like, you know, would that be, would that be the thing. Anyway, you know, I at this point again want to just come back to the OODA loop.
Kenny Cane [00:32:03]:
And there’s just right now the information that we have. There’s no good information that we have. There’s. There’s things that we can sort of understand like the, the housing market. Like my wife and I got displaced and so you have a binary market. Those that can afford what’s available and those that are. Might have been able to. But now.
Kenny Cane [00:32:24]:
Absolutely.
Matthew Barnes [00:32:24]:
In terms of running.
Kenny Cane [00:32:25]:
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so what happened? And I had a very visceral moment when I went to go look at a place in Santa Monica. You know, it was like a 3 bedroom apart apartment for 13 grand and I wouldn’t pay 5 to if I was loaded.
Matthew Barnes [00:32:44]:
13 grand a month.
Kenny Cane [00:32:46]:
Yeah. For. And it’s not, it’s, it was terrible. And as I’m in the space, I’m aware that the four other couples that are in there with me are in a very different position. They’re multi millionaires with multi million dollar policies. So they’re going to be able to, you know, bob and weave and do whatever they want. And it’s not like I, and I have no bitterness towards that. This is just sort of like.
Kenny Cane [00:33:12]:
So when you’re using an OODA loop, you know, you got to go, okay, what are the resources that we have? And so we don’t have that and we can’t compete with that. And that would also be not wise at this moment. And so the other recognition is that humans in moments like this, and I think this is where some other tools are helping me. You know, humans often want either certainty or they want flexibility. So there’s sort of like a, let’s concretize something or let’s migrate. And those are like very animalistic responses. And then there’s another, we use a, a psychometric at with my team called Market Force. And this is really fascinating.
Kenny Cane [00:33:55]:
People have stress responses that are very similar to animals when stress hits. And so you can just go, what’s the stressor? And go, okay, it’s cold. What does a beaver do? Beavers build. Okay, what does a bird do? Birds migrate. What does a bison do? Bison tolerates. What does a bear do? They hibernate. And all those stress responses are perfectly appropriate given those individual biologies. And so this is what, you know, this is the, this is the email that I sent to my team.
Kenny Cane [00:34:27]:
I said, know that our community is hit hard by this and we’re going to have very different animalistic responses based on the stress induction. And we must in this moment also be composed to understand that our biology and our internal bias is going to think that one way is better than another way of handling whatever’s happening. But people have default settings and so we must give space for those default settings. And so which are you?
Matthew Barnes [00:34:56]:
The bear, the bird? The beaver?
Kenny Cane [00:34:58]:
I’m a combination. I’m a little bit more of a, a beaver and a bird, but I can be pretty tolerant as well. So I’m a little bit of a hybrid. But you know, in, in this, this moment, you know, my wife wants to build, like, she wants to establish a home and this kind of stuff. I’m like, you know, and I’m just trying to have a conversation like we don’t compete in this market and we have this, we have really challenging decisions in front of us. Like, okay, what does that mean if her and I are physically not present for the business? What, what does that mean? And there’s a lot of unanswered questions there because, you know, of the things that I mentioned before, you know, we’re very much central.
Matthew Barnes [00:35:39]:
You still have a physical location.
Kenny Cane [00:35:40]:
There’s a. Yeah, and there’s, yeah, and there’s a, there’s a, there’s a presence there that is helpful for me.
Matthew Barnes [00:35:47]:
So did you have insurance on your home though?
Kenny Cane [00:35:49]:
And this is the other part of it. So like, so when we had renters insurance and are you renting?
Matthew Barnes [00:35:58]:
Were you renting?
Kenny Cane [00:35:58]:
We were running.
Matthew Barnes [00:35:59]:
Oh, okay. So I was assuming that you.
Kenny Cane [00:36:01]:
No, no, we were running. No. And we were in a position to buy in that neighborhood. I mean, it’s like one, you know, $1 billion, you know, so it’s like we just weren’t in that position. And so we had renters insurance. And when we were going in, we were family that has athletic gear, kids, soccer cleats. The most expensive thing in our material position was my sauna and my plunge. Those are the most expensive things that I had.
Kenny Cane [00:36:35]:
And we were thinking as we were getting the renters insurance in the context of thieves, like what would somebody steal? And we did a very calculated, let’s go with this policy because the only thing expensive is Char’s triathlon bike. Outside of that, everything is like not that expensive. It’s not. Yeah. And the expensive stuff that we have, we have this very elaborate gym setup. So I’ve got rigs, I’ve got, I mean, eight barbells, thousands of pounds of weight matting, Astroturf. But like if a thief is coming, the only thing they’re walking with is her bike. Nobody’s walking out with a sauna, nobody’s walking out with a plunge and there’s no thief.
Kenny Cane [00:37:23]:
Just like, okay, we just need four hours to load this van up. You know what I mean? It’s just not, it’s not happening, you know. And so, and at that time, our gym policy covered the material part of, of the home gym.
Matthew Barnes [00:37:40]:
Oh, interesting.
Kenny Cane [00:37:41]:
But then in April they changed their policy and so I hadn’t quite figured out like that. And so I got, you know, 45, 50 grand of home gym stuff and our policy caps at 22. And so we’re just, I mean, we’re.
Matthew Barnes [00:37:55]:
Like, is there any displacement covered that covered rent. Rent for a period of time.
Kenny Cane [00:38:00]:
So that’s, that’s what my wife is currently working with our insurance on. And there will be coverage for four to six months of rent. So there will be some incoming from that, which is great. And all that relates back to what I was saying earlier though, when you’re, when you’re trying to use the OODA loop, trying to decide on, okay, what’s the physical location, what, what, what cards do we have in our hand and you know, or how did the ball land on the course, you know, played as it lays. And so there was a lot of.
Matthew Barnes [00:38:30]:
Critique, Kenny, of, you know, government, California and the city of la. Water supplies, the reservoir feeding those hydrants being empty because they didn’t repair it. You know, all the money that been set aside for water recapture not being spent because of environmental concerns. How much of that is accurate and what’s your perspective?
Kenny Cane [00:38:52]:
That’s a great question. I think one of the, one of the challenging things and Again, this is all, I think those conversations are so critical to have, but at this moment, we got to let the heads cool just a little bit so that we can investigate it. Yeah. And, and the nature of our communication right now, politically, it’s not helpful to solve that. And I think that that’s my actual, my larger concern isn’t that us humans couldn’t actually figure that out from a practical perspective. I, I have seen firsthand how humans could be amazing in recovering from something like this, just from what I’ve witnessed in the last 14 days. But until my thought is we’re a little bit more disciplined with our tongue.
Matthew Barnes [00:39:50]:
And well, that means discipline with your mind.
Kenny Cane [00:39:53]:
Discipline with the mind.
Matthew Barnes [00:39:54]:
Right.
Kenny Cane [00:39:55]:
And we’re in this moment where it’s just the base of the brainstem, emotionality is the play because that’s the leverage point for humans from a political perspective, from a financial perspective. And so the, the real question is for all of us, like, is that how we can live? And you know, I think there is some real serious stuff that needs to be looked at. Like there’s, I mean, we know, we know that fires are going to happen in Southern California. We know that they’re going to happen in Northern California. And we also, I mean, there’s, there’s two things can be coexistently true. Like there was 100 mile winds that night, 70 mile. The fires were going to move regardless of whether humans did a poor job in planning or not. The fire, fire was going to do some stuff.
Matthew Barnes [00:40:55]:
That’s right.
Kenny Cane [00:40:56]:
And so, and the other part of it is like, how can there not be water there?
Matthew Barnes [00:41:01]:
Right.
Kenny Cane [00:41:02]:
Well, we know that that area burned in 62.
Matthew Barnes [00:41:07]:
I didn’t know that.
Kenny Cane [00:41:08]:
Yeah. So the, and the, and the fires are cyclical, so it needs to be less than every 100 years that these areas burn. And so if we know that just from a, a rhythm standpoint, nature’s going to do that and arsonists are going to do that. So whether human created somebody was, you know, a knucklehead in the backyard with the barbecue, whatever it is, things are going to happen. And you know, the contingency plans are like, you know, not so good and the warnings were there. And so those, those things are true. But again, even if that’s true.
Matthew Barnes [00:41:44]:
It.
Kenny Cane [00:41:45]:
It also doesn’t mean that we can’t.
Matthew Barnes [00:41:48]:
Have like a thoughtful conversation.
Kenny Cane [00:41:52]:
A thoughtful conversation.
Matthew Barnes [00:41:54]:
That whole notion has been obliterated. It has some kind of thoughtful conversation in the public.
Kenny Cane [00:42:00]:
It has. But you’re not having that conversation. I’m not Having that conversation. And unfortunately we’re not the masses.
Matthew Barnes [00:42:07]:
Right.
Kenny Cane [00:42:08]:
But we are the sheepdog, you know, helping sheepdogs try to have these conversation. And you know, I don’t want to give up belief that us humans can’t get to that point. And I, I also, you know, I, I took my company off of social media. Like I took myself off like eight, nine years ago. And I took my company off six years ago. Seven, six, seven years ago. And because of this breakdown in communication and these, these mediums are, I’m finding increasingly difficult to have that they’re. Well, I was.
Kenny Cane [00:42:48]:
So let me just back up to two kind of ideas. When you said I want to do in studio conversation, I was like so pleased.
Matthew Barnes [00:42:57]:
Right. Because took me a while to get here.
Kenny Cane [00:43:01]:
Well, but there’s so much more that happens human to human 100 there’s so there just we are meant. And look, technology does allow us to have intellectual conversations. But we’re in this moment of time where we’re shifting from an atom based reality to a bit reality. And the interesting thing about that is like when we talk about reality or this from a neuroscientist, you know, what is reality? It’s a combination of five different things. Thoughts, feelings, emotions, perceptions. And then I put a line under it and then the next one under that is actions. The actions are the concretized step out into the world. But those first four things are rather flimsy if you think about it from a human.
Kenny Cane [00:43:53]:
Like our perceptions can change moment to moment. Our thoughts, feelings, emotions, all those things can change very whimsically. And these mediums, these bit mediums are getting those first four things to be very flimsy. And her actions are increasingly kooky. And so segue getting into flesh to flesh, eye to eye conversation with you back to long form human to human contact, which is evergreen in human healing and human longevity. And I really do believe that technology has such a great role to play in some of this. But I also think of technology. I get this language from the center of humane technology.
Kenny Cane [00:44:41]:
Technologies can be regenerative or they can be extractive.
Matthew Barnes [00:44:45]:
And if it’s an extractive generative.
Kenny Cane [00:44:47]:
Degenerative. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. And so, and they are, and they’re degenerative as we watch it. I mean just, we just need to look up and just go what’s happening? It’s like.
Matthew Barnes [00:44:56]:
Well we saw that with social media. It started out as very positive thing, way for people to connect. Totally 2008, reconnecting with people. You hadn’t seen amazing. 20 years and then 211, 212, it changes around 211. Yeah, exactly. When it got gamified, started triggering and then it.
Kenny Cane [00:45:12]:
Yep.
Matthew Barnes [00:45:12]:
Then it got siloed and then it became a screaming. Yeah, and not just an echo chamber, but a screaming chamber.
Kenny Cane [00:45:20]:
Yeah, screaming chamber.
Matthew Barnes [00:45:20]:
So now it’s degenerative and be interesting to see where that goes. But you know, generally with tech it’s, it’s the, it’s the application.
Kenny Cane [00:45:29]:
Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Barnes [00:45:30]:
So all those qualities that existed in social media to begin with are still there, but the application, they’ve kind of been buried. Right. So they got overridden just like nuclear technology.
Kenny Cane [00:45:40]:
Yeah, I think they’ve been over.
Matthew Barnes [00:45:42]:
The positives are there. We’re afraid to touch it though, because of the negative side, the abuse of that technology.
Kenny Cane [00:45:48]:
Yeah, it’s been a wild ride for us. I know that like I, I made a decision for a company, I, I got to a basic position where it’s like, look, I’m a, I’m a health company. So if I know that these mediums at that point occupy two plus hours a day, if they amplify anxiety and depression, if they per 10 minute increment, if they repurpose somebody’s attention to something that is not theirs to own, those are all qualities that don’t relate to the world that I want to live in. And so I mean it’s just throwing this little teeny pebble in this giant ocean.
Matthew Barnes [00:46:32]:
A fun thing though, just to acknowledge back to kind of the nature of the mind. Right. So every individual creates their reality, their mind. They either do that effectively or ineffectively. The only way to do it effectively is if you train your mind. Right. And so there’s actually not one world out here, there’s 8 billion worlds.
Kenny Cane [00:46:56]:
Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Barnes [00:46:57]:
And so you see that very clearly when you doom scroll through social media. Like, holy shit, look at that, look at that world, look at that world, look at that. Like none of these are your world, but you’re inviting that in and you’re misperceiving it as a co created reality. It doesn’t have to be. And so by inviting it in, you’re actually tainting temporarily the present moment with this dysfunctional world that is not yours. And so it’s very powerful when you recognize that what you allow in is going to affect your perception, it’s going to affect your own reality. And so you got to be very, very cautious. So I applaud you for getting me.
Matthew Barnes [00:47:37]:
I haven’t watched. We haven’t had network news in our home 30 years probably I’m looking at my wife’s name 30 years. So when we kind of like wander by a, like we’re traveling and we wander by a TV that’s showing like CNN or something, we’re just like, like.
Kenny Cane [00:47:53]:
So much, so much coming in. It’s just so much.
Matthew Barnes [00:47:56]:
It actually hurts my brain scrolling and.
Kenny Cane [00:48:00]:
There’S just like all kinds of stuff. It’s like, it’s wild. It’s really wild. So and I think you know what I just want to invite is long form conversations around this and human to human gathering, you know.
Matthew Barnes [00:48:12]:
Yeah. I think and you know aside from the fire thing, you know you guys are going through a lot. Your community needs that, that in person. But after Covid people are craving in person connection and mental health issues are extraordinary and people really starting to feel the negative effects to social media. And now the science is kind of coming to reinforce that it’s there, it’s there.
Kenny Cane [00:48:42]:
And also do we need the science to observe that? We don’t, we don’t, we don’t. But you know, and the science anything.
Matthew Barnes [00:48:50]:
In this world without an academic and you don’t even know whether that academic, you know, thing is comma, how biased.
Kenny Cane [00:48:57]:
Totally saw that because they’re on the, on the tank.
Matthew Barnes [00:49:00]:
Yeah.
Kenny Cane [00:49:02]:
I think for us like we, we recognize early like from a health, from mental health, from a psycho, emotional, physical perspective we can handle 80% of it with just basic habits. Even if they’re crude. Show up, be amongst your people, eat pretty darn well, sleep. That’s totally.
Matthew Barnes [00:49:27]:
They don’t have to be crude. That’s just.
Kenny Cane [00:49:29]:
But simple.
Matthew Barnes [00:49:30]:
How about you instead of crude, simple.
Kenny Cane [00:49:32]:
But, but simple principles with that were bypassing so much of that because so much of our community is working from a top down approach. Right from my therapist and my biohack to this is like brother, you sleep four hours a night. Like I don’t know what conversation we’re trying to have until you like get that part sorted. So let’s, let’s get this 80% cooked up. And when you’re around other people that commune around like being healthy, physically being together and I’m just seeing that so much in our community because we do that, we do hard things together and that’s in our DNA and humanity. There’s just billions of people not doing hard things together. They’re at each other and so the habit needs to be choosing the difficult.
Matthew Barnes [00:50:22]:
Well you do hard things together and thrive through adversity or you end up doing Hard things alone because adversity finds you anyways.
Kenny Cane [00:50:30]:
And this is the point when we’re going through all this, like our community is just. And this is what gives me purpose. So when you ask the question like, am I going to stay in la? I’m just like, man, this community gives me so much purpose and I have to find a way to caretake for that before I make any sort of like directional move, you know. And it’s. It. I just feel like it’s so baked into the cavemen that survived and women that survived to get us here. It’s just we’re meant to do this. We don’t need to build as much anymore.
Kenny Cane [00:51:04]:
And the mammoths aren’t coming together.
Matthew Barnes [00:51:05]:
That’s interesting, Kenny, and I’m not pushing back at all. But I used to think that we had a CrossFit. Us. CrossFit. Yeah. We ran SEALFIT out of there.
Kenny Cane [00:51:14]:
You did many, many, many hard hours.
Matthew Barnes [00:51:17]:
There many times on our grinder and we lasted 10 years. And then because all of our training was outside, we had some people complain because.
Kenny Cane [00:51:27]:
Yeah, I remember that.
Matthew Barnes [00:51:28]:
Yeah, you know, we’re like doing huya shows in the middle of the street at 4 in the morning.
Kenny Cane [00:51:33]:
Oh my God, I’m so glad they were right to complain. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matthew Barnes [00:51:36]:
And the city came down and said.
Kenny Cane [00:51:38]:
Wait, hold on, let me just. For the listeners that don’t know, I mean, so I did a thing that Mark ran and some of you may know about it, but we did a kokoro thing and then there was.
Matthew Barnes [00:51:46]:
He’s saying it’s 50 hours of non stop training.
Kenny Cane [00:51:48]:
But I mean, like one of our exercises is that we had to take the gym and go put it in a public park. And we had like two hours to do it. And so like it’s 600 meters Muscle Beach. And so we’re just like, like hauling this stuff. And it was like 4pm on a Saturday. And so it’s not just in the middle of the night. I’m sure the community, at some point we’re like, what is.
Matthew Barnes [00:52:11]:
That was one of my favorite elevations because we got a clean gym out of it.
Kenny Cane [00:52:14]:
I love that one. I. I love that one. I had such a. That was a. That was.
Matthew Barnes [00:52:20]:
You remember you’re hauling it all up to the top of that lookout and all my, all my SEAL instructor staff are up there just pumping pig, you know, like doing barbell curls and stuff.
Kenny Cane [00:52:29]:
It was.
Matthew Barnes [00:52:30]:
The community thought we were nuts. So anyways, the city rightfully said, you know what, you’re you’re making too much noise. And then they, their mechanism for basically shutting us down was to say that we couldn’t work out outside.
Kenny Cane [00:52:43]:
Yeah.
Matthew Barnes [00:52:44]:
We couldn’t train outside.
Kenny Cane [00:52:44]:
Yeah.
Matthew Barnes [00:52:45]:
Even in that beautiful 5,000 square foot.
Kenny Cane [00:52:47]:
Grinder we had ring such a great spot.
Matthew Barnes [00:52:50]:
So my point is we had a really loyal community. I think we had like 10 marriages. I’m sure you’ve had countless marriages that came through your community. And, and I really resisted. You know, what are we going to do? We’re going to get another place, whatever. But if you build a strong community, it’s like it’s okay to kick it out of the nest. And it survived and it’s right. They’re still thriving.
Kenny Cane [00:53:12]:
Wow.
Matthew Barnes [00:53:12]:
They still trained together. You know, they found a way those who wanted to and we moved on. And it gave me a lot more flexibility. Right. So I can run my business anywhere I want and do this and do this type of stuff. Yeah. So just something to think about.
Kenny Cane [00:53:28]:
Yeah. I appreciate that. I really do.
Matthew Barnes [00:53:31]:
But at the same time I, I also hear what you’re saying. Like there’s a, there’s power in that in person community. And especially leading with physical training. You don’t have to be CrossFit. There’s a lot of critique about CrossFit. You and I know we kind of modified.
Kenny Cane [00:53:44]:
Yeah. We changed it a hundred percent.
Matthew Barnes [00:53:47]:
We got rid of all this stuff that was injuring people.
Kenny Cane [00:53:49]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we both have like yogic martial arts.
Matthew Barnes [00:53:52]:
But it’s like Five mountain training is happening there. Yeah, right. The physical is just one aspect. It’s an important aspect because it’s a vehicle for everything else to happen. Well, if the physical is not working well, nothing’s working well. It’s like the foundation of the house.
Kenny Cane [00:54:11]:
Some of the stuff that we use that you gave me was the Vuga conversation, which really influenced the philosophy of our gym. You know, we talk about. So when somebody goes, why does your business exist? And I said, my business exists because I believe physical training is a conduit for life. So that when difficult things happen, you’re prepared.
Matthew Barnes [00:54:44]:
Right.
Kenny Cane [00:54:44]:
I mean that in a sentence or quasi paragraph that would be a it. And I’ve always been since going through those exercises to kind of get me to that point. That’s what, that’s why the gym has existed. And, and so here we are as a community with nearly 40 of us going through this, proving.
Matthew Barnes [00:55:03]:
Proving that that was a valid concept.
Kenny Cane [00:55:05]:
This is a huge concept. And then we have, you know, you had the five mountains, I had five tenants that that held, held the business together and continue to hold the business together. And they’re, they’re made for decision making because I find that, that there’s always going to be breakdown in communications and understanding about like philosophies. And I have, you know, I had a, like a coach that taught me the distinction between covert agreements and explicit agreements. And I always love that language. And so humans very naturally run covert agreements on one another. And so in micro gym communities or any, any business, people will have like an agreement that they’re running in their script, in their operating system, in their biological default that is different than other people. And so given that that is always going to be the nature of relationships.
Kenny Cane [00:55:53]:
And if what we’re doing is relationships, we must have some tools to be able to work through difficult things. And so our tenants are purpose. So that means why the business exists and from a coach’s perspective, why are you coaching here? So coach has got to be pretty clear why they want to coach on the Oak park team. And then, and from there, you know, I know you talk about dweck. I talk about dweck all the time. Like you know, the growth orientation. So what’s the adaptive capacity that you possess as a human being? Like and are you adapting with time to all the different contingencies that are happening? And a lot of the Kokoro development and the SEOFit unbeatable mind, all that stuff kind of influenced some of that, that thinking for me. The third one is connection.
Kenny Cane [00:56:39]:
I was really influenced by the book Tribe by Sebastian Younger and went down a wormhole of self determination theory and positive psychology and really trying to understand that and just kind of recognizing that humans need to do difficult things together. That’s binding. It’s binding from a biological level, it’s by binding from a social level. And if you can agree to what those things are in principle, then you can.
Matthew Barnes [00:57:02]:
Yeah. You know, such as having a rite of passage for young men.
Kenny Cane [00:57:05]:
Exactly.
Matthew Barnes [00:57:05]:
Doesn’t exist.
Kenny Cane [00:57:06]:
It doesn’t exist. Huge loss. Huge loss. Yeah. It’s funny because I, I know what I’m going to do for my eldest son, but the fourth one is, is contribution. So what I’ve seen in a lot of businesses and micro gym communities is that they kind of cannibalize themselves. And so we started with like this conversation from the book Legacy. The idea of like, you know, the All Blacks and the principle of the athletes there were like I’m going to leave my jersey better than how I found it.
Kenny Cane [00:57:37]:
And so the same thing exists in Our. Our coaching community at the gym, it’s like, if you’re going to retire, you must leave the place better than you find it versus the coach peeling off, taking 30 people, breaking the community up in a. It was like, so we have systems in place to kind of support that. And then the. The fifth sort of tenant that holds the business together is this. This concept of value. But that’s just as experiential as it is material. And so if you align those first four things that will be valuable to those that are seeking those things.
Kenny Cane [00:58:07]:
So we have to do an exercise all the time. Like, who are we attracting? And we want to attract people that find resonance in those concepts. Are they training with purpose? Are they growing as a human being outside of the gym? Are they connecting to themselves, to the community, to the broader world? Are they making the place better than how they found it? Like, then those are binding, evergreen principles. And so, you know, some of the work that I’d done with you made me think about, okay, what are they going to be? My. One of my things that can help bind the thing together. And it’s been very useful when there’s breakdowns. And another mentor taught me, breakdown can lead to breakthrough if you let it. And so, you know, those things have been in place to really help us through.
Kenny Cane [00:58:52]:
I mean, all the stuff that Jim’s been through, all these, you know, the last 20 years, it’s been wild. A lot of things.
Matthew Barnes [00:59:01]:
That’s normal.
Kenny Cane [00:59:02]:
A lot of things.
Matthew Barnes [00:59:03]:
Vuca is a roller coaster.
Kenny Cane [00:59:04]:
Vuca is a roller coaster. And this is. This is a pinnacle moment. Covid was a big one, but this is. This is especially big, you know, because when the gym knocked up Oak park in Northern California, it was more personal. And then I renamed the gym Oak park because of it, but, like.
Matthew Barnes [00:59:20]:
Oh, okay, so it used to be CrossFit LA. Or.
Kenny Cane [00:59:23]:
Yeah, it’s. We call it Oak park, home of CrossFit Los Angeles. So we haven’t lost CrossFit Los Angeles, but we just. I just wanted to have legacy because the tree symbolizes.
Matthew Barnes [00:59:30]:
It’s more than CrossFit.
Kenny Cane [00:59:31]:
Yeah. And it’s. It. It. CrossFit’s a tool that we use. But the tree in Celtic culture and Indian culture has been. The oak tree has been a place where communities meet to get strong, to go on their journey.
Matthew Barnes [00:59:44]:
Right.
Kenny Cane [00:59:45]:
And so that symbolism. And I grew up playing in oak trees.
Matthew Barnes [00:59:47]:
Right. That’s cool.
Kenny Cane [00:59:49]:
Yeah, I mean, it’s powerful. It’s an audience of one over, you know, and. And play and play for us. Oak Park, Come play in the park, do hard stuff together is our play.
Matthew Barnes [01:00:00]:
You know, Vuca, right? So volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. There’s an antidote, right? So the antidote to volatility is vision. If you got a clear vision, just think about, I mean, listening to you, right? You. You have a clear vision. You’re. You’re aligned around your purpose, right? And fire sweeps through and destroys your home and 36 people, your gym, and that’s volatility. It happened fast. Volatility is when things change fast.
Matthew Barnes [01:00:33]:
And had you lacked clarity of vision, you’d be all over the place right now, emotionally, physically, it would be a real crisis. But crisis means opportunity for transformation. 100% opportunity for transformation, crisis. I think that’s something close to what the original meaning of that word is. So uncertainty is dealt with by getting to understanding. And that’s the OODA loop. The only way to deal with uncertainty is to OODA loop something, and to activate that, observe, orient, make a decision in small one and then act and then get right back into the observation mode, which gets you to clarity of understanding or better understanding, to deal with the uncertainty and the C, which is complexity, I just use the term. But the way through complexity is to seek clarity, right? And to seek clarity, you need to have communications.
Matthew Barnes [01:01:28]:
And so this is how the seals got through complexity. They’re radical communication, like up, down, cross, like constant. All sorts of different modes of communication to include hand signals, Right. And relying on your intuition. Right. And so, you know, like a flock of birds, a Navy SEAL operating at night with this platoon, suddenly, well, everyone will shift left, and nobody said a word because communication is happening at multiple levels. And that’s how you get to clarity, to overcome complexity and then ambiguity. The way to deal with that is adaptability and agility.
Matthew Barnes [01:02:06]:
Like, quick adaptability, fail forward fast. Isn’t that cool? Call that Vuca Prime.
Kenny Cane [01:02:12]:
Love that.
Matthew Barnes [01:02:12]:
Vision, understanding, clarity, and adaptability.
Kenny Cane [01:02:15]:
So great.
Matthew Barnes [01:02:16]:
That’s one of those silly frameworks. But, you know, there’s a lot of truth there, and you can practically.
Kenny Cane [01:02:21]:
There’s so much truth, and as I’m listening to that, there’s so much resonance with that.
Matthew Barnes [01:02:25]:
Yeah.
Kenny Cane [01:02:25]:
You know, part of that’s activated, part of that’s not. And I’m just going to take that with me once again. Nothing but net. Divine.
Matthew Barnes [01:02:35]:
Nothing but net. You’re a funny thing. So speaking about vision and purpose, what. What does that look like? Like for you, 10 years from, let’s say five years, 20, 30. Of course, AI is in full bloom. What’s your vision for, what’s your vision for humanity and what’s your vision for your role going forward?
Kenny Cane [01:02:57]:
I’m really interested in cultivating leaders that are capable of getting, helping humanity through this.
Matthew Barnes [01:03:16]:
Inflection point.
Kenny Cane [01:03:17]:
Inflection point, this nexus point. I mean you’ve all, you’ve all most recent book is like fantastic as far as like the nexus point. And, and I really appreciate, you know, some of his thinking on this.
Matthew Barnes [01:03:29]:
Yuval Harari.
Kenny Cane [01:03:29]:
Yeah, yeah. You know, and his most recent book is called Nexus. Okay. He’s talking about this because never before.
Matthew Barnes [01:03:36]:
Have we had nexus between homo one and homo deuce.
Kenny Cane [01:03:40]:
Well, ye, yes. And what, what he’s saying is like we’re at the inflection point. To simplify the, the conversation, he suggests that never before have we had as accurate information as we want and we’re also making the least sense of it at the same time. And so, and there’s all kinds of reasons why that’s happening and the inflection point. And I really do feel that, I think this is different. You know, you can look at, there’s so many different scripts that you can read that are seven hundreds from B.C. that are like the end of days is coming. And, and I do feel like this, this moment is a little bit different because of the atom based versus bit based reality that we’re currently facing and the bit based reality kind of manipulating human consciousness.
Kenny Cane [01:04:36]:
But as far as like what my vision is for the world, for my role in it, I’ve really gained a lot of purpose from here in supporting in particular really extraordinary men. And a lot of the guys that I work with, I mean, they’re out there doing amazing. And they’re authors and writers and, and, and, and, and CEOs and surgeons. I mean, just some amazing humans. See, I just think they’re just so incredible. And I’ve gotten really comfortable. Like I’ve had a lot of spotlight on me in the first part of my life. And I’m really interested in supporting the development of a small army of people who can make meaningful change.
Kenny Cane [01:05:40]:
And meaningful change to me looks like a world that’s capable of paying attention to the important things, starting with our attentional capacity, which has been downgraded. So I mean, our attention has been halved in the last 15 years. Halved?
Matthew Barnes [01:06:02]:
That’s crazy.
Kenny Cane [01:06:02]:
Our heart rate is going, our resting heart rate’s going up, our respiratory rates going up. And you know, it’s not because people are working out, they’re just agitated, they’re.
Matthew Barnes [01:06:16]:
Stuck in hyper Arousal.
Kenny Cane [01:06:17]:
There’s a hyper aroused thing. And I would like to live in a world that’s not hyper aroused but beautifully present. Doesn’t. That’s interesting.
Matthew Barnes [01:06:25]:
And not addicted and, and not connected.
Kenny Cane [01:06:29]:
And not connected. And, and you know, I don’t want to malign technology, but I do want to come back to this now.
Matthew Barnes [01:06:36]:
There’s, it’s, it’s, it’s strange like where this transhumanism push is coming from because most human beings didn’t ask for it. No, they’re being led. They’re being led along this path that they really don’t have any idea what they’re getting into you. And as soon as you start, this is my view, you know, this. Anyone listening? But you know, and your children or children’s children, when the call comes to like plant something in your head or to be permanently connected to 5G or to whatever the future version of the.
Kenny Cane [01:07:08]:
Yeah. Right.
Matthew Barnes [01:07:09]:
Don’t do it.
Kenny Cane [01:07:10]:
Yeah.
Matthew Barnes [01:07:11]:
Because you will lose your autonomy right then and there. There’s no going back. And if that happens, the human race will split.
Kenny Cane [01:07:19]:
Yeah. I, I complete. I buy that so much. And, and I’m not interested in that world because the thing, the thing that I just experienced this, what we’re capable of with our love.
Matthew Barnes [01:07:33]:
That’s right.
Kenny Cane [01:07:35]:
Like we’re going to dismiss, you know, getting.
Matthew Barnes [01:07:38]:
Disconnecting from the disconnecting things will ultimately naturally bring you back to yourself because you just literally get to now stare at yourself and be like, oh, wow. I grew up in upstate New York in 1960, you know, 60s and 70s. What do you think we were doing for fun?
Kenny Cane [01:07:57]:
Yeah, right.
Matthew Barnes [01:07:58]:
We were watching tv.
Kenny Cane [01:08:00]:
Totally.
Matthew Barnes [01:08:00]:
And we weren’t scrolling on an iPad. Those things were not even imaginable back then. And we had a blast. We got creative. We built forts and we roughhouse and we got injured on the playground and we turned out divine, I think. I don’t know. Maybe not. Well, there are some things that could have gone better, let’s put it that way.
Kenny Cane [01:08:21]:
And there’s, you know, I, again, I, I always come back. I love the conversation that the center for Humane Technology is having. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with their work, but they’re, but they’re a fantastic resource for really nuanced conversations in and around these topics. Because a. All the people who are part of center for Humane Technology are the people who created the technology, the addictive technologies. And they’re the ones coming out just going, I created this. This is a monster. It.
Kenny Cane [01:08:53]:
We, we can design Technology to be in alignment with a greater purpose. But right now it’s not.
Matthew Barnes [01:09:00]:
Yeah. And so we, until we can have those conversations in an attuned way.
Kenny Cane [01:09:06]:
Right. It’s just because now it’s getting decorated of like it’s about freedom of speech or freedom, you know, just like man, it’s not about, it’s not about any of that. And that’s the hard part is that like people want to go into this thing. And you know, again, I have, I have existential concerns that I share with you on that. And I also believe in the work that, that I’m currently doing that like I’m doing what I can as a literal antidote to that. Right. To the best of my ability that I, that I possess right now. And you know, I really do feel like the, the guys, as we, as we bond, we, we, we do basic things, we do breath work, we meet around the fire, we break bread together.
Kenny Cane [01:09:56]:
They’re, they’re required to write light, they’re required to reflect and they’re required to have swim buddies. We know these things. Those are evergreen things. And as these men learn how to be vulnerable, how to be strong, how to come from an authentic heart centered place, they’re more resilient going into the world, being present in the ways that they can. And you know, and I also, I also want that for my, my community, my gym community. So I do not want to stop fighting for that existence of connectedness and human relations. And I also get why it’s so much easier to doom scroll because people are a pain in the ass.
Matthew Barnes [01:10:49]:
Yeah.
Kenny Cane [01:10:49]:
Humans are so hard. It’s so easy to go. Let me just look down and flip my phone because you. Well here all this stuff, part of our training is coming out is to.
Matthew Barnes [01:11:00]:
Get comfortable with discomfort and, and our relationships are uncomfortable with themselves because they haven’t done self awareness because their bodies are unhealthy. So they’re like agitated, hyper aroused.
Kenny Cane [01:11:13]:
Totally.
Matthew Barnes [01:11:14]:
So. So when you’re uncomfortable with yourself, instead of doing the hard thing, which is to go to the gym or to go take a walk or to do the breath work, it’s way easier to pick up the phone.
Kenny Cane [01:11:24]:
So much easier.
Matthew Barnes [01:11:25]:
So. Yeah. That’s awful.
Kenny Cane [01:11:29]:
Yeah.
Matthew Barnes [01:11:29]:
But it’s got, I think, you know, there’s enough momentum at least around the people who are thinking and having these conversations.
Kenny Cane [01:11:37]:
Right.
Matthew Barnes [01:11:38]:
And knowledge coming out about the damage or the danger to these misuse of these technologies. I’m optimistic that we’ll rebalance. You know, look, we have. And if humanity splits.
Kenny Cane [01:11:52]:
Yeah. Then we’ll be on one side of it.
Matthew Barnes [01:11:54]:
Yeah. One group will go to Mars and the other group will stay here.
Kenny Cane [01:11:58]:
Totally, totally.
Matthew Barnes [01:12:00]:
Hopefully we’ll be okay.
Kenny Cane [01:12:01]:
Yeah, I’m, you know, I’d love to come down on a horse and hunt with you if that’s what it, if it comes to that.
Matthew Barnes [01:12:11]:
Let’s just say it’s going to be messy, but, you know, the net result might be kind of cool.
Kenny Cane [01:12:15]:
We’ll be all right. I, I, I, I feel like we have to be optimistic and, and I, I want to continue having long form conversations like this because decontextualized conversations and, and bit sized chunks, you people, people can’t orient around them and, and we know that. And so again, it’s this bit, bit reality that I’m speaking of. But I just, I like have the.
Matthew Barnes [01:12:38]:
Attendant of, you know, how many people are going to sit through this whole interview. But then I think like Joe Rogan, you know, does like three hours at a time, or my friend Sean Ryan. I remember watching, I couldn’t watch more than like an hour of it, but he did like the seven hour interview once.
Kenny Cane [01:12:51]:
Wow.
Matthew Barnes [01:12:52]:
With a former Navy SEAL who became a, that’s a long transgender Navy Seal. And then he transgender back.
Kenny Cane [01:12:58]:
Wow.
Matthew Barnes [01:12:58]:
Chris Beck became Christine Beck became Chris Beck again. It took seven hours to tell that story, apparently.
Kenny Cane [01:13:05]:
Oh, wow. That’s a lot, lot. There was so much to unpack. I mean, it’s just like so much, so much on pack.
Matthew Barnes [01:13:13]:
I’m not sure I want to listen to all the details there.
Kenny Cane [01:13:15]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matthew Barnes [01:13:16]:
It’s a lot. Anyway, so you’re right. Just having conversations, just sitting down in the coffee shop. You know when you go out to dinner and everyone like couples are staring at their phone. We were just, Sandy and I were in the Bahamas. We’re like, wow, look at all these people.
Kenny Cane [01:13:29]:
It’s brutal.
Matthew Barnes [01:13:29]:
Staring at their phone.
Kenny Cane [01:13:30]:
It’s brutal. I mean, I just would like the world to look up and that’s the world that I want. I want the world to start getting upright again. I want to live in that world too, you know? Yeah, no, see, you got to be the change you want to see 100%.
Matthew Barnes [01:13:42]:
But it’s nice to have a Sherpa, a guide. And that’s what you’re doing. That’s what I’m doing ultimately, you know, I want to, I want people to jump out of the nest. You know, the day that I don’t need any clients, that’s success. And I’m going on a sabbatical.
Kenny Cane [01:13:56]:
Yeah. Planned obsolescence I actually like that idea of. No, no, but that’s a great. I love, I love that as a, as a, like I, my cohorts, I intentionally break up after a year. Like these guys, they, they bond together.
Matthew Barnes [01:14:09]:
I’m like, yeah, you don’t want a dependency.
Kenny Cane [01:14:10]:
No. I said, we got to break apart. Yeah, we got to break apart. And they don’t want to. I’m like, we gotta, we’re gonna break this thing up, you know, and so I think some of them understand that at this point. But it’s like, it’s, it’s a very necessary process for us to break, you know, come really close and just to learn that process of how we go.
Matthew Barnes [01:14:31]:
Through such a good point, you know, around growth in general. Right. Because even doing very positive things for your growth can turn into a rut if that’s, you know, becomes repetitive routine. We saw that with like Ashtanga community. My family, Catherine and I, we did that for years and we saw people getting injured. The more they stayed doing that as their only thing.
Kenny Cane [01:14:50]:
Yeah.
Matthew Barnes [01:14:51]:
The thinner they got and the more injured they got.
Kenny Cane [01:14:53]:
Yeah.
Matthew Barnes [01:14:53]:
And the more narrow minded they got that. Yeah.
Kenny Cane [01:14:55]:
It’s awesome.
Matthew Barnes [01:14:56]:
Even though they were doing something really healthy, like the super healthy, but the.
Kenny Cane [01:15:00]:
Myopic focus over time is degratory.
Matthew Barnes [01:15:02]:
Same thing with CrossFit. Anything.
Kenny Cane [01:15:04]:
Anything.
Matthew Barnes [01:15:05]:
You got to have variety.
Kenny Cane [01:15:06]:
Yeah.
Matthew Barnes [01:15:06]:
And you got to know when to move on.
Kenny Cane [01:15:08]:
Yeah.
Matthew Barnes [01:15:08]:
To something.
Kenny Cane [01:15:09]:
Yeah.
Matthew Barnes [01:15:10]:
So crack you wide open in another dimension or another way.
Kenny Cane [01:15:13]:
Yeah. And we have tools for that, that, that help us understand, like when it’s, you know, like a red light or a green light for that growth. We have a, we have a, a metric system that we can, it’s just a napkin metric system, but it works very, very well to kind of help decision make in that regard. So it’s very helpful. But again, it works on a one, on one thing and you can kind of look at it person to person, go, yeah, it’s time.
Matthew Barnes [01:15:40]:
Awesome. Kenny. So it’s only two weeks after the fire, so we’ll come full circle. You’re still looking for a place to stay. Your family’s in Sweden. Are you still living in the hotel?
Kenny Cane [01:15:52]:
I’m still living in the hotel.
Matthew Barnes [01:15:54]:
Oh my gosh.
Kenny Cane [01:15:54]:
Different hotel.
Matthew Barnes [01:15:56]:
Are you going to be able to find a place up there? Because the demand must be through the road.
Kenny Cane [01:16:00]:
We’re going to find an Airbnb. Well, we have an Airbnb for a month.
Matthew Barnes [01:16:04]:
Okay.
Kenny Cane [01:16:04]:
And then. And again, I’m just trying to buy time.
Matthew Barnes [01:16:07]:
Right.
Kenny Cane [01:16:07]:
Because we can’t we know that we’re not going to compete with some of the people that have come into the market. I mean Santa Monica is already an insane market. And so now, now, okay, now that.
Matthew Barnes [01:16:16]:
13 Domino Place probably for 15, you.
Kenny Cane [01:16:18]:
Know, and that’s just a, you know, this doesn’t. So let that thing cool off a little bit and because there will be an exodus and a lot of people will leave and some Santa Monica once.
Matthew Barnes [01:16:28]:
The reality hits them in the head and once the insurance money starts running out, they’re going to be like, yeah, bye.
Kenny Cane [01:16:33]:
A lot of people are going to be gone. And so, so let that sort of calibrate itself and in the meantime we’ll be able to orient towards. Are the kids the new school that they, that they, they’re now going to go to, is it a good integration for them? Are they, are they healthy? Are they happy? Or is it like, boy, this is going to be an uphill lift to keep them in the school. You know, do we need to think about relocating them to another school in the area?
Matthew Barnes [01:17:00]:
Many conversations from your school about that.
Kenny Cane [01:17:03]:
The school did a pretty darn good job of like relocating. They, you know it is la USD is a monolith. It’s a, it’s like the second biggest school district in the country. So it’s like they decision making, it’s just like there’s a lot of collateral damage when they decision making in a situation like this. They move and it’s just like, you know, it’s you know, pulling a china shop. There’s a lot of stuff going down, you know, but they found a school that had physical space for basically they. The remainder of the students who didn’t relocate from our school community to go into and just to join that school. To join that school.
Kenny Cane [01:17:48]:
So we’re still going to be Marquez elementary at Nora Sterry.
Matthew Barnes [01:17:51]:
I see.
Kenny Cane [01:17:52]:
So we have a physical location with all the same teachers which is going to be great for my boys, particularly for my 9 year old who has just like he really. The teacher that he has is so good for him at this moment of time for him because he’s been going through a lot this year. And she is so fantastic. She’s like this little angel that just came into Thor’s life. So sweet. Yeah, Thor. Thor Kane. And, and so then you know, Max’s soccer team.
Kenny Cane [01:18:26]:
Really good soccer player and he was just made. I didn’t know that they had captains at seven years old. But he is, Max is the most resilient. I mean he’s, he’s like one of those football players that, like, he’s like, rocky, he just gets knocked down. You’re like, you really shouldn’t get up. You know, he’s like, I got it. I got it. You know, and like, you know, he was concussed two times last year and just broken bones.
Kenny Cane [01:18:55]:
He’s like, headwind Harry. He’s just like. But that kid gets soccer. It’s everything.
Matthew Barnes [01:19:01]:
Oh, everything.
Kenny Cane [01:19:01]:
I mean, just. I mean, he’s got multiple bottom breaks, you know, concussions. And he’s just like. He almost died twice. You know, he’s. Because of hsp. I think you might remember I had to leave one of the things one time because he was. You know, it was not good.
Kenny Cane [01:19:16]:
And one night, Sean, I actually thought we was hospitalized for multiple times for like a week. But he’s like Rasputin. You can’t kill him. You know, you just can’t take him down. You know, if. You know, if. You know your Russian history, that.
Matthew Barnes [01:19:27]:
Which doesn’t kill him.
Kenny Cane [01:19:29]:
And so anyway, he’s just. He’s so resilient. God, that kid is like. And so we’ll see. Like, did the kids come back from his soccer team that he’s a captain of now? Well, will they have a club team? You know? You know, so we’re just gonna have to see if these things present themselves and if it’s. And then get information on. Hey, what does living in that area look like for a child that’s 9 months old, 10 months old, 11 months old? What does it. What does that actually mean? Is it okay? Or do we not know? Or do we not know? And it’s gonna probably be.
Kenny Cane [01:19:59]:
Be mostly okay or like. Yeah, no, it’s not good for an infant’s lungs to be in that area. This is stuff that we don’t know. And so we’re gonna have to get that. All these, you know, a lot of observing, and that’s what I’m saying. The OODA loop is so critical, but it’s a lot. This OODA loop is like, there’s small little decisions. Hotel now, Airbnb next, then maybe stay to friends so we can get a little bit more information.
Matthew Barnes [01:20:26]:
Do you. This is interesting. I want to relate this to another story, but do you have, like, here’s the one week, here’s the 30 day, here’s the three month, here’s the six month. And just start to fill in some of the dots there.
Kenny Cane [01:20:39]:
Yeah, there is. There’s. I mean, the. The. As far as what’s in front of us, my wife Typically takes the kids back to Sweden to the summer home for the summer. Okay, so Swedes take off the whole summer and they just. And her, My wife’s dad has a, a summer home that just unbelievable. It’s like a little island off the west coast of Sweden.
Matthew Barnes [01:21:01]:
Oh, wow.
Kenny Cane [01:21:02]:
And it’s a bunch of sheep on it and you have to take a boat to get to it.
Matthew Barnes [01:21:05]:
Nice.
Kenny Cane [01:21:05]:
And it’s just like, you know, pretty calming on the nervous system. Yeah, yeah, it’s really idyllic. It’s also rough. There’s like Viking ruins on it and stuff. When the weather changes, it’s like, okay, we’re going to stay inside because it’s summer, but it’s raining outside and cold as balls for the next four days. You know, it’s just like North Atlantic. That’s North Atlantic stuff, you know. And so.
Kenny Cane [01:21:28]:
But my goal as far as like this orientation is once we get them there, there’s going to be all kinds of qualifications that we’re going to understand. The schools are going to go okay. Mark Marquez is going to open in two years, one year, three years, six, whatever it’s going to be. We know what the environmental concerns are going to be. We’ll know if the boys are enjoying themselves. We’ll know if her daughter is safe or not to have her in these regions. We’ll know what’s happening to the business. Did 25% of our income just fall out and we’ll be gone, you know, for the next year or two.
Kenny Cane [01:22:10]:
Is it worth trying to repurpose and rebuild around that? Like all those things we’re going to orient around, we’ll have, have more concrete information that, that will help us then discern what’s next. What’s. What’s next. And so, and again, the, the, the OODA loop thinking just helps me so much. Like we’ve got these little micro things chunk down. We’re in different spots. Like my wife’s nature versus my nature, like all bias flexibility in a moment like this. And she’ll slightly bias certainty in a moment like this.
Kenny Cane [01:22:43]:
And so we were just having this pretty normal. It’s very normal. It’s very normal.
Matthew Barnes [01:22:47]:
Go for certainty.
Kenny Cane [01:22:48]:
And so she was like, look, I, I want to, you know, be able to nest with the kids and build a home. I’m like, I get that. And also we could, from a financial position, put ourselves in an aborable position if we, if we move too soon. And then any nesting that we want to do is not available in 18 months because it just, we Are like way over our skis in a situation we do not have command of at that point. And so, you know, I’m blessed with some history from observing this in Northern California. Knowing what some of the financial patterns are, knowing what some of the migratory patterns are. It’s a very different community, my hometown, Santa Rosa. But there’s, there’s, there’s evidence based stuff that I can just kind of go, okay, this is what I, I’ve seen this before, so I’ll be able to like orient around a lot of that.
Kenny Cane [01:23:37]:
Again, it doesn’t change my purpose or what I want to do, what my vision is. These are just, just, you know, things that will be.
Matthew Barnes [01:23:43]:
But your decision making, once you get to the decide and act, you’re always checking it against your purpose. It has to be because, you know, there’s always a fork in the road. And so the question is, which one’s in alignment with my, my purpose?
Kenny Cane [01:23:55]:
Yeah. So that’s, and that’s where it’s got to be.
Matthew Barnes [01:23:57]:
Yeah, that’s heart in here, right?
Kenny Cane [01:23:59]:
That’s got to be in here. And you know, having been through it, that’s, that’s the gift that all the stuff.
Matthew Barnes [01:24:10]:
Yeah.
Kenny Cane [01:24:10]:
That’s come before has, has taught me now. Right.
Matthew Barnes [01:24:13]:
I mean, everything in life prepares you for this moment. And this moment, this moment will always happen because it’s the only moment.
Kenny Cane [01:24:21]:
It does.
Matthew Barnes [01:24:21]:
There it is.
Kenny Cane [01:24:22]:
It does.
Matthew Barnes [01:24:22]:
We did a event recently called Leading Under Fire.
Kenny Cane [01:24:25]:
Okay.
Matthew Barnes [01:24:26]:
It was basically Vuca leadership. And we got to wrap up this. I kind of tell you this whole story, but it’s a really good drill for anyone to do who’s listening. So in the middle of the event, we had something called an inject. Like, hey, this message just came in. And the message was that the Internet has gone down and we don’t have any further information. Right. So everyone’s like, oh, that’s no big deal, right? So I said, well, okay, I’ll stop.
Matthew Barnes [01:24:57]:
So this is actually pretty important. So I want you to get your teams together and think, okay, what are we going to do? Do? What are the questions you’re going to ask? Right? How are you going to respond? And they’re like, well, how long has it gone down far? We said, I don’t know, could be up in an hour. But if the Internet goes down and nobody’s communicating, what are you going to do? Start thinking, what are you going to do? And so they’re like, oh, okay. So they came up with this plan thinking, oh, this might be like 24 hours. But even 24 hours, you got to think about how am I going to communicate, right? The cables are out, you know, what if the. Does it include the cell coverage, right? Like, what if the grid goes down? So grid goes down a lot of things, right? So they started their planning and then another inject came in. So we just learned that it’s going to be at least a week before it’s restored. Oh, shit.
Matthew Barnes [01:25:50]:
Now we got to get to the store, we got to fill up our tanks with gas, you know, we got to fill up our cars with gas, get some propane. Oh, there’s going to be a run. This is going to be like serious, right? And so they start thinking about that now the OODA loop shifted a little bit longer term, right? And so they started doing that planning and then we had another inject that said, okay, this is more serious than we thought. It’s going to be down for at least three months, right? And now, like, that changes everything once again, everything. Because you’re like, oh, shit, three months. I don’t think we can even stay in our house. We can’t grow, you know, where are we going to get food? Now we’re talking about like National Guard and, you know, and riots and so like, wow, okay, so, so what are you going to do now? It was one of the most incredible exercises for this group to just keep on expanding their mind. Like, oh, oh, oh, oh, that could happen now what could happen now that could happen.
Kenny Cane [01:26:49]:
It absolutely could happen.
Matthew Barnes [01:26:50]:
That could really happen. And so for you and everyone who is dealing with the crises, whether it’s LA or in other areas, if everyone’s safe and gets through it, count your blessings and use it an opportunity to plan for the next major thing that could happen, right? And you’ve learned a lot of lessons, Kenny, and you need to teach those which you will. So part of your training now is up the sheepdog and up the crisis planning and get people ready. Because we’re going through of transitions. There might be a Eden Utopia on the other side of what we’re going through, but I don’t know, you know, I think we are at a nexus. And when, when we are in an inflection point, right, There’s a lot of things that break down. The old doesn’t. It resists the old institutions, the old energy, right? As it starts to lose oxygen and lose focus and people start to find meaning elsewhere, they fight back, they try to hold on.
Matthew Barnes [01:27:54]:
And that’s what we’re seeing with kind of global institutions and, you know, the bifurcation of global order and regionalization and Russia like stealing territory again and.
Kenny Cane [01:28:04]:
Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Barnes [01:28:05]:
I mean, United States, like might steal territory, you know, Panama Canal and totally Canada.
Kenny Cane [01:28:11]:
My mind, all my night. Yours, mine. What’s happening?
Matthew Barnes [01:28:14]:
Who knows what’s gonna happen?
Kenny Cane [01:28:16]:
That’s mine.
Matthew Barnes [01:28:16]:
So just get ready.
Kenny Cane [01:28:17]:
Right.
Matthew Barnes [01:28:17]:
Yeah.
Kenny Cane [01:28:18]:
Enjoy the. But be prepared.
Matthew Barnes [01:28:19]:
Yeah, be prepared.
Kenny Cane [01:28:21]:
As you’re speaking, I know that one of both of our favorite movies is Interstellar and there’s a distinction when they talk about Murphy’s Law at the beginning of it. And so I know that’s one of your favorite movies, but just as you’re talking, I’m reminded of that film. It’s just a phenomenal film. But. But in a, in a cosmic, spiritual time sense, I’m reminded of what you just said from a theatrical perspective. But I really appreciate what you just said and you’re right. I mean this preparation we are preparing, there’s just. I think that preparation.
Matthew Barnes [01:29:03]:
Has to be.
Kenny Cane [01:29:04]:
Grounded in some very basic things and to keep coming back to those basic things as the ground floor and then being able to work these higher level of operational decisions. Because as you said, just why would.
Matthew Barnes [01:29:16]:
I have a strong body and a strong mind? So you need to train both. That’s.
Kenny Cane [01:29:20]:
Yeah. Foundations to be able to handle these things. And just being curious about strong community.
Matthew Barnes [01:29:27]:
That’s those three things.
Kenny Cane [01:29:30]:
As you said that, I just thought, like, I was just thinking about the people in my network, just the able bodiedness of our community. I was like, I’d be stoked to be. All right, okay, well, we got something.
Matthew Barnes [01:29:44]:
Metaphorically like strong body, strong mind that exists in the I and the we and the it. Right. So the I, the individual has to have strong body in mind, the we has to have strong body in mind, and the it structures have to be strong in body and mind or in terms of, you know, the culture and the rules and regulations and you know, how it’s going to stand. And, and if you have strong body, mind in the eye, we in it, you can get through anything. Anything.
Kenny Cane [01:30:14]:
I really feel that right now. I see that in my community. I, I feel that personally, but. And there’s still so much work to do. Yeah, there’s so much work to do.
Matthew Barnes [01:30:27]:
Good thing you like to work hard, Kenny. Let’s go. Ring it on.
Kenny Cane [01:30:31]:
Let’s go. Let’s go.
Matthew Barnes [01:30:33]:
Go. I’ll tell you what, we’re here for you. If we can help in any way, let us know.
Kenny Cane [01:30:37]:
This has been a real treat, man.
Matthew Barnes [01:30:39]:
Yeah, it’s been awesome to have you down Here.
Kenny Cane [01:30:40]:
It just feels.
Matthew Barnes [01:30:41]:
Feels appreciate you coming down.
Kenny Cane [01:30:42]:
Yeah, I appreciate being here.
Matthew Barnes [01:30:44]:
Yeah.
Kenny Cane [01:30:44]:
And again, like there’s a conversation, but I’m still. Still learning.
Matthew Barnes [01:30:50]:
Still learning. Me too. Just getting warmed up.
Kenny Cane [01:30:53]:
Yeah. We got a lot of work to do, man. Let’s go. Let’s go, everybody that’s out there, let’s go. Yeah.
Matthew Barnes [01:30:58]:
My new favorite saying is that the only thing I know is that I don’t know. I really don’t know. Ultimately, I don’t know anything, man.
Kenny Cane [01:31:06]:
The older I get, the more I feel like I am.
Matthew Barnes [01:31:08]:
I just got my PhD, Kenny. Did you know that?
Kenny Cane [01:31:10]:
No.
Matthew Barnes [01:31:10]:
I just spent four and a half, five years packing my head full of knowledge.
Kenny Cane [01:31:14]:
Katherine’s getting hers now, really unlike conscious leadership or.
Matthew Barnes [01:31:17]:
No, it was a global leadership and change.
Kenny Cane [01:31:19]:
Global leadership.
Matthew Barnes [01:31:19]:
And at the end of all that, I’m like, you know what? I really don’t know anything. And neither do any of these professors, God bless them. They know a lot of. Of ideas and concepts.
Kenny Cane [01:31:28]:
Right.
Matthew Barnes [01:31:29]:
But when it comes to the, you know, really what’s going on in the world and the spiritual nature of what’s really going on, they don’t know. You know, we don’t know.
Kenny Cane [01:31:38]:
We don’t know.
Matthew Barnes [01:31:39]:
All we can do is just be the best person that we can be and show up moment to moment with total presence. And, you know, the ultimately OODA loop is to get us to that razor’s edge moment of awareness, because it gets you faster and faster. You’re observing, oriented sighting and acting.
Kenny Cane [01:31:55]:
Yeah, right.
Matthew Barnes [01:31:56]:
And it ends at the moment of awareness. There is no more OODA looping because it all presents itself.
Kenny Cane [01:32:05]:
It’s funny. I have some insights to this, you know, through some plant medicine work, which Herb Men’s group, you know, does some. And I’ve kind of interfaced with that in a different sort of dimension. And I experienced that. That some of that feeling during this last crisis.
Matthew Barnes [01:32:27]:
Like that bad.
Kenny Cane [01:32:28]:
That love energetic. The presence to like that. That sort of universal.
Matthew Barnes [01:32:33]:
So radically present that your mind is not in memory or it’s not projecting and. And you just feel the totality of universal love and awareness so much. But it’s directed like it’s directed through your brain on the problem at hand. That’s power. That’s called flow, by the way.
Kenny Cane [01:32:53]:
It is another word for flow. Mahali, Chiks and Mahal.
Matthew Barnes [01:32:56]:
Yeah. All right, brother. I should let you go. You got to get back on the road and put your mask back on.
Kenny Cane [01:33:05]:
Go into the Schwartz. Just breathe. Breathe through that. In my mouth. Take it all in. So I Got one year to live. Let’s go.
Matthew Barnes [01:33:16]:
Oh man, oh man. Well, thank you so much.
Kenny Cane [01:33:19]:
Appreciate you, yeah. Bringing me on today, brother.
Matthew Barnes [01:33:21]:
Yeah.
Kenny Cane [01:33:22]:
And appreciate you coming down. I love the Seal Fit community. This, you know, it’s, it’s meant a lot to me through the years and again, some of this work has really prepared me for these moments. So I’m, I’m very grateful.
Matthew Barnes [01:33:36]:
Oo yah, yeah. Oh yeah, brother. That’s it for the Mark Divine Show. Thanks so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Kenny Cain as much as I did. Incredible insights. Heart goes out to him, his family and everyone else up in LA who’s been affected by those fires and frankly everyone everywhere who’s affected by crises, which is a moment of opportunity for transformation.
Kenny Cane [01:34:03]:
Absolutely.
Matthew Barnes [01:34:04]:
Check the show notes [email protected] check the video out at YouTube. Special thanks to my incredible team, John Dahlgren and Kathryn Divine and our audience of Sandy Divine to.
Kenny Cane [01:34:18]:
Who bring you.
Matthew Barnes [01:34:19]:
This show and our newsletter every week. Newsletter by the way is called Divine Inspiration. You can go to markDivine.com to subscribe. Comes out every Tuesday and it’s chock full of goodness. Chock full of goodness. Check out our new Seal Fit supplements. Go to sealfitsupplements.com we have a cool electro greens which is a combination of electrolyte and a super high quality greens product, product supplement, I mean. Or you can just go to Amazon and kind of search for it there and click Buy, subscribe and give it a five star review.
Kenny Cane [01:34:51]:
Nom, nom, nom nom.
Matthew Barnes [01:34:53]:
Thanks so much again for your support of the Mark Divine Show. I hope you find it valuable and if you do, please rate and review the show and forward it on and share it with your friends. Thanks also for doing the work, being part of the change you want to see in the world together at scale. We can be a force for global transformation. So why not? Oh yeah, let’s do that.
Kenny Cane [01:35:15]:
Oh yeah. 100%.
Matthew Barnes [01:35:17]:
Vine out. Kenny, thanks so much.
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