Daniel (00:01.09)
My guest today is Tom Myers. I don't think I'm exaggerating to say he's one of the great minds on the earth today in the realm of biomechanics and human physiology anatomy. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. I was lamenting recently to some friends and to my wife that sometimes when you've built a mental map that's very rich in data points, it can be a little bit alienating. And I've been looking forward to this conversation because
Tom's somebody with a big mental map and it's a deep satisfaction to get to have a conversation with somebody like that. Also, I want to say if you've heard over the last several years about myofascia, if you're into fitness, exercise, mobility, yoga, whatever it is, if you're into body work and you've heard about fascia, it's because of Tom Myers. He's really brought that work and that idea forward into culture in probably the biggest way that anybody has.
And it's pretty amazing to see now how many people are teaching under that umbrella. So Tom, welcome to the show.
Tom Myers (01:08.579)
Daniel, it's great to be here.
Daniel (01:09.842)
It's really good to be here. Like I said, I've been looking forward to this a long time. I I kinda wanna just start off by talking a little bit about what your work has been over the years. But I really am interested in seeing what you're interested in today. but first let me just say being here in your library, there's a lot of books here I know and recognize that are incredible books. There's a lot more here that I just wish I had had the time or opportunity to read, but what a collection this is.
Tom Myers (01:36.75)
Yeah, this is fifty years of of thinking about the body and how the body how the human body in particular is. And with you in particular, Daniel, I think of us as paired units because I have that feeling for the wild and you're out there doing it. And my dedication this lifetime, I'm an urban creature and
I think we'll talk about this later. Homo domesticus is my the species that needs the most work on the planet. So I've been working with that homo domestic But with the the wild one in mind, right? Right. because it's the wild one that set our genes. Yeah. Both the genes of the food that we eat and the genes of the movement that we do. but instead now we have been domesticated like some of the other animals around us.
Daniel (02:10.529)
Daniel (02:27.286)
it's like the wild variant gives us like a template almost, right? It's kind of I always say if you wanted to take care of a domesticated animal, it's helpful to know the wild progenitor, what its needs are, what it eats, how it lives, to inform you at least how to raise the domestic Yeah.
Tom Myers (02:43.576)
All those people are gone. All those people who well, most of the people maybe you found them. Maybe you found them out in the people who are surviving. I had an old woodsman here when I was young. I hired him, to help me with the aquaculture project that we have here. And he could survive on tea berry and all kinds of things that you probably know about in the woods where I would die shortly.
Tom Myers (03:07.59)
But the problem that I've been addressing myself to is, we have all of these humans living in a world to which they were not adapted. Right. And I think of you as out there exploring what would happen if we hadn't adapted, you know, if we were wild humans, and that's a really valuable
exploration and I'm so glad you're doing it because I'm not doing it because I'm running around from city to city. Here are all these you know, you go back to the eighteen hundreds and don't quote me on the figures, but it was something like ninety five percent of the people lived on a farm. And now three percent of the population takes care of our food needs. And the other ninety seven percent are pursuing something else in the city.
Daniel (03:43.96)
Right.
Tom Myers (03:54.666)
We're out here in Maine. I don't know what your life is like, where you live, but I you know, you see what a beautiful place I live in. I am governed by my computer, by my phone, right, by the daily things of the business that I'm still running at seventy six and
I could give all that up and go back to the wild. I'm not willing to do that. I really love the human experiment. In spite of all the numbsklery that is going on right now, I love the human experiment and I would like to see it continue. I do see that our bodies, our minds, and our feelings, and probably our spirit, I'm not qualified, have all been shrunk in in the last bit.
Daniel (04:35.416)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (04:38.462)
of the domestication of human beings. And so what are we gonna do about that? How do we fulfill the needs of our children, their genetic needs, and still live in an urban environment? Because I don't see we can talk about that, but I don't see how everybody rewilds.
Daniel (04:55.468)
Yep. Yeah, right. Not not in this current moment. Yeah. The situation's gotten so dire it's like we can't keep kicking the can down the road, unfortunately. I think we've like run out of like runaway for kicking the can. And so it's like we've got to start getting serious about dealing with it. There's a lot you said I want to pick apart. one of the things I'm I wonder what it would be I wonder if you've ever had the opportunity to work with
Tom Myers (04:58.454)
Not in this gun.
Daniel (05:22.464)
Indigenous people who still are somewhat close to their life way, people who you know, like y there's still some pockets in the world, right? South America, New Guinea, off the coast of India, where there is like natural humans, even uncontacted people in some of these places, which is amazing to think about. But then you're also hearing about them getting phones and internet and how quickly their life way is changing. And I I sort of imagine like if you know
If we lost all the dogs on the planet, we could go to gray wolves and tease dogs back out of that genome. Uh-huh. But what happens when all of the natural people are gone? It's like that's just like you said, lost and like w we won't know what they were even like what their bodies are even like. D do any of you or any of the therapists you've worked with have have you got to work with people who haven't spent their life in the built environment?
Tom Myers (06:15.406)
I have literally gotten to work on two or three of those people in my life. and I I don't have enough experience to say, yeah, this is what is the difference between wild humans and tame humans.
I look at a tribe, if I think about a tribe, not everybody in the tribe needed to be a hunter. Right. We needed cooks, we needed bottle washers, we needed well not bottles, but you know what I mean. there's all kinds of roles in the tribe. So I was born short-sighted when I was born in a in an era where that short-sightedness could be corrected in various ways. but if I were in a tribal life and I were short sighted, then I would be the fire keeper or something where you don't need long sight.
But you wouldn't take me out on a hunting party because I couldn't see the the quarry. And so I think that we probably had
There isn't a human that was suited to the old environment. There were lots of different kinds of humans and some people in the tribes really needed to have big muscles, but not you know Sprinters. Look at your Sprinters, they don't have big muscles. They have wiry bodies. So is there somebody in your tribe who's wiry that we can send a message over the mountain to the other village? So no I don't think there's one type that's adapted to the old life. I think there were a variety of types that were adapted to the old life and we see the remnants of those old types now.
Mm-hmm. but they're all domesticated.
Daniel (07:42.611)
Yeah. Something I've identified and I I talk about in my workshops is
I I look at the world, I look at the as the world as having like three distinct buckets or the three worlds. There's the natural environment, there's the built environment, and now there's like this digital environment. And I'm noticing that so few people are adapted anymore to the natural world. Everybody's well adapted, I shouldn't say well adapted, everyone's adapted to the built environment, and more and more, especially young people, are very adapted to the digital environment. But it's like the further you go this way, the harder it is.
is and I always note how we have all these T V shows about people who are in the wild who have to figure out how to stay alive until they can get rescued back to the built environment. Because we're now looking at the 'cause they're never about like them staying there and setting up a sustainable life. It's always like we're just to we can get rescued, right? Or something like that.
Because I think there's a deep fear of that because we're s we view our own environment as being like a foreign world kind of like as if we're astronauts and not from here, you know, and like that's the degree of the domestication. but maybe you could speak a little bit to how the built environment has reshaped us or or changed us, or maybe we haven't reshaped and it's all pathology. I'm I'm kind of curious like how you see from your unique perspective how our bodies are being impacted by the built space.
Versus the natural.
Tom Myers (09:09.656)
Good, I need to build into that just for a sec. if we go back to where there wasn't a separation between us and the rest of the natural world, we have to go back about six million years, really. and the first thing that we did, and we were discussing this earlier, we might come back to it, is stand up. And our psychobiology changed with standing up. Everybody that had our basic vertebrate structure of a spine and two sets of limbs and a head on the front.
that basic structure, the line of sight and the line of motion, and the line of the spine and the line of the digestive system are all the same, which makes sense.
Daniel (09:50.55)
When you said the line like from the beginning of the tube to the end of the tube lined up with that scene.
Tom Myers (09:54.976)
Yeah, because it gets curly Q in the middle, but but but us, we when we stood up, when we took the hip, which was really flexed, here's here's the spine of a cheetah, here is the horse, and here is the femur. The knee is right up against the ribcage. Yeah. If your knee is right up against the ribcage, you're really flexed. A horse never comes to this.
Daniel (10:15.99)
Yeah. Yeah. You try to take your dog leg like that. Sure.
Tom Myers (10:20.654)
And then it will come back. Okay. 'Cause it can't stand up on two legs. When you stand up on two legs, you take your nose away from the ground. Wow. So the world of smells
is no longer the world you live in. You need to smell fruit, you need to smell other chimps, you need to smell what's up there in the thing. But you are not down on the floor of the forest where look at your dog. I I I went walking with the dog this morning, you know, had to get the female and you know all that stuff. And we don't do that. Right. And if you put your hand on the bridge of your nose, your hand is covering your frontal lobe.
Your finger is coming down at the end of between your frontal lobe and your parietal lobe at the sagital suture. Your frontal lobe was your nose brain. Your rhine encephalon. So we didn't need so much of a nosebrain when we stood up and went up in the trees. Which we're pretty sure if you you know, I don't want to go on evolutionary theory, but
Daniel (11:10.712)
Okay.
Daniel (11:21.194)
That's the current story we're telling.
Tom Myers (11:22.474)
We see yeah, the the best story we're telling is we evolved from the old world monkeys with their collarbones. We have a collarbone too. you know, a cheetah doesn't have a collarbone. And so coming up into there we already divorced ourselves from the animal world slightly by standing up. That happened to monkeys too. And and they are somewhat social, somewhat yeah divorced from that. But that's not much of a divorce. But it really is a change of
Suddenly your spine is like this, your digestive system is like this, your line of motion is forward. So what does that do to your psychobiology? No self-respecting animal I'm not this is taking too long to set up, I'm sorry, but no self-respecting animal walks into the world with their bears all this. Their belly and their genitals and their face all up front. Yeah. Right? It's the first thing I'm gonna
Yeah, if I come is your soft underbelly. Right. You're protective. So that whole psychology of safety and protection comes in when you expose your soft underbelly to the world, which we do 16 hours a day. Right. Compared. So standing up was the first one that changed our psychobiology away from the natural. The second one came six hundred thousand years ago and that's fire.
Yeah. We're the only animal that controls fire. Right. What makes us unique? We control fire. Yeah. That came in around six hundred thousand years ago, and in archaeology and in fossil hunting you you find ashes of fires in human habitations really quickly across the globe. Fire was such a good idea for humans. Cooked food, that's another discussion. What I'm thinking about is how did it change our bodies to have fire? Well
What are you before you have a fire? You are a monkey sleeping in a cave or under some kind of shelter hoping that the saber toothed tiger finds somebody else tonight. But after you have a fire, everybody goes to sleep in complete and utter safety and peace. Two people stay up.
Tom Myers (13:29.206)
And if the saber-toothed tiger comes on, they pull a branch out of the fire, wave it at the fire. And the saber-toothed tiger says, I'll go in search of something a little easier. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So safety happens when you have fire. And then what's the second thing? What do we do around a fire? Yeah. Dance and talk. So the whole culture of these things that we're celebrating in those few tribes that are not left who are probably dancing around the fire, and maybe they have a machete and maybe they don't. But they're still
Daniel (13:44.012)
Yeah.
Daniel (13:56.834)
Some tools that might have washed up on the beach.
Tom Myers (13:59.662)
But wreckage. that us with fire really standing up is one thing, but us with fire really separates us from the thing. The lights that we're doing now are an extension of that control of fire. Okay. The third one that really affected our bodies and our movement is agriculture. Up until ten thousand years ago, you foraged for your food or you hunted for your food, as you do.
And that was ten thousand years ago that that started, but was as few as three thousand or one thousand years ago for some people.
Daniel (14:35.5)
Yeah, I often point out when we say Neolithic revolution, it sounds like everybody just got on board, but but I like to point out there's still pockets of resistance. It's not even a complete revolution yet.
Tom Myers (14:43.926)
It wasn't so good.
Yeah, it was it was took a long time, but and everybody started doing farm work. And what was that phrase that you talked before we started of each generation baseline syndrome. So once we get into the agricultural era, everybody was born into that shifted base. Everybody thought, that's how we do it.
Daniel (14:59.55)
shifting baseline similar.
Tom Myers (15:11.554)
But there's a there are whole books that are arguing this, and I'm not gonna go on very long about it. That wheat enslaved us. That rice enslaved us. That cotton enslaved us. And so these products came up out of the agricultural era. Well, what do you have when you have an agricultural era? All of a sudden you're not moving around. You're not a nomad anymore. So you need soldiers to protect your property and to protect the side all that grain. You need cats.
Daniel (15:33.198)
All that grain, yeah.
Tom Myers (15:36.468)
Which was a source of a lot of of diseases. You need cats to get the mice who were eating the rats you were eating your grain.
Daniel (15:42.446)
'Cause the rodents.
Tom Myers (15:46.006)
'cause the rodents. And so you need soldiers, merchant merchants, serfs, landowners, that whole caste system and our class system, the English class system, that's all all around
Daniel (15:57.23)
I mean I point out 'cause it's very interesting, like with Gobekli Tepe. that site they say is about fourteen thousand years old and it's kind of like the oldest site we know. And the weird thing about it is like, it was built by hunter gatherers. But the f that's what they think, but then the first wheat
Tom Myers (16:02.744)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel (16:16.332)
domestication of wheat was only like fifty miles away. And I've just like I'm like, mm ki kinda feels like they needed to figure out the wheat growing to feed the people that were doing the work because you kinda can't have people building cities all day when you hunt and gather. Like you you everybody needs it's all hands on deck when you hunt and gather. So anyway, I just would I would suggest that's the slave trade, which is the biggest it's ever been right now around the world, right? It's the largest slave trade there's ever existed right now. Yeah, there's more people enslaved right now than at any other period in
human history. There's like about fifty million people or so in in active forms of slavery, whether it's the sex trade or it's the brick making or something. You know, it's like stuff going on all over all different types, but this this trade of humans I think is f somewhat agricultural based 'cause you have all this division of labor. I'm not trying to get you off track.
Tom Myers (16:46.862)
Because of the numbers.
Tom Myers (17:07.117)
You don't wanna in a hunting gathering society you don't wanna gather a whole bunch of people that you now have to feed.
Daniel (17:11.426)
Yeah, you gotta go gather for them too. Like that's a that's a lot of work. But once you have grain and you have a surplus of food it starts to make a lot of sense. You send them out to the fields to do that while you administrate from the top, right? Right.
Tom Myers (17:14.766)
Yeah, yeah.
Tom Myers (17:24.482)
But even those people out in the fields, they are still walking to the fields, they are doing rhythmic movement most of the days, and they do varied movement also. That ends when we get to the industrial era.
And name that one when you will. Two hundred years ago for England, a hundred years ago for China, you know, fifty years ago for China, etcetera. The world is industrializing still, but we went into the industrial era where we make things. If you talked about education and the body hundred and fifty years ago, all the literature is written in the language of agriculture.
Mm-hmm. We want to have a nice crop of students. And what do we have to feed them? And how do we water them to get a nice crop of students? That is not the way they talk today. Students are a product, and we need to make sure that they go through the right industrial product processes to come out the right product. So true. And so again, it's that same thing. If the generation is born into the industrial era, you take it as the baseline.
Daniel (18:14.478)
Yeah.
Daniel (18:29.546)
And the technology always informs, I've noticed, like anatomically. I see so many of these books here. We could see it in these books like Leonardo's depicting the body as ropes and pulleys, 'cause that's the dominant technology of the time. I often joke about how when I was growing up the body was a car. You fed it the fuel to burn the fuel as a car 'cause we were thinking now everybody's like, the body's like a computer and we're hearing all about your brains, like a supercomputer. We always seem to relate ourselves rather than relate the external technology to what we're like, we
relate ourselves to the external technology of
Tom Myers (19:00.774)
And your brain is when I was starting well when Rene Descartes started this idea, the newest machine, the most exciting machine in the world in the sixteen hundreds was a vacuum tube. Mm-hmm. You like at the bank when you put that little thing over to the teller. the that's what he thought when he saw nerves. He he realized a signal was being carried up. it heats your finger and that travels up a tube and it was like a vacuum tube.
Daniel (19:15.182)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (19:28.854)
because that was the most complicated technology. When I was growing up, we had no computers, so the brain was a telephone system. It became a computer system. Then it became a dual processor and then it became a what do they call a hologram. And now I would say, in my work now that I've been doing this fift fifty years, yes I know a lot about anatomy. But a body is more like a meme than it is like a machine or even maybe like a plant.
Daniel (19:35.786)
Yeah, right.
Tom Myers (19:58.062)
At least that's what we need to explore now, the body as a meme, as a pattern.
'Cause you are not the stuff that you're made of. You the urban myth is you change your body every seven years. Change all the molecules in your body every seven years. I just recently learned that's not true. No. Most of it, you change much faster than seven years. Really? Your skin is changing all the time. You have a t all new molecules in your stomach lining every three weeks. You have a whole new liver in terms of molecules every six weeks. That's why when you're that's why when your uncle stops drinking.
Daniel (20:31.978)
In terms of cells, but in terms of molecules.
Tom Myers (20:35.008)
Yes, the molecules are changed over because your liver is rapidly turning over. But there are probably molecules in my Achilles tendon that have been there since I was twelve. Mm-hmm. Because your fascia is so inert.
Daniel (20:50.062)
Vascular up.
Tom Myers (20:50.638)
It's not vascularized, so it depends on seepage. And so those very stable collagen molecules are very stable and they stay there. And so those molecules I'll probably die with those molecules from my puberty time in my very, very, you know, thoracolumbar fascia, hilariotibule tract, Achilles tendon. Yeah. Those places that we're the fascia. So that doesn't it doesn't need to turn over. Right. It's stable.
Daniel (21:13.196)
Yeah.
Daniel (21:19.276)
Wow. What could you I'm sure you're quite good at this at this point, but for listeners who they've they hear the term fascia, I know they hear it. Everybody's talking about it. It must be cool to see. I mean I my my understanding is you learned from Ida Rolf. Yes. But then you took the work to the world in a way that she you know, did th different time. But but it must be amazing to see the impact. I don't know if from where you sit if you see it, but I mean I see it everywhere.
Tom Myers (21:41.728)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (21:49.52)
I am one of many people who are doing this.
Daniel (21:52.448)
Your bin Your book Anatomy Trains is the book everybody when you have the conversation about Maya Fascia, everybody wants to talk about your book. It's like the foundational to the to the it's like the foundational text, I think, for most of this work today. Although there are so many other incredible voices, I I not to to downplay that, but yeah, I think what you've taught about Tensegrity and about Fasha, it's was pretty revolutionary and it it's it the impact is now visible.
Tom Myers (22:19.88)
The book was published in two thousand and one, it's now two thousand and twenty-six and twenty-five years. I'm impressed with how much this idea has been taken in and taken up. And I think it it speaks to what a wonderful writer I am. And it speaks to this is the time in which holistic things are being seen. So the fascia is the fabric that holds us together. Without it
Daniel (22:34.508)
Yeah, yeah, that's
Tom Myers (22:46.316)
you would be a big puddle at your feet 'cause all the water would fall. So fascia is designed to keep your water up. Well what about my bones? Well, your bones, yes, are the s absolutely the solid thing. They're not as solid as people think they are, because they're changing all the time. Mm-hmm. Remember when we were just talking about the cells changing over, your bones actually change over quite rapidly. They've got they're full of blood vessels, so they've got so the bones change over fairly rapidly. You think that cartilage that the
Daniel (23:07.007)
Okay.
Daniel (23:12.462)
Well sorry to interrupt you, but do you think that a lot of times people are they think of a bone and they picture a baked bone that has all of the soft tissue removed so that there's just
Tom Myers (23:24.706)
This brittle thing that I found, this is a deer bone.
Daniel (23:27.778)
So people think that's what's in my body. C correct me if I'm wrong here, but if I were to take a living bone, two of them, let's say I took two identical living bones, I put one in a bottle of vinegar. Yeah. I put one in an oven. Right. Right. The one in the vinegar is gonna dissolve out all the the appetite, the calcium phosphate, and I'm gonna be left with this like rubbery tie in a knot thing.
Tom Myers (23:33.666)
Yes.
Tom Myers (23:50.838)
Let's say not say rubbery, let's say leathery.
Daniel (23:53.216)
Okay. So something you soft tissue.
Tom Myers (23:55.508)
like the leather in your belt is c mostly collagen from the skin of a cow. Okay. And the leather in your bone, you can take that if you leave it in the finger th you you'll be able to tie a knot. But it is the fascial bone. Your bones inside your body are equally both. Now it depends on your age as to whether they really are equally, but they are both. So in a young body you can bend the bones. Right.
Daniel (24:00.182)
Yeah, yeah.
Daniel (24:09.358)
Okay.
Daniel (24:20.834)
kid falls out window, bounces, no injury, and you're like, that would break me. Excuse me. Yeah. So so back to it I think a lot of times people imagine inert dead bone inside themselves. Just because they haven't seen. You know, it's really different when you again hunting is gives you such an insight because you're taking these bones out all the time and you see what they're like and they're they're so alive.
Tom Myers (24:43.522)
I'm laughing because I don't hunt the humans I take apart, but I've taken apart quite a number of
Daniel (24:47.886)
Yeah, so and you famously more of your work you famously lead cadaver labs where people get to actually disassemble formerly living humans and see these fascial connections, right?
Tom Myers (25:00.77)
Yeah, the organs, the nerves, everything. So the so to continue from there, something has to hold your blood vessels, your nerves, your organs, and the muscles on your bones has to hold it in place. So nature developed a biological fabric. That biological fabric is present in salmon, but you know that fish aren't as tough as other meat. So as soon as you walk out onto the land, mmm plants use cellulose
as their basis for what they're doing. We use collagen because it's pliable and tensilely very strong, but it's mobile. So we can use collagen as plants use cellulose as what has been for 500 years thought of as the packing material, the peanuts for your body, of just, well that's just the stuff that holds it. Get, you know, cut that away and throw it away so we can see the interesting things. Yeah. And
So because we didn't have systems thinking so much in our brain, and we were really focused on the nervous system and the circulatory system. If you look at medicine, modern, what we call modern medicine is almost exclusively focused on the circulatory system.
Daniel (26:05.877)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (26:15.02)
They can inject in here, in here, up here, up the other end, but they're getting it into your circulatory system. Food as medicine is another way of changing the chemistry. So we call it medicine, but it's almost all chemistry. Two hundred years ago, somebody, Freud, organized a science of what's going on in this set of representations in here. And you know, we went through all of this, id and superego and all the stuff that he did with the
bourgeoisie of the Vienna of the eighteen hundreds, and then now we've applied that to a much wider psychology. And the but that's that's come into a science in two hundred years. Medicine is certainly, you know, a very well developed tree of knowledge
Daniel (26:49.544)
We'll leave out his nephew for n right now.
Thanks for the floor, I dad.
Tom Myers (27:06.574)
And we have a third one which is should be built around the fascial system, but has been instead built around the musculoskeletal system. My objection to musculoskeletal system is it leaves the fascia out. And that's what's joining the muscle to the skeleton, but it's doing more than that. It's surrounding and infusing your brain. It has got a bag, oops, wrong side. It's got a bag and very fine fiber going all the way through your liver. So your fascia is
Daniel (27:14.989)
Yep.
Daniel (27:19.331)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (27:35.936)
Everywhere. Yeah. If I could make everything invisible except your nervous system, you'd see my if I made everything invisible except my own nervous system, a talent I don't have, you would see my body sitting here because there's nerves going right up to the surface. There'd be lots of them here and
Daniel (27:50.702)
Right.
Tom Myers (27:52.756)
As nerves, right? There wouldn't be so many back here. But there's plenty here. You know, the polyvagal theory or ventral vagus area is a very social area that we have a lot of nerve endings in. If I could go zap and make everything invisible except my circulatory system, you've probably seen that in body worlds, you know, where they inject the latex and you could see the exact shape of the body in the capillaries.
And nobody has done with the musculoskeletal system what we need for that third system, which is the fabric system, the fiber system. If I disappeared everything but that, you'd see my ileotibule band very clearly. If I was a woman and had breasts, they would be very it would be light and filmy because
You have to have a lot of fluid flowing through breasts. You don't want a lot of fascia, in fact. A lot of fascia in breasts is a fibrotic condition and that's what you don't want. so glands have very little fascia, the liver doesn't have a lot of fascia in it, the pancreas
Daniel (28:50.508)
You can take a liver and just pull it apart. A raw liver just it's got very little you can tell when you butcher it.
Tom Myers (28:56.118)
And a raw pancreas is hard to find. Mm in in the human sometimes. course depends on what they've been eating A lot more variation in the diet in the animals that I dissect.
Daniel (29:08.428)
Then yeah, right, that's for sure. That's for sure.
Tom Myers (29:11.978)
Anyway, the the fascia holds us together and we've certainly thought about the iliotibule band and the plantar fascia and things like that, but then you get particularized. So, my god, the bottom of my foot hurts, and somebody tells me you have plantar fasciitis. So I go and I show the doctor that plantar fasciitis. But I get much more help for plantar fasciitis almost never by working on the foot.
I will work on the foot so the client knows that I heard them and that I understand and that I do and it feels good or it doesn't feel good because they've got plantar phosphitis, but I'm gonna get the problem solved in the lower leg, in the in the deep calf muscles, in the hamstrings, or in the suboccipital muscles over here. They're all part of the superficial back line and the the kinetic chain that runs up the back of the body. so these chains are really useful in chronic things.
because your body distributes strain through the fascia.
Daniel (30:07.66)
Yeah. And it's not i the fascia's not discrete pieces. It's just one like it could be my foot's being a affected by something in my occiput because it's one large
Tom Myers (30:12.557)
No.
Tom Myers (30:20.244)
And because as we spoke earlier, we are so sure about the mechanistic description of the body that we are looking for those parts as if they were parts of a Ford F-150. Yeah. Right. Right? But we're not put together in discrete parts.
Daniel (30:35.038)
Right. If the tailpipe is the problem on your Ford F one fifty, you just replace the tailpipe, it's not like, maybe it's coming from the wheel. Right. It is a dis it is distinct part.
Tom Myers (30:43.498)
Although if you've been chasing electrical car, not not these days, but they could lead you around the body too of your car. But the the body definitely is this one thing. And plantar fasciitis is a result in the plantar fascia of strains that have been focused instead of easily distributed. So
We all know we've seen kids or you yourself, you take a bad tumble and somebody says Jesus and you go, no, I'm fine. 'Cause everything just was a tensegrity. Every everything went k choom boom. So everything moved a little and nothing moved too much. When one of these breaks, when one of these breaks, when one of these breaks, just any of the units in your body breaks, then this would be a joint and a bone and a ligament, I don't know what.
Daniel (31:22.776)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (31:38.088)
but then all of a sudden your physio or your orthopod might be focused on the joint that's broken, but it's part it's only going to work again in the context of the hole. And that's less true with acute injury because it's acute and it just happened and it hasn't distributed yet. But if you try to use the same techniques on an injury that's been there for ten years that you're using on somebody who just sprained their ankle,
Daniel (31:50.007)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (32:05.09)
you're not gonna have much fun. Yeah. Because that s tendency to sprain the ankle has distributed to the pelvis and to the chest and takes a while to get it out. Mm-hmm. Now, is coming to me for body work the only way you can get it out? No. You can use yoga, you can use CrossFit, you can use any of those things to move your body and get out of the
Daniel (32:24.822)
Can you all right? I'm gonna get real personal here. I'm a train wreck. I'm a train wreck. And I'm at a point where the problem is I love to train, right? So I've doing several hours of like steady state type cardio stuff, locomotive stuff, plus strength training, plus mobility work throughout my week. Yep. But I know I'm loading dysfunction very often. And I've got
A major twist running through me because I I rotationally broke my Tib Fib in the mountains in a winter day and had to be sort of rescued out walking on a ice axe splint. I got a cast, I didn't do any rehab. They wanted to do the bolts in my leg. I said no, just push the bones back together. I'm glad I did that, but I didn't do any physiotherapy. I was poor, I didn't know better, I d I wasn't thinking about the future, you know, I was in my early twenties. Now, like my wife ran a half marathon the other day. I can run a half marathon
But at the end, my I'm hurting. 5K, I gotta kinda stick to that zone because my hips just are so imbalanced. I it over distance it I accumulate. if I do a if I do a heavy squat, I'm just not balanced right. So I'll watch other people and it's like, man, I'm so jealous. I wish I could just do my wife is like structurally perfect. She grew up doing synchronized swimming, so she developed her whole myofascial system in the water.
Tom Myers (33:41.248)
Uh-huh.
Daniel (33:49.346)
You know, so it's like but it's like a perfect system. And I'm just all these dysfunctions. And for years I've gone to different therapists and I always two things happen. One is I I start to doubt whether they have any idea what they're doing. And the second thing is they always want me to stop training. Cause they want me to like let what they're doing be the major stimuli. And then I'm like, man, I'm really fearful at my age of losing what muscle mass I have.
Cardiovascular fitness I have. So now I'm going, I need to get fixed, and my all my methods of trying to fix myself are temporary band-aids, right? So I'm saying all this one, selfishly, but two, I'm guessing a lot of people listening to this are like, man, that's I kind of have some of that going on. And what do I do? I mean, it is like extremely uncomfortable at times in my body. I have other times where I'm okay, but I mean.
Recurring injuries, you know, recurring the same stuff over and over again. And it feels almost sometimes like kind of hopeless. Like I'm like, Am I gonna die like this? And then I talk to somebody like you, I'm like, maybe there's a what do I do? Like, where do I even start? Where's a person start who knows? Like my wife is like I said, she, you know, not like she never gets injuries, but like she's not any issues like that. But I
Tom Myers (34:53.806)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (35:08.034)
If she does get an injury, her body is set to remodel that injury, to repair that injury.
Daniel (35:13.912)
Correct. I look at myself without clothes on in the mirror, I see I'm all twisted and imbalanced. Like it's visibly obvious to me that I'm twist.
Tom Myers (35:22.456)
So I am sorry for the answer.
Daniel (35:25.739)
But we do. And it's hopelessness.
Tom Myers (35:27.692)
Because spatial medicine of the
you know, the the medicine of chemistry is pretty well developed. You can argue whether they're doing going down the right road on something. And the language of psychology is pretty developed. I think that has more to go too. But the language of our body is very poorly developed. If you go to an orthopod, you will get a surgical solution. If you come to me, you will get a manual therapy solution. If you go to your local t y yoga teacher, you'll get a yoga solution. And we haven't we all haven't started talking to each other and instead we're talking shit about each other.
Which is really, really bad, right? there are people for whom CrossFit is the cat's whiskers. There are people for whom CrossFit is not the appropriate thing. So is CrossFit good? Right. For some
Daniel (36:12.994)
But everybody thinks their thing is the solution, which is the challenge.
Tom Myers (36:16.714)
for everybody thing. And and that's not true. We need as as with medicine, not every, you know, a Zimpic isn't I don't need a Zimpic. Right, right. so just because it's the new drug on the market, I don't need to take it. Yeah. and so you have to judge for yourself. Now
If you are in this case of you're now in your forties or your fifties, you have reached the limits, you've had a couple of injuries, you recovered from them, but the body isn't what it used to be, then looking at yourself in the mirror and taking that kind of inventory is something that we don't do for our children.
Every child should get a standing bending test at seven to see whether they have an incipient scoliosis. Mm-hmm. When all those scoliosis scoliosides are discovered is when the kid's thirteen or fourteen and the growth hormone, you know, there's suddenly the bones growing, you know, they they see one sleeve is different from the other or one hem is different from the other. And so then they will go in and get a heroic terrible thing, where the spine is straightened and a rod put into it. Now that will be considered barbaric in fifty years.
Daniel (37:20.846)
Yeah, it sounds like civil war era surgery to me. That's the way.
Tom Myers (37:23.15)
Yeah, yeah, but it's it's still the choice, the treatment of choice for bad scoliosis. But if you took scoliosis at seven, we need to have this as an experiment for me to say it with the definitive that I'm saying it right now. But my strong belief is if we took children at seven and we put them through a KQ assessment, we give them an IQ assessment.
Sooner or later we're gonna give them an EQ assessment. What's your emotional intelligence? I don't know about you, but I hire for emotional intelligence. I can teach you a skill. I can't teach you this. Or it's gonna take a lot longer to teach you this. So but KQ is something, you know, that you're I I'm pointing to my bellic as the Dantien is your center of gravity, so that's the center of the fashion. K KQ meaning kinetic
Daniel (37:56.504)
So
Daniel (38:07.918)
Kinesthetic. Yeah.
Tom Myers (38:11.988)
intelligence, emotional intelligence and intellectual intelligence. And you can argue whether the IQ tests are really measured. Whew, that's a good one. Yes. But anyway Yeah, that's the that's the old matriarchal intelligence. and we see evidence of that in the body all the time. Excuse me for this little side note. In front of your organs you have an apron. It's called the omentum and it hangs from your stomach and your large intestine and it generally hangs down about as far as your pupic bone.
Daniel (38:17.774)
I might throw digestive intelligence in there too.
Daniel (38:33.069)
Yeah, the aumentum.
Daniel (38:40.45)
Hunters call it the call fat. The call fat? Yeah, that's like in the d if you're gonna cook with it, it's the call you can wrap it's fatty, so you can wrap meat in it and
Tom Myers (38:48.142)
Routinely if somebody's had a surgery they just cut it off. And out, yeah. You don't need it. It's like your gallbladder, you don't need it. Anyway, when we open up, so sometimes the omentum is gone, when the omentum is there, it will have migrated to the organ in trouble. It will be over here on the small intestine or up on the liver or over here on the spleen. It's amazing. It moves.
Daniel (38:52.047)
my gosh, and out?
Daniel (38:57.802)
Really?
Tom Myers (39:17.184)
And it moves to the organ in trouble because fat is the mother of the body, so this is a very fatty, as you just pointed out, organ. And it goes to the organ in trouble and wraps it in fat cells, which are healing cells. Your body is doing its best to maintain the equilibrium. It's just we feed it and we live in an environment that doesn't support it.
Back to your problem that I do agree with you is a universal thing. I'm very lucky, I get a lot of body work and I think a lot about these things, so I'm seventy six and I feel pretty sprout.
Daniel (39:52.674)
You look amazing and you move really well and you it's it's incredible, like it shows, you know, like your aging strategy is obviously working.
Tom Myers (40:00.162)
But I've been lucky. I you know, other people are under such stress or, you know, have children in trouble or parents in trouble or finances in trouble or relationships in trouble that they don't have the leisure to keep themselves this way. So I I feel lucky in that way. but I do
think it's really, really possible to keep yourself much more mobile. I I'm I'm seventy five, I would still call myself middle aged in terms of not not in terms of my face or my skin, but in terms of of moving about. I I just don't have that much
Daniel (40:32.034)
You picked her foot up and showed it to the to the camera. That's not a typical thing that people do in their seventies.
Tom Myers (40:37.45)
but you have to find a good worker from the outside. It is very hard to do these things from the inside so far. Mm-hmm. there are books like Kelly Starrett's or mine or others that you might look at to say, Okay, how how could I look better or how could I train better or what could I what am I missing? But for to unravel the kinds of twists and turns that you're talking about, there is no exercise program for
Daniel (41:06.188)
And we have sorry to interrupt you here, but I feel like I have a tremendous amount of blind spots. So like I feel like I need somebody who can see it from the outside because from inside, it's like if we're talking about my emotional issues. It's like, well, it's very hard for me to pinpoint them all. I know some of but the ones I'm blind to, I don't know because I'm blind to. So the patterns are like
Tom Myers (41:24.992)
I'm gonna interrupt you now, because it's exactly the same thing in the body. You have, let's call them number one areas. They're available to me when I wake up in the morning and I can do this, right? but if I fix my arm here, I can actually get a much better range of motion out of my pectoral by doing this. Call that area that got stretched a number two area. So this is my number one, but
Daniel (41:51.532)
It's not under muscular control. It's range that
Tom Myers (41:54.178)
You have but I have to have an outside force to make it stror, Christian. This is how far I can open my legs. This is where I'm screwed up. as a number one. Anything from here, I'm starting to go. And if if you said that's all in your mind, Tom, if only you could let that go, you too could do this.
Daniel (42:16.494)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (42:17.982)
The yoga teachers in your class. If I did those splits, I would be in the hospital. Mm-hmm. Because I would tear my perforating arteries that are going through to my adductor magnus. It's there is this tissue and there really it doesn't. And it's real. And it's real. And it gets thicker where you broke your bone. Okay. It's gonna involve the muscular tissue. There'll be more fascia, scar tissue in
You broke the bones because that tissue was disturbed, and then you put it in a cast, you didn't have the same experience. so you're
Daniel (42:50.476)
Muscles are different, right? Like look correct me if I'm wrong here. Sure. Some of the tone in a muscle is because individual fibers are firing to keep that tone. If I get more tone, it's because I have more muscles, fibers that are firing at any given time that keep that muscle under tone, right? But then I have some psychological control over that. So if I'm stressed and tense, I might feel like I'm so tight, but actually could let some of that go by just
Tom Myers (43:16.942)
Yes.
Daniel (43:18.188)
But the connective tissue, once it's fixed in place, that isn't under that same kind of enervative control, right? So it needs to either be manually stretched or moved.
Tom Myers (43:28.494)
Yeah, you can use tools, you can use somebody else's hand, you can use a doorknob, you can
Daniel (43:34.444)
Yeah, right, right, right. yoga is But I can't just relax it mentally. It needs to be remodeled.
Tom Myers (43:40.672)
You there is nothing you can do to remodel the fascia from your mind, except to let go of tension, and that will cause the fascia to remodel or
Daniel (43:44.162)
Yeah, okay.
Daniel (43:49.43)
Over longer stretches of time.
Tom Myers (43:52.338)
if I do this to you guys, sorry. if I hold my pelvis out in front of my feet, right? Mm-hmm, I cannot stand here without tension in the back of my legs. So I'm exporting that signal to the back of my legs. It also has something to do with the fact that I was born into the wrong family, so I'm alert all the time. So it has an emotional thing to it.
And we tend to do that exporting to our body with any of the stress that we have. It doesn't stay around in I know you think it's staying around in the mind, but it's being exported down to your body. So I'm strong and really common one, right? So people take their poor rib cage and they go and they feel weak and they go, No, I'm strong.
Daniel (44:42.22)
Right.
Tom Myers (44:42.798)
Right? So I've just recruited a whole bunch of muscles here, and to maintain that thing that I'm really strong, Daniel, I really I am strong, I have to export tension, export signals from my brain that ends up being tension in the muscles. The fascia says, Okay, if you're going to stand with your pelvis way forward and your ribcage raved back.
You don't want muscles to do that 'cause you're not using them as muscles. You're using them as straps. And your body will fibroblast, the one that make the fascia, will come and lay down more fascia and just like
Daniel (45:17.494)
Just like with bones. Remodels so instead of osteoblasts and osteoclasts, fibroblasts and fibroclasts that will so if if y'all if I have tension on there, it'll lay down more fiber, so I don't need to hold the tension. It will hold the tension. And if I start to change that pattern, will osteoclasts come in and remove some of that fiber? we don't, okay.
Tom Myers (45:36.808)
We don't have fibroclasts. So just for listeners who may be familiar with this technology terminology, osteoblasts make bone and osteoclasts eat bone. And they're not the smartest bulbs in the chandelier, so they only have this one commandment. And the osteoblasts have one commandment, thou shalt make bone under the periosteum.
So maybe I have plantar fasciitis where I tear my fascia. That's plantar fasciitis. A lot of people will tell you I got plantar fasciitis right here on the front of my heel. That, the plantar fascia, becomes the saran wrap around the bone. The periosteum around the bone, it's the same. We divide it into two different things. God didn't it's even through the heel bone, but let's leave that alone for while now. If this gets pulled off the heel bone,
Daniel (46:23.982)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (46:33.292)
This hand is the heel bone. My arm is the plantar fascia. This hand is the perosteum around the bone. Okay, I tug, tug, tug, tug, tug, tug on the plantar fascia. I pull the perosteum away from the bone. And there are these cells in here, the osteoblasts, and they say, God told us, fill in under the perosteum cell. They fill in under the periosteum and they build a bone spur. There's nothing painful about a bone spur.
Daniel (46:55.682)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (46:58.792)
It's your lateral plantar nerve coming in on the side that happens to be under that, so when that bone grows, you're stepping on a nerve. We have to solve that problem. Right. But it's not the bone space.
Daniel (47:09.354)
So okay, I always thought bone osteoclasts laid down bone. Osteoblasts. I feel like they should be when I hear blast I think that should be removed. Okay. So osteoblasts, I always thought that they laid down bone wherever there was a piezoelectrical charge from the crystal of the bone being deformed. That's what I believe.
Tom Myers (47:13.953)
yes.
Tom Myers (47:18.958)
That's the yeah, okay.
Tom Myers (47:29.206)
They will lay down more calcium appetite in the areas where there's compression and they will lay down more collagen where there are areas of tension, because tension goes through your bones too. Right? So they're but the osteoblasts are mainly responsible to responsive to the space under the periosteum. So your scap your scapula starts life as a bag and the osteoblasts come in there and fill up the bag until there's scapula.
Daniel (47:54.51)
Fabulous.
Daniel (47:58.573)
Wow.
Tom Myers (47:59.01)
The long bones are different, but mm but some of these bones. Osteoclasts again, not the brightest bulbs in the chandeliers, so they're sent forth also with one commandment of
That bone which is not pressurized of that thou mayest eat. But the bone that is pressurized of that thou mayest not eat. And so when you load your bones with the training and the exercise that you're doing, which if you came to me, and we still haven't gotten to the osteopaths and body workers who could deal with these problems, but that's really what you have to do, is to go into somebody else to look at your number three areas, the areas you don't know at all.
I know my number one areas. If I have a pain in my number one areas, that's easy to find. Number two, send me two yoga. man, that really needs stretching. That's a number two. I don't move the number three areas. Yeah. Like like when I was trying to do the splits. Those are number three areas. I don't know. Right, so it's really hard to know your blind spots 'cause you're looking.
Daniel (48:52.59)
Blind spots to your nervous system.
Tom Myers (48:57.55)
So somebody else, this is still the answer to your question of what do I do at 50 when I've got these nagging things, is get to somebody who knows that. There are wonderful chiropractors. There are chiropractors who will just knock your bones and tell you to come back next week. There are osteopaths who have become doctors and will hand you another prescription. There are osteopaths who really know their business in terms of manipulation, osteopathic manual manipulation.
And there are various massage therapists and sports therapists and who have gone and gotten extra knowledge of fascia and muscle and nerve and joint and everything that you it's not just fascia that you need to know about, right? It's the whole shmir. And then then there's people. You know, okay, I see the problem with this person, but he's already out there in the woods. Now how could I take the style that this man has and add something that would get him
Towards I'm sorry, I'm looking at you to get that L five and L four to come up out of your pelvis a bit.
Daniel (50:00.778)
No. Is that that specific to me? What you just said? thank you. Give me something to work with, yeah.
Tom Myers (50:06.454)
show you before we meet. but that's that's a thing that's really hard to do for yourself 'cause you you have spent your lifetime not knowing those places. And
Daniel (50:15.254)
Yeah. That's what I'm I'm like one of the hardest okay, one let me reframe that. One of the lessons that's hitting me the hardest in my late forties is how serious the problem of not knowing what you don't know is. You know, when you're young and so full of hubris like you don't even care really, but now I'm like
I've had this experience so many times where you realize that you didn't know what you didn't know and how like foolish you feel after where you're like, my goodness, I had no idea how blind I was to all of this. And now I'm at this place where I'm becoming aware that these things are there and I know there's a whole bunch of things I don't know and I'm not sure like, yeah, like what do I do?
Tom Myers (50:56.958)
And people the the problem with the contemporary therapists and the can even contemporary trainers is that they will listen to their clients and do what the client says. Mm-hmm. If the client had the right analysis, they wouldn't have to come to you. They would have solved the problem. So I listen to what my clients say and I don't believe a word of it.
Daniel (51:13.944)
Peace.
Tom Myers (51:14.838)
Because if they had the right story they wouldn't need me. Mhm. And they do need me, so they don't have the right story. So how can I what can I add to that story? 'Cause some of it's right obviously. Mm-hmm. But some of it's not getting there. So you know the things that you know and you know the things to do, but you don't know the places that you don't know in the in the
Mm-hmm. This vast territory, which is your body. I must say, I I just gotta put this in here as an apropos of nothing, which is that I've been 50 years in this and I am nowhere as close to the bottom. Wow. My brother is a painter and he's now eighty-five, I think, and he's still painting. God, I hope I get to the bottom of this before my day. It goes everywhere. My other brother is a musician on the organ and and
God, I still hope I can get these eighty two and he can I get this Bach thing right? Yeah. And I play in kinesthesia, not in visual or auditory, but I play in this in this one. And I'm not a dancer, I'm a terrible dancer, I'm a terrible sports person. I would probably flag if we went out in the woods and I tried to do what you do on a daily basis. But that
I have not finished playing in that thing at all. I have not gotten to the bottom of it all. I just go into work and most of my work is teaching now, not practicing.
Daniel (52:39.342)
I thought I had it all.
Tom Myers (52:47.008)
It's going to change the world with my wonderful Rolfing thing that I had gotten from Hyder Rolf and You start out that way. It's you need to start out that way. Yeah. Doctors start out that way. You know, you there's this incredible hubris from a lot of doctors, not all of them, coming out of medical school. I'm sorry, you just had a training. You haven't started your career yet.
Daniel (53:08.811)
how many patients have you had?
Tom Myers (53:11.982)
and they get a lot. They get a lot in the medical training, but it it's also within a a particular frame that I'm very glad not to have to work in that frame. and if I were working in emergency medicine, you'd have to work in that frame. It's time is of the essence. But with these chronic things, we would have the time to and I wish everybody would undertake this, but right now it's expensive, not paid for by your insurance, etc. But
Daniel (53:20.333)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (53:38.114)
Puberty is a great time to go through your body. I would love to see Rolfing as I learned it as a puberty right. Yeah. People would go through a series of sessions as part of going into high school or part of eighth grade or something like that, that when all those hormones are going on that you even out the body, that you show people their number three places, and that that happens sometime around puberty and then
Daniel (54:02.895)
could you give us like the haiku version of like what a what rolfing like what's a complete rolfing session or or series of sessions?
Tom Myers (54:11.404)
Yes. roughing is deep body work. It's has a reputation for being way too deep. That's the one where they scrape your muscles off the bones and make you scream about your mother. that is n that's a fair enough characterization of what we were doing in the nineteen seventies, but it's not a fair characterization of what we're doing now. We're really anatomically cognizant and
movement cognizant and we're trying to have people be able to use their bodies. we haven't even started talking about this yet, but when you're out in the wild you're really talking about Homo sapiens. I don't think we're talking about Homo sapiens anymore. I think that we have domesticated ourselves along with the chickens and the cats and the dogs and the horses and the cattle. I agree. And the goats and the sheep. We we got all those species that we're amenable to
Daniel (55:00.056)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (55:00.939)
being fed by us and now we're enslaved to them or whatever. cats have taken over the world.
Daniel (55:08.526)
Yeah. They've got the easiest ride of all the domestic animals.
Tom Myers (55:12.282)
Build hospitals for
Anyway, I think that we're dealing with a different species now of Homo domesticus, simply and and I don't know enough about genes to know whether the genes have changed. I do know the epigenetics have changed substantially. And a really easy example of that is our jaws are being torn more narrowly than they used to be. There's the theory that we used to chew much more on unprocessed foods.
So that n you would never have gotten flour that was ground down to the what you got now, you'd be chomping your bread.
Daniel (55:48.214)
My dentist and I have a joke that I have the teeth of a hunter gatherer 'cause I've used them as tools because that's the other thing is you you know, you're working a hide, you're working a sti you you're constantly using it as a as a third hand which we don't do as much of now 'cause we have so many tools. But like they be they get used. Uhhuh. They get used. that's so the jaw gets used, right? So
Tom Myers (55:59.746)
Third hand.
Tom Myers (56:09.024)
Their jaw gets used, but that's one theory and we can go off on how how soft our food is. and maybe whether babies should have harder food. They're giving plastic things for babies to chew on. Give me a break. Just give a carrot. Chew on.
Daniel (56:24.174)
Where will they get their BPA though?
Tom Myers (56:29.294)
I'm sorry, I lost the thread, but we're
Daniel (56:33.198)
I think we were talking about you were talking about how puberty is a great time.
Tom Myers (56:37.806)
no, there's a but there's a second reason that jaws could be narrow, which is when you domesticate an animal, their jaws get narrower. Yep. Look at a bison, look at a cow. Mm-hmm. Jaws narrow. Look at a wolf, look at a dog. Look at a lion, look at a domesticated cat. We don't have pictures of people back there, but we have post tribes that you were talking about that are just barely met or as yet unmet in the Amazon or or
out in Indonesia somewhere. But so we don't really know what those people are looked like. But we can be pretty sure from the jaws that we saw, the guy who wrote Exercise, Daniel Lieberman, his first thing was he went to Harvard. He was an anthropologist. He said, Well, Harvard has a lot of skulls, so I'm gonna study skulls. So he studied skulls and wrote a book called The Evolution of the Head, which if you want to go to sleep is a really But I've gotten a lot from it.
Daniel (57:31.97)
Yeah, we're called book.
Tom Myers (57:36.718)
And what he found was hunter-gatherers needed no orthodontists. Hunter-gatherers needed no dentists. There were a few people with carries. There were a few people with crooked teeth. That was a potential, but it wasn't the norm. Now almost every American child needs a ten thousand dollar smile. Mm-hmm. Twenty thousand dollar.
Daniel (57:59.512)
Don't in England though for some reason. They just roll with it. They just roll with D.
Tom Myers (58:05.644)
But don't think that the cup of tea and the bickeets didn't
Daniel (58:07.886)
but yeah, but I always think of that as like we we know its dysfunction, so we correct it, right? And then it gives it it's like a band-aid, it's like cover up for degenerative processes. Dem do you think it's fair to say d domestication's a degenerative process, or do you feel like it's an evolutionary process?
Tom Myers (58:11.864)
Ha ha.
Tom Myers (58:32.978)
I I just haven't seen the end of it, so I don't know whether it's a degenerate. I think we have
lost contact. I I I want to be careful of judgment. Yep. I don't have judgment on the modern world. It's not suited to the genes we were born with. So the problem, as I state it, looking at urban person and what is the design capable of, what can we do in an urban environment to bring those closer together? They probably will not ever
Daniel (59:06.718)
Actually match. But we could be it would be great if our society was less of a factory farm and more of a zoo. Right? Because like when you put an animal in the zoo, you try to at least recreate the conditions. You know, you create little habitats, little waterfalls, plants that they might have, diet that's like their diet. In the factory farm, it's like
concrete floor, you don't care because you're you only want them for two years or whatever. You don't want like the zoo, you want the animal to live as long as possible. The farm you're like just want to extract maximum product, right? So you're it's you try to cheapen everything as much as possible and make for efficiency. And when I look at what we're doing, it's like, hey, we're factory farming ourselves, not creating a zoo for ourselves.
Tom Myers (59:50.008)
God, I was lamenting the zoo. You'd just taken it one farther. We have to get ourselves out of the zoo and re wild ourselves.
Daniel (59:57.972)
I think of a zoo as actually like a pretty friendly environment. Biologically for the animal it's not perfect, but at least there's an attempt to make it seem like the conditions so the animal can be healthy and you know, I I do think some of us are lucky enough to live on more of a like this is a much more of a free range human farm out here. Yes. And if I lived in Manhattan it'd be like, that's like in high intensive high intensity factory farming of people.
And you're like, what's the product? Well it's like all kinds of things, but it's certainly taxation, it's labor, it's AI. Yeah. Exactly. How many how much cattle do we need now that we have AI? But but anyway, to your point, I I do agree with you. Like I just wonder if it's degenerative, because it's like you see these the neotony that you have in animals that are domesticated, but also things like you're talking about like with a like a pug. You're like, well that doesn't seem like it's moving trending in a good direction. No.
Tom Myers (01:00:52.795)
Hybridized animals, hybridized plants, we've seen a lot of that. Hi hybridization in plants works a lot better. but reducing the genome
Daniel (01:01:02.222)
Correct, till you get to it really and and I think what used I guess one of the things that I think about sometimes is the city state used to do this thing where it would go out and it would pillage the countryside. It would rape and pillage, which would infuse the city state with genetics from And so you would get a reinfusion of strong genetics.
Tom Myers (01:01:20.654)
Okay.
Daniel (01:01:25.07)
It's like you raise chickens long enough, sometimes you gotta like go get some other varieties and bring them in to like infuse the genetics. We've kinda we're kinda like running out of people to do that with. You know, so like where does it do we end up looking like gray aliens at the end of this? You know what I mean? Like are do we if we follow this trend line long enough and adapt because the gray alien looks really adapted to the world we're building.
Tom Myers (01:01:49.602)
The gray alien looks really adapted to the world we're building. Okay, I'll I'll take that.
Daniel (01:01:53.516)
Right? Like no no genitals, no like digestive track, huge eyes, long touch screen fingers, like everything looks like it's you know, for the digital and built environment, you know, like right, not an efforting environment. Exactly. Yeah.
Tom Myers (01:02:06.456)
Not an efforting environment.
Tom Myers (01:02:11.854)
Yep. So training now is saying, Well, you don't effort enough so come into the gym and we'll effort you correct
Daniel (01:02:18.314)
And and I just I put out some videos recently saying, like, hey guys, we we need to like read and do math and, you know, maintain some of these skills because the Industrial Revolution replaced your labor with machine labor and then, like you said, now we have to run on the hamster wheel. We all have experienced cognitive diminishment from technology tremendously, especially in memory is where I'm I'm doing a lot of memory work now because I'm realizing my memory's going away because
Tom Myers (01:02:46.094)
You don't have to.
Daniel (01:02:47.316)
And now Google's changed so much. It used to be I search, it gives me web pages, I have to still, it's like going to the library. Now I'm asking Google really specific questions and getting answers, and I'm noticing that because the answers are available, I don't really remember everything it's telling me anymore. And and I saw that happen with phone numbers, and I saw that happen with all kinds of information. So yeah. In the Gray Alien, interestingly, you know that's
Tom Myers (01:03:05.005)
Well.
Tom Myers (01:03:14.254)
Very narrow jaw and a very wide head. Very neotony, as you say. It's we we we tend to make our aliens like big babies.
Daniel (01:03:21.186)
Yeah, like a big fetus.
Daniel (01:03:25.646)
Big baby. Wow, I hadn't thought about that. That is neotony.
Tom Myers (01:03:29.122)
So there's the question of whether we should define this term neotony for your listeners, maybe they're but neotene is to hold on to young characteristics into the adult phase. So a chimp goes through a
Daniel (01:03:35.638)
It's good too.
Tom Myers (01:03:45.356)
period where it looks like a human baby before it gets all the hair to make it look like a chimp. So we're neotinized chimps. We get pulled out of the womb at nine months when we really should be in the womb for sixteen to eighteen months for a full development.
But we're born with our bones unfinished and our brain is going to double in size. Well, you ask any mother whether she wants to put that brain through the bottom of her body when the brain is double in size. This is one of the things where the mother won and the baby has to leave after nine months, because that's as much head as is going to get through the bottom of that pelvis. sort of between walking and and birthing, we have this equation. And so we do a lot of our embryological development out.
Daniel (01:04:28.672)
Outside the body. Wow.
Tom Myers (01:04:30.318)
And so one of the things that I'm going for now in in my later career, since Fasha, as you pointed out, has pretty well established itself is how we treat our mothers and babies. As a very well-educated and body working 35-year-old person, my we are getting ready to have our baby and after several miscarriages, etc.
But finally she was coming and so we were around babies a lot and somebody would hand me a baby and I would go, that's so cute and look full. I don't know how to I don't know about this little thing, it's all squeaky. So I had the best education money could buy, Harvard the rest of it. I didn't know how to hold a baby. How s high you know my education was really lacking. Right. When we took my baby to Bali, and she was by that time
Daniel (01:05:03.268)
What to get the
Tom Myers (01:05:23.904)
twenty nine, I think thirty pounds or twenty eight pounds or something of just pure fat. She was wonderful. She looked like the Michelin with all of this. I could hand her off to any four year old in Bali. Yep. Secure that that four year old would know exactly how to hold a baby, would not drop it, would be very careful, and indeed was. She we passed her off to all kinds of people in Bali, even little kids, because everybody can hold a baby there.
Daniel (01:05:31.422)
Okay.
Daniel (01:05:50.798)
That's a harsh indictment on humanity.
Tom Myers (01:05:52.6)
Wow. On my loving parents who did the very best for me, you know, but but I was isolated. I didn't have that thing. And so we should are there basic you talked about math, and I think there are basic human skills that we haven't thought we had to put in, but we do. Have you seen a dead person? So many of the people who come to our dissections have never seen a dead person before.
Daniel (01:06:17.1)
Yeah, yeah, I people most people don't see anyone born or anyone die.
Tom Myers (01:06:22.752)
And those are two things that happen in a hospital that are not pathological. There are two things that happen in a hospital that are not pathological, birth and death. They are both physiological processes. And birth has been medicalized? You have a condition called pregnancy. Would you like an abdominal extraction or a vaginal extraction? Any minute now. The so that's a problem that it's that birth has been medicalized and then death also, you know.
I went I had to go into the hospital locally where I was born to find out what time I was born for my astrology, but I went and I was looking through the death records and it's back then, nineteen forty nine, natural causes, old age, pneumonia, just the things that take old people out. Mm-hmm. But go live go read the death certificates, no. Cardiopulmonary failure, brain failure, renal failure, hepatic failure. It's always a failure. Yeah. And it's always a failure when somebody dies.
Daniel (01:07:16.686)
Apologize.
And many of those causes of death w were called natural death before, right? That's what you're saying? So you're like now they're pathologizing at all. Like you're not supposed to die but something
Tom Myers (01:07:31.2)
Right. It's a failure when you die. So I'm not gonna go to a hospital to die 'cause I I have every every intention that my death is gonna be a complete success.
Daniel (01:07:37.986)
Man, I I I had a really unique experience a few years ago. my wife has a f a ha a s a friend of the family, basically like a somebody in a family member almost, very close, and he outlived everybody around him and you know, he was in his late nineties and just he was starting to be feel like he was a burden on his his daughter and he's in Canada so he opted for medical suicide, I think they call it. That maids program. I don't wanna
sp making judgments on that program, but I he invited us to his death, you know? So I go to this thing and I don't I don't really know this, like I'm new to this family, so everybody's very close and I'm just the sort of like, this is just like observational for me in a weird way, you know? And I had never really watched someone die. I've watched a lot of animals die, but I had never watched a human being die. And
You know, they came in, it was a nurse and a doctor, and they had to like speak to him real quick, make sure he's under his own, you know, this is a decision he's making. And it was a series of crazy injections with all kinds of different sized needles, and one by one they just deactivated him and I watched him die. And it occurred to me, like I don't know where we come from and where we go, but I think people would wonder about that a lot more if they watched it.
And we would talk about it a lot more if we watched it. And there's something about taking that away from human view helps to reduce the world to cogs and wheels and belts and pulleys or or a a completely materialistic worldview because we're not exposed to the fact that people are coming in here from somewhere and people Does that make sense? Like like you
Tom Myers (01:09:23.608)
Going back out somewhere. Somebody stop
Daniel (01:09:27.38)
Yeah, well it's just like is there a portal? Like how do we you know what I mean? There's something really interesting about if you sequester away birth and death. It just it just takes it like this is the big important stuff.
Tom Myers (01:09:39.106)
Yes, and people have I think in the materialist society and in the internet thing there is this sense of living forever. Mhm. I have a lot of people out on the west coast who think if they have the right diet and they do the right exercises they're gonna cheat death. Well good luck, brother.
Daniel (01:09:53.683)
Yeah. I always go like, hey, you ever think about native people who lived here like four hundred years ago? No glyphosate, no right no heavy metals, no perfect diet, perfect exercise, all the sunlight, they're doing all the things. They still just died at the end. Like you you think you're g in in this toxic soup you're living in with all this dysfunction, you're gonna eat your way to immortality? Like I used to think it too, but it seems really silly now.
Tom Myers (01:10:19.938)
Does it I I see these people trying to balance themselves out with doing everything on the right side that they do on the left side and your organs your liver's over here, it's heavier, your stomach's over here, it's heavier or lighter depending on whether you ate recently. it's the the whole thing of you are never going to be in balance. We this this was my youthful
Daniel (01:10:32.098)
Later.
Daniel (01:10:36.95)
Yeah, right.
Tom Myers (01:10:46.506)
Stupidities, you thought you were gonna live forever if you ate the right things. I thought I was gonna achieve postural enlightenment and then nothing would bother me anymore because I would be in a state of satory and everything would that isn't the thing. Yeah.
Daniel (01:10:54.862)
Nothing.
Tom Myers (01:11:02.498)
The thing is to be able to be resilient when life hits you upside the head 'cause life is gonna hit you upside the head and if it doesn't, I'm kinda sorry for you 'cause those are the things that build your character and build your kid's character and preach let you know about your relationship in a much deeper way and things like that. So I don't want to not I d I thought I was going to achieve this place where I wouldn't be buffeted. And then I realized, no, I just wanna be strong and Yeah.
resilient when I'm buffeted, so that this these models are kind of good thing. You you get the twist that happens in life and then the strain comes off and you come back. Mm-hmm. And that's what you're talking about in that the fifty year old. You got a strain and then it didn't come back. Yeah. So then the question is what happened to the joints, what happened to the muscles, and that's where I I find it hard to give one nice piece of advice to everybody with these things. And finding somebody good in your town.
Daniel (01:11:42.796)
Yeah, I'm stuck in the strain.
Tom Myers (01:11:56.074)
Mm-hmm. I don't care who they are. Psychologist, acupuncturist, osteopath, body worker, find the person who's really busy in your town and go see them. Mm-hmm. And doesn't matter what they do, and listen to them. And then if they can't sort sort your problems out, say, Well, who would you see? Because people who are busy refer. And people who are busy usually have a good referral network. So I go to this acupuncture.
The problem is your lower back is probably not gonna yield to acupuncture. Might, but might not. But she knows a really good osteopath. yes, he's forty miles away. You wouldn't have heard about him, but she knows him.
Yeah. So building getting a referral network, you you you are we are not in a place now where there is a place that you can go and get this sorted out for yourself and send a picture of yourself in and maybe there will be, you know, you get a three D scan and it'll go into some AI and it'll come back with a a program for you. We're not there yet. Mm-hmm. And so for those of us with deep things in our bodies that we say, Okay, I don't wanna go into old age with this. Yeah. I wanna see if I can get this out. There are some things you c
You know, we can't unbreak your tibia and fibula. Something happened there. However, we can go in there with a fine tooth comb and comb out the tissue. And in my own case, because I broke my leg in a similar way, and when five years later I showed up at my first raughing, he said, When did you break your leg? And I went, how did you see that? And of course I can see that all the time now. but it's you you have to go at scar tissue the same thing you it's
Like your kid got gum in their hair. Mm-hmm. You're not gonna take their hair and a brush. Right. You're gonna take a little bit of hair and a little brush and you're gonna take it out a little bit of time. When you talk about the fascial gunk that has gunked up around an injury, we're in the same kind of thing. We're going in there with a short bristle brush and we're getting the gum out of the hair and hopefully it will be, you know, flowy and and easily letting fluids through it and yet still resilient enough to to handle the forces.
Daniel (01:14:04.334)
I wanna ask another fascia question, but I would just wanna leave a pin and we were we got s talking about birth and death there and I w wanna make sure we come back there. I'm wondering where the current science is in fascia stuff. I saw an article sitting over there. I believe the title is Fascia is able to actively contract and may thereby influence musculoskeletal dynamics. I hear things about fascia as a communication network.
Tom Myers (01:14:29.388)
Yes.
Daniel (01:14:30.38)
W what do we know now like you said, initially it was thought of as like packing peanuts. I know as a butcher, you're mostly cutting it away. Unl unless you're gonna, you know, braise a cut, yeah. Right? Where I can I can turn that stuff into like soft gelatin, then it's like supremely lovely to eat. But otherwise you're always trimming it away, it goes in the dog food pile, you know? And it there is a tendency that you know, they often call it in butchery silver skin. And you think of it
Yeah. You think of it as sort of like not really useful material. I definitely don't look at it and think of it as
I guess when I I don't know what it does outside of its holding the body together. I'm curious if we're now I'm curious. I keep he yeah, you're right. You're right, of course. But is there more? 'Cause I keep hearing things. I keep hearing rumblings that it does more. Yes. But yeah, that that's a that's pretty good.
Tom Myers (01:15:13.07)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (01:15:23.386)
that's pretty good. So I I would say a couple of things. The silver skin that you see under the skin of an animal is also a muscle attachment for every surface muscle that you've never seen in an anatomy book. All your litissimus, your trapezius, your obliques are your abdominals are all tied into that silver skin. We take the silver skin off, and that's where we start the anatomy book.
Daniel (01:15:52.172)
Yeah, so when people see that chart of the red guy standing there, all all that's been removed. Silver skin doesn't Except you they'll leave it in the like the lumbars. You'll see a little white okay, not not the silver skin, which is the exterior.
Tom Myers (01:16:00.123)
That's underneath. That's still not It's called the fascia profundus because it's
Daniel (01:16:07.724)
Okay. So it's a specific type. Okay. Under specific
Tom Myers (01:16:10.494)
specific layer and it goes it's a unitary it goes all over your body and it's sometimes it kind of melts into the other layers where you you can't find it. but it's all over the body it's a developmental layer and the skin goes on top of that.
So you have the silver skin, then well you know this is a hundred. Then you have the fat layer, which is actually two layers, one that's more lymphatic and one that's more neurological. And then you have the skin layers, which is a very thin panicular fascia to which the skin cells are attached. And I believe, don't quote me, I think you have about six hundred layers of skin cells and two hundred two hundred of them are dead. So the only part of you and I that are looking at each other that's living is the part that we keep wet.
Daniel (01:16:54.179)
Yep. Right.
Tom Myers (01:16:56.396)
The rest of it has about two hundred layers of skin. And if you, you know, hit the road and your skin weeps but doesn't bleed, you went down past the dead skin level. Yeah. So when you say you're exfoliating, you're maybe taking seventy-five of those two hundred layers off. You've still got a whole layer of dead cells on there. And if you did what they did in Clockwork Orange and hold your eyes open, your eyes would you wouldn't see for very long. Because you're your eye all the cells on the surface of your eyes.
Daniel (01:17:07.478)
Living skin.
Daniel (01:17:24.27)
Start dying. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I was wondering, yeah, is there communication, is there hormonal, is there anything going on in the fascia that is beyond its structural component?
Tom Myers (01:17:27.65)
We were going on
Tom Myers (01:17:36.696)
Okay. Hormones and fascia are just now being studied because most of the studies are done on men whose hormone picture is so much more constant constant than women. So now, fortunately, the research is being is beginning to work on it and we're looking at people who have very soft fascia like ligamentous laxity or
Ailer Stanloth, that's a condition that's that seems to be a genetic condition of the fascia, but there are all kinds of things that lead to that, and we're just getting into that. So hormones and fascia, chemistry in general, your chemistry, blood type and things like that, how it affects the fascia, that's an area of research we're just going into now. We know hormones affect fascia. Now, in spite of the title of the article that you just read, fascia doesn't actively contract very much.
The active contraction in fascia, and I kinda hesitate to say this because then people go out and say fascia contract. If you cut a wound, the because the fascia is tensile, the two sides of the wound will spread apart. And then they get proud on either side, and then over the then it covers over, and then over the days you see it
Daniel (01:18:43.102)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (01:18:49.836)
being pulled back together. That's fascial cells reaching out and grabbing onto the fascia, reaching out and grabbing onto the fascia, and within the limits of what cells can do, pulling that fascia back together. So wound healing is one of the few places that we know that there's active contraction of the fascia. Dupatrance contracture, where you sometimes see in
Daniel (01:19:07.31)
Okay.
Tom Myers (01:19:11.946)
Older women, you see nodules and their fingers are like this, I can't open the hand. That is maybe some of these cells that do this active contraction going crazy in the hand for reasons we don't know. Happens on the foot too. but fascia is really responding to your muscles.
But your muscles in gravity. Your muscles in physics, but mostly gravity, right? So to g hold myself up here, if you said, Tom, relax and I really did relax and sit in the chair, right? I need some tonus in my muscles to say that. except that our brains put out a lot of extra tension.
Daniel (01:19:41.538)
I I think
Tom Myers (01:19:51.902)
Mm-hmm. So that extra tension, we talked about it earlier, if I have an arching thing because I'm eager to get in the world or I'm a little worried about my place in the world, or I don't want to. And you do that with your muscles, your fascia just essentially says, I'm anthropomorphizing the fascia, but the fascia essentially says, okay, if you're going to do that with your muscles, then you need straps here, here, here, and here. And then even if you change your muscle patterning.
Straps are still there. Yeah. They will disappear, but they disappear a lot slower than muscles.
Daniel (01:20:28.396)
Yeah, and that assumes you s don't fall back into your pattern all the time, which is very hard to
Tom Myers (01:20:34.018)
To get out of the pattern. But if you do stay out of the pattern, you undertake a new training program, you're doing things that you didn't do, your fascia will remodel according to that training program. Or couch potato. It'll remodel to be a couch potato. It remodels as a couch potato towards the thing which is generally responsive to whatever threat might come or whatever change might come. And that's a cotton ball.
impregnated with jelly. Mm-hmm. In other words, the fibers are going everywhere, they're like felt, they're just going in every direction. So no matter what force comes on it, it will adapt to that force. Now imagine that I took that cotton ball and I did this with it. The fibers would all fine and I would get to a place where it stops.
Daniel (01:21:15.64)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (01:21:21.1)
Yeah. Uhhuh. So try that on your arm right now. If you put your hand on your arm, you can move a quarter of an inch, half an inch in any direction. You can even move a half an inch away or a half an inch in, right? Any direction. And it's really easy, right? There's very little resistance. Okay, do it again. Now move your hand towards your elbows five or six centimeters and feel what's happening to the braid on your wrist.
You're moving it. So the cotton is omnidirectional, looking out for everything, but then you put a tension on it and it says, that's where the force is coming. I'm gonna resist that force to save these tissues because I don't want my skin to tear. Right? So it's weak, weak, weak, weak, weak, strong. Unlocked, unlocked, unlocked, locked.
Daniel (01:22:02.456)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (01:22:05.888)
So Fasha has that ability to be really soft and easy for the movement that I want to do, and then solidified by muscles, it becomes a strap that can, you know, bench press, whatever you can bench press. Right. that we have thought a lot about muscles and joints and nerves.
And it's not that the fascia is more important than these other ones or less important. It's just part of the equation that we haven't really put in. So tendons are made out of fascia, ligaments are made out of fascia, all that white stuff that you see in the anatomical books is made out of fascia. And once you do that, you realize, my God, all of our sea cells are living in a sea of fascia. And so now we've
Daniel (01:22:50.528)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (01:22:54.87)
Literally every cell except maybe you could say the red blood cells. There's a debate Okay, I wanna I want to get back to this, but the there's a debate in the thing of how much of the water in your body is free and how much of it is tied up in the fascial system. Wow. Because most of our listeners will be thinking of the fascial system as what we've been talking about, the fibers of collagen, sinewy and white, and you can see it in hunting the silver skin and all of that. There's another element of it which is gel.
You've also probably seen that gel. It's slippery, it's synovial fluid in the joints. That's the primary thing of that gel. That gel is a lubricant in the body and it allows for movement and allows for these kinds of changes in the length of the fascia. Which happens in yoga, happens when I put my elbow in there. Now you want it to grow back into the proper shape. I dropped on my elbow, I don't know if the camera can see this, but I dropped on my elbow.
elbow I was carrying a cup of coffee and just went and cracked it but didn't know I'd cracked it because the burst there's a bursa right here and it was a mess, it was bloody and all full of fluid. So by the time I had gotten around this this extra bit, this heterotropic bone growth had happened, so now I have a new tool.
Daniel (01:23:54.298)
Daniel (01:24:09.08)
I was gonna say that looks like feel great going up your skin.
Tom Myers (01:24:11.926)
No, but it looks unsightly for my girlfriend, but the He goes, you know, you can't get through this life without a few dings and I and I just it was a very interesting ding to watch it go. And I, you know, here here's another thing. Can I make that go away? Is there somebody who knows how to make that go away? I don't know how to make that go away. Can I find somebody that and at seventy seven, I don't know. I'll tell you a story. I broke my
Daniel (01:24:14.569)
That's how it's
Tom Myers (01:24:37.57)
The lateral molliscus on my left knee. I was chasing my favorite sixteen year old down the dock here in Maine and she did a face plant and in order to avoid putting my foot in the middle of her back I did a big leap and landed wrong and your your meniscus in here is shaped like a crescent moon and I split it off. And I was shortly after that I was clearly painful and clearly
Not so I I was giving a class in Norway and a physio said, I've got an ultrasound machine, we'll go look at it and we could see it split. So I have the I have the picture of the proof that it was split. And I did all the things that I know as a therapist to heal cartilage. But I was sixty-nine at the time, I didn't think that that was ever gonna heal. At seventy-two, three years later, I went through Norway again, and the same physiotherapist was there and I said, Can we have a look at it again?
And the thing it healed. Wow. Now, I'm not saying this because I eat the right food. I eat terrible food. I'm on the road all the time. I survive on Starbucks and the rest of the terrible things that are in the airports that I have to go through. at least they're cheap. A piece of chicken, a sprig of broccoli. Yeah. But the so it's not it's not
Daniel (01:25:46.702)
release they're cheap.
Daniel (01:25:52.438)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (01:25:59.126)
because of that. But I think the healing powers that would still be in your discs. That would still be in some of the things that you might think, that's really gone beyond the pale. I think that we have not tested the healing powers of these things. Maybe it is neotony. Maybe we are retaining those youthful characteristics farther and farther. I don't know, but I I also one measure of this would be how long can you have braces on?
They mostly s they're doing some adult work with braces now and expanders and things like that because of this narrow jaw thing that we were talking about a while ago. But the
Daniel (01:26:39.392)
I'm watching a kid right now, she's two cranks a a night. It looks so painful to me. Yes. But she needs that space.
Tom Myers (01:26:48.652)
She needs the space. I I feel like my jaw is wide enough, but I didn't have room for my wisdom teeth. Why would God give you wisdom teeth and then not enough room to put them in? It's it's us, it's our diet, it's something that we're doing to the piece. And I you know, I I had no idea. I'm sure genetics will be part of the answer to that, but I think the environment of the zoo or the jungle or the what was the th your third one? Yeah, no.
Daniel (01:27:15.298)
the digital. Actually, fun?
Tom Myers (01:27:18.154)
A factory farm, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I I had not gone as dismal as putting us in a factory farm. That's really where we are. I thought about it as the human zoo that we built a zoo and we live in it. And I think that might be true out here in Maine where we actually can have a nice zoo with some
Daniel (01:27:25.78)
Okay.
Daniel (01:27:36.984)
I think it's yeah, I mean if you live high enough too up a up the up the pyramid you can definitely live in a zoo, right? There's lots of zoo out there. Mm-hmm. It's a whole different
Tom Myers (01:27:45.614)
But it's hard to live in the wild anymore. Yeah.
Daniel (01:27:48.072)
And there's hard t you know, like as a hunter, you it's so different than it would have been ancestrally because one, there's way less animals. Two, they're way more hip to what people are. Three, every, you know, quarter mile you're hitting another property boundary. It's not like you can just range over huge areas and follow herds of animals anymore. Like you can't. You're just like private property, private property, private property. So it's like it's
That's not even the air to live in anymore. I mean, you know, y y y it takes a lot of space for a person to live as a true hunter gatherer. You need to quite quite a big piece of land
Tom Myers (01:28:27.862)
That's why we can't go back to that. We can't even go back to everybody having their little agricultural plot. You know, William Penn set up Philadelphia with a long lot so that you could have a house in the front and a gar full garden in the back. Right. You know, you still see that now, but the houses have been built all the way down the lot. So you have all these houses in Philadelphia that are not very wide but very, very deep. Yeah. because of the way he set it up for gardening for each person to have their individual garden. But you know, maybe you can do a windowsill garden if you're my daughter living in Brooklyn.
You could do a windowsill garden or you maybe there's an allotment thing that you can get a piece of in your neighborhood. It's it's you're you're yeah kinda reaching and grasping to get a little bit.
Daniel (01:29:07.596)
Yeah, I think I think it's headed headed towards obviously smaller everything, smaller space. Question for you. Do you think that everything we've been talking about, these changes, and then what we see on the horizon, because it's like we're seeing the rollout now, finally after quite a long time, but we're seeing the rollout of robotics at a level that's pretty astonishing when you see these robots doing backflips. And I remember when, you know, you were seeing
Boston Dynamics or General Dynamics showing them when they were still wired, but now they're carrying their own power. So wow, that's a whole new thing. AI obviously has rolled out in just a couple years, and I love when people go, Yeah, yeah, but you can tell it's AI. I'm like, dude, it's the second year you've had it. Like, give it a second. It's gonna be indistinguishable from reality pretty soon, I think. We have nanotechnology, you know, it's like they could you you can have self-assembling machines in your body now. we have genetic
alteration, I guess, or d engineering available to us. CRISPR. So these technologies combined with that shrinking space, that neotony, that f factory farm, I'm wondering if you personally chalk this up to organically unfolding because of like a collective movement towards this, or do you perceive it as a nefarious
d in in other words, do you do you see that the world is being steered by benevolent and malevolent forces, or do you think that these are forces that emerge from within us? In other words, is it an emergent property d because cause it's real easy to look at the world right now and be like, who's in charge of this? Darth Vader? Like what is this? Like where are we why is it so why does it look like it's constantly imprisoning human beings and degrading us? Is that an emergent property of people, or are there forces at play that are
against humanity.
Tom Myers (01:31:10.094)
I you're asking me a philosophical question that I feel unqualified to answer, but let me ever Yeah, let me have a stand at it anyway, 'cause it's fun. in the old tribal world, you get to these numbers, what are they? Moore's numbers or something like that. How many people could live?
Daniel (01:31:17.038)
But he's unqualified.
Daniel (01:31:32.179)
yeah, dun bars and dumbar.
Tom Myers (01:31:33.006)
How many people could live on a given thing of land? As you say, if you're a nomad you or if you're a hunter-gatherer, you need a lot of land to support a a small group of people. So they say groups of thirty or maybe up to a hundred and fifty, but then they'd have to split because you couldn't do more than a hundred and fifty people. You can't do Rome without agriculture. Yeah. And
So the people who were looking over the village, the people charged with keeping that the shaman, the village wise woman, the chief, were very much doing what everybody else was doing on a daily basis. Yeah. Right. Going hunting and gathering. It was just you put a special hat on him, when the when the council was and then he was the chief and then he had a stick. I don't know.
talking stick got passed around. Well, by the time you get to a king, that crown can kill you and so can the other hand. but it was much more even and they would look out for the kids. In the village. You couldn't be a psychopath without being caught by your tribe in the process of growing up. Yeah.
Luigi Mandioni or whatever his name is can get through school and nobody picks him up. or choose the murderer that you want. but somehow these folks are getting through our society, which is so industrial now, people can come up without that mentor that the village would always have. Mm-hmm. But we invented another type of person called a corporation, and a psychopath is
ideally suited to run this thing called a corporation. And so we have instead of selecting psychopaths out of the village society, which would have happened in a tribe or in a small village, take those small villages in England. You can be batty, but you couldn't be murderous. Agatha Christie would come and get you. Yeah, yeah. You couldn't be you couldn't be murderous.
Tom Myers (01:33:38.528)
But now we license those people. We give them big salaries and say maximize our profits. And that is not maximizing the well-being of all the people under the care of that corporation, whether you think that corporation is caring for anything or the government that's supposed to be it's all so large now, there is no village. I just was part of well, I want to get back to the birth thing before we finish. Because I was just in an event about rebirthing the village.
Getting birth back into a village context. because as we said earlier, if you have birth and you go to a hospital, it's considered a disease of which there are several ways to get out of that disease. by a knife or by the vagina with a lot of drugs. but having a natural childbirth you have to fight for. Yeah. We were talking about how you have to advocate.
Daniel (01:34:30.49)
A lot of doctors, my impression, is are uncomfortable with it because they don't do it that often and because they're afraid of how many complications could come up and they've got a golf game scheduled for three hours from now and
Tom Myers (01:34:42.114)
Yeah, I th I don't get the third one. The golf game? That that's a trope, but I don't I find that one. Yeah, I will remove the what these are driven by is the insurance companies. Yes. The outcome of a C section is better now than the outcome of a natural birth. Yeah, wow.
Daniel (01:34:48.27)
Move that. But you filled it up first two. Yeah, but
Agreed.
Tom Myers (01:35:04.034)
Because we've upped the skills in doing C sections and we've diminished the skills of doing a natural childbirth. Two French physicians made up forceps. They gave courses in how you use them.
Daniel (01:35:21.198)
Grab the head, force it.
Tom Myers (01:35:22.828)
Yeah. You can reach up inside a horse and pull the fold out. You can reach up inside a cow and pull the calf out. Why? Because the what we are pleased to call the pelvic floor is for them a pelvic sidewall. So they don't need a whole bunch of muscle. Right. We're sitting on it all. So
Daniel (01:35:38.926)
pelvore head.
Tom Myers (01:35:39.542)
Our pelvis our pelvis had to do this for us to walk. The pelvic floor had to get really taut. And then you're gonna put a baby through that. We talked about that. The baby has to get out after s nine months instead of out of sixteen or eighteen months, just because of the size of of that. And you know, I all power to it. I I want healthy babies and healthy mothers. And if the baby was gonna die or the mother was gonna die and you need to get in there and do a C-section, okay.
But Michel Vaudon, the a very prominent obstetrician, he was a surgeon and he went into obstetrics because he heard all the screaming down in the obstetrics ward, and he went, what is going on here? And he went over there. And then, without telling his whole story, he ended up running a clinic in which you could have a natural childbirth or a cesarean section. None of the intervening epidural ptosin, none of that stuff in the beginning. You just had a natural childbirth.
Thing we can talk about another time of of how to set that up. But the he had a cesarean rate in his clinic of four to six percent a year, year on year. Meaning What is this? Meaning that one in twenty-five women need a C section. But now fifty percent of the babies that are being born on this planet are being born C section.
Daniel (01:37:03.118)
Do you think that the amount that is needed has increased due to pelvic change like structural changes or do you think it's all driven by what we were talking about before, which is changing
Tom Myers (01:37:15.094)
I think mostly driven by what we were talking about before, which is the need for the medical system, the patriarchy, if you will, to control feminine creativity. That's a big thing.
Daniel (01:37:25.982)
Get those midwives out of there. That's arcane science. That's ar arcane witchcraft.
Tom Myers (01:37:30.574)
But in the eighteen fifties most it wasn't great medical care, but most medical care that was given to women was given by women. Yeah. It's more recently that we've put men doctors in charge of of women's health care, which is a dubious thing.
Daniel (01:37:44.43)
Pretty crazy. Pretty hard for men to understand women at even a basic level. So I mean Yeah, exactly.
Tom Myers (01:37:51.242)
You know spend a lifetime with it. But the I think to get back to this subject, I think that birth is the place where the fewest dollars
and the fewest amount of because we don't have much time, right? Mm-hmm. That the most immediate change could be made in parental relations and then the child growing up. I'm sorry, I forgot one thing on the caesarean sections. The research has come through, now I just read this recently, that because we're doing so many cesarean sections, some of those cesarean sections are being done on women whose pelvis is just too naturally narrow to have a baby. Guess what?
Their children are too narrow to ever have a baby. And their children will be too narrow to ever have a baby. So yes, we are, by our ubiquitous caesarean sections, preserving genes for narrow pelvis for women, which would not have been preserved without C C but it's already showing up in the f in research.
Daniel (01:38:48.108)
That's a hard teaching, but it makes sense.
Daniel (01:38:53.858)
Let me make sure I understand that. These are are you saying that these genes would essentially the the natural my understanding is the natural mortality rate for infants is about fifty percent. Historically. So you'd have a lot of child
Tom Myers (01:39:10.198)
That would be argued. Yeah, I I don't know.
Tom Myers (01:39:18.52)
Okay, that's better.
Daniel (01:39:21.578)
mortality early in and then of course to get a child just up to where they're like self sustaining was hard to do.
Tom Myers (01:39:27.606)
Sure, but think of the pioneers. They had seven children in hopes that four of them would make it to adulthood. Right. And the hopes that one would stay behind to take care of them. Yep. Yeah. So
Daniel (01:39:32.843)
Twenty four of them and they had
Daniel (01:39:38.584)
But are you saying that many of these children might not have made it through childbirth and so those genes wouldn't be carried forward and now they are? So that's a hard thing to
Tom Myers (01:39:47.288)
Talk about It's a hard thing to talk about. But those women would have died in childbirth and who wants those women to die in childbirth so they get a Caesarean section. But just understand that's meaning that pre generation will need the Caesarean section as well.
Daniel (01:39:57.518)
That just creates a downstream effect.
Are there, from a myofascial perspective, a structural perspective, is there any v important value for that squeeze of a natural childbirth as the body's deformed its way and spiraled through the vagina versus pulled out into the open air like that?
Tom Myers (01:40:20.14)
Yes, and there are benefits that we don't know about yet. What happens when you squeeze the brain like that? I don't know about you. My baby was born as a cone head. Yeah. That's pretty common, right? And because it went down through the birth canal and bones are not ossified, sutures are not ossified. and
It's fortunate for the mother that the br head can do that. And within an hour it'll look like a grapefruit and you're wondering how the hell did that get through there? because the head really expands in that first hour or two. I'm w my youngest client was an hour old, his cone head was not resolving after an hour, and I took that God, this was such a privilege.
I just thinking about it, but I just had this she was on her mother, of course, but I just had this tiny little head in my hand and it was was like suggesting through my head changing. I didn't have to do anything. I love it. so as
Daniel (01:41:10.094)
Yeah.
Daniel (01:41:13.793)
Like the smell of those little heads.
Tom Myers (01:41:20.918)
A very well educated man who when he was faced with having a baby had no idea how to handle them. I think that even mothers now are that that's me as a dad and lots of dad have lost contact with that infant thing. and we could bring that back. 'Cause it's a joy. It's a joy to interact with your and once you know what they're doing, it it only takes a few hours. If I have a few hours
Daniel (01:41:45.856)
What do you know?
Tom Myers (01:41:47.01)
Well if you know what the baby is doing, mm-hmm, then you can move with them. Mm-hmm. Or they can move with you if you're alert to the signs. Mm-hmm. So my baby is now almost forty and we were back with the pins
on the diapers, and so I would put my hand on her hip and I would turn her over onto one side and take one pin off, and then I would turn her over on the other side and take the other pin off, and then do something to clean up the area that needs cleaning up. And by doing that, very gently enrolling her pelvis within a week,
I would put my hand on her hip and her eyes would and her head would start to turn the other way. Mm-hmm. This is gonna make me cry too. Because we were doing it together. Yeah. Now, what could her contribution be at four weeks, four months? Not much.
But we were doing it together. And that made the communication between us so much more rich. Right. And I'm not doing it too hard. I know sometimes you gotta put the groceries away and you just have to sit in that chair. I get it. But not all the time.
Mm-hmm. Sometime you can be down there and you watch the baby reach out with one arm and turn this way, you just put a hand under that foot and all of a sudden they organize themselves to turn over and see the cat or see mom or see whatever they're gonna see. so if you understand how nobody ever taught me how small bodies move. Even after I knew how large bodies move, even after I was a body worker, I still didn't understand small bodies. And now I understand small bodies and I can really help fathers a lot and mothers
Tom Myers (01:43:27.234)
come by it more naturally for sure. But even even now we're so isolated. We're s in such nuclear families we don't grow up with children all about us. Right. And so that's
Daniel (01:43:38.52)
Couple s friends around me who have l big families, religious folks mostly, five kids, six kids. Got it's so unusual today to see this like troop of people, you know, the size of vehicle they need to go anywhere.
Tom Myers (01:43:45.474)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Myers (01:43:52.126)
Yeah, yeah.
Daniel (01:43:55.39)
yeah. yeah. The one family was telling me they were at like a Renaissance fair last summer and they brought their kids to the childcare area and they were being made fun of by the childcare workers and they could hear them, you know, talking about how unethical it was for them to have these kids and stuff. I mean, just the anti human this sometimes, the mis misanthropy misant misanthropy. I was a real victim of that kind of thinking for a long time, but
But anyway, side note. I've got some friends right now, they've got five. She's pregnant with the sixth. They don't have a midwife, a doula, or they're just doing it at this point. Yeah. She's just she's just gonna call him and you know what? She just won a deadlifting contest the other day. She's not sure what her due date is, but it's this month. She won a deadlifting competition, pulling I think she did a hundred reps of two twenty five. With like the the torpedo belly, you know. And so you you see
Tom Myers (01:44:52.866)
Thinking about that poor kid trying to get through that
Daniel (01:44:55.022)
It's astonishing what we're capable of and what we're really like and then what we've been kinda convinced that we are. Like they just not only do they not see it as an emergency, but they don't even see it as like we need anybody involved. We've done this so many times. We just are gonna integrate it into our life and and watching how all the kids take care of each other and they all know, like you said, how to handle babies.
It's reframing being around people like that. So like reframing how I think about it, you know, because I feel like we really have turned it into something
Tom Myers (01:45:26.934)
W well the people who are shaming them are out of date because we're having so many fewer babies. Yeah. and the good thing about that is that each baby is gonna be precious. Mm-hmm. I used to say a thing and I was in I was jesting.
We'll know our society is getting its bearings back when midwives are paid more than bank presidents. Yeah. Because the midwives are guarding a treasure that's more valuable than what the bank president is. But we don't know.
Daniel (01:45:57.1)
Reserve debt notes.
Tom Myers (01:45:58.13)
Right. We don't we don't mm recognize that in our s but we are now going to because fertility rates are going down, hormones are going down all over the world. All over the world. It's not just us. And and then in educated societies, industrial societies as we have now, having a child is an incredible luxury. Yeah.
Child a very expensive thing to have. Yeah. And they keep getting more expensive the older they get.
Daniel (01:46:28.142)
You ever seen the film Idiocracy? You know, and that theme that like the educated people are not having kids and then the uneducated people are having lots of lots of kids and then the story being the dumbing down that happens as a result of that. But it is interesting to watch and and also as you you no doubt know, it's like if i I would have to have with my wife three kids in order to add to the population. Yes. Right? And I thought I think people don't realize that. It's like, hey, if you only have one kid, you're you're in the removal of
Tom Myers (01:46:57.358)
We're doing a big removal thing now, and we had to be because we were overpopulating like crazy. We thought it would be maybe education, but it's really education of women and making women more equal in the workplace. And then children, as I said a hundred years ago, were the necessary resource to have you taken care of. Now that's not the thing. A child is just an expensive luxury. Right. and we we have to make that change. Now, while we have the time when only a few children are being born.
We are being also being born into an age where they can have Aristotle as a tutor and Louis Pasteur as a chemistry professor, right? You know, the the the benefits of education coming down the internet are amazing and we we will focus a whole lot on the children that are left.
Daniel (01:47:44.986)
If they're doing that kind of education and not just watching videos all day. No. Which is it's like the internet is the greatest tool ever existed and we're using it to like masturbate. I mean it's kind of like I wish that it was like we were using it well. I don't feel like we even know what to do with it.
Tom Myers (01:48:00.792)
Right, but but I think we will be better with that with kids in education and things like that in future generations and and I find this now in in America and I I'm sorry I'm gonna say this about America and not about Europe, Australia, Japan, China is that
Americans are no longer taught to use their brains in to find something out. So I got a bunch of students in my classroom up there and we have winnowed them out, because these are the final things after a year's thing. The ones who want to know the answer.
Here's my book. The answers are all in here. The people who want to be engaged in the question are the people we want in the training. Yeah. Not the people who want the
Daniel (01:48:49.454)
question has the word quest right in it and many people are not interested in the quest. Stay in the Shire. Yeah, well and I just have this like memory of I would have an interest, I would go to the library, I would go to the card catalog, I would pull 20 books out, they'd be all stacked there on the table with a big dictionary, and I would have to piece together that answer. And and just like it was a lot harder to get from point A to point B in the past,
Tom Myers (01:48:53.824)
No, they just want the end.
Stay in the shower.
Daniel (01:49:18.71)
And now it's very easy. It's like it's gotten so easy to get information that I just, yeah, it's sort of like how hard it is for people to start exercising when they don't exercise. It's like, but it hurts. And watching people have to think sometimes, you're like, does it hurt? Like, I worry that that's why I've been encouraging people to have resources, like hard resources. Maybe you don't need them, but it sure is good for your brain to need to solve problems. Or I was saying recently, play chess, like something, but find some
Tom Myers (01:49:34.35)
Sorry.
Tom Myers (01:49:48.088)
These habits these habits of mind. I th we're we're talking about habits of body and habits of body are very important. We're talking about birth and you get so many hormonal and ecological things set in your body at birth that that that seems to me to be a a very fruitful place to put our efforts. But we the the habits of mind of being able to deal with a world that's unpredictable has not been a big value 'cause the world's been pretty predictable for those of us living in the Western world.
Daniel (01:50:15.8)
Those eighties and nineties were pretty nice.
Tom Myers (01:50:17.842)
Well I think my mother had the right idea. She died in September of sixteen, about three months before Trump was elected. I think that was about the time to leave.
Daniel (01:50:27.554)
Yeah, because sixteen is when I I remember things really changed around twelve, but slow. But by sixteen it was it went crazy and now I can't believe where we are in twenty six. Like it's like the it's remarkable.
Tom Myers (01:50:42.38)
Very, very rapid change. And I don't want to sit around like an old man saying, it's so much better when we were young. In some ways it was when we were young. And in some ways I my younger friends would mean, well you grew up in the fifties when it was pure water. we grew up in the fifties when the engines were so poor we were breathing hardware carbons.
Daniel (01:51:03.446)
were polluted and there was no organic food.
Tom Myers (01:51:06.304)
Exactly. You couldn't get walnut acres, peanut butter. And Amazon was certainly not available to deliver it to your house in two or three days. So they were good times in in many ways and but we have to redo this thing. We have to redo this thing, not in terms of trying to get back to the fifties or the sixties or the eighties or the eighteen hundreds.
That we we're facing a new situation. And then I get these people. I'm doing yoga that was passed down from Patanjali in the third century. I am doing a martial art that was passed down from father to son for five hundred and sixty five years. Thank you for telling me how irrelevant your practice is. Yeah. Yeah. Because we're facing a situation
Nobody's ever faced before. And I'm not I I love yoga, I love Tai Chi and all the martial arts. They're all very important. But those they're agricultural answers to an agricultural problem. Yeah. Agriculturally based answers to the problem. So I want all the wisdom that I can get to here, because some of it will apply to the electronic era. But all our exercise went
mechanical mm-hmm when we went into the mechanistic era. Mm-hmm. And so now we do a lot of things that doom your muscles and all that kind of thing. But as we go into the electronic era we're gonna get electronic exercise. I think it's gonna look really different. Yeah. I don't mean electronically enhanced exercise, that's something different. We can all get our you know download our classes from the internet, we can put a ring on that tells us what's going on when we sleep and
all of that kind of thing, but to sense yourself inside and to know when things are off. You asked me a question a long time ago, which is, what do I think the power of the fascial system is? Does it have a communications aspect? And yes it does. It clearly communicates tension and pressure. That's its main job is to transfer force. when the ferns
Tom Myers (01:53:09.118)
By which I mean the things that the the parts of the glue, the gooey stuff, which looks like a fern if you look at it under a microscope. And they line up water molecules in rows like soldiers for thousands of rows of modern molecules out. So they organize the water in your body into what Gerald Pollack calls the fourth phase of water. I don't want to Easy water. Easy water. And so your body is structuring the water.
Daniel (01:53:34.008)
Water.
Tom Myers (01:53:38.728)
If your fascia is in a bad state, the ferns curl up, they get sticky, and they're obviously not organizing the water molecules. The water molecules are just freely going out there. So you want this stuff to actually be engaged with the water molecules of your body. Now, it looks for all the world like an antenna. What is it an antenna for?
The fifty years of dealing with this thing, my answer is hunches. It's your intuitive system. We think of I'm having an intuition in my nervous system. I don't think so. You might realize it in your nervous system, you might give voice to it in your nervous system, but it was actually coming from your antenna that's tuned to where are the threats in the outside world. Mm-hmm. One of the things in anatomy that the where this goes is your nervous system is newer than your fascial system.
Your newest your nervous system is really good at carrying coded signals across your body. Signal from here to there, signal from your gut to your head on the vagus nerve. But before that, before there was a central nervous system and an organized nervous system all over your body, it was your fascia that had channels all over your body, sinew channels that they talk about in acupuncture. And
I think that system was capable of reacting faster than the nervous system. Wow. The evidence I'm going to present to this was I was going to show my girlfriend of the time the petroglyphs in Santa Fe, and you have to walk through fields and desert to get to this petroglyph. And she was walking in front and she said, Are there snakes out here? I went, No, there are cows out here. The snakes don't like the cows. You won't see any snakes, don't worry. And she said, Well, you walk in front anyway.
So I started a hundred feet later, I almost stepped on two mating rattlesnakes. Wow. They were mating. The guy was not amused at most. Yeah, I know. And came up and my partner said, you went straight up in the air and then you went backwards and then you came down. And it happened all very fast. Too fast for an image
Tom Myers (01:55:58.88)
Of an unfamiliar terrain with an unfamiliar animal in it to register on my retina, go to the occipital lobe, come back to some basal ganglia or hypothalamus for recognition out through the limbic system and I end up jumping. I think that went on my fascial system. I think there's an ancient thing, but it only does messages like Help or DANGER FIRE. It doesn't do things like, can you just move your toes like this for the arpeggio of the Chopin?
Daniel (01:56:21.014)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (01:56:27.88)
That that has to happen from your nervous system. But the things of oof withdrawal or total organism threat was carried originally by the nervous by the fascial system and is now being carried with much more nuance by the fascia.
Daniel (01:56:45.25)
I've had that. I almost stepped on a rattlesnake. I felt the the wind of the strike on the hairs of my leg and I I remember so distinctly what you're describing. I stumbled back way way before I I was stumbling before I even understood what was happening. Like it it yes definitely was a primitive response.
Tom Myers (01:57:03.562)
The fascial system travels at seven hundred and twenty miles an hour. wow, I'm sorry, five hundred and twenty miles an hour. This is Yeah, no, no, this is the speed of sound in water. Because it's an aqueous media. yeah. It is a sound wave. That went through my body at the speed of southern that's three times faster than your fastest nerves. So your fascial system communicates about three times faster than your nervous system. But it's not capable of
Daniel (01:57:11.694)
We're talking speed of sound.
Daniel (01:57:24.6)
Really?
Tom Myers (01:57:32.37)
all the nuance that you're nervous, of course. I'm not I'm not trying to say, the fascial system could take over from nothing like that. I'm just saying, it was the tunic that held you in and therefore it got sensors in it to what's going on outside. Now that tunic is covered by skin, the silver skin is that tunic. It's covered by skin, it goes all through you two, so it's in with the organs. But I believe we just let that whole system get so untuned, mm-hmm
Daniel (01:57:36.558)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (01:58:01.46)
in this generational slide that we're doing, that that system got so untuned, our nervous system is tuned, but it's tuned to very particular things now, as you say, on the internet. And our chemistry system is now tuned to glyphosate, to PFAS, to all the things that are coming in from the environment. there's simply no question
that cancers this is I believe been proven beyond any doubt that cancers some cancers are environmental, that they have nothing to do with your genes going wrong, they are just the or the genes go wrong because of the stimulation from the outside.
Daniel (01:58:35.918)
When you add seventy thousand new chemicals into the environment every year it's probably some of are gonna not be good.
Tom Myers (01:58:41.804)
Yeah, wow. So I yeah. So th I do believe that there is a really wonderful human potential. I see wonderful things happening with the young people that I know in the world, and their desire to change it. It often feels to me as if this stone is rolling down the hill and that even if we get really stroppy about it, we're gonna have a hard time stopping that rock.
Daniel (01:59:08.366)
I was gonna ask you, yeah, do you do you see us over these next decades? It seems like there's a really like you could almost just thread the needle and not have catastrophe. Or do you think that we ha that because there's a way of looking at the young people right now and be like, man, these kids are a mess. But I feel like it's because life is so easy. Like add some crisis and I think they pull together pretty well. I've read that the greatest generation
Like that World War II generation, that there was a lot of talk when they were young about what, you know, how dumb these kids were, they couldn't understand anything, blah, blah, blah. And then the crisis of the war led them to be the greatest generation. And I wonder if this generation is going to inherit the crisis and hardship will generate strong people again. Or do you think that maybe we thread the needle and somehow we can get through these next years without
The 'cause it's just seems like everywhere you look is corruption and collapse. Like I every institution seems to have become not just corrupted, but almost the opposite of what it's supposed to be. So you get like the regulatory agencies actually just become you know, they just end up bringing in the thing that they're supposed to be regulating, right? So it's like you end up with
Tom Myers (02:00:21.895)
That's a stall trapped yes.
Daniel (02:00:23.734)
Right. Everything just seems to be like the hospitals. The g they should be taking care of health and what do they do? They like cut, burn, poison people primarily and like rather than doing what they should do. Or or you know, it was like, cool, we're gonna have this like Make America Healthy Again initiative that turns into like Monsanto's glyphosate. You're like it's the opposite of everything just seems to turn into the opposite of what it's supposed to be. So it's like beyond corruption. Do you think that
this like s something new is gonna birth out of us without hardship or do you think we just have to go through the difficult time?
Tom Myers (02:00:55.508)
If we are going to go back to the kind of mature, you say the greatest generation and I would have said the grown-ups. Mm-hmm. That it's been harder for my generation to grow up, and harder for your generation after that to grow up. to by by grow up I mean mature. Mature into real adults. And some of that was just nineteen fifties dreck about, the man should do this and the woman should do that. But some of it really is
Are you responsible? Are you responsible for your family? Are you responsible for your community? I'm responsible for my family, which is my company family here. I am perched in this community. I depend on other people to plow the roads and to do the things and and I don't do much with the town itself. Other people do. It's it's not my life because I'm an itinerant teacher, so I'm gone a lot of the time. I'm not blaming myself, but I am saying that,
Being a responsible adult, a lot of people aren't doing that now. And so if you want those responsible adults, I don't see any other way than the big hardship. Mm-hmm.
Another depression, another war. That's what happened in the 30s. You had a depression, and then when the depression got over, it got over because of a war, started the whole industrial thing up again. We're not gonna do that. We're gonna have maybe another war. We're certainly going to have a time when nine billion people on the planet are gonna have a hard time eating. Mm-hmm. I I don't see avoiding that. But I'm an old man. the the other way of looking at this, and I wish I had more of an answer because this is an idea.
That I've just been contemplating my young friends and thinking is that there's another neotomy going on, that the young are going in and joining on a subconscious level on the internet, so that there is a much larger substrate of unconscious. And we're not aware of that because we're conscious. We're the conscious generation, and we're
Tom Myers (02:02:55.862)
children of the greatest generation who are trying to be conscious. But these kids are building a collective unconscious that we can't see yet. Mm-hmm. And that that will sustain them even though they don't have these skills. And they're the skills that we think are necessary, mm-hmm, but we don't know the world that's coming. Right. Right? It's gonna be something we don't know almost by definition.
Daniel (02:03:09.703)
Yep.
Daniel (02:03:19.854)
Sure, like what they have front load adaptations for that we don't perceive.
Tom Myers (02:03:22.85)
Yeah. Right. So what is actually adaptive and what is essentially human and we can't take it away. If we do take it away we're no longer human. those things are I do believe those are gonna be tested. and I believe the kids might be th that whole generation might be building something that we don't yet understand that will emerge
Daniel (02:03:34.958)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (02:03:44.618)
as it matures, that it's that it's in the womb now and you can't see it because it's in the womb and maybe in some years it'll come out. but that's that's my hope also that if humanity is going to transcend this thing, we're hearing a lot about AI now and AI's gonna that you were talking about robotics, ro robots are gonna maybe replace all our jobs. Great. In the industrial world, you defined yourself by your work.
If you ask an American, what do you do? They're going to tell you their work. They're not going to tell you their artistic pursuit or that they go bowling on Tuesday night. They're going to tell you their work. And your work is not going to define your value anymore. It's your engagement. It's your connections. I don't know. I think feeling is going to be the thing because the internet is so far relentlessly audiovisual.
I teach a kinesthetic art how to use your hands on somebody else's body in a very particular way.
I refused during COVID to certify people over the internet. You can't do that. In an audiovisual medium, I need to feel your hands on my body. It's a kinesthetic thing. Now you can imagine some blanket that I could put over my shoulders and somebody in Australia could do this to another blanket and it would happen to me. You know, they're doing that with surgery now and things like that. So I can imagine it. It hasn't happened yet. So right now.
Daniel (02:05:04.472)
There, yeah.
Tom Myers (02:05:06.87)
You want job security? Become a massage therapist. Because or or it's like somebody where human feeling, because I think human feeling is going to be the currency of the future, because it's going to be the irreducible. Everything audiovisual is changeable. And as Harari pointed out to us, money is the story we tell ourselves. And what happened in the Great Depression is we lost faith in that construct of money.
And we now have a construct of money that's so far away from even the little pieces of paper that symbolized something that I was willing to take in return for my time because I could take those pieces of paper somewhere else. That's a story we tell ourselves.
That story might it might be this lifetime that that story goes out the window in which case your work, all that you built up in your life, all the things that were supposed to be the American dream and the building of middle class life and the result of the Enlightenment from back in the seventeen hundreds. All of that has reached its end now. We're we're going into something different. And I only see you just asked two ways and the the two ways is that it's something spiritual and that all this inward going
is gonna build an unconscious or subconscious event that will then grow up and I probably won't understand it 'cause I'm of a different generation, but but it will be the next thing that humanity does. Or if we're in the more pedestrian world where people have to eat and yeah we're not in AI disappearing into the silicone world and carbon based life forms are no longer necessary and all of that kind of thing.
Then I don't know, that's the end of history for humans. Too bad 'cause I liked this experiment and I really liked my fellow humans. Maybe next time we'll do a little better job, but whether that's inherent evil in people or just sort of an accident of of how the whole thing unfolded, I have no idea.
Daniel (02:06:44.099)
Yeah.
Daniel (02:07:01.814)
What do you think happens? Do you when you die, do you you believe in a soul? Do you think you have a eternal peace? Do you what do you think happens to your consciousness?
Tom Myers (02:07:12.042)
Well, th for what it's worth, 'cause this is just my belief, I believe consciousness is a material thing and that there's so much of it around this planet and that it's distributed to all the beings that are in some way participating in consciousness and you can ask, you know, trees, grass, dirt, I don't know. but in terms of hum
Daniel (02:07:33.774)
For a consciousness that's already here.
Tom Myers (02:07:36.864)
Yes, yeah, yeah. That's your yes, an antenna or radio. Yeah. it's kind of a Rupert Sheldrakian idea of morphogenetic fields and that kind of thing. But so I believe when I die that the energetic patterns that I have made will go will be part of this newest sphere that's a around the planet. Sphere of consciousness. I have I will be delighted if my
Daniel (02:07:58.146)
Sphere of consciousness.
Tom Myers (02:08:04.792)
Personhood survives death. But I barely survived a divorce.
Daniel (02:08:08.032)
Yeah.
Tom Myers (02:08:11.126)
Divorce nearly killed me. I don't expect to survive death. you know, if if you go through that, I I I I don't know where you are as a psychonaut, but I've been through those experiences with psychoactive medicines that I certainly died and all right disassembled and and was assembled
Daniel (02:08:14.186)
Daniel (02:08:29.207)
Symbols.
Tom Myers (02:08:33.656)
thing of consciousness and if I go through the bardo or whatever that is and I come out in another body I will either have forgotten or I will be delighted that that is in fact the case. But I don't I don't know that I've done any I think people like Jesus or other enlightened folks might build a soul that would survive death.
Daniel (02:08:54.466)
Get out.
Tom Myers (02:08:54.892)
That's kind of a Gergiefian idea. but I don't think that I've done all the work that we introduced. So I don't I don't expect Tom to show up in any other form. Other than my vibe got to be part of the universe somehow.
Daniel (02:09:04.162)
Right.
Daniel (02:09:08.088)
Thanks for what you contributed while you're here. has is there anything we haven't talked about that you want to make sure comes up?
Tom Myers (02:09:16.712)
No, I think we got this. I just I hope that people will take such joy in the body as I've been able to 'cause I was certainly carefully educated by my parents to have neither a body nor emotions. Right. Feelings are something that other people was was the way I was brought up. And you know, yeah, very new England. So to I'm still doing the work to get out of that
Daniel (02:09:36.674)
Yeah.
Very New England.
Tom Myers (02:09:46.818)
particularly autistic way of being that my parents put in me with all the good intentions in the world. and that I absorbed with all the good intentions in the world but are now irrelevant and need to be taken out. So I really hope that people who are tied up in their careers or tied up in the problems that they have will take some joy in their bodies and I my own research is it will repay you time and again.
Yes. This investment is a a very worthwhile investment.
Daniel (02:10:19.774)
Well said. Thank you so much. It's been great to talk to you, man. hey, what people wanna get your stuff? People wanna get a ten segrety model or they wanna get your book.
Tom Myers (02:10:30.654)
Yeah, yeah. the the kinds of things we're doing, thank you. www anatomytrains.com is where we have all our courses. We have tons of online stuff because of COVID. We've put things up there. We are known for our dissections.
which we do twice a year in Boulder, Colorado. You can see them on TV, which is like looking over the shoulder of somebody who's really good at it, 'cause it's our guy in Boulder who does this. or if you come to Boulder you'll be doing the dissection yourself. Rex for that? Warm and have a checkbook. Okay.
Daniel (02:11:05.272)
You don't have to be a therapist of with 'cause I think to do some of your work you do need to have some background, do I recall that?
Tom Myers (02:11:11.402)
Yes, yeah, you in order to enter our training program, which is my version of Rolfing, which is a program of sessions designed to re configure this fascial system and particularly to get rid of the things that have accumulated over the years in those number three areas. and yes, those are there are requirements for people to come into that. Although we have in recent years taken in a lot of yoga teachers, Pilates teachers and trainers who don't have a manual therapy license.
they need to settle that with whatever jurisdiction they're working in. That's not our job. our job is to train them and what I found is that some of the people who were in movement
who don't have any experience with their hands can translate their movement experience into manual therapy very easily and some cannot. so we ad admit those spells and then if they're not up to it, we say, why don't you go get a little training in massage and then come back and and study with us. but we train physios, osteopaths, chiropractors, massage therapists, acupuncturists, as I say, the movement people who come in. And then occasionally we get people in who are researchers or
I had an animator come in because he wanted to understand movement for or to do his animation. Yeah, yeah. So it's been a wonderful journey to do that. But my people will be upset if I don't say that we have an app that we just put out anatomy trains for all. So if you want to see some strange anatomy like you wanna see this bone you were talking about the fascial bone, I have a bone where you can just not in the bone and things like that either.
These are all up on the website and we hope people will either come to a course, enjoy our website or come see us in a dissection. That's the
Daniel (02:12:55.724)
I always tell people that your book should be I just think anybody who does anything with the body, their your book should be in their library, even if they don't understand it or read it, you could just look through the pictures of that book and almost get the the gestalt. Yeah, you you earlier you said something about being good with words and I was thinking, well, you're good with the pictures too. You really nailed the balance there because you know, the reading is somewhat technical, but the
Tom Myers (02:13:11.328)
It was designed.
Tom Myers (02:13:21.437)
yeah.
Daniel (02:13:22.796)
the imagery speaks volumes and so I think just to put that plug in, I just think that that's a crucial book. I I it's funny 'cause I grabbed my book off the shelf. I like, I should get him to sign this and then I opened it up and you had already signed it and I like, yeah, I did that already. but I think that's an essential reading for everybody with a body. So I'm gonna put that plug in there for anatomy trains.
Tom Myers (02:13:40.694)
Great. Well, we we do have people all over the world. We have a find a practitioner thing on the site if you want to find
Daniel (02:13:46.316)
I w I did want to ask about that because yeah, people want to work with somebody who's trained under you. There's a
Tom Myers (02:13:50.892)
There's a find a practitioner thing and and sometimes if you email us there's somebody that's not up on the list that we can point you to. in terms of finding people who are skilled to do this kind of unraveling. I wish there were more people skilled at this kind of unraveling. and I was just recently doing some work with a bunch of people who were very well trained physios and in that orthopedic world.
And they just went, We did not get this in school. We just did not get this.
kind of point of view. Because if you're thinking of the body as a car and you're thinking of what part to replace. Mm-hmm. If you're thinking of the body as a tensegrity structure, it's a set of relationships. And it's the relationships that are important, not the thing. Mm-hmm. It's how how are you going to deal with the sets of relationships in the body? And that's that's what I'm hoping to you know, I'm working I figure I have about ten years left in me, I'm trying to build a faculty that will carry this thing on.
Daniel (02:14:50.676)
I all I wanna say that you're pretty blessed to have seen so much change from so many people the change from their work happens long after they're gone, you know? And
Tom Myers (02:15:02.227)
Get a lot done if you are willing for somebody else to get the crazy.
Daniel (02:15:05.09)
Well, I think you a lot has happened in your lifetime with your work and that's pretty cool to get to see because obviously it will become more and more mainstream over time. That's the direction it's trending in. I hope so. So I'm glad that you haven't had to struggle in obscurity with this. It seems like the world's embraced it to a degree that is yeah, it's a cool thing.
Tom Myers (02:15:28.054)
It is it is very interesting if you don't mind one more story. The I just went this spring to I was invited to a tongue tie conference. Mm. We've been talking about how the jaw was getting smaller. Well maybe one effect of that is that children are being born with more tongue ties. Mm-hmm. Whatever the reason children a frenulum under the tongue is too short for the baby to latch properly on to the mother. Mastitis, failure to thrive, lots of things follow on from this, so it's
Daniel (02:15:44.888)
Or they release that tissue from a
Tom Myers (02:15:57.908)
the midwives, the old midwives of Europe would keep a long fingernail. And just if the if the kid couldn't latch a lot less than circumcision, let me tell you. and if it's very little blood
Daniel (02:16:06.734)
Cool. Give it a little cuss.
Tom Myers (02:16:14.582)
Yes, it hurts for a few minutes and then the baby you know, put the baby right back on the nipple. so I see the argument for that. And then of course it got medicalized, so then you need a procedure and then it's not gonna happen for several weeks 'cause the procedure has to be gone through. but the procedures are surgical and, you know, not somebody's dirty fingernail going under your tongue. but the in this tongue tie conference we had dentists, orthodontists, surgeons,
osteopaths, orthopods, physiotherapists, speech therapists, lactation consultants, dualist midwives, and all massage therapists and acupuncturists and all. I love gatherings like that. Where everybody's gathered.
But they're all different professions, they all have different lingo, they all have different Argo language in their in their things. And that's a really good opportunity to make people talk together. You have to use the same language. You can't use this term for this when these people over here. You need to be able to talk to each other. It's the same thing. And or you're saying two different things, but it's actually you're saying the same thing, stretch, but it's actually two different things that you're doing, and that needs to be distinguished. We don't
have a tree of spatial medicine, the medicine of the fascia of the body moving, the way we have a tree for psychological medicine and a great big tree for chemical medicine. What we have is yoga, CrossFit, all these things are shooting up like little shoots out of the forest floor. They have to combine into a tree. And that's that's that's what I am grateful to have been able to
Daniel (02:17:56.544)
Wrap them all in a fascial sheath. Well, Tom, I appreciate your time today. I appreciate the work you do. Thank you very much.
Tom Myers (02:17:59.771)
Send them down the tube.
Tom Myers (02:18:06.87)
Right. This has been very enjoyable, Daniel. Thank you.