The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Jon Paul Crimi grew up on the Irish Riviera outside Boston, a place where city mentality lived inside suburban houses and you learned early that your bike might get stolen and somebody might beat you up and that was just Wednesday. At nineteen he was at a party, grabbed the wrong guy during a fight, and took a knife to the head. Forty one stitches. Almost died from blood loss. The doctor who stitched him up told him his hair would cover it. Jon Paul is completely hairless. He has alopecia. He has no eyebrows. The hair the doctor promised would cover the scar never came. None of that part turned out the way anyone expected.

He moved to LA to become an actor and fitness model. His entire identity was built on his looks. Then bald patches started appearing on his head. His eyebrows went patchy. The doctor put him on prednisone, a catabolic steroid that made him fat and bloated while everyone around him at Gold's Gym in Venice was taking anabolics to get jacked. He was pencilling in the patches on his head to go to auditions. Then he bottomed out from drugs and alcohol. Got sober at twenty-six. Made the decision to stop the shots and get off the medication and let the hair go completely. Two months sober, he told a doctor that if that was what God wanted for him, then so be it. He had the courage of someone who had just found his footing and did not yet fully understand how hard the ground was.

What followed was sixteen years of sobriety, a Big Brothers mentorship that taught him what it felt like to do something for someone else with nothing expected in return, a career as one of the most sought after celebrity sobriety coaches in the country, trips to pull people out of crack houses in the favelas of Brazil, rock bands on tour, movie sets, private planes at thirty thousand feet with someone trying to open the door. Then Matthew Perry handed him a breathwork session. Then a Tony Robbins VIP invitation led to a night in San Jose and an awakening moment where everything clicked. Then Matthew came to his first sold out breathwork class and told him he had found his gift.

JP has now been leading breathwork classes for fourteen years, certified over three thousand facilitators worldwide, led the largest breathwork class in Switzerland for a thousand people, taught at Tony Robbins events, trained Olympians and Oscar and Emmy and Grammy winners, and runs Sunday morning classes online that cost nineteen dollars for your first session. Matthew Perry is gone. The ping pong table JP taught him to play on is being auctioned off. But the breathwork exists because Matthew pointed the way. JP will not let you forget that.

This episode is for the guy sitting in the back row of the class with a look on his face that says he cannot believe his wife dragged him here. JP sees that guy. He speaks directly to him. And that guy always cracks open.