Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Power Project EP. 215 Live with Special Guest Co-Host Chris Bell

Episode Date: May 23, 2019

Today's episode of Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast we have special guest co-host Chris Bell. Chris, Mark Bell's older brother, is the producer of the documentaries Bigger STronger Faster, Prescription Thugs, Trophy Kids and A Leaf of Faith. Today he and the guys talk about training at 4am, the Keto and Carnivore Diet, and the benefits of Kratom ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Find the Podcast on all platforms: ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4YQE02jPOboQrltVoAD8bp ➢Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

this hat when it's new kind of saws off my ears it's kind of sawing them off but it looks nice i don't care yeah oh yeah plus with the headphones compressed down yeah you're getting killed who needs ears they're overrated so not one but two bells today oh my god double bells hell's bells baby you need that thing to be uh moved upward or whatever you can uh adjust the microphone there, if you want. I'm trying to work my lower back. I'm actually up on a

pedestal right now. That's just how tall you are. I wish. Well, Elliot Holes told us to put that pussy up on a pedestal, so here we go. There you go. I actually told us not to, though, right? Yeah, he told us not to.

That's what we don't want to do. Shit. I got the whole message wrong. Makes sense. We covered a lot during that episode. We'll move her up. There we go. And then just like, yeah, and then tilt it down towards you, too.

There you go. There you go, right there. Oh, you're perfect now. Look at that. I've always been perfect, baby. Hey, Bor, what do you think about this guy going to Worlds Jiu-Jitsu? I think it's amazing. He's a top-level athlete over there, kicking some ass.

I think it's awesome, too. I'm excited. I'm going to go. Where is it? Where is it? Check it out. The Walter Pyramid in Long Beach. Oh, Long Beach.

Yeah, that's perfect, man. Yeah. When is it? Next week, Wednesday, Long Beach. Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah. So when when is it next week? Wednesday, I leave. So I think it's the 29th, 30th through the weekend, but I'm competing on Thursday. Wow, that's exciting. You pumped up? Yeah. Are you ready for it? I'm as ready as I can be. Like, like I say, with all that stuff, I just I do all the training I can and then I just go and compete and see what happens. You have any idea who you go against or anything, or do you just go in blind?

Right now there's 24 guys in the bracket. They haven't put out the brackets yet, but there's 24 guys total competing. I saw a lot of familiar names there. I didn't see Jason's name. Jason's the guy who won Worlds last year, and he didn't get promoted, so it's not like he's competing as a purple belt.

So I guess he's just not competing in it this year. Maybe it's yours. How do the belts work? White, blue, brown. White, blue, purple, brown, black. Typically, on average, it takes someone three years to go from white to blue, another two to three to go from blue to purple, and then maybe another two to three there, and then like four years to go from white to blue another two to three to go from blue to purple and then maybe another two to three there and then like four years you have to pass some sort of test or

competition or something or it just really depends on most schools do it by like how proficient the individual is maybe how fast they're progressing so if someone's just picking up jiu-jitsu really fast and you know they're they're beating upper belts they, they can get promoted faster. At Casio's, if you compete and you do well in your belt class or whatever, if you're doing really well and you're beating a bunch of those people in your belt, then you can just get promoted to the next one. They whip people when they get a belt? I've seen before.

Is that just for a black belt or something? Some schools do stuff like that. Guys have no shirt, and they walk through the line and everybody whips them right with the bill uh-huh you ever see that boy yeah i've seen that yeah so they have a bunch of interesting rituals and then like sometimes also like if someone's getting a black belt uh sometimes they'll go against like literally everyone in the school like everyone in the school will roll with the person for 30 seconds yeah you gotta beat everybody right so yeah that's a version of the gauntlet for black belt promotion so yeah acasios i haven't seen him do a gauntlet or anything like that usually you just give them their black belt and then they'll they'll do their speech so um yeah yeah damn i'm you know i'm in the middle of a 72 hour faster coming off

the back end of it i guess and um i get um, I get to eat tonight. So I'm pretty, uh, I'm pretty pumped up about that. I know you've done a lot of fasting, but have you messed with fasting? We all know about your carnivore-ness. Yeah. You started with some keto and now you're doing carnivore. Have you messed around with fasting much? Um, not really. I don't, um, I don't really like it. And, um, I haven't found it to be necessary at all, like to get to where you've been, like to get to where you've been making progress. Yeah. To get to where I've gotten. I don't, I don't, I just don't necessarily feel good. You know, when I, when I do it, I feel like I try to do it. And then all I do all day is

think about food and it just sort of throws me off. So I think that I don't think there's anything wrong with just saying like, Hey, I'm not ready for that yet. I I've done it. Um, I've done intermittent fasting for like, you know, long 18 hours, uh, periods of time, but I have seen no benefit from it. Um, as far as like weight loss or speed of weight loss or getting any leaner, I personally have an experience like, wow, that was amazing. Or, you know, a lot of people talk about like, Oh man, my mind just opened right up and I don't get any of that. So, but I don't get any of that from almost anything. So it's really hard for me to say like, oh, my mind opened up or, you know, I got fantastic results. I think you and I have had, well, all three of us at this table have had

pretty good practices over the last, you know, let's just even say just two years, right? Over the last two years, we've had pretty good practices. And so I think it makes it harder to kind of tell, like, you know, I heard, you know, a lot of people talk about a keto diet, like being really good for your, you know, the mind benefits of a keto diet. Well, yeah, it might make sense if you were eating junk for a while, that a keto diet might help. But I think Lane Norton posted something and it's just a study, you know, whatever studies or studies take them for whatever you want. But he posted something that, you know, was kind of, you know, refuting that evidence of, you know, a keto diet really doing anything in terms of like mental clarity. And what I would say is just that any overconsumption is probably

going to mess up your mind, you know, whether it's, it doesn't really matter what we're overconsuming. I do think maybe if we're over-consuming like fats and proteins, maybe it's less insulting to our metabolism. Maybe it doesn't have as big of an impact on the health of our brain. But if you're, if you're eating all day long and you're stuffing yourself with a lot of junk, I would imagine you just wouldn't feel very good. Yeah. And a placebo effect is also really strong. So if people believe that they're getting a benefit from doing a ketogenic diet, I don't see any harm in that. It doesn't really actually hurt you to think that you're getting better mental clarity, even if you're actually not. But, you know, I do like to know what's the truth and what's not, you know, so it's cool that he posted that. But I would just say that like anytime you look at studies like that, you have to go in and look at how the study was done, look how it was performed. I think we find that like 99% of the studies that everybody's out there citing are epidemiology studies. And those epidemiology studies are just a terrible example of how nutrition science data is captured nowadays.

And you'll hear like a lot of people like John Ioannidis from Stanford University basically saying it's worthless, you know, like, hey, it's a good starting point, but like, it's not going to really tell you much of anything. And I think that's where we're at. Studies in general. Yes. Epidemiology studies in general. And I think that's where we're stuck at is like, we don't have a lot of good data on any of this stuff, you know? Yeah. I think, again, it's great that we have studies to show different ideas, but at the same time, I think it's just the most powerful thing is just to try it for yourself. I mean, really, I would have thought that, you know, eating protein once a day, right? Maybe it's not that big of a deal or maybe you're not going to lose that much muscle. At the end of the day, just try it out even if a study doesn't or refutes what you may want to try. I think the studies can be like a distraction in a way because like somebody says something and then they try to back it up with this study. But it's never referring to like any of us. And when I say us, I just mean like anyone that has been like doing fitness for a while, anyone that has lived like a fitness

lifestyle, they're talking about kind of like the general pop. And they're talking about people that just kind of eat, they don't eat very well. They don't take care of themselves at all. So it's like, well, why would I care about that study? Well, you know, you and I interviewed basically all the top players, not all of them, but a lot of the top players in nutrition in the past two years. And we've been putting together a documentary. And when we started out, we launched a war on carbs. We toasted a piece of sashimi together

and we launched a war on carbs together. You wrote a book about it. Our hypothesis at the beginning of this film process was like, hey, look, carbs don't do anything good for most people like most people have a problem with them right um we know like yeah it's great for you know if you're an athlete and you're training for jujitsu or whatever you're doing like you probably need some carbs here and there but like we're just talking in general and we mainly mean like crappy

carbs like that that's where we're really talking about but i think that our hypothesis uh throughout like it's i've changed my mind a lot, but I've come back around to the point where like, yeah, it is a war on carbs for me. Like that's, that's what works for me. I know that leaving carbohydrates out of my diet is a necessity for me to feel good. I don't know that it's a necessity for everybody. Obviously there's people all over the planet that are feeling great every day and they're eating carbohydrates. But what I'm looking for is our answers to some of these really crazy health issues that I have, like arthritis and just pain. And is there a way out? And I even think with a carnivore diet, 100%, I've done it a hundred percent where I've gone like

just meat and water for long periods of time. And it doesn't get rid of everything, but it fixes a lot of things and it makes me feel a lot better. So for me, the conclusion at the end kind of comes around to being the same as at the beginning. I know a lot more truths now and a lot more information now, but the basic elevator pitch of like what your diet should be is the same. Eat a lot of meat,

you know, drink a lot of water, train, get good sleep, you know, and, and don't eat a lot of carbs. It's still the same. And also we don't know, like if you, uh, even feeling better over the years, we don't really know if it's attributed necessarily to like the actual diet or weight loss. Cause you haven't lost weight both ways. Right? Exactly. And if we just know what you did, that's all. Yeah. And two of the people that we talked to a lot are like Lane Norton and Stan Efferding. And both of them are, you know, very adamant about the fact that like weight loss fixes

a lot of health problems. So just the fact that I lost weight, even though I'm saying for me, I know that that matters. I'm saying that, but I'm saying that in the context of like, well, the only diet I did was carnivore because that was the way that I found it easy to restrict my calories. So if it is just a calorie equation, if that is what it is, the only way I found to reduce my calories was a carnivore diet or some sort of ketogenic diet. What goes on with you when you do reintroduce carbs? Cause I know maybe you've tried that since, right? Yeah. I just don't feel as good like in the days after, but also my problem is a slippery slope and I can

be the first one to admit it. I don't eat like you, you know what I mean? Like I'm not going to be the Encima, like I'm not going to go and get like the boiled chicken and rice. Like, I don't know if you eat like that, but I'm saying a lot of body, a lot of bodybuilders do, right? A lot of people in bodybuilding do, they eat like rice and boiled chicken and stuff like that. So if I eat the rice, that sort of sends me down the slippery slope of like, well, then it's easy for me to have Snickers. Because, you know, carbohydrates just turn into sugar no matter what you do. It's just going to turn into sugar. So it makes me have sugar cravings.

You know. Picks up the cravings. Now, it does that same thing for me, too. If I have too much at once, that same thing will happen. But it hasn't been happening as frequently. And I think definitely activity plays a big role. My question to you though is this also, because like, are you high fat, high protein

or like just very high protein, moderate fat? Yeah, so nowadays I've been using this Piedmontese beef, which is awesome. Yeah, you told me about it. So yeah, Piedmontese, it's sort of like the Belgian blue bull that's bigger, stronger, faster. It's awesome.

It's a giant bull, right? And so like these steaks that I've been eating have 50 grams of fat. I mean, 50 grams of protein. So 50 grams of protein, only four grams of fat. Oh, really? They're amazing. Yeah, I'll bring you one.

You're gonna have to try it. So this Piedmontese beef, I think it's, so it's a higher protein, lower fat. What was the one you gave me? Was that a filet? It was whatever it was. It was really good. No, I think I gave you a New York strip.

It was awesome, whatever it was. Yeah, but anyway, that steak is amazing, and that's just like a way to get more protein in with less fat, and I think that's the way to really do this diet. If you look at my own podcast, Better, Stronger, Faster, I interviewed Ted Naiman on there and Ted Naiman was awesome. I mean, he basically just says like, if you really want to lose weight, just crank up your protein. But most of the time that means like eating more chicken or something, right? Because like what else has high protein that doesn't have a lot of calories in it. But with this Piedmontese beef, now you can kind of crank it up and still be eating beef. But the beauty of the Piedmontese is because it has double muscle, sort of like smelly and yourself.

The muscles, the meat's really tender. So it's more like eating like a really good prime, you know, steak. It's like eating Jay Cutler. Yeah. For a slice amount. Not bad. There you go. Yeah.

One thing I haven't heard in a while, because I remember like early on, for me early on, like maybe four years ago when I discovered the ketogenic diet, there was a lot of people saying like, oh, if you eat too much protein, it's just going to convert into fat and you're just going to keep gaining weight. I haven't heard much of that lately. Why do you think that is? Well, because the- Well, hold on a second.

Protein, it's really unlikely that it will turn into fat. It can turn into glucose in your body. Maybe that's what it was. A lot easier and kick you out of ketosis. They call it gluconeogenesis, which just basically means new glucose. So gluconeogenesis and basically that can kick you out of ketosis. But you would have to eat a really big, huge amount of protein. But the thing is that we only make glucose as needed, right?

And I think the original person who brought this up was Jimmy Moore, who's a very popular keto guy. Keto Clarity, he wrote the book. Yeah, Keto Clarity. He's been very important to this whole movement. And I think in the beginning, a lot of people had a problem. You know, they basically like they brought that problem up to him years later. So that book had been out for five or six years before anybody really challenged it. And then finally, people started challenging it.

And when they challenged it, I think even Jimmy Morris stepped back and now he does a carnivore diet and he's eating high protein as well. And I think that that's over. I think there's a lot of things in this like keto world that pop up and then they simply just go away after like a couple of people look into them. So when you think you see things in the carnivore movement pop up about like people go, what about TMAO? What about mTOR? And these are things that can like increase that might be bad for longevity on a carnivore diet. And Dr. Baker will look into it and say, yeah, TMAO doesn't really not that big ofMAO doesn't really, not that big of a deal. mTOR, not that big of a deal.

And then you just go, okay, moving on. And it seems like almost every issue that we've come up against so far on a carnivore diet has been the same way where somebody that's really smart, a lot smarter than I am or Mark is, and they'd say, you know what? That's not that big of a deal. am or Mark is. And they'd say, you know what, that's not that big of a deal. So for me, I look to certain people like Sean Baker, Paul Saladino, and I look to those guys to get my information from about what I'm doing. And so far they're saying those things aren't an issue. I think a lot of people are excited for things to be a big deal that aren't a big deal. Like they, they, they want to put their hopes into take an extra magnesium. You know, they want to put their hopes into, you know, whatever supplement they have or that this, you know, doing it this way is the wrong way.

Like they want to put their faith in that a lot. And I think from our standpoint, we've never been really like quote unquote keto. Like the word is like just not, we're not like clinical keto. We do like a low carb, high protein diet basically. Although I did do that in the beginning. Yeah, I've done it. I've done it as well. And I think, but I think the shift came when people started testing ketones and they had more, uh, easier access and capabilities of testing ketones at home. Because back in the day, you and I were just peeing on keto sticks, which like, isn't the same thing as like testing your ketones through

your blood. But when I went back on the ketogenic diet more recently, I tested my ketones every day for like a year. And it came down to the fact of Mark being like, that's just such like, he's just looking at me like I'm stupid. He's like, ah, what a waste of time. He's like, you're pricking your finger. You're bleeding all over, shooting blood everywhere. The sticks are like five bucks a piece. You know, it's like, it was just this big thing. And then after Mark kept saying like, it's stupid, you don't need it. I don't think he's like, I don't think ketosis is even that important. And I kept going like, he's just wrong. He's gotta be wrong. And then one day I just stopped testing and guess what? I had abs in like six weeks. So, you know what I mean? It was just a different level.

Yeah. You did keto after you did carnivore again? No, I did. I know what I'm saying is like, I just continue to do my diet. Yeah. But I just threw away the stupid ketone meter. And what was happening, and Mark was right, Mark was like, every time you're not in ketosis, you're just going and double dipping on MCT oil. And you're just adding more fat into your diet. Like, you're just going to get fatter.

Trying to get a ketone score, like chasing after the ketone. Chasing ketones. Yeah, kind of chasing after the ketones. And, you know, Jesse Burdick and I have played, we played around with a lot of stuff. And like in the beginning, you know, he put me on a ketogenic diet and we took some information from John Kiefer. And John Kiefer was also kind of saying, look, you know, you don't, it's called a ketogenic diet and you can get into ketosis. And it's a good idea to go low carb for a handful of days um but we don't need to be like registering ketones we don't even need to check them we don't need to do anything just go about two weeks very low carb

and then you're going to be utilizing your fat a little bit better and from that point you can actually start to eat carbs and then also what people don't factor in is like if you start to lose weight especially if you're losing body fat, well, your body composition changes. So now everything changes. Your metabolism has just changed, uh, kind of right in front of your very eyes and you have ability to, to be a little bit more flexible. You can eat some different foods at that point. And maybe you can afford to, uh, eat some carbohydrates here and there, even have a cheat meal here and there. Yeah. And I think, I think when I get into deep ketosis, I actually feel kind of weird. Sounds so weird. Deep ketosis.

I don't feel that good. Like I feel kind of like, like it gives you a horrible breath. It makes you feel a little bit sick. I felt shitty too. I had a hard time lifting and stuff. It was, it didn't feel right. I didn't feel great. And then like now when we lift at 4.30 in the morning, I feel like a million bucks. And you, by the way, you're in ketosis or no uh i don't know i'm not sure you know i don't know but i don't feel so like i don't look at yeah i i know for sure when i'm in deep ketosis because you can taste this sort of like metal kind of taste in your mouth you know wonderful yeah um it's yeah it's not great so i don't you know i don't really look to try to get into ketosis

anymore so i don't really know but try to get into ketosis anymore. So I don't really know, but I can test again and find out. I'm in ketosis. I measured it last night. We were talking about how dumb it is. But you're fasting, so maybe it's smart to test it for that, right? I was actually trying to test my blood glucose because Dominic D'Agostino sent me a glucoketometer, and I thought I was just testing glucose.

So I was like 3.2. I'm like, that sounds, it sounds like I'm going to die, you know, for talking about glucose, but it was a millimolars and it was for my ketones. He's like, oh, it does tracks both. And I was like, oh, okay. So I haven't checked. Oh, is that like a new product that he has or something? I don't know. He said, I got to use a different strip or something. I was like, okay. But yeah, I had a 3.2, but yeah, I've been fasting for a few days and I'm using like the, what are they called? Fake ketones. Yeah. Exogenous ketones. Exogenous ketones.

What is your benefits from fasting? Like, what do you get out of it? Because I know, I know you get a lot out of it for like work and you get really focused. Yeah. Is that it? Or is it like, do you feel like you get leaner? You feel better? So just like really some simple stuff is like, I like to work and then I like to eat. Like I found that that feels good to me. Get a lot of work done, get like my lifting done,

get all of my just regular work shit done. And then, you know, when the day's over, go home and eat. One thing that I love a lot more than fasting is to stuff myself. And so I can go home and I can kind of have at it. You know, I really like that. And I think that having that kind of fat kid still inside me somewhere, I want to do that. I want to eat like a double dinner and then maybe finish off with like a snack and then, you know, maybe have about an hour between that and bed so I can, you know, sleep okay or whatever. But I mean, that's part of the main reason. Another reason is that getting out of the house early in the morning, it seems like I always have

to shit. And so by, and so just by eating less and by fasting, it's like, it's been helping a lot of that. And then if I fast for a few days, like the last couple of days to get here in the morning has been easier because I'm not like halfway out the door and going, oh my God, I got to take a dump. So a little less bathroom time, but like in terms of like clarity and a lot of those things, yeah, I feel pretty clear and I feel pretty focused, but I felt that way for years. I've always, I've always feel good. I know you don't track calories or anything like that, but are you worried about being like in a, in a deficit at all with fasting for so long? No, I go back and forth between some different techniques and different methods.

I go through times where I just don't care if I lose weight. The goal is to lose weight right now, so I'm losing weight. And if I lose some muscle along with it, then that's okay. I'm also experimenting. I've never fasted for this long before. So I'm just trying something new. After doing it, I think it seems to be pretty excessive. It seems like if you're to actually think about fasting in a more logical sense,

I just saw a video. I think you sent me over a video. It might have been a follow-up video from Slimland. That was a really cool video. Simland. Simland. Simland. It might've been the follow-up video from Slimland. That was a really cool video. Simland. Simland. Simland. Simland.

Okay, there we go. I thought it was Slimland. Yeah. Sounds like Dracula. He's amazing. Yeah. He's got some really, really good information. Check out his YouTube channel.

But he talked about fasting and he just basically said that if you are to fast for 18 hours or 20 hours a day, you know, not every day day but let's just say five days a week like add that up add up that amount of fasting versus fasting 72 hours like two or three times a year yeah you know what i mean so he was just trying to put it in a little bit more simple terms and then he also talked about which is something we always talk about when we talk about diet there's going to be a plus and minus to everything that you do so people are talking about autophagy and creating new cells well maybe you shouldn't be creating new cells all the time.

Yeah, what I actually do- Maybe you shouldn't be fucking with that all the time. The advice that I follow for fasting is just simple. It's what Rob Wolf told us. I believe a lot of what Rob says. And Rob just basically told us that if you eat when the sun's up, then you're just at a much better metabolic advantage

according to your circadian rhythm, right? So for me, the sun comes up around 6.30. So usually I don't eat breakfast. I usually don't eat until about like 9 or 10 o'clock in the morning. And I have like a steak or have whatever. But at 6 o'clock or now the sun goes down later. It goes down at like, I don't know, 7.30 or 8 o'clock, right? But by 7 o'clock, I'm done eating.

So I just eat like, you know, not from sun up till sundown, but basically a couple hours after the sun comes up until the sun goes down. And then once the sun goes down, I don't eat anything after that. So he said, eat when the sun's up. Yeah. That's interesting. I eat when the sun's down pretty much. That's interesting. Yeah. So why did he like, I mean, circadian rhythm? Yeah. But what, are there any other benefits or reasons to do that? It's just in tune with when we were, when we were awake, like we're, you know, I mean, circadian rhythm, yeah. But are there any other benefits or reasons to do that? It's just in tune with when we're awake. Like, you know, we're designed to be awake when the sun is up.

So we're designed to, like, catch our food and eat our food. Yeah, we're definitely like robots, too. I think, like, you know, like not only the sunlight. I mean, the sunlight does a lot of stuff for us. But I think even the scents and the different things going on outside, I think it's all different. Whether it's, you know, we don't really recognize all of the changes but i think it's it's a big difference but you know i don't i think some of those things like um it's probably important for somebody that has had like their cortisol levels messed up and all their like blood work is just totally messed up it's probably important for them to probably adhere to something

like that for a while until they get things heading in the right direction. You don't seem like, you don't seem like you're having a bunch of a problem over there. Yeah, no, not at all. Let me ask you this. Um, how have your workouts been these past three days as you've been working out, like being fasted? Yeah, they've actually been pretty good. Uh, the first day was really good. That was Monday or what is today? Wednesday, Wednesday. And, uh, yesterday I did some stuff on the treadmill that was pretty hard. And then we went to deadlift. I was like, I was not doing good.

I was like, yeah. Yesterday he did this. I kept kind of, well, I kept kind of like leaning on the, on the weight tree in between my deadlift attempts, even though we didn't deadlift anything heavy. We just did it. No. But then afterwards he did this like CrossFit workout. What was that workout?

That's because I came, that's because I came, I came back around. So I, I had some essential amino acids that I downed. Oh, he didn't tell us. And,

uh, has, uh, you know, potassium and sodium and things like that. I tried salt and that didn't work. So if I broke my fast and maybe I broke my fast, but I just was like,

I, you know, I'm, I don't want to pass out, you know? So I did that. And actually a couple of minutes later, I felt fine and ended up having a great workout. So the workouts have actually been good.

What I would just warn people of is keep in mind why you're fasting and then line that up with the intent of your workouts. So you can still go in there and bust some chops in your workout, but maybe it's smarter to make it a little easier of a workout. Maybe it's like biceps, triceps, and shoulders or something rather than heavy squats or something like that. I think that you can still perform well, but whether you can perform well day in and day out over the course of like three, four, five days, it's just probably not smart. And maybe make your workouts a little shorter and break them up. Maybe you might even be able to get two training sessions in a day rather than, you know, one, you know, banger that you just kill yourself on.

And you could focus on like a more cardio type stuff versus like lifting. Yeah, right. Something less intensive, I guess, is what I'm saying. But, yeah, I went I went pretty nuts yesterday. I did stuff on the treadmill and then I did some deadlifting. And then I did, yeah, like a 21, 15, nine of a CrossFit workout, uh, which was deadlifts and burpees back and forth. And I can't do burpees very well. I suck at it for now. So hopefully I'll get better at it, but I don't just, I still

move very well that way. And then, yeah, after that we've messed with the sledgehammer and that was a lot of fun. Yeah. Uh, Dustin just posted a good question on the live chat, which, um, you know, if you guys are just listening to this after the fact or on iTunes or something, one of the, you know, best incentives to watch this live is you get to talk to Mark and the guest. But he's asking, what about like a recovery time between workouts when you are doing keto versus adding carbs? Like, do you feel a little bit better or worse with either one of them? Say that again? So, like, when you're following like a pretty pretty strict keto diet your recovery time between workouts versus incorporating

i know you don't really have carbs but you know carbs yeah yeah you know what i recover awesome now on a carnivore diet um i i use kratom you know and and I use meat basically as a form of recovery. And to me, that's been amazing. I feel great, you know. I think that carbohydrates, normally they allow you to perform a little bit better. So in that sense, your recovery might be a little bit worse with carbs because they are replenishing your body for the workout. But you can even make an argument that maybe they allow you to train a little bit harder. Maybe they make you more sore because I know a lot of times when people are first experiencing

some of these styles of diets that they need to cut back on their intensity a little bit. So I've never actually had a problem with the recovery either. I have used performance-enhancing drugs as well, so somebody might point to that. But I'll also say this too. I think there's a lot of confusion about performance-enhancing drugs. I think they help you over a period of time for sure, but then they only help you to get to a certain point, and then they don't help any further than whatever that point is.

We all have a point where we just stop. Otherwise, there would be people walking around that are're 400 pounds, they're just completely jacked, right? So you, we're not mice, you know, we don't grow until we die, even with drugs. We haven't found the drug that does that quite yet, I don't think. But basically, you know, as you, you know, if, as you're taking like anabolics, you're're you don't exponentially get bigger and stronger all the time. There's going to be a point where where it all slows down and where it all stops, basically. But also in terms of like soreness, people like they always they relate recovery and soreness together. And they somehow relate anabolics with doing something to your central nervous system.

And if anabolics do anything to your central nervous system, I'm not aware of it. I don't think that they do. Trying to target your central nervous system is actually what makes you stronger. Being able to figure out to get the right amount of resistance training against your central nervous system is what makes you stronger. Obviously, you can contract your muscles a little stronger when you start to take steroids

because you build muscle and you build size. And the more size that you have, the more it allows you to kind of lift more weight. It gives you, it puts you, um, it just gives you better leverages, uh, basically. But, uh, you know, this kind of idea that like somebody is going to do these really hard MMA workouts and because they're on shit, they're just going to like wake up the next day and be like, oh yeah, time to go to jujitsu practice again. It doesn't't really it doesn't really do that i'm sorry i know everyone's i'm bursting everybody's bubble but i don't think they help that great with recovery what about uh because i i i get way more sore if i'm on steroids because i trained way harder like that's that's what i would make sense so it's not like all of a sudden you do a workout and you're like oh my

lats aren't even sore from yesterday. They're like twice as sore because I went nuts. I guess we'd have to define recovery more. But I think that most people, when they talk about recovery, they're just talking about like soreness. And steroids, anabolic steroids are not a force field against soreness in any way. So you said you would hit like eventually like you're not going to grow any further. I've heard people say like, oh, that's why you cycle off. So like when you cycle off and then you get back on again, do you like kind of get like rejuvenated again and kind of do sense or you get

sensitive to, you know, the anabolics or is that kind of bullshit? No, I just think that, um, and Sima and I have talked about this one before. I think you got like five years or so. Yeah. Like five years of training and then you're going to kind of start to top out and then you have to start thinking of different methods and you might, you might be able to prolong that for another three years or so. And you might be able to take steroids and have the whole process, you know, last you

about 10 years. But the first cycle I've ever, I ever took, uh, it pumped me up to about 240 pounds and I was probably like 10% body fat. And that was a long ass time ago. I was probably like 26. You haven't gotten much different than that no besides like you did your bodybuilding show how much did you wait for your bodybuilding show 220 no i weighed 235 on stage i weighed 230 now but i'm not i'm not as then you were shredded

yeah at 230 so like you're only like a little a couple percent body fat less yeah and and a couple pounds yeah on stage i mean if I was to take a wild guess, I might have been like 8% or 9% or something. So, yeah. It was like a 10-year period of time, though, right? Like in between from when you started till, or maybe more, maybe a little bit more. Yeah, no matter how, I mean, it's very depressing,

but no matter how you slice it, you don't exponentially just get all that much more betterest. Well, I think people think that you get all these much more betterest you know yeah well i think people yeah people think that you you get all these gains out of uh steroids right they think that they do all these miraculous things and um you know even even the other day we were having a talk in the gym with one of your guys here and he was like well that's because that guy's on trt i'm like have you ever taken trt and he said no and i said then you can't talk like you don't know like it actually doesn't really do anything like as far as like getting super jacked you know

what i mean like really well it it i shouldn't say it doesn't do anything it does something but like it doesn't like for you for example like it's not going to make much of a difference it's not going to make you that much bit like oh my god look at him on trt compared to normal like it you'll see a little bit especially those dosages but not like if you actually took the right dosage which nobody does but if you took 200 milligrams a week uh it wouldn't it wouldn't make you substantially like to where you're like oh my god that's such a difference it would maybe be a little bit of it you might notice some pretty good improvement after about six weeks or so yeah um in terms of like i don't know just some some of your strength and stuff like that but i don't think it would uh i don't think it would do anything crazy i i think that it would also like you know probably pack some size onto like your

traps and shit like that there would be some spots that would just kind of like grow just because that's what happened i was disappointed when i used steroids like i was just i was like yeah you know doesn't like i thought it was going to do a lot more how much did you gain like when when you started versus like i know eight months how much did you think you put on in terms of muscle um i it's hard to tell i never did them right and i was like a drug addict and alcoholic when i started doing steroids yeah back in the day so it's it's really to tell. And it was a stupid way to do them for the most part. But then I did go on like a normal cycle of TRT. Yeah.

And I actually never put on any weight with them. I would like lost weight with them because I was, you know, once I started getting on it with a doctor, I started doing like a regimen where I was eating good and training and stuff like that. You were just talking about this before. Some people are just super responders to that. If you look at a guy like Jay Cutler, Phil Heath, a lot of these IFBB pros that just look like they're 3D and muscular, they respond well to stuff like that. And even before they got on, if you see pictures of Kai Greene as a 16, 17- old, you know, he looks like a lot of the entry level IFBB pros as a natural. Yeah.

You know what I mean? So some people are just going to respond, put on 40, 50, 60 pounds of lean body mass. Yeah. So some people with just with 200 milligrams of testosterone, it could mean a lot. Yeah. So for me, it didn't, I guess I should say for me, it was disappointing because didn't i thought i was going to turn into kai green or you know one of those guys yeah that is kind of what you think you think you're just going to automatically you know i used to be the guy i used to be the guy saying well like dude look at like it's because they're on steroids if i was

on steroids i like i would think i would think like well i could do just as much as mark because i used to be stronger than him. Then he got on some shit and now he's way stronger than me. But it's because he's on stuff. Right. And it wasn't because he was on stuff. It's because he he worked way harder and he was actually stronger. And that's just something we have to accept.

And so, you know, you know, moving forward from that point, I just learned to accept things rather than just point to somebody and say they're on steroids. Yeah. Consistency is always going to be it's always going to be a factor, you know, diet, even a stair. I mean, bodybuilding is so crazy. The, the regimen that you have to follow in terms of like the nutrition and like even just little things like tanning and shaving and like, it doesn't seem like those things would matter, but they do. It's, it's a huge part of it. The meal prep and everything that goes into it. And then the amount of anabolics that these guys take, it's like, they can't afford to be like, Oh, I'll just take a shot tomorrow. I mean, not these high level guys, they have to, they have to be on point with it. And it's like, it's this crazy rigorous routine

that like never stops, you know, it's a huge dedication to it. And I think for you, for many years, you had a lot of problems with like being super consistent and then you would kind of, you know, do like a low carb diet and then you were trying to do cardio and things like that. You're in way better shape now. Do you do any cardio now? Zero. Really? Yeah. This is the leanest I've seen you ever.

Yeah. I haven't done cardio in a long time. Sometimes we might pull the sled or something, but that's about it, right? I barely do that because I hurt my knee like a month ago. So in the past month I've done no cardio at all. So you're just lifting every day. Um, I, we lift mostly every day. Like today we didn't lift. Five or six days a week. No, I didn't lift. I didn't pull a fast one on you. Yeah. I was just making sure he didn't come in at like four in the morning and

ghost me, you know? But yeah. Um, no, I haven't been doing cardio. What I do do, and I recommend it to like every single person I talk to, and it comes from Mark and it comes from Stan, is just a simple 10 minute walk. Every time I eat a meal, I just go outside and just walk around the block. It's that easy.

It's like literally that easy. It's like the walk doesn't, it's more pleasure than anything. It's like my favorite thing to do.'s, it's more pleasure than anything. It's like my favorite thing to do. So I have several podcasts that I listened to. And as soon as I eat a meal, I just put on a podcast. I go out and walk. And sometimes I walk a lot longer than 10 minutes. Cause I'm just into what I'm listening to or whatever. I'll walk for a half an hour, but you don't need to, I think is the point. And there's several people that have followed me on

Instagram and they, they hit me up and they want to know like, Hey man, um, I was, I'm doing an hour of cardio every morning and I'm on the, you know, and I'm training this and that. And I, when I tell them what I think that they should do, they're always like taken aback. Like, well, that's not going to work. And I'm like, well, that's the only thing that's worked for me. And it's actually, uh, what I like about it is, uh, I'm 46 years old. So I'm an old man. Sustainability, it's easy. Like I was killing myself. I would have to mentally prepare to like go work out in the morning because I would sit there and like the edge of my bed going like, man, I can't believe I have to go do this right now. And it was because I was doing what Stan said not to do. I was sleeping for five hours,

getting up and doing an hour of cardio at four in the morning. Just doesn't make any sense. Like you're not rested, you know? And so I started going to bed earlier. I started doing what Mark said. It set my alarm to go to bed. Basically like since I've been to rehab, Mark and Stan have like completely changed my life. You know, since I got out of rehab, I just actually started, I stopped thinking I knew what I was talking about and started just really getting into listening to what other people that are smarter than me and in better shape than me are saying you look a lot different than this guy right here yeah man that's it's crazy and i yeah but that chick digged me you could tell

you know the uh you know just the first back to the 10 minute walks for a second just so people are clear it's like the 10 minute walk alone by itself if you're 300 pounds and you're thinking the 10 minute walks are going to like be the saving grace for you they're not but they're momentum towards the right things and momentum towards uh the right moves also if you're listening to this and you want to get bigger the 10 minute walks can be beneficial because it can help with your, uh, just basically can help you with where you're going to kind of store your carbohydrates and things like that. It can help you, uh, you know, when you're ingesting extra food to kind of put it in the right spot basically. But it's, it's a movement towards the right thing to do and it can end up being a good habit.

And then from there, once you got that momentum doing that, maybe you can start to make a change or two in your diet. Maybe you can start to think about going to the gym, but going to the gym and doing four or five exercises, ending the workout with something like a farmer's walk or ending the workout with, um, even just going on like a, you know, um, airdyne bike or a rower and doing a little bit of like light sprint work. If you're newer to fitness, that, that workout is going to send your body all the correct signals to burn fat. Whereas the cardio stuff is great and it can be super beneficial, but it's, if you hate it, it's probably not a great place to start, you know, find some things that are a little easier, find some things that you, uh, that you enjoy a little bit more. Exactly. That's the only reason why I'm able to do as much cardio as I do now, because with

jujitsu, I enjoy that form of cardio. It doesn't feel like work put it that way. So I can do it literally every single day, enjoy it. And it keeps me at the body composition I want to maintain. I like keeping things simple for people like that. You know, Mark, Mark and I were talking yesterday and Mark was like, we have a really good ability to just help people in a couple sentences. And I think that that's really important. I think, like, that's where our gifts lie as far as, like, being able to help people, being able to get people out of a hole. Just simple, like, simple things. Like, when I say just eat meat and drink water, it might sound stupid to some people.

just eat meat and drink water. It might sound stupid to some people, but if you just do that, if you simply just do that, I can tell you in less than five seconds and it can completely, it would completely change your life. You know, now I should probably say eat red meat, drink water, because you want to be a little bit more specific or eat fatty meat, drink water, whatever. Right. But you do that and throw in a 10 minute walk that maybe takes six seconds to say it. And now that person can just start to say it. And now that person can just start moving towards health. And it's exactly what we did with our dad. It's exactly what we were trying to do with our mom. We're trying to work on her a little bit more because some of the habits have crept back in. But what I've also found is like Mark said,

you're building momentum towards, well, our mom, unfortunately started feeling a little bit worse and started, uh, so now she's going more away. Right. So now we have to like bring her back. We have to inspire her again. We have to get her, get her motivated to get, to go back in the right direction. Cause her knees started hurting a little bit worse. And then she started eating bad again, you know, here and there, not as much, not all the time, but, um, and so it's a matter of like getting her back on momentum, getting her back on track so we can just keep her healthy. People tend to want these big stories.

They want like they want facts and they want science and all this stuff. And you can kind of look into all this and you can find you can find science that that does show you that that there is evidence to back some of this stuff up. But like we don't really need evidence. We've shared this information with people. I made a list about a year and a half ago of like 13 or 14 foods. It didn't necessarily mean that all other foods are bad. It was just a list of like, hey, stick to this. And I said, stick to this until you lose five pounds and then have a cheat meal and then repeat.

You know, it's like just so simple. I think I added in a 10 minute walk on there. And it was just kind of, you know, telling people, you know, different types of meat that they can eat and they can have eggs. And there were a few vegetables kind of thrown in the mix, but it's so, it's just so simple. And it's something that when something's simple, it might be easier for someone to implement it. Yeah.

You got to just think simple, right? Like, so if you're out in the wild and you're a rabbit, how many foods do you eat? If you're a lion, how many foods do you eat? If you're a lion, how many foods do you eat? You know, if you're a monkey, how many foods do you eat? There's probably a list of like 10 things that you eat, right? That you habituate to eat because you're out in the wild and you only eat a certain amount of diet. We have like 650,000 things in every grocery store that you go to.

You know, there's so many products that are on the market in in the food scape you know and they actually call it food stuffs yeah because they don't even know what to call it because these things are so bastardized from uh from real food so if you were to say hey i'm gonna like just pick 10 foods stick to those 10 foods as long as those 10 foods are like whole foods from the earth, natural, you know, not something that's made in a factory and comes in a box or a bag. I think even that, even regardless of carbohydrate intake or regardless of like almost anything, you're probably going to be okay because nature or God or whatever you believe in has made it hard to over consume these foods that are natural. Yeah.

No, you're totally hard. You're totally right. And you know, it's even to a point where I feel like a lot of people can probably feel when they're lacking nutrients. Like for example, we had this talk through the dad,

Chick-fil-A had a lot of Chick-fil-A. So I know I had a lot of calories, but the next morning I was really, really hungry versus the nights where I, maybe I have a steak and some eggs and maybe a little bit of rice or something. Right. And the next day, right. Exactly. The next day, I'm like, Oh, I'm full still. Like I still feel full. So you can really feel it. What do you actually like compare when you have a lot of good whole foods that have a lot of nutrients versus a lot of big empty calories, you can tell the difference. It's fascinating. I just said that

because right before we went on here, we were about joe rogan talking to laird hamilton and they were talking about like good stuff like they were talking about uh turmeric and rogan was like yeah i kind of like crave it and then laird hamilton said because it's good for you i he's like i feel that you crave things that your body needs just like you're saying yeah you know so that they had a similar point of view on that yeah and when we're in a state where we normally eat junk, then we're craving that too, though, right? Because it goes both ways. You get used to it.

And I'm like, I think that a lot of it comes to from your stomach. Your stomach is the one kind of crying out for it. And it kind of makes your brain, you know, overrides the brain and makes you act on it. Where the idea of whether it's true or not, but I actually think it has some truth to it. The idea of protein leveraging came from, which some people debate whether it's true or not, but I actually think it has some truth to it. The idea of protein leveraging came from, which some people debate whether it's true or not, but the idea is like,

if you eat enough protein during the day, you won't really crave as much other stuff. And I find that there's some truth to that, like sort of like along the lines of what you're saying. It's sort of been like semi debunked, I don't know. It's like everybody argues about everything, but I feel like there is some truth to like, it's not necessarily protein, just protein.

I think it's like if you fill up on the foods that your body craves that are good for you, that your body wants, then you're not going to want more stuff. Well, it could be a little bit like taking a supplement. You know, sometimes a supplement is just going to be that one thing that kind of sets you on track. Like maybe if you're taking like a fat burner, um, maybe the fat burner, like does close to nothing, you know, maybe percentage wise, it does like, you know, 0.03% of, of the work that you need to have done to you. Right. But maybe it keeps you on track and maybe it makes you eat those egg whites, or maybe it makes you eat a certain way. When I travel sometimes, what I'll do is I'll have, I get a few hard boiled eggs. I don't like the, I can get them at just about any airport. I get few hard-boiled eggs or i'll stop somewhere beforehand starbucks always has them and i'll grab some hard-boiled eggs i'll eat like four of them

and i don't like the egg yolks in the in the hard-boiled eggs they're all dry yeah they're super dry so i just i just eat the egg whites and that's like a way for me to kind of you know protein leverage the way for me to just get protein in. I halfway filled my stomach up. Now, if I feel like eating like a cookie or something comes up while we're traveling, then, you know, uh, then I'll probably go for it, but it's gonna, it's gonna probably prevent me from eating some junk because I'm like, you know what? I already stuck to the plan for most of the day. I'm doing pretty good. I just downed some egg whites. I don't even really enjoy them that much, but I just did it for my health and I did it for my goals. So I'm already headed towards my goals.

Why would I make a U-turn right here? Why would I head backwards? There's no reason to. And then plus, if I was to eat, I'd probably eat less. Yeah. I also think just what you're saying, you had some egg whites. And on a carnivore diet or in the carnivore community you'll see a lot of people be like

ah egg whites and they'll poo poo the egg whites or the chicken breast or whatever but a lot of times you'll see me eating steak and chicken and a lot of times the reason is because I don't have my Piedmontese beef I don't have my lower fat beef

so I need more protein and so to have more protein on the plate without fat is not such a bad thing. It's going to help you build muscle. It's going to help you fight against sarcopenia. It's going to help you fight against aging and all these different things. So why not just throw some more protein in rather than, you know. And it's satiating as hell.

Like when you eat and you overeat protein, it's hard to overeat on anything else. Even if you do have some extra carbs in your meal, when you have protein protein it's much harder to eat an excess amount of these other types of food i have no problem with anybody that i'm helping eating more protein just protein no problem with it yeah yeah chris uh sorry i didn't mean to cut you off um mark in the past has said like uh he doesn't really think going like uh like cheating clean is a good idea like having like a quest cookie or something like that because it's gonna kind of fire off the same uh you know the same things where you know it's just gonna make you want more sweets um what's your opinion on that stuff um cheat dirty like go for it man like when you if you're gonna cheat then just cheat like there

it's um i was in this sort of realm of like, you can have a keto pizza and like you're going to have. And I was eating all those keto foods in the very beginning. And if you're trying to get into the diet, like, for example, if you're trying to get your parents into the diet, send them all the quest pizza that they want in the beginning. You know, like I don't think those foods are bad necessarily for like that's how we got our mom started. But if you really want to get serious and buckle down and get lean, I think you should go for as long as you can without cheating. And then when you have those days that are like your daughter's birthday or, you know, your wife's, you know, anniversary, your anniversary or whatever, then, then like, yeah, go ahead and just have whatever you want and then just get, get right back on it. Um, I try to look at it like sobriety, except for

sobriety is a lot more dangerous. Like if I fall off my diet, it's not that big of a deal. So it's kind of like my play sobriety. Like I get to, you know, I get to sort of have fun. Like, you know, like for example, this past weekend, I really wanted breakfast cereal for some stupid reason. And I went out and got like fruity pebbles and I'm like, you know what, who cares? And just kill the whole got like fruity pebbles and I'm like, you know what, who cares? And just kill the whole box of fruity pebbles. Like it's not a big deal. If you're going to go right back on your diet, like it did do actually like the next morning when I woke up, I was really lean. I'm sure. And SEMA can kind of explain that, but it might have

just been my glycogen or whatever. Um, but I really had no problem with it, but also people need to know I have not eaten breakfast cereal in over two years before that, you know? So to do that was like a big, a big leap, you know? And I'm like, Oh man, this might really kill me. But I did it. And then after I did, I was like, that wasn't that bad. I just won't do it again for two years. I feel like when it comes to this like cheat idea, it's not, it's not bad at all, but we need to, uh, a lot of people listening should limit it to a meal because when, when a lot of people start having cheat days, you're like, yeah, yeah. When they start having cheat days, you can do a lot of damage in a cheat day. There's a guy that I just started working with, right? And he has this habit of having one cheat day a week. So I just let him do that. And so just to see how many calories, the idea like 6,500 calories in that day. And then look at what that, that just kind of took you out of the whole thing we were trying to do during the week.

If you have one big, nice meal. Yeah. Yeah. You might have an excess of calories, but you're not going to mess up. Like you won't mess up a week of progress. Yeah. Right.

But if you do that in a full day, really bad habit to build over time. For example, your client might've only ate 1,500 calories, you know, over. Yeah. Had they like, you know, they might've ate like 1500 calories instead of 6,500. How do you say, Hey, you have whatever you want. And that one meal is like in and out with fries and whatever. And it's 1500 calories. That would be much better than saying go in the whole day. And then also like, think about your fasting windows and your eating windows. You're sort of more falling into that.

So I would say the same thing, like either a cheat meal or like you can maybe, maybe get away with a cheat meal back to back if you're a little bit leaner, you know, but then like, then that's it. Then you're done. You know, there's a lot of options when it comes to all this stuff. Like what you're saying is, is a good mindset for people to get into, you know, for, for someone to say, okay, I want to cheat on this day and there's to get into you know for for someone to say okay i want to cheat on this day and there's a picnic you know at noon and i'll probably just eat like whatever i want

for the whole day and they probably have a list of foods in their heads that they're going to go annihilate right they're super excited about it but they should pump the brakes on that a little bit and just say you know what i've been on this diet for the last two weeks i'm making pretty good progress that's going to set me back like four or five days, basically. It will set me back a lot. So, you know, what are some strategies I can use going into this? Well, maybe, for example, you already know that you're going to be somewhere on a certain day, and you prepare for it with maybe a little extra exercise,

maybe with a little bit less food. So maybe they fast or prep into it a little bit, and maybe they can just figure out a way to make it less food. So maybe they fast or prep into it a little bit and maybe they can just figure out a way to make it less harmful. And then my, the recommendation we talked about earlier, the protein leveraging, you know, before you go and go to a Mexican restaurant or something, why not have a chicken breast or two? It's not going to overfill you up so much that you can't enjoy the food that they have. But it will, it will probably prevent you from eating like, you know, 4,500 calories in one sitting. That brings up a great point because the other day when I did

go get that box of cereal, um, I made, um, some, some lean ground beef before I went and ate that because I, I didn't want to be hungry afterwards. It's a nasty slosh in your stomach. I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, I ate it like a couple hours,. Fruity pebbles and beef. Yeah. Yeah. See how that comes out in the morning. But no, because of that fact though, I wanted to get some protein down, you know, before, before I ate shit. Yeah. Well, and then you can also kind of have some of it be a little bit of a calorie equation, you know, like I, I don't, I don't particularly count calories. I'm not a huge fan of it. It can be effective for weight loss, but maybe that's something that you do kind of count

or do pay attention to when you're going to cheat. I don't know. Maybe it's with frozen yogurt. Maybe it's with, you know, like you're mentioning eating like Fruity Pebbles. A lot of times when I have cereal, I'll eat it with, I just use my slingshot protein with it because I don't want to, I can't have milk really. It'll make me just shit all day. So I usually just use that rather than like milk or almond milk, which is just going to add more calories. And

like I said earlier, I don't usually even like factor in, I don't even really look at calories, but they still count. And maybe that would be a good time to look at the Ben and Jerry's and say, you know what, maybe I should only have one of these instead of three. Yeah. Well, you know what the thing that you do with the slingshot protein, that's been a staple of mine too. So he mixes full fat grass fed yogurt with some slingshot protein chocolate.

And it tastes just like this chocolatey pudding. It's amazing. And so weird. It doesn't sound good. Like I recognize it doesn't, it doesn't sound good. It's not, it's so weird. It doesn't sound good. It really doesn't. It doesn't sound great. It's so good. It's like chocolate pudding.

Yeah. It is really good, but I had too much of it the first time because I don't do good with dairy either. But I had like a, because I tasted it, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so good.

So I got like a Home Depot bucket size full, you know, and I just kept going until I was like, oh, this is amazing. I'm just getting protein. And the next two days, it's just a blowout. Just just non-stop i'm like i can't do that again but just use like one that goes uh back to our heavy cream story in the beginning andrew's having like half a cup of heavy cream it was a quarter of a cup but still do you guys know about my my mct uh emergency room

story yeah yeah i think you talked about on the last podcast, but it's a good one. What about what you did to Brian Shaw? You did murder Brian Shaw. I did? Yeah. How did I murder Brian Shaw? I think it was when we all

went to dinner in San Francisco. Oh, it was at my house for breakfast, it was. But it was that same weekend. Oh, I think I had like a bulletproof coffee or something and he blew it out. Yeah, like within seconds.

Like he was coming here to the gym to train and everything. I'm like, you messed up the world's strongest man. What are you doing? I had like a bulletproof coffee or something and he blew it out. Yeah, like within seconds. Like he was coming here to the gym to train and everything. I'm like, you messed up the world's strongest man. What are you doing? I gave him a blowout. He was in my bathroom for like four hours. But I think I just gave him a normal amount. He just never had it before.

So what is it that you put in that bulletproof coffee again? It's C8 oil. It's like MCT oil, like one specific type of MCT oil. But yeah, that stuff, like if you drink too much of it. And you put in like heavy cream or butter or something. It'll just kill your stomach. And he loved it and he downed it. That was part of the other problem.

He chugged it too. He was like, oh, this is great. And he just hammered it. And then he was done. That's right. I did kill Brian. Yeah. Last night I had an amazing protein shake.

It was a slingshot protein. And then we had Noah Kingery here. And he kind of, he reintroduced me to that PB2 peanut butter powder stuff. Yeah, yeah. So I actually got that and the chocolate PB2, and it tasted like a liquefied Snickers bar. Oh, man. It was incredible.

That stuff is pretty damn good. It was so good. How the hell do they make that? I have a problem with the PB2, though. What is the good that comes out of it? Just flavor? I think so. Flavor. Yeah, just flavor. and just play okay so and one one and a half grams of fat with very low calorie count yeah okay so it has so there is a reason to have it like it has instead of having peanut butter you can still get that flavor without as much fat without as many calories

you can throw it in like a yogurt and stuff like that too or like i put it uh i put it in some oatmeal the other day. Yeah, that would make sense though. Like you still want the peanut butter flavor, but you don't want all the calories and bullshit. Yeah. That's what it makes sense. Like I am like excited to go home and have more.

Like it's so good. People always flip out about the different foods. So like if you post something and you're eating some rice, people get all concerned. You know, hey man, like I've been following along. I've been doing carnivore, and you're supposed to be, like, our leader.

You're just going to turn your back on us like that? Yeah, they're like, what happened, bro? How dare you? I tell them to go over to Sean Baker. See him? He's still eating meat over there. Go back to him. But you mix in a little bit of stuff here and there.

I mean, you try stuff. You try fruit, and you try potatoes, and you try different things. here and there i mean you you try stuff you try fruit and you try potatoes and you try different things um are they ever are they ever any good for you for any particular reason just to eat something different uh they benefit you in any way they make you feel worse like what do you what have you noticed with it i think that fruit's amazing um for just like feeling good i just feel like uh i don't know when we were ever since we were kids you have a piece of of fruit, it just feels and tastes healthy. Like there's something, there's something nice. Makes you feel like fucking Superman when you have a glass of orange juice. You feel like a badass when you have a glass of orange juice for some reason.

There are a lot of people that will, you know, in the carnivore thing be like, there's no reason to eat fruit and blah, blah. But like, there's, there is a reason. It's, the reason is it helps my brain. I want something sweet. I'm craving something sweet. It doesn't help the world for me to be like, Oh, I'm just going to be a stoic savage and sit here and not eat anything other than what's on. Yeah. I'm going to be a dick about it and just not eat that. Right. Like, and it's, and it's, it's not that, but like, I'm just saying like, it doesn't help me to do that. It doesn't make me stronger. It doesn't make me go like, well, I have an iron will. I'm not going to eat the apple.

You know, it's like, it doesn't behoove me to do that. Like, I think I'm better just like, cool. I want that. I'm going to eat that. And I'm smart enough to know what's going to harm me and what's not going to harm me. And you're turning to fruit. You're not turning to like a freaking Snickers bar or something. It's a better habit.

Yeah. It's a better habit. You know, back to the cheat thing a little bit, the clean cheats. You know, if you do want to do stuff like that and you are like kind of in the beginning of a diet or maybe you just want your diet to be able to be something that you do consistently for a long time

without having these big like kind of epic blowouts of eating pizza and stuff like that. A good way to do it is just, for me, I found that doing it at night helps because I can kind of tell myself ahead of time, look, you're going to have one Quest cookie or one Quest bar, one, even sometimes it might be like dark chocolate or something. I'm going to just have one thing and I'm going to eat some of that and then that's it and I'm going to go to bed. So it's just, it's, it's kind of a reset. When I wake up in the morning, goals are back to being, being on a high level. I feel good. And I'm,

I'm ready to kind of, you know, start the fast or start whatever plan I have. What's crazy is that if you were to chart my progress on my chart, like how good I've been on my diet. And you looked at the hours between like, you know, four o'clock when we wake up until around like four o'clock in the afternoon, it would be a hundred percent. It would be full bore. Like it'd be like, wow, you've never cheated once. And every time I cheat it's at night. Yeah. It's just, it's just is, it's like, and I never want to, you know, a Snickers bar. That's why maybe fasting five in the morning. That's why maybe fasting later in the day might help. I was thinking about doing

that. Cause I kind of do this. I do something similar. Fasting later in the day? Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about maybe, I don't know, eating at like... So I've been doing that recently. Maybe eating breakfast and lunch and then, yeah, just fasting throughout the rest of the day or something like that. I've been doing that recently and like what sort of kicked it off. It's not the reason I'm doing it, but I think it might've been Lane that said it, but people were talking about people that eat breakfast. And they said, well, hey, look, on a whole, everybody's intermittent fasting.

Everybody in the whole world's doing it now, right? And everybody's like, oh, I don't eat breakfast, bro. I just skip it. And everybody's saying that as if it's like a badge of honor. And I was like, I don't know if it's a badge of honor. I wake up some days, I'm really hungry. Also, we wake up at 4 a.m. And sometimes by 8 a.m., I'm starving.

And so why intermittent fast until like 10 or noon if I'm actually start like feel like I'm starving. So I just decided to start eating and I eat in the morning and then by like three o'clock in the afternoon, I'm not hungry at all anymore. So like last night, I think that my last meal was at three or four in the afternoon. And then I was able to fast, you know, until the morning time and ate again around like nine o'clock or something like that. So you're, yeah, you're fasting a New York strip. I'm fasting, but in a weird, in a, in a different way than I was used to. Right. So like, um, and it's kind of, you kind of fast anyway. We, we didn't really point that out, but you, you don't eat four or five meals a day normally. No, I ate two, two or three.

Yeah. So you, Three at the most. Utilizing some sort of intermittent fasting. On some days when you only eat like twice, there's going to be like a six or eight hour stretch. I kind of utilize it every day, but it's not much more than like 12 hours or 14 hours. It's never more than like. There's still a decent amount in there. And also. But not snacking.

I guess that's the main point is like, look, no matter what diet you're following, if you want to lose weight, you want to lose body fat, you have to be hungry. Yeah. So bodybuilders eat six or seven times a day sometimes, but there's smaller meals and those motherfuckers are hungry. Yeah. I also feel like not doing cardio makes me not as hungry. Right.

Yeah. You increase activity. It's going to tell you to find more energy somewhere, right? Yeah. It makes me not as hungry to do that, yeah. Other than fasting, what's some ammo that people that are listening can take with them? Because somebody just mentioned, they're like, man, I'm good all day just like you, Chris, but I get home, my kids, the candy, the Oreos, everything comes out at me.

What's maybe some tips for someone like that? Get all that stuff out the house. Yeah. The number one thing is get it out of the house. But if they have kids, that's going to be, you know, it's going to be difficult. I do think that things like Mark said, finding some protein sources that you can eat.

Oh, just eat. You know, definitely eat before you go home. You know, it might not be the ideal situation because you're at work or whatever. You might not be able to have the best food or whatever. But, you know, if you're going to go home at five or let's say, let's say you get home at five 30 and, uh, it takes a while to get dinner situated, right? Well, you're just dying at that point. Like you're cooking it, you're smelling it. Um, and you're just, you're going to snack and then you're going to eat dinner.

You're going to probably like, like in my house, like we lay out some cheese and some, uh, meat and stuff like that before we eat. A lot of times you're going to pick at the food that you're cooking. I mean, how many of us are guilty of that? You're sitting there, you know, eating so much and then you forget that you ate that versus what was on your plate and everything else. Right. So a lot of really just bad habits. So eat a, eat a good meal at like, if you're going to go home at five and be home at five 30, you know, smash a pretty good meal, like four if you're going to go home at five and be home at five 30, you know, smash a pretty good meal, like four that's primarily protein, maybe some protein and some vegetables. Vegetables are great. Cause it can take up some space in your stomach. I think also like having

some things, uh, like for example, Mark has dessert every night, but his dessert is like either a protein shake or like the slingshot, you know, the yogurt with the protein in it. Um, sometimes I just have a protein shake. Yeah. Yeah. So, so having something that's like, like that might help somebody who's like really struggling. And the other thing is, um, that, you know, it's like, you don't have to eat what your kids are eating. You don't have to do that. Or you could feed your kids better too. There's another option is just like feed your kids meat. They'll love you. They'll be stronger for it.

If you look at the things that we pack in kids' lunchboxes, it's terrible, you know. And it's all carbs and it's all sugar and things like that. And so if you start changing what your kids eat, it'll change what you eat also and it'll be better for the whole family. Yeah. And Seema's like, yeah, of course. You know, and i don't mean to be an asshole right now but i'm going to be but like you don't have a kid right i was also no i don't have this is what i was going to ask you because like you have kids you have a kid you

have to deal with uh growing up my mom didn't keep like sodas or sugary foods in the house even though i wanted them yeah if i did want them like my mom, she loves Kit Kats, but she'll make sure that if she wants that, she doesn't keep it in the house. We'll go to the store when I was a kid, we'd get something and then we'd eat that then. So I'm just wondering here, right? Oh, I have my kids and I have this stuff in the house. So when your kids want it, why don't you guys just build the habit of maybe just going out and getting that at that one time rather than keeping it in the house? I mean, I know it's easier, right? I don't have a kid, so I can't talk, right? Yeah. I just wanted to bring up the point because like, I know there's

definitely somebody out there like, Oh, that's so easy for you guys to say. Like my kids definitely can't do that. It's taken my fiance and I about a year and a half to clean out our house. But if you go there right now, there's no cereal, there's candy from like birthdays and stuff, but it doesn't get touched. There's no ice cream in the fridge. There's like, there's no garbage. All there is, is like, I mean, I can't even think of like what the worst thing is, but it's taken us about a year and a half to do that. Go back, you know, two years ago, if we said we're taking everything, it would have been a struggle, right? But it's now she's kind of adapted and she knows that when she's at our house, it's like, okay, the best thing I'm going to have sweet wise is probably going to be a protein shake, you know? And it's like,

it's such a cool feeling to like, not worry, like, Hey, go to the kitchen, have whatever you want. You know, a big, a big mistake for some people is they'll, they might try to have like this intervention with the family, like, Hey, like I'm going to start eating better. And, uh, and you know, the whole house is going to eat better. And it's not a bad plan, especially if your kid is a little older, but your kid's going to be super resistant to it. But if you were to explain to them, hey, look, you know what?

I'm recognizing I'm not happy with the way that I'm eating right now. And you explain it to your wife and your kids and everything. And I want to really make some changes and I can use your support. I could use everybody's help. And you guys are still free to eat

some of the things that you like, but here's some of the changes I'm going to make. That's one way to approach it. Another way to approach it is just to start changing things little by little, as you mentioned. Maybe you're like my kids, they'll kind of eat almost whatever's in front of them for the most part. I mean, they love, they love going to Applebee's and Red Robin and they love In-N-Out Burger and different things like that, just like any other kid. They love ice cream and stuff like that. But if I'm going to try to make some decisions for them, I go against my normal principles and I just, I use calories as part of the equation. So maybe, you know, instead of watching them kill tons of Cheez-Its, I get pretzels or something like that. Get like the mustard flavored pretzels. There's a lot less fat in them. There's, and they taste good and they like them.

Uh, try to make sure they're always having protein again, that kind of protein leverage, just some, how do we get protein into the diet? That's kind of where my head is at all the time when they sit down and they eat when we're at home. A lot of times, um, you know, they want to go right for the, uh, tater tots or whatever, like carbohydrate we threw on the plate, uh, whether it's potato or, or whatever, they want to go right for that all the time. And I try to explain to them every time I got to tell them all the time as a leader, as a, you know, their father, I tell them all the time they get, they get pissed at me.

They hate it, but I tell them all the time, like, I want you to have the best shot possible at the best life that you can have and this is what we're trying to do i just say it over and over again yeah i do the same thing with like uh so i took took jazz out on like on a daddy daughter date day like just did as much as i could with her and we ended up going to danny's for breakfast and she i'm just like order whatever you want you know it doesn't matter today and of course she got like the you know chocolate chip pancakes and whatever it was i'm like you can get whatever you want. It doesn't matter today. And of course, she got like the chocolate chip pancakes and da-da-da-da, whatever it was. I'm like, you can get whatever you want, but you're eating like all the protein first.

And then sure enough, she had like a quarter of a pancake because she didn't want it anymore. But, you know, like just little things like that is like, that's such a huge. That's a perfect way to do it. It's such an easy cheat code, right? Like you just eat this first, then go to town. Eat one egg, you know? Yeah. And then, you know, eat a slice of bacon and then eat your other food you know yeah something some sort of some sort of strategy yeah and i think definitely just obviously not keeping it in the house but like yeah if you know she has a good week at school like yeah we're

gonna go to cold stone but we're not gonna bring cold stone home you know so stuff like that i've gotten so used to eating meat um that i actually i just look forward to it every single time you know and i think that um it meet with intermittent fasting it's like it's such a great thing you make yourself hungry for it every time well yeah like that's that's the thing is like um i don't incorporate fasting necessarily on purpose i do it like just like you said when i every time i, I want to be like really hungry. I don't want to just be mildly hungry. I want to be starving. So it tastes awesome. And it's like, you know, I dig into it. And most of the time when I do eat, I eat pretty aggressively and pretty fast because I'm very hungry. You know, like by the

time I get there, I'm pretty, pretty hungry. And I usually only cook up. Like the other thing is also, I don't cook up a whole lot of meat like i don't eat nearly as much as uh dr baker does he's an animal he's like four to five pounds of meat i'd say maybe probably two pounds of meat a day you know like half of that and so it's not a whole lot either so when people say oh you eat all meat diet and they think it's you know really crazy it's not a whole lot of meat you know and dr baker eats throughout the day right he eats throughout he eats whenever he's hungry usually Usually twice a day though, I think. Okay. I messed around with a couple other things too with fasting. I've done where, you know,

my last meal is at night and then my next meal is post-workout. And I've liked that a lot. I haven't done it enough yet to like really know how it, how it felt. But at night I kind of ate, you know, a carnivore ish. And then in the morning I had like almost like a bodybuilder breakfast to kind of replenish after the workout, I did fruit, oatmeal, egg whites. And when I post on Instagram, everyone of course got upset that I was eating oatmeal. They were like, how do you eating oatmeal? I'm like, I don't know. It doesn't like, I don't have, I don't have autoimmune disorders. I don't react weird to any foods that I know of. I mean, milk, something that I can struggle with.

It can hurt my stomach and make me fart and stuff like that. But for the most part, I don't really have a lot of allergies to food. I don't think. Yeah. Have you tried A2 milk? You were telling me about this. I never, I never messed with it. No.

That's a non-farter. If you do have fart problems with people out there. Speaking of farting, I somehow been farting. I farted last night a bunch and That's a non-farter if you do have fart problems. If people out there have problems. Speaking of farting, I've somehow been farting. I farted last night a bunch. And Andy's like, this is amazing. She's like, you need to be studied or something because how are you farting? Where is it coming from? Yeah, you're 48 hours into a fast.

I'm like, I don't know. I don't know what's going on. Would you swallow a skunk? Yeah. Well, that's right. Somebody in the chat said that, yeah, fasting gives them the sharts. They can't stop. It can kind of. Well, that guy's sh Somebody in the chat said that, yeah, fasting gives them the sharts. They can't stop. It can kind of feel weird in your stomach. I mean, I know you and I've been sitting here before where our stomachs are going boing, boing, boing, boing. And we can hear it almost like with our headphones on.

when I did start intermittent fasting, like my poops were really watery. And I mean, I'm not even trying to say this to be nasty. It took a while for my stuff to like get solid again, but it took a little bit of time. So maybe that's like- I think that happens with everybody when they switch their diet. Any type of diet change.

I don't think it's keto flu. I think it's generally a changing your gut microbiome problem. I mean, we see it with like keto. When people go keto, they get keto flu. When they go carnivore, they get carnivore flu when they do intermittent fasting they get the shits it's like well like all these things are causing problems like in the beginning but then they level out i think the keto flu is a little different because i think it's a

a hangover come from coming off of carbohydrates you know people i think they originally thought it's because they're eating too much fat or they're doing the keto diet too well and they're uh getting like the keto. But I think it was kind of the abstaining from sugar that's making them not feel great, which makes a lot of sense because I think the same thing happens with drugs, right? When you're trying to abstain from drugs and you're in the beginning stages, it's really hard and people get very sick. And then with the carnivore diet, I think that anytime you change your diet, your poop's going to change a a lot and i get a lot of people that ask me all the time you know how do you poop you've been doing a carnivore diet for a pretty long time how do you poop a great there's never

any problems there's never any issues the only issues are is if you go off the diet you know that's that's when you're going to pay the price has there ever been any issues there though um as far as like so yeah i actually um doing a carnivore diet and and uh eating fruit and this is sort of like why i stopped eating fruit last time we went on joe rogan it was about a year ago and i talked about the carnivore diet and i added in fruit and um but i can't eat too much fruit and i learned the hard way i have a very sensitive stomach you eat way too much fruit and I learned the hard way. I have a very sensitive stomach. You eat way too much fruit when you eat it though, right? Yeah. You'll kill a whole thing of blueberries. That's, that's so like, I have a, I have an addiction problem, you know, like I'll take

the blueberries, I'll eat the whole damn thing and then I'll have the worst. That's wild. I would never, I would, I would know that that would be disastrous for me. I love blueberries too, but I wouldn't do it. A thing of blueberries isn't that big. No, no, it's not really that big. I can eat that real easy, but like if I eat that that real easy i'll end up in the emergency room whoa really that's what happened to me yeah i ate like um i ate an apple and an orange back to back just not

thinking it was a big deal just a regular size apple regular size orange ate them back to back and something with the acid or whatever like i had to go to the er i was dying oh my god and then all they did when i went to the er was gave me um what do you call it just pulled your finger yeah pretty much they gave me xanax for anxiety because you know when you have a bad stomach ache it gives you really bad anxiety your heart races and everything and that's all they gave me and it just put me to sleep and then i was fine do you think a lot of people that are picking up the carnivore diet um need to go full carnivore i mean i feel like there's just a definite benefit in eating more meat and still eating a few vegetables here and there. So you have that variability.

I don't think so at all. I think that, I actually think it's easier to not go full carnivore and keep a couple of things in your diet. And the reason is when you go to eat those other things, they're not going to bother you really. So as long as those other things are healthy and good and not some other, you you know junky carb crappy garbage then i think it's probably totally fine to keep a couple things in and whatever you know whatever feels good on your stomach you know if you can eat vegetables you can eat fruit you could have uh some uh carbohydrate sources like beans or rice or potatoes i don't see any problem with having some of that in there as long as it's not causing you to uh overeat because

we were talking earlier about how when you just eat long as it's not causing you to overeat because we were talking earlier about how when you just eat meat how it kind of sets you on this path and part of the reason it sets you on the path is because you don't want to overeat it because you literally kind of can't overeat it there's something that's called palate fatigue and when you start to mix ingredients start to mix things together you know if you had your steak and you um you know if you're trying to eat some steak, you might, you might struggle to eat a large amount of steak. But if we threw, um, teriyaki sauce on there and if we threw rice on there, now you have no problem killing this giant bowl that

now had maybe double the amount of calories, you know? So the palate fatigue is, uh, is a factor in there as well. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Ain't that right? Hell yeah. But yeah, I've liked a lot of different versions of fasting, and I think people can utilize all different types of it. You've also been using kratom for a long time, and you made a movie about it. How did you even find out? How did you stumble upon kratom?

Kratom is an interesting one. So actually, after doing prescription thugs out like how did you stumble upon kratom kratom is an interesting one so um actually you know after doing prescription thugs and going through like a really severe drug and alcohol addiction and being caught up in all that i was you know going to aa and i was doing everything right that you're supposed to do but i was still miserable and i was still in a lot of pain everything hurt you know and so um what do you mean by everything hurt? Just, um, I have arthritis, you know, I had a double hip replacement surgery a little over 10 years ago. Um, just every joint in my body's inflamed. Everything aches every day when I wake up. Uh, I'm not normal, you know? And, um, I've accepted that. How can you describe that to people?

Is there any other, is there anything that you've had that people can relate to like does it feel like when you have aches when you have the flu or something like that or yeah yeah like okay so if you had the flu and you're like you know when you get the flu and like fucking permanently have it and your lower back hurts and stuff and you're like stiff and yeah you're just achy and you have like the chills and you're achy and stuff just like achy like that all the time you know and so for me it's been a big problem you know just in um just even like getting up and and getting having you know having the energy to get out of bed and just go do something and so um my buddy horseshoe uh you know he was in prescription thugs he called me up and he's like hey bro you got to try this kratom stuff and

i didn't know what he was really talking about and he came to the gym and uh he gave me some of it and i tried it and uh shortly after i tried it though i was like what what did you give me like whatever you get at first i was totally against it you know like oh this isn't gonna work and the reason i thought it wasn't gonna work is because it was natural right so this is like actually started my whole journey towards health so i thought because it was natural it wasn't going to work is because it was natural. So this is like actually started my whole journey towards health. So I thought because it was natural, it wasn't going to do anything. I just come off of making prescription thugs. I knew that prescription drugs worked because they were dangerous and they did shit to people.

They actually worked though because they had these crazy side effects. But like that's probably why they worked. So when I found that Kratom actually worked for pain relief, to me, it was like mind blowing. You know, I didn't think anything could really work for pain relief. At the time I was using Advil and Tylenol. I was on Dr. Drew's podcast and Dr. Drew said to me, you know, that they, they found that, um, taking Advil and Tylenol together in combination actually works better than opioids. People prefer it.

Four out of five people prefer it. So I went and looked up the study, looked up the safety of it, looked up the study, and I was like, wow, this is like really interesting. Started doing that for a while, and then I started listening to more people about more things and trying to find specifics. And I came across Rhonda Patrick who said,

ibuprofen will destroy your gut microbiome. If you're a male, it'll destroy your testosterone levels. It'll do all these crazy things. So I was like, oh my God, I got to stay away from that. Right. And, um, I had just recently had heard of Kratom. So it was all kind of like came together at the same time and, um, started taking Kratom basically as a safer alternative to taking Advil and Tylenol. And I found that over the course of like maybe about two or three months that I was like almost pain-free most days. And to me, that was like a miracle. That was something that had never happened. And ever since then, as long as I take it, I feel great.

On days when I don't take it, I'll definitely feel achy, which I don't look at as bad. I just look at it as like, that's the way it is, you know? So some people say, well, man, you got to take it every day. It's like, I don't have to take it every day, but if I don't want to feel achy, I have to take it. Right. That's a trade-off. And there are really no like bad side effects, right? Um, not for me, you know, like I think some people will say, like, I actually was talking about this the other day joe rogan was talking about on his podcast and he was saying that like if you take a certain amount you get high and he's like i was really high man but i actually don't feel that

because i've been taking it for a while and also even when i first started i started it with a very high tolerance yeah um because i was i had been on opioids for so long. So I do take, you know, a decent amount of it, but I take it once in the morning and it feels great. And so like, even if I am high, if that's what people want to say, like, Hey, it makes you high, then great. I'm high and I feel great. I feel excellent. And I'm not ashamed of it. And I actually had a conversation with Mark about it. Cause I said, you know, like, this is kind of weird to me because like you have people saying like, maybe you're not sober if you're taking it. And then he said, don't let anybody take that away from you. Like you worked really

hard to get that. You worked really hard to not take drugs and drink alcohol. And I think about, I'm like, yeah, I've never had a problem with Kratom. I had a problem with hardcore drugs. Yeah. I had a problem drinking alcohol. I don't have those problems anymore. You know? So the way I look at it, is there bad side effects? No, I haven't felt any other side effects besides a dry mouth. The, uh, there, you know, and it can have addictive properties and, um, you know, we'd warn people against, you know, just getting too crazy with it, you know, but I I've taken, you know, about 10 pills multiple days in a row and never noticed anything. You mean 10 pills at once? No, not at once, but like two or three here and there and then kind of throughout the day, maybe a total of 10.

But I would say like on average, I probably take about four a day now. I take about three or four in the morning and then like one or two later on in the day a lot of times. And I've been doing that for, I don't know, a year and a half or a year or so. And, you know, I haven't noticed anything negative. I've only doing that for, I don't know, a year and a half or a year or so. And, you know, I don't, I haven't noticed anything negative. I've only noticed positive things. One thing that's interesting about it is it, you know, it takes a while to hit you. Yeah. And sometimes depending on what you have in your stomach, like if you didn't eat anything,

it might hit you a little faster. But if you, sometimes if I eat something, I almost forgot that I took it. And then I'm like, man, why am I feeling this way? Why am I in this good mood? And I'm like, oh shit. Yeah. It's because I took mind bullet. I kind of forget about it almost. Yeah. And that's actually, so like I do take up to 10 of them a day. Um, and, but most days I'd say I take around like six of them, you know? Um, but I think it's different for pain relief, like for, you know, like I'm, I'm taking it for a completely different reason than most people take it. For mental clarity, focus, drive, all that stuff,

I think people take two of them, they're more than okay. I don't feel the pain relief, though, if I just take two of them. I tend to take more of it, but I don't recommend that to anybody. I'd say to people, hey, try it, see how how you feel and then figure out what you need from there you know no it's i just find it interesting how like you still have a lot of people that speak so so negatively about something like this right when you look at things like ibuprofen it can wreck your gut um alcohol in general you know what i mean like people like they, they overindulge in alcohol. Uh, and we have something bad to say about Kratom, which just makes you feel a little

bit better and it could take away some pain. And so far we're not really seeing massive. What I love is that CBD does nothing in my opinion. Like I don't think it does anything. Everybody's selling rubbing CBD oils on them. People are probably so mad at me right now, right? The second, Hey bro, I take it and I know. And it's like, no, you don't know. Because if you actually look at the science and look at the studies behind CBD, there's nothing that say it works, says it works for pain. Not one goddamn thing that says it works for pain. Um, definitively, not one thing, not one single thing. And it's everywhere in every store and it says pain relief all over it. And so I'm like, eh, i don't really know you know what's interesting it might work for pain yeah you know

but it but there's no actual scientific proof yeah and i want to see scientific proof if i'm gonna pay to take something that's 80 well you tried it though i've tried i've tried it a lot yeah a lot you know every athlete and their mother is posted about CBD on social. I'm just so curious, like, what were you doing before? Like everyone is posting about CBD now. And it's just like, were you not recovering before? And now CBD is magically helping you recover even faster. Yeah. And I think so. And nobody has anything negative to say. Yeah. So like, um, you know, when I was just talking about, uh, Rogan, we love Rogan, right. But Rogan's on there and he's shaking this bottle of THC and CBD pills. And he's's like i take you know two of these a day one in the morning one

at night and he's shaking his bottle i'm like yeah but it's the thc is what's doing it for you the thc does kill pain thc does work for pain relief but cbd by itself has not been proven yet in any sort of like realistic way to kill pain. It does work for seizures. We've seen it work for seizures. It's actually FDA approved for seizures because it does work for seizures, but that doesn't mean that it works for pain. Does it help calm people down? Because I know some people- It can help with anxiety, but that's also not been scientifically proven yet. Yeah. It would be impossible to improve that one just because how would you- Everyone just thinks they have tons of anxiety.

So I don't know. They would just say I have less, you know, and I don't know. Let's go try that DMT. People also say that with kratom, like I have less anxiety, but it's something we haven't really proven yet. Yeah. Yeah, it's a hard, sometimes there's hard things to prove. What is kratom? It's just a plant from Southeast Asia.

It's in the same family as the coffee plant. And so it's just a plant from Southeast Asia. It's in the same family as the coffee plant. And so it's just a plant. It can grow up to like 80, I think they said 82 feet tall, something like that. Pretty damn big tree. Yeah. And actually-

It's time to get those leaves. And so basically it was discovered in like the 1800s in Southeast Asia. But by like the early 1940s, it was already illegal because Thailand was like the number one place to get opium. And they were, they wanted to like rule the opium trade. So in order to rule the opium trade, they had to have people like, you know,

taking, taking opium. Yeah. And when people started realizing like the people that were in the fields that were harvesting opium were chewing on kratom leaves all day, and they were working, like, 18-hour days out in the sun. Like, why are these people working so damn hard? These people are freaking crazy. And they're so happy. And they're so happy. And it was because they were all chewing on raw kratom leaves.

My hope for kratom, and this should be exciting to everybody listening to this, if we can start getting raw leaf over here, if we can start growing raw leaf and we can start doing stuff with raw leaf, I think it's going to be way more effective even. And I think that, in my opinion, it's a cure for the opioid epidemic. Everybody thinks I'm crazy, but every single person that's ever solved any big problem has always been thought of as crazy.

I can see it though. I mean, I've seen, I saw it as soon as, I saw it the first day I tried it. So you can't get leaves now? You can't't get raw you can't get like fresh raw leaves but dr mccurdy down in uh university of florida he's growing trees right now um they're growing about 600 shady people i think i can get it here yeah there's they're growing about 600 uh trees down there and then they're they're doing the research to study it you. Their interest lies a little bit different than ours. They don't want to really see it be necessarily a dietary supplement.

They want to see it be a botanical drug, which I'm fine with too, because I feel like there's room for both of them. I feel like you could take Mitragyna speciosa, which is kratom. You could take it and extract the main alkaloids from it, make it really super strong, but it would not be addictive. The reason is that kratom or Mitragyna speciosa doesn't create what's called beta-arrestin. And so beta-arrestin is what causes people to have respiratory depression, which means your breathing slows and you die. Kratom can't cause that. So means your breathing slows and you die kratom can't cause that so kratom can't kill you in the same way an opioid could if that makes any sense in any amount because it will not sequester the beta arrestin and make that make you not yeah and you know you could anything in some crazy amount

could probably kill anybody right yeah and there's 91 deaths associated with kratom according to the fda but just like steroids when you actually look into the deaths there's 91 deaths associated with kratom according to the fda but just like steroids when you actually look into the deaths there's you know 57 other things in the person's body right that died there's one guy one guy that died with nothing else in his system and he was a cop and he was in um i forget where he maybe virginia or something like that but he was doing what they call toss and wash and And I think it's absolutely disgusting. And that's why we put ours. Sounds gross.

What is that? We put Mind Bullet in capsules for a reason. And so people don't do this. Kratom is very effective in a powdered form. It hits you quicker, you know, gets in your system faster. So people like to take Kratom,

mix it in water. The problem is it mixes up nasty. You can choke on it like cinnamon. Yeah. It tastes nasty. Not water soluble. It water-soluble. It's not water-soluble. And so a lot of people will just take it, dump it in water, and try to drink it down.

But then a lot of people just take the dry powder, dump it in their throat like a pre-workout, and then dump the water down after it. And I know people do that with pre-workout too because they don't even want to bother them. My girl did that with the Kratom. Yeah. And he died from that. Ooh. Because he choked on it. All right.

She can do that. And so they were saying that that was, well, so we don't even know if that's necessarily true. Mm-hmm. That's the only thing I can think of. Because that's what he did. And then he died of pulmonary edema. Yeah. Which means he had air in his lungs.

Like an air bubble. Like some sort of maybe blood edema. Edema is swelling in your lungs. So he had some sort of uh our blood maybe blood edema edema swelling in your in your lungs he had some sort of swelling due into whatever he was doing yeah and um and so that's the only thing i can think of that happened to him other than you know they're saying hey it was the only thing in his system and it's like well if you choke on something that's way different than if you actually die from ingesting it you know yeah when you were originally telling me about this um just like just like anything that's new, you know, you always

think stuff's dumb. That's like, that's your first defense mechanism towards anything. You always think stuff's stupid. I thought fasting was stupid and now here I am messing with it. Right. I normally I'm a little bit more open-minded than that, but it just kind of depends on what the thing is. And with this, I was like, well, I'm not really in pain, so I don't, I don't think I need it. You know, I, I think I'm fine. And then you, you know, you, you mentioned, mentioned it several times. You're like, well, it just kind of, you're like, I don't know how to put it, but it just, this makes you feel good. And then I was like, all right, well, I guess I'll give it a try. And then, um, uh, and then I, I, after trying it, uh, I didn't notice much. And then you were like, well, you got to try it on an empty stomach,

try it on an empty stomach. And then I noticed a good kickback from it and I basically just about a half an hour after taking it, it just puts me in a good mood. The way I've explained it before is it just feels like everything's going right for me on that day and you hop in your car and for whatever reason, your favorite song is on and it just makes you cheery, makes you happy. So I like being happy

and the happier I am, the more work I can get done. Just putting yourself in a good mood. I almost, uh, didn't even realize how important that is to each day. And now even, you know, with or without mind bullet, you know, that's my job every day is to try to figure out how do I get myself in like the best mood so I can just have a kick-ass day every day. Yeah, if you start your day out positive, right, hopefully it goes in that direction. Like you say, you gain momentum going in that direction. To me, it's so important to just have alternatives to what's out there. People are in pain, and people know when they're in pain.

what's out there. We have, um, you know, people are in pain and people know when they're in pain. It's not like, Oh, I'm in pain and I need to go to a doctor to get something. Cause I know, you know, like it's like, there's the only thing they're going to give you really is opioids. Everything else is, is available over the counter and it's all dangerous. Right. So to have something that's, um, pretty safe and effective and an alternative for people, I just think it's so important to have. Is there any type of, does Kratom running into any type of legal issues or like, are they trying to ban Kratom right now? Yeah, no, it's in such a gray area

because the DEA and the FDA, they don't really like it because they don't really know where to classify it. They don't know where to put it. What is it classified as now? It's nothing. It's so weird. It's like, it's not able to be considered a dietary supplement.

Like the way that it's sold now, it's just like in a gray area, which I think is really, really dangerous. I think they need to get rid of these gray areas and just make it more black and white. Because the gray area is like – it's like, well, you can't really sell it as it as a dietary supplement right and it's like you're not really supposed to sell it like that but everybody that's taking it is taking it as a dietary supplement therefore there are like three and a half to five million people that are completely unprotected from the fda they're completely unprotected from like like say any sort of regulation but we we test all of our products right we test them three times they they're all everything's tested make sure it doesn't have heavy metals in it make sure it doesn't have impurities but there's only about four companies on the market out of a couple

hundred kratom companies that do that and so that's where we run into the problem of like why it shouldn't be a great you know I don't think it should be a gray area thing I think it should be black white. And I think companies should be forced to test their product. They should be, if you want to be in the market, you should have to test your product. Yeah. How would you classify it then? Like what, what, what do you think it should be? Um, right now it's just, it's just called a botanical. I don't even think, I don't think there is, I mean, like I can only classify it as like what it actually is. I can't really say. I think it should be a dietary supplement.

And hopefully like in the future, we'll get that clearance. But I think just like it's really hard to be making marijuana more and more legal by the day and making something like Kratom be illegal. And it's really weird. There's like so many people on the tip of like, um, Hey, we should use, uh, marijuana to combat the opioid addict, you know, opioid crisis. And you're like,

you assholes, there's an entire movie on Netflix about combating the opioid epidemic with something that's more one-to-one, like something that makes more sense. Uh, or maybe, maybe the answer is marijuana and Kratom together. Maybe there's,

there's some synergy there. But to like overlook Kratom would be ridiculous. I mean, it literally plugs into the same receptors as the opioids do. But like I said, it doesn't create that respiratory depression. Has it helped you out of addiction as well? Because I know that that's, you know, some of the things that people were using it for.

I mean, you mentioned it, you use it as a transition off of like Tylenol and Advil and stuff like that. Were you able to transition into that off of like painkillers or anything like that? I haven't used it for that. So I was already, you got sober first. Yeah. I got sober first. And then like a lot of people, that's probably the most important thing for anyone listening that's on pills or something like that. They got to get their shit together right before they just think Kratom is going to solve all their problems. So almost everybody that hits me up about Kratom, they have a couple problems and their problems are either addiction or like or pain, you know. And so if a lot of times like people say, hey, man, I'm addicted to blah, blah, blah, but I can't go to rehab.

I don't have time. I don't want to go to AA. You think Kratom will help me? And I'd say no, I don't. I think AA will help you. I think rehab will help you. And I think along with those two things that Kratom will help you. they you know it's like they want to quit drinking you know should they take it and i'm like i can't tell you if you should take it or or not i should tell i could tell you that you should quit drinking yeah you know the other problem is like a lot of people are in pain and they hit me up and they say hey look man i'm 500 pounds and my ankle's killing me okay well we need you to get on a carnivore diet first we need you to lose like 200 pounds and then we'll give you kratom or or we'll do it at the same time but i'm not gonna just give you the free pass i never i i don't think i ever give anybody a free pass saying you know what i think kratom would be perfect for you because i feel like that's the easy way out and i feel like people need to utilize kratom with some sort of health plan i just unless you're you know if you're already healthy like in sema if you came to me and

said hey man my my jujitsu has been hurting my back a little bit lately. Like, yeah, dude, try some Kratom cause you're already healthy and in shape. And so like for you, it could really help you, but give me a break. Most people just want a quick fix. They just want the answer. They didn't want to skip right to the answer and they want the answer to be found in a pill. And I'm like, no, my answer was much harder to find than that. My answer took years to find and it took a long, you know, it was a long, hard road to get there. But now that we have them, they're pretty simple answers. So you and I teamed up and we created some mind bulletness.

Hell yeah. And, you know, people always ask me, like, where you live. They're always confused whether you're just here all frequently or whether you live here. Well, I live here now. But you live here and you're just here all frequently or whether you live here well i live here now but you live here and uh you're hustling some of that mind bullet and um you're really passionate about like getting people to take it i mean not just because we're profiting from it but you've been that way from the beginning even when you were um i think i was actually more more that way before we were selling it than when we are selling it because it's a little hard for me to be like, hey, and try MindBullet. I don't like that at all.

And some people say stuff on social media. They'll comment on it. Some guy's like, hey, stop trying to sell us stuff and talk about the carnivore diet. But it's like, who cares? Well, I'm never going to sell anything that I don't enjoy. I like it. That's why I i think and this has been really hard i would have chose something else to try to you know if i'm trying to just make more money there's a lot of other routes i could have gone there we could sell cbd and exogenous ketones out the ass i could sell bcaas we could sell it we could sell like crazy and say this is what got

me ripped this is what got me jacked pre- what got me jacked. Pre-workout, I could go all those different routes, but I never did. I don't use a pre-workout except for Mind Bullet. I use that as my pre-workout. The interesting thing to me is there's only one consecutive thing in my entire transformation from when I started three years ago. The one thing that's consistent is Kratom. There was no carnivore diet in the beginning. There was no ketogenic diet in the beginning. There was nothing in the beginning except for kratom and a will to work out and Mark. And so following Mark, after I got, after I got a rehab, Mark moved me up here,

you know, brought me up here and said, we're going to, we're going to take care of you for a little while. We're going to make sure you're okay. And before I made a leaf of faith and before I moved back to LA, Mark and Andy, his wife, they wanted to make sure, you know, that I was okay. And before I made a leaf of faith and before I moved back to LA, Mark and Andy, his wife, they wanted to make sure that I was okay. So I was up here and I was in good hands. And the only thing that was consistent from day one was the Kratom. Everything else that came in, came in like in steps, like even the working out. I think when I started taking Kratom, think when i started taking kratom i deadlifted uh 315 and my sobriety date five years out from sobriety was um a 700 pound trap bar deadlift i saw that which is crazy though right yeah like um and if you say well like the only thing you really did that was consistent during that time

were kratom right and a carnivore diet i threw in a little sarms we can count that i'm not i'm not ashamed of that true um but you know like that's another like again another possible answer right like something i'm exploring something i'm looking into i'm not saying that anybody should use sarms but i am saying that like look i'm gonna mess around with them and see if they work see if they're useful yeah because if they are useful i'm going to mess around with them and see if they work, see if they're useful. Because if they are useful, I'm going to utilize every shortcut, every so-called hack I can get because we're not here for that long. You know, just like what you and Mark were saying at the very beginning, it makes you feel happier. And when you're happier, you can get a lot more things done. And what you just said with that being the consistent factor throughout your whole transformation, it makes sense.

You know, a lot of days you probably go and feeling better, feeling happy, and you're able to do the things you need to do. Picking up the habit of doing carnivore, working out, all of these things are a little bit easier to do because you're in the mindset and the mood to do it. So, I mean, I took three of those

before we got on this podcast and I can't stop smiling. Every time I take that shit, I just like, I can't close my mouth. I remember at the yacht. Uh-oh, uh-oh. I remember at the yacht. Noted. mouth i remember i remember what's so funny it's so funny you guys are gonna be down in soca together he's the uh the natty professor and what struck me as hilarious was when we were at the arnold

and we had we had a booth there for kratom somebody comes up to me like yo and sema needs one of those like extract things so we had these really strong extract Kratom somebody comes up to me like yo and SEMA needs one of those like extract things so we had these really strong extracts that were there and they're like and SEMA needs it and I'm thinking like I'm like and SEMA needs it he's like he's all natty but then when I went and saw him

he had the biggest smile on his face he was so happy that stuff is wild mind bullet potion we're going to be coming out with that pretty soon it's actually yeah yeah we're making it that's been the the one thing that i've taken where i'm like i'm definitely high right now i was so high i sold so many hip circles that day the um it's it's really interesting the clip that i was talking about with rogan talking about being high rogan's

like yeah i talked to my friend he uses like 10 and he's like and so i took 10 and he's like and i was fucked up you know and then he's like but but here's where the the interesting part comes in right he's like everything functions your arms work the way they're supposed to work your legs work the way they're supposed to work everything functions but your body's screaming like this is not sober you know and he's like but it's a different kind of not sober because like everything works and so i came up with the question like if everything works and you're and you are high does that even matter like does it make a difference like if you're not impaired and everything works but you feel really good does that make any difference like should it make

any yeah it's not like you're crying in the corner because you took a bunch of mushrooms or something yeah like should you be yeah should you be against that have you ever seen the movie limitless yeah yeah i love that movie that's what this shit reminds me yeah like you just see everything clear and all the colors are brighter and you're just like you just feel better or it's like the matrix taking the pill right yeah yeah i was joking i can't remember who i was joking with but i was saying like i stayed in the booth, but I can see the entire expo. I know what you mean. Dude, that's what I felt like when I was there.

I know what you mean. Yeah. Somebody had asked about arthritis and osteoporosis. Does it help with that? It's amazing. I mean, I have osteoarthritis, double hip replacement. But you said osteoporosis? Yeah.

So osteoporosis is your bones. And so some things that would help with that would be a carnivore diet is really consistent with that. We've seen a lot of information on that kind of stuff. Vitamin K is supposed to help with that quite a bit. They might have to look that one up. I just heard that more recently, but vitamin K is supposed to help with like bone density and things like that. I'm not. So even just dairy, if they're able to eat dairy,

especially full fat dairy, might have more vitamin K than something else, but it also has calcium in it as well. Yeah, and from what I know about bone density, I think actually SARMs can help with that too because they help with bone density, but I'm not going to tell people think actually SARMs can help with that too, because they help with bone density. Um, but I'm not going to tell people to take SARMs,

but, um, also there's, uh, my friend John who makes the X three bar makes a thing called osteo strong. So osteo strong is like a place that you would go into. And, um,

what that does is like, uh, you exert force against a machine and that helps build your bones. It's like a isometric type stuff, right? Yeah. And I, and I've heard, I don't know all that much about it, but I heard that that stuff is very effective for actually like building bone.

Let's just say even, Hey, try some form of strength training. Yeah. I think strength training is, is awesome. If you're in a lot of pain, then mind bullet could potentially help. And yeah, those are some things that they can look into, uh, for the main thing, like with osteoporosis, the person's going to be in pain, you know, like that's going to be, that's probably going to be their main issue. So for that, for the pain part of it, yes, I think it can definitely help. I think lowering inflammation with a carnivore ketogenic diet is

really important. And then people that are in pain, like you were in tons of pain and you're still in pain. How do you get, how does this person that has osteoporosis or somebody else listening how do they get themselves moving and then how do they stay moving even though they're in pain like it sucks when you're in pain you're grumpy it's hard it's got to be very slow so i think it's got to be um so when i when i first started it was the day that trump got elected that's like the day that I started my diet Well, the the reason I can remember is because I was walking to the polling place Which was less than a mile away and I almost died walking there and I was with my girlfriend at the time lauren and um It's like I I just like I just felt like I was I was dying. I was out of shape

I was in a lot of pain Everything hurt and um, I started breathe breathing really was, I was dying. I was out of shape. I was in a lot of pain, everything hurt. And, um, I started breathing, breathing really heavy. And I was like, man, I'm, I'm just so out of shape. I'm so fat. I'm so in pain. I'm so inflamed, you know, uh, what am I going to do? And so like that very next day I decided to go back on a, you know, sort of like a ketogenic diet and sort of, you know, so it just, it just started slow. I mean, it started with like, okay, cool. Today I'm going to eat no carbs. Um, tomorrow I'm going to go for a walk, you know, and, and then like slowly building into those 10 minute walks, slowly,

um, taking some Kratom, you know, like slowly figuring everything out. I didn't do everything at once. It's really easy right now for me to be on this podcast and prescribe somebody like, yeah, just go out for a walk every day. Stop eating carbs and ball. It's, it's not that easy. It's like, stop eating carbs. That might take you six weeks, you know, walking around the block might take you a couple of weeks. Also stop where, stop worrying about failing. Just, just try it, you know, try it. You know, we're, we're, we suggest these things and we say like, you know, go for a few 10 minute walks every day. Just try one 10 minute walk just on one day and try to not eat any carbs on one day or half a day. Like start with, start with something.

That's sort of what the journey was. It was really slow and it would just keep building up, you know? And then, you know, now like once you can take on more things, you just start taking on more things, you know? Like once you can take on more things, you just start taking on more things, you know? What about, you know, like abstaining from things and the different things you learn from rehab and kind of the things that maybe you see people do on a daily basis where you're like, hmm, these people are not really living that clean of a life either. Like, you know, here you were years ago, probably thinking you're so screwed up because you're addicted to these pills, but everybody's kind of addicted to something. Everyone's kind of got these kind of bad, nasty habits. Now, unfortunately, drugs drag you down enough to where it's hard to function for the next day. It's hard to do your job. It's hard to have relationships. It causes all kinds of problems.

But were there things that happened kind of through the rehabilitation process or things that still go on today where you're kind of looking around and you're like, man, all these people are kind of fucked up. It wasn't just me. Yeah, well, you start living your life by the 12 steps of AA.

You start going like, okay, I have a problem. I need to admit it. I need to believe that something bigger can deliver me from this. So those kinds of things, you start thinking through the steps of like how to get through each, uh, each individual problem that you might have. And so, um, even, even thinking about the diet in the same terms as like recovery is like, okay, I'm fat and out of shape. You know, I need to believe that, that there's a program out there that can deliver me from this, right? I'm going to'm gonna basically um take an inventory of myself and say what's wrong with me this is another step

like in aa to say hey these are the things that are wrong with me and this is what i'm gonna fix i'm gonna ask god or whoever your higher power is to remove those shortcomings you know and and basically like all you're really doing is reinforcing a lot of shit in your head that you probably already know to be true. Like that's what I found out about rehab is there's a lot of things that you know you're not supposed to be doing and you're just kind of reinforcing your head. Okay, I'm not supposed to do this and I'm supposed to do this. And it's about making better decisions and it's about constantly making better decisions until you get to the end and you're sort of fixed up. better decisions until you get to the end, you know, and you're sort of fixed up. But yeah, it's going through the process. So what I learned is like, it's easy to see that other people aren't living their life perfect, but the program of AA makes it very hard to judge

people. So you go like, you turn into a helper, which I think is really important. You turn into like, ah ah look at that asshole what he's doing over there but like then you go over and rather than say like that asshole there you go over and say hey man maybe i can help you with this or maybe i can help you with or even just say hi period yeah or just say hi period or just like let them know that you know that you're thinking about them or you know whatever and it's it's just i don't know it's really interesting because i get people that write to me every day on social media and it's just weird man like I got a guy who wrote to me the other day about he designs like spurs and buckles

and stuff and he's down in Texas and he you know he just he just reached out to me and he just seemed like he was hurting so bad he seemed like such a nice guy he's like yeah you know my wife she knows about my alcoholism and she knows about this. And she, you know, she's willing to help me out of it. And so I just said to the guy, like, can I call you? And he said, yeah, you can call me. Called him right up. We talked for like two hours.

Like, that's insane. But that's incredibly powerful. Like, imagine like, I don't know, man. Like, I don't know how it made the guy feel, but he said it made him feel fantastic. But imagine like somebody made a movie and they called you and they said, hey, I want to help you out of your problem.

Like, to me, I'm just thinking like- Yeah, I really liked Jurassic Park and I get a phone call from Steven Spielberg. Yeah, it's not that big of a deal, but like, I think- To that guy, it might have been. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, just to be able, like, look, whether that guy gets sober or not is not the issue. The issue is like,

I gave him my all, I gave him everything I had, you know? And so that the next, so that when somebody reaches out to him and says, I'm dying over here, I need help. Hopefully somebody he'll reach out to that person too and help that person, you know, so to me, it's all about like who we can connect. Like the reason I'm so passionate about Kratom is we lose so many people to opioids. We lost 72,000 people and everybody wants to like get fake outraged in this country. Like, oh, did you hear what Bernie Sanders said? Did you hear what Trump said? It's like, who cares?

None of that means anything when we have 72,000 people dropping dead and nobody's doing anything about it. None of these politicians are when we have 72,000 people dropping dead and nobody's doing anything about it. None of these politicians are ever talking about this. And when they talk about it and they bring it up, Trump declared it a national emergency and then did nothing. Zero. He hasn't done one thing about the opioid epidemic. Nobody's gone to jail.

Nobody's getting in trouble. And that's what I think we need to start bringing the hammer down on a lot of these companies. We're starting to see it. It's at the very beginning of some of these companies getting hammered for the things that they've done yeah but it's not going to bring back the bodies it's not going to bring back the people that died you know do you think everybody should know these 12 steps like do you think this is something that should be you know should just be like taught somewhere should everyone just know this um like is it do you think there's a lot of value in the 12 steps uh just period whether you have a drug problem or not i do i do but i do what if what if we all

knew it uh so that we can combat addiction before it ever happens almost i think about five of the steps are redundant but besides besides the fact that the book was written in 1933 and isn't uh very written by one person yeah Yeah. Bill W is his name. He like made it up. There was two guys and, and mainly one of them wrote the book, but they say like, if you hear somebody say,

I'm a friend of Bill, that means that they're in the NAA in the, in the program. But there's a couple of steps that seem to be like very close together that are like, for me, it's always hard to decipher like, ah,

that step seems like the last one. Isn't it the same thing kind of, and there's people that can like delineate the difference to you between the steps and stuff like that. But I just feel that the 12th step is the most important to knowing, you know, that you've resolved your issues, that you carry it on to other people. I feel like that's a super training motto. It's like, look, I trained myself up. I got jacked and tan. Now I'm going to carry that on to other people. I feel like that's the super training motto. It's like, look, I trained myself up. I got jacked and tan. Now I'm going to carry that message to others. And like, that's sort of what we do every day.

I think that's the most important thing, carry the message to others. What's the, because I know there's a step that has to do with like, you mentioned like a faith or something. What is that step? Like, well, there's a, the step of like, you basically ask God to remove your shortcomings.

Now, you know what's interesting about that? First of all, you believe in a higher power. A higher power, yeah. And it could be anything. Exactly. Now, I'm curious about this because I read a book about like not the 12 stats, but I think it was about like habit recently. And they mentioned AA and that specific step in like believing in a higher power. mentioned a a and that that specific step in like believing in a higher power and that apparently was a step when they interviewed a bunch of people that came out of a a was the big one

it's the hardest one right it's it's the hardest one but that was the thing that allowed them to stick to whatever it was that they were doing the belief that you know what is it again can you say that belief in a higher power belief in a higher power but like specifically like i'll believe that god can deliver you from and deliver you from whatever it is not not like i'm not talking about like jesus or anything but just that specific belief made it easier for those individuals in that situation i'm still curious as to why do you know why that is i think it's taking it off of you you're taking you're taking the pressure off yourself you're like no no there's this bigger thing out there there's this god and he's gonna like remove this from me he's gonna

he he's gonna take this from me the world is so great and so kind that it's gonna take it from me you know what i mean like i feel like that's maybe the reason why that really gets into a lot of people's psyche because they don't have to do it. And it makes it easier for you to believe that. It's not like I'm going to take this and pray it away. You're like, no, no,

somebody is going to take this. I believe, I believe like, look at it this way. What you're saying is like, I believe if I do all the right steps that somebody is going to take it away from me. But what's really happening?

I'm doing all these steps and I'm making it go away. You know what I mean? Like, if you look at it that way, it's like, is somebody taking it away from me? Who knows? And I do think disappear. I do think people that deserve to be helped get helped too. So once you kind of deliver the message to yourself that like, this is no longer in my

hands, maybe it gets passed off to like family members and stuff. But I mean, maybe it still does come down from God. Like if you believe in God, you know, uh the other people that helped you in your situation maybe uh we were sprung into action from god you know or maybe it was designed in some some other different way who really knows but i do think it's it sounds super important the other thing is that nobody will get help or saved if they don't want to so um when the same thing with like diet too right yeah yeah you need to you need to like want to do it and also like i think for some people the way you're brought up is really instrumental for me it's very instrumental

like when i just like when i saw my parents i was was like, why am I, what did I do? You know what I mean? I felt like I was in such big trouble with my parents and with my brother, especially like with Mark, because you're like, like the last thing you want to do is like let down Mark, you know? Like I showed him everything about lifting. Like we were boys. That was like my best friend all growing up. He was my homie.

You know, I took him to the gym every day when he was a little kid. Got him fired up, brought him up, got him strong, and then let him down. It's hard. Well, you mentioned these shortcomings. Are these things you got to like list out or something or you do it in private or you write them down and you share them with a group or something? Yeah. So interestingly enough and honestly enough, I've actually never have done it. Wait, what?

This whole time I was thinking. Yeah. No, no, no. I went to rehab. When I went to rehab, I went to three different places. It was kind of broken up. So I was never like consistently in a program for a long enough time to actually like get through all the steps. And so I'd be like up to a certain point and then I'd move and then I'd get reset, you know, again.

So I never really went through it in the same way that everybody else went through it. What are you supposed to do? Yeah, you're supposed to sit down and write all this stuff out and do these things. But like there really is no supposed to do, right? Like I've been in AA and I've seen people like, yeah, I've been in AA for 27 years and I've never done one step. And then you have people that go, yeah, I've been in AA for two weeks and I went through every step. Like I actually did go through every step, but I kind of raced through them and I raced through them in like a workbook that we did at like in the first

rehab I did. So I don't really count that. Like, yeah, I went through it, but I just like went wrote down some bullshit answers and went through it. You're supposed to really go through it with a sponsor. And a sponsor is just a person who's been in AA longer than you that can usually they have to be in there for like at least six months and then they can turn around and help you. And that's the thing about AA that's really like wonderful is like they have like sponsors and so like they they also have what's called commitments i think commitments are really important like if um it's like you know how you have that guy that just like he just won't show up on wednesdays it's like well you make him the coffee guy and then he shows up every wednesday

because if he doesn't show up every wednesday nobody makes the damn coffee yeah you know so they have what they call commitments and commitments make people show up every Wednesday and nobody makes the damn coffee. Yeah. You know, they have what they call commitments and commitments make people show up to meetings. Like you might just have to read some little thing or you might have to do a little thing, but making a commitment to the group is what makes you, you know, go back to it.

Yeah. It sounds like there's a lot of like leadership stuff kind of taught in AA. It's fascinating. I think, you know, when I was going to AA in the beginning, Lauren told me that she was jealous. She's like, I wish I had a place I can go talk about all my problems, you know, because I don't have anybody to talk to. And to me,

I found that like really interesting. I'm like fight club. Yeah. I feel like that's what it's like. It's like this, it's almost in a way it's kind of cool. Remember fight club, he goes to all those different things. I think in all those different treatment groups support groups yeah but i think that like if you had that in this world in the lifting world like if everybody just came and sat around in a circle and talked about the issues they were having in the gym or with their diet or with their training that could be so powerful i think people are doing that more now i think there are things like that um a few friends have told me about some different things they went to where there's like these like seminars of like trust and he just went like a friend suggested that he go and he went and he was like, just not feeling it to like ever bring anything up.

And then he just, the last day he just like went up on stage, like he was possessed and he just like, you know, let out that he was abused as a kid and all these different crazy things. It's like, so there are, there are things like that more, but I think everyone just still thinks you're a weirdo if you go to something like that, you know? Well, you know, I was told in rehab that therapy isn't something that you have to do. It's something that you get to do. And I think people need to adopt more of that thinking to it. So the fact that, you know, like you said, like Lewis Howe, he went there and he didn't

share anything and he didn't say anything. And he could actually went through the whole thing and that still would have been still would have been fine the fact that he went to it is is what's really important i think the fact that people like go to things and and get the knowledge it's like it's really important and it doesn't matter if you participate or not um in aa like i said, I go to AA now. I hate sharing. I hate saying anything. I don't want to bring up my weaknesses. I don't want to bring up what went wrong that week. I don't want to seem inferior.

You want to at least halfway lie about it, right? Yeah, but you know what? When you hear somebody like talk about how shitty their life is and how bad things are that week for them, it almost makes you want to share your shitty story. Yeah. Because you're like, oh, well, I'm just like him.

You think that story sucked? Listen to my story. It's kind of the way you get. And I think that that's important in like moving on with your life and moving forward is like realizing that you don't have it the worst. So make it any easier to abstain from stuff because you learn to abstain from drugs and

alcohol make any easier to abstain from uh you know cookies or something like that no it makes it worse i think because it's the only yeah the only kind of release right it's it's like when i got out of rehab i was like well all i have left is food and for like a year i went crazy i ate whatever i wanted to and i was like so fat you know i was like is that why you see a lot of cigarettes and coffee and stuff right like outside the rehab centers right you see them a lot of people are smoking it's insane it's like all aa is is addictions you know like it should it should be called addictions anonymous right like that's all it is it's like so it's like people be smoking they'll be drinking coffee they'll have all these bad habits but they just

don't drink alcohol and um i don't know i've always said like i don't think people i don't even i don't think people should even like i don't think there should be coffee i don't think there should be cigarettes but that's just my asshole attitude towards everything where i'm like you know hey if you're gonna go somewhere to abstain from stuff, let's abstain from it. Let's not be on our phones in the AA meeting. Like make people put that shit in a basket when you walk in. When you felt that, like you maybe would have an urge to relapse or do something like, yeah, when you'd have an urge to relapse, what is it that you turn to or what is the thing, what is the thing that you do? And do you still even get those urges anymore? Um, I don't necessarily get the urges to like relapse

on you know drugs or alcohol um i would think that uh if did you before in the beginning or anything in the beginning yeah in the beginning like every day i would drive past a liquor store and be like i feel like pulling in and i just wouldn't, you know? But then like as time went on, I'd say it took about two years for that to totally go away. Shit, that was a long time. Yeah, well, you know, you just get so used to like, if for example, like you go home the same way from here every day, there's a Starbucks on the corner.

If you stopped at that Starbucks every day on the way home, you'd be addicted to coffee. You'd have to stop there. It wouldn't feel right if you did. And then for two years, every day that you passed it, you'd be like, coffee you'd have to stop there it wouldn't feel we wouldn't feel right if you did and then for two years every day that you passed it like man i missed that starbucks you know and it's like you'd want to kind of pull in but you just wouldn't and that's that's what it feels like it's like you know you're stuck where you're like i think i should do this but i also know that this could be very detrimental to me you know was there like a thought like was that

the thought process every single time? Like I want to, but I know it's when I was talking to this guy the other day. Yeah. Uh, the Texan, he was like, you know,

I get down, you know, I 95 or whatever. And I, it's like, there's a corner store right there. And he, he said that he went to the corner store and he got in his car.

He, he stopped there to get beer. And then he took off, went down the road, made a U-turn, came back around, stopped at the corner store and he got in his car he stopped there to get beer and then he took off went down the road made a u-turn came back around stopped at the corner store again left came back turned around went to the corner store again he did it three times and didn't buy anything and i just said dude i'm so proud like yeah he made me cry i was like i'm so proud of you like that that's what happens i'm like it's a sickness that's when they say when they when people say I don't like going to AA because they call it a disease. Well, what the fuck is that? That's a disease, man. If you have to turn around three times in your car to go back to the liquor store and go back to the liquor store and then still not almost you almost don't have any control. It's a disease and it needs to be cured. You know, it needs to be fixed. So whatever people want to call it, it's a it's a problem and it needs to be cured you know it needs to be fixed so whatever people want to call it it's a it's a problem and it needs to be fixed yeah did you think uh sometimes like i came too far i can't you know i can't go backwards like that well that's that's what i think what keeps you sober

long term is like you've come so far you don't want to go backwards you know um and that's that's what sort of kept me off of off of things you, like I said, people will argue that because I use Kratom that I'm not sober. They'll say that. If somebody wants to say that, I'm actually fine with it. I'm like, okay, well, I'm not sober to you. I don't really care. I just care that I'm free from the addictions that I once had. So it doesn't really – like I don't even really say like, oh, I'm five years sober.

I just say like I've gone five years without drinking and taking prescription pills because I, I don't want to really, uh, I don't know. I, I, cause I am an AA. I don't want to like, uh, make anybody upset or angry. Like I'm not the type of person that wants to go in and cause controversy. So I'm not trying to make anybody mad by saying I'm sober and trying to sneak something in. If that's what they want to think, I'll just say, Hey, look, I'm not sober, but I'm coming to your meetings anyway. You know?

Yeah. I get no, I literally cannot understand what an individual would say that just because you're taking Kratom, you're not sober. Because like you're taking it mainly for pain. Because they want to say if something affects you from the neck up, then you're not sober. But cigarettes affect you from the neck up and coffee affects you from the neck up. So it's stupid is what it is, you know, but that's, it's just the way it is. Yeah. Do you think, uh, that you got into, uh, drinking and, uh, painkillers and stuff like that because you were in pain, physical pain, or was there some other underlying thing going on that you maybe realized later? Like,

was the pain, you know, sort of an excuse to get started or what are your thoughts on that? It's really difficult to tell. I mean, I would like to say that it was because of pain, but I think there's a lot of things, um, that are, that are triggered for other reasons, you know, that I, I don't know i mean i i think i'd have to go through some pretty deep therapy to figure that stuff out you know you got to figure out like what what caused your trauma and what caused that like what caused you to want to drink or or use drugs and i don't i don't really know what it is i think for like a lot of other people it might be easier because they they can clearly see like when i was a kid my dad used to

beat the shit out of me, and that's why I'm an alcoholic. And you go, okay. Or I grew up in an alcoholic household, and that's why I'm like that. But, you know, we had it pretty good. You know, our parents never abused us, never even really yelled at us that much.

And then, you know, we went through all the stuff with Mad Dog, and who knows what trauma he experienced when he was younger to make him act the way he did a lot like it's it's not always so cut and dry with these things you know yeah yeah and our mom you know she was always like uh you know just told us the dangers of drugs and alcohol because her parents were that way and a lot of addiction ran on her side of the family so she you know basically just flat out told us drugs are bad yeah and i think um i actually think that the way we were brought up though went a long way into us not doing drugs you know we were brought up on the whole drugs are bad just say no kind of thing which for most kids didn't work and they went the

other way and they did all that stuff but But like, we actually believed in that American dream of like, you know, when Hulk, Hulk Hogan would say, train, say your prayers, eat your vitamins, brother. Like we listened and we always wondered like we, it was, it was fascinating to us. Cause when we were little kids, we would always think like, why do nerds like comic books? Because they, these nerds read these comic books and like, all I want to do is go get jacked. And all they would want to do is read more comic books.

So for us, comic books inspired us to look like the Hulk or look like the Thing. And for other people, it inspired them to read more comic books. So we were just, I don't know, we believed in that Americana, train, say your prayers, eat your vitamins. Let me ask you this. I'm like, you know, train, say your prayers, eat your vitamins. Let me ask you this. I'm curious because Mark, you've never smoked weed or anything like that before.

And obviously you chose to do that when you were younger too. You chose not to do that when you're younger. Why is it that you just never even gave it a shot or never even tried it once? Yeah, I think, you know, a few reasons were just, you know, my mom and dad, just what they were telling me. And then, you know, watching my oldest brother, you know, go through so many struggles and go through so much hard times with drugs and like lying to my parents. I was like, my parents seem pretty cool. It's just easier to like, just tell them the truth, you know? And it seems easier just to, just to kind of ask them for stuff rather than, but also, you know, I had two older brothers that broke my parents down over a period of time.

And so it makes the parenting much different. I got parented a little different than, than each one of them. And that's something that people don't ever really talk about, but your first child is going to be different than your second or third child by a long shot, because parents don't know how to parent until they're a parent, right? So you're learning from child number one and from child number two, hopefully you learn a little bit more. And then maybe by child number three, you have the tools to, you know, to, to do things accurately. But I learned a lot from them. I learned a lot from watching them and Chris wasn't into, wasn't into drugs or smoking weed or drinking alcohol or anything like that. And he took me around

everywhere with him. So it just seemed like all we really did was like lift and eat. And then like, even, even when he got, when he got into like high school and stuff like that, he would take me with him to parties every once in a while. And I was probably too young to go to those parties, but my parents just knew that he would, you know, bring me back at the right time and stuff and that it would be fine. And I just never, I never got into, I just never got into any of it. And I saw him at these parties, like not drinking. So I just thought that was normal. I was like, Oh, all these other people are drinking, but like he's choosing not to, uh, our uncle John, he passed away from drug and alcohol addictions and stuff like that too. At 34 years old. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Super young. So I was like, oh, I, you know, that just seems

like, and my mom always taught me, she was like, it's a trap. You know, she's like, you'll be drinking one day and you'll think it's going to be fun and you're, you're going to be having a good time. And she's like, it can do that for you. But she's like, this is in our family. Like, she's like, I don't know, you know, if it don't know if it's in our blood or how it works, but she's like, this has destroyed a lot of my family and I don't want to see it happen to you. So I just stayed away from it. And again, watching them kind of firsthand

or watching Mike in particular firsthand and just watch all the different stuff that he went through, it just seems easier just to not do that, just to not fall into that trap. I think I drank once in high school. And the one day that I drank, my so-called friends let me get completely hammered. And they basically just dropped me off on my front lawn with no shirt. And I passed out there.

And I woke up in the morning in my bed. And I was like naked, I think. And I was like, I don't know where I am. I don't know what happened. All I know is I'm in so much fucking trouble right now. And I was just scared to leave my room. And as soon as I left my room, like my parents just let me have it. They were like, what were you doing? You were passed out drunk on the lawn. What is your pro I felt like such a loser. I don't think I ever drank again through high school until I went to college, you know? And so, um, that had a huge impact on me too, because like, yeah, the doorbell rang at like

11 o'clock at night or something. And yeah, there he is with no shirt on and he's completely hammered. He's like my idol. I lift with him every day. He outlifts me every time he's older and stronger and I admire him a lot. So yeah, I was like, what the hell? You know? And my dad like dumps a bucket of water on him. And my dad is trying to figure out like, yeah, my dad was old school. He came in with a bucket of water.

Like my dad's trying to figure out too, like, is he just drunk or is there something else going on here? Is he somebody pill him up or did he take other drugs or whatever? So yeah. Yeah. Things like that. I mean, having things like that happen, happen you're just like but see mad dog would do that every week and then my parents would yell at him and he'd be like who cares and then he would be out of like mad dog just had a way with like he didn't care about anything so like he'd get in trouble he'd be like oh you're gonna ground me well who cares i'll just play video games and then like my parents were like we don't know what to do with you because we can't if we ground you you don't even get get mad. He would just find a way out of it. Punishment just doesn't work.

Yeah. So they were like, we'll get Chris. He'll listen. He'll be grounded. He'll stay grounded. It's really, I think it was weird a year and a half ago. Every now and then I'll have a beer or something. It's not a big deal for me.

But a year and a half ago, I think I was just enjoying just like enjoying a beer, like almost every single night. And it became, I caught myself one night. I was like, wait up. Why am I going to the store to grab this? It's like, this is eight or nine days in a row. No, like, yeah, it was like, it was almost two weeks. I'm like, I'm finding it that I need one to wind down. I was like, oh, this is bad. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's getting pretty bad. So I had to like stop myself from doing that. And I still drink every now and then, but it's, it's it's it's it's it's getting pretty bad so i had to like stop myself from doing that and i still drink every now and then but it's it's really crazy how easy it can be to just slowly creep down that it can happen at any age too you know like life life is life is a lot longer than we give it credit for everyone says life is short well it can be short but like if you live to be

like 80 i mean i i can turn to drugs and alcohol tomorrow because something happens. And we're just I just I don't know, make a couple of bad choices or think that I need a drug to recover from an injury or something. Who knows? Right. But it's a long it's a long battle. I think this people are so people can get addicted to anything. You know, I think that's something that we have to be really careful of and we have to like really look at, you know, one day when I went to my medicine cabinet, I realized I was taking like 13 drugs every morning. This is like, you know, taking a thyroid medication. I was saying like whatever the doctor would give me, basically I'd go into the doctor and say, I had all these problems. She'd give me a bunch of drugs and I would just take them all. And I remember going through like all these pill bottles. And I used to do the same thing with supplements.

I'm like, what am I doing? And now I take, you know, it's like, there is no medicine cabinet. I don't need one. There's a state cabinet. You know, it's crazy back when I was playing college soccer, it was, uh, I didn't even realize that it was a problem, but like after some hard practices, a lot of us, like almost all of us would be taking like ibuprofen, it's like 500 milligrams after every single practice. And that was just normal for us as college athletes. Like we, we just would, we all had ibuprofen, you know, if someone didn't have the, Hey, you got some ibuprofen. All right, cool. And we never really knew it was an issue. And I realized that later on, I was like, Oh God, this is, I have to like stop taking this stuff, you know, because you wouldn't feel sore, you know, you'd have to recover from session to session,

but I didn't realize how damaged, how damaging that was at that time. Yeah. I didn't kind of wish he did. Right. Like, man, like, what am I doing? And that's why, you know, I actually would love to be at the forefront of more of this research on stuff like Kratom because we want to make sure that it's not, not doing these things. Like right now we think it doesn't do the same things like that.

But we, you know, we, we'd want to know for sure. And I think studying that stuff would go a long way. But it's all about finding like healthier options, healthier alternatives. These early morning workouts are horrible, aren't they? Um, it makes you change everything that you do throughout your whole day, right?

It, it, um, so getting up, so to get up at four 30 and get here. It takes about 20 minutes to get here. So you got to be in the car by like 4.10 else you're late and you don't want to be late. I was late once this week. One day I actually missed, which was terrible. I felt so bad. I woke up at like- Just snoozed it completely, right? I woke up at like 4.45 or something.

I'm like, I'm not going to make it. That happened to me with work one time i was supposed to be somewhere at steve zim's gym i was a personal trainer i was supposed to be there at five to open the gym and i woke up at eight oh whoops and i called him and i said i know i still have a shift so i'm gonna come in and he was like bye i was like oh man and i got there i was like i don't have an excuse i just slept he's like it'll. I was like, oh, man. And I got there, and I was like, I don't have an excuse. I just slept. He's like, it'll happen.

He goes, that's your one time. I was like, understood. Got it. Wow. That's the worst feeling, though, when you wake up, and you're just like, no. I hate it. I wasn't even close. You know, it's so funny.

And I'm like, did I shut it off? I don't know what I did. Yeah. It's easy to roll over and go back to bed, especially, like, when you know it's going to be a grizzler, you know. But there's also something about like I have not gotten out of bed with such fire since like my sobriety date, which was like May or not May, the 29th of April. Right. So the 29th of April, so the 29th of April I've never popped up

out of bed Mark was out of town but I knew it was my sobriety date I knew I had to come in and try to do like a 700 pound trap bar deadlift

like I've never gotten that excited about like a morning you know lifting so like if it's weird it's like if the lifting

is going to be good and we're going to be doing something that I'm good at I'm really excited to come in that makes sense but if it's 430's weird. It's like, if the lifting is going to be good and we're going to be doing something that I'm good at, I'm really excited to come in. Oh, that makes sense. But if it's fourth, yeah, but it doesn't matter what time it is. Yeah. But if it's an early morning workout and Mark's like, come in at four, we're going to push the sled tomorrow. I'm like, yeah, no, thanks, man. I'm not that good at that. Yeah. And you know, a lot of people can relate that are listening right now. Like, you know, if it, if it was like a bicep workout, you know, I, I've always said like, if I, uh, invited a bunch of people to

come in and work out and do a bicep tricep workout with me to probably be a, a line, you know, out of the store and out of the gym, you know, but if I said, you know, Hey, we're going to do squats, you know, it wouldn't be as many people, uh, as excited cause it hurts, you know, it's painful, but also to like, I think that people should really think about their mindset and also they need to be very careful of all the little thoughts and all the little things that you do. A lot of times you go in the gym and it's going to be a squat workout and it doesn't really matter whether it's early or later in the day.

Maybe you got off of work and you're kind of tight too, rather than just, uh, just waking up or your back's tight and you know, you were sitting all day or whatever. But the first thing you do is you go to move with the bar and you're making these faces as if there's 900 pounds on the bar. And it's like, well, maybe you should, you know, try to move and try to calm down a little bit. Like what's, you know, what's with these, uh, these angry faces. And maybe you're making a bunch of noises, you know, you, that, that, uh, old man noise getting up off the couch, like all that stuff. The more that you do all those things, the more that that wears into your body and the more that that takes away from all of your capabilities. You're telling yourself that you really aren't sure if you can do it or not by crying and whining about it. If you make an exploding cigar face, as you would say.

Yeah. I was like when I train, I strain. It's like a Stallone thing. He calls it the exploding cigar face. I always, like when I train, I strain. He gets like a Stallone thing going on. Hey, yo, Adrian. And then he'll say, he calls it the exploding cigar face. So the other day I put like a picture on Instagram. I'm doing like curls and I'm all jacked. I'm like, you know, like, and he just writes exploding cigar.

And I'm like, I think that's what it meant. Yeah. It's cool for pictures, but like all of that's voluntary. Like you don't have to do that. You don't have to groan. You don't have to make those faces. I find that though like when um when i'll be training i'll be squishing up my face and then mark will say to me like hey it's you're not working out your face relax and then i relax my face and you'd feel it more in your arms

you know like putting all that effort in your squishing up your face yeah i do that for all kinds of things even sometimes i'm just eating and i'm, why are my traps flexed so hard when I'm eating? Like, am I eating like this? You know, I'm like, why don't I just, why don't I just take a breath and just chill or even like brushing my teeth or it could be anything. And I'm like, why am I, what the, what's wrong with me? You know, and having a-

Oh, there's like splitting. Listen to, oh yeah. Listening to Patrick McEwen talking about the breathing and stuff, that's helped me a lot. Every, every moment, you know, that I get Every moment that I feel this kind of overwhelming tightness going on or I feel like I'm bundled up, I just start remembering, okay, I've got to breathe in and out of the nose, give it a second, and I'm able to relax, and it helps a lot. I was trying during the 21-15-9, and I just couldn't.

I felt like I was going to suffocate. It's really hard to breathe in and out of the nose for lifting. It really is. It can be really challenging. I mean, it depends on the lifting that you're doing, but, uh, I'm so used to exhaling, you know, with every press and stuff like that. Uh, it can be really difficult. I did it this week on some dumbbell presses and it actually finally got through like five sets of it without, uh, breathing in and out of finally got through like five sets of it without uh breathing in and out of the mouth but it was it was hard and then afterwards it you know just felt like i gotta get some of those uh big nostrils i know like i can see my nostrils

do you mess with mouth tape when you sleep or not really you know what i've been trying to mess with it and um it just has not been successful yet yeah i think i need duct tape and i'm here it off no like i'm being serious. I think I need something that will seriously stay on my face way tighter. I think it's pretty sticky. It always falls off. Really? Yeah.

It's like a mustache. It ends up being on one lip. Yeah. Well, it'll fall off, but I always put them back on. It's kind of too annoying for me. I got you. It's like the thing on my face, the eyes too, always falls off. Oh, that thing always falls off.

Yeah, that's for sure. I need a helmet. Yeah. You know, the cool thing I realized with the mouth tape stuff is that like even now if I forget to put on the mouth tape, I don't open my mouth and I don't snore at all, even without it on. I think that's pretty good. You're more used to it now.

Yeah. I don't need it on. I think the same thing is true with me. So you've got, you're holding your mouth shut all night. You just got used to it and, yeah. Yeah. I don't need it on. I think the same thing is true with me. So you've got, you're holding your mouth shut all night. You just got used to it and now you don't need it. Yeah, I don't snore at all when I don't put it on, which is, I mean, that's really good, but it can help build that habit, I guess. I still snore with mouth tape or not.

Still making some wheezing? Yeah. No, no, like full on snoring. Like, Stephanie, like, dude, you snored all night. Your little dog, Daisy, snores like a champ. Yeah, she makes- And it's like two pounds. you snored all night. Your little dog Daisy snores like a champ. She makes like two pounds. She makes little weird noises. Well, I kept thinking that she was awake.

When I was staying over Mark's watching his kids, I kept thinking the dog was awake and she was snoring so loud. Wow. I want to meet this dog. You haven't met Daisy? I haven't met Daisy yet. Daisy's jacked. Yeah.

How is it living up here now? You were watching the kids a few weeks ago and like when you were in LA, you don't have, you know, there's no family there. I'd only come and visit every once in a while. I think, um, it's, you know, it's just like a huge difference having your family around. Like I get to go to a coffee with dad sometimes in the morning and like, just, that's even cool. Like I haven't got to do that in, you know, 20 years, you know, just to say, Hey dad i haven't got to do that in you know 20 years you know just uh say hey dad you want to go to breakfast or you want to go hang out and go over to mark's hang out with mark's kids like it's it's a great feeling i think um what i was lacking

in los angeles that i didn't even really know about was serotonin which comes from from your family you know like the love from your family And you miss that when you're gone. I got, I've been gone from my family for how long? 25 years. You know, like, so I left when I was like 19 to move to LA all by myself. I came out here. I was here for a couple of years. Mark moved out, then Mad Dog moved out. Then, you know, eventually my parents moved out. Mark moved to Ohio, Mad Dog moved back to New York. Then they both moved back out, you know, eventually my parents moved out. Mark moved to Ohio, Mad Dog moved back to New York. Then they both moved back out, you know? And so it was like this whole big thing of like, my family being all over the place. And now that everybody's back in one location,

it just feels good again to be able to, to get together with everybody and kind of hang out. It's something that like, I think in those mediocre, those middle years there, I just felt like I didn't need. Who wants to be around your family? But then when you get a little older, you're like, that's really important. Be around people that care about you. Where can people get MindBullet? MindBullet.com.

You can plug your thing. It's MindBbullet.com, and if you order it from my page, mindbullet.com backslash Chris Bell, C-H-R-I-S-B-E-L-L, you can save 20% on MindBullet. Oh, my God. All right, man. Awesome having you on the show as always. Hopefully I'll see you around soon somewhere. I'm sure I'll see you at Phil's. I'll see you at Phil's.

Strength is never weak. This week is never strength. Catch you guys later. Later.