Mark Bell's Power Project - Brad Kearns - Aging Backwards, and Why You May Be Fasting Too Much || MBPP Ep. 784

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

In this Podcast Episode, Brad Kearns, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how maybe we've been Intermittent Fasting too much. Brad Kearns is an American author, podcast host, professional speed golfer, masters high jumper, and former professional triathlete. Follow Brad on IG: https://www.instagram.com/bradkearns1 Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://boncharge.com/pages/POWERPROJECT Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off!! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really does work): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject Code POWERPROJECT20 for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast

How's it going? You guys probably have watched a lot of Mark's lifting videos and some of my lifting videos and you've probably noticed that our shorts never go past our knees. Nope. There's a reason for that. Y'all gotta show those quads off, baby. And the shorts that we're always wearing are from a company called Vior can wear them to dinner parties, dates, gatherings, all that good stuff. But all their clothes fit well, like fit amazing. This is a shirt from Viore, by the way. Look at that shoulder. Just look at this. It fits so well for people in fitness.

And even if you're not, just check them out. Andrew, how did they get it? Yeah, clothes that look good inside and outside of the gym and work just as well inside and outside of the gym. Head over to viore.com slash power project. That's V U O R I.com slash power project to receive 20% off your first order. Uh, links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Sure I was.

And, um, I agree that was really fast. I mean, it's amazing when you're you know 419 that's fine yeah i mean when when you're when you're in training you're thinking like geez how can i get down to 415 and now it's like shit how do i do that you know what's fucking stupid about running all of it i mean what yeah everything hello welcome to the bash running podcast this is uh one ex-runner and two frustrated runners yeah no um what's dumb about it is that nobody ever talks about how fast you're running like they have all these other ways of saying it but like we're here in the united states can't you tell me how many fucking miles an hour you went nobody ever talks about it i don't

even know how you like measure it or see it but like yeah you know running a 419 mile when you're in high school it's like it'd be kind of cool now how fast you're running i mean i imagine you're running like 12 miles an hour or something like that but i don't know it would take some calculations and they have it on tv during the world championship track and field they had the the current miles per hour of everybody and it was really that makes the most sense to me. Yeah, but what about on your watch? Like how many miles per hour am I going? It's always pace per mile that shows right on the watch.

I'm going 907 right now. I'm speeding up to 848. That's not good enough for me. I don't even know what that means. Yeah, right. Well, I mean. I don't care. You know, 10 miles an hour, six minute miles. That's 60 minutes.

Okay, so we know if we're running six minute miles, we're going 10. Yeah. I know Usain Bolt goes 27.8 or something at his highest speed a human's ever gone, running 9.5 hundred meters. Is it, though? Well, I'm fairly certain that— I actually doubt it. You think that's true? Yeah.

You know, I had this class at UC Santa Barbara. He was the only guy measured, right? But I bet you there were some dudes somewhere along the lines at some point that ran faster. No way. Some motherfucker that ran from a goddamn cheetah or something. I don't think he ran 31 miles an hour to stay alive. He ran 20 miles an hour and blew out his hamstring. He had a brief glimpse of fame and then the cheetah got him.

Well, I had this class at UC Santa Barbara, Professor David Young. He was like the world's leading expert on the ancient Greek Olympics. And he had this radical premise that he thinks those guys were very nearly as good as today's athlete, which no one would think. It would seem ridiculous that these ancient Olympians were anywhere near Usain Bolt. But he said the ancient Olympics ran for 800 years. But he said the ancient Olympics ran for 800 years. And these guys who won were celebrated as the greatest victors in society in their village or their region.

And so they were essentially professionals. And so he destroys this amateur myth of the modern Olympics too with his body of work. And so these guys trained full time. They were fed grapes and steak and the best food by their servants. And they went to the baths and they took care of their bodies. And they ran things like the 200 meters and the long jump, and there's no way to compare their performance. But he studied this and said, you know, if you do something for 800 years, like, okay, we've been in modern Olympics for 120-something years, and these guys are pretty good. Usain Bolt's, I'm going to say, the fastest guy who's ever run run on the planet but it would be interesting to think of these ancient dudes going out there and like the wrestlers you know they had sports like that pancreation yeah pancreation where you

had to um the secret way that you gave up was you had to tap and um it was uh milo was undefeated the greatest ancient greek athlete he was he couldn't never lost in the wrestling and he was the guy who got strong by lifting up the calf you know that legend yeah like he had a baby calf and he lifted it up every day he invented uh like periodization or whatever yeah right periodization just every day lift it up till it's 500 pounds is no problem same thing you're doing every day milo of croton yeah wow how was that chocolate in sema that shit was kind of spicy. I let it melt on my tongue. Okay, so by the

way. You're getting spiced up. You want to give this a whirl? Yeah. You can either take that square or take another square from here. I'll take this little square right here. So this is... That's Lily Bell Farms in Central Point, Oregon. I did a personal visit there on Why are you so low class, man? He's super low rank. What are you supposed to do?

You're supposed to let it melt on your tongue so all the flavors can envelop your mouth. I'm trying to get cavities. I never knew that until you just told me I'm supposed to eat chocolate like wine. Chocolate connoisseurs, right. I can't be a wine snob. I don't drink. So I'm a full chocolate connoisseur. And I did learn from the experts.

You let that thing soak in. What happened? Yeah. Then you get the terroir or the terroir, whatever it's called. You can taste the fruity after overtones and things like that. Or as Steve Carell said, the oaky afterbirth when he was drinking wine on the office. What happened where you can't drink? Did something happen?

No, people ask me that. Like, why don't you drink? And I'm like, I don't know. Maybe I should start. As we're going to get into in this podcast, everything's open season now. I'm in a spicy mood with that spicy chocolate, and I'm rethinking a lot of things. Spicy. Maybe I'll start, yeah.

This spicy chocolate reminds me of when I had my football coach change from, it's hard to talk with this thing. I had my football coach change from doing dip every day. He's like, my wife tells me I need to talk with this thing I had my football coach change from doing dip every day he's like my wife tells me I need to get off this shit

I was like coach no problem I got you I'll bring you fireballs tomorrow that's the best way to get off that stuff he's like it is

the next day he's like choking and coughing what the heck is fireballs you know what I mean alcohol yeah candy

candy fireballs it fucked him Candy. Oh, candy. Candy fireballs. Mm hmm. It fucked him up. There's like super spicy jawbreakers. There's a lot of fireballs. Especially in the middle of summer.

He's like choking. He went down to one knee. He's spitting. And it's all red. So other people think it's blood. He's like, God damn it, Bell.

He's like, get me some water. I can't remember that. But it stopped him from dipping. Yeah. At least for that day. Wait, so it stopped him from dipping perpetually or just... Really? That's a weird... Why did you think that

though? That doesn't make any sense. I was just bullshitting. I made it up. He just wanted his coach to have to just deal with the fucking... the spicy candy. The next day he was doing it again.'re all laughing we're like i can't believe he's doing that why is he believing in me what's going on here the dipping is some nasty shit i remember there's a something like there's some dipping going on and i went for a bottle that i was about to i thought i was about to drink some water i went like this and i saw that shit i was like oh

my god yeah i almost drank someone's dip sauce from their mouth. It's fucking nasty. That's brutal. So 419 mile in high school. That's going back a long time now. I can't even imagine it. When you're in training, you're just thinking about how can I get down to the elite

412 or 415 or whatever. Was that like nationally ranked and stuff? I was ninth in California State Finals, which was a good achievement because this is a lot of great runners here. I was 12th in National Junior Olympics when I was a little guy. It was a 16-year-old division. How the fuck fast are people running? That sounds

really fast to me. Now, I'm obsessed with this guy, Jakob Ingebrigtsen from Norway. He's the greatest middle distance runner in the world. He just crushed at world championships and Eugene I saw for myself and he won the Olympic gold last year at age 20 in the 1500

and he's been going hard since he was like 10 years old there's a reality show you can watch it's been filmed over several years so you see this 13 year old kid being interviewed saying Jakob want to beat the greatest in the world and I want to beat my brother. His brothers, two older brothers were both world-class and European champions.

And here's this kid just training, looking up, looking up to his older brothers and all of a sudden breaking through. When he was 16, he ran a three 56 mile, the youngest person ever to break four minutes in the mile. Wow. And he's just continuing to progress with this amazing career.

mile. And he's just continuing to progress with this amazing career. And his training methods are really novel and super interesting. What's he doing? Well, you know, like you have this sense of what a distance runner does and they go out and run a hundred miles a week and they're always running and they run long on Sundays. And even the best milers, which is a pretty short event, they're universally running over a hundred miles a week. They're working hard on the track. They're doing their long runs. They're doing their hill repeats. And what him and his brothers do, they're trained by their father, who was completely unschooled in athletics. He just studied. He was like a, you know, regular guy engineer and studied from all the greats and put together this programming. And Jakob's older brother, Henrik, is 10 years old than him. So he was the first to kind of, you know, just immerse into this unique training. But they run

right near anaerobic threshold all the time almost. And so they're running these, what you would call hard workouts, often twice a day. But it's right at this pace, the threshold is the term. And that means it's right before you would plunge into lactate accumulation, which would make your muscles burning and you'd have to stop. And then that's what a lot of runners do on their hard day. Hey, we're going to the track today. We're going to work hard. We're going to do quarters. We're going to do repeats and your muscles are burning and you're gasping for air. And then you have to recover for three days of jogging. And so instead, like they've thrown out a lot of the easy stuff, but they never exceed this capacity in training.

So there's a New York Times article we can put in the link about Jakob and his training. He never goes over 87% capability in training. Now, that's pretty fast for the world's leading guy in the gold medalists. for the world's leading guy in the gold medalists, but for him, he's running at this threshold pace, which is below his capacity, but he's maybe working it twice a day. And yeah, he goes to the front and leads and just dares everybody to keep up

with this machine-like stride and strategy. He's not sitting and waiting to the end to kick because he talks in interviews like, well, I'm the best runner, so I don't want to leave it to chance. I'm just going to work the hell out of these guys. And yeah, that's the golden mile at his home country of Norway. He's a national hero and his brothers.

And I love that face where he's just, if you're watching on YouTube, his face is calm. His stride is not tense. And so it looks like, hey, why don't you try harder in the home stretch to go faster? But that's as fast as you can allow the body to go by remaining tension-free.

Wait, 346, was that a... That's a mile. Yeah, but was that a record? Because I'm looking at the... It should be. No, the great El Garou still has the world record in the mile of 343 from 1997 or 98. And he's the greatest middle distance runner of all time.

And I thought El Garou's record would never be broken in my lifetime, maybe my kid's lifetime. But he's got a shot here, Yaka, because he's only 21 years old. And to think that he could take down El Garou for for running fans it's like this guy was you know the greatest legend his his records have held for 25 years it's pretty impressive i may be tripping by the way but you said 1500 isn't 1600 mile or is it a mile is 1609 meters 1609 so when they have a mile race just for the fascination of the crowd and you know people still have a high regard for the mile from old school but but in international track today, it's the 1500 is the big event. That's the middle distance signature event.

And this is a rare occasion where they run a mile race just for the heck of it. And even in America, like in high school, the guys do 1600 meters, the high school runners, which is nine meters short of a mile. It's not even a mile, but it's four laps around a track, because tracks are 400 meters. We've gone mostly to metric, and then we still have this leftover dangling. I don't know if they have that in weights.

Everything's in kilos, except for the powerlifting Western Championship meet in pounds. When he trains, any idea how far he's going? Like how long is he holding on to this like 87%? Because it's very common for lifters to lift that way. Right, right.

But when you lift, you know, it's like it's over pretty quickly. You do doubles and triples and singles and stuff like that. Well, I mean, lifters are smarter than distance runners. I've known that for a long time since I worked in sports nutrition years ago where, you know, the bodybuilder knows how to get a big bicep. Right. They work the heck out of themselves and they rest and recover. And meanwhile, the distance runners and the triathletes are just overtraining every day and not developing.

So, interestingly, like he rarely runs over one hour in duration of his workout, which is also a fascinating breakthrough because you've heard this on Huberman talking about where- That makes sense. He only runs for four minutes, right? Well, I mean, he's also the world champion at 5,000 meters, which is a 13-minute event, which is pure. I mean, that's a real distance event. And he could probably crush 10,000, which is even, you know.

But rarely running over an hour is extremely rare because these guys are universally going out and doing their two and a half, two hour runs jogging though. So these guys are working hard or they're resting and not studying. He had a famous quote in that interview where he was trying to bring his books to training camp and study in between workouts. And he realized the books were tiring him out for his next workout. So now we're talking about the highest level of sophistication of a training athlete

where he can't even study between his workouts. And look at that training graphic that Andrew's pulling up. Yeah, so if you look at something like 20 times 400 at 63, 64, that is a pretty insane workout. But let's not forget, he's 328, 1500 meter guy. So for him, that's within his capability. I think that's the most important takeaway

is that everything on that list, they're showing his training Monday through Sunday, if you're just listening. It's all hardcore training, but it's not out there for hours and hours. So he's not overproducing the stress hormones in a chronic manner. He's just hitting a hard workout,

but again, not too hard for him. It's within his grasp. And what's also amazing is like, he hasn't missed a planned workout since he was like 11 or something. So- I love the, it says 20 times 200 meter uphill times two. Yeah, yeah.

So that's 40 quick hits up the hill. But if you aspiring distance runners are looking at this, what we want to do is extrapolate everything down to our level of capability. So if I'm looking at this, I'm going to do one set of 10 times 200 meters up the hill, a quarter of what he's doing because I'm not the world champion. And, you know, same with high school runners who are trying to get good. And when I was in high school, we got pretty good. We trained super hard, but we destroyed ourselves. And I, you know, I'd wake up Saturday

morning, I couldn't even walk. I could barely, you know, get my calves going into the kitchen because everything was beyond our capability to the point where we're just like getting into this competitive, ego-driven, let's see who can crush each other mindset rather than, hey, I'm building, building, building. And his father was building him since he was 11 or 12 or 13. You go on the reality show and there's these nice interviews, you know, and the father says, are you sure you want to do this? And Jakob says, yes, I want to do this. I want to be the best. I want to beat my brothers. And I also want to be the best in the world. The dad's like, okay, then, well, here we go.

You know, we're off and running. Do you know how his brothers do? Like, do his brothers compete also? Yeah, Henrik, the oldest, is a European champion. One of the fastest 1500 meter runners of all time. Fifth in the Olympics in London, 2012, 10 years ago. Philip succeeded him as European champion. And also highest level of the world, 330 personal best.

So those three guys from one family in Norway are among the best runners of all time. And Jakob is on his way to – he's like a once-in-a-lifetime talent. Did their dad do anything notable as a runner or was he just a great coach? No, he was an engineer dude. Engineer. He didn't have any sporting background. He was an engineer dude. Engineer.

And he didn't have any sporting background. Like he didn't have that bias, which is interesting. You know, like if dad was a great runner back with Lassie Viren, you know, in the old days, maybe he'd come into it with the traditional bias like the old baseball manager where the pitcher has to only throw 80 pitches and then stick his elbow in a bucket of ice, you know. It probably sounds fair to say like that he just basically just doesn't really train running very slowly. Right. Yeah.

Like almost, it doesn't appear like he, I mean, who knows, you know, you can't see all of his training through YouTube, but most of the stuff we're watching, it's like he's moving pretty goddamn fast. Yeah. And it's pretty open book. I mean, the reality show cameras have been on him for a decade and, you know, you can now they're, they're glad to publish, you know, his methods. And it's sort of like, Hey, here's what I'm doing. Why don't you try it and try to catch me? Because it's a pretty stunning commitment to being an athlete and not being able to study

in between workouts. I think it's just so awesome. One of the, one of the big knocks sometimes on the endurance athletes is that they're not very strong, right? And so he's still maintaining, whether, I don't know how much he lifts and stuff like that, but like he's maintaining a level of strength by going at these intensities and doing things like hill training and stuff like that.

Yeah, and it seems like, you know, it's very sport specific. So he would probably get his butt kicked in most general CrossFit games type of approach. But they don't care either. And it's also interesting because, you know, we talk a lot about cross-training and the triathletes. You get fit because you're swimming, biking, and running, so you're so fit and your biking translates over to your running. But these guys, like, if they're off their feet from an injury or something, it sets them

back tremendously. Even if they're riding that bicycle like crazy every day and doing the sprints on the bike or running, you know, you run in the swimming pool in a flotation vest and go through the stride. Yeah, there's just no way to get good at middle distance running besides running those middle distance workouts that we saw on the screen. And to compare him with Kipchoge, the marathoner that's 159, the greatest marathoner of all time, he runs rarely over 80% of his capacity because he's a marathoner, right? So it's a whole different, he's training for a two-hour event rather than a three-minute and 28-second event.

But he sort of has that same philosophy of where he's just working event, but he sort of has that same philosophy of where he's just working up near his threshold all the time and not needing to go and jog or rest or deal with, you know, breakdown and injuries and soreness and things that, you know, even recreational runners deal with, let alone, you know, competitors. A lot of the U.S. guys, some of the most famous guys bombed out this year. They didn't even make the U.S. team to go to Worlds because they were performing poorly for whatever reason. Injuries or overtraining, I'm going to say. Being a runner for sport is just so interesting. Like even doing these longer distances as far as your training is concerned.

Because, yeah, maybe they do some stuff in the weight room. But the just repetitious aspect, you know, like, yeah, maybe you can go outside, get views, but maybe you're on a track and you're just going and going and going. And I just think about just the mental aspect of that, because when you think of like lifting or martial arts or any of those, at least there's some type of variability. Right. but when it comes to these long distance running in the training, it, I'm trying to think of something that could be more grueling and just more just mentally taxing because it's just same, same,

same, same, same. Yeah. You know, it's just damn being there. Being in a pool. That's what people have said.

People have said the pool is tough. You just look at the fucking bottom of the pool and you can't even like, unless you're my wife and you've been training for a long time, you can't talk in between your sets. You know, she has it all strategically planned out so she can gossip in between her sets and stuff. Yeah, rest intervals. Yeah, it's really difficult.

But you said something interesting earlier. We were talking about like being social versus being like the greatest. And for a lot of people that aren't, for a lot of people that maybe find out that they, or for a lot of people that are struggling to get to where they want to be, they recognize at some point they can't really be that social, right? Well, yeah. If you want to be a serious competitor, I was saying like back in the old days in triathlon, I would plan these long rides. We're going to go climb in the Sierras. It's this great route. I'm inviting you to my house to start there on Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. And I'd head out there to a planned seven-hour ride, and we'd get to the hour and 20-minute checkpoint to get water. And I'd tell my buddies, like, guys, I'm not feeling it today. My legs aren't there. I'm turning around, going home, going to sleep. Here's the map. Enjoy yourself.

And, you know, it was kind of like it takes a lot of courage to get to this point where you're going to put your long-term best interests and your competitive goals in front of being perfect attendance award. I get a T-shirt at my CrossFit box because I made every workout this week. It's like if that's what you're going for, that's fine. And if it's mainly a social outlet and you're there because you want to do the run to feed the hungry every year and you're going to practice with your friends and it's not this perfectly aligned, serious thing. That's fine too. But like, we got to get clear with our goals and say, you know, if I want to be serious here, just like the father talking to young Jacob, it's like, do you understand what this takes if you want to be the best in the world? And the kid's like, hell yeah, I'm going to kick my brother's ass and kick everyone else's ass. You know, he was ready for it. And you can't judge either approach, but do not get intermixed there where you're trying to be sort of social and sort

of go for that perfect attendance award, but also you harbor these competitive goals and you're spouting these great, you know, aphorisms like, I intend to, you know, be the, you know, be the best I can be. Well, then go to sleep. Instead of show up at 4 a.m., what's the guy's name, your buddy that comes in? Which one? Josh. Josh. Oh, sorry.

It's like, that's great, but one of those days is not going to be right for you, the individual. So you've got to hit that snooze alarm and don't feel like a wuss. You're going to get shit because you didn't show up. It's like you're locked into your intuition and your best long-term decisions. And that was hard for me because part of it was like, hey, here's a race. They're inviting me to fly to this Caribbean island for free and get an appearance fee and I can go and

pick up some more money. And I'm a professional, so that's what I'm all about. But it's like, is this in my long-term best interest when I'm pointing for the world championships four months from then? Because I got to deal with jet lag, a hot environment, a hard race, jet lag coming back. And so you have to make all kinds of different sacrifices if you intend to go for your ultimate potential. I remember when I was lifting, there would be, people would talk about all kinds of different ways of lifting. Some people would squat three times a week. Some people would bench three times a week or deadlift three times a week. Or some people would bench, squat, and deadlift on the same day. There's all these different ways of lifting.

And I remember Ed Cohn saying he felt like the people that were the most worried about it were the people that wanted to do it more than once a week and you know he is the greatest of all time you know he deadlifted 900 pounds at 220 and it's just a really good point of like you can train it multiple times a week but if you just put in a really hard good effort you can also train it differently than that and there's even been guys in powerlifting powerlifting years and years ago, there was guys that would do a heavy lift every other week. You know, so it's like it's crazy. Like what you can even Eric Lillibridge more recently, him and his dad and his brother, they all train that way.

They would only do a heavy squat or a heavy deadlift every other week. And they did that for years on end. And so it's amazing like what your body can do and how your body can kind of adjust to certain things. But in powerlifting specifically, lifters have been pretty in tune with the fact that lift doing stuff at a hundred percent is not a great idea. And spending too much time in the gym is not a great idea. And for people to really make progress, they, they most often have to kind of be in that percentage range that you're talking about this guy being in. Kind of that somewhere between 75 and maybe almost 90 percent. Yeah, it's greasing the groove or whatever you want to call it to become pretty popular.

And then I think when you go to execute it, at least I'm speaking for myself, it's pretty difficult. Like I'll go to the track to do a set of 200s knowing that my goal time by calculation is 36 seconds, which is not that hard for me. I'm used to going 30, 31. And so I'll be like, I can't train that way anymore. It's too difficult, too stressful. I get sore after. So I'm going to slow down to 36. And I cross the line.

It says 34. And I'm like, you know, I have to work harder to be focused on the purpose of the workout. And there's some good clips in that Inga Britson show where the dad's yelling at them for coming in a second too fast on their repeat. Because again, that anaerobic threshold physiologically is a huge difference between exceeding that lactate buildup in the blood versus staying right there in that beautiful sweet spot. It's four millimolars per kilogram. And so they can finish the effort, the uphill thing, prick their finger really fast and see what their blood lactate is in real time out there on the course. So that's how they're tracking it?

Are they using a wearable of any kind? You just go and prick your finger. Yeah. And of course they have their heart rate. And so then you get competent knowing that 173 is about my anaerobic threshold. I don't want to get it over that. But to get even more accurate is prick your finger. The Tour de France guy has been doing that a long time. And there's good content in, was it Tyler Hamilton's book, The Secret Race, where he talks about all the doping and how they got away with it. It's pretty fascinating.

Oh, but also they had a calculation of number of watts at anaerobic threshold per kilogram of body weight. And there's this calculation. And if you're at the right number, you have a chance to win the tour. And if you're not, you're not going to win the tour. You're going to be the working person that hands the water bottle to the favorite guy. And it's like, if you're over 6.8 or 7.1 or something, you are known that when they get to the mountains where the body weight matters so much, because on flat ground, anybody can win. They go for five hours and some guy sprints and then the specialists win because they can sprint the last hundred meters. But when you get to that

mountain, then it's how many watts, right, how much power can you put out on that bike per your body weight? Because if a light guy is doing, if you can put out 500 watts on your aerodyne bike, so can I, let's say, but I weigh this many pounds less than you, I'm going to toast you on a hill. And so the whole tour comes down to this mathematical equation that they can go and figure out in June when they're training, they're going to climb up a steep hill. They're going to prick their finger and the coach is going to go, you're going to win.

You're going to work for him because he's better than you. And it's, it's pretty wild how, um, now how do you get to 7.3, uh, you know, wattage per kilogram, you're doping your ass off and you're taking the red blood cell product EPO because how can you train that hard to put out that many watts when you only weigh 140 pounds? So that's the other factor that comes into, you could probably even predict like this guy's doped if he's at 7.3 because 6.8 is the most any human could ever get to in terms of ability when they're not full of EPO and their hematocrit's not too high. You know, I don't pay much attention to cycling cycling i still don't pay any attention to cycling but

since lance armstrong has there been anybody who has been able to i don't know match his skill like yeah good question i mean and also skill what does that mean and to me when i when i look at lance like he was the most prepared and the most mentally optimal athlete I think that we've ever seen. And it was just amazing how he lived his life, how he organized the operation. You know, U.S. Postal bicycling team had 40 employees. 20 of them were riders. 20 of them were therapist, coach, manager, whatever. And he was pretty much ruled that environment and orchestrated everything with his sidekick, Brunel,

who was the team director. And so they'd pick the right athletes, and they'd assess who was up and coming and get that guy on their team because they needed him to work for him in the mountains. So it was like a business. And then he was training his body as an athlete, and he had the highest level of confidence.

But I wrote a book about him. It was called How Lance Does It. I interacted with him a lot when we were triathletes back when he was a kid. And he just had this, the most ideal competitive mindset I've ever seen. And it was just this complete confidence, you know, cockiness, like everyone accuses him of, but it was mainly like confidence in his own abilities and his ability to stay focused and work hard and also like complete fearlessness of not only winning but fearless if not fearing losing either yeah which is an important distinction because i think a lot of athletes they're afraid of winning and breaking through because then they

don't have that struggle that they're so familiar with and some of them have talked about this in public and i think we see like the mental aspects where the mental health is now a big factor in in sports and I think it's all great to have this come out but a lot of athletes are afraid of being the best and then there's a ton of them that are afraid of losing and therefore playing conservatively and in the fourth quarter the Warriors are up by 18 but they start to get stiff and Curry's not flipping his shots anymore um Dr uh what's his name? Dr. Lohr. He's written a bunch of mental training books. He says Curry is the best ideal athlete mindset he's ever seen because he's constantly loosey goosey, relaxed, having fun, sticking his tongue out, wagging his tongue, flipping a shot because your shot, when you're 27 feet away, you can't have any tension or forcing

the shot. He's flipping his shot up like he's playing on the playground. And that's how the best basketball player ever, I think in many ways, he's the shot. He's flipping his shot up like he's playing on the playground. And that's how the best basketball player ever, I think in many ways, he's the best. But Lance was like that in cycling, to answer your question. So he had all those attributes that were beyond anything we've ever seen. And because the

sport was so dirty and so doped, he would win the tour by two minutes or three minutes or seven minutes. But if it was clean, he would have won by 20 minutes or 30 minutes. I don't think if it was clean, he would have won by 20 minutes or 30 minutes. I don't think enough people say that or appreciate that. It's like he was a victim of the genetically inferior athlete taking a shortcut to catch up to what he was naturally.

And, of course, he was 6% better because everybody was doped. And so it closes the gap just like in the locker room of the NFL or high school. Go to Grant High, Powerhouse, or whatever. Three of those guys look like you. They're 17, and they're going to D1. They're getting a full ride, and they're doing an NIL deal. The quarterback, Nicholas Tennessee, is getting $7 million dollars to throw balls he's in 10th grade he's going into 11th grade

the greatest NIL deal anyway there's these genetic freaks that have the attributes and then all the drugs can come into play to help them get higher especially the red blood cell drug because if you're oxygenating your blood that high you're going to make a huge bump

and you're going to get as good as the, you know, the best, the best natural guy, I guess. Now I haven't followed the sport that much. I just love the Lance era and watching all that. And it was so great. And I kind of got disappointed when all this stuff blew up. Um, but apparently they're still climbing the key mountains like Alpe d'Huez. They have these signature climbs, the tourmalet that they go on most every year. It's a famous mountain pass. It's like going over the Sierras, you know, who can ride up Donner Pass in an hour or whatever. They're still climbing like in similar times to what Lance threw down in the era of, you know, rampant doping and drug use.

And so I'm not going to – I mean I can can speculate, I guess, on this show, we have no limits, right? It's like, okay, well, you're not going to beat Lance clean because Lance was doped and he was better than you because he's the most genetically gifted endurance athlete we've ever seen. He was 15 years old. He was racing against me and the others on the pro triathlon circuit, 15, 16 years old. I guarantee you he wasn't doped at 15 or 16 years old. So he was an incredible endurance machine, the likes of which we've never seen. And then of course he got ushered into the doping era. But yeah, I don't know what's going on these guys now, but in Tyler Hamilton's book, The Secret Race, he's talking about micro dosing with EPO,

where you just take a little pinch every night or something into the skin to help boost your red blood cells. And by morning, you will test clean because it's a small dose rather than a big dose where you're going to get busted. And he calls it like your radioactive period. You don't want to get tested by a surprise unannounced drug test visitor during that time. And so he has passages in the book where he and his wife are making dinner in the kitchen. The doorbell rings, they hit the deck and freeze for 30 minutes and don't move and don't talk. And the doorbell rings again, doorbell rings again. And then the person writes down, you know, failed attempt. I'll be back at 6am. And if you miss that one, you're suspended. And so it was just funny. Like he'd finish his bike ride and he'd always cut

through like the neighbor's yard, lift his bike over the fence, sneak through his own backyard, into the basement, up the stairs, and then into the kitchen in case someone was at the door waiting for him. It was a heavy read, put it that way. Can you tell us about Lance Armstrong's gardener? Do you know that story? No.

Lance Armstrong's gardener went with him on the Tour de France tours, and he would stop at a local bar or whatever, and Lance would meet him there, and he would blood dope him right there on the spot, like give him whatever, EPO or whatever drugs he had. I think his nickname was Moto Man. Moto Man.

I didn't know it was Gardner, but it was Moto Man. Yeah, they called him Moto Man. Yeah, he would cruise around on a little moped. That's why they called him Moto Man. And, he would cruise around on a little moped. That's why they called him Moto Man. And he had all these like drugs for him or whatever. And then in that documentary that they did, they had like – it was funny because they were really suspicious of the U.S. team. And they're like, we don't really know what's going on. We can't just go and accuse him.

While they're talking outside of this mobile home unit that they had that they were cruising around in, they're in there doping at that very moment. Like they're in there like getting like these blood, I think, I don't know, blood transfusions or something like that. They replaced their own blood that they took out six weeks before. While they're outside talking about. Yeah, how suspicious it is. But they can't go in and like, you know, just bust them on stuff. How did they know that they were doing that at that moment in time, though? Like what?

It's in the documentary. I forget how it's shown or explained or maybe they just said, hey, in retrospect, I think that it was happening. And maybe they just showed a clip of it or something like that. What's it called? I want to watch it. Do you know the name of the doc? The Armstrong Lie. The Armstrong Lie.

There's so many, man. I'm losing count. It's incredible. It's all pretty. It's incredible. many man i'm losing count it's incredible pretty yeah it's incredible uh the one thing where you kind of like where his story just loses me is like and i don't even i don't have any idea of his business or or how any of it happened but it appears that he like went out of his way to attack people yeah yeah that were that were throwing shade at him but like i mean it was it was a

business strategy um i think it was he sued sued a guy for like $2 million. Yeah, he sued everybody that spoke out. There was some – It's just like a random writer who doesn't have that kind of dough. Yeah, yeah. And he won. Like Lance Armstrong won. Oh, God.

Yeah, yeah. And there was people like tearful confessions, people coming forward saying, I've seen it all. This is what happened. I'm telling the truth to clear my own conscience. And then they would get their asses sued off by the machine. Because once you're stuck in that lie, and he's done a pretty good job these days coming forward and saying, look, what am I going to do?

The greatest natty or not story of all time. Yeah. You're stuck. It's like Madoff or something. You're not going to go to the two-thirds mark and go, hey, sorry, I took all your guys' money. I really, I'll make it up to you. Please, you know, forgive me. It's just blown up and it's gotten so big. And now he's a hero to the cancer survivor. So he's not going to let down the little bald children. And it just got, you know, it got really heavy. But I think we, you

know, the thing we have to appreciate when we point fingers and say, that person's a cheater, this person isn't. It's like, look, this is major big time sports. And we now know that everyone was dope at the highest level of especially cycling. And we can speculate all we want about the other things and liver king and all the rest, you know, but it doesn't, I think I'm going to say that the playing field is most likely level wherever we're looking so is Usain Bolt did he take dope

when he was sprinting well if he did I guarantee you the other seven guys in the finals did and so he's still the fastest

I would agree with that the ones that are deliberately cheating when they know they're in a clean sport that's rough and that was my era of triathlon 86 to 94 where you know the doping was just kind of emanating into the endurance

sports and people realizing that even if you take anabolic steroids, even as a skinny geek going and riding your bike up the hill, it's going to have a huge advantage. And I had to make this assumption, like I had to go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning, assuming that this sport was squeaky clean. And these were my buddies and I crashed with Mark Allen and Kenny Sousa in Colorado, two of the best guys and I go train with Mike Pig in Arcata, another top guy and use his bathroom and borrow his toothpaste

and it's like I know this sport is clean and everyone's working hard and we're all trying our best otherwise I'd have to quit I know these guys, they go to church with me on the weekend I mean it's like this. You raise hell and accuse everybody of doping. Quit or join them.

Those are your three choices, and none of them are any good, right? Or fourth, get your ass kicked and go home and give a hug to your wife and say, I got seventh, but I was maybe the first clean person, so let's go celebrate with a pizza. None of those four are good. Hey, but what about getting a PR? Well, I mean, if it's your profession. I mean, a faster person will help you get a PR, right? Does that not matter because you don't get first?

I mean, I gave up nine years of my life dedicated to the pro circuit. So I wasn't interested in PRs or moral victories. And so if I was becoming suspicious that I was in a doping sport, I was going to have this crossroads where... What if you win and you get your worst time ever? It's okay.

Win's a win. I don't care about that. Everybody else got injured, you got your worst time ever. I don't care. To think about it now, and then subsequently a few guys got knocked off here and there that I raced against that stole money out of my pocket because they were doped and I wasn't. And that one's pretty heavy. It all happened pretty much after I quit.

You say got knocked off. What do you mean? They got caught? They got busted, yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so there were people experimenting and trying to take a shortcut and get a break and beat people like me. And so that one gets me riled up. But compare that to the cyclists and Tyler Hamilton story where one of the chapters

is called a thousand days. And the reason it's called a thousand days, he goes, that's how long you last in Europe clean before you get smoked so bad that you're heading back home to the farm. And in Europe, cycling's blue collar sport. So those guys are going back home to the factory and the foundry to pound out steel or whatever. It's not like, you know, they're falling back on their college degrees. And I guess I'll go, you know, I'll go get a marketing job and do some tech venturing. No, they were win or die. And so it's very easy to cross over.

And they said, you know, they took him aside, Tyler. And they said, you know, we saw your heart. We saw you fighting in last place in the pouring rain and not giving up. And you have a lot of potential and you have the heart of a champion. You just need to get your vitamins right. And so go into, yeah, that was the euphemism. And so that was his ushered into the era of, you know, of, you know, the professionalism of the sport. And then it's like, you know, he's writing this thing, like, do I tell my wife? And there's another guy, Frankie Andrea, one of the sport yeah and then it's like you know he's writing this thing like do i tell my wife and there's another guy frankie andrea one of the guys that ratted out lance later i have bad thoughts about that his whole how his whole thing went down but like his wife made him swear

up and down his fiancee do not do any of this doping shit that i've heard about if you do i'll divorce your ass and i'll never oh i promise i promise i promise so he's about to lose his job years later because he's just not quite that strong. He's fighting hard. He's a talented guy. And he got in his car one day and drove across the border to Switzerland where you walk into the pharmacy

and you can buy some EPO. And he's like, oh yeah, I need some EPO. And the guy's like, how much? He goes, one. You know, he goes, no, you need a hundred. Here's what you need. Take this, take that. And so he's, you know, off onto the dark side too

and keeping his wife out of it for a while. But I'd imagine like the pain and suffering of having a passion for sport like that and having to keep it secret. And then, you know, it was, it's pretty fascinating, but it's kind of a subject that's sensitive to me because I was that racer that dedicated my life to it and wanted to believe it was clean. But now I think I was probably, you know, naive in a way. And it's like, shit. You never took anything? Nothing, man now I think I was probably, you know, naive in a way. And it's like, shit. You never took anything? Nothing, man. I'd never taken anything in my whole life. I didn't even take pain kills after my appendectomy. I had an emergency appendectomy. It was pretty serious. You know, I almost died. I was bleeding out. And, you know, I told the guy

in the hospital, like, no, I'm an athlete. I'm strong. I don't want any of that stuff. Leave me alone. He's like, well, if you ever need anything, push this button. And like a few hours later, the anesthesia wears off and then the pain kicks in. I thought I was feeling fine, you know, but it was because I was still under a little bit. I was pushing that button so much they were telling me to shut up because I wanted more drugs, more drugs, more drugs. It was just so – the pain was so overwhelming. But I have that starting point of like – even with like, you know, training, I don't even want caffeine.

You offered me a caffeine generously, but it's like when I was tired as an athlete, I wanted to feel the full extent of my fatigue so I could make the right training decision. I did not want to take a central nervous system stimulant, even though of course it's going to help me, whatever else was probably going to help me. But I felt like somewhere down the road,

I was going to pay for it because I was propping myself up. It's almost like, you know, going in there and playing the heavy metal music is going to change your mood and change your state and change your neurotransmitters. And maybe I didn't need that today. Maybe I needed it. You had like entrance music today when you came in. Totally.

Right at the exact time. Thunderstruck came on right when you walked in. It was unbelievable. But I mean, now it's, you know, like I said, said i'm rethinking everything maybe that's one of the things i should rethink i should just you know coffee up every time i work out so i can get a little you know a little boost and do something better but i feel like what about trt because like now you know like so you're going against other old geezers right so yeah yeah that's right how old are you by the way 57 man i'm it's uh you know when they say age is just a number?

Yeah. I think someone called bullshit on that. I'm like, you know, that's a good point. You better respect however many years you got because I'm not 27, and I need to be careful. I can't extend myself too hard. I need to know my limits. You're aging well, though, dude. Oh, thanks.

You're aging really well. I feel fitter now than when I was a triathlete in many ways. Yeah, healthier. Even though I was very fast to go straight ahead in a swim and a bike and a run, but I couldn't lift a sandbag or do – I couldn't even do my 10-pound back work. I couldn't do anything because I was just fragile and like a little greyhound. Why do some people like yourself – and I don't know if you say this about yourself – why do some people like yourself, and I don't know if you say this about yourself, but why do some people like yourself sometimes not consider themselves athletes?

Because you've had a really good athletic career, it sounds like. You have this running background. You have records in speed golf, and now you're doing high jump. Yeah, yeah. Sounds very athletic, but do people, do sometimes people in the endurance community just, I don't know, maybe is endurance stuff not viewed as being athletic? I don't view it as. Excuse me, all you endurance listeners.

The 4% – what's that demographic report, Andrew? There it is. 4% of listeners like endurance. Well, it's such a narrow focus. But when you get immersed in that for so long – I was an endurance athlete since high school to age 30 when I retired from triathlon. You kind of think like anyone that can like endure it can do it? Yeah. And it's like, I thought I was a big, big badass athlete because I was a pro triathlete who could go fast in those three events. But I was a pathetic athlete. And I realized this,

like coaching my, like I told on the last show, I said, I transitioned from triathlon and my next athletic goal was to dominate little kids in soccer, basketball, and track because I coached for 10 years, and I'd get out there on the soccer field, and I was full-on participatory coach. I had full gas on every time. I didn't hold back on these poor little guys. Just wreck those kids on the field. But it's like I wanted to get better at cutting and backpedaling

and gaining all these different athletic skills. High jump, I love the event so much and it brought back now in my adult life to be like my main athletic focus now, but I was coaching it for the middle school kids. And so I say, hey, watch me do this. I want to show you how you hit that curve hard and explode off the ground.

And so these are things that you need to pull out of the hat and the triathlon didn't help me. And so there's a lot of adults, like we kind of tend to, you know, plug into these athletic goals because of cultural and marketing forces saying, Oh,

you should do a half marathon because you need to get healthier and get your butt off the couch. Okay. I guess I'll sign up and start running. But it's like, that's like a little slice of the pie. It's a tiny sliver of what fitness really means. And so maybe they should come in here on Saturday, Sunday and see if they can lift something off the ground, see if they can

lift a PVC deadlift. Can you do it right? We have a primal fitness coach. We filmed this certification course and we had the camera guy. He was the video coordinator and we needed a guy to do the deadlift and demonstrate on camera, teaching a novice a deadlift. And we're like, okay, keep your back straight when you lift up this pvc off the ground and every time he hunched his back over he could not keep his back straight no no no keep your back straight man this is the third try i want to see you keep your back straight a lot of people don't know what that means you couldn't even get the click going yeah and it was fascinating because it's like um we're so far removed from functional culture in so many ways. We can sit in a car, sit in a chair, sit in a subway, sit on the couch.

We don't have the basic notion of human fitness. So I'm putting up high ranking on the list. Strength training, of course. Sprinting. Being able to explode and do something explosive is 97% of the communities completely disengaged from that. But then we have 60,000 people shuffling along doing the New York City Marathon. It's better than being on the sideline. Absolutely.

But it's sort of like, all right, now you can do that. Maybe not take it to such an extreme because it's not necessary. If you can run three miles nonstop without stopping, I think that's pretty fantastic. Yeah. And at a slow pace. Yeah, 20. You can run 20-something minutes. That sounds pretty good. That's a long-ass way. Yeah. I mean think that's pretty fantastic. Yeah. And at a slow pace. Yeah, 20, you can run 20 something minutes. That sounds pretty good.

That's a long ass way. Yeah. I mean, it's three miles, downtown Sacramento for me. You know, that's a long run. Someone's going to have to pick you up. But then, you know, when you go further down that road at the expense of just basic fitness competency, and I think that's what, well, I mean,

even the elite athletes, they of course are sacrificing that. And I sacrifice all that to be a triathlete. That's fine. But then you wake up and go on with the rest of your life. So it's like, yeah, I mean, even the elite athletes, they, of course, are sacrificing that. And I sacrifice all that to be a triathlete. That's fine. But then you wake up and go on with the rest of your life. So it's like, yeah, I mean, high jumping is important. I think I should be able to jump off the ground and land safely and all that fun stuff, you know? I think also, too, when it comes to, like, distance running, I don't think you have to run. I don't know shit from shit.

Like, I'm so new to running. But I would say that I don't think that you have to really run that far to be a good distance runner. Oh my gosh. The research from Dr. O'Keefe, he has a TED talk, Run for Your Life, but Not Too Far and at a Slow Pace.

Like there's research that the maximum cardiovascular benefits accrue with a very modest commitment to cardio, something to the tune of a couple few hours a week at a slow pace. And they talk about zone two. You hear people talk about that, Peter or Tia. You got to work on your zone two for your longevity,

which zone two means really comfortably pace under that aerobic capacity. So you can talk and pedal a bike or jog or jog walk or whatever it is. But it's like, you can go get an A plus in that class just from walking after dinner, uh, with your mate for 15, 20 minutes with your dog every day or whatever you can. Yeah. We got to have more movement in life and, and more cardio from, from zero, but you can go

from zero to a plus vastly more easily than any of the half marathon runners might, might understand, you know, because you're, you're, you understand. Because you're immersed in this culture and this community thinking like, well, I only did a two-hour time. I want to do a one hour and 45 for my next half marathon. Okay, fine. But it's already way up there. And then where are your deficiencies? And that's where I think explosiveness, power, being able to –

Running some 200s and 400s would probably be ideal for somebody trying to get faster at a marathon. Yeah, I mean, you know, Sisson talked about this 15 years ago with the primal fitness of, you know, sprint once in a while, lift heavy things, and move around a lot. Those were the three primal laws that's honoring our ancestral past and how humans evolved. And, you know, notably missing from the list is steady state cardio at that in-between

heart rate that's quote unquote kind of hard. That's a quote from Dave Scott, our legendary triathlete from Davis. He goes, I don't want my athletes ever going kind of hard. You want to go slow and comfortable, or you want to go explosive and build your sprint capacity. But that in-between place is where you get tired. And unfortunately, if we walk into any gym and see those people on the Stairmaster where they're sweating and their face is showing the fatigue or people running around the park, most exercisers are going kind of hard too frequently,

and they're just blowing out their hormones, they're blowing out their joints, they're not getting fit. They're just getting, you know, I guess they're getting, you know, cardiovascularly fit at the expense of their health. Yeah. Yeah. You know, quick question, man. Mark actually asked you about the TRT thing, and I'm curious because you're 57 now, right? Yeah. 57. So is that something that you ever think you're going to do? Is it something that you

think is necessary? Because it seems like you're doing just fine. You're not on TRT, right? Not at all. No, I've never taken anything. The most I've ever taken was those pain pills when I was pushing the button and Nurse Rudy was coming and giving me more morphine or whatever they were giving me. But I'm totally open to the idea. And I think I probably should be more open because a lot of these notions, like my notion of living a pure and clean life, I think has served me pretty well. And I don't reach for prescription drugs for any reason. I don't even want to take antibiotics. I want to like wait till that foot's about to get, have to get cut off and then I'll go in. But, you know, I want to push it to the edge

of what I can do with my own natural capabilities. And I test all the time my male hormones and I put up some good numbers. I had 1,008 serum testosterone last year. Jesus! I ranged from 560 to 750 to 820 to 730 to 1,008 to 840. No, that's amazing though. So I guess that's pretty good. But I mean, yeah, it's fine. I wouldn't be a candidate.

That's good though. But that just means there's aspect, like that's when I wonder, okay, I mean, would TRT even make that much of a difference for somebody like you? And the cool thing about you though is that you have everything about your lifestyle is in check. A lot of people that end up trying to do TRT, they don't sleep well. They're not active. They don't have good nutrition.

They get aromatization, right? They take the TRT and it turns into man cans or something. Right? Right. They take the TRT and it turns into man cans or something. Right? I mean, if you're not healthy, that's what my understanding is, is if you go and take something exogenous and you're not healthy, you're going to aromatize it. You're going to turn it into estrogen.

I don't even know. I mean, I feel like if I've done everything and I'm at level 5 and I want to be at level seven or I'm at level seven and I want to be at level nine, then I'm open to any idea. Sis has been talking about me with this for many years. Why do you think it's been a moral issue for you with rubbing elbows with some of your friends who made a different choice? rubbing elbows with some of your friends who made a different choice um you pro i'm just gonna guess and say that you probably didn't feel that they were so morally unsound that you just would completely remove yourself from their life so like why like why why is uh why would utilizing a performance enhancing drug for you why would there be a moral dilemma or hang up for it oh right now there wouldn't be because i'm not in the wada official sporting years ago when you were a triathlete and you started to have a good understanding of like oh it's all right well

these guys take this this and this was it more of a health thing or was it more like i'm not doing that i want to see what i can do more on my own. Oh God, it's not a fricking health thing. And that part, I think we need to blow that myth out too, because if you're a Tour de France rider and you're putting your body through that kind of pain and suffering every day, if you jack yourself up on EPO and testosterone,

you're going to be vastly healthier coming out of that than, I mean, what I did to my body for those nine years of triathlon circuit was extremely unhealthy. I just fried myself. I would test my, you know, hormones and my testosterone was routinely between 200 and 300. It was like from 189 to 290 was my range

for those years when I was racing. And now it's 1,000 when I'm 57-year-old old man. So, you know, I was not healthy in any way. So I would have been much better off doped off my ass while I'm riding my bike seven hoursold old man. So, you know, I was not healthy in any way. So I would have been much better off doped off my ass while I'm riding my bike seven hours through the Sierras, for sure, with no adverse health consequences

besides everything you're doing is unhealthy in a way. So it wasn't that. And, you know, I competed all the way through assuming that I was racing against clean athletes or perhaps this guy that cheated got busted and good riddance to him fuck you go take your two-year four-year ban I mean you deserve it right I mean so that didn't bother me it was like and if they're getting away with it

not getting caught you know you control what you can control and um so maybe you never got to that inner circle of like people just being really open about. Yeah. It was not, it was not a dirty triathlon. I don't think it was a dirty sport in the late eighties, early nineties. And I think, you know, when the court, were those things even illegal at that time?

Yeah. Yeah. We get tested all the time. Yeah. I got tested many times. Yeah. Just people knew how to pass it. Huh?

Just people knew how to pass it. Uh, no, I don't think, I don't think it was a dirty sport. I think the sport was too close-knit. It wasn't multimillion-dollar professional contracts like you have for the NFL or whatever where the incentives are so high. And then in cycling, like from reading the books and the culture, it was like this is the culture.

It's been the culture for 100 years. They used to take cocaine in the tour in 1923. They'd go stop at the roadside thing and get whatever. Even the ancient Greeks and stuff that you pointed out at the roadside thing and get whatever. And so, I think that's... Yeah, even the ancient Greeks and stuff that you pointed out, I'm sure they just took whatever. They did. They had all kinds of performance enhancing substances, yeah. And so, I think, you know, the

testing bodies have a tough battle, like in MMA and Nowitzki is trying to get, you know, this thing heightened up to where people are going to be deterred from trying it due to the penalties. And I think there is a plug for morality somewhere because, you know, like I could cheat in a triathlon by holding my breath at the first buoy and swimming underwater and waiting till the, you know, like you could, if you want to cheat to make money because

I'm a professional, there's all kinds of ways to do that better than, you know, doping, cheating and winning. Yeah. There was this, um, German racer named Nina Kraft. She won the Hawaii Ironman and she was one of the best of her time in the late nineties. And, um, she got, she got busted for EPO after one of her victories. And to her credit, she had a great immediate confession. And she said, I screwed up. I got injured early in the summer. I panicked. I didn't think I was going to recover in time. There's so much pressure on me.

So I took some drugs and I really apologize. And the thing is, like, she won the race by like 30 minutes. And so if she hadn't been doping, she would have won by 12 minutes or something incredible anyway. And, you know, it was kind of a, I like when you have that window to the confession to see like, wow, this is what, you know, I feel that athlete's pain and their conscience and they, they're explaining it just like Tyler writing a book and the other guys, Floyd Landis writing his book. And it's like, wow. Okay. Now I know, now I know, you know, a bigger perspective of how, how would athletes make these decisions? Why Lance had to sue his, every single person that was tearfully confessing

and telling the truth and lying under oath. And you see those videos on some of the documentaries where it's like, how many times do I have to tell you? I've never taken anything. It's like a politician with the finger. Oh, okay. I'm sorry for asking, sir. Next question.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is an argument to me though about what you were mentioning where a lot of these athletes they train so much where they're like tanking their tests like for example in natural bodybuilding where they do get tested um you'll get a lot if you test any of these athletes a few weeks before they end up stage you look at their blood levels test is tanked you know i mean even even myself like i had no sex drive for the last like five months of my prep because i was so fucking lean and i was eating like 30 grams of fat right so

for some of this shit it's like it would be it would be dope if yeah dope be dope dope right now no no but but it would be cool to have something where at least the athletes are at a baseline level of hormonal health. But, you know, if you add one thing, then everyone's going to try to find the next thing to get the edge, right? So if this is allowed, well, there's going to be guys that are taking this. Yeah. It's a tough thing. Why do you think performance enhancing drugs are even banned in something like endurance sports? You're mentioning like it's already pretty unhealthy already.

That's probably agreeable. Is it for the health and safety of the athletes we want to ban these drugs? Come on. Just for public perception? Yeah. And you know what? I had a guest on my podcast, Shelby Houlihan, recently. Because when you're saying these things,

like for me, I get excited. Like when you're saying like the guys would prick themselves with a little bit of EPO every day, I'm like, good for them. That's fucking great. Yeah, that's right. They're smart and they're racing for big stakes. And Shelby is a huge victim of the doping system

because she tested positive for a very, very trace amount of nandrolone, five points, five nanograms, where like a therapeutic dose for performance enhancement is like 400 to 500 or something. But she got busted, busted in quotes. And she's like, I don't know how this shit got into my body. I'm a clean racing athlete. I had a burrito, a pig burrito at the food truck and you probably heard- Oh, the burrito girl.

Yeah, you guys gave a little plug to her. But the story is tragic because she's like deer in the headlights going, she's training hard. She's the number one female middle distance runner in America, American record in the 1500 and the 5000, the same events that Ingebrigtsen runs. And she's like, oh my God, I'm freaking out. I have no idea. Had to hire a lawyer. They had to figure it out. They had to mount a case because the burden of proof is on the athlete. She spent her life savings that she earned so hard on the running course and they denied her case. They're like, no, it's improbable that you got this from the pig because that was their defense. And so like, she's like, I don't know where I got this into my body. It's a little

fractional amount that now, you know, they're picking up these drug, these drug tests can pick up the most basic thing. Who knows where she got it from? She's banned for four years. And so like, do we have to test athletes to the extent that we're kicking out a clean, hard-training athlete who's winning golds for America? And it's another question to reflect upon. It's like, this system ain't perfect. She's highly believable. There are other areas where people are cheating, and it's, like, pretty common. Like, have you ever done anything to your bike?

Have you ever done anything to your shoes? Have you ever done anything to your bike or have you ever done anything to your shoes or done anything with swimming? Like, yeah. Uh, what about the altitude tents, which there's an affordability quotient there where you can spend $12,000 and sleep at high altitude and live in Sacramento and to get the benefits of both worlds. And it's like, you know, that's not fair. And then speaking of affordability, like, you know, an athlete who doesn't have the means to defend themselves against a positive drug test. They just have to suck it up and be banned for four years. That makes me more upset than the possibility that some of these athletes may be micro-dosing sometime or, you know, boosting.

And then, you know, like, what about creatine? What about this? What line do we draw? Bike could cost a fortune, right? Lance Armstrong's bike, I think weighed like as much as like a paperback book or something.

Oh my God. Shout out to Sacramento, by the way, because someone here stole his bike. Oh, that's right. I remember that.

And it was like such a signature bike. Like anyone riding on the bike trail with that bike? Oh my gosh. Like, are you kidding me?

It's like stealing the Van Gogh. Like, yes, here over in my, in my study, I have an interesting painting. Oh, isn't that the one of the kind of priceless artwork? Who's going to steal a Van Gogh and put it on their wall? Maybe there's an undercurrent of black market art appreciation people.

Come in my basement. I'll show you my stolen collection. But you know what? Back to your question. If I'm doing everything I can and I want to be better and I feel like I'm frustrated and I'm stuck at a crossroads, I would be open to it because it makes a lot of sense that like, look, there's no downside risk. Like you're going to increase your risk of cancer because your testosterone is too high. that's more the case that you're going to, you know, proof yourself from a lot of breakdown and metabolic disease because you're out there working out, maintaining muscle mass

and by any means necessary. But first of all, we should go get into our training protocol, do the best we can. And then it's, you know, then kind of talk about the add-ons. And, you know, I don't need anything. I don't allow anything in my body that's impure, like, you know, vegetable seed oils or processed sugars or processed foods. I just don't allow anything in my body that's impure like vegetable seed oils or processed sugars or processed foods. I just don't.

And I don't have any desire to either. And so I'm checking all the boxes, but we'll see what the future holds. I'm trying to remain open to everything. What did you think of the Icarus documentary? Because in that, it made it seem like all the steroids in the world wasn't going to help this guy become think of the Icarus documentary? Because in that it made it seem like all the steroids in the world wasn't going to help this guy become one of the best. Yeah. I mean, there's a ton of other factors and back to all that liver king fun stuff. Look, let's take off 12% if the person is juiced up, right? They're having this huge advantage. They're way bigger.

Take 12% off, Brian. What do you get? You get a fucking shredded guy who trains harder than almost any human and eats with more restriction. And on that note, like we have never seen an athlete training at that level and eating with that level of strictness and purity.

And right now, you're talking about liver king. Yeah, I'm talking about liver king. And in contrast, like Matthew Frazier, one of the greatest athletes ever on the planet, he talks about chomping on snicker bars in between his workouts and whatever. The main athletes are having their cheat days and the guys in the NBA and NFL. But liver king is going on a five-day fast every quarter preceded by a failed hunt. He calls it, which is a extreme glycogen depleting workout. I don't think any athlete has ever pushed it to

that level. And that's how you're going to get veins and complete shredded year round. I mean, it's just, let's have a bunch of other people try that. They're going to look like liver King. So that in my mind, like, you know, it's, it's sort of a, a funny thing, and I love how he takes it where he's like, what an honor to be accused of doping. And I have my own story there because when I was – my first year, I think I talked about this on the last podcast. I was a rookie triathlete. I quit my job as an accountant, and I was training, training, and loving the lifestyle and going to the races and getting my ass kicked by the top guys. But I dreamed of being there someday. And I was always improving and I was totally focused on my own personal improvement. So if

I got 21st in a big race, I'd noticed that my run time was the fourth best of the day. And all I had to do is improve my swim a little more and improve my bike. So I kept working hard, working hard. And then I went to this big race at the end of the year and I upset the two top ranked guys in the world. And I was completely out of nowhere and no one knew my name. And that's when I got all this attention immediately and the sponsors were calling and it was such a great moment in my life. And then I did it again. There was a rematch and I beat the same top guys. Everyone was gunning for me. And now I was showing that I was deserved to be at the highest level of the sport. And I'd got there really quickly in my first year. And I remember I got this feature magazine interview from the best magazine. The guy talked to me for an hour on

the phone and I was so excited to be like, they're going to do a story on me. Oh my gosh. Tell me about your training, Brad. And you ran at UC Santa Barbara, but you got injured a lot and then you'd store triathlon. Yes, sir. And it's been really great. And I'm so excited to be here. And then at the end, I realized he was working me the whole time to get a scoop. And at the end, he's like, hey, dude, so like off the record, like what kind of stuff are you taking?

And I'm like, what do you mean? We talked about my diet and my protein. He goes, no, no, man, come on. Like, oh, you guys. And my team, my training partner, Andrew McNaughton, was also rising at the same time to a high level out of nowhere. And we were clicking, man.

We were kicking butt and beating some of the top guys. And so this guy had spent this whole time just trying to set me up for me to admit that I was doping. And I was like, I finally realized what was going on and like my heart broke and I was like both, you know,

just sad and just furious that, you know, to be accused of something like that because I had improved at such a high rate. Take it as a compliment that's what everybody said it was like a shocker and so now i can relate to like anybody who's you know you have fun with your people accusing you too and it's like there's a certain fringe uh emotion there where it's like no they didn't see you working out from seven to

nine man and then coming back the next day and doing it again and doing it again and doing it again. And so it is kind of a slap in the face to go, oh, what shortcut are you taking? Yeah. Anyway. Power Project family, how's it going? I hope you guys are enjoying the episode. And I want to tell you, sometimes when you're a lifter, you need certain pieces of equipment that's going to help you perform a little better in the gym.

Just like the hip circle is going to help warm up your hips, knee sleeves are going to keep your knees warm when you're squatting. The slingshot's going to help you bench a little bit more. But the cool thing is that Mark made all of this equipment when he was in the middle of his powerlifting career because he wanted equipment that could help him perform better as it can also help you perform better. The cool thing is that all this equipment was made for lifters by lifters. Andrew, can you tell them how to get it? Yes, that's over at markbellslingshot.com. And at checkout, enter promo code POWERPROJECT10 to save 10% off your entire order.

Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. That's interesting. When you were mentioning the thing about Leverking, how long have you known him? Maybe four years now. Four years? And you want to talk about, like you guys talked enough about your visit there, like talk about a legit living human. And I'm going to take partial credit for him blowing up on social media because I was in his face in 2019 going,

dude, you need to show your life to the public because there's so many posers and, you know, hucksters out there that are, that are passing themselves off as, you know, the biohacking king. And this is what I do.

And I've noticed a 12% improvement in my libido. It's sensational. You know, it's like, come on, man. You seem to be channeling somebody specific. No, anybody. Could be anybody. Could be anybody. Okay, okay.

I'm tunnel vision, man. I don't even pay attention to popular culture. I forget who's president now. It's all a burr. Obama. Yeah, yeah. But like, I love Obama. Yeah.

But like, you know, to be that legit, I think it's good that he's getting the credit he deserves. And, you know, he's a great businessman, like you said. And I've had interactions with him on a bunch of different levels. We promote that MoFo product together, male optimization formula with organs. It's one of the ancestral supplements products and, you know, high integrity, high character, you know, straight shooting guy. And he's going for wins every day. And it's so motivating and inspiring. I like that stuff where he was talking about his kids, like, I'd rather them hate me than hate themselves in 10 years. And I'm like, yeah, man, am I being too soft on my daughter? I mean, I try to step up and go, you know, hey, come on, you know, rally, you can do it.

There's a few people that I hate your guts right now for talking positively about them. Is that right? Oh, yeah. People love it or hate it when it comes to him. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's the whole point of this developing content is you want to get people thinking. And so if they hate this particular Power Project episode or whatever, that's fine because they're listening and they're getting riled up and then they're going to go express their own confirmation bias, which is fine too.

And I'm really trying to do the opposite, like remain open-minded and think critically about the new information that we're getting to. Maybe this is a transition point in the show because you and I have been talking about a lot of stuff where it's like, my head's spinning right now because I'm rethinking a lot of the foundational premises of ancestral living that I've been writing about non-stop for 15 years and now I'm like shit what am I talking about here it's it's it's like uh you know exploding yeah you

found some different things uh out about I guess, like keto and fasting and things like that. You've been listening to a podcast. I forget what the guy's name is. Yeah, this guy, plug for Energy Balance Podcast, Jay Feldman. He does a fantastic job. His sidekick name is Mike Fave. And they go at it. I listen to a lot of it.

It's really good information, yeah. Yeah, and they go hard for an hour or whatever. And the studies are referenced throughout the show this study that study so it's not like these you know hustlers like me talking about training like look at this guy he's going 87 i think it's a great new thing you know it's very regimented and science-based but he hit me in the face with a couple key one-liners like fasting and keto turn on stress hormones there's stress mechanisms in the body and that is, in fact,

the mechanism by which they deliver the highly lauded benefits. And so with fasting and keto and you get good at fasting and you get fat adapted and you get keto adapted and I'm never hungry and I'm alert and energized

and I'm more productive at work, that's because you're under fight or flight mechanisms, man. That's why it's happening. And so now I'm more productive at work, that's because you're under fight or flight mechanisms, man. That's why it's happening. And so now I'm reflecting, because at 57, I get to reflect on a lot of stuff that you younger listeners might hit there someday and go, shit, I still want to be fit and healthy

and be a peak performing athlete. And so I want to direct all the stress capacity that I have to my workouts and my stressful everyday life, right? I'm trying to run a business and deal with being a father and navigating this and that, right? I have enough stress. I'm not short on stress in my life.

And I'm saying stress in a positive and in a negative context. I'm not saying I'm stressed all the time. I'm like, I stress myself on the track. I stress myself high jumping. I love it. It's fantastic positive stress, just like going in and getting a workout. It's a fantastic positive stressor. Do I need to fast or do I need to restrict my carbohydrates to ketogenic level so I can kick in more stress mechanisms and access those benefits? Or if we take these all as an aggregate, and access those benefits? Or if we take these all as an aggregate, could it be possibly that you can err on the side of excessive stress? And I guess that's a personal reflection for everyone. And I think, you know, we've written bestselling books. There's a lot of people out there reading

the Keto Reset Diet. It's still a bestseller, Mark Sisson and I. And most people who are grabbing a book off the bookshelf at Barnes and Noble or clicking, excuse me, because they had to walk to Barnes and Noble, they probably are sitting too much. They're probably not putting themselves under resistance load. They're probably not doing a lot of cardio. They're probably eating a lot of shit food. So going keto could be a tremendous health awakening because they just kicked out the bagels, the ice cream, the rice, the soda, fantastic health progression. But if we're already working out hard and putting ourselves under sufficient stress and trying, like I'm hanging on by a thread

trying to recover from my workouts at age 57, do I need to minimize all other forms of stress, including the metabolic stress of fasting, keto, low carb, time-restricted feeding, all these wonderful things. And I'm becoming convinced that like, you know, give me a reason why I should ever fast again during my busy, healthy, athletic lifestyle. Well, and I'd also say like, you know, at 57, you're in tremendous shape. You're very lean. You have a good amount of muscle on you, but you could kind of also say like, what's in your best interest at the moment. In your best interest at the moment is probably to hold on to, if not build, even a little bit more muscle mass, right, rather than – He's always saying that to me, listeners.

Like come in here every time a little bit more. Yeah. Just a little more. Yeah, let's give you a little tap of testosterone. Yeah, a little more muscle mass. Bump you up a little bit. But yeah, you know, I think there's a lot of people have done something like fasting because what is fasting and what is keto? Keto mimics fasting. Keto is something that is supposed to help you to eat

less. So it's an overcorrection, right? We kept, yeah, we kept missing to the left with our field goals, right? And now, and now we're, now we're probably missing to the right and now we need to figure out a way to kick the ball down the middle. And, and what if, you know, what if you have breakfast and what if you just simply don't overeat? Uh, do you still feel great at, you know, if you have breakfast at eight o'clock, seven o'clock, and then maybe at.m. do you still feel good if that breakfast was something that is good for you, something that's, I guess, like a natural food, like if it's a whole foods, probably do, you probably do feel good. And I also think like there's so many different versions of fasting. I think like a fast away from your phone is a good idea.

I think like there's certain things, like when I go out to eat with my wife, I usually will fast from my phone. I put my phone in a drawer. I don't bring it with me. She has hers. If our kids need us for some reason, then they can contact her. Like stuff like that. I try to practice stuff like that often because I just think it's a healthy practice. For me, I love food. So for me

to fast away from snacking is a really good idea for me personally. For me to have parts of the day where there's hours, hours and hours where I don't eat is also a good idea because I fucking love to eat. So I do eat breakfast pretty often. Sometimes it's just a shake with coffee and other times it's an actual meal. This morning it was an actual meal. It just kind of depends. But I don't give a fuck. I don't care that much about like the fast. I did do some of that for a while.

I did some of that for a little while. And then I also kind of recognize like, oh, this is nice to like manipulate my body weight and stuff. But every once in a while my eyes will be like sunken in.. I'll just look like I'll just look really tired. Like this is not good. Yeah. And so I didn't like some of that. So I'm like, you know, I'm just not going to even worry. Like, what am I even worried about it for? I'm already in pretty good shape. I feel good. Let me just go by how I feel when I wake up. If I'm kind of hungry this morning, I woke up and I'm like, I'm cooking up some fucking bacon. I'm cooking up some eggs. And I had some bacon and eggs and some fruit and it was delicious.

I think this is why it's so dope that we're not selling any type of diet here because this is the thing about nutrition is so fucking all or nothing. It's the most annoying thing ever because if somebody says, oh, do the carnivore diet, they think you're perpetually doing the carnivore diet every single day of your life. And if you do, you eat some fucking fruit like Paul Saladino talked about, it's not carnivore anymore. You know what I mean? There's so many comments of angry carnivores that are like, Oh God, he's eating, he's eating fruit. Oh my God, he's not carnivore anymore. That's let's not call that carnivore. You're going to get fat eating that apple. Michaela, and you know, Michaela Peterson in that comment section, she had a point because some people do carnivore because certain things give them autoimmune issues. So those people need to stay away from fruit. But how

about the people that can eat a fucking peach and not break out in hives? They're okay. And it's the same thing with fasting because this guy, Jay Feldman, it's probably really dope. And fasting is a stressful thing. But when you adapt to the stress of not eating, it's no longer feeling that stressful, right? Very good comeback. Yeah, that's right. And that's the thing. Most people eat too much and eat too fucking often. So maybe picking up a little bit of a practice of fasting for a little bit so they can understand how to feel, not feel food focused is beneficial because nowadays, I think in the beginning when we started fasting years ago, I took it too far. Like I was fasting every day, 16, 20 hours and eating everything within a four hour window. So I backed off of it.

Now I fasted this morning, but when you offered me a piece hour window. So I backed off of it. Now I fasted this morning, but when you offered me a piece of chocolate, I was like, fuck it. I'll have a piece of that chocolate. I don't give a fuck. Right. And it's not fasting every day. It's like certain days you're like, okay, I don't really feel like eating until later. And certain days I feel like eating breakfast. All these things turn into, they were like, they're tools in a toolbox. We're like, stay out fast fast today i won't eat carbs today i'll eat fruit and carbs and and and meat today i just don't feel like eating you know what i mean it's like you're not perpetually sticking to one diet for the rest of your life when you start

implementing some of these things but when it comes to this shit everyone's like i'm a keto guy i'm a carnivore guy i do ifym itM. It's like, dude, it's not that serious. Pick up the practice, get something from it and utilize it so you can get whatever transformation you're looking for. You know? And you can implement it wherever you want. So you can use it if it fits your macros to your advantage. You can be like, well, I did pretty good today. Maybe I didn't eat as much because I knew I was going to go to a birthday party or whatever. And you want to just have that barbecue and you want to have the cake and whatever else too. It's like, well, it fits my macros for the day because I don't care that much.

And I didn't eat that much earlier. Or maybe the next day you spend a little bit of time fasting. I think our modern day intermittent fasting is like a joke. It really is. Like, I'm going to drive past all those grocery stores and not stop in and like get fresh food. It's definitely like a modern, you know, United States problem.

And if it is a problem at all. But again, the key factor here is just so many millions of Americans. It's quite obvious. The majority of us are overeating and we need to figure out a way to correct that. Now, that doesn't mean not to eat at all. However, if you ever helped anybody who's very heavy, sometimes it does have to be like really black and white, like, bro, I got to stress this to you. Do not eat carbs at all. Like,

don't fucking touch them. And usually that's a good message for some people because it's something that they can – it's something they can grasp. It's something they can go into their home and they can communicate with their significant other and their family and say, this is what I'm doing. And they're like, hey, I'm confused. What diet is this? Like, oh, you see like where this says it's got 47 grams of sugar? I can't do that anymore. Nothing has any carbohydrate in it at all. And that's the diet that I'm going to choose for a little while to see if it helps me,

to see if it helps me personally eat less. And most of the people that you see that have done keto for a long time, they start to kind of have some different versions of it. You see Paul Saladino going through this different version of the carnivore diet where he's starting to eat fruit. Is he going to start to put in like a vegetable? Is he going to start to be like, oh, you know, potatoes aren't that bad or rice. Like those things are probably coming next.

It depends on what he wants to do. If he wants to get like maybe competitive in something or if he wants to uh even feel like he's got more energy i wouldn't be surprised for him to be like hey you know organic rice is not that bad or whatever yeah yeah oh and and speaking of speaking of criticizing liver king or criticizing saladino for for twisting his thing oh my gosh i mean so many props to a guy who's fighting the battle for all of us at the front lines and digging into all the research and testing and refining. So I give him tremendous credit for modifying his original take of being, you know, a hundred percent carnivore and, um, watching his funny shit on Instagram and shouting at the camera and like,

Sisson and I tried to sneak into Whole Foods and got kicked out. And then he was in there slamming on the Whole Foods salad bar, which it so upsets me that Whole Foods, which passes themselves off as the place where they got you covered, and as soon as you walk in, you're good because they did all the hard work scrutinizing their products. And there's canola oil all over that store. It's like they might as well have a raindrop walking through. But, yeah, we got kicked out. We tried to get official permission.

We couldn't get official permission, so he bootlegged that video. That was good. Calling out the bullshit and being strong about it because we're fighting a royal battle with mainstream conventional dietary practice. And that's why I think all these, like you said, a toolbox.

We need the toolbox because we're getting bombarded from all sides with cultural messaging that it's okay to put this shit into our bodies our whole life. And then we're going to go visit people in the hospital with cancer. And it's like, we have to wake up and start, you know, getting hardcore, however that looks. And if it means buying 10 books and trying 10 different things, at least you're thinking about it. And whenever you skip a meal and you're fasting, you're breaking from cultural tradition, right? And so you're doing something that like

you're trying to take responsibility for your health. And so it has positive benefits just to be engaged in any way with this stuff. Just like when people go vegan from standard American diet, they have a health awakening from this extremely high risk and ill-advised diet at first, but it is better than

Burger King and a kookaroo and the rest of them. So, um, then if we get further down the line, I think you guys are like, you know, the, the cultural trendsetters here to say, Hey, I don't, I don't give that much of a crap. I'm having a piece of chocolate here. And that's like the highest level of, you know, sophistication of dietary strategy is to say like, you know, your body can fight off anything. And even if you're going to Chuck E. Cheese birthday cake one day a year. But I like how Dr. Robert Lustig, author of Metabolical and many other good books, one of the leading anti-sugar crusaders in the world, he contends that if you just eliminate processed foods from your diet,

you can't get fat and you won't get sick. You won't get metabolic disease patterns. And it's as simple as that. And so that's some common ground. I can get fat. You can get fat and you won't get sick. You won't get metabolic disease patterns. And it's as simple as that. And so that's some common ground. I can get fat, too. You can get fat. It's harder. It's harder to get fat, but you can definitely get fat.

I mean, tell me when. Trust me. Right away. I guess. I'll show you the bell jeans. You'll be shocked. The bell jeans. Mr. Bojangles bell jeans.

Yeah. I mean, you go fatten yourself up on steaks and eggs. You went from six eggs to 12 eggs a day, and then you went from three steaks to four. There's a certain point where you're probably going to level off, and it might be above our performance weights if we all do this experiment, but it's not going to be disaster. And there's a lot of this talk about endotoxoxins which you hear a lot of people talking about now when you eat that processed food you produce endotoxins it's internally manufactured toxins that interfere

with your ability to uh to to burn fat or to to function mitochondria effectively and so you start to get bad at burning energy internally. And so therefore, where do you trend to? You're reaching for more and more processed foods and sugary beverages just to get energy because you can't burn fat internally and everything's all screwed up because you have these processed foods in your diet. And so that sends you down a slippery slope.

And that's why I think zero tolerance is probably a good recommendation for a lot of people that are stuck in this processed food, sugar burning pattern is you gotta walk away from that stuff and get your body back in gear. Yeah, you gotta break yourself away from that stuff. Yeah, like Jay Feldman says,

hey, if you say that you feel better from fasting versus eating breakfast, we gotta go take a look at your breakfast because if you have a nice nutritious breakfast, you're probably going to feel pretty good. And you might feel good fasting too because you've built those capabilities. But that's a good quote also.

It's like, you know, get the shit food out of your diet. You're going to start feeling better. But then what if you, back to my personal example, because I have good blood work, I have good body composition. Where's my optimization? I'm looking at, I've been on a three month experiment now to eat more food, see what happens. And I think you're bringing up a really excellent point. A lot of people in fitness, like if Andy Galpin was here right now and he was observing us talking about, even all

of us here talking about fasting, he would be like, this is a ridiculous conversation. Why are any of you guys fasting? And that's just because, again, like we're already in good shape. I think one thing that's interesting is that somebody that is unhealthy and very overweight, what I've noticed is that they got to get themselves to a healthy point before they can start

to really lose weight. Now they might lose some bloat and they might lose some weight and they might knock off 10, 20 pounds. I've seen people do that before. Like, I tried keto and bam, you know, this weight came right off. But there's like a little extra piece of the puzzle that after some of that initial weight comes off, they have to try to figure out how to get themselves healthy. And that is really hard because you're thinking that it would work the opposite way around you're thinking if i lose this fat this is my road to success i'm going to be healthier but it's a little bit like being

successful or it's a little bit like attracting a woman it's a little bit like attracting success where you have to first become a successful person. You need successful attributes to then be worthy of success. You need to – we had a Russian lifter years ago explain to us how to deadlift. And he took the rings, the Olympic rings that you use for gymnastics. And he said, this is how you deadlift. And he said, deadlift is like pretty woman. And he pushed the ring away from him. And then he let it go.

And the ring swung towards him. And he's like, but most of you are trying to reach for the pretty woman. And then he showed how it goes. Like when you reach for it and grab it it goes away from you and i think that a lot of stuff like this when it comes to the diet and and when it comes to success you have to first have the habits ingrained first you have to start to accumulate some of those habits how do you ingrain some of those habits sometimes you're going to have to go to like a boot camp almost sometimes you're going to have to really go to war with it. Make these black and white rules to where you're like, I'm doing this for 60 days. I'm doing this for 90 days.

Andy Frisella has 75 hard that he does. And it's a challenge and he gets rid of drinking and he tries to have people really commit to something that they would consider to be hard for 75 days. But again, when you get healthy, none of it's hard because you leveled up and you're used to it. So it's a complicated thing to kind of get when you're on the outside and you're very upset and frustrated with where you're at at the moment. But it's those little tiny steps, that 10-minute walk that you force yourself to do. You pushing off a meal that you know that you shouldn't have. Those are the harder things to do. The decision to eat the good food isn't really that hard usually for a lot of people.

It's the saying no in the circumstances and situations that you're always in where you know the food's going to be compromised, watching a football game or going to the birthday party or whatever social thing it is, right? Yeah. Yeah. You know, real quick, there's, there is an aspect though that one should think about. You hear these antidotes, like for example, GSP has talked about how he feels more focused when he fights, when he doesn't have food in his system beforehand. A lot of martial artists talk about that. And there's the aspect of when you are in a stressful state, fight or flight versus being in rest or digest. So when you are in fight or flight, you are more focused.

You are sharper. This is why a lot of people, when they start doing a little bit of intermittent fasting, they're like, oh, for some reason I can focus a little bit more. So the aspect of being under stress, again, is not a bad thing and it has to be controlled. This isn't something that you do perpetually forever. Every single day you fast for 20 hours, right? But it can be you like, if, if I'm going to come to work and I eat a good meal, I feel pretty good, but relaxed when I come to work, I don't feel or don't feel as sharp. So the thing about this is, again, perceived stress is not, like you mentioned, perceived stress isn't always bad. It can actually help you focus in to whatever you're doing a little bit better. I noticed that

with jujitsu. I don't, I'm not as sharp if I have some food right before I train versus if I don't. And there are a lot of fighters who feel the same way about that. And then for you personally, you have a hard time stopping if you eat something, right? What do you mean? So it would be – it might be – I can stop. It's like I could eat a lot. Before training.

But I'm not like – I'm not like once I start eating, I'm a fucking – I'm just saying like if you were to eat like an apple or something like that before you went to practice, maybe it would feel better. But I don't know if you mess with that. I've done that before. I don't like it. Like this is a straight thing. I don't like to eat before I train. And that's just one thing to think about.

Two hours, three hours. I don't like to eat before I train. Straight up. I just don't like it. I don't like the way I feel. If I were to eat something, it would be very light and it would be fruit. But I'm not going to eat a big old meal before I train anymore. I used to do that in the past, but I feel sharper if I don't. When you say train though, are you talking about like straight

jujitsu or are you talking about like lifting? Jujitsu or lifting. Oh, okay. So I don't, but this is the thing. When I eat food, if, if, if it's on a day that I fasted or if it's on a day that I don't, I eat a lot of food. Right. So one thing that people got to remember is if you're choosing to fast, you need to make sure that when you eat, you actually fuel your body enough, which is the main mistake that people that fast make with training. When they have their eating window, they don't eat as much as they should. So then when they go and train, they're not working with as much fuel as they could versus the individual who's eating throughout their day. These are the little nuances that can make something work and that can make something be disastrous for an athlete. Yeah. And in regards to the perceived stress. So like if I have something I have to do like

early in the morning where I'm not going to be able to have like my full on breakfast, if I didn't fast or I didn't like have experience with it, then I'd kind of be screwed because then I'd be like, when are we going to eat? What am I going to do? Like I'm going to be thinking about it nonstop. But because I do, I do have this tool of being able to I'd be like, when are we going to eat? What am I going to do? Like, I'm going to be thinking about it nonstop, but because I do, I do have this tool of being able to fast and be like, I'm going to be a little bit hungry, but we're good.

And so like, I actually have significantly less stress overall. Now I know you're talking about like a different stress on the body, but I'm just saying like mentally it's like, it kind of fades away because I'm like, Oh, I've been here before. I've like,

I'm totally good. Yeah. I like that. It's just not overusing the tool. You been here before. I'm totally good. Yeah, I like that. It's just not overusing the tool, you know what I mean? Right, yeah. I mean, I told you I'm in this experiment now three months of eating more food, eating more frequently, waking up every morning, huge bowl of fruit, huge protein smoothie every day versus previously it would be like nibbling on some squares of dark chocolate

maybe till midday, 11, 12, whatever. I made a big meal, whatever. And so I've lost some, I think, fat adaptive metabolic flexibility. Like now- Do you really think you have? Oh yeah, yeah. Like at three o'clock, if I haven't eaten anything,

I'm like, I need to get something to eat. Like just like the old days. Whereas, you know, I haven't felt this for over a decade because I've been locked into, I guess, sort of a, you know, primal paleo low-carb experimenting with this fat being the main goal. And now Jay Feldman is saying like fat survival mode. Fat is survival fuel and we should be burning carbs as our priority. I'm like, wait a second, man.

That's super radical. It's not radical, though. This idea of energy optimization where you're constantly fueled and your ATP is constantly being restored so that you don't have to dip into these stress mechanisms. Because when you call upon cortisol, glucagon, and adrenaline, that's liberating glycogen from storage, liberating fat from storage. And it's great and it's wonderful. And it's how our ancestors survived and how we evolved to be humans and ketone burning in the brain is so optimal and it's low inflammatory and all these great things. But those are all things that we've called upon when we're starving. And so what's the opposite is like athletic peak performance.

And now in my reflections, I'm also realizing, as I attended the World Championship track meet in Oregon and saw the greatest track and field athletes in every event for a week, practicing and looking at them, there are almost no examples of extreme dietary practices among elite athletes in any sport. They're sipping their Gatorade throughout their warm-up, and they're eating crappy energy bars, and they can all level up if they would listen to the show more.

But it's pretty interesting to note that none of those people would ever think of fasting, probably ever, because they're working so hard, and they're having such demand on their body and high calorie intake, like the NFL training table or the UCLA football team got in trouble for like, they spend $45 million a year on food, Chip Kelly. And they do, it comes out to like $45.22 per box meal per athlete after every practice and every team meeting.

It's like hilarious. But that part is sticking in my brain too. That makes sense though. Yeah. I would also say that you were saying there's not that many extreme examples of diet. I would also extend that into training as well, like outside of the sport. Like I think that the athletes, they play their sport. They do a great job of it. A lot of them do care about it. A lot of them are training, um, but extreme training and like really following these exact protocols that are again, outside of like you showed the, you showed the stats of the, of how the guy runs and stuff like that. Talking about outside of running, how many runners are really committing to, to lifting and being really extreme with protocols, like the best of the best probably are not doing that.

No, not much. There's no more energy left. Yeah. But they're fully fueled in general. The top performers are fully fueled, whereas the biohacking community or whatever you want to call it, they're not athletes. They're not extreme people.

Right. But then, you know, let's say our – They're not athletes. Like the biohacking guys, like all these dudes. And they're cool that they're in the biohacking community, know let's say are they're not athletes like biohacking guys like all these dudes like and they're cool that they're in the biohacking community but let's be real they're not fucking athletes it's different you know what i mean like they want to be in shape they want to look in shape but you tell them to go do something at a right close to an elite level they're not going to do it i'm not bringing shade to that it's just true it's a different crowd

athletes can handle more calories because they are burning more calories and they need to make sure they're fueled up. Guys that are biohacking, they're not the same. Yeah. Now here's the question, like the theoretical longevity contest, who's going to win? The guy who's meditating an hour every morning and eating his lentil soup and his single bite of a cucumber? Or is it going to be some guy who's preserving optimal functional muscle mass throughout life? Or, you know, keeping strong and athletic and explosive like the 100-year-old sprinter guy? Did I send you that link?

He ran the Penn Relays. This guy, 100 years old, he's running 100 meters. And, you know, 40,000 people cheering him on. And going pretty fast, like 18 seconds or something or 28 seconds. I mean, he's moving down the track. It's the guy like you, straight up. The person who's continuing to do the damn thing. You're doing it.

You're going to live a very long but also a very virile life because you're not stopping. A lot of the biohackers, they do these things so that they can get away with doing less. I'd love to see some – Truly. Well, I'd also love to see some stats on people that are trying and or ending up being the best at what they do, how long they live. Yeah. Because that's an interesting thing. How long is Jordan going to live?

How long are some of these guys? It's a lot of stress. It's a lot of stress on the body. I don't think it's going to be an ex-Tour de France guy or even an Olympian because... Or a billionaire or a multi-millionaire. Going to the extreme is going to cost you. They can, yeah. But again... That guy's hauling

ass, man. That guy's like 80 or something, but they're in the old man's division. So that guy's pretty impressive too. But the slow guy is on the far left. He's wearing a white single black shorts. He's the 100-year-old guy. Is this age group a specificity? That's like 80 to 100 or something.

But yeah, that guy in the front was hauling at 80. And here's the 100 guy. If you're watching on video, you can see Lester Wright, Penn Relays. Still got a good bounce to him there. Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, to what end, like how long do you want to live if you're not, you know, in that peak performance mode? So I'd certainly hope that, you know, at 100 I'm spry and having fun and going to track

meets rather than being able to still meditate on my cushion for an hour every morning and eat lentil soup and a half a cucumber. It's just not you know i have a different i have like a little bit different interpretation of fasting too just because again people in the industry like in this fitness industry they it gets so dogmatic about each thing like um if i just didn't eat for three or four hours i kind of consider that to be fasting especially coming from a background where I ate a lot. That's not fasting, Mark. Yeah, I ate a lot more often.

It's got to be at least 16 hours, and even then, that's just intermittent. Yeah, right? So power lifting, you're eating like a horse all day. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, just any opportunity. Any opportunity. Hey, in between sets, right? Yeah, somebody made a lot.

Eat some fucking Pop-Tarts and stuff. Someone left half a bar on the rack you just grabbed it yeah yeah people used to show up with like fast food and donuts

remember y'all brought like two or three boxes of pizza at the last gym oh yeah that shit was good too I missed all of that by the time I showed up

it was like everybody's getting all healthy the week before Mark was like no more and it just stopped happening I'm like fuck and I was like super unhealthy so I Mark was like, no more. And it just stopped happening. I'm like, fuck.

And I was like super unhealthy, so I would have loved it too. The donut thing was really like it became a phenomenon. I remember that shit. Somebody brought some donuts one day, and we were filming like a workout. And so the donuts were on this workout. And then people just thought that we loved donuts. So people that would travel to super training, they would always bring donuts.

And just every week, and I'm trying to be on a diet at the time and stuff. I'm like, this diet's not working out so good. That's where you need to get your toolbox out, I guess. Okay, I'm going keto now for six weeks. Something, put something in the way. But I think for me, if I ate in the morning, like if I, let's say I ate at seven o'clock or something like that, then I go out on a walk. Then I come here.

We podcast. We might work out. We might podcast again or whatever else we're doing for the day. By the time I get home to my house, it's like probably four or five p.m. like probably 4 or 5 p.m. If I'm going to go home, I'm not going to run because I'm going to eat and I'm just going to chill for the day. So I usually make the decision to go and run. But I still consider that fasting. And even if I was to eat something, which again sounds funny with eating and fasting, because I might eat something so small, like again, a protein shake and a coffee. A square of chocolate perhaps? Yeah,

I just don't consider it like a meal. It's just like, it's just a thing that carried me to the next spot. I might eat a piece of fruit or two, two or three hours before I run. And I don't consider that to be a meal. I don't think about it as a meal, but the meals usually, if I'm going to eat, I don't like to kind of like you're saying, I don't really like to do much after I eat unless it's way after I ate and or unless it's just like walking, something like that. Sure. And then, Brad, when you are eating, what does your food look like? Because when you're saying that like towards the end of the day, you are starting to kind of slow down. I'm just curious like what you're actually eating.

That's if I happen to skip a meal, which was so routine before, but now it's like, I've, I've sort of like, I've, I've taken a fork in the road. And once I think you turn on those appetite sensors, you know, especially for me now in the morning, I'm used to fasting for years and now I have like a nice load. And so come around midday, I'll be wanting more food. And at dinner, I'll be wanting more food. Waiting for one of you. This is the interesting experiment. Like Ryan Baxter, this primal health coach, I had him on my B-Rad podcast. He did a very quantifiable, he's an engineer.

He wrote down everything he ate for a year, calculated the calories, everything for a year, and did an experiment and added 600 additional calories from his previously logged year. So he went 600 calories up of always nutritious food. So again, that argument back to eliminating processed foods, we can all agree upon that. And so he's adding nutritious calories to his diet. And a year later, he weighed the same, same body composition. And I'm three months into it. I still have the same body composition despite eating a ton more calories.

I didn't add it up to say it's this many, but let's say it's 600 a day. Where's that energy going? So arguably it would be I'm more active. I'm tapping my toes more. I'm thinking harder. I'm thinking more clearly. I'm recovering faster from my workouts,

all those positive things. I'm not getting fat from adding nutritious calories to the diet. And that's kind of an eye-opener. Like someone tell me what's going on there. Dr. Herman Ponser, author of Burn, makes that really prominent claim, his life's work, that we have this caloric ceiling every day. And he studied the Hadza and Tanzanian, and he studied relatively inactive modern citizens from around the world.

There's tons of data on calorie burning. And the argument with this constrained model of energy expenditure is that we bump up against the ceiling every day, and we make an assortment of compensations. If we did a bunch of calorie burning during our workout, we have to borrow from reproduction, repair, and growth. Reproduction, repair, growth, and locomotion are a zero-sum game. So locomotion is everything you're doing to prep for your contest. So you're turning down the reproduction dial and the other ones. And we don't want to ever do that, arguably, because we're pursuing healthspan and all these great things. And so now new research is showing that that constrained model only applies if calories are limited.

Like the hods are barely hanging on. They have to kill baboons now instead of bison because they've been run out of their territory. So if there's a caloric abundance model, we can work out more, eat more, and be more active. So it's like this eat more, move more premise to where you're going to have more muscle mass. Rob Wolf said it straight up, one-liner to me. He said, if you want to live longer, lift more weights and eat more protein. Okay, that's different than do a 16-8

and cycle in carbs on the weekend. It's like, boom. You want to be as active as possible, especially if you have anything less than optimal functional muscle mass, which most people wish they had less fat and more muscle mass. So we want to go toward that goal, and that's going to be enabled by nutritious, healthy food. Makes sense. It does.

I think that's kind of Saladino's thing. I'm really strongly believe that he's hit upon this most nutritious diet, the animal-based diet. It's hard to argue if you have liver in a micronutrient analysis, it's going to kick ass on the kale smoothie. It just is, no matter what anybody can argue. It's like we're choosing the most nutritious foods on earth, the eggs, the liver, the steak, whatever.

Then you're adding in sufficient carbohydrates to help perform and recover and restock glycogen and help your hormones and your thyroid and all these things. It's very easy and nutritious to digest. You don't have those problems with plant toxins or interfering with your internal energy manufacturing. So you're getting a maximum amount of nutritious calories. Seems like a win. Yeah, eat enough that it supports your training and allows your training to

be as hard as you want to make it, but don't eat so much that it makes you fat. Dr. Tommy Wood, the most sensible guy out there. I hold him in the highest regard. Very smart guy, leader in the ancestral health scene. He says he tells his active clients

eat as much nutritious food as you can until you gain a pound of fat and then you dial it back a little and that's where you're at at optimal yeah and so um that doesn't give you a pass to have donuts and chucky cheese because you're going to gain a pound of fat easily because you're going to screw yourself up but if you're going for the the meat and the fruit and the the omelets and all that it's like sky's the limit you're going to feel full anyway i've kind of even on a big bowl of fruit, there's so much water content. Like you feel fantastic.

You're not like angling around for a Pop-Tart, you know. Some of the studies that they've done where people have eaten like enormous amounts of fruit, the only thing that they've seen is just that people have bigger poop rather than like them gaining a bunch of weight. So fruit is really interesting. And so is protein. We've had people on the show before that have kind of referenced like the protein calories seem to have somewhat disappeared when we're trying to equate for them or trying to figure out what the fuck happened to them in this mathematical equation. It seems like they're not accounted for in some

way. So the energy balance thing is definitely something that I have always been in question of. And on top of all that, what you're talking about bumping up next to the caloric intake per day, obviously the body does not work that way. It doesn't work on a daily basis like that. When you eat something like liver, you may have some of the stuff that's in liver, some of the vitamins and some of the other shit that we're not even aware of. You could have that stored in your body for days and sometimes even longer. I think like vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin K, like some of these fat soluble vitamins can stay in your system for a pretty long time. So your body doesn't just work on these daily basis.

And when you go to do something and you go to expend energy in a given day, that's not registering for that day necessarily. The body has like a long, in my opinion, has a long lag time. Sure. You know, like when does your body like recognize how sore it is from a particular workout? It's like three days later. So at minimum, the day, the body works in like a three

day delay. What about when somebody tells you something? What about when you start to develop a new belief? You sit there and go, fucking, Hey man, what that guy said to me on Monday really makes sense. And it's now Thursday, right? It really starts to sit with you more. Mine's two days, Mark. Yeah. Two days, 48 hour. Well, you got a quick turnover over there. But yeah, the body just is, it's very complicated on like what it's trying to do

and when it's trying to do it. It's hard to really pin down exactly how many calories we burn versus how many we, how many we're taking in and so forth. Yeah, the effects of the workout, that's an interesting one because I can't figure that out. I'm just still blown forth. Yeah, the effects of the workout, that's an interesting one because I can't figure that out.

I'm just still blown away. Like I thought I did a good workout and then two days later I'm sore and I'm like, oh, okay, well, it was over my limit, but it took a long time to kick in, you know. There's a huge delay there. I think the stress hormones flowing through your bloodstream and all that, then you kind of have to allow yourself to bottom out once in a while and see that.

That's why I was saying. That's only what we can feel. Right. That's only what you can feel. Who the fuck else? Who knows what the hell's going on? All you know is like what the, what the watch says or what the performance standard is. So, um, I, I hold those, those, you know, those athletes I saw at the track meet, whatever

they're doing is working by definition because they're at the top of the world. So it's important to pay attention to that and to the scientific research. But I think we kind of get polarized and we don't like merge them together and think more reasonably because I mean, some of the science seems to be bullshit and you can figure out a way to draw a conclusion. You can back into a scientific conclusion and everyone will pat you on the back and you'll get your professorship. But it's like, eh, well, it doesn't really work well in real life, you know? Yeah. I want to highlight something real quick that Mark mentioned earlier, but I want to mention it again, since we've talked about so many different aspects of like how different the way we

eat is and how we change things up all the time. If you're somebody who is currently you're on the path to getting to a healthier body composition, let's say you're like 100 pounds overweight, 50 pounds overweight, et cetera, you mentioned like sometimes you need to just cut some shit out of your diet because that restriction helps you get from point A to point B and it's working. So if it's working for you currently, stay on that path. But now that if you've gotten to a place where you have a good body composition, everything was working pretty well. Let's say you're a carnivore and it helped you get from point A to point B and you want to start eating some apples or oranges and see how that works.

Start doing it. You'll probably feel better and you won't gain a fuck ton of weight by eating a few apples and oranges. I've added in a lot of fruit. I haven't gained any weight from it at all. Same here. I actually have lost like a little bit. Yeah, no, same here. But you, but you're healthy. That's the thing. You're, you're at a healthy body composition and it's not like you can't do this. Like if you are overweight, adding in fruit, but an aspect of it is that like, if you notice, if you do that, then you start to just crave more calories and it makes sticking to your

regimen harder to get to your goal, just don't do it for now. You got to understand that the diet you're doing is the diet you're doing now to help you get from point A to point B. But then when you're potentially at point B, because everything's worked well, you can be a little bit open to adding certain things in and see how they feel. You don't need to then continue to be dogmatic towards, I'm keto and I don't fuck with carbs or carnivore i don't eat fruit you don't have to do that anymore you can you can adjust and if if for some reason you eat an apple and for some reason you have a bad reaction okay don't fuck with the apple you

probably won't but you know like then just don't fuck with it yeah how'd you get into uh jumping oh my gosh i i love doing it in high school. Last time you were on the show, were you doing long jump? Or high jump, rather? High jump. Yeah, yeah. Maybe not as obsessively as I have been doing since. Yeah, actually, I jumped in a meet in early 2020, and I was just having fun. I jumped five feet, which is not that great.

It used to be my warm-up height, but that was years ago. And it was number one on the USA ranking for old guys. So then I started to get interested in Master Track. Like, hey, that's cool. No one else is bending over the bar at this age. Maybe I can be good at something, you know? It's like I think I realized from that past life of being an athlete, like I never want to let that go.

I want to have like this competitive intensity at all times and giving me an edge in some way in terms of my interest is athletics. If it's an artist and you want to paint and do that and have that edge, it's like, we have to have something that helps us, you know, stay focused and aspire to peak performance. Cause I think modern life is getting easier and easier for a lot of people, not for everyone, of course, but like if we kind of get lulled, I think we, we lose a lot of, um, what's, you know, our humanity really. And so, you know, I've been long gone from, from triathlon racing and having that, you know, living and breathing that obsession with peak

performance, but now I can kind of calibrate these goals to fit conveniently into the lifestyle of a 57 year old. I don't want to be out there riding my bike for hours every day, but it's so fun to study the videos of the great jumpers and go see them in person. I was so thrilled in the stands. It just keeps the excitement going. You were saying that you keep getting injured. Yeah, man, it's tough. What injuries have been occurring?

If you are messing up, where do you think you're going wrong here and there? Yeah, you know what? I think it's about governing that competitive intensity. So that great strength that's carried me through my life and made me the person that I am can also be my biggest enemy. And when I was a pro, for certain it was. That's why I tell them the story of turning around and bailing on my friends, dude, why are you bailing? Because I'm a professional and I have to do this the right way. And I have to stick, you know, committed to my goals and values. And so I think even now I have so much fun out there and I get so excited when I get to the

track that I push myself pretty hard and it's no trouble. It's not like I'm puking on the, on the grass, like in the movies afterward, I'm just having a great workout and feeling good and pumped up and coming home and going about my day. But then at the 24 hour checkpoint or the 48 hour checkpoint, it's like, Oh yeah, I'm 57. Fuck. What was I thinking out there? You know, I hadn't done anything for the previous few weeks for whatever reason. And so these little tweaks, which, um, I remember distinctly in my youth, they'd be gone the next day. Like, Oh, my glute is really messed up. And then the next day it's gone or which, which side was it the right or the left? Oh, I forget. Um, so now they last like a week or two. And so that part, um, you know, it's an ongoing,

it's ongoing process to do all that flexibility, mobility, prehab. I was going to ask, are you diligent about warming up before you do your workouts? Yeah. Yeah. I to do all that flexibility, mobility, prehab. I was going to ask, are you diligent about warming up before you do your workouts? Yeah, yeah. I mean, all that stuff, there's no shortcuts anymore. And that's been, for you younger listeners, like do it now even though you don't need to. Like get in that habit of respecting the heck out of your body. And again, back to the track athletes that I watched, they warm up so extensively, you can't even believe it. I mean, I watched Elaine Thompson, one of the greatest even believe it. I mean, I've, I watched

Elaine Thompson, one of the greatest female sprinters of all time, my favorite, she's just amazing. And she would go in the same spot in the practice area every day. And you'd walk over this overhang and I just watch, and I'd just be transfixed for an hour watching her practice her start again and again, and do her drills again and again and again, the same thing. And, um, they're just, you know, thing. And they're committed to such a high level. And then they step out on the track and they do their race for the television cameras. And you think they're so fast and so amazing, but it's just the buildup that I have the greatest appreciation for behind the scenes.

And so trying to model that and not, you know, you go out there, you feel a little twinge, you have to pull back and cancel the workout and come back when it's another day. And I'm still kind of, you know, messing that up a little bit and wanting it to work out because it's Tuesday or whatever, you know. It's hard when something does happen and you do feel like you've done, you know, you feel like you did your homework. You feel like you did everything you're supposed to do, and then you still get something in the calf or ankle. You're like, God, this just sucks. And you just want to make it happen, but it's like it's not the right day.

Yeah, and I think I don't really want to turn off that all the way because if I just accept everything, like, oh, I'm not ready for it, or maybe I'm too old to do this crazy sport of high jump, it's extremely challenging to the body. The Olympic high jumper Amy Acuff calls it a car accident, basically, because you're running up and you want to hit that foot so hard and basically break on that. And then your body gets flung over the bar with physics. It's angular momentum, it's called. And so it's not like anything that the human is designed to do. It's angular momentum, it's called. And so it's not like anything that the human's designed to do. It's going against nature. You have to really slam your heel down into

the ground on purpose, right? Absolutely. Yeah. You're a car accident. You're going fast at a curve and then boom, hit the curve and you spring over the bar. Yeah. Yeah. We had a Cadorziani into the gym recently and he's become a multiple podcast now, but he has some certain things that he does to check in with his body. And I think that just taking that concept and having not just like a warmup, because some people, when they think of warmup, they'll do like high knees or maybe just do some lighter weight on a bar, but really having certain practices that allow you to check in with different ranges of motion you have, um, with different movements and you can see, okay, this isn't where it should be today. I'm going to back off a little bit.

Yeah, like a little checkpoint, checklist. Yeah, and he has these movements that he does just to check in and see what he has for the day and it gives him a gauge of like, ooh, I can go today or if I'm going to back it off. I think those types of things, if an athlete can build whatever practice that is, then number one, it will help them not get as injured as often because they have certain things that they can at least look at and it will give them a better as injured as often because they have certain things that they can at least look at. And it will give them a better perception of like their internal battery.

You know what I mean? Like at this point, I can feel when I wake up after I do a few things like I'm going to have some really good workouts today or today my workout is going to be lighter and I got to back off. I can feel that. But if you don't have anything, then you're just kind of, you're just shooting, shooting blind. You don't know what you're going to do. You don't know what's going to happen. And it makes things a lot harder. I love that.

Yeah. Some actual check. We got to pass through this gate, then this gate, then this gate. Show your pass, please. He actually calls them gates. It's funny you said that because he calls them gates. Good vision. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. Um, well you were saying in your powerlifting that you weren't going for those big numbers except for in the competitive environment. And I think that's a really good one. Like I said, just toning down everything to 87%. If the greatest runner in the world is not going past 87% in training, and if you're not familiar with running and the numbers, that's a huge difference. Oh, yeah. It's super easy

compared to 100 effort and like back in my days as a runner triathlete we'd go and do workouts and we'd kill each other at 99 because hey you have to prepare for what you're going to do in the race right and the answer is no you don't dr phil maffetone's great about this he's the leading endurance coach you've referenced him a few times. He says, look, you do not have to train the brain to suffer. The brain is going to be fine. If I come and put a gun to your head, we're going to run a marathon right now. Even if you're not much of a runner, you're a runner, you'll make it, no problem. But if I put a gun to your head, you're going to run 26 miles right now with me. Let's go. You don't need to practice suffering royally. It's going to be rough

on you. You'll be right in the hospital after, but you can do it. So you don't have to constantly put your brain under duress to be a tough athlete. And that's like blowing up the notion of tough coaches everywhere, all over. It's like, you know, take care of yourself, you know, nourish that competitive intensity, harness it. And then the second thing, you don't have to train extensively or for a prolonged time is the anaerobic muscle fibers because they're explosive by definition. So these workouts should be short in duration. That's not a problem in the gym

because everything's short. But I'm talking about going and doing repeats of running around the track 20 times, times 200 like he's doing. It doesn't have to be at your max because those muscle fibers take a long time to recover and they're very explosive. And so what do you train extensively

is the aerobic, the oxygen carrying muscle fibers. They nourish the anaerobic muscle fibers anyway. So if you get more aerobically conditioned from just putting in the work every day at a comfortable heart rate, that's when you can build up to be even a fast explosive athlete. Yeah. It's not an easy thing, you know, to so many people get kind of hooked on

the endorphins of kicking butt and crushing the workout. I mean, they say that term all the time, let's go crush a workout. Well, you just crushed your chances for, you know, doing well in competition. Now, most people, maybe their competitive ultimate is the Saturday session at the CrossFit box. That's fantastic. Just put everything into perspective so that you don't have to, you know, play your big cards day after day after day. I think one thing that separates out someone that gets really good at something versus somebody that just does it here and there or has a really hard time progressing is that people that get really good or get to be great, they're like super in tune with how

something's supposed to feel or how something's supposed to kind of work out. I know for myself, when I got to my strongest, I could literally feel like I could feel like, oh, that was, that was the set. And sometimes I would do a set before it, where that was lighter. And I was like, that wasn't quite it. Like I need to either do another set with the same weight or I need to do another set with maybe a little bit more. And luckily for me, I, normally I was pretty reasonable with that. A lot of times I would just say, look, you know, more weight is more weight. We already have a lot of weight on here. I don't need to put on an extra 45 pounds on each side. Cause that's kind of, you see that sometimes in powerlifting, people get excited. They lifted six plates really easy. Then they go right to seven plates.

powerlifting. People get excited. They lifted six plates really easy. Then they go right to seven plates. So things, things, things like that. And again, mentally you're like, well, that's what I'm going to do that in the meet easy. So I should be able to do that. No problem. But then it's just getting outside of your, getting a little outside of your training. It's like, uh, you're kind of doing it for everybody else rather than just for yourself. And that's when shit gets to be, shit gets to be shit gets to be uh weird but when i did certain lifts i remember like i'd put the weight down on the rack and i was like yeah i got stronger today like we're good like i can fucking leave right now i don't need to do leg curls i don't need to uh do glute ham raises or reverse hyper or stiff leg deadlifts or bent over rows like i can go like i squatted well

that went great i got stronger and if i needed to come back the next day and i don't know do accessory work i always thought the assistant stuff uh was great because it's not barbell exercises and it's a mimicker so like i'm not a huge fan of like drills like you were saying you were showing me some of these drills and i'm like man i fucking hate drills uh because i always like doing the actual i always like doing the actual thing i'm not saying that drills aren't useful but one of the things that makes a drill useful is that it's not sprinting yeah like sprinting is the most useful a drill is a drill yeah that's right and a drill will help the sprinting i'm not disagreeing that it won't help but do you kind of see my point like the sprinting is so intense and it can be so hard

we all recognize you can't sprint all the time so then you therefore have to do a bunch of drills you have to do a fucking drill that somebody made up that's like they're like hey this is anyway they drive me nuts i don't think you're a fan of drills either yeah he skips them no that's a warm-up. Sorry, never mind. Sorry, my bad. My apologies. My apologies.

I'm already warm before I get there, bro. I know, yeah. That drive is pretty... No, I'm usually... I've always done a workout before Jiu-Jitsu. I'm just fucking with you. I think it's just funny. Yeah. One of the better...

Well, I'll say one of the best dudes in Jiu-jitsu over there is also just skipping the warm-up. I don't need it. Let's change the subject. Hey, tell us about this jersey that you're wearing. I'm wearing an authentic U.S. soccer team jersey signed by Landon Donovan. Oh, did you steal it from him? Does he not have a jersey? Maybe the greatest U..s soccer player of

all time talk shit about the kings though so i always always hate him for that did he really yeah why why does he care i know right but no it was when they were like almost moving to seattle oh yeah i don't even remember what he said but he said he's like peace out yeah something like try something else no it was some lame shit like oh i didn't even know sacramento had a team like some bullshit like that that's pretty good and like hey motherfucker you were playing you Try something else. No, it was some lame shit like, oh, I didn't even know Sacramento had a team. Like some bullshit like that. That's pretty good. And I'm like, hey, motherfucker, you were playing in San Jose for many years before the earthquakes moved, so quit talking shit.

That's right. I didn't see him going to mix the chocolate and the tasty pastry at the same time. Spicy. It's all satisfying. It works. Yeah. Mm-hmm. It works. Yeah. Yeah, in my book, he's fasting. Sure.

Got to fuel up for the next podcast. Anything that's under, like any meal that's under like 2,500 calories, it's a fast. Oh, my God. Does this break a fast? Does that break a fast? Yeah. Four eggs and a steak. No, that's fine. Yeah. I had salt in my water. Is that break a fast? Yeah. Four eggs and a steak. No, that's fine. Yeah.

I had salt in my water. Is that breaking a fast? Yeah. It's got calories. So the main thing that you're getting from some of this, from some of the podcasts that you're listening to and stuff is just that you were maybe just overdoing some of the fasting and some of the keto-ness. Well, I mean, I was never that strict, fortunately.

Like I'd be writing about keto and in my own life, I had that intuitive need for more chocolate or something. And same with Paul and Carnivore. Like I was captivated by his message back in 2019. I lost my appetite for like salads and stir fry and these things that have been the centerpiece of my diet for years. I just looked at the steamed broccoli and I couldn't eat it anymore. You're like,

you can like mess with my brain, you know, and it was really interesting how that happened and how there's so much psychological association with what you think is good food. Are you back to eating some vegetables here and there? Oh, sure. I mean, it's only for being polite or if it's part of, you know, fine dining, which I'm not engaging in every single day, but of course at a restaurant or whatever. But it's the fact that they're not the centerpiece of nutritional density and that you may be harmed by them. That's pretty heavy. I mean, we should all reflect upon that.

And I think, I was doing these super duper green smoothies inspired by Rhonda Patrick with her viral YouTube video of dumping in the raw celery and the raw spinach and the raw kale and raw beets and whipping them up and all that stuff. And that would blow my stomach up for a few hours every day after I had it. And that's because it was an intense amount of raw produce that has high oxalates and all the other things.

So I definitely reacted to that. But in general, I'm not a sensitive plant person that's going to, you know, break out after a peach. But that was a, you know, that was a huge dietary transition. And I forgot what the question was. No, I agree with you. A salad, you know, a lot of times people that are, even someone who's trying keto, you know, a lot of times on a keto diet, you can have, someone who's trying keto, you know, they're, they, a lot of times, uh, on a keto diet, you can have, there's room for vegetables. And I think one of Mark's, uh, Mark Sisson's things was to have a big ass salad every day. Right. And, uh, I think when people do that, they think they're making a great decision, but they might be getting like a chicken Caesar

salad, which is a good choice. Cause you got chicken, you got some protein, uh, you're having vegetables that's supposed to be good for you, But then you dump a bunch of Caesar dressing on there. And then the chicken is vastly inferior to the steak. We learned from recent – Paul's hitting that message really hard too. And it's like, shit, a chicken salad, it's like – it's missing a lot of checkpoints. You know that guy Brian Sanders, Peak Human? Have you talked to him? Nose2Tail.org is his meat company, and he has a podcast called Peak Human.

He has this scoring system for food, minus one, zero, or plus one. Plus one is animal-based foods with the nutrition. He says vegetables is a zero, basically. And a minus one is processed food. It's kind of a quick snapshot way of looking at it. But to put vegetables at zero is going to break a lot of people's heart but it's like hey it could even be a minus one if you're one of the

carnivore sufferers and the tremendous awakenings they've had well they can get a negative because they could be a shuttle system for excess calories that you just don't need you know you're thinking like you're going to get away with something because you're not eating a lot of calories when you're eating vegetables but had Caesar or ranch on it you might have had 30 grams of fat or 50 grams of fat.

Nothing wrong with fat, but maybe the fat that's in there, maybe it's seed oils, maybe it's harmful to you. And it's a disaster. And maybe it's just calories that you just otherwise didn't need in the first place. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you asked me if I'm overdoing it. I'd say probably not, but like now I'm reflecting what is optimal and how can I get from level seven to level nine. And so, you know, I don't think the fasting hurt me much either, or the carb restriction, um, that just came about mostly restricting processed carbs, but I haven't

eaten a lot of fruit in the last decade because we kind of came out saying, oh, the fruit's the most sugary and then the vegetables have the, you know, the fiber came out saying, oh, the fruit's the most sugary and the vegetables have the fiber and all these things. And now it's completely flip-flopped thanks to the information about the plant toxins and all that. And so now I'm eating a ton of fruit and it's like, what was I thinking? This stuff's great. It feels good. I know that reference. I had this on a sticky note for years on my wall and it was Dr. Perlmutter saying, don't eat fruit in the winter because it's against our ancestral experience. And our ancestors probably ate no carbohydrates, and therefore, we're not genetically adapted in the long, cold days of winter. winter are you talking about? Because you see those lights that illuminate the super training gym at 4 a.m. December workout or the 72 degree thermostat on the wall or the track workout that

I'm doing. Or wait, last winter I went to Hawaii twice because Southwest Airlines had an $80 ticket sale. We pounced on, no, no, we went three times because it's like, wait, are you kidding? Non-stop Sacramento to Maui for 80 bucks and my sister just moved there. Boom, we're there. Boom, we're there again. Boom, we're there again. So my winter consisted of nice, sweaty, hot hikes and sprints on the beach. And so it's like, why are you telling me not to eat fruit in the winter? It's a very sensible and respected message. But it's not the same fruit that our ancestors ate. It's genetically modified, Brad. Yeah. Denise Minger's got a great comeback on that on her blog about all this

super sweet natural fruit and, you know, it's kind of like all those comebacks is it's time to second guess that stuff and maybe, you know, be open to experimentation

and new ideas is my goal because it's so easy to get, you know, locked in. Could you imagine giving a caveman like a modern day nectarine?

He would abandon whatever the fuck he was eating before and just eat tons of those. He would be like, this is fucking unbelievable. Not only that, Tommy Wood, again, referencing research, today's elite athlete, like CrossFit Games, the competitors, what's it, this weekend or something? Yeah. The finalists in CrossFit

or the people at the Olympic, the World Championships track and field I saw do six times more physical energy expenditure than the busiest, hardest working hunter-gatherer throughout history of humanity. 6X. There was no hunter-gatherer that was doing Matthew Frazier workout. Okay, now time to run a mile with a 15-pound weight vest and 608. None. I mean, they had some hard times, and maybe a lot of them had some easy times, which when we romanticize our ancestral example, it's like, wait, I look at Oppenheimer's, there's a website called Oppenheimer's Human Migration

Across the Globe. And it might be down right now, but it's one of the greatest learning tools. It's amazing, where we started in East Africa, and he's got arrows and timelines, and timelines and you hit click and then there's more migration and it shows the pattern of human migration. We actually went from Africa over to Indonesia first, Australia area, then went back and then went to Europe. So it was like all that stuff is earlier than our first humans in Europe because the ice age and things like that. But we migrated along the shoreline of India and, you know, Africa, India, down and around. So they might've had a shit ton of fish and easy pickings where they could lay on the beach and reproduce and maybe not be super fit, you know, romanticize individuals that could carry big heavy stone. Maybe they just lived in a straw hut for, yeah, look at that. Wow.

So, some people think that only 120 humans were the original successful departure. So, in other words, most of us descend from 120 people that were brave enough to leave Africa and then go and make it all over. Well, it must have started with less than that at some point, right?

And then anyone that has pure African genetics today, David Epstein references this stat in his book, The Sports Gene. The genetic disparity between two members of the same pygmy tribe in Africa is greater than the genetic disparity of the rest of humanity combined. So two tribal guys are more different than all of us put together. It's, it's, it's mind blowing. It's funny. I did a 23andMe because all my relatives are in Nigeria. Um, but if you do a 23andMe, most people have some Neanderthal DNA or whatever, uh, a certain amount of variants. I have zero variance because we've just been there the whole time. So like I'm 100%. I did that shit because like some of my relatives are like super light skinned.

And this thing, people in Africa can vary in terms of skin tone. There are people that are your skin tone, but they're black people. They're 100% African, right? So I was like, is there anything else in here? Nah, I was 99.9% West African. See, that proves you're a genetic freak. No, it doesn't prove I'm a genetic freak. It just proves I'm 100% African.

Well, no. You're going to have the most extreme examples, let's say, of athletics in the most pure African genetics that haven't been diluted and watered down and watered down again and watered down again and watered down again. So 496 of the fastest times in the 100 meters come from athletes of West African ancestry. Jamaica, USA, whatever, they're from different countries. That's pretty heavy, and they believe it's from the malaria resistance, getting more anaerobic muscle fibers. And so your talent pool is there for explosive fast pace. And then in East Africa, in a small area of East Africa, the Great Rift Valley comes 80% of the fastest times in distance running marathon, 10,000 meters, 5,000 meters. Most of those athletes represent Kenya or Ethiopia or USA or whatever, but that's the greatest concentration

of athletic talent that you can imagine. And it's because those guys trace their ancestry back really deep. And so they can be more disparate and have, you know, amazing genetic gifts. And of course, who are we watching on the starting line? Definitely the fastest West African ancestry of all those with West African ancestry, because there's some slow ass ones too. ancestry because there's some slow ass ones too you know you might have the slowest sprinter ever from nigerian ancestry right there next to his cousin who made the olympics uh-huh theoretically uh-huh you know yeah that's crazy man yeah when we have dan uh gardner or gartner on the show i forget how to pronounce his last name but uh he'll be on the show pretty soon and we'll get to the

bottom of a lot of that stuff because he knows a ton about genetics and things like that. So I'm super excited to get an opportunity to talk to him coming up. I had a question for you, Brad, because this is something that I found pretty interesting. It's about the chocolate, the spicy chocolate? Well, that sounds pretty good, but – That's amazing. As you start to eat more fruit, right? More fruit, more protein, huge giant protein smoothie.

I'm going to give that a lot of credit for just recovering better and keeping, I guess, keeping appetite in check too. Like I'm trying to eat more, but it's all good food. Yeah. It's like I've had enough. I've had enough steak. I mean, I eat it every day. And I can see people that are struggling. Like you mentioned, those people that are trying to lose 50 pounds.

It's like, how about filling up with maximum energy? They have less cravings. Real food. Don't screw around with extended fasting yet, because we might be, when we're not looking, see that guy hit the Ben and Jerry's on Tuesday after his 16-8 day on Monday. It's tough unless your energy mechanisms are working well. Well, I was going to ask you this about like in terms of like your cravings now, because cravings aren't necessarily bad. It's just what do you turn to when you're typically

craving food? Because if you're turning to Snickers bars, fast food, et cetera, things that are put together so that you'll crave more and more of it. You can't necessarily trust yourself when you're like, I'm hungry. Like, are you truly hungry or are you hungry because you're used to eating Doritos and Oreos and all this processed food that is when you eat it, you crave more and more of it. But when you're eating a whole real foods, you know, it, it becomes much easier to actually trust when you're actually hungry. That's where a lot of people are.

A lot of people, when they say I have crazy cravings, they're coming from a place of eating a lot of highly palatable processed foods all the time. Where now when their body says I'm hungry, you don't need more. You know what I mean? So how are you feeling? You don't feel – I know you mentioned that you eat a lot of fruit and shit, but you don't feel that you're overdoing anything, right? Not at all, no.

And it's also like ghrelin turns off after 20 minutes, right? So I'm starving my ass off and I need some food right away and I can't wait to eat. But if I don't, it's going to go away in 20 minutes. I'm going to start making more ketones. I'm going to sail through the afternoon. But that's all great content and it's a pull quote highlight for the book or whatever. And if you're using cold exposure to lose excess body fat,

I've been doing some research on that topic because it's kind of cool. Like, hey, jump in the cold tub and your weight loss will be accelerated. Ray Cronise's work has proven that pretty interestingly, how he has a lot of clients and he himself lost a lot of weight just from getting cold frequently and all that. And so all that stuff works, but again, it's stress mechanisms getting it to work. And so, you know, right now, like my last blood test, my insulin is 2.3. My triglycerides are 27.

My numbers look good. And so I'm not trying to challenge my fat-burning mechanisms or accelerate something. I'm just trying to get to what is optimal. So I guess it depends on where the listener viewer stands right now. And if you have some extra gut you want to get rid of, then we have to go on this boulevard rather than this one. And like Mark said, you got to get healthy first. You got to get rid of that processed food. And people are really banging this drum really nicely now.

Kate Shanahan has been doing it for a decade, that the industrial seed oils cause mitochondrial dysfunction, cause dysfunctional fat metabolism. And so if you can't burn energy yourself very well, you're going to crave the Oreos and the foods that are put together for that purpose. So we've become a society that's dependent on these drugs, basically.

That's a really interesting point. There are people that burn the same type of calories less efficiently than somebody else. Oh yeah, that's what obesity is. Right. I mean, obesity is storing excess calories for years and decades because you're not able to burn them. And you got to give a plug to, hey, get out and exercise more because that is a huge important

factor for it. But it appears, I'm not the scientist to make the final conclusion here, but it appears when those processed foods are in the mix and those industrial seed oils inflict damage immediately at the cellular level showing that they'll render mitochondria less functional and less able to burn energy from the body, you're totally screwed. And you're not going to willpower your way out of it. You're going to walk into the 7-Eleven

and go for the ice cream at 9 o'clock at night or whatever. Yeah, you got to sleep a lot. You got to exercise. You got to hit all these checkpoints. But if we're not, if we're dealing with processed foods, we can't even listen on further on the show, really. And it also might take you years to get away from processed food. I hope not. I mean, how much of a scare do we need?

How many times do you want to be slapped in the face, you know? I just mean like literally, like for people that are heavy, like it might take them a couple of years to distance themselves. Like they can work on it and they can get better at it and they could go a couple days. Yeah. They can go a couple weeks. They could start to go a couple months, but it's going to be very, it takes a lot of time. Yeah. It lures you back in. Another book from Dr. Lustig, The Hacking of the American Mind, and talks about how the marketing forces are luring us into these dopamine-triggering instant gratification behaviors. Mobile devices, video games, porn, sugar, alcohol, street drugs, prescription drugs, they're all triggering and flooding the dopamine pathways of the brain. And so we're at a loss here. It's hard to extricate because we're literally addicted to them.

And it's not for the hit of pleasure like we often talk about. It's just to get to baseline as you need in the terms of food. You need those foods just to have energy to get up off the couch because you feel like crap because you can't burn energy. And so you get a hit of ice cream or 7-Eleven Slurpee and then you got an hour in you to finish at the office and what's going to hit us next. So I think it's like Paul shouting his Instagram posts. Why are you shouting every post, man? You're a smart freaking guy.

Tell me. But it's like we got to wake up. And so if we have a chance here to say, hey, wake up and ditch those processed foods as number one goal, just don't do it. Just make a stand. And by the way, there's so many fun ways to work around that and buy the cookbook that has the keto brownies. And oh my gosh, you put in what's in there, almond flour and egg yolks and heavy cream and whip it up and sprinkle coconut on top. It's delicious. You can totally enjoy your life, but you got to get away from the brand names and the shit that they're peddling down our throat. It's heading down a slippery slope these days. How do you maybe advise some parents go about having a better dietary practice inside the household.

You must have written about this before. Oh, yeah, yeah. When I was a soccer coach, it was fun because the helicopter moms would come in like 22 minutes into practice and be shoving Ritz crackers and grapes in the kid's face. And I'm like, get that food out. I'd always direct it to the kids so I wouldn't offend anybody. But I'd be like, what do you need? We need food right now, man.

You need to run. I was so shocked when I went to my daughter's volleyball games and she had the tournaments and stuff. There was food. I thought the Dallas Cowboys were going to show up or something. There was so much food everywhere. I was like, who is this food for? And these kids are only here for a couple hours. Was it for her team and the opponents?

It's for everyone. There's just food everywhere because there's a bunch of different teams and a bunch of different... Like a sports facility where they have the snack bar. It's like a free-for-all. It's a tournament and parents bring food. There's a food thing there.

There's taco trucks. There's food everywhere. I've never seen anything like it. There's food literally everywhere. There's food bar. There's a food like thing there. There's like taco trucks. There's like food every – like I've never seen anything like it. There's food literally everywhere. There's Doritos and burritos and like – Chitoritos. I was just like, what in the hell? And I actually – for my kids, I was like – I just – I said – asked the parents. I'm like, I know I'm like crazy fitness person, but can we bring better –

I'll bring a bunch of healthy food, and then if you guys could chip in and bring some healthy food. We want them to play well, right? We don't want any – And I was also like, they're here for four hours. Honestly, they don't really need any food, but to have some nutrients here I guess makes some sense. But I'm like, damn. Curious about that real quick, and Brad, I don't mean to cut off the question. But when kids, because I was thinking about this, because I have my puppy growing.

And then I was like, well, the kids, when they're growing everything, they probably, no one's tracking their kid's food. But if you want a kid to really grow like you'll see cases of kids that went from somewhat malnourishment to actually starting to eat a lot of food and then they have like an eight inch growth spurt in a year year and a half you see that all the time these are finally getting in enough calories so yeah you want to fuck the doritos and shit but like kids if you give them put fruit and all this other shit in front of them, they might still scarf all of it down because they're they're growing kids. Right. Oh, they'll eat it. Yeah. No, they like as soon as we made some changes, they ate it.

And I wasn't like a speech of like, hey, let's only bring stuff that's like super healthy. It was like, let's just have some better options. Absolutely. You know, and so what if they're like, I don't fucking care if there's like a sticky bun there or like a bagel or whatever. But at least now the kids, like if they're going to eat in between the games or have something in between the games, it's something small. It's something quick. It's something that's going to digest fairly easy. And like the first time that I saw it, like I saw a couple kids like eat like a muffin and then a bagel. And I was just like, that's just like, this is not great.

I mean, we're going to be doing this every weekend. Like this doesn't seem like a good idea. Yeah, it's rough. I've fought that battle hard with my kids. You know, they're 24 and 22 now. So the battle part's over. But I always tried to, you know to have that healthy baseline in the house and encourage them to eat a good meal.

And then it was a losing battle at a certain point because they're out and about. They'd stop at 7-Eleven and get a Slurpee after sports practice or whatever. But I think the only thing you can do is set an example and do enough lecturing to where they have the knowledge and then they have a you know they're making a well informed decision and oh my gosh I remember

I used to brainwash my kids really good when they were little and we'd drive by McDonald's and I'd be like see that place they're criminals because they feed food that kill people and you can drive in and get the food that'll kill you later or you can go inside and it's McDonald's they're evil the m is evil you know and then like my son was in first grade his first sleepover uh party you know and mom and i are worried like okay if you know if you get scared

you can call us you can always come home if you can't sleep and you know he was like you know a little shy when he was a little kid so we drop him drop him off at the house. And then like, we get the call, he wants to come home. And I'm like, what's wrong? You know, are you having a rough time? He goes, no, it's great. But we went to McDonald's for dinner. I can't eat here. And I'm like, oh my God. I was like, tears were coming to my eyes. Like the, you know, the whole thing, like internalize the whole thing. And he was scared. Like he didn't want to go to McDonald's. Uh, I think I, I think I met him there and brought him some snack to take home and the whole drama was alleviated. But, um, he's like, you know, turned into a big culinary guy, big athlete, and he's really into healthy eating. And, you know,

I kind of like trusted the process because I think now we're in the era of over-parenting, helicopter parenting, trying to navigate, orchestrate your kid's life like with puppet strings. And it's better to just – they're going to make their own choices. They're going to make their own mistakes, hopefully, if you let them, right, if you don't protect everything. And then a lot of times they're going to come around and have, you know, values and behavior patterns that you set a good example for. But, you know, there's no guarantee, but at least you put it out there. Try your hardest. Just on that same note, I had to have my wife remove an app that she had on her phone to where she could, like, track my son's grades and stuff. And, like, she was just always up his ass about his grades.

And she was, like up his ass about his grades and she was like always stressed about it i'm like you know the best way to alleviate that stress he's like what i was like get rid of that fucking app nice he's not gonna do his homework like he's just not it's not gonna happen because you yell at him more it's not gonna happen because you're more stressed out like that's not the solution and she you know she eventually got rid of it and he'd like i don't know he figured shit out enough to get through high school or whatever he needed to do but it's there's just like a lot of hovering that parents do and it's like hey you want to just not worry about your kid falling and just fucking look the other way yeah i mean it's tough to do it let him get hit in the face with the ball. He's going to be fine. Yeah. I mean, the stakes are so high now that, like, in high school, if your kid gets a B, they're not going to Cal or UCLA.

If they get a single B, you know. And if they don't get into accelerated sports in elementary, middle school age, they're not going to start for the varsity, basketball team, soccer, whatever sport. And I think that's great. Yeah, that's right. Like that's going to shove you in the right direction. Yeah. You don't belong in that direction anyway. You didn't get the A.

You didn't get the A. Yeah, yeah. My sister was a valedictorian at Yale. She was a high student. She's a doctor, and she was destined when she was in second grade after skipping first. She was on that path. No one needed to bother her or hound her about her homework, and I was not on that same destined path for the Ivy League.

My dad would try to convince me that the Ivy League was the best school. He went to Princeton, and he was like, Princeton is a fine school. It's located in New Jersey. I'm like, Dad, I'm pulling a 2.8 at a shitty public high school in Los Angeles. I'm not Princeton material. He goes, Oh, I think you should think about it. Don't rule it out.

I'm like, well, they've already ruled me out. I'm more a UC Santa Barbara kind of guy, the surfing, the running. But it's a good reflection to think like our destinies are set and the parents think they have more influence than they really do. And it's sort of like our ego or something where if I can be the biggest, best role model possible and also, you know, check their grades on the app and keep them aligned and open up all the possible doors, then it's going to be wonderful. And boy, you know, to live through it where it doesn't go perfectly, it's kind of like, all right, I can get over myself now and realize that, you know that there's a lot of factors going on,

and you can't control it all, basically. Same with a dog. You can't control it all. You just do the best you can. Andrew, you got anything over there? I was just thinking about feeding my son. I've talked about it a lot on the podcast because I'm so proud of him. But even when we're eating, let's just say steak and rice.

Uh, when he gets, you know, a fork full of rice, he's just like, I don't want that. And like, give me the good stuff. He wants the steak.

But my wife made, she baked, uh, some, uh, blueberry, blueberry muffins the other day. And it was like,

he couldn't control himself. And it was just like, interesting because like for his first birthday i didn't want cake out like no cake like get that shit away from us but then somebody eventually brought one and then like he didn't want anything to do with it uh did the thing were like terrible like just the whole situation is terrible but like they put their finger in the frosting and put it to his mouth and he just he hated it i was like this is great but for some reason like home baked muffins he was just like i don't want anything else but that so for us now i recognize that i'm like i'm going to throw

away all of that shit because it just can't be in the house because what he does is he puts us in check um if i'm eating something that he can't have why the fuck am i eating it you know like if i'm eating a bowl of cereal or something he'll come up to me because this kid's always hungry he's one and a half years old oh my gosh always hungry and it's amazing but if i'm eating a bowl of cereal and he's just like you know pointing at it i'm like oh you can't have it and in my head i'm having this conversation well dad how come i can't have it but you can it's like oh well you know it's because uh yeah you're right so like yeah you know so we talked about that on the podcast too is just like oh but i have kids, well, you know, it's because, yeah, you're right. So we talked about that on the podcast, too. It's just like, oh, but I have kids.

How can I have healthy food in the house or get rid of the unhealthy food? Like, well, they don't shop for it. You do. And so for my son, he definitely keeps me in check because he's always wanting to eat more and more. And all he eats is, seriously, all he eats is like steak um like ground meat or ground beef and like bananas he eats a fuck ton of bananas it's amazing meat and fruit yeah just trying to keep them in that top one percent as sean baker told me there you go yeah so that's been it's been um yeah learning experience my daughter she's 14 um she knows good or bad food i guess if you want to label something

as good and bad but with her she will definitely go out and have the doritos the oreos and stuff like that so it's hard to uh reverse you know stuff that's already been implanted there but we're working on it she's getting better andrew take us out of here buddy i sure think thank you everybody for checking in on today's episode. Please drop us some comments down below, and please make sure you guys like today's episode on the way out and subscribe if you guys are not subscribed. Follow the podcast at MBPowerProjects on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. My Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter is at IamAndrewZ.

And Seema, where are you at? I'm Seema Inning on Instagram and YouTube. I'm Seema Inning on TikTok and Twitter. Brad, where can people find you? Where am I at? BradKerns.com. You'll find me. All kinds of fun stuff.

Great to be with you guys. Yeah, thank you so much. You have a blog that you post on, right? And you also have a podcast. The Be Rad Podcast. It's all kinds of fun stuff. Very cool. Thank you so much for your time.

I appreciate it. Thank you, guys. I'm at Mark Smelly Bells. Strength is never weakness. Weakness never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.