PHIL WHITE - CO-AUTHOR OF THE LEADER'S MIND & CO-HOST OF THE BASKETBALL STRONG PODCAST - EPISODE 827

Website – https://www.philwhitebooks.com

Phil White is an Emmy-nominated writer and the co-author of The Leader’s Mind. Phil is also the co-host of the Basketball Strong podcast. His other books include The 17 Hour Fast, Waterman 2.0, Unplugged, and Game Changer.

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Have your notebook handy as you listen to this episode with Phil White, co-author of The Leader’s Mind and Co-host of the Basketball Strong Podcast.

What We Discuss with Phil White

Growing up in England and learning to love the game
Attending college in the US at Mid America Nazarene University, an NAIA school where he played for Coach Rocky Lamar
Switching his major from Physical Therapy to English
Writing about the history and culture of DJ’ing
His process for writing books
Volume, Intensity. Density and Collision
Improving an athlete’s mobility
How his experience at Mid America Nazarene shaped him and the influence of that liberal arts environment
“Stop outsourcing your decision making to an inaccurate wearable device.”
How breathing exercises can anyone and everyone
“You downshift your nervous system from sympathetic fight, flight, or freeze into parasympathetic rest, digest, recover. You don’t need a device.”
Ancient wisdom and simplicity
Understanding your own physiology
Getting to your Flow State
“Honestly assess how many minutes a day you are on the socials. And again, if you’re a coach, what is that doing to your family life and doing to your ability to make your clients fit healthy and well? Just think about it.”
The need to limit social media usage
Why teenagers all think they are famous
Simple but not easy
How can you perform optimally and not just survive, but thrive in less than optimal conditions or very adverse conditions?
Ways to help athletes deal with adversity
Contextual Coaching/Human First Coaching
Tim DeFrancesco and the Basketball Strong Podcast

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THANKS, PHIL WHITE

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TRANSCRIPT FOR PHIL WHITE – CO-AUTHOR OF THE LEADER’S MIND & CO-HOST OF THE BASKETBALL STRONG PODCAST – EPISODE 827

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here without my co host, Jason Sunkle tonight, but I am pleased to be joined by author, podcaster, jack of all trades, Phil White. Phil, welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod

[00:00:13] Phil White: Thank you, sir. Appreciate being here.

[00:00:16] Mike Klinzing: Excited to have you on. Looking forward to Diving into all the things that you’ve been able to do throughout your career and tapping into some of the knowledge that you’ve shared both in your books and your podcast and everything that’s going on there.

So I want to give you a chance to share those things. Let’s start by going back in time to when you were a kid. Tell me a little bit about your upbringing and how you got involved in athletics.

[00:00:39] Phil White: Yeah, so growing up in Southwest England, not far from the town of Cheddar, which is where Cheddar cheese comes from, so it’s Cheddar country, dairy farming, a lot of tourism, so kind of close to Bath and Stonehenge, that field full of big rocks down that part of the world.

So yeah, so that was good and just grew up playing, playing outside with my brother, Barry, and he was a much better natural athlete. He actually ended up playing with Southampton FC’s academy for a couple of years. So obviously it. a Premier League team until recently when we got relegated, unfortunately, but Premier League tragedies aside, yeah, he was a great, a great sprinter.

Naturally way stronger, but so it’s weird because most people are looking up to an older brother athletically, and I was looking up to a younger one. But anyway, so I kind of found my jam with basketball. A friend, Steve Mather, introduced me to that. And a good friend of his was coaching.

His two sons and he was involved in kind of the county setup, which is our equivalent of state. And so eventually I worked my way up from being able to not make a layup at probably age 14, 15 just starting for county. And then I also at a Nike camp ran into a guy named Anthony Barnett. And he played for the Bristol Buccaneers in the National League in England, and so anyone listening that may have come up at that time will know his name is the big 6’7 beast, and if you didn’t move your feet, he was going to dunk all over you all day.

And so people may not think of of basketball in England this way, but I was one of one of only two white guys on this team. This was inner city Bristol. It was dangerous enough that he would have to come meet me at Bristol Temple Meads train station and walk me to and from practice and games.

So I was sacrificing from an early age to try to learn the game. And to get there, you had to, you can get there by train, but you had to take a bunch of trains and then it was probably a 30 minute walk. So that was two in front practice. I get back at midnight or one in the morning. My dad had picked me up from the train station.

We drive five miles back home. And then there was usually a game away at the weekend, like Peterborough or pick anywhere, pick any mid sized city in England that we, we played them. And because of Anthony and a couple of other guys, we we often beat him. And there’s an old joke in England when they say, what position did you play?

And you say left. Yeah, left back in the changing rooms. So, it wasn’t quite that, but I was on the bench. But, again, in practice, there was a guy, Aaron, that the Mac McClung dunk, where he could touch it off the top of the shooting square, pull it back, and then reverse it, he could do that at 6’3 And if you didn’t move your feet…

You were going to get crammed on. And so I learned how to defend and eventually applied for this service called College Prospects of America. And I think it’s still going and they represent you and send out your, both your academic and your sports profile. And a lot of times they were mailing this thing out late nineties.

There was none of this none of these recruiting apps, no huddle, you know? And so. Yeah, I almost went to the school where it sounds like one of your kiddos is going at Denison. Almost went to Kenyon College, but D3 doesn’t offer athletic scholarships. And so I went back home and went to Plymouth University for the best part of a year.

But when I was home for Christmas, I found an old recruiting letter that had somehow missed. And it was from Coach Rocky Lamar, who anyone that’s played College basketball in America. Any coach knows that name. He recently retired with 803 wins. He’s on the list with Coach K, Jim Boeheim as all time leader in college basketball and won a national championship and should have won many, many more, I think six straight final fours in the NAIA and Yeah, just some amazing players there.

Aaron Harris, Dan Fleming. So again, I had to play JV basically and hardly even sniff varsity, but play basketball and soccer for him for him at mid American Nazarene in Kansas City, met my wife. And now we have two beautiful kids. Johnny’s 16, Harry’s almost 14, and we live in Evergreen, Colorado, which is just up I 70 West from Denver.

So there’s the life story.

[00:04:37] Mike Klinzing: There you go. What was the transition like? Coming overseas to the U. S., leaving England.

[00:04:42] Phil White: Hard to leave my mom, my brother, my sisters real close to all my nieces and nephews. And my dad grinds my dad is where my work ethic comes from. He’s a small stonemason’s business and worked all the hours God gave and drove a taxi at the weekend.

Even ended up taking a third job cleaning a car dealership to make some extra money to be able to help me and help my brother. And yeah, and then my mom was a freelance journalist. She worked for a mayor of our local town. She worked real estate and so they were just both grinders. And then my mom was the storyteller, which is where, which is where the storytelling piece comes from.

[00:05:22] Mike Klinzing: Did your parents watch you play a lot when you were in England? And then when you came over here, did they ever come over to watch you play? Never.

[00:05:29] Phil White: No. My dad would do the books for his business if he had to drop me off at practice. And then, like I said, I was solo. Going into Bristol and then National League and you know, my mom was dealing with everything on some, some things on the home front and health wise.

She’s had fibromyalgia and arthritis for a long time and dealing with all of that drama. And and my dad was just grinding always. He took one week off a year. A guy at his church would rent out a beach house to anyone that wanted to pay 50 pounds. I think it was maybe 75 pounds near the end and being an English summer, it could be.

75 degrees and beautiful every day and it could be rained out every day. And that was, that was the only time he took off all year, bro. Just grinding since he was 15, 16 years old.

[00:06:11] Mike Klinzing: When you came over here and you’re playing college basketball, what was your thought process academically? What’d you major in?

What’d you think you wanted to do with yourself?

[00:06:20] Phil White: So initially I was an athletic training major and I really liked that we had some great PTs, a great strength coaching program there now it’s Whitney Rodden took over from Coach Cross, who had worked with Tubby Smith, had worked real close with the Olympic Training Center down in Colorado Springs, an Olympic lift in, and imagine the gunnery sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, that was Coach Cross, right?

Without the swearing, because it’s a Christian school. But he would kick guys out of the weight room for bench press and he would say, he’d say, tell me a sport where you have to lie on your back and push weight off you . So that’s funny. Yeah. So that was, that was interesting. And he would close our weightlifting sessions when everyone’s fatigued.

He’d go out and put his big old Ford truck in neutral and have three guys on the back. We’d be divided into teams of three and have us push them across the parking lot. We’ll just kind of be yelling that we were a bunch of weaklings out the car window, like just an absolute trip, but it got me into Olympic lifting and kind of like with Andy Galpin who self taught himself it it was a little bit of that, but then coach helped me and then coach Rodden helped me.

And so I never competed in it, but, just kind of kept that up pretty good. And so yeah, just a great, and they were actually, there was only one of two schools to compete every year at collegiate nationals against division one programs. And we had some athletes like John Booth played on the Chiefs played, he actually caught the last touchdown pass of NFL Europe.

When his team won, I think he was on the Amsterdam team. And him and his brother James were just athletic freaks. And my buddy Jermaine was from Jamaica, our 4×1 team and 4×4 team was beating Division 1 squads. And so that was kind of fun to watch. Great track team as well. So yeah, it was Real experience to be around these freaky athletes, which at the NAIA level, I never thought, and I never thought the level of coaching would be there either.

[00:08:08] Mike Klinzing: What was your favorite memory from playing basketball at college?

[00:08:11] Phil White: I think just practicing with and against a player like Dan Fleming, who, he broke Scotty Pippen’s NAIA scoring record in the national tournament one year, and Just having to go against a guy like that in practice and see some, or another guy, Adam Utz, who was an All American, he was probably 6’4 and a half, 6’5, and built like Charles Barkley, like people, centers would come in and they’d be 6’9, 6’10, and they’d think, I’m going to dunk all over this guy, but they were not dunking on Adam Utz, he was, he would hit him freaking hard.

He was a bull in the post and a grinder. And so just, yeah, a combination of Dan Fleming’s just sheer athleticism and scoring talent and then a bull like Adam Utz and having to try to but belly up with a guy that outweighs you by 50 60 pounds in the post when you’re giving up size and height and that that was yeah some interesting stuff.

[00:09:05] Mike Klinzing: Were you planning to stay in the U. S. when you graduated or were you planning to go back to England?

[00:09:08] Phil White: I was probably planning to go back but then one time I was out with a group of friends at Old Chicago and it was another group of friends there and, and there was my, eventually one of these girls was My future wife’s cousin.

And I think the only conversation I had with my future wife, Nicole, was I said, Hey, can I try that drink? That looks kind of weird. It was like some orange cocktail thing. And my buddy, lucky Tyler Lux he said, he was like, no, don’t be a pussy, man. You know, we got to be up at five for lifting, dude. Coach Cross is going to be kicking our ass.

You can’t be doing that. And lucky he was a pole vaulter actually, but just a freaky athlete. And so him and my training buddies, were kicking my ass. Like, no, bro. You can’t touch that. So anyway, we we’re in the cafeteria the next day after this lifting session for breakfast. And her cousin, Emily comes up.

It was like, Hey, remember my cousin Nicole last night? And I was like, yeah we talked for a couple of minutes. And she was like, well, here’s a number. She wants to take you out on a date. And Dude, that doesn’t happen too often. That

[00:10:04] Mike Klinzing: That works really well. That’s the way you want to have it set up.

[00:10:06] Phil White: And if you saw a picture of my wife I I married up a few divisions a few leagues. And so, yeah, we were engaged after four months, married for another four. And then I did I did 68 hours of school, bro. I put my junior and senior year together. 34. hours per semester for two semesters.

She was working in an accounting firm to support us. And then, yeah, that was that. So I somehow got a ring on her finger. I don’t know how July 4th was our 20 year anniversary. So yeah, I was staying at that point.

[00:10:37] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, absolutely. Congratulations on all of that. When the, when the girl comes and talks to you, that’s always a positive.

Same idea. Same idea. My wife, we were out at like a whatever bar club and this place was called the basement and there was like, it was set up like an old grandparents basement like washers and dryers, whatever. And she was dancing on the washer and came down and she was supposedly looking for a guy with blonde curly hair and found me with.

What little hair I had even back then. And so yeah, so it’s just it makes it easy on us guys.

[00:11:09] Phil White: Oh I still don’t know what she was thinking. She probably doesn’t either. I talked to my good buddy Ben Spicer back in England recently, my rugby playing friend, my him and Jono Lloyd, kind of my training buddies.

We go run sprints for an hour at the rugby club and then go lift in this little gym up there at North, North Dorset Rugby of all places. And And he said, 20 years, bloody hell mate, she would have got less than that for murder.

[00:11:35] Mike Klinzing: Oh, isn’t that the truth? We’re all, we’re all lucky and blessed in our own way, right? That, somehow they stay with us goofy guys and somehow put up with, put up with all our shenanigans. That’s the way, that’s the way it goes. All right. So, so talk to me a little bit about your Career after you graduate, you’re married, you’re trying to figure things out.

You’re in a new country. Where do you go? What’s the idea?

[00:11:57] Phil White: Yeah, so I switched majors to English. I had a great professor called Tyler Blake and just blessed to learn from him. And then As luck would have it, my newspaper advisor, Kevin Wright, was the chief editor of the Olathe Daily News, which is the paper there by Mid America and Suburban Kansas City, and we had been tasked with a professor called Jeannie Milhoff, who is also amazing, had us do a feature story on someone interesting on campus, right?

And it couldn’t be a student, it had to be some You know, staff member and so a good family friend of my wife’s role, Roland Gill, and who, who since unfortunately had Parkinson’s in his past, but him and his wife were great family friends of my wife’s family. And, and he was a locksmith and he got so good at being a locksmith that the FBI and the CIA would have him come in to crack safes And this guy was a pilot, he was a hunter, he was just a real renaissance man and a great storyteller, almost like an honorary grandparent to my kids really.

And so, did this story on Roland, and Professor Milhoff liked this story I guess, and so I was back in England grinding, working double shifts. Pubs, which when you go to a Nazarene school where there’s no drinking or dancing allowed, at least allegedly, it’s kind of ironic when you’re working behind a bar and drinking at the rugby club on a Saturday, you know?

I don’t think my Guinness habit would have gone over too well. But anyway, so irony aside, I got back and my mother in law Janice said hey, have you seen the LA for Daily News yet? And I said, no, what do you mean? And she was like, well, your story is the cover story of the new issue. And I was like, what are you talking about?

She said that, that piece you did on Roland, I guess your advisors like that. And so that was my first portfolio piece, bro. And then a good buddy of mine, Luke Kreisel was editor at Nylon Magazine and they had a thing called Nylon for Guys as well. So really a fashion magazine, but this guy was interview, he was out getting drunk with Matthew McConaughey like doing some really cool shit.

And so, He started having me do front of book copy which in magazine speak is tiny pieces like 200 words on Japanese salvage denim that this American company is sourcing or just this random mini film reviews, album reviews just throwing me some work to build up my portfolio and really mentored me through that.

And then he called me one day and he was like, Hey bro, you know that That book I’m writing. So he had teamed up with a guy, Rob Princip, who started this Scratch DJ Academy with a member of with Jam Master Jay from Run DMC. Already just teaching people how to DJ. And so they started on vinyl, then they got into CDJs, and now like the Pit Pioneer stuff you can do with MP3s.

And Luke had agreed to do a book on kind of the history and culture of DJing and a bit of a how to, but his dad was real sick with stomach cancer and so he was going back and forth between New York and then to London, and then an hour and a half, two hour drive back down to where we’re from. And, and luckily his dad was in remission and managed to come through, but he was like, dude, I owe these guys 80,000 words in three and half months.

I got words. Do you think you could step in, help me finish this thing? two year old at the time, Johnny’s now 16, so it would have been 14 years ago, and a full time job at a software company. I literally worked every night and every weekend, and I’d be up till five in the morning interviewing DJs on the and it was everyone from DJ Jazzy Jeff, who went from the Fresh Prince to being like a really well regarded house music producer BT, the Grammy nominated composer that scored the film Monster Above and Beyond, the guys from England, Paul Oakenfold, Pete Tong, anyone hip hop or electronic that you’ve heard of in the last 30 years we interviewed and then we wrote it.

And then three and a half months later, bro, we had like a 90,000 word book done. And so that proved I could do it. And that really gave me the confidence to start doing some of these other books.

[00:15:42] Mike Klinzing: When you write a book, what’s your process? How do you go from idea to getting those words down on the page to final product?

Just, is it, is it always the same or is it different depending on the topic or how you’re approaching it? Yeah. Just how do you go through and write those things?

[00:15:57] Phil White: So the next two were history books. And so I was in a dusty, archive a lot. The Truman Library in Independence, Missouri doing a book called Whistle Stop on Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign.

And they were so convinced that he was cooked in that election that they stopped polling in mid September. Like, imagine that, right? If Gallup was like, no, we’re calling it, he’s fucked. So we yeah, but he came back and won. And the way he did it was these 350 plus Little train stops around the country and there were these seven young guys feeding him information on each local town.

So he could say, Oh, dang, I was really sorry to hear about that fire. You know, you guys had a couple of years ago in your little downtown, but I hear you bounce back strong. Or if there was a baseball player from there, he would make a crack about the guy and how he was doing in the major leagues. And so we had all this kind of local information fed to him and it really allowed him to connect.

And he literally speak from the back of the train in each one of these little towns and connected enough with. Small town folk that he managed to win this election. So a lot of time in the archives and then the National Churchill Museum in Fulton in Missouri is where Winston Churchill gave what he called his most important speech called the Iron Curtain speech in 1946, which is really the first time either England or America told the truth about communist Russia and what they were up to.

And so I wanted to tell the story of how the hell the most famous man in the world, the most famous British leader of all time, ended up in Little Town in rural Missouri and what the speech meant that he gave there. So that was a lot different than working with Andy Galpin or Kelly Starrett, where it was mainly interview based Brian McKenzie, Fergus Conley and for those books, for the human performance books, we, I just challenged him.

I said, guys, I need 10 chapter titles or 10 big topic areas. Can you do that? Yeah. Okay. I can, I can do that. So they put that in a Google doc. And then. Okay, I need five to seven main talking points per chapter. Can you do that? Yeah, I can do that. They do that. And then I just interview them around it.

And then I’m from there. I research it and they send me some stuff. And I do a chapter, I send it, they do a quick edit, send it back and my good lady wife, Nicole, God bless her, edits all of my crap. And we, then we lock the chapter and we knock them down, chapters one through ten. And at the end, you get either a phone book size book, like Game Changer with Fergus, or you get a little book, like Unplugged, or like the 17 hour fast with with Dr.

Frank Merritt. And by the end, I’ve basically had a masterclass in fasting, in mobility, in physiology, in breathwork from an Andy Galpin from a Brian McKenzie. So I feel like I’m getting an education that should be costing me six figures a year from the absolute best in the world. And it’s just a real blessing to be able to share that with people.

[00:18:45] Mike Klinzing: Yeah absolutely. All right, let’s go through a couple of the books that you just talked about and maybe pull out one or two big takeaways, something that you went into it that you did not know prior to going into the book. So let’s start with, let’s start with Game Changer.

[00:18:59] Phil White: So really Fogus has this four pronged approach to everything really and it’s VIDC.

So it’s Volume, Intensity. Density and collision. And his point being that you cannot, you can only prioritize one of these qualities if you’re turning it up to 10 out of 10. You can maybe hit a couple like at 7 or 8, but you cannot turn them all up to the max. And he found that too many sports and college teams were trying to turn it to the max all the time, and wondering why their injury rate was skyrocketing, guys are burning out, and they’re not seeing the gains that they want to see.

Off the field, in the weight room. or indeed on game day. And so really working backwards from game day, initially we were going to call it game day ready, working backwards from game day and understanding what the demands of game day are going to be, and how often you’re going to have to perform them in the season, and then figuring out what the load exposure needs to be to bulletproof people, and then to develop these for the VIDC quadrants in a sensible and responsible manner that looks at the athlete as a whole human.

And this was years before anyone was talking load management, like Fergus is so far ahead of his time with this stuff. And this was before I’ve done some running for Smarter Base, which is now teamworks, and they’re doing an awesome job of quantifying and they’re also real smart about subjective data.

But Fergus was way ahead on subjective data, dude, like just way ahead, way ahead of his time on load management. And, and, and realizing that that does not just mean a guy gets a day off more and sits on the bench , right? Sorry,

[00:20:41] Mike Klinzing: Let me ask you this. So your experience as a college basketball player, I’m going to just kind of compare and contrast it with mine and then with the theories that are being laid out in this book because I go back to, so I played college basketball from 88 to 92.

I played at Kent State and my coach, Jim McDonald, these concepts of whether you want to call it load management, whether you want to call it understanding the Demands that are being placed on the body was not, we were completely old school. I mean, there was no discussion whatsoever of, Hey, we might want to save these guys legs or, Hey, Mike placed.

37 minutes a game in the real games, but the day before practice or the day before a game, we’re still going to have a two and a half hour practice, or we’re still going to have every single guy going full speed. And I can count the number of days off that we had that were unexpected days off in my four years.

I could probably count them on less than Less than one hand. Let’s put it that way. And so it was just a completely different, there was no thought of, Hey, how are you guys feeling? Or do we need to have a recovery day? Or maybe we should have the starters go a little bit lighter. There was none of that.

How was it like for you with your team? Do you remember it being to that extent? Or were you starting to see some changes in terms of the way that coaches prepared in your own personal experience?

[00:22:02] Phil White: The guy that really got me in good overall shape was outside of both Jono and Spicer, the rugby players I mentioned was Steve, this old American coach that somehow ended up in Bristol and was coaching us knuckleheads.

And he’d have us run like run the stairs up and down on an overpass, come back to the outdoor court, do 50 push ups, go and do this agility drill in the grass with cones, run back to the overpass over the top of the motorway in Bristol, a busy city, you know back down and just do these wicked circuits.

So I think There’s an element in Fergus’s approach that is old school, like Steve, like, he came out of the streets of Brooklyn, ran some AAU squads there, and the guy was relentless, just relentlessly hardcore, screaming at us. Kind of like, picture John Mosley, right, at ELAC? Like, if anyone’s watched Last Chance, you, and if you haven’t, both as a model of a human being and a Christian driven leader, check out John Mosley and Rob and their crew there.

Yeah, man, I’m rewatching season two and holy crap, the guy’s the best leader ever. But anyway, that aside, that was my Jon Mosley and I needed him to kick my ass. Now, in college, Coach Kross was very much into old school periodization very much into every sport has to Olympic lift and very cute with not very smart with not trying to make a football program into a basketball program because when you’re being paid like 40, 000 a year as an NAI strength strength coach and you have 12 to 16 sports team men and women and you may have one or two grad assistants and that’s all you got This is a different deal to what we see at Alabama football, North Carolina basketball, right?

For sure, absolutely. But he, he was able to nail the basics, like Javorik, if anyone’s listening that knows about Olympic lifting, you’ll have heard the name Javorik, like the complexes, complex one, two, and three in the weight room. We do that with the stick, right? Or the PVC pipe. We do it with the 45 pound bar.

And if you’re not nailing your complexes, he won’t even let you put weight on the bar, dude. And Javorik was his mentor. Like he was at Johnson County Community College, like one of the greatest minds ever in Olympic weightlifting worldwide. And so they had figured out together that we got to get these kids mobile.

We got to, if they can’t do an overhead squat with a stick, kind of like Gray Cook, you’ve got to move well before you can move often. And so I know guys, particularly some taller guys with long levers that never put weight on the bar. It was stick and it was bar and it was Javorik’s complexes. And that’s all it, and if they couldn’t handle that, he would break the complexes down into dumbbells.

And he had an old VHS tape, which is still doing the rounds amongst us old people. Where the next coach Whitney Rodden, I think was the girl doing the movements, but he would lend those tapes out to people in the summer and be like, dude, just what do you have? And the guy would be like, Oh, my dad’s got a couple of rusty old dumbbells.

Okay. I don’t care. You don’t have a bar. Do these complexes three times a week. And guys will come back in phenomenal shape, man. It was basic. So basics and a smart mind.

[00:25:17] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I think when you look at the way that things have transpired in the last 10 or 15 years and how much smarter everybody has become about what we need to be able to maximize performance, it really has been, I think, a huge benefit to the athletes that are playing.

Again, it doesn’t matter whether it’s basketball or any other sport. I just think that as coaches, we just have a much greater understanding. There’s so much more. knowledge out there about what should be done. And yet you still have guys, obviously, Fergus, that you’re talking about that have this tremendous ability to think ahead, right?

And just be on the cutting edge of that next thing because of the way that they approach stuff. So I think that’s really when I look at it, I look at the, some of the biggest changes from back a long time ago when I was playing. And even in the early years of my coaching career, the way that We did things back then.

You look at it now and you’re like, man, how are we possibly thinking that we were, we were maximizing either our own performance or the performance of our athletes thinking about it as coaches. I always say this like we, when I was coaching my first year coaching high school, when I got my teaching job and I was an assistant varsity coach, we had a really young staff and there’d be days where we’d practice like with high school kids, like three and a half hours.

Cause we had nowhere else to go. You know, none of us were married and you know, whatever. And it’s just like, I look back on it, like

[00:26:39] Phil White: The glory days, brother. You can, we, exactly. Jono or Spice, if I was working with Jono at the pub shout out to the spread Eagle in some good, good times there, both working and having a few beers to be candid, but if we weren’t doing that, then we’d be driving after a shift or a double shift to the rugby club, or if Jono wasn’t working with me, Spice would come pick me up and.

Like I said, we’d go hammer the sprints until we couldn’t feel our feet and then, then go and lift. Right. Yep. And that was good times. And that was, man, like even the soundtrack from that, my oldest son’s getting in the system of the downright and Spicer just played the song toxicity. That was like our eye of the tiger for anyone that knows that.

And so it just came to me the other day when we were on the way to work, I was like, you need to pre work. He’s working at a coffee shop now and he’s saving his money for college. So I see myself in that, but it triggered a memory. And I was like, here’s your pre workout song and it’s Toxicity. So sometimes you need that.

And that was old school workouts, man. The same, my buddy, Corey Maxwell my buddy Asmar in college. And then Lucky, we will lift him. We’d be in the weight room for two hours. Just one team would come in, you’d talk to your buddies there, and you’d maybe talk, try to talk to a couple of girls and fail desperately, and then you just keep going.

But, but it was the community aspect. And, or you go down to the training room if you had a bit of a niggle and just… It was almost like the small town I was from, a small college. And the fact that we had Coach Lamar and an amazing staff, some guys that were knocking on the door of being NBA level talent like Dan Fleming and Aaron Harris.

And then you also had You know, Coach Rodden taking over from, from old Coach Cross in the weight room and a great athletic training staff, like it was a mix of a small town, but a small town of experts. And so even at that point, I was gleaning everything I could from them.

[00:28:34] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. To be able to be in those environments.

It’s amazing how the number of people that you talk to that so much of their success is set up by happenstance of just the people that they ended up being lucky enough to be coached by or just to be around because of the situation, whether it’s the school that they went to or the town that they grew up in or whatever it might be and how much the, I don’t want to say necessarily luck because it’s not always luck, but just The people that you get in contact with early in your career.

And then if you take the time to build relationships with those people, all of that eventually just puts people in a position to be able to have success later in life. And I found that so often on the podcast, Phil, that you’re just talking to people and it’s like, boom, all of a sudden I’m like, man, this guy was coached by this famous coach way before that coach was famous.

And then as that coach moved on up the ladder, then they remembered, Hey, This kid played for me or this guy was my graduate assistant and boom, before you know it, it just kind of pays itself forward. It’s amazing how that works.

[00:29:34] Phil White: It really is. And just and even soccer team, like my buddy, Justin Wack and his wife, Liz, she played women’s soccer at Mid America.

It was the first year of the varsity there. Justin and I we lived Two minutes from each other. We’re still great friends to this day and our families and everything. But, you know Dale Mitchell, Travis Emerson my buddy, Alfredo O’Huela, who moved back to Columbia. And at that point, if you were foreign and you could kick a ball to the wall, you were given a scholarship.

Like my brother thought it was the funniest thing ever having played for Southampton FC. Like again, one of the top. You know, 20 teams in the world or sorry, in England, that I, someone would give me money to play soccer, but it was basically Jamaicans on the track team Central and South Americans, and then a few Americans.

And it was just a melting pot, man. And so be able to hear from Alfredo about growing up in Columbia, like two, two of the cousins from Argentina. I’d never even met anyone from Argentina, bro. So just being able to To be around these education, right? The cultural, the cultural education and Jamaica to get down with the pat one dial dialect and know when they were swearing about the coach and laugh about it on the bench and just and, and coach would say, first pass, free pass.

Me, don’t have to run anymore in the summer. Like the worst heat dude I’ve ever experienced in 2001. It doesn’t get the triple digits in England, dude. So, or at least it didn’t. The Jamaicans could have run sideways. They probably could have crawled faster than everyone. And Jermaine was like a 45.

1, 400 meter runner. And I swear, dude, again, you don’t think this at NAIA level. It’s 104 degrees. Everyone’s dying. And these guys are just jogging past you and you’re going as hard and fast as you can. So I mean, I, I, any, anyone that’s listening that has a son or a daughter and is thinking about schools.

Maybe your son or daughter is like me, like, they’re old school, they’re, they want a small town environment, they don’t want to be in a lecture hall with 500 people, like, 20 people, 15 people in a class would do better, they’ve got better access to professors. You, you want quality, value driven education, like, look at somewhere like Mid American Nazarene University, like, you get that education, you get that small town feel, and you get these friendships and mentorships that last for life.

And sure, it may not open doors like a Harvard or Stanford, North Carolina, but… There’s something to be said for a small four year liberal arts school, man. There’s a lot to be said.

[00:32:01] Mike Klinzing: I think what you have to, what I realized after going through it as a parent first with my daughter who athletics was not a factor and now going through with my son who’s going to be a senior in high school this coming year and trying to help them to make decisions.

One, I realized that my input or what I can contribute to those discussions is pretty small. Like when I went to school, I chose the only division one scholarship that I had. And that was pretty much why I chose the school. There was, I didn’t care, I didn’t really care about the professors, the campus, the, this, that, it was like, Hey, this is a division one scholarship.

This is where I’m going to go. And so when I start trying to help my kids, I’m like, well, I don’t know. And then neither one of them have my son a little bit more than my daughter, my older daughter, but they don’t have a clear picture of, I want to be a lawyer or I want to be a doctor or I want to be this.

And so then you’re like, okay, well, we’re not looking for a specific. Program at a school because we don’t really know what you’re going to do. And probably chances are, even if you say, you know what you’re going to do when you’re 17, you probably are going to end up somewhere else anyway. So it’s just, it’s hard to give, I find it to be hard to give good advice.

And what I’ve found at least is when you go and you visit the school, that it’s more of a feel like you walk on campus and the kids like. I feel like this would be a place that would be good for me. And it’s not so much anything tangible. It’s more a case of it just feels right, at least in my two experiences to this point.

So I think you’re right though. You can find, I think there’s a lot of places, big, small. NAI, Division 1, Division 3. I think there’s a lot of places that you can go to school and you can have a good experience and you can get out of it what you put into it ultimately. That’s the message I always try to get my own kids.

[00:33:42] Phil White: And if you want to run sprints with Jocko Willink, go where my wife went, which is point, sorry Jocko, you’re about to get invaded on your workouts when you and your wife are going to the sports. But the one time I interviewed him, he did let this slip. Twice a week, him and his wife go up early morning to the NAS, as he calls it, Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego.

And if you walk on that campus, even if you don’t know who Jocko is or wouldn’t find that appealing, look out the ocean over the point there, right by Sunset Cliffs, and tell me that that is not the best view in the world. And my wife got to go there for free, bro. So yeah. There you go. That works.

[00:34:18] Mike Klinzing: If you go to school in San Diego, you’re doing something right.

[00:34:20] Phil White: And if you’ve got any writers listening, Dean Nelson at the journalism program has written for the Boston Globe, the New York Times, LA Times, he’s the best mentor I’ve ever had. So I’m doing some recruiting for these Nazarene school bros and I’m not even a Nazarene. Nice work.

[00:34:35] Mike Klinzing: I like it, man. I like it. I like it.

All right. Let’s talk unplugged.

[00:34:40] Phil White: Yeah. So here’s the premise, stop outsourcing your decision making to an inaccurate wearable device. Okay. So Michael Easter, who wrote, wrote a good book about how you got to do hard stuff and you’ve got to carry heavy stuff, check out Michael Easter’s work, recently did a little study and he found that the inaccuracy is very prevalent with wearables still, they’ve got way more sensors.

They got. Oxygen meters and HRV and all this crap and the least error rate he found was plus minus eight percent and he found that a twenty dollar or less pedometer from Walgreens or CVS is more accurate at step counting than like a thousand dollar, I won’t mention a brand because I don’t want to piss anyone off triathlete watch should we say.

And so if This device is a minimum of 8% accurate you know, inaccurate, sorry. So you’re looking at 92% accuracy and also you don’t, are you, are you really willing to put all your eggs in this basket? And what Brian McKenzie found, bro, is like. I’m getting a sleep score of 95 and I feel like shit. All right, I’m foggy, there’s no amount of caffeine on the face of this good God’s green earth that is going to help me.

The next night I get a 67 and I woke up on a tear. I woke up a bit early, went and crushed some eggs. And dude, I worked for like eight hours straight with no caffeine. I was in a flow state. If my watch’s recommendation of don’t train today Maybe back off on the work if they’ve, they’ve started tying some stuff into slack now dude, like Chris, Chris Winter, the sleep doctor is kind of up in arms about this, as well he should be, if you need sleep advice, Chris Winter, Matthew Walker, those are your guys, but stop, stop abdicating your decision making to a device.

So the three stages that we go through in Unplugged with Andy and Brian, and again, like, just being able to mention these gentlemen is enough. Being able to work alongside them over the years is just a real blessing and a treat. So stage one is, your coach, or a, and, or a device, say Coach’s Eye was the one that was popular when we were writing this book, your coach is using Coach’s Eye, say, to film you, and they’re like, bro, Here’s the freaking problem, right?

Look at how your left knee is collapsing, or maybe both knees, when you squat. That’s going to, that’s going to be a problem over time. So let’s, let’s, you show me what your starting foot position is on this squat. Okay. That’s wrong. Okay. Why is it wrong? Here’s why it’s wrong. Okay. Let, let’s look at your finish position where you’re ending up.

Cause if, as Kelly Starrett says, if we can, if we can sort out you entering the tunnel at the right angle and exiting the tunnel at the right angle, what happens in the middle is probably going to be okay and you’re not going to crash into the wall or another vehicle. Okay, so I’ve learned this later from Kelly.

So step two is, I’m going to have you redo it with your original faulty mechanics. Tell me if when you get to that midpoint, if you can feel that that knee starting to do something weird, and you’re like, you do three or four, maybe it’s just an air squat, and you’re like, shit, That doesn’t actually feel very good.

I’ve never noticed that before. And it’s probably because your body is like, there’s some load on the bar, right? I’m trying to just get this thing up and down, not get stuck in the hole, pop back up, get the damn thing done, move on to the next set. But you’ve never noticed, for whatever reason. So you feel that, right?

You feel that, yeah? Okay, now let’s do it my way. We’re just going to grieve the pattern unloaded, okay? Do you feel that hitch now in your giddy up? No, coach, it actually feels way better. I’m not feeling that restriction. Okay, now I want you to do it without me looking at it, and I’m not going to give you any cues.

And eventually you go through this process to where there’s more, you’ve used this, this app minimally as a tool, which it should be, it shouldn’t be the main arbiter. It’s been an experienced coach who is just backing up what he’s seeing. With some objective data to get my buy in as that athlete. And now I’ve got you to the point of self awareness, where you can say, Shit, that didn’t, that didn’t feel very good unloaded.

I can’t imagine with three, four hundred pounds what that’s going to do to my knee over time. And now you’re able to course correct. So we go from third party tool being used by an experienced coach as a tool, not as a replacement for the coach. It will never it should and will never happen. If if I I just don’t see an AI or this shit.

No, it’s just another tool in the toolbox. I’ve got now to the place of self awareness, where I recognize the 4D motor pattern. And stage three is I’m able to self correct it now. Myself, so that when I layer on speed, power, strength, I am not layering that on top of dysfunction, which over time is going to lead to injury.

And if, even if it doesn’t, it’s going to compromise performance. That’s Andy’s three stages. So go check out his, his series with Huberman on the Huberman podcast, go check out his stuff with Peter Ateeh on his podcast, and he says it way better than I do, but basically that’s, and also our thing is. It’s not a Strava fail if your device doesn’t log your workout.

You still did the damn miles, bro. Your physiology knows. Like, hashtag Strava fail. Like, oh, Strava didn’t work. Whatever shall I do? And it’s not a knock on Strava. And Strava is doing an amazing job of data collection and they’re sharing these insights with the masses. It’s a great company and they have great tools.

You know, Garmin’s great. Suunto, Aura, Whoop, they’re all great, but they are tools. I am using a microphone now. That is a tool. I am using periodic audio, shout out to those guys, periodic audio headphones. I am using we tried to use my Rode Pro car, my Rode mixing desk, right? These are a tool. They’re not having the conversation.

You and I are having the conversation and everyone at home is listening. Do you see the difference? Stop advocating. your decision making to inaccurate devices. Use it in a minimal way to get the athlete to raise their self awareness to the point where they feel the error, they recognize the error, and they are able to course correct by themselves without any tool or device needed.

[00:41:30] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, that’s a great way. To approach it. And I think it’s something that people, as this new stuff has come online, people haven’t really figured out the best way to utilize. And as you said, too often, I think people use it as a crutch as sort of the, the tell all of this is the whole thing that.

Everything that I’m doing is all about. And then if I’m not logging in, if I’m not checking it, if I’m not trying to meet whatever goals or criteria it’s throwing at me, that I haven’t had success. And that puts people in a different, in a difficult position. I know just as an example with my son back now, so now again, he’s going to be a senior, but when we first started shooting out like a shooting machine, so this is probably when he’s in like.

Seventh or eighth grade maybe when we started really taking the time and shooting, he’d get frustrated at the machine, like miscounted or if it wasn’t working accurately, it was almost like he didn’t even want to do the workout. If it was, if it wouldn’t keep his stats, like, ah, I can’t, I don’t want to do that.

You know, it’s not keeping track. And you can understand that to some degree from a kid’s perspective that yeah, you want to add to your total and there’s a leaderboard and all this stuff, and so you get it. And at the same time, he’s now gotten to the point as he’s matured and understood that like the workout is the workout.

It’s not. The end statistics don’t tell the story of, Hey, did I get better today? Like I can go out on the court and be away from the machine and get more work, get things that are more realistic, that are going to translate more to my actual performance in a game than necessarily being on. the shooting machine.

There’s a place for all of it, but it’s just interesting that as you go through, to your point, you have to use it as a tool and not the be all end all.

[00:43:05] Phil White: Right. And Brian McKenzie and Emily Hightower on team are doing a great job with Shift, where there might be some tracking involved these days, but knowing Brian is ideal, I doubt it.

But if there is, it’s just a little insight. But breath awareness, the quickest way to shift your physical, emotional, spiritual, mental state that we have available, and Patrick McKeown and others have done, have done the research on this, so we know it If you breathe in a certain pattern for three and a half minutes, and the simplest way I found it there’s an HRV study, they compared a bunch of different patterns, and they found like 5.

5 breaths a minute. So let’s say five or six, all right? So you breathe in, and, and I’m just talking about an even nasal inhale, not super deep. Oh, take a deep breath. No, that’s actually moving the physiology the wrong way. Take a reasonably deep breath. You know, take, take a moderate breath in, in through your nose and then go out through your nose and try to get to say five or six breaths a minute.

You do that for three and a half minutes. You have downshifted your nervous system from sympathetic fight, flight, or freeze into parasympathetic rest, digest, recover. You don’t need a device. Okay. Huberman did some great protocols for whoop recently. So if you have a whoop band. Check out, I mean, Huberman’s not playing and the breath stuff he got mostly from Brian Mackenzie because they’re good buddy.

I was, the only time I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Andrew was just in passing. His bulldog happened to be boarding at Brian Mackenzie’s house and I happened to be staying with Brian and I met Andrew before he broke cover, but I could see greatness in him and he’s had great success. But, so if you need a device to guide you and you have a Woot band, say check out Andrew’s protocols that he did with Woot because they’re phenomenal.

And again, look to Brian McKenzie and Emily Hightower at Shift for some other protocols, but these, it’s what my friends Joel Einhorn and, and J. R. Smith at HANA, which is an Ayurvedic supplement company where they source everything from the Himalayan plateau, and if it’s good enough for Jimmy Chin, or for Travis Rice, or for Ian Walsh, it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me.

So top quality supplements, but we talk about ancient wisdom from modern living, so breath. is the most underrated tool to tinker with your physiology out there. And a combination of Patrick McKeown, who I’ve learned from, and Brian McKenzie, and now Emily Hightower and others, and Jill Miller, Body by Breath, probably the best book in our field written in the last year.

All these people have ways that you can twist knobs, move levers up and down. And make profound changes in your physiology. Now you may start with a Weep Band with Andrew’s Protocols, or if Aura, Apple Watch, whatever has it built in, perfect, if you need the cue. But to Andy Galpin’s point, try to get to the point where you recognize in your physiology, like, shit, I need to pause in the driveway because I am not in a good head space with my significant other and my kids.

And you breathe for three and a half minutes through your nose, nice and slow. Don’t even time the inhale and exhale. Because that. If you’re chronically stressed and anxious, that could make it worse. But just do what Patrick McKeown says, like, nose first, shallow breath, like, you don’t want to be over breathing, and slow it down, like, just nose and slow.

Just think nose, close your freaking mouth. Your mouth is for talking, like we’re yapping now, and for eating. It’s not for breathing. Take three and a half minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, just to breathe. Be grateful for your day, be thankful you came home in one piece and got through rush hour, then go in.

Before work, you’ve got a big board meeting and you’ve got to present, whatever, a big sales presentation. Take your three and a half minutes. Nose breathe. Don’t do it super deep. Do it slowly. Stop counting it. Just okay. I’m just going to pause for a couple of minutes. I’m not going to look at the time Maybe it’s not even three and a half minutes.

You will start to shift your physiology You don’t need a device and it’s a portable practice. You’re nervous about flying Nose, breathe your way through it and notice the difference in how you you feel in your mind and in your body So the most powerful practice did you do not start if you must if you don’t know The protocols, if even this was too complex for you, and Brian says it better, Andrew, Jill Miller, Patrick McKeown, all of these, look up these people’s, read their books, but their most basic protocols, Brian would say you don’t need a book I’ve written.

Jill would say the same thing. Look at their YouTube. Look at a freaking Instagram Reel for 10 seconds of Jill Miller doing a nasal breathing exercise, dude. It’s all you need. Shift your physiology and get to the point where you know how to tweak the inhales, the exhales, the pauses in between. Maybe a bit of box breathing, like the Navy SEALs, whatever it is. But get to the point where you don’t need the tech anymore and be like, thanks Woot, thanks Andrew Huberman, now I can do it alone. Because Huberman would say, I want you to get to the point. Kelly Starrett says this, you should be able to perform basic maintenance on yourself.

That’s his whole, do 10 minutes of mobility a day every day. Okay Aaron Alexander, in our book Align, Go for a walk every day, get out in nature unplugged every day. We got some real simple stuff in that book. Check out Aaron’s work, and there’s 10 protocols in there. They’re all saying the same thing, and we’re going away from, Oh, it tracks 240 data points?

Amazing! I’m going to drop 1, 000 on this thing, and my 50 bucks a month. No, start there, but to Andy Galpin’s point, become independent of the device. If you have it there, sure. Do you want to confirm or deny an assumption? Disprove a hypothesis, maybe? Sure, it has a place. But a lot of these things, breathwork is portable, mobility is portable, Goruk has a new kettlebell that’s basically a canvas bag that you can take to the beach or a lake and fill with sand.

Portable tool, to Michael Easter’s point. So, The lessons I’ve really learned from everyone from Fergus to all the gentlemen and ladies I just talked about, they’re all trending towards ancient wisdom and simplicity. And, yeah, so just check out any one of their work, ten seconds at a time, and do likewise.

Or as Pavel says at Strong First, do your swings and do your get ups, right, your simple and sinister. Well, how often? Just repeat until strong.

[00:49:52] Mike Klinzing: I think simplicity, when you start talking about that, and again, it becomes really easy to get… Drawn in by all those fancy bells and whistles. And as you said, Hey, this thing can measure 240 data points. Ooh, that’s so exciting. But the reality is, is that look, most of what we know about how our body and our mind functions, the way that it should is fairly simple, right?

We know what we should do, but we’re always looking for this next sort of trick and thing that we think is going to make it. Miraculously turn out the way we want, where really it’s things that are simple to do. They’re not always easy to do, but they’re simple to do.

[00:50:28] Phil White: Well, look at, and they all say, they all agree.

Like if you’ve got Gray Cook in a room and Dan John and Kelly Starrett and Aaron Alexander Jeremy, Jeremy Bethel was another one at Variant out in Santa Barbara, who’s amazing at systems thinking like Fergus. If you put everyone I’ve mentioned in a room, We’re all going to agree on 95, 98, 99% of this stuff, Huberman, everyone even the sleep guys.

Like, if you look at Huberman’s light and dark exposure, okay, get out in the morning in a bit of sunlight. If it’s cloudy, do it for longer. With no sunglasses Aaron Alexander would then say expose little skin. To get more vitamin D synthesis going. At the other end, Chris Winter told Tim DeFrancesco Strong podcast episode, he once had a pro athlete start using a headlamp, like a runner’s headlamp that you would use if you were running at night or on a, an ultra light Leadville and turn off all overhead lights and lamps.

And suddenly the guy didn’t have insomnia anymore and could actually sleep. I think it was an NFL player. Limit your light exposure. Replace all these horrible bright LEDs with Edison bulbs, because light spectrum is, is better. Get off your devices two hours before bed. Limit alcohol to two drinks.

Cut off caffeine. The whole cutting off caffeine like at noon thing, Fergus and I were drinking coffee at 10pm when we were working on Game Changers, so I’m a little… take some Doc Parsley sleep remedy if you’re going to do that, you know?

[00:52:02] Mike Klinzing: Part of that is knowing your own body too, right? Some people have different reactions to it.

[00:52:05] Phil White: Dude, don’t even get me started. Like, I work with some ex Navy SEALs, and they’re all morning people, and I love it. I love it, it’s great. I am not they’re up for four hours before I am, maybe five but I have worked until 5 a. m. and gotten up at 7 a. m. for a full time job, and done that until my heart hurt for three to six months at a time, multiples.

I’m deadly serious. That’s how I like to do it too.

[00:52:31] Mike Klinzing: I am definitely, if I’m going to get up and what I like about working at night, honestly, Phil, is the only cutoff is when I decide I’m going to go to bed. If I’m working in the morning, then my cutoff is when your kids are awake or whatever. And I’m not in control of that deadline.

Whereas at night I’m in control of that. And you’re not stealing time from your family.

[00:52:48] Phil White: Correct. God knows I have. To my detriment, I have. And from my wife. Because these books require, I love them and I laid out, if anyone was listening and they want to write a book hit me up for advice if you want, for free advice, but I just gave you my whole blueprint of how to do a book.

Now I will give you what Dan John’s coach told him about how to throw hammer and discus at the college level. He said, you’re going to weight train three times a week. You’re going to go to track practice two or three times a week. Can you do that? Yeah, I can do that coach…for eight years.

That’s the part Dan says that people don’t want to do. Like they’re like, yeah, I can do that weekly for eight years and the history books, which maybe one day I’ll get a chance to do another one. Take three or four years, you know game changer took us at least two. These things take a while, but to your point, find out about yourself.

You don’t have to do 60 hard, or 30 hard, or whatever it is. You don’t have to be a mourning person, and I think non mourning people get shamed into it, and it can actually bugger their physiology. Stephen Colt, though. Who wrote the riser? Superman told me one time it was for Unplugged. Actually, I don’t even think it made it in the book.

He was like, every rider I know is up before everybody, or he did not say, and or they are up later than everybody. And that is when not only their physiology tells them it’s time to rise and grind, or time to stay up and grind. It’s when, as to your point, when does your schedule allow for a flow state to happen?

What playlist do you want to curate to drop yourself into flow? Who are your musical artists? Even if you want to do like an auto generated Spotify thing, whatever. Who are your artists? And game that to the point where you don’t hear the music anymore. Get some really good noise cancelling headphones.

Get a quiet space. And even if you have to carve out 30 minutes, dude, because you’re tired. Try to do that three or four times a week. It’s like your workouts, right? Enough time to drop into a flow state find out when your physiology is best Not when david goggins is telling you you’re a pussy and you need to get up and i’m not mocking goggins He’s awesome.

No, I know what you mean. And he would kick my ass and if you heard that maybe you will so whatever But you don’t have to get up at 4 or 5 pm to be successful or to write books And at the same time have a functional family kind of and only joking kids. And also a full time job.

[00:55:30] Mike Klinzing: Exactly. There’s, there’s a lot of balance.

I will say that in my own life, what I’ve, what I’ve sacrificed, I haven’t been willing to sacrifice family. And to your point, there are certainly times where I do things that yeah, but for the most part, again, I try to do things late at night when everybody goes to bed and what I’ve sacrificed to sleep, and that’s just the reality of.

The certain time that you’re in, in your life that if you want to do, and again, I think everything is probably too big of a word, but if I want to try to do as many things as I would like to do, then something has to be sacrificed to some degree. And I found myself figuring out how to function on probably less sleep than I should if I, if I really want to.

[00:56:13] Phil White: And even beyond the sleep piece, which is super important. And I can sleep for days. My wife’s like being on out of town. It’s been glorious. I sleep before. Before I saw Yui share a car, so she’s in Kansas with the kids, I walked 30 minutes to the coffee shop where my son’s working, had a chat with the boss, reminded her that he needs more shifts to save money for college, like we were talking about earlier, and then I walked back.

And it’s a mountain view, it’s right by the lake, we’re already blessed where we are, but even if you lived in a city and it’s been… Put your headphones in, do what you need to do. Walk to the coffee shop instead of driving there. So that’s one good change to make. Get you more movement in every day. And be willing to sacrifice that time too.

But, cut back, be honest about your device usage, right? You should have my friend Kenny Kane on the show. And he’s trained Joakim Noah. He’s trained a lot of late career NBA guys and kept them healthy. Kenny and I did a lot of pieces for Train Heroic, and some of it was self experiment, some of it was diving into Cal Newport stuff with deep work and digital minimalism.

And Kenny’s question, if any coach is listening, do you want your athletes to be more fit, healthy, and well? Or not. Okay, are these social media platforms making them more fit, healthy or well, or are they not? Honest answer. Okay, is the time that you are devoting to picking yourselves up on these platforms making the yourself more fit, healthy or well, and I would add Giving you more quality time with your family or less.

And really what we get to is Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport’s book, where… I want people to hear from Tim DeFrancesco on the Basketball Strong podcast and from our awesome guests. I’m just the setup guy that does the research. So I like to write about that stuff. I want people to read and learn from my co author Dr.

Jim Aframo and The Leader’s Mind. So, a tweet about that. But I literally get on there, I’ll repost somebody else’s stuff, I’ll like a few things or give a supportive comment and try to show some positivity to a Mike Boyle or Dan John or another mentor or friend, but I’m capping it at five minutes a day.

And it’s a one time deal. Honestly assess how many minutes a day you are on the socials. And again, if you’re a coach, what is that doing to your family life and doing to your ability to make your clients fit healthy and well? Just think about it.

[00:58:44] Mike Klinzing: It’s a great question and I think it’s something that, especially right as parents, it’s something that you become acutely aware of when A, you think about your own usage and then B, you try to think about your kids’ usage and how to manage it.

[00:58:57] Phil White: And they don’t have a phone is the answer.

[00:58:59] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, that is my kids didn’t, my kids didn’t get one, so my son got his when he was in 10th grade. daughter got hers when she was in ninth, and they complained probably for three years before that, that they were the only people in their grade that didn’t have a phone.

[00:59:12] Phil White: And you and your wife did the thing where you’re not trying to be best buds with them all the time. Correct. So you didn’t drop 1,800, which on a freaking Samsung Galaxy Fold, like somebody just shoot me in the face. Is it not enough that we got 16 year olds driving around Colorado and back brand new BMW X7s?

That’s a problem. You know, but Shane Trotter has done a lot with his book, Setting the Bar. He talks about a lot of different things and he gets into this just a little bit, but if you look at Tristan Harris at the Center of Humane Technology, you look at Cal Newport, the guys have done the research on this you know, and Tristan was the one that was behind the documentary on Netflix, right, on social media, which is awesome, you should check it.

Past a certain point, these socials and being addicted to this device, it was deliberate, and it’s extractive. It is an extractive attention economy designed to enrich Mark Zuckerberg and company, and they knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway, to our kids. Willingly and knowingly to increase profit margins and their only goal is to get you on the platforms as many times a day as possible and get you to stay as long as you can and to engage at a higher level and to share more of your data points so that they can target and sell ads.

And Zuckerberg said it in front of Congress, a congressional subcommittee, Senator, we sell ads. And boy, do they ever. These people do not have human goals in mind, they do not have the mental well being of your kids in mind, and when 90% of Gen Z, per Psychology Today, is anxious, depressed, or even suicidal most of the time, we have a real problem.

And… You giving your kids a device, you are part of the problem. Be the adult in the room and say no. And if you’re say, well, oh, I have a daughter and we live in kind of a dangerous city, and she has a practice, and what if it’s canceled and no one else is around and she shows up and she needs to tell me to come pick her up.

Punked phone, flip phone, dumb phone is a smartphone. Right? And that’s, that’s an option. They do not have the fortitude. These are not David Goggins and Jocko Willink and Commander Rourke Denver. These are not Navy SEAL commandos. They have not led men. into battle, sometimes to die. They do not have, the average adult I know, the average coach I know does not have the fortitude to self limit.

So you can get an app that will set a hard limit for you. It will just cut you off and darken the screen. You’re, you’re five minutes a day, you’re 10 minutes a day. And if you’re a coach and you’re like, I have to be on there for my business, like Tim DeFrancesco does a great job of this. He puts out his exercise video or his little truth about nutrition.

Again, he’ll do some positivity and share some stuff from his buddies in the industry who are doing a great job and he gets the hell off and he spends more quality family time than almost anyone I know, any father I know. So yeah, just do the bare minimum to get new clients, to keep clients, to celebrate your athletes, to share your knowledge and mentor at scale in a minimal fashion and you’ve got to get honest with yourself and you, if you can’t speak truth into your life, get your pastor, get a mentor, get a good friend to be like.

What do you think of my, my social media usage? What do you think of, what have you noticed about me since I started bringing my phone to when we have a beer occasionally or dinner? Just level with me, dude, and then start figuring out how you can minimize.

[01:03:01] Mike Klinzing: Isn’t it amazing to think back 20 years ago that nobody had one of these things?

[01:03:09] Phil White: And today… And Yellow Pages was a thing? There’s a guy selling a house in Evergreen, it’s 21 million dollars, our realtor’s selling it. I don’t know why he plays with us. And they got a Bugatti Veyron and 34 other sports cars, and you know where that money came from? It’s the Yellow Pages fortune. Any kid listening to this is like, what the hell is Yellow Pages, bro?

[01:03:33] Mike Klinzing: Oh, that’s funny. We were, I was watching actually my, my youngest daughter who is 13. We were watching, we watched Back to the Future last night. And so Michael J. Fox is going in, he goes in the phone booth and he’s looking, rifling through the Yellow Pages and he tears out a page to try to find Doc Brown’s phone number.

And my daughter, I can see just, she’s looking at the screen and just completely… confused and perplexed by what she’s seeing up there. Like, what is this phone booth? And there’s a book with phone numbers. It’s just, it’s amazing to me just how different when you go out into a social setting and you see people and every, just every person is dialed into that phone.

It’s, it’s, it’s incredible. And you, you understand again, that’s what it’s designed to do, right? It’s designed to be addicting. And yet we all have to be willing to, to put it down.

[01:04:23] Phil White: And don’t get me wrong. Like if we’re We like to drive, say, like Coronado Island. We’ll blow some hotel points over summer. You know, we stop in St. George, Utah. It’s a good, like, 16 17 18 hour drive. And the kids have a little portable DVD player, which is an absolute piece of crap. And on full volume, they can barely hear it. They’ll watch some DVDs. It’s not built in. It’s just literally stuck between the front seats. And occasionally we hope it doesn’t one of those, whoever’s driving, it doesn’t fall in their lap and then we kill everyone.

So we got one of those. But there’s, for some reason, Mazda saw it fit to not put. a CD player and our little CX 5. We’ve always shared a pretty cheap car and so I don’t have a choice. I, we either run an iPod. I bought everyone a click wheel iPod a few years ago, which is freaking glorious. I love that thing with wired headphones, by the way.

None of this freaking Bluetooth crap, but then… You know, Apple Music is quite handy, or Spotify, to set a playlist and one of the kids hits go, and it just runs for eight hours in between the movies, so dude. Not saying it doesn’t help, but I’m so directionally challenged as we all are these days, I need the directions a lot of the time.

But I wish there was somewhere in between where it did. You could get Apple Music or whatever, Spotify, you could have directions and it had text and phone and that, and that’s literally it.

[01:05:49] Mike Klinzing: There’s your next new invention.

[01:05:50] Phil White: Well, I mean, Punk’d is doing a good job.

Like they put an MP3 player on theirs and it looks badass, but I’m pretty sure the navigation part isn’t there. And I guess you could get away with that stream of music, but yeah, the navigation part isn’t there. So if they ever add that, I will smash this iPhone with a hammer the first day, I swear to gosh.

But it’s not about being a Luddite, like Andy Galpin’s got a lot of shade on this from people about, Oh, so you and Mackenzie and whoever that stupid British writer guy are you’re just saying the tech wearables suck. I’m an idiot for using them. And it’s like, no, we’re just trying to say. Get to the point of self awareness, which should then lead to self regulation.

And as a coach, your job is to empower your clients to get to that

[01:06:36] Mike Klinzing: Again, it’s whether it’s the phone, whether it’s a fitness app, whether it’s a tracking device, whatever it is that It has to be a tool that you use to better yourself, better your life as opposed to something that you are attached to 24 hours a day, that you can’t live without, that you’re constantly looking at, staring at, that it is taking the place of the human beings in your life.

And I think that’s what it comes down to. And we could boil it down and talk about a million other different ways to approach it. But ultimately it’s learn how to be responsible for. Yourself in lots of different ways. And if you want to use these things as a tool to supplement, that’s where you want to be.

You don’t want to be in a case where that is dictating what you do.

[01:07:23] Phil White: And yet these new like traffic light systems on phones or on devices red is stop, yellow is pause. You know, green is go or yellow may be perceived caution, and yet it’s coming out of a place. You cannot just look at HRV, dude, or an arbitrary sleep score that takes HRV and then allegedly tells you how long you spend in each sleep stage.

Allegedly. Get Chris Winter or Matthew Walker on the show and ask him how accurate they think this shit is and I’m going to tell you, not very. You know, actual sleep doctors, PhDs in sleep, what do I know? What do I know about any of this? I’ve just happened to glean from some smart people and the way I can serve.

is by hopefully putting it into words on a page where some people can benefit. And that’s, that’s my way to serve, man. But it, it, it comes down to a binary opposition. I can play with my kids. We can play Uno, the three of us with my wife, or we can play Monopoly or Masterpiece, or one of those great games from the 70s or 80s.

Or, We can all sit around on our phones. It’s not both. It isn’t. You can go and shoot hoops with your kid in the driveway, or teach him how to hinge, or squat, lunge, whatever, push press, you know. Or, you could be effing around on the gram, or on… Who knows what is some freaking thing called be real now?

God help us. God help us. Apparently it’s set you can set challenges on there, where it’s like you have to post every 30 minutes or every 15 minutes. And ki kids that work with my son are getting away with doing this when it’s slow. And they’re like, why don’t you have this? And he’s like, my dad won’t let me have a phone because he’s a crazy old guy.

And it’s like, but they don’t want it. They don’t want it ultimately. So if you’re doing be real challenges every 15 to 30 minutes, would you rather, I mean, do you want that on your tombstone? He ignored his kids and his wife, but he was real good on be real for his four followers.

[01:09:38] Mike Klinzing: Here’s his four bazillion pictures.

[01:09:42] Phil White: Aframo and I did a great, we had Gabby Reese on and we had Laird Hamilton on Champions Conversations, which we’ve paused because we’re deep in the book land again, which is kind of fun. But Gabby was saying there’s a mass delusion going on at the airport.

These teenagers all think they’re famous, the way they act, the way they’re having their friends stage photos of them, or they’re, they’re staging selfies, or they’re going live. Like, Gabby Reese is pretty famous. Her shoe for Nike was the first female signature Nike shoe, and it outsold Air Jordans. She’s pretty damn famous, and she is not doing, she is not going live, or doing reels, or doing whatever the hell it is, at the airport.

She is… Going to get a coffee and actually having time to read a book for once, she told us. So listen to that episode, and then Laird had something to say about, on Tim Ferriss podcast, Tim Ferriss always closes with, where can people find you? You know what Laird said? Did he say Instagram? Did he say Twitter or Facebook?

Be real. He said three words, the Pacific Ocean.

That’s where you can find him. If you follow Laird Hamilton on social media, he ain’t doing that account. Sorry to burst your bubble, but he is not. He doesn’t know how to use it. I can tell you with dead certainty, having worked with him and Gabby at XPT. So… That’s funny. That’s funny. The Pacific Ocean, you can find me, you can find me in the mountains of Evergreen, Colorado is what I want.

And frankly, if we didn’t have, if I wasn’t trying to make it so… The burden of marketing wasn’t all on Tim for the podcast for Basketball Strong or for Jim for The Leader’s Mind. I would not be on there at all. I just wouldn’t.

[01:11:43] Mike Klinzing: I only use whatever social media I have. I have only ever posted things that are related to my basketball.

Camp business or my podcast. I don’t think I’ve ever once put up a photo of me on vacation of my kids doing this or that. I just, that to me, like anybody who wants to see that stuff, I have enough of a relationship with them that they could just come to my house and I could show them pictures or have a conversation with them.

[01:12:14] Phil White: Here’s the deal, dude. When we were going back and forth on trying to get this thing going, you could have gone on Twitter and had a thousand micro. Some of which would have been meaningful, some of which less so, and so could I, or we could do this like I could have, I could have driven, if we had two cars, which we don’t, I could have driven to, to a drive through and not talk to my son’s coworkers and his boss a little bit and not plodded back up the mountain.

But I would have been missing face to face contact because my wife and kids are out of town. I would have had no face to face all day. And, and also we, you and I could get stuck in having only transactional conversations. Where we’re applying for a job. I’m trying to get a new book off the ground. We’re doing these interviews which are awesome, but it’s somewhat transactional. But when was the last time you sat down with a friend, and you looked up four hours later and were like, man, where did the time go? Because your phone is locked in your house or in your glovebox, you didn’t even bring the damn thing, dude.

Like, don’t you miss that?

[01:13:20] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what I say to people is at the end of a podcast interview one of the things that I always say to people is I hope that what happens as a result of the podcast is that there’s a genuine relationship that happens. And obviously it doesn’t happen every single time.

There’s a ton of people that we’ve had as guests on the show that. You know, I now consider to be a friend and some of them I’ve met in person. Some of them I’ve had deeper, longer conversations with that are not part of the podcast. Sometimes it’s just as simple as me checking up on, Hey, how’s their team doing and sending them an email or that kind of thing, and that doesn’t happen because I say to people, how often, when’s the last time you had a conversation with someone that lasts between an hour.

and an hour and a half where you just sat down and you just talked to them for that length of time. I mean, you almost never do that.

[01:14:11] Phil White: I think that’s why Ferris got popular, Brogan, Huberman. Because people are using it as a proxy for the lack of deep conversation in their own life. Yeah, yeah, I think you’re probably right.

And that’s not to say, I mean, all those guys do, like, one, we wish we could have like a thousandth of their followers, but it’s good on them, like the revenge of long form, like this notion of no one reads books anymore. It’s bullshit. Nobody, people have a desire for story in their life, and they have a desire for conversation in their life, because that’s how we make meaning out of the world.

And so, do you want to do more or less of that? Because if you want to do more of that, On a deep level, you need to do less of the superficial shit that really doesn’t matter very much. And again, Oh, but you don’t get it, dude. Like I do, it’s all online coaching. Cool. Five to 10 minutes a day, and then get the hell off and be disciplined.

And if you can’t find an app that will kick you off, cause they do exist.

[01:15:18] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s something that you have to be disciplined about. And sometimes even when we know that we should you find people that just They can’t help them. They can’t help themselves.

[01:15:30] Phil White: Well, it’s like the, Oh, I know I should sleep seven to nine hours whatever it is, 6.

5 hours to 9. 5 hours at night. Are you though? Like how many million Americans are hooked on sleep pills, have chronic conditions, or are just messed up sleep? Like there isn’t clinical. We all know we should walk. The 10, 000 day, Steps a Day was made up by a Japanese. scientist who realized that his peers his age were not walking enough and then a clever company realized that with the Tokyo Olympics they could probably make some coin off of making something that would encourage people to walk more.

And these clubs literally sprung up around Japan where people would get together and walk outside. That’s pretty awesome but it was the most basic pedometer in the wake of the Tokyo Olympics. But it’s interesting that the the actual 10, 000 steps. An exercise physiologist pulled that at Tokyo pulled it out of his arse, and then a company globbed onto it and now it’s become gospel.

But we all know we should walk every day, at least some. Do we? No. Okay? Easy. It’s right. Simple. Simple but not easy. Simple but not easy.

[01:16:46] Mike Klinzing: . We don’t do them. Simple but not easy. You’re right, we don’t.

[01:16:49] Phil White: don’t. And people like Chris Winter, like on Sleep might get some, some criticism for being too basic or Matthew Walker, like, yeah I know, cut off caffeine by this time, don’t drink too much cut off screens two hours before bed, try to have consistent sleep wake times, get morning sun exposure.

Are you? Go down Huberman’s sleep protocol, or circadian rhythm protocol, where he starts off with morning sunlight and he ends with what you should do at night. Tell me how many of those you are currently doing or not doing, and let’s check those off before we get to any kind of complexity.

[01:17:29] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I mean, if you could master the basics, right?

It’s just like… An athlete, you have to master the basics of what you need to do. And once you master the basics, then is there some things that you can do once you get to that basic level that can level you up a little bit? Sure. So many people are focused on the things that aren’t important until you’ve mastered the basics.

And I think there’s, I don’t know how you fix that. Just other than continuing to preach the message as much as you can.

[01:18:00] Phil White: Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, also take a look at what is. Coming out of the military, whether it’s from veterans like Jocko Willink, like Rourke Denver like Goggins to some extent, or even from people that they commanded.

So Ryan Birdman Parrott has a charity for burn victims. Started off it was just military and now it’s kids as well civilians. And… Has just devoted his post Navy SEAL sniper career to helping burn victims, but really what they did a project called 7x and the human performance project and they were looking at What would happen if we got a bunch of messed up veterans and some pro athletes in extreme sports who were dealing with addiction and divorce and all this stuff, life stuff, and we took them to all seven continents and we ran seven marathons in seven days, we did seven skydives in seven days, and it’s ultimately, it wasn’t trying to recreate the stressors of the battlefield, but just saying.

Like some of the stuff that emergency services personnel or service members in our military deal with day in day out for 20 plus years, life is chaos, right? So how do we, how do, what are some of the basics we can do to get people to perform in very suboptimal conditions where Good consistent sleep is not an option.

Good consistent nutrition might not be an option. They’re sure not tracking stuff when guys are in Fallujah. I can tell you on the ground, they just can’t. Because it’s data security. The enemy could hack into that and find the location of the SEAL team that took out Bin Laden. How well would that have gone if Bin Laden knew they were coming?

Not well. That’s why they weren’t wearing… a device, right, to track them. They were just doing comms and their weapons. So, to me, a lot of the stuff that comes out of the military, and they’re starting to figure out, like with POTIF, with H2F, whether it be a joint command with SOCOM, or it’s the big, big military, how to do these things at scale, and the people running…

H2F programs for a whole battalion, POTF for a whole battalion. Look at some of the shit coming out of there. Some of the basics of how you can perform optimally and not just survive, but thrive in less than optimal conditions or very adverse conditions. Cause that’s, what’s starting to fascinate me.

Cause in sports, if I’m at Manchester United. Not just my, my first team, but my academy players are going to want manicured grass, they’re going to want cryo chambers, they’re going to expect wearable tracking, they’re going to want everything, or even fighters! I know, I’ve heard stories of fighters where their music didn’t play, or didn’t start at the right time, their entrance music, and it threw them off their game and they got their ass kicked, or they got knocked out.

Because everything has been optimized to the degree, and Andy Galpin says you can’t always be optimizing. So to me, not just look at what Andy and Dan Garner and Doug Larson, the guys from Bob L. Shrugged are doing, and Anders Varner, but look at what some of the stuff that’s coming out, again, either from retired commanders like O’Rourke Denver, or from people like Ryan Birdman Parrott, who’s a SEAL sniper, and then look at…

Look at what they’re doing with people that are still in the service to figure out what are the big rocks, but from a different perspective, because life is chaos. And as Andy says, you can’t always be optimizing. So therefore what, what are the big rocks you need to get in place through the lens of chaos and adversity?

[01:21:20] Mike Klinzing: Right? That’s ultimately what coaches are trying to do is be able to figure out how can I get my team to be adaptable, to be able to play their best under Challenging circumstances and that’s what coaches are always trying to strive for.

[01:21:34] Phil White: Bob Bowman, why did Michael Phelps, people think this only happened at the Beijing Olympics, that is wrong.

It happened at the World Championships the year before. Goggles start to slip or fill with water on one side, suddenly they fill on the other side and I believe the Olympics, it was either the Olympics or the World Championship race, he swam 175 meters out of a 200 meter race. without being able to see.

And he won the gold medal, which was part of his eight, eight, eight medal to beat Mark Spitz’s record of seven, and gave him the most Olympic medals of all time, and the most golds of all time, and he broke the world record. And they beat Lochte, and he beat Peter Cech. How? One time in Maryland, or actually, no, they were training in Michigan at the time of Bob Bowman the power went out and Bowman said, keep going.

He said it was good. Phelps talked about this in his book, No Limits. And then Bowman took it a step forward, further, where he would sometimes just randomly turn the lights off when they were training and be like, keep going, full pace, count your strokes, know when you need to turn. And then he started blacking out Phelps goggles with a sharpie.

One eye. Left eye, right eye, both eyes. So when he got to the world championships in Australia and it happened, he won the race. I don’t think he set the world record. He won gold. And then in Beijing, the ultimate test, and you saw him, dude, like he would go from a race back to the practice pool and have active recovery swim.

And then he’d have to go out and do another race. Like. What in the hell is going on? It’s not like in the, if someone doubled up, say Michael Johnson, the 200 and 400 or whoever, where the heats are not for another three or four days. And I’m not saying that isn’t demanding because Michael Johnson’s Michael Johnson.

He’s an incredible coach now, as well as a a legendary track athlete. But Phelps was literally doing one final, having a couple of hours to get some food down and go swim again. And then having to go into the heat or a semi final for another event. And how did he deal with adversity? Bob Bowman is how.

[01:23:44] Mike Klinzing: Figuring out ways to be able to simulate those things that might occur in training, right? That might occur in competition, and figuring out how do I simulate and put my athletes under stress in practice. In lower stakes environments so that when they get to a situation where they have to perform at the highest level, they’ve pretty much had every single thing thrown at them that they could to be able to be at their best and at their peak when their peak is necessary.

And I think that’s what, again, that’s what coaches are trying to do. You’re trying to get your athletes, your teams to perform at their very best when their very best is needed. And how do you do that? You keep just trying to give them. Different stimuli, different challenges, different obstacles that they have to overcome.

And that’s what the very best coaches do. And that’s the, that’s the art of coaching. I mean, obviously there’s a ton of science behind it, but ultimately coaching comes down to, you have to have an understanding of The science, but you also have to have the touch, the art of coaching in order to be a truly successful coach.

[01:24:50] Phil White: And going back to coach John Mosley he had the player who he found out was autistic and he was just starting to put a bigger burden on this kid and think he could be our starting power forward. I got to shuffle my lineup because they were losing and they should not be losing with the talent they had on that.

And this is season two, Last Chance U Basketball on Netflix. But he realized that. He was coaching this kid wrong because the recruiter said how’s he doing with his autism? And he was like, what the hell are you talking about? And he was like, yeah, he has autism. And he realized that his context, when, when the kid said, coach, I don’t understand, he would make everyone stop and run sprints because he thought he was being disrespectful or being lazy.

But he wasn’t, and a lot of the time it was sensory overload to the point where the kid told the assistant coach, I can’t come into practice today. I’m already overstimulated. I can’t deal with the shouting, the bouncing balls. So that’s context. And like Kenny Kane, I mean, Brett Bartholomew does a great job too, but Kenny Kane was the first one to coin this.

And unfortunately, other people kind of stole his stuff and put it into their books, but contextual coaching. Like knowing that stuff will fight and mostly felt terrible. And since then is, is communicated differently and got the best out of this kid and served him better as a human. But if a coach, if a coaches knows that a guy’s going or a girl is going through a divorce, or if they’re younger, a breakup that that has an impact.

If they know there’s a life situation going on, they’re coaching a college athlete and they’re trying to switch schools in the transfer portal. Say that’s a big. thing. If you’re trying to go from you think, oh, I actually want to be close to my family on the east coast, I’m in California. That’s a multi thousand mile move.

That’s a huge deal, right? Or a cyclist, maybe they’re training a cyclist who’s trying to get on the junior tour in Europe, say, that’s a big life thing. You’ve got to, the art part of the other coaching is what Kenny Kane calls contextual coaching, and it’s what Fergus would call human first coaching as well.

We’ve got to know the context. And if you do find something out, actually act on the information like coach John Mosley and, and like Rob and all the assistant coaches there and have a heart for this kid. pretty much apologize to him. Like, dude, I just didn’t, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. And from now on, it’s going to be different.

And then put that into action the same as we do with our kids. But you have to ask questions and you have to be actively involved in listening to the answers. And you can’t do that if you’re on a device.

[01:27:21] Mike Klinzing: That’s absolutely true. And I think it goes to whether you’re in a work situation, whether you’re in a coaching player situation, whether you’re in a parent child situation, all those things are completely, are completely true. And you have to be willing to invest in the other person. And you can’t invest with somebody when you’re relying upon a device. You just can’t. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the Basketball Strong podcast.

[01:27:48] Phil White: Yeah. So Tim DeFrancesco for those not in the know.

His first four years with the Lakers were Kobe Bryant’s last four years. So he was helping Kobe rehab under the guise of Gary VD, of course, who was in charge of sports medicine there and was basically like everything that was a one man show for many years. So yeah, check out the episodes with Gary VD.

They’re pretty, they’re pretty fun and really candid, some good Shaq and Kobe stuff and Phil Jackson in there and just a great human, a wonderful storyteller. But So Tim also had a lot of young players like Julius Randall who, who had this horrendous bone break. I think two, my son has Julius Randall’s rookie card and I think it’s like eight points and he’s like, dad, why does Julius Randall have like thousands of points now and he only had eight in his rookie year?

And I’m like, well, son, ask Tim sometime. And he had a lot of younger guys, Brandon Ingram, who these, oh, these guys are going to be busts. Well, He started putting in the foundation that eventually would help Brandon Ingram become an all star, would help Julius Randall become an all star, and they were not, in fact, bust.

They were just really young and had never strength trained. And so, yeah, so Tim and I started doing, I would ghostwrite for him a bit for Train Heroic, and then started doing a bit for his blog, and He wanted to restart a podcast and rename it, and so we came up with Basketball Strong. And we have…

The best starting point is Henry Barrera, who is now with Alabama Men’s Basketball, but was at Liberty U for a long time. On a gut level, a soul level, listen to Henry Barrera’s life story, the first 20 minutes of that, and tell me that you are not moved to the depths of your soul. That’s what we’re going for.

Like, we’ve had some big names on. We’ve had Meta World Peace on our test. That will be episode 100. I think we’ve had Byron Scott on. We’ve had Judd Buchler telling us firsthand what it was like in Michael Jordan’s first practice back from, from retirement. What it was like to be part of that group with Scotty and Dennis Robin and Phil.

And so we’ve had some in quotes, big names, but yeah, start with Henry Barrera. I think it’s episode three. Yeah, and we’re really just trying to, even if someone’s listening doesn’t like basketball, there’s just some great human stories there. That’s fun.

[01:30:02] Mike Klinzing: That’s one of the things that we’ve enjoyed the most about our pod too, is just getting a chance to allow people to tell their stories.

And just like you, we’ve had some big names on, but I get as much pleasure out of talking to a high school coach from wherever that nobody’s ever heard of that has a story to tell.

[01:30:16] Phil White: Yeah And I mean. It’s amazing, like with Henry, people may not know his name, you may know the handle of Hoop Diaries, though.

So he does this amazingly creative job of looking at mentors work, like with Game Changer with Fergus, and or Dan Pfaff is another one whose work he’s been inspired by Dan works with Stu McMillan and all those great coaches at Altus, and then just riffing on it and putting it into the context of basketball, and he almost does it in like a comic.

It’s just an amazing creative talent who happens to coach basketball players in a really responsible and caring way. But yeah, it’s just people’s life stories and where they bumped into the game of basketball, what it’s given to them. Maybe some… advice of how to help younger coaches or younger players along the way.

And then we always end with what does it mean to be to you to be basketball strong? Whether that’s a soul thing, whether that’s technical thing, whether that’s a physical thing. What does it mean to you to be basketball strong?

[01:31:17] Mike Klinzing: It’s a great question. It’s a really good way to be able to allow the person to sort of boil down their relationship to the game into one question.

And I’m sure you get a lot of different answers and a lot of interesting ones. We we have, we have blown past an hour and a half, Phil. We probably have like four more hours. We could talk, but I want to give you a chance before we get out of here, just to share, where can people find your books and then just give them again, the name of the podcast where they can find that.

And then after you do that, I’ll jump back in and wrap things up.

[01:31:45] Phil White: No, it’s most kind and I appreciate you letting me, I’m very caffeinated as anyone knows me during the work. I love a good espresso. So, so Yeah, thank you for being patient with me rambling, but yeah, so, I mean, the most recent book is The Leader’s Mind, with Dr.

Jim Aframow, who people may know from The Champion’s Mind, his first book, and we’ve got two more coming out in the next two years, so check that out, check out Jim at Gold Medal Mind on Twitter, now, ironically, as we’ve been talking about social media, but, yeah, everything he shares is super inspirational, and Yeah, really is a sports psychologist.

He’s at, he’s at the very top of his game. So a joy, a joy to work with Jim and learn from him. And then as you mentioned, unplugged with, with Dr. Andy Galpin and Brian McKenzie. If there’s anyone who’s into water sports, check out Waterman 2. 0 with Kelly Starrett, which is basically supple leopard, but through the lens of surfing, paddle boarding.

Canoeing, kayaking, that kind of thing. Any water sports people. If you’re a sports scientist, or a coach, or a performance director, or you want to get your kids studying that stuff, check out Game Changer with Fogus Conley, and then all of Fogus other great books. And then, as you said, the Basketball Strong podcast is…

Just what it sounds like. Search the whole thing because if you just type basketball strong some weird other stuff comes up. But yeah, I think you’ll dig it. Again, start with the Henry Barrera episode and then go where your curiosity draws you. But we just had Carrie Moore, the Harvard women’s coach on.

She was amazing. The Byron Scott double episode is, is really great as well. And yeah, we’d love it if you, if you like it. Just subscribe, as always, so you don’t miss any episodes. Give us a like, give us a review, because that, in a competitive marketplace on Spotify and Apple, just clicking like and giving us a few good star reviews that really does help, as you know, from, from your crowd.

So yeah, appreciate it. Makes a big difference. Appreciate everyone listening to my waffling and, and really blessed by this conversation today.

[01:33:40] Mike Klinzing: Phil, can’t thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule this afternoon to join us. I know we’ve been trying to make this happen for a while, so it was good to finally get it done.

Great conversation. Really enjoyed every second of it. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks

PHIL WHITE – CO-AUTHOR OF THE LEADER’S MIND & CO-HOST OF THE BASKETBALL STRONG PODCAST – EPISODE 827

MARCUS KAHN – UNIVERSITY OF MARY WASHINGTON MEN’S BASKETBALL HEAD COACH, 2026 NCAA D3 NATIONAL CHAMPIONS – EPISODE 1241

ROUND TABLE 88 – WHAT IS AN UNTAPPED AREA OF PLAYER DEVELOPMENT THAT YOU’VE STARTED TO SPEND MORE TIME WORKING ON WITH YOUR PLAYERS? – EPISODE 1240

NBA PLAY-IN PREVIEW & LOOK AHEAD TO ROUND ONE – EPISODE 1239

FONZO MARTINEZ – MCKINNEY CHRISTIAN (TX) ACADEMY BOYS’ BASKETBALL HEAD COACH – EPISODE 1238

AUSTEN HURLEY – HIGH SCHOOL BOYS’ BASKETBALL HEAD COACH IN SOUTH DAKOTA – EPISODE 1237

TALKING NBA WITH COACH ERIK BUEHLER – EPISODE 1236

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