Quality Values

Jacob Conlan Shields
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  • Philosophy
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🎙️What are your VALUES in the context of your story? 🌟Conversations with QUALITY artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, scientists, leaders, engineers

  1. Jul 22

    QV#74 James Murray: The Feldenkrais Method, Healing Through Movement, Improving Alignment

    James Murray spent twelve years as a competitive bodybuilder in South Africa, and in all that time his hamstrings never once got sore. Scoliosis since he was young, a back "as tough as a drum," couldn't draw his knees to his chest. He gave himself two years to fix his body and get back to the gym. That was twenty-five years ago. He tried Pilates first — got certified, got good at it, body didn't change. Two years of Gyrotonic after that, still couldn't find his own sit bones. Then a Feldenkrais practitioner working the same gym floor sat behind him, put her hands on his stomach, and told him to push his belly out. Nobody had ever told him that. He took a Feldenkrais class not long after — forty-five minutes on the floor — and came out of it with inches of length behind each knee that a decade of stretching never gave him. He spent the next four years training to become a practitioner himself. James Murray is a Feldenkrais practitioner now, and he wrote a book on incorporating the ideas — "Cure Sleep Apnea by Moving Out of Your Own Way" — making the case that obstructive sleep apnea isn't a slack-tongue problem, it's a head-position problem, and the fix is the same as everything else in his world: change the self-image, and the body follows. This one starts with the life of Moshe Feldenkrais himself — fleeing pogroms, a teenage walk across Asia to the Adriatic, a physics PhD in Paris, and a friendship with the man who invented judo that ends with Feldenkrais bringing the sport to the West. From there we get into what the method actually claims, straight from Feldenkrais's own book "Body and Mature Behavior": posture isn't a position, it's a decision your brain keeps making without telling you, and you don't fix it by stretching or strengthening, you fix it with awareness. We get into Awareness Through Movement and Functional Integration, why his own glutes and hamstrings wouldn't grow for over a decade, what a frightened rabbit has to do with it, and why the quality of a movement matters more than its range. The idea I keep coming back to: movement generates awareness. Not the other way around. Thanks for watching. 📚 James's books: Cure Sleep Apnea by Moving Out of Your Own Way https://a.co/d/0fSHpCq1 Back Out: Cure lower back pain by doing 1 thinghttps://a.co/d/00gu6ZuY 🧠 Learn more about the Feldenkrais Method https://feldenkrais.com/ More Quality Values: Playlist — https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcDYjJATsN-Nn0Fs5HLuIq5EIzDcA9tgg All episodes — https://jacobconlanshields.com/pages/podcast/ Spotify — https://open.spotify.com/show/5xzOcAP2agwcVVAdu7vztc Chapters: 0:00 Cold open: highlights 1:46 James Murray joins, spelling out Feldenkrais 2:54 The plan for this episode3:14 Moshe Feldenkrais's early life: pogroms, a walk to the Adriatic, Palestine 4:20 The Sorbonne, a physics PhD, and meeting the inventor of judo 6:45 What the Feldenkrais Method actually is 7:19 Self-image and the shoulder that won't come down 9:45 The lost-hat story: movement generates awareness 11:53 Awareness Through Movement vs. Functional Integration 14:24 What good posture actually is: "independent from gravitation" 19:13 Why "stretching" isn't doing what people think 21:12 His assessment protocol and the myth of symmetry 24:20 The book he wrote on curing his own sleep apnea 31:05 Homeostasis, and the nervous system in balance 38:36 His story: twelve years of bodybuilding, scoliosis, a body stuck in place 40:54 Pilates and Gyrotonic first, then a Feldenkrais class 51:24 Why the problem is in the brain, not the muscle 54:12 Anxiety as a learned fear of falling 1:05:57 Good days, bad days: the self-image is plastic 1:11:07 Head position, gravity, and why you can't sleep 1:14:51 The frozen rabbit and the glutes that won't grow 1:20:13 Where to start if you want to try this #QualityValues #FeldenkraisMethod #SomaticMovement #SleepApnea

  2. Jul 17

    QV#73 Glahens Paul 2: Solving the Loneliness Epidemic with an App | Dipidi Co-Founder

    Glahens Paul survived the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, immigrated to Boston at nine years old without a word of English, and now runs Dipiti, a Nashville startup betting against the entire social media playbook. Second sit-down with Paul. First one covered the concept. This one gets into the man — the math kid who tested equal on creative and analytical scores, the kid who went from an open-door courtyard in Haiti to a concrete-jungle version of childhood in Boston, the founder who built a company out of his own isolation instead of around it. Dipiti is the technical answer to a personal problem. Paul and his co-founder were two social new grads who kept watching plans fall through because the day got busy. So they built a tool that answers four questions — who, what, when, where — and gets people out of group chats and into rooms with each other. We get into the 2010 earthquake and the two months he spent sleeping in a shared courtyard with his whole neighborhood. We get into why he calls social media "diet social interaction" — all the sensation, none of the nutrition. We get into a University of Chicago study on what people will pay to quit apps they can't stop using. And we close on the question Paul keeps coming back to: does AI give us the chance to become more like ourselves, not less? Nashville rooftop, freezing wind, ground beef and sweet potatoes. Some things about building a startup never change. Watch the full playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcDYjJATsN-Nn0Fs5HLuIq5EIzDcA9tggMore episodes: https://jacobconlanshields.com/pages/podcast/Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5xzOcAP2agwcVVAdu7vztc 0:00 Intro 1:26 Second episode, shot on a Nashville rooftop 4:04 Dipidi means engineered serendipity 6:03 A math kid who immigrated from Haiti at nine 7:48 Chunking, The Art of Learning, and transferable skill 16:57 The Anxious Generation and the 70% drop in in-person time 20:39 Why building Dipidi became personal 23:32 Busy schedules and plans that never happen 26:39 The 2010 earthquake and two months in the courtyard 31:20 Boston, isolation, and hyper-individualism 36:01 Diet social interaction and the illusion of access 41:28 The product market trap: paying to quit what you use 44:47 Who, what, when, where: bringing the human back 50:40 Why the commune fantasy never survives finances 58:22 Ancestral socialization as the pitch 1:00:07 From letters to AI: the deck 1:00:38 Does AI let us become more us #QualityValues #Dipidi #StartupFounder #LonelinessEpidemic #SocialMediaAddiction

  3. Jul 11

    QV#72 Anthony Simpkins: Gems on VHS Founder on Going Viral by Accident & What Really Matters in Life

    Anthony Simpkins runs Gems on VHS, a Nashville channel built on slow, unscripted, folk-inspired video work. Recorded at Wild Side MMA — Nashville and Clarksville — right after Simpkins and I rolled a few rounds. He's got the fat lip to prove it. Origin story: A felony for selling mushrooms at eighteen kept him out of college — no Pell Grant for felons. So he bought a Canon T2, started filming musicians in Nashville's early-2010s scene (Belmont, house shows, a town that felt like the center of something), and decided he'd never work for anyone else again. Free videos on Craigslist turned into paid ones. One of them — his friend Benjamin Todd playing a song called "Using Again" against a white wall — sits at 12 million views on YouTube now. He didn't see it coming. What he does now: Gems on VHS. Intimate, acoustic, cinema-verité style, shot in the spirit of old Alan Lomax field recordings. He's turned down bigger paydays — a Zach Bryan booking among them — to keep working with people he actually likes. Patreon, AdSense, and whatever else pays the bills in between (bar mitzvahs, bus commercials, gym promos — he's done it all). We get into stepping away from capitalism as an operating philosophy, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the difference between fear-presence and the real thing, dumb phones and why the carriers won't let you have one, and why jiu jitsu and live music hit the same nerve. His best idea: chase quality over quantity, work with people you like, and stop needing every upload to top the last one. Good luck out there, Anthony. See you on the mats — or somewhere with worse Wi-Fi. Gems on VHS:Website: http://www.gemsonvhs.comInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/gemsonvhsPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/gemsonvhsDiscord: https://discord.gg/2xAtJTYBr6YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GemsOnVHS Quality Values Podcast:YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcDYjJATsN-Nn0Fs5HLuIq5EIzDcA9tggWebsite: https://jacobconlanshields.com/pages/podcast/Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5xzOcAP2agwcVVAdu7vztc Chapters:00:00 – Intro01:41 – Post-spar sit-down at Wild Side MMA02:45 – Started BJJ at 30, taekwondo as a kid03:26 – Why he'll never go pro04:43 – Jiu jitsu vs. rock climbing vs. lifting05:43 – The touch you stop getting as an adult07:35 – What Anthony actually does for work10:16 – Discovering video through Alan Lomax11:39 – Buying a Canon T2, Nashville's early-2010s music scene13:16 – Free videos on Craigslist, getting fired from the last real job16:09 – The viral hit: Benjamin Todd's "Using Again"19:41 – Building Gems on VHS as a personal brand20:36 – Getting recognized in Ireland and Australia22:20 – Upload pressure, and letting go of it22:53 – Stepping away from capitalism25:06 – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance27:53 – The core variable: honesty, chill, peace29:21 – Turning down bigger artists to work with friends30:24 – Making content that resists the algorithm31:08 – Fear vs. presence, and chasing flow33:49 – Live music, open mics, locking in35:06 – Dumb phones and why capitalism won't let you have one36:31 – The felony story: mushrooms at 1838:48 – Going off-grid for Peace Corps41:01 – Who runs the Peace Corps, and Doge cuts43:09 – Presence, travel, and missing a place before you leave it44:34 – Sign-off, Wild Side MMA and Husky Fat Promotions shoutouts #QualityValues #GemsOnVHS #Nashville #Podcast #BJJ

  4. Jul 6

    QV #71: Kris Reeves - Order, Chaos, and Space Hippies

    Kris Reeves — stage name Kris Raves — is the first stand-up comedian on Quality Values, recorded in his living room eighteen months into living in Nashville. He started comedy in 2016, the year his dog River died and, a few months later, his wife left him. Did it partly out of spite — figured he could get a room full of strangers to like him faster than she ever did. Nine good months, then the rest of the grief caught up as a drug problem, then rehab. Came back to stand-up in 2021 and has been at it since, minus a year off. Got a set on Kill Tony somewhere along the way. He's also spent three years working a strip club, has "810" tattooed on his face — numerology he only understood after the fact, infinity divided by zero is undefined, zero divided by infinity is one, so nothing contains the infinite, so nobody's definable — and has a sacred geometry tattoo on his chest meant to represent the universe that, per the tattoo artist, actually represents water. The conversation covers billionaires, AI, simulation theory, religion, Quakerism, a strip-club-to-stripper "pipeline" bit, and a cartoon he's building called Space Hippies — Rick and Morty by way of Star Trek, a crew where each character carries a different piece of the human condition, built on the tension between order and chaos. His best actual advice, buried under all of it: skip the after-show drinking circle and pay for structured comedy classes instead. Friends won't tell you a joke's bad. A room you paid to critique you will. Kris Raves:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@krisravesInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/krisraves/ Quality Values:YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcDYjJATsN-Nn0Fs5HLuIq5EIzDcA9tggPodcast: https://jacobconlanshields.com/pages/podcast/Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5xzOcAP2agwcVVAdu7vztc 0:00 Intro0:53 First comedian on the podcast1:58 Billionaires, and why nobody should have that much money4:54 Asking ChatGPT to start a revolution6:12 AI, self-driving cars, and trusting machines over humans7:47 Simulation theory and self-aware photons8:40 Every religion saying the same thing11:25 The show's actual question: values in context13:09 How comedy started — a dead dog, a divorce, rehab16:43 Skipping the drink-with-comedians scene19:10 Obsession, self-promotion, and fat-tail careers21:00 A residency for artists, athletes, entrepreneurs22:24 AI breaking work into a million pieces24:08 A Google Earth for human history25:11 Lie detectors built into smart glasses29:53 Peace Corps, conscientious objectors, a Quaker childhood39:56 Face and hand tattoos, decoded50:04 Three years working a strip club, and the "pipeline" bit58:12 Getting tattooed out of the white-collar track1:05:18 Pitching Space Hippies, his order-vs-chaos cartoon1:14:16 Set up, punchline, tag — how a joke works1:20:02 Why paid comedy classes beat advice from friends1:24:56 The meaning of life, kept simple1:33:13 Focus through chaos — closing thoughts #QualityValues #StandUpComedy #Comedian #KrisRaves

  5. Jun 18

    QV #70 - Glahens Paul: Loneliness As Deadly As Smoking — Building a Social Operating System, Dipity

    Loneliness is as deadly as 15 cigarettes a day. Paul Glahens is building software to push people back into the same room. Paul got a computer science degree, became a software engineer, did the career thing. Graduated in Boston. Grad school in Kentucky, where he met his co-founder. Networked the alumni circle until someone wrote a check. Nine months ago he went all in. The idea started as an AI dating app and kept expanding until it became something else: a social operating system. Patent pending. Now he runs Dipty — short for serendipity. A startup aimed at Gen Z and millennials, the loneliest demographic on record. Not a screen-time blocker. A social utility that gets plans out of the group chat and bodies into the same place. The metric he cares about is speed: how fast the system moves a person from "I want to see someone" to actually sitting across from them. Recorded in the Nashville living room, first episode shot here. The conversation runs through the loneliness epidemic, Vivek Murthy's advisory on social infrastructure, sports as a vanishing social glue, hikikomori in Japan, and why presence — showing up, choosing to participate — is the thing both training and tech keep circling back to. In-person time has dropped 70% over twenty years. Twelve percent of Americans now report having no best friend, up from three percent in 1990. Paul's sharpest point: the platforms that call themselves "social" are anti-social. The Instagram superuser spends their finite daily social energy liking, commenting, sharing — free labor for the company — and ends the day lonelier than they started. If a product doesn't produce a real-world interaction, it isn't social. It's the opposite. Paul's 24. Says there's more coming in the next few months. — YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcDYjJATsN-Nn0Fs5HLuIq5EIzDcA9tggPodcast page: https://jacobconlanshields.com/pages/podcast/Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5xzOcAP2agwcVVAdu7vztc Chapters 0:00 Cold open 1:52 Nashville living room 3:24 The what 3:44 Dipity, in-person by design 4:53 Tech first or the problem first 7:40 From idea to first check 10:11 Nine months all in 10:39 Patent pending, social operating system 11:05 What a social operating system is 13:27 The platforms are anti-social 15:41 What real-world interaction is worth 18:40 Functional movement and presence 21:07 Serendipity, the name 22:34 The elephant in the room 24:09 Sports as social infrastructure 27:18 How abnormal this is 30:35 Deadly as smoking 31:40 Hikikomori 34:27 Why we can't agree on anything 35:18 Monetizing people interacting 40:32 Intent to interaction 42:09 The best nights are last minute 43:11 The Roaring 20s, again 44:30 Sign-off #QualityValues #Loneliness #SocialOperatingSystem #Startup #Serendipity

  6. Mar 20

    QV #69 Scott Jones - HuskyFat Promotions | Kickboxing Potential In the US

    Scott Jones started a fight promotion as a joke name between friends — "husky fat" meaning a dad bod with an attitude — and turned it into a memorial show for his training partner Nick Phillips, a world champion kickboxer who died of pancreatic cancer three months after diagnosis. That show raised money for the Pancreatic Cancer Foundation's Oklahoma chapter and felt good enough to keep going. Four years later, Husky Phat Promotions runs kickboxing events out of Oklahoma with small gloves divisions, Glory-style clinch rules, and a 45-year-old bald male ring girl. Jones hosted the U.S. leg of the K-1 Grand Prix last year and sent a fighter to the world tournament. He also runs a roofing company that pays the bills while every dollar from the promotion goes back into it. Jones talks about why kickboxing is the most underrated combat sport in America, the community organizations he partners with to get underprivileged kids into martial arts, and what it's like to build something when you started with a trailer park childhood and deal with depression daily. His best idea: worst case scenario is bankruptcy — kids are healthy, wife still loves you, life moves on. Take a risk. Thanks for listening. Husky Phat Promotions: huskyfat.comHusky Phat YouTube: youtube.com/@huskyfatpromotions1882Husky Phat Instagram: instagram.com/huskyfatpromotionsCleats for Kids: cleatsforkids.orgThe Come Up Foundation: comeupfoundation.comBig Brothers Big Sisters of Oklahoma: bigoklahoma.org Quality Values Podcast: jacobconlanshields.com/pages/podcastYouTube Playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcDYjJATsN-Nn0Fs5HLuIq5EIzDcA9tgg

  7. Mar 20

    QV #68: Sav Hill - Functional Movement | The Root Cause, Not the BandAid Fix

    Sav Hill is a mobility and kettlebell specialist in Nashville running Fight Flight Conditioning. She played music for half her life before fitness, climbed Kilimanjaro on her brother's behalf, and has been called the world's best or worst influencer — a title she's proud of. Sav came up through injury and an eating disorder she didn't understand at the time, got educated instead of staying stuck, and rebuilt everything around joint health and functional movement. NASM corrective exercise. FRC mobility cert. Hardstyle kettlebell training under Zach Henderson. Then she found Bellfest and discovered entire other worlds of kettlebell work she didn't know existed. Now she coaches with a joint-first philosophy and treats the boring prehab work as the actual work. We talk about what functional training actually means and whether transference or intentionality is the better definition, why kettlebells open more doors than barbells, what it looks like to train for your life instead of a number, how sitting in discomfort is the thing that actually builds you, and why the strategy is having no strategy when it comes to social media. Sav's best idea: if you go to the root cause, you don't have to keep going back for the bandaid fix. Thanks for watching. If this one hit, subscribe and leave a comment. — CONNECT WITH SAV HILL Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/savfit__/ QUALITY VALUES PODCAST YouTube Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcDYjJATsN-Nn0Fs5HLuIq5EIzDcA9tgg Podcast Page: https://jacobconlanshields.com/pages/podcast/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5xzOcAP2agwcVVAdu7vztc — CHAPTERS 0:00 Preview 0:57 Sav Hill in Nashville 1:55 How injury led to education 4:35 Sharing what the fitness world gets wrong 6:15 Fitness is a personal journey 7:34 Injuries happen for you not to you 8:17 Nutrition myths and assumptions 10:04 Kettlebells changed everything 10:50 Zach Henderson and kettlebell mentors 12:26 Bellfest and discovering other styles 13:35 Defining functional training 14:45 Intentionality vs. transference 16:54 What do you visualize when you grind 18:14 Stay in the suck 18:56 Training for real life and Kilimanjaro 20:43 Silence on the mountain 21:06 His bucket list 22:33 Training through grief 23:13 You don't do anything alone 25:23 Prehab as a philosophy 29:41 The world normalized pain and injury 31:04 Root cause vs. bandaid fix 31:49 Walter Cannon and homeostasis 34:59 Hustle culture and the Apple Watch trap 35:44 Sit with your own thoughts 37:34 You can't be a victim or toxic positive 38:14 Social media and the coach's dilemma 42:08 I'm more than a fitness person 42:48 World's best worst influencer 46:24 Trainers vs. influencers 48:03 Making content as art 48:48 Tattoos and sisters 50:37 Meditation and building habits 53:52 Prioritize yourself to serve others 56:40 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 57:34 What is art to you 59:43 Art in the snatch 1:02:49 David Weck and intellectual confidence 1:06:26 Flow arts and expression 1:07:19 Stop asking for opinions #QualityValues #KettlebellTraining #FunctionalFitness #MobilityTraining #NashvilleFitness

  8. Mar 16

    QV #67: Shawn Sherman - Square One System, Nervous System Training, and Why Rehab Falls Short

    Shawn Sherman thinks exercise is making you worse. Not always. But more than you'd like.Shawn played high school basketball in Pennsylvania until a kid jumped on his back during a loose ball scramble — sophomore year, done. He went to Penn State for exercise science, found a system called Muscle Activation Techniques, got 90% of his own back pain resolved, and became the first MAT practitioner in Major League Baseball, working with the Chicago Cubs. Then one client kept getting worse under the protocol. So Shawn did the opposite of everything he'd been taught. The guy called him the next day — pain gone, 2–3 inches taller, 11 strokes off his best round of golf. That accident became Square One System.Now Shawn runs workshops and online courses teaching movement professionals — rehab, fitness, performance — a neurological problem-solving framework. Over 200 joint actions, six head positions, four eye positions. Binary input: threat or safe. Find the threat, show the brain it's safe, let it reorganize. He's taken a few thousand people out of pain himself. His students have scaled that into the tens of thousands.We get into why he deliberately stopped reading industry material for three and a half years to keep his thinking uncontaminated. How he compares to systems like Go-To, Counter-Strain, and MAT. Why he thinks the rehab/performance split is an insurance artifact, not a real boundary. And his best idea — your brain is running old software from injuries that healed decades ago. Square One doesn't add new apps. It restores factory settings.Thanks for watching. New episodes when they're ready.—Square One System: https://www.square1system.com/Square One on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/square1system/Quality Values Podcast: https://www.jacobconlanshields.com/pages/podcast—0:00 Preview0:58 Intro1:47 What is Square One System3:09 Injury stories and how Shawn found this niche7:12 Muscle Activation Techniques and the split from MAT11:32 Neuroplasticity as a physical thing14:01 Long-standing compensations and how to treat them20:07 Comparing systems — Go-To, Counter-Strain31:14 Shawn's why35:17 Is Square One finished38:28 Where new ideas come from42:24 Rehab vs performance — the insurance gap49:05 Same philosophy for everyone, different points on the curve51:12 Fascia and the software/hardware line55:08 Perception vs reality1:02:39 Talk therapy, delusions, and closing the gap1:05:10 Where to find Shawn#squareonesystem #nervoussystemtraining #movementrehab #qualityvaluespodcast

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About

🎙️What are your VALUES in the context of your story? 🌟Conversations with QUALITY artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, scientists, leaders, engineers

Information

  • Creator
    Jacob Conlan Shields
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    74
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Jacob Conlan Shields
  • Show Website
    Quality Values