Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 172 Live - Sal, Adam & Justin of Mind Pump Podcast

Episode Date: January 24, 2019

MindPump is an online radio show/podcast that has been described as Howard Stern meets fitness. MindPump is a top 10 health, fitness, and wellness podcast that generates over 1 million unique listens every month in 100+ countries. Hosts, Sal Di Stefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews have over 40 years of combined fitness experience as personal trainers, club managers, IFBB fitness competitors and fitness thought leaders. Sal, Adam and Justin use MindPump as a platform to shed the light of TRUTH on health, fitness and a host of other topics. Link to sign up for the ST Classic: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/super-training-classic-2019-tickets-53251741392 ➢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  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

Don't act like you didn't like it dude People are weird when they drag the arm down That was kind of weird Have you hung out with Kyle Kingsbury? Have you guys been friends with Kyle dude? Kyle Kingsbury? So good buddy of ours right? I got a good story with Kyle

He gently caresses our lower back all the time It's awkward The first time we hang out Absolutely just love the guy We hit it off like crazy becomes an instant friend crush Monday. I get it. Right, right.

We totally, we're totally our people and we're heading over to, uh, uh, Starbucks. No, it was Whole Foods. No,

no, no. It was a Pete's. Was that Pete's coffee? Oh, he did a Whole Foods too. Right across the street. When I was there,

when we were in line at Pete's and he walks behind me and he does this hand drag all the way down my low back to my hips, you know, and holds it there. And I told the guys afterwards, we talked about it because we just met him. And I said, man, that was a weird feeling for me. It's something I've never experienced in my life before. And they're like, well, what happened? And I said, well, he was aroused. I said, no, it wasn't that it was for the first time in my life. I felt like I could, I could relate to what women talk about when they feel

threatened by a man for rape, because you know, I've never felt, I mean, no woman's going to rate me that I can, I can't, can't handle myself, but for the first time, maybe Ronda Rousey. Yeah, maybe, but even then I think I could put up a good fight. And you would probably just let it happen. Right. But Kyle could literally manhandle me. He could hold you down and have sex with you.

Right. If he wanted to, he could. And so I felt that feeling of like true fear of that. And I thought that was pretty wild. And I told him, I'm like,

if that happened, we would just watch. There's really not much we could do at that point. But anyway, he's a cool guy. Good friend. Yeah,

he's a very, very cool guy. We're good friends with him. He would totally not do at that point. But anyway, he's a cool guy. Good friend. Yeah, he's a very, very cool guy. Good guy. We're good friends with him. He would totally not do any of that. Yeah, he's just a good guy. He's got that jujitsu background, you know, that MMA background. He's been inside the cage, you know. He's a savage, that guy.

Oh, yeah, he's a legit badass. He's actually one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, too. Super cool guy. So how do you think we should handle this? Because, you know, we got two podcasts. So we can do one podcast, and then we can do another. Or we can just do one giant orgy podcast. One giant orgy.

I think we should run them. I think we should do two. I think we should run them back to back. I think we should do one that you kind of drive mostly. All right. And then we'll do one that we drive mostly. Or we'll have a conversation. I think they perform better when we do.

We've done the one where we release one on both podcasts. And it doesn't do as well as when we do two separate ones. Yeah. Typically. We've even done it where we cut it in half and then you, you know,

listen to the other half. That did not work very well. Our audience hated that. They hated that one. Just honeydicking everybody. Yeah, exactly. So you guys ran some numbers, you did some math,

you did some science and. We did. We had charts and graphs and all that shit. No, no, no, no, no. Don't get me wrong. It's all based on a feeling. We did none of that stuff.

We feel like it's better. Yeah, no, no. Don't get me wrong. It's all based on a feeling. We did none of that stuff. We feel like it's better. Yeah, really. All right. Well, Andrew, I don't know. Can you start up the or is the crank messed up? The podcast machine does not like getting cranked twice in one day. Our podcast machine is from the 1800s, which is weird

because there was no podcast back then. You can imagine how smooth this runs from day to day. We have no advertising so we don't have money to get this machine up and running. You listen to it on a phonograph. Yeah. But luckily, you guys

got the email about the script for today, right? So at least we have... Thank God, yeah. At least we have that to go up for today, right? It's all here go off. Okay, good. All right, everybody. Well, welcome to Mark Bell's Power Project. And today we got Mind Pump on. Why don't you guys introduce yourself so people can get used to your voice and your name? Yeah. Hey, I'm Justin. I'm one of the hosts for Mind Pump and we're out of San Jose, California. We all started as trainers and decided to group together and, about fitness, what we see that's going right and what we see that's out there that we definitely wanted to address that we have problems with.

That was a lot of the driving force behind us when we first started. I'm Sal. That's it. That's it. That's not really important. I'm Adam Schaefer. I started off as the janitor and I've worked my way up to actually running the company. These guys have allowed me to tell them what to do. So it's pretty cool. Yeah.

And so far so good. He made you work for it though. He cleans toilets like no one else. Yeah. And I blast him. What are your roles individually for the podcast? Gosh, that's a great question. You know, we all, when we started it,

we all didn't really necessarily, I don't even know if we've ever really defined our roles now as much as just doing what we do best, which is have good conversation. I would say if I had to define the roles, I guess, and you guys maybe let me know if you guys disagree or agree. I'd say Justin brings a lot of humor. Adam definitely is the, you know, he says a lot of the, what's on his mind. So sometimes he comes across as an asshole. Sometimes he comes across as a nice guy.

Everybody loves it though. You know what to expect though. Yeah. And we love it. I like to talk a lot about the science behind what we talk about. But we all kind of wear different hats on the podcast.

So it's just a lot of fun. We enjoy what we do. Is it hard for you guys to get a word in sometimes on these podcasts? It is for me. That's enough, Justin. I think that's the thing. I'll tell you what's good.

Well, I'm glad I opened this one. It worked out really kind of crazy. When we first started, we actually had a fourth host, Craig Caperso, who's a good buddy of ours, sponsored by bodybuilding.com and all over the magazines and shit with sell your core and stuff. And he was a part of this group and we recorded 15 episodes that never went live. And when we finished it, one of the things that I think we all kind of struggled with was he really

wanted this, you know, like he cared about each one of us having our own celebrity status or airtime. Who gets what? Right. Like, you know, well, you know know sal talked a lot on this last one mark so this time when you shut up so right so he was trying to orchestrate that you didn't listen and when we all got together we agreed that the conversation would be very organic no different than uh if the three of us were sitting in a room together and just having a conversation that's what we wanted to present and no one gave a shit about if sal talked the whole time or if Justin talked the

whole time. And so, you know, that there was a, it was a little rough at first when he originally was going to be with the group, but then it didn't work out and he moved on. And then the three of us, I mean, I think everyone does what comes natural to them. Justin, uh, actually hates being on camera, hates talking on this, but he has a lot of really good quality things to them. Justin, uh, actually hates being on camera, hates talking on this, but he has a lot of really good quality things to say. And so even though he doesn't say a lot, when he does have something to contribute and say, I think it's really powerful. I think Sal and I have, uh, you know, the stronger personalities we talk more, uh, but, and we disagree a lot. Uh, so, you know, we'll talk about something on the show and if I disagree with it, I'll,

I'll challenge him and vice versa. And I think what people appreciate on the show is that, is that we're not just preaching to you like our beliefs. And it's like, it's, we're having an open conversation and dialogue about a lot of things that I think people are curious about and want to hear about. And we challenge each other on the show. I look at it as a lot, like we're a team, you know, and we all, our roles that, you know, we, we know we're good at certain things and we just intuitively, you know, we, we lead with that and we figure it out as we go. And it's just sort of turned into the chemistry that we have. You know, we, the, there were a few things that we really had in common though. All of us were trainers, um, for a long time, 15 to 20 years

working in a big box gyms or private studios working with everyday average people. Uh, we also have, um, a desire for integrity. We really value integrity quite a bit. And it sometimes to a fault, sometimes we're so honest that it hurts our sales and it hurts, uh, you know, maybe the message a little bit, but we've definitely agree that we need to be honest, uh, all the time. We all live by that. Um, and then because we've all have experience working with everyday people, one thing you learn training everyday people who just want to come in and get in shape. And this is, these aren't athletes. These aren't hardcore people. These are just mom and, you know, mom and dads and, you know, Joe and Jane's coming in, wanting to lose weight, whatever you really learn how to communicate what you're trying to communicate very, very well,

because it's easy to take an athlete or someone who's really, really into fitness and tell them what to do. And they do it. It's very, very easy, but you get the average person that comes in and you have all this great information on how they can get in shape and get fit and get healthy. Um, but it doesn't matter if you can't communicate it effectively. It doesn't matter if they don't implement it in real ways and lifelong ways. And so what you learn through working all throughout with all these people for, like I said, 15 to 20 years is how to communicate what you're trying to communicate, how slow the process can actually take, um, and what really works and what really works, not just on paper, but in context of, of real life. And so a lot of our conversation revolves around that. Like I know,

you know, I know if I take someone and give them a meal plan and give them a workout that if they follow exactly that, it'll work for them. Duh. Like that's going to work for anybody, but it's not going to work for most people because they're not going to do that. They're coming into me to my gym and I'm talking to them about, you know, counting their macros and their calories, this, that, and the other. And you know, the only thing they can really handle right now is maybe adding one serving of vegetables every day, or maybe working out once a week,

like once a week is not going to give you much, but it's a lot more than nothing. And if we can start there and I can do a good job of communicating that to you in an effective way to where you make fundamental changes, I know that slow process turns into real lifelong changes. I've really made a huge impact. Uh, and it took, God, it took me five years. How long did it take you guys to learn? It took me at least five years to learn. I'd say closer to 10. Yeah. I mean, how many times do you guys have clients, you'd get them in shape and then they'd stop working out and get back out of shape and gain weight and lose weight you're like god i'm not this isn't working what

i'm doing isn't working i need to come with the come at these people with a different approach took a long time to learn that really did addition is really powerful you know you when you add to what someone's doing you you mentioned adding in vegetables like this idea of adding stuff to your quote unquote plate is probably where we should all start. Um, because if I tell you, look, man, I need you to, um, try the following, you know, I need you to try to have a serving of vegetables every day. I need you to try to have a serving of fruit every day. I need you to try to go on two, 10 minute walks every, I mean, just try just, you know, I'm not saying you have to actually do it saying, just try, you know, try to get any of those going for you. Uh, try to drink X amount of water, um, just a couple of things.

And then maybe what will happen over a period of time, as somebody gets more and more into fitness, as they start doing the walks, as they start feeling better, as they start making the progress, maybe you continue to add so much. they ain't got time for anything else. Right. You know, because now you're adding in other sources of protein and now you're adding in other sources of carbohydrates. And it's like, you really don't have a whole lot of time to dick around because I'm asking you to walk twice a day.

I'm asking you to eat four or five times a day. And I'm asking you to do X, Y, and Z. And now we added so much, you don't have time to think about junk food and to do other harmful things to your metabolism. Well, what we're really dealing with is, uh, uh, our behaviors. These are, these are, uh, behaviors that are part of who you are. Why is it so hard for people to change how they eat? Because your food is tied to literally who you are. I mean, I know you, I'm sure you've had people on your show that are hardcore paleo, hardcore keto, carnivore, and they fight each other like it's a religion. It literally becomes a part of who you are. Everybody's like that. So if I'm trying to change somebody, somebody's behaviors,

how do you change a behavior? It's a slow, long process. It takes a long time and it's little by little. It's got to be changes that are challenging yet realistic for that individual. Now, what does that mean from person to person? Well, shit, man, that can mean a whole lot of different things. For this person over here, it might mean literally exercising once a week. For this person, it may mean exercising three days a week and adding more vegetables and eating less, whatever. But it depends on the individual

and their small changes that are challenging and meaningful, but realistic. And then you add those up over time. It's a long process. It takes a while. You also got to give people the right expectations. When someone used to come in and tell me, I want to lose 30 pounds, I would sell them on the fact that that's not going to happen. What we're going to do right now is we're just going to make you feel better. And then that would actually happen. They'd feel good about it. And then we'd move to the next step. The, the, the industry is in a terrible job of doing this terrible people. The drop-off rate is insane. Gyms just trade members back and forth diets come out, you know, every single month is anything really working. Nothing's really helping people make those

behavioral changes. So we try to communicate that in that type of a fashion, I'd say. Why would you tell somebody that they can't lose weight right away? Okay, well, I'll give you a great example. Exercise alone is a terrible way. First off, it's a terrible way to lose weight by itself. It just doesn't work very well by itself. You know that you have to combine a lot of different things to make that happen. Nutrition being one of the big factors. and that's a very difficult one to change.

So what I would sell people on is look, uh, right now you're committing. And I would always ask people how many days a week can you make it into the gym realistically, consistently forever right now? And sometimes they would tell me twice a week. I can do twice a week. That's realistic for me. No problem. Here's what you're going to get twice a week. We're going to get you a little stronger. You're going to move a

little bit better. You're going to feel a little bit, a little bit better. And your metabolism is going to boost a little bit. And we're going to start with that. You might not lose some weight. You're not going to lose weight doing that, but you're going to feel better. You're going to have more energy. You're going to move better and you're going to be stronger. And I'd get them to commit and understand that. Then when that would happen, it feels good. Like they've overcome that challenge. It feels really good. Like they've overcome that challenge. It feels really good. Now we're going to move into the next phase.

Let's talk a little bit more about maybe working out more, or now we'll start to look at your nutrition. You know, I would have clients who would come in wanting to lose 35 pounds and it would take, you know, there was one guy I trained who wanted to lose 35 pounds. He lost 35 pounds three years later. Okay. Now that was 12 years ago. I don't train the guy anymore. I haven't, I talked to him every once in a while. We're still friends. The guy has never gained a weight, a pound back, and he continues to

now live this lifestyle of health and fitness. I also have had clients in the past who've lost 35 pounds in three months. And you know, where are they now? Gained the weight back, probably not working out. Did they really do anything for themselves? Well, weight loss is, is, is a terrible indicator of success anyways. I mean, you could take somebody with the exact, that's pure bullshit. Yeah. You could, you could literally take somebody, cut their leg off. Well, no, you could, you could take a body who's somebody who's 35% body fat and never move the scale at all and completely change and alter that person's health and strength and everything else. So it's, I think it's a very deceiving indicator to go by.

So when someone, I used to use the analogy and it's an extreme analogy, but to get my point across when someone walk in and say, Hey, Adam, I want to, I want to lose 20 pounds and whatever it takes. You know, I've heard that a million times. I'll do whatever it takes. Tell me what I need to do to lose 30 pounds. I'm like, well, if all you care about is losing 30 pounds on the scale, well, it's simple, you know, stop eating for the next 30 days and walk on the treadmill every single day. You'll lose that weight. Now I would never advise someone to really do that because you'll probably fucking die, but that's an extreme analogy. And we actually end up doing something in that spectrum, right? So maybe people don't go that extreme, but we tend to do something in that direction of like starving the body, not, you know, not feeding it properly, overstressing it, training like crazy.

And even if you reach that 30 pound goal, it's so short lived because you're not in a healthy spot to maintain it long term. What you do to take it off is what you got to do forever to keep it off. So that's the way you got to look at it. And, you know, do you want to do this the fast way or the right way? It's always a way I would always answer questions that way. I want to do this. You know, I want to, I have this goal. Okay. Do you want to do the fast way or do you want to do it the right way? And then we'd get into a discussion about what those two different things mean. So basically if you were to pull out 500 calories from your diet every day,

you were to eat less food and move around a lot more. What you're saying is that if someone's not used to that, if they have never done that before, most likely those 500 calories are going to add up and you are going to be really, really fucking hungry at some point. And if you start missing exercise, you start missing workouts, you get hurt, you go on vacation, a. A couple things happen and now you're not exercising as much. Your diet gets thrown for a loop. Eventually, you're probably going to be as hungry as you were before. Makes a lot of sense. That hunger probably never quite died off. And it's certainly not going to die off in a few days. So it's kind of like

it's kind of building back up and they might rebound to be heavier than they were before. One thing that we've talked about a bit is there's no wagon. Everybody's getting on and off the wagon, and this is one of those things. I don't know what that means either. We tried to talk about that on this podcast, and we're not sure whether it's good to be on or off of it. Yeah. I don't know what it means. It's this rat race.

I think that's the thing. It's this rat race. So, I mean, I think that's the thing we're trying to kind of steer people away from the race of it and trying to get people into, uh, you know, really buying into the idea of that they can better themselves every day, you know, incrementally, which will end up to where they want to get. It's just, you have to enjoy the process. You have to, you know, be bought in a hundred percent with this is going to take some time and, you know, put, putting the work in will benefit you. And you're going to get there. It's just a matter of like changing your mindset.

You mentioned hunger. Okay. I would, I would venture to make this claim and I'll stand behind this claim that most people in Western societies, modern Western societies have never really felt hungry ever in their entire life. We've been fed every day cravings since the day we were born. Okay. People don't fast like they used to. Well, we used to have to fast because food was so scarce. And then it was a part of most spiritual practices where you fast for three, four, five, six, seven days. Nobody's done that. At the most, somebody might go, you know, 24 hours without eating because they're sick. So people don't really know what hunger is. So when people say I'm hungry, what

they really mean is I have a craving. Cravings are very different. Cravings are attached to emotion. They're attached to context. Um, you know, I'm at the movies. I crave popcorn. I'm stressed out. I crave food. I'm bored. I want to eat. I'm sad. I want to eat. So when people start to, uh, that's a, that's a big one. Like let's talk about hunger and let's talk about what that really means. And you're right. When we take away your drug of choice, which is food, you're going to have that craving because that's how you normally, that's a behavior that you reinforce with food and we're going to have to deal with it differently.

And it's okay to feel hungry. In fact, I think it's an important thing to feel every once in a while. So you know what it feels like. Now, this isn't true for everybody. There are people with certain eating disorders I would never recommend this to. But a lot of people, fasting can be one of the best tools you ever use. Not for weight loss, not for the physical benefits, although there are a lot of physical, physiological benefits, but just the mental, spiritual benefits that fasting provides.

physiological benefits, but just the mental, spiritual benefits that fasting provides. That breaking the chains from food, not having my favorite comfort thing, not having my drug. How do I deal with this boredom? Oh, it's lunchtime, but I'm not eating today. Okay, what do I do now? I'm sad. What do I do now? I'm anxious. And just start to disconnect from those things. And then when you reintroduce food, you have a different relationship with it. Because I used to love that. People tell me I'm starving. You know, like my kids, it's my kids say this all the time. I'm so hungry. I'm starving. I'd be like, okay, I have some steak from last night and some broccoli. Nah, I don't want that. Do we need any chips? Well, you're actually not starving. Let's be honest. If you were starving, you would eat anything I put in front of you. The reality is you have a craving. And so we'll have that discussion.

anything I put in front of you. The reality is you have a craving. And so we'll have that discussion. I think fasting is really important. I think that, you know, it would be, it would be very difficult for somebody just to like jump into fasting. So it would have to be something where you start to get comfortable with food, making the right choices. And then maybe you would utilize some fasting at some point, but I agree with you a hundred percent that most people haven't really felt, you know, real hunger. I've done 48 hour fast and I just did yesterday did a 36 hour fast. And I use fasting quite a bit. And I, I really, I like it a lot. And one of the reasons why I like it is because I used to weigh 330 pounds.

So I've lost a lot of weight. I've made a lot of changes, but I've also taken a long time to do it. Like you might look at some point, you know, where I lost like 40 pounds in a fairly short to do it. Like you might look at some point, you know, at the, where I lost like 40 pounds in a fairly short period of time, but this whole process has taken like 10 years. And so you guys are saying that it takes time and I couldn't agree more. Like, not only does it take time, I think it takes years because it takes years to try to figure out how to master some of this. How do we master? You're not mastering. It's not just kind of like conquering

food. You're mastering your mind, which is the hardest thing to do. Who do we, who do we look up to? You know, who, who are we following? Who are we paying attention to on Instagram and on other forms of social media? Have these people really changed or they just kind of keep improving upon who they are and what they're already doing. That's still impressive and that's still really cool, but we all understand how hard it is to really truly change who you are because you're the byproduct of everything that you ever heard about yourself. You're the byproduct of everything that you ever thought about yourself. And you're the byproduct of this weird thing in which in which of we're thinking about how other

people think about us, which is a weird interpretation might not even be true. And so that is ingrained into every cell in your body. And so we started to talk about weight loss. I'm glad you guys are touching upon all these points because these are the most important points. The point, the point isn't just about the food. The point isn't just about calories in calories out it's a long ass discussion about how can we master our mind how how can we figure out a way to have our mind stop playing tricks on us saying

that you're hungry saying that you're starving saying that you need you know how many times do you eat and then eat again it's like you just you just ate, you should be totally fine. It's a practice. Well, to your point too, Mark, about, I don't think fasting is for everybody. And I don't think fasting is something that I would recommend to somebody who's just learning about nutrition. Um, in fact, when we first started talking about the health benefits of intermittent fasting, I spoke against it a lot. And that was just because most people haven't done the work to figure out what their body needs. And so if you haven't tracked and figured out what your body needs, I think using fasting as a tool for weight loss or a strategy like that is a really unhealthy relationship with it. Cause then all you're somebody is just starving yourself. Yeah. You're just, you're, you're just

starving yourself of food when you want to lose weight. And I think that's the wrong reasons to fast. And especially if you don't know what your body needs. And what I find that, you know, I would say there's a probably 50, 50 of people that are listening right now that could like going back to our restricting 500 calories conversation that could come right into it and potentially restrict 500 calories a day and be completely healthy and lose body fat. And then there's another 50% or other half of the people that probably have fucked up metabolisms, have already done extreme dieting and overtrained, have tons of stress, already eating too low a calorie, that that would be a really bad idea for them to just all of a

sudden start restricting more calories. And in fact, they would be far better off adding to their plate and figuring out where they're lacking nutrient wise and trying to find ways to add more things that their body needs versus looking to right away subtract. Because I think most clients that I've, that have ever hired me that are struggling with weight loss, most of them are in a position where their metabolism isn't working for them. It's working against them. And a lot of that's due to outside stress or poor relationships or bad programming and training, bad freaking extreme diets. And so you got to figure that out. And the tricky part to your point again, about this takes years, is there's such an individual variance just right here in this table. I mean, the four of us

probably all eat very, as we should, because we have different goals. We have different body types. We have different metabolisms. And I think that's what's, what's wrong with our space is, you know, everybody's trying to claim that they have the best, whatever, you know, for you. And it's like, nah, it's, it's too hard to say that, you know, I might have the best thing for a group of people, but for another group of people, the message that maybe Sal's giving is, is, is a better message. You know, what are your guys' beliefs on something like flexible dieting? Oh, you know, we so you know we beat up

a good tool yeah we beat up ifym actually we came after we made t-shirts in our first year that said ifym sucks and uh i used to pick on our boy lane uh all the time because i know he's a big proponent of ifym and here's here's and i wrote a post about it a couple of years back, and I don't think that it, it necessarily sucks, even though we made t-shirts that said that I said, what it does is that I think it encourages a bad relationship with food. It encourages people, you know, the tracking part of it, I'm pro that, right. And if you've never tracked macros and you don't understand that, I think it's a good first step. Just, uh, basically to let everybody know who doesn't know it, flexible dieting, you're just

accounting for your calories, you track everything, and it gives you some flexibility towards being able to eat things that may be on other diets that you wouldn't eat. Right. As long as you're tracking it, you're good to go. As long as it fits your macros, you're good to go. That's it. Right. And Twinkies are an option.

There's the shirt right there, right? So I think it's a good shirt. It's a good, it is a bestseller, right? It's a, it's a good first step in the right direction. If you've never counted calories, you've never counted macros before learning and understanding the difference in a ho-ho versus a cheeseburger and a chicken breast and white rice, I think is a really good thing for people. But then I also, it also starts to perpetuate this relationship of I'm being good or I'm being bad, or I can restrict all this so I can have a cheat day. And so if we talk about food being one of the most addictive things out there, just like a drug, would it be healthy

for somebody to be managing their drug addiction and then restricting so they can over binge on a Saturday and fit it in? That's how I look at it because most people struggle with food the same way I've seen addicts struggle with drugs. And so that's, it doesn't, it doesn't address the behavior. It definitely can help. Look, there's, there's, when you first learn something, there's four stages you go through. And the first stage is just being unconsciously incompetent. And most people are there when it comes to nutrition. They don't know what they don't know. You ask the average person, how many calories you're eating, how many grams of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. And one of the answers you may get is what are proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Another answer may be, I have no idea whatsoever.

So the next stage is to be, you're, you become consciously incompetent. Now, you know that you don't know. And IAFWM gets stuck in the third stage. There's a fourth one, but they get stuck in the third one, which is conscious competence. Now I'm consciously counting and adding things up and fitting them within this target. And that's, you got to get there before you get to the fourth stage. But the fourth stage is where you go for real long-term total health. And when I say total health, I mean, mental and emotional health surrounding food as well, because there's a huge psychological component. So you don't want to always have to be in this conscious competence stage. You want to move to the next stage, which

is unconscious competence, where you eat according to how you feel, you know what you need to eat when it's, it's a little looser in that sense. You don't, it's okay. If you're outside of your macro sometimes because of the context or how things are. You don't have to add everything up. I've had a lot of clients come to me and freak out because I'll tell them to stop tracking. These are people who are like maniacs about tracking. And they fit everything in their macros. Like you're being neurotic. Yeah, whether it's pancakes and Skittles and chicken, whatever.

They'll fit everything in their macros. And I'll say, okay, don't track. And they're just like, uh-oh, I don't know. I'm freaking out. You're lost. I'm absolutely lost. So we saw a lot of the eating disorders that that can potentially cause. So you got to touch on, so for your audience that may not know, like, um, I'm an IFBB pro,

right? And what I saw when I got into the space, cause before that I wasn't even really interested in the space. I was blown away all my 15 years prior of training average Jane and Joe's. I saw more eating disorders in the professional bodybuilding world than I saw in all these average day Americans that blew my mind. Oh, it's crazy. And I think that part of that's perpetuated by this weighing and tracking and fitting macros and cheat, cheat foods and cheat day culture. And so that was kind of, and that was,

obviously we took a stance that was very polarizing and we knew would grab people's attention because right then was when IFYM was just like really exploding. But I mean- Fruit loop pizzas everywhere and everything else. It fits my macros. In someone's defense of IFYM and like what I've talked to Lane about many times is,

I mean, technically I'm doing that, you know, when I'm competing, I mean, I'm weighing, I'm tracking and it's got to fit my macro. So technically it falls under that umbrella, but I think it's created this culture of sharing all the shitty food I eat on Instagram and telling people it fits my macros and I got abs. And so if you're, if you're in what I used to say to people, it's like, dude, half of America is addicted to sugar and you're, you're an asshole because you're a fitness person. And what it looks like is you're standing up at an AA meeting, drinking a beer. That's what it

looks like by doing that. If you're a fitness professional out there professing eating clean and health or eating healthy, right. Or what's good for your body to be in shape and be a strong human being. And you're up there presenting these foods like to a bunch of addicts. Are you really, are you really sending the right message? And so I would challenge those that are, you know, put IIFYM in their bio and share their fucking Oreo cookie pies. A really tough topic because who, like, you know, my brother and I are, are working on a nutrition film and we've interviewed everybody, you know, we've interviewed every top, top doctor and top expert. Uh, no one agrees. And the only thing that's, uh, understood is that, uh, there's no common ground. And so I don't know

what's healthy. So I agree with your statement because I do think that sugar is a problem, but maybe it's a problem, me promoting meat. And maybe it's a problem, somebody else promoting vegetables. Like, I don't know. Like, I don't know what's, you know, I don't know what's Well, there's, there's one ass was one, first off individual variants, each, each, each, each person's body has, has a, has their own microbiome fingerprint, has their own reactions to foods. You have your own antibodies you may create and develop towards other foods, giving you intolerances. You may have different psychological attachments to certain foods. Smelling cherry pie, for example, for you may invoke a different

mental state than it does for someone else. These are all things that you want to take into account. But I think there are some general rules that are true for everybody. And one of them is you probably, I think, but you just said you think, so, so I mean, it's a thought at best. Well, here's my, here's my speculation. Uh, I would say that, uh, processed foods probably better off avoiding them most of the time, but here's why not because they're necessarily unhealthy because you can have processed foods that are nutritious and healthy. Although most of them aren't. You can. But the reason why I think processed foods are better to be avoided is because processed foods are engineered and designed to overcome your natural signals and systems of satiety. They literally hijack those things. jack those things. And we can run these tests all day long. I could give someone, you know, Chris Kresser gave us a great example when he was on our show. He said, I could give somebody plain white baked potato, no salt, no butter, and tell them to eat 3000 calories worth. And they probably wouldn't be able to, they would gag. I could give them a bowl of potato chips

and they would do that. No problem. The palatability factor is a very important factor that we need to consider. And when you eat heavily processed foods, these foods are designed to overcome that. They're designed to hijack that system. And if you're living in modern society where you're surrounded by these processed foods and you don't move a lot, one of the things you don't want to do is overeat. Well, it's really easy to overeat when you're eating heavily processed foods. I mean, how many times have we had those big dinners and you're stuffed and then they bring out the dessert and somehow you find room. Um, there was a, another example that Cressor gave us was, uh, what's that

guy's name? Man versus food. Oh, the ice cream challenge you did. Yeah. You see that one where you had to eat a whole, whole sink of ice. Oh yeah. And you had salt. Yeah. Yeah. And in order to make it through, he had to eat a plate of crispy, salty French fries to overcome his palate fatigue. And so I think that's a general rule of thumb. What a great test. He's able to eat more ice cream with the French fries. No, it's a great analogy that we use all the time because it's exactly what happens to us all the time. Who is this guy?

It's that novelty. How come this guy's not running for president? Fantastic. Maybe he will next year. So there it is right there. There he is I'd vote for that guy so I think

generally heavily processed foods you probably want to avoid because they're probably going to direct you in a direction that's not going to benefit your overall health and those systems of satiety we evolved with for thousands and thousands of years.

And if you hijack any of your natural systems, you're probably going to do something that's not good for you. Like sleep or. I would say that that statement's undeniable. Yeah. It really is because, you know, you can't argue that the food companies aren't trying to sell the product. I mean. That's where all their money goes. That's where all their money goes.

And they're, they're going to, and we can like make it sound, you can make them sound as evil as we want, but. No, we're buying it. You know, when they, when they, when they make something, if we were to create a product, if we were to make something, we're to make a mustard or something like that or whatever, right?

We're going to make a supplement, a pre-workout. We would taste it and be like, that is fucking awful. We need to, you know, people need to consume this thing. Then we would keep working on it together and we'd find something that tastes good. Be like, okay, that's palatable.

People can handle that. That'll work. And then we want, on top of that, we don't want it to just be barely palatable. We want people to come back for it. Like, okay, that's borderline addictive. That's perfect. Let's go with that. And that's the response that you want to get because you got to make sales, right?

Well, if you ever talk to, so i've met with and talked to these experts that work for these companies um and their job is to design the and the the palette to organize and design and engineer the palatability the things that go into the science that goes into making a food palatable is insane it's not just the taste it's the texture it's the sound it makes when you crunch into it it's the color it's the bag the way the the sound it makes when you crunch into it. It's the color. It's the bag, the way the bag opens. It's where they place it in the grocery store. It's the context that they sell you with the commercial and how you're eating it, when you're eating it. The aroma is all that stuff.

This is all, and you're talking about billions and billions of dollars that has been spent on making foods hyperpalatable over decades and decades of the modern food industry existing. So you're not going to win. If you eat processed foods all the time, good luck. These guys have spent a lot of money getting you to eat more of this stuff. And you know how hard it is to eat the right amount of calories, proteins, fats, and carbs when you're consuming lots of processed foods. And so I think that's a great general rule. In fact, uh, and I did this towards the back half of my career as a personal trainer. One of the things I would do with some clients is I'd say, look, I don't, I don't, you don't need to count your calories and watch what you're eating. All I want you to do is not eat processed food, just avoid all processed food. And you know what

would end up happening? They would end up losing a lot of body fat, uh, because their body would start to reach this kind of natural, uh, state of health because these. Well, good luck getting fat on chicken breast and white potatoes, you know, and broccoli. Good luck. Or just whole natural food. You can do it. You know, trust me, I've done it. You can do it, but it's much more difficult. And I, so maybe, so maybe a message to the general public, especially, uh, us parents

out there is just try to limit the amount of processed foods your kids are eating, because maybe, maybe your kid stands a shot in this world and maybe they, uh, might have an opportunity, uh, to where they stay healthy, uh, for most of their, um, childhood. And as they get older, maybe they don't have to really ever be on a quote unquote diet if they're not eating a lot of processed foods. You just relatively recently, you just competed in a bodybuilding contest, which required you to do a long diet process. And gave for pay.

Just natural progression. I just thought you were going to ask that question. We were getting to it. It is still the natural progression of it. But you just did a long stint of dieting, which meant you had to really restrict your food intake and eat particular things.

Horrible. How did at the end of it, how did a food like a strawberry or an apple taste? Amazing. And that's why, you know, back to the fasting too, when you fast, I mean, when I fasted yesterday for this 36 hour period, I went home and the first thing I ate was liverwurst and I can eat liverwurst normally. I'm fine with it, but I don't really enjoy it. It actually tasted fucking good. Right. And I'm like, oh my God, I've lost, I completely have lost my mind. This liverwurst tastes good. But yeah, during that bodybuilding show, um, anytime I was allowed like a slight cheat or anytime I was allowed even just some fruit

and things like that, it was fantastic. And so we're dealing with what we're dealing with when you're dealing with the average person who majority of the food is, is comes from processed foods. They don't know what they're eating. They're obviously not active. What you're dealing with are, and for, for lack of a better term, you're, you're dealing with an addict in the sense that look,, look, if somebody drinks five cups of coffee all day long, they're not going to feel an extra bit of caffeine. They're not going to feel it.

They have to consume all that just to feel normal. You take the average person who's consuming all these processed foods all the time, and you tell them to eat fruits, vegetables, meats, nuts, and seeds, and it's going to taste bland and boring and not exciting. Their receptors are all downregulated from all the hyperpalatable food. Of course it's going to taste bland and boring and not exciting. Their receptors are all down-regulated from all the hyperpalatable food. Of course it's going to suck. It's a slow process. You've got to slowly wean them off the drug and bring them into a healthier state. And it takes a long time. And I know we keep hammering this home, but I tell you what,

it's not as slow as you think it is. Yes, it may take years, but that goes by very quickly. And if you take two parallel lines and I move one, one degree to the left, you follow those lines down long enough and they're miles apart. And that's how you should approach your fitness and health. That's how we try to communicate what we're trying to communicate on our show is it's going to take the slow process. These are behavioral changes. They don't happen overnight, make small changes, stick to them and then add new small changes to it, and then watch what happens. And when I said it took 10 years, I mean, the whole process took 10 years.

It doesn't take 10 years to make progress. Sure. And there's so many other markers of progress. What about that client that you helped lose some weight, and they just lost about 6 pounds, 8 pounds. Someone hasn't seen them in a little bit. And someone's like, oh, my God, what are you doing different? You look great. That happens. That can happen fairly quickly. That can happen even just from eliminating some, uh, soda from your diet. If you're currently drinking soda and that momentum, that momentum is huge because now it changed the

dialogue in your head. We talked earlier about kind of changing your story. You ask someone who's real successful, like what were the shortcomings of starting that product or what? And they're like, well, there was none, you know, they kind of, yeah, they kind of forgot how hard it was. And this person that thinks that they can't lose weight now has rewritten part of their story because someone else just gave him a pat on the back for the first time in their life and said, wow, man, you're doing it. You're doing great. You look awesome. Well, healthy, healthy looks really good. Um, and you can even get healthier, not lose weight and people can see it.

Well, not only that, that's, I mean, I remember when I was one of the first trainers in my area to stop using the scale and body fat calipers and everybody thought that was like so crazy. Like how are you doing? Yeah. What are you doing? I said, well, because most of my people don't need any more of that information. What they need to learn is how to connect the dots to other other markers for example your sex drive your sleep your relationships your energy level your mood your skin your hair your shits you know how many how many people just ignore that they shit like themselves like twice a day i'm not ignoring my shit i mean so many like you ask somebody like hey when's the last time you had a good shit and they're like oh i don't know what's a good shit like what does that look like or what does that feel like people just assume that

everybody like literally shits himself on a regular basis it's like no these are all signals your body is trying to give you that you're probably not doing something right don't dm us pictures of your shit or these are all signals that you're probably on the right track well Well, in bodybuilding, they laugh all the time about like being gassy. And it's like, man, like you probably really shouldn't be eating foods that are making you gassy. What are you doing? Or the 400 grams of protein that you're consuming every single day, right? Like maybe your body doesn't need that much protein. It's something we talk about too.

So, yeah, I think that's been a big challenge for a good half of my career has been trying to get people to let go of the scale and the body fat percentage as their indicator of success and learn to look at the other markers in your life. And if you learn to look at that, it's, it's a lot more motivating day to day because it's like, Hey, you know what? My scale hasn't really changed, but fuck dude, you know what? I had the best sleep. I had the best sex in my life yesterday. I feel great. My relationships and my mood, like you start seeing, you start connecting those dots. Then it makes it easier to make those healthier, better choices or to get to the gym.

Not because you got to punish yourself for being fat, but because, hey, I know when I work out, I fucking kill it on my podcast. I know I sleep really well. I know I'm happier when I talk to my wife. Like you start to connect those dots and then it becomes a different goal for yourself. Even though the ideal goal when you first walked into my office might have been, I want to lose 30 pounds. But when I help you start connecting the dots to all these other markers, it becomes a lot easier to keep chipping away at this long-term goal. And losing that weight is the road to changing your life forever. Because if you can,

if you can even just make enough progress with your diet, if you're somebody that's heavy, you know, if you can make enough progress with your diet to start to get better sleep and to start to get a little bit better with your training, you're on, you're on the right track right there. That's, that's the road to success. You're, you're kind of on your way. You got really good momentum. I think, that's the road to success. You're, you're kind of on your way. You got really good momentum. I think, you know, people really prioritize sleep and they, you know, they hold sleep really sacred. And I, I agree 100%, but I think that your sleep can get, uh, impacted by other stresses

of your life. You're, you're training, like you can over train and not sleep and you can train so hard that you mentioned sex drive. I mean, from getting ready for a bodybuilding show, there's none of that. People just don't account for all those additional stressors in your life. And I think that's,

that's one of those things I'm always addressing when I get somebody new, it's like, you know, like I try to peer into their actual life, like what's going on and, and be able to kind of show them that, well, let's also like address,

maybe you have aches and pains and things like that too. We're going to work through all this stuff that's going to allow you to feel more energized and motivated to be here. And just being here is an accomplishment. Well, stress is a good thing. It's what causes us to adapt, right? That's what adapt and change and progress, but the right amount of stress. And I think that the, we just in general seem to think that more is always better and that's not necessarily true. And you have to take into consideration that even lifting weights as huge advocates, we all are of that. That's still a stress on the body. And if you're going through a divorce, you're just got fired

from your job. You didn't sleep, but two hours last night. And then you go to the gym and then you punish the shit out of yourself in the gym. Like probably not a good idea because you're already stressing the fuck out of the body. So I think that we have to like be able to pull ourselves back, look at other, you know, markers besides just my scale going up or down and really learn to look at other aspects of our life. And you know, is my exercise, is my diet improving these other markers? And that should be really a target. And it's funny when you really focus on that, the weight loss and the muscle becomes, you know, it happens as a by-product and then it's a lot less stressful and it's a lot easier

to maintain that long-term. Some of the things I'm most proud of in the gym are the things that I haven't done. Like the things that I, like just the other day I loaded up the bar and I was going to take this weight and I was like, okay, this would be a really good indicator. I'm preparing for a contest that we have here locally, uh, February 9th and 10th here in Sacramento, uh, the ST classic. And I'm, I'm getting ready to do a 500 pound bench and I'm hoping that I do the 500 pound bench at two 20.

We'll see what happens with my body weight. Can't make any promises, but we're getting close. Um, but you know, I, I, I took a heavy weight and I nailed it and I was like, fuck, okay, that, that felt really good. I think I can go up, loaded up the bar, chalked up, got ready and just kind of reevaluated a little bit. I'm like, there's really, I would love to do that way. And I know that I can do that way. It's not a confidence thing, but there's not really a reason for me to do it. And then what's the recovery process look like and why do it here in the gym and why not do it on a stage? Why not do it out in front of everybody? Why not save it

for game day? And I told the guys, I said, I'm done. I took my wrist wraps off and we, we took the weight off. And I've done that a bunch of times in the gym and done that a lot with Andrew. Andrew has only been lifting with me for a few months and he'll do a set and he'll be hyped up and want to do the next set. I'm like, you're good. Cause we, we gotta, we gotta figure out a recovery. We gotta figure out how you're going to recover from this workout. And there was one workout that we did where we were squatting and I was like, you know, do it like a set of eight and something happened. I don't know what happened to him.

I know you guys probably relate to this really well. It's like every once in a while, you just like go berserk, right? Like he just did like 20 reps or something. He just went all in and I was like, and he racks the weight. And I was like, that was, that was some savage shit. I'm really proud of you, but I'm like, you're, you're toast. Like you're going to actually die from that. He was sore for like the whole week.

Yeah. Well, he hit me with it. Now you got two more in you. Like, all right, cool. So you got two more.

I was like, all right, I'm just going to keep going. Cause this guy keeps telling me I got two more. So I'm just going to, and then he got quiet. I'm like, yeah,

that's right. I'll show you. Yeah. And I was like, ah, yeah. But then after that, he like,

you know, put his hand on my shoulder. I'd be like, all right, you have to go do something else and you're recovering right now. Maybe finish up with some lat pulldowns or something. You're not touching your legs anymore. You're good for today.

That's that wisdom. It takes a while to build that wisdom through years of training. It helps. And when you're working out, you're letting shit out. A lot of times people go in the gym because they're hating themselves. I hate myself, so I'm going to go punish them. They don't realize that they're doing that, but they're in there to beat the crap out of themselves. And yeah, you'll succeed at being the crap of yourself, but is that really helping you?

What do you guys think of this principle that Paul Cech shares of working in? He talks about people going to the gym and they work out. Like you said, they get hyped up. They have a bunch of coffee on the way to the gym and they get their favorite Metallica song on. They get in there, put their headphones on. They're pissed off at the world. They got their hoodie up and they're ready to, to, you know, bang some weights around. But you know, a lot of times lifting should maybe make us feel better and maybe it should be a different experience than just, you know, slamming your head against the wall. I think there's, I think there's a place for both, right? I think that, um, and I think

as I've gotten older and been lifting for long enough now that I've, I've, and I still don't think I have this mastered. I think this is a lifelong journey for yourself of learning when it is time to throw the hoodie up, throw metallic on and fucking throw some weight around. And when is it time to maybe do some mobility work, stretch, yoga, meditate, go sit in the infrared sauna. Like when it, when is it best to do each of those and learning to separate your ego or your training partner who wants to get after it today and go, you know what? Like I'm still sore from, I'm really sore from two days ago. I freaking had a lot of going on at work. I didn't sleep well. I didn't feed my body very well. Like, Hey, this is probably a better day. We would do what we call active recovery type of training, which is so hard. Yeah. That's a hard, that's the hard part. It is. It is. It

really, and it's rationalized what's going on. Yeah. It's hard. And then also, cause I think there's two people, it depends on who I'm talking to. Cause then there's the other side of the people that are looking for an excuse to fucking, and I always say this on the podcast all this on the podcast all the time i feel like whoever's listening right now it's it's the opposite of what you're supposed to be doing we all tend to correct you think you should be yeah right we it's we all gravitate to what we'd like so if you're the person who just identifies with the pre-workout hoodie crush the weights with your workout partner you're probably the motherfucker that needs to sit and do some yoga you know saying and if you're somebody who motherfucker that needs to sit and do some yoga. You know what I'm saying? And if you're somebody who want, that loves doing yoga all the time and you meditate and you're so Zen, like you probably need to fucking throw some weight around.

Deadlift. Yeah. Go, go, go move some heavy weight. Stop being so bendy. Yeah. Right.

Right. So we just, I think we're just, it's, we're naturally drawn to what we're good at or what we like. And the truth of the matter is that, you know, there's,

there's a lot of value in, in both sides. And of the matter is that, you know, there's, there's a lot of value in, in both sides and the real art is learning, you know, when you individually need to, like Paul check would say, work in and when it's time to move some weight, you know? So what do you guys think, you know, you mentioned avoiding the processed foods. You guys talked to a lot of experts. You guys talked to some of the, uh the leading people in the world on nutrition and training and stuff like that. What do you guys think are safe foods for people to kind of go after? Like, what do you guys like? Like fruits and vegetables? You like meat? You know, what are some sources of food that people should be maybe looking into? So, you know, I would say whole natural foods

are a good category to start with, but then you have a huge individual variance. Years ago, I had a client, a very, very smart guy. He was a doctor, and he was athletic. Just because you're a doctor does not mean that you're smart. That's true, but he was smart. He was a competitive swimmer in college, and he hired me to train him, and you want to improve his performance and all that. and he hired me to train him and you want to improve his performance and all that. And, you know, he would always run into kind of these digestive issues and,

you know, his progress wasn't as good as we thought it could be. And he did everything I would tell him. Like I would tell him like, eat this and eat that. And he would follow it and, you know, do this exercise and he would do it. And then, you know, about six months into our training, he did one of those, uh, doctors without borders trips where they go and travel and, you know, offer their services for free. And he had to live with this community of people that were vegans so he could treat them for – I forgot what he was treating them for. But he ate like a vegan for about three weeks.

And he came back and he's like, I feel amazing. He's like, I've never had so much energy. I feel stronger. I feel great. And we went back and forth and I debated with him for a He's like, I've never had so much energy. I feel stronger. I feel great. And we went back and forth and I debated with him for a long time. You're like, you're a liar. You're lying. But, you know, again, one thing you learn training people for a long time is the individual

variance can be incredible. And so he went and started eating vegan. He did it very intelligently. He, you know, he knew what foods to combine. He was able to track his macronutrients and know what he needed to eat and his micronutrients. And he did. He did it very intelligently. He, you know, he knew what foods to combine. He was able to track his macronutrients and know what he needed to eat and his, his, his micronutrients. And he did, he did much better. He performed better. He felt better. And so for him, meat, he just didn't digest it well. His, uh, his body didn't do well with meat. So he did very well as a vegan. So saying it's very hard to get specific with what are safe foods. We had Michaela Peterson on our show.

She's Jordan Peterson's daughter, and she follows the carnivore diet. I know Jordan Peterson does the same thing. We had Sean Baker on the show do the same thing or talk about the same thing. You ran that for a while too, didn't you? I'm doing it right now. Okay, you are. So for some people, they're so reactive. Their immune systems are so reactive, so many different foods,

that just eating meat, they feel much better. Now, for a lot of people, just eating meat may reduce their performance, may not make them feel good. Probably not good for most people, but for some people, it's going to work really well. And so learning your body is a big part of this. Well, trying to figure out why that is too. I mean, I remember when the ketogenic diet was really big and, or, you know, coming back, making a comeback. Right.

Yeah. It's been around for a while. And I was right in the thick of bodybuilding at the time. And I'm eating like six, 700, six to 700 grams of carbs. And we're talking about the ketogenic diet. And I'm saying no way I would do that. I mean, I love my life right now. I 700 grams of carbs.

I can pretty much get away with almost anything. And I still have these abs and I caught myself saying that. And I thought, well, you know what? Like, that's why I should try it. Let's see what happens when I run this keto diet, how I feel so then I can educate our audience on my experience going through it and what I've learned from it. And it was an incredible experience for me because what it taught me wasn't that the ketogenic diet was great for me. It showed me that like how much I was over consuming carbohydrates because I was inflamed all the time. I had achy joints.

And then all of a sudden I switch over the ketogenic diet and inflammation comes down. I don't have achy joints. I also noticed that I had satiety. I wasn't like craving foods all the time. I didn't need to get to the next meal. Like I felt really good all day. Not being attached to your food is like one of the blessings of a ketogenic diet. If there is, if there is a magic part of it,

I think that's 100%. And, but then when I try to tell everybody is listen, it's not the ketogenic diet. It's that I was eating all of these carbohydrates. And so, and then I also saw the benefits of me having to increase my fats. Like I noticed my skin, I noticed my hair, you know, my hormone levels. I know my testosterone kick up. Like I see all these things happening. And I think the problem that the average person get falls into is somewhere in their journey, their friend, their girlfriend or friend told them, try this diet, try this workout plan. And whatever it was, whatever that change happened for them, changed them more than they've ever changed in their life. And then they now become an evangelite. Yeah, exactly. They, they, they believe it's the end all now

that, oh, the ketogenic diet. I don't care what you say to me. And then you can't speak to that person because they've already seen the change in their body. But instead of saying like, oh, it's because you're vegan. Well, maybe you were just not eating enough vegetables and that's why, or because you're ketogenic or carnivore. maybe it's because you're eating all these shitty carbs that your body has a reaction to and maybe that's what it was and maybe finding some sort of a balance that's the hard part because it's like there's a lot of value in a lot of these diets and the main thing is that it provides structure for a lot of people because like you're you're trying to get at it's like well what food do i actually eat and it's it's tough because you actually have to do the work in investigating and going through that process where, you know, maybe we start with an elimination

diet or like a carnivore style diet where it's like, it's very minimal. And then I'm slowly introducing these other foods and I see how my body reacts. I see, you know, how that affects my sleep, you know, all these, like the energy, like all these different factors. And then I can kind of take myself through that process to understand myself on a deeper level. And people just don't want to look at it like that. They just want to consume. Yeah. And not to make things more complicated, but what works well for you today doesn't mean it's going to always work well for you because context, you know, matters. Things change, your life changes, your goals change.

What got you here might not take you there type of deal, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, there's, there's been times in my life where I feel really great eating a particular way. And then there's other times when that way doesn't really feel too good to me. So. I really liked the, uh, verbiage, um, uh, that Mark Sisson uses and says, you know, he calls it keto reset. And one thing I like about, you know, you're kind of, uh, I guess resetting your metabolism. So I think that, you know, my wife has been doing the carnivore diet with me and she was telling me yesterday, she was been doing it for a few weeks and she was

telling me yesterday, she's like, she's like trying to like justify it to me on why she's not going to do the diet anymore. And she's trying to like, almost like let me down easy. Like I'm going to be disappointed in her. And she's trying to like, almost like let me down easy. Like I'm going to be disappointed in her. And she's, you know, kind of throwing out all these things. And I'm like, no,

no. I'm like, this is the way diet works. Your diet should ever be evolving. It should always move. Shouldn't feel bad. Cause you're like, cause we were doing the carnivore month,

you know? And, uh, I'm like, no, this is not, we're not trying to make it to X period of time. And then all hell breaks loose.

Like we're doing these things for life. Like we're going to try, you keep trying stuff. I said, now, you know, what eating meat, how it feels and what it does for you and what it doesn't do for you. And she's like, yeah, I want to start bringing back vegetables and I want to start having some fruit and I want to start. I'm like, why not? Like, why, why do we have to have now for somebody who's really struggled in their lifetime from what I've seen, I've seen, I've seen huge effects from many different styles of diet. I've seen people, you mentioned the guy feeling great from vegan. I see a lot of people promoting vegan diet. I see a lot of people, uh, Alex Rodriguez recently jumped on the carnivore diet

and he said, uh, jump on it with us, you know, me and Jennifer, and we're doing it for the next 10 days or whatever. I see a lot of people feeling good and they've tried a lot of different diets, but from what I've seen from people that are heavier, uh, people that have, you know, 50, 60, 70, and so on pounds on their body is that a lot of them seem to respond pretty well to black and white. You know, if there's a set of rules and if they can follow, obviously they have to follow those rules. What I, what I think can get screwed up is, is, um, maybe like ideas that are a little bit gray, you know, when you have like, look, man, you just, just for one month, just stop eating carbs, just cut them back. And when you don't feel great, have a, have a, you know, have some extra fat in your diet. And maybe if like, you're really like bonking and have an apple or something, you know, bring, bring your blood sugar back up. Cause you're not, you don't need to kill yourself,

but get used to some of these foods for a little while and see how you feel from it. See how you respond to it. But I see a lot of people responding really well to something that's black and white. And in my experience, usually, and keto is the wrong word and you guys know this it's like these are low carb diets they're not actually there's no people aren't actually like very good people are on the medical keto yeah which i don't even think is great i've explored that rabbit hole pretty deeply i it wasn't great for me i should say um but from what i've seen is like these these rules of like some intermittent fasting or these rules of like some intermittent fasting or these rules of you're not going to eat, you know, you're only going to eat X amount

of carbs per day. Like a lot of these rules seem to have helped a lot of people. What are some things that you guys have seen that have actually really worked? Well, so the rules, black and white rules, you are correct. Help initially. And they're very good short-term plans but they're terrible long-term it's like it's like telling your kid i told you because i told you so yeah instead of teaching don't eat carbs ever again yeah you know giving giving the black and white thing is is very

similar to you know telling your kid don't do that because i told you so versus explaining to the kid why you don't want him to do that and i I think that's the problem with the, the, the knock that I have on, you know, the black and white and just telling somebody, cause I know there's a deeper psychological issue that's led this person to becoming a hundred pounds overweight. And if I don't get to the root cause of it, it'll later on express itself. Even if I get them these great results for the next six months, I know inevitably if they don't address the root cause, they'll be back in this situation later on. And so even, I know inevitably if they don't address the root cause, they'll be back in this situation later on. And so even though I know the black and white thing works

initially long-term, it's really tough. Look, we also need to understand that the process, you get a lot from the process. It's not just the goal. You know, I used to have a studio, a personal training studio that was near a hospital. And, uh, every once in a while we'd get patients that, uh, did gastric bypass and gastric bypass surgeries where they basically bypass most of the stomach and you're left with like a small pouch and you're forced to lose a lot of weight. So you, you, you have a stomach, the size of maybe your thumb and you end up losing a hundred pounds just cause you can't eat. So I would get these people every once in a while. And sometimes I'd get people after they got the gastric bypass.

And sometimes I'd get people before where they'd come and see me and say, doctor recommends I lose a little bit of weight before I get the surgery, which I think is interesting. And my goal was always to see if we could get them to do it without having to do this type of procedure. But I had two people in particular that I trained at the same time. And it was a really interesting kind of experiment. I had one guy who came in, he got the surgery. He would sometimes show up for his workout. Sometimes he wouldn't.

He wasn't super motivated or super bought in, but he did lose a hundred pounds and it took him, gosh, under a year to do so because again, he was forced to. And eventually he became so inconsistent with his workouts that we just kind of parted ways. Then I had this woman that came and hired me and she hired me before she had the gastric bypass. But through the process, she decided to continue to just work out with me and try and change her behaviors. Now it took her, I think it was something like, it was years of, it took her years to lose that weight, but little by little, she became more consistent, it was years of, it took her years to lose that weight, but little by little, she became more consistent, more dedicated, more. She changed her behaviors in long-term ways.

She ended up becoming a personal trainer years later, this guy, I ran into him, I think a few years afterwards, and he had gained some of the weight back. And I think the lesson in that was the process. First of all, she went into it differently, but the process was challenge, overcome challenge, challenge, overcome challenge. She had developed real behavioral changes. This guy was forced to lose weight, but he never really was able to tackle the reasons why he was there in the first place. He still probably had depression issues. Many people who try to solve their problems this way end up becoming addicted to other substances like drugs or sex or gambling. Because actually, if you look at the statistics of people who do this procedure, you can see that there's a higher, a pretty significant percentage of them actually get addicted to other things. It's almost like if you waved the magic

wand and you were able to make someone lose a hundred pounds, they'd gain it back anyway, because they don't have the tools necessary to keep it up. Yeah. And it's the process of challenge and overcoming challenge that is more important than the goal itself. And so I think people need to realize one thing. Look, they think they come, they go to the gym or they see a trainer or they get on a diet and they think, if I just lose 50 pounds, I'm going to be happy. What they don't really need to realize is they need to be happy to lose the 50 pounds.

It's the other way around. It's completely the other way around. And that's the message I think that needs to be communicated. So do you guys see how, you know, how crazy this can all get? And it, it's actually, it's not complicated. I think that's the mistake is that it's, it's, uh, there's a lot to it. There's a lot of things to uncover and to, and to examine, but there's some different things that you might want to think about when you're trying a particular diet. Like you mentioned on a keto diet, maybe you're not as attached to food. So maybe if you're somebody who is in a work environment that you don't have

access to like a microwave or refrigerator, you don't have easy access to food, maybe you don't have time to go out for lunch and things like that, then maybe a keto diet might play into your work, the way that you work. But also there's a possibility that maybe the keto diet doesn't fit into what your body needs and what your body responds well to. So there's a lot to consider when you start to think about when you wake up every day, when you go to bed every day, what your job is. And there's, there's so many factors that fit into all this. It sounds complicated. Everything that we're talking about right now, I'm sure confused a lot of people, just as many people as it probably helped. But at the end of the day, look at it this way. Look, treat yourself like someone you care about. It sounds very simple, but it's very true. Now, how do you treat someone you care

about? Like I have kids, right? I care about my children. Do I just give them whatever they want to eat all the time? No. Every once in a while, I'll give them a treat or let them enjoy some ice cream. But I'm not going to do that every single day. Sometimes I'm going to be a little tough with them and say, no, this is what's better for your body. This is what's going to make you feel better. This is good for your health. But every once in a while, we're going to go to a birthday and we're going to enjoy some cake.

Because at that moment, what's important is not feeding your physical body, but rather enjoying the people around, enjoying the moment. Maybe we're feeding something different. We're feeding connections and you know, whatever. Treat yourself like someone you care about. And you know, you, you brought up Paul Czech earlier. It's funny. We had him on the, we were actually one of the first fitness podcasts to have him on the show, but I'd known him for, known about him for a long time. The guy was a legend in the world. A Czech Institute down in San Diego. Oh, a legend in the wellness world. And he's a, he's out there. Right. But the guy can, he can talk about any subject and, uh, interesting individual. Amazing. I also do like walking lunges with like 275 pounds and he weighs like 20 pounds. Oh, he's doing one arm pull-ups in our gym, you know, 50 healthy, 56, 58. Anyway, he comes,

we had dinner with him before, uh, we did one of our podcasts gym, you know, 50, 56, 58. Anyway, he comes, we had dinner with him before we did one of our podcasts and, you know, we're serving, you know, the bowls of food or whatever. And he gets his food and he does this thing over where he kind of like, he's real quiet and then he comes up and he starts eating. You're like, is he going to disappear? Well, so the next day on the podcast, I asked him, I'm like, you know, I didn't know you were any particularly religious, but I saw you praying the other day over your food. And he's like, no, no, no. He goes, I wasn't praying.

And I said, well, what were you doing? He goes, well, he goes, I was asking, I was connecting with my body. And I'm not going to say it exactly like he did, but this is what I understood. I was connecting with my body and asking my body if it wanted to receive this type of food. I was connecting with the food if this food wanted to be consumed, whatever. So we had this whole conversation with the food, and he ate it, and then he ate the food. Now, at first, I thought, well, that's kind of silly. Like, you're asking the food and yourself.

But then I thought to myself, how many people would eat a Pop-Tart if they stopped and did that right before they ate the Pop-Tart? Like, you grab the Pop-Tart out of the cupboard, and you stop, and you, okay, you ask your body, is this what you want to eat? Ask your heart. Right. And your liver and your kidneys and pancreas. Exactly. And so really what he was doing is he was just treating himself like somebody he cared about. It's really what he was doing. And I think if you start there, then the process becomes easier. Then you're really looking at your food and seeing and saying to yourself, okay, am I really feeding myself like someone I care about? And again, sometimes that means you have a slice of pizza and you have a glass of wine because

you're with your buddies, you're enjoying yourself. And at this moment, what's important is that we're connecting and having a good time. Most of the time though, it means you're eating things that are actually good for your physical body. Well, to that point too, this is why I like to give simple tips. I mean, people always want to ask how much protein should I have? What exercise should I do? But a simple tip that, you know, you'd be surprised how many people eat while they're also scrolling on Instagram or watching their favorite Netflix series. And that's a really bad habit to get into because it's really easy for those, those systems get overridden by the palatability of the food and you just mindlessly keep eating and you'd be a surprise how much i've helped people just by saying when you eat just don't

do it in front of a tv and a computer just sit like eat and allow your body to do its natural signals actually chew your food yeah exactly there's another one oh my god that's a great one like so we i mean i remember paul check was the person who chew it into a liquid so he said stop drinking water. Stop drinking a liquid. And I thought, well, that's kind of strange. Like, okay. And then I remember when I tried to do it and this, I, I drink liquids with my food

now, but it was a great practice for me to do that because I realized, holy shit, I was just shoveling food. You know, I was just shoveling food and washing it down. How many times you wash it down? It's like stuck, right? Like pills. Like down. Yeah. How many times you wash it down? It's like stuck, right? Like pills. Versus, you know, try and take a, you know, take a steak and rice and chew it till like almost a liquid form.

And wow, if you eat your whole meal like that, it's amazing how you don't end up overeating, you know? So there's little thing, practices like that, that I think are. To that point about watching a TV show or whatever, you are reinforcing, you're reinforcing potential bad behavior. So what I mean by that is like, and by the way, food companies have known this for a long time. Like you go to a McDonald's and you go to a McDonald's with a play gym or

whatever, and kids fucking freak out, right? Oh my God. And what's happening is they're creating this behavioral association of food and fun. So when you're watching your favorite TV show, which is already creating these awesome feelings in you, whether you're excited or whatever,

and you're eating food on top of it, you are create, you are strengthening a behavior that doesn't necessarily need to be strengthened that way. Rather than do that, try eating in a quiet setting without any distractions and just focus on your food and watch how differently you eat. It's, it's a fucking trip. The first time you do it, you'll trip yourself out the first time. Do you think it's a good idea at some point to like, you try to, you mentioned like kind of getting past these challenges. You think, uh, it's a good idea over a period of time to make certain things a little bit harder for yourself so that everything eventually becomes

easier? Oh, geez. Are you kidding me? I think one of the reasons why... Almost like weight training, right? Oh, one of the reasons why people are... Look, let's be real now. It's the best time objectively to be alive ever in human history. We have everything. Everything we need. Food is so plentiful that people don't die of starvation in Western societies. They die of too much food, uh, climate controlled environments. Uh, we have more time for leisure than, uh, than ever before. You can explore who you want to be, and you can argue about trigger words and get pissed off over stupid shit because we can watch porn whenever we want. We have that leg. That's a great one. You can do that whenever you want. It's a bonus. Hey, that's a huge bonus uh i almost said like i was say something else

but but yet anxiety and depression are through the roof why and you got people signing up for like spartan races uh left and right why because we need to artificially create challenge because we thrive off of challenge that's what gives us meaning we need to be challenged and we need to artificially create challenge because we thrive off of challenge that's what gives us meaning we need to be challenged and we need to overcome that so when everything's easy and we're sitting around our climate controlled environments and eating food that we didn't need to kill that was delivered to us delivered to your door and you never really do anything hard and you never you know nothing's ever really a threat to you and you start creating your own stresses and it doesn't feel good so yes yes, I think it's important to challenge yourself. It feels fucking good and it gives you some meaning.

So every once in a while, make yourself uncomfortable. It's that delayed gratification. It's a lost art. In my opinion, everything is so impulsive these days because it's so easy to get, you know, consumed by that because everything we're, we're just constantly trying to make things easier with technology. To be able to artificially create more struggle through a lot of these processes is something to consider. Dude, you brought up porn, right?

You know what the fastest growing demographic of males who are now suffering from erectile dysfunction is? Men in their 20s. Men in their 20s are going to the doctor with erectile dysfunction is men in their 20s. Men in their 20s are going to the doctor with erectile dysfunction. That category of men never, almost never suffered from erectile dysfunction that needed to actually have treatment. But now young men are getting erectile dysfunction because

they're exposed to this insane visual stimulation that, look, let's be honest, like Mark, you know, we're right around the same generation. When we were be honest, like Mark, you know, we're, we're right around the same generation. When we were kids, a dirty magazine, you could have traded, a kid would have given you his bike for it. Oh yeah. I was like gold. And you had to hide it, right? You had to hide it. You had to wait for just when your parents were gone. I mean, it was, it was a lot of effort to get your time alone with yourself to do things like that. Right. Or get an actual article to look at where, man, these kids now they have access on their phone. It's for free.

Millions of pictures and videos and it's creating problems. So, you know, we didn't evolve in an environment where we got everything we wanted. And I think what's happening now is we're getting everything that we want and we're realizing it's not what we want. And so people are, it doesn't feel good. You get a lot of anxious, stressed out, depressed people. The way that I'm hearing

this message is, ladies, you got to step up your game out there. That's what I heard. Oh, man. No, don't. Stop with the ass clicks. I was kidding.

I was kidding. Well, kind of. No, man, you go on Instagram. Oh, it's crazy. Like, regular people posting ass shots and they have like 3,000 followers and it's just,

they're not even making money. I remember when I was a kid, we would see celebrities talk about like how much money they would need to get in order to get on Playboy. People are doing for free now on Instagram. It's crazy. Well, it's amazing because we end up comparing ourselves to so many other people where I'm sure that's always been a thing. I mean, you're always going to, you know, size each other up. You're always going to, you know, kind of check at the urinal and see how you're doing compared to somebody else. I've never done that. Oh, no, never, never in the thing. I mean, you're always going to, you know, size each other up. You're always going to, you know, kind of check at the urinal and see how you're doing compared to somebody else.

I've never done that. Oh, no, never, never in the shower. Yeah. Liar. Um, you know, like there's, there's always going to be these comparisons that are to be made. You compare yourself with the kid down the street

that plays football or someone on your, on your baseball team or whatever, you're always going to, you know, have that. But now, uh, it's just such a saturation and you're seeing so many people it's in your face 24 seven. And then to add to that, it's, it's also being false advertised. People are, you know, scheduling a photo shoot where they take 400 photos that gets dripped over the year. So I've got people coming to me that are like, you know, showing me, you know, Instagram

model, so-and-so who's got a million followers. I want to look like her body. I said, that bitch only looked like that for like two weeks. She doesn't look like that year round. Don't let her fool you like that. I know what she looks like right now. Yeah. Like, and I, and I use the example of go walk into a gym and look around like that. The gym is where all the fitness, the fit people are mostly are at. Right. And tell me how many ripped people that you see in a gym. You don't. You don't. Those things mean a lot to me. They matter a lot to me. You know, when I, uh, when I see people, you know, sharing these different messages and then I know like the current like shape that they're in, I mean, look, we're all going

to come and go, you know, with our physique here and there, like we're going to have injuries, we have setbacks and like, there's going to be some minor deviation, but I'll just be like, man, that guy certainly doesn't look like that, right? Well, the human, you know, the human psyche evolved to, we definitely evolved to compare ourselves to people around us because you're always trying to judge where you are on the hierarchy of things. The problem is the pool of people you're judging yourself from. I mean, your brain doesn't know that Instagram is showing you the 0.1% of people. It thinks that those are people that are around you. Like if I only ever saw pictures of NBA players,

I would think that seven foot tall human beings were all over the place. And I would feel extremely short at six feet tall. The reality is I've never seen anybody seven feet tall in real life, except for when I've gone to an NBA game. I've never seen them before. So that's what's happening. People are looking at these pictures and they're comparing themselves with the best of the best.

Go outside in the real world. Look, if you work out two or three days a week and you've been doing it for six months to a year, you're more fit than 90% of the people that are around you in your neighborhood. Just go to Disneyland instead. Oh, geez. Sit on a bench and you'll feel good about yourself. You will. And this is also why people freak out and think things are so scary.

You know, you go through your feed, your news feed, and it's like, oh my God, the world's going to end. Everybody's so terrible. Everybody's so not really. Which is also why I can't stand the beast mode message that's out there too. Because then what, again, going back to the average person who's looking at this, they see this body that looks incredible. They, and they think it's year round. And then they, what ends up happening is they, they try and obtain this, this unrealistic physique and they end up giving up. And then what they end up doing is saying to themselves, like, I just don't got it. You know, I don't, I don't, I obviously don't

have enough beast in me to, to look this way. And that's, and I'll never, and they give up and they, and it's unfortunate. And, you know, a lot of that message is being perpetuated by other professionals in the space and just not a fan of that message. It doesn't, it sure, it resonates with me. Like I like that. Like I like clicking on someone's video and it's like, get after it's like, man, I, yeah. Cause I know how to monitor that. And I know, but the average person who's trying to figure things out for themselves and sees a body like that. And then, you know, here's the beast mode and sees cheat days. Like there's, this is what they're getting as like, Oh, this is what I think I'm supposed to do too. And it's like, man, that's

going to be an uphill battle, man. There's messages that are, that are way too soft that sometimes you see them and they catch you at the wrong time. You're like, right. And there's messages that come off way too hard and way too harsh. And you're like, well, that's not appealing to your average person. And, uh, it leaves us, it leaves us kind of confused on like, you know, where we should be, but that's why podcasts can be so great is because we've got this long format where we can communicate and we can say, yeah, like, look, a keto diet can work great. These other diets can work great. A higher carb diet can work great. It worked great for you when you did bodybuilding and it's worked, you know, a lot of different diets have worked well for different people for a variety of reasons.

But when you only kind of see like the surface of it is when I think people start to get a little bit confused. And, um, I saw someone kind of mentioned the other day and I was like, man, I just, with the type of people that follow this guy, it, it, I was kind of pissed. I'm like, oh man, it's just, the message is a little off. You know, he was saying something about like, you know, just kind of shoot to be around 70% with your diet. And I was like, you can't say that to people that are new. Like they, they need some structure and they need some rules, you know, they need some things to like follow. And they also don't know what that means. What does that mean? 70% of what? Yeah. Yeah. And I was just like, you know they need some things to like follow they also don't know what that means what does that mean 70% of what

yeah yeah and I was just like you know but then I also thought about it more I'm like I understand he's basically just saying look just get comfortable

with healthier food for a little while is basically what he was saying and I think anybody can agree with that yeah dude like don't even really worry about a quote unquote diet

just don't eat processed food for a month and get rid of sugar you know try to bump out some sugar and you'll be good to go and get used to how that feels. And then we'll worry about other things after that. I mean, I mean, we're hammering a lot on, on things like Instagram and social media, but the reality is new media is really, uh, ushering in a new era of, uh, of, of informed, uh, individuals.

It's a great time. It's a great time. I mean, you talk about long form podcasts. This couldn't exist before because the, the, the bandwidth was so limited, you know, it was all soundbites. You watch TV and it was like, you got to talk, all right, you know, we got Mark Bell on here. He's going to talk about the ketogenic diet. All right. You got 15 seconds and then they'll, they'll, you got to say soundbites. You got to sound, you know, say cool things and not really give out good information. Well, now the bandwidth is almost unlimited. We have podcasts, we have social media, we have, um, abilities to communicate with people with very low barriers to enter. Um, almost anybody can start a podcast and broadcast it out. Almost anybody can start a YouTube channel and put out

videos. And if it's good, it'll go viral. It doesn't cost very much to do so. So I think it's a, it's a good time. I mean, look at the end of the day, you know, although I may sound like I'm complaining, the reality is the average consumer today is more educated than they were 20 years ago. When I started off as a trainer, the average woman today isn't as freaked out about lifting weights as she was 20 years ago. The average person sees a before and after picture 30 days, you know, massive transformation. The average person now knows that question it at least. Yeah. They know that's kind of bullshit. Whereas before, you know, they were buying, I mean, one of the first investments I made as a young kid trying to build muscle was a cybergenics. You remember that? Remember those ads? You had the before and

after, and I bought like 12 bottles of shit. Those workouts were impossible. It killed you. It made you sore for a month. But that's not why you buy it, right? You buy it because it had 12 bottles of pills and you thought, Oh, I take this one at this time. And, you know, they, charismatic people. And they don't necessarily have the best information. The ones with the really good information tend to be boring and dry. And so one of our goals, uh, with our, with Mind Pump is to combine the two. We want to be able to be entertaining, charismatic, but also deliver the right information because if we don't. Be exciting and wet. information because if we don't exciting and wet, that's Google, Google that turned on. Yeah. But you know, if you combine those two things, I think that you'll, you'll get across to more people and

we'll get the right information. Exciting and wet. That's right. I see that as a tag. Next commercial Doug. Okay. Oh man. Just a little splash. So we had Justin, I'm going to, I'm going to sell Justin out right here. Oh, great. So this is like our first year or whatever. And we're organically growing. He's like, I'm out of here. I'll see you guys. We're high-fiving each other and talking about how great we're doing and excited that we're gaining traction with the podcast.

And we all decide that, hey, we're starting to make a little bit of money. Let's throw some money into advertising. Hey, you know, we've got, we're starting to make a little bit of money. Like let's throw some money into advertising. And Justin comes in one day with this brilliant idea. And he says, you guys let's advertise on porn. You go, listen, we're, we're, we're raw truth. We talk about all these crazy subjects. We cuss, we swear.

Like there's, we, we, we touch all the third rails. So, you know, the people that are watching porn, I don't think are going to be offended by us. And the, and the price was like, it's dirt cheap. Yes, it's cheaper there than anywhere else. And so we must've spent, I don't know, three or four days. We all had assignments, you know, we all went home

and everyone had to write their five ads, you know. And the goal, remember the goal is, cause we all, you know, we're sitting around, we're like, okay, how do we get someone to click, to go off the porn and click on our ad? It's gotta be something. We're interrupting their sesh. So we gotta, you know, make go off the porn and click on our ad? It's got to be something. We're interrupting their sesh.

So we got to, you know, make it clever. So the ideas that we came up with are pretty, pretty terrible. It was a bad idea. It was a bad idea. Yeah. We didn't make any money. We didn't get any new followers. To my defense, they agreed.

So it's just as much your fault. Yeah. What were some of the ones that we came up with? I don't even remember. They're too bad. Yeah. I think I just mentally blocked it out. We'll share an email form over to Mark so he can get a laugh one day.

We were revisiting it a couple of years ago. It was something like, get Jack so you can stop jacking off here. Yeah, it's along those lines. What was the one in your hole? Put mind pump. Fill your holes with mind pump. Fill your hole with mind pump. Fill your holes with mind pump.

Yeah. That kind of thing. Oh, my God. It was just... Yeah, mind pump. Better than a gang bang. Not our best idea. You know, we've definitely.

I get people on my YouTube. They say, uh, just came from Pornhub, still fapping. Now I'm like, huh? You, you, my friend, have that. You have won. If you can do that. Yeah. Uh-huh.

You got a listener for life. Yeah. It happens frequently. I don't know what's, I don't know happens frequently. I don't know what's going on. To kind of put a punctuation on it, we've talked a lot about eating and stuff like that. How do you guys eat? What do you guys do nutritionally for yourself at the moment? Yeah.

Okay. At the moment, like mine's different than probably ever right now. So I'm probably at the lowest volume of training that I've been at in probably 10 years. You talk about, we touched on the Paul check working in. a lot of my focus has been around that my relationship great you turned weird no no it happened you're getting old and weird no we check them no no don't worry i'm still bodybuilder guy at heart and so still love all that we lost them we lost a good one guys but you started to wear those poofy pants. I would say I'm fasting more now. And so typically for me, it's like a once a week thing where I'll do somewhere between an 18 to a 24 hour fast.

I'm eating a higher fat diet, moderate protein, but still carbohydrates. I consume roughly between 150 to 200 grams of carbs on a pretty regular basis. You're really paying attention to like the numbers or kind of just eyeballing it because you've been doing it for so long. Not, yeah, I'm not, I am not weighing. In fact, that's like part of what I'm doing right now is not weighing, not tracking because I've done that for so long. On the show, I talk a lot about that.

I think it's very important for people to track at some point, to weigh at some point. I think it's most clients that I've ever trained, if I asked them, what is six ounces of a sweet potato look like? Have no fucking clue, you know? So I think it's an important lesson that everybody does at one point, but then I also think, Oh my God, that was 14 ounces. Yeah, no. Right. And remember the first time you put a sweet potato on the scale? Like, yeah, you're like, I'm getting screwed here. You can't work out a different deal, you know? Right. So, so for me, because I, you know, for almost four years there, I was immersed in the bodybuilding culture and the weighing and the measuring and being neurotic about all those things. I'm kind of on the other end of the spectrum, but not on the other end of the spectrum

as I'm going to be over on this side. I love to weave in and out. Like, uh, I just came off of. It's fun. Yeah. No, it's fun to experiment and to learn what's feeling good and what's working. Right. And so that's kind of where I'm at diet wise right now is I'm not, uh, I'm not taking selfie mirror pics or bathroom pics right now and comparing what my abs look like and shit like that. Yeah. So I'm a, I'm on the woo side a little bit. Uh, but also enjoying good balance.

Like I'm enjoying foods right now. I'm not caught up in my, my aesthetics like I was just a couple of years ago. And then, uh, what's the fasting doing for you personally? Like how, like how's it making you feel? And, uh, what are you learning from it? Well, there's a lot of things. One of the things that you touched on, I think is, is so important is I realize like these foods that you normally would categorize as don't taste very well, or I don't like them. And when you reset and you take everything away from your body, and then you allow yourself to have these things. That was a sugar addict my whole life. I ate, uh, you couldn't

come to my house without seeing bags of candy and ice cream in my freezer. And that was all the way through my mid twenties. And so I, I still battle with that. Like I, I, I'm not the type of person who can have sweets in his house because I don't, I don't have the discipline to say, okay, I'm going to have just one. If I go one, I go all in. And so when I fast and I take away and I detach myself with that, with, with food, it just gives me such a better relationship with what's what my body wants and needs. That's kind of why I mentioned that black and white thing earlier. I was basically speaking about myself. Like I respond really well to that. And so, um, but a lot of people that I've helped have responded really well to that as well, but probably because that it's been my experience. So maybe I'm kind of sharing this black and white method to them a little bit, you know, more,

more, uh, high level, high level athletes do really well with that. So do I. So I agree with you on that. Like it's, it's much easier for me to, to be that way. But I mean, and then fasting too, it's like, it always reminds me again, like we, we mentioned this, we think we're hungry. Like, am I really hungry? Like it's only been, you're just being a bitch, right? It's only been six hours. Yeah. My body can go for days and days and days without food. I'm really still craving. So that, that kind of consistent intermittently introducing fasting allows me to kind of reset and detach from the food. Um, I'm not using it for a weight loss strategy.

It's more the, the food relationships and then like reminding myself of what my body needs and wants. I just realized that I look really tall right now. Cause you're standing like that. I know people watching probably think you're the biggest one on my pump. You look great. Yeah.

Appreciate that. Uh, how do I, I, I always pretty much eat more on an intuitive level, meaning at some points I'll increase my carbohydrates or my fats. Other times I'll eat mostly plants and I'll reduce my protein intake. But at the moment, I'm consuming more than I normally do. I like to eat foods that are – I like egg yolks a lot i like organ meats a lot red meat a lot uh my carbohydrate sources tend to be the

easily digestible forms like white rice how do you get in the organ meats uh just you just get like liver and heart and stuff from like a butcher or something like that yeah yeah yeah um bone marrow you know we'll go buy some uh some bone marrow from the, from the whole foods and we'll suck it out of there. Oh, it's good shit, man. It's really, really good. I'm making a stew. Yeah. I like high cholesterol, uh, in my diet.

I've noticed strength gains from doing that. Do you ever put like a heart or liver in like a beef patty? Yep. Yep. Yeah. Cause that doesn't change to me. It doesn't, I don't know. Disguises it well.

Yeah. I don't know. I, I'm not like, oh, that's gross. It tastes like a burger to me still. No. And the other thing too, is I'll take chicken livers and I'll just saute them with some, some ghee, a little bit of seasoning. Um, and, uh, and that's pretty much it.

I don't need much in there. And I actually enjoy the taste. Just giving you a ton of nutrients, right? That is very nutrient dense. Extremely nutrient dense. You can actually overdo it. You can get too much, uh, you know, vitamin A, for example, if you overdo that. I've learned that one.

But I mean, that's, I eat more, like I said, on an intuitive level. So sometimes that means I eat more, eat less. So what are some of the signs that I look for? If I start to feel a little bit inflamed, I'll reduce my carbohydrate intake. If I start to- He looks pretty flaming from where I'm sitting. He is. On fire. He emanates. carbohydrate intake. Um, if I start to pretty flaming from where I'm on fire, uh, if I, uh, start to feel, um, like my digestion's a little slow, I'll reduce my protein intake a little bit.

Um, uh, if I start to feel sluggish with my energy, that's usually when I'll fast. Uh, cause I noticed a boost in energy when I do that, uh, for about six months, I did a 72 hour fast once a month. And I experimented with that. And I six months, I did a 72 hour fast once a month. And I experimented with that. And I noticed, you know, one of the things I noticed from, from prolonged fasting, not the daily intermittent fasting, but from the occasional long fast was the awesome rebound effect I would get afterwards. Like I'd go on this 48 or 72 hour fast. Then I'd slowly refeed my body and I'd get these boosts of performance in the gym. This is something I don't think we've ever talked about on this podcast, but we are talking,

ladies and gentlemen, about one of my favorite topics of all time. How about super compensation? I love that. I love that word and the way that that feels. And you've experienced this in bodybuilding. When you deprive yourself so much of people will say, oh, I get a refeed. And it's like, bullshit, this isn't a refeed for you. You eat like a pig as it is.

You already consume a lot of calories, but when you really dump those calories and dump those carbohydrates, and then you actually do like a real refeed and those glycogen stores start to fill up, you feel like the fucking incredible Hulk when you're in the gym. It's amazing how strong you feel.

I tell people, so I openly discuss my anabolic use and cycles that I've ran. Wait, what? Yeah, I tell everybody about all that. Right? I feel lied to. Right. I got to get this guy out of here.

And so I tell people that the feeling that you get when you do that is more than any massive shot or dose of testosterone I've ever taken in my life. That's how powerful that is. It's, it's insane. I could be on a, on a massive cycle of something and I could do that with my food ready for competition. And the most anabolic I felt that entire run was after I've been deprived for a long time. I've been doing some of that right now. Cause I'm trying to prep for this, uh, power lifting meat. I benched over 500 pounds since I was like 25 years old and I'm 42. So I I've had a goal since, since I first benched a 500 that I wanted to do it for like 10 years. And then once I kind of got to that mark, I was like, I'll be sick if I can do it for like

another 10 and we'll, we'll see what happens. But, um, now I'm trying to do it at this, uh, lower body weight. So I've been implementing some fasting and I'm like, well, it doesn't make sense to like fast through these heavy bench days. I mean, I know that fasting, you know, it can kind of, uh, your body kind of goes through this process where it starts kind of protecting you and you're not, you know, you're not chewing up muscle and things like that. But, um, when I started to really think about it, I'm like, well, it'll make more sense to eat food around the training. And so like today, today I actually get to, I get to eat for the day. It's not a fasting day. And then, uh, tonight I'll have some sushi and then tomorrow

morning I'll have a breakfast that has a little bit of carbohydrates in it and I'll come in here and I'll bench heavy. So I've been doing like some fasting kind of, uh, going into like the day before I, uh, I'm going to do a heavy lift and, lift and uh it's been it's been serving me really well so far it's been like it it's been wild i haven't really talked about it much here because i don't like to talk about stuff that i'm just starting to experiment with too much because i don't want people to be like i'm gonna try that right but uh so far it's really having a profound effect now did you did that light bulb really go off for you when you just competed recently was that or have you kind of always known that and always use that method? It was from competing.

And, uh, my, um, honey Rambod was the one who helped me with my, uh, bodybuilding show. He was the one who did my diet and you guys should definitely have him on your show. He's worked with Jay Cutler and a million other, uh, professional bodybuilders. Uh, Phil, uh, Phil Heath is one of the main guys he works with, but that guy has got a lot of great information, but he, uh, he was, you know, telling me like, you know, Hey, you know, you should have a cheat tonight, you know, and most of the time the cheats were pretty conservative. So I was like trying to be meticulous about it. I only had about an eight or nine week prep, uh, for the show. And so I didn't want to, you know, do anything the wrong way. I wanted to try to follow what he was saying. And, um, he's like, you know, do anything the wrong way. I wanted to try to follow what he was saying.

And, um, he's like, you know, I have some potatoes and he's like, you know what to, you know, top, but just, just fucking cheat, you know, just like, but eat, eat some good carbohydrates, but just, you know, once you do that and once you had your dinner, he's like, just fucking cheat. And so I, I just kind of ate a lot of, you know, not a, not a ton of junk food, but I ate some junk food along with my dinner. And then it came in the next day and I'm like, I have never felt, and I wasn't my strongest, but I have never like felt that before. I've never felt strong like that before. And I was like, man, I feel like I could just pick up anything in here.

This is amazing. I explain to people, it's like a, it's like a sponge, right? And you know, you're, the nutrients is like water running through a sponge and where most people are just constantly oversaturated and most of that water just kind of runs to the sponge. You wring that all out and those receptors are just primed to just take up everything. And you feel that, man. It almost felt like I was wearing like five pairs of elbow and knee sleeves for the day. Like I just felt like hulked out and I felt like I could press or lift anything. It felt awesome. Studies will even show that consistent protein feeding all the time actually reduces the, uh, the protein synthesis signal. You actually start to become less efficient with the protein that you consume. In other words,

more of it gets turned into energy and less of it gets used for the rebuilding, uh, and, you know, recuperative, uh, processes. And so avoiding protein and then eating it, you'll get that kind of boost in protein synthesis. So I get a, dare I say, anabolic effect from doing a prolonged fast every once in a while and then slowly refeeding.

I have some of the best workouts of the whole month when I do that and I feel amazing. Especially since he touched on probably having junk food, which means you probably quadrupled your sodium. And that's a lot of what you feel too.

Because that's amazing when you've been on a low or a moderate type of a sodium diet and then you get this surge. So the surge of the protein, the surge of the carbs, surge of the sodium. I mean, you just feel, I feel more anabolic then than I ever do taking anything synthetic. It's amazing. I like what both of you guys are saying because neither one of you are like, I'm on this diet. You're just like, this is kind of, this is a sketch of what I'm doing. And I think that that's, that's where I'm hoping a lot of people get to that. Listen to your show. I'm hoping a lot of people get there from listening to this show and listening to, uh, some things they might've found out from, uh, some of the people that have been

on Joe Rogan show and things like that is, you know, get yourself to a point where your worst day still looks a lot better, you know, than, than, uh, than it used to, right? Like it's, it's always improving. So sometimes you'll run into people that in the fitness industry and they're like, ah, I kind of eat whatever I want. And then you find out like, ah, they're still having protein shakes. They still utilize fasting and their version of whatever they want is way different than eating burritos all the time. Right, right, right. How about for yourself?

What are you doing? He eats burritos all the time. Yeah, I was going to say, I eat pizza, drink beer, and kick ass. This is the guy I want to hang out with. Right, yeah. Blocks of meat. Blocks of cheese. Lots and lots of cheese.

Wheels of it. Actually, for me, I went through a whole process of trying to figure out why I was, I had a chronic acid reflux and that, that was one of those things that, um, I just live with it. I thought that that was like a genetic gift I was given. And my, my parent, my both, my dad has it, right. Has the sleep apnea, like all these different things like associated, uh, with that process. And, and, and for me, I, I just thought I had to take the medication every time I ate. And so that was just how I lived. I was constantly eating Tums and trying to medicate myself,

but would eat better and eat quote unquote clean and go through that process. But I didn't really get a handle on that. I still had, you know, issues with acid reflux. And so actually what I mentioned previously, you know, issues with acid reflux. And so, um, actually what I mentioned previously, you know, uh, about carnivore diet, I went through that process of, um, even before that I fasted and that was the first part for me to really realize, uh, you know, how, uh, there was this like hysteria about eating. Like I had to, had to eat, like, uh, I felt like urgency to every two hours. Yeah. There's, and it was just these false signals I was getting. Anyway, so that was the first sort of aha thing for me.

It was like, I don't need to eat all the time. Yeah, what if the food in my gut was actually digested first before I ate again? Yeah, weird concept, right? I think a lot of people just don't realize that you don't have to struggle through all these things. And that was something that now I can address this. And so I went through that process of like, you know, basically eliminating everything, reintroducing things and found that gluten didn't really do well with me. And so I started, uh, you know, seeking out different carb sources and, uh, you know,

adjusting my diet accordingly. And, you know, and I, and I eat basically based off of what feels like it nourishes me and it makes me feel good and gives me energy. And, you know, I've got a good handle on that now. And it's like, you know, the bloating and like the all the additional stuff that went along with that is been eliminated. And so now I just feel healthier. And I think that was my goal was just to like get in a healthy place. And I'm going to build off of this even more. So it's just been a process for me.

You just came and it was like a couple of months ago you were on the carnivore. You're not full carnivore right now. You're eating carbs. No, I'm not full carnivore. I'm, I'm definitely eating carbs. But there's, there's carbs. I'm avoiding like a lot of wheats and I'm, I'm avoiding a lot of these processed foods and things that, you know,

I wouldn't eat it very often, but at the same time, uh, I was a little more casual about it. Cause it's like, I'm hanging out. I have two kids, like, you know, we're out, you know, going out to restaurants. I'm not, not super neurotic. I'm not competing for everything, uh, for anything. Uh, so yeah. So now I've just been a lot more mindful about, uh, what I'm eating and like what the quality of the food that i'm seeking out the consequences of you um eating some of the things that maybe you shouldn't be eating i would imagine it has improved though right like so if you uh if you go back to eating something that used to always kill you and give you acid reflux

does it still have the same response as it used to? Or are you getting, or is your stomach getting better? It's, it's actually, um, I went through a process of it being even, even a, a stronger reaction. So when I would reintroduce it, uh, it was, it was painful. Like almost immediately I would get acid reflux as a result. I understand. It was getting like, you were more sensitive to it. Way more sensitive to it. And I think a lot of that is just, you're more aware, right? I think, I think when people

are just kind of eating whatever they want, a lot of these signals that your body's naturally giving you just kind of gets blunted. Kind of like I told her, I was saying earlier that, you know, how many people actually really like look at their shits and go, you know, am I shitting normal? And if you're not like, that's your first signal that your, your body's probably not digesting it ideally. And so, you know, I think? And if you're not, that's your first signal that your body's probably not digesting it ideally. And so I think you're less aware of it, then you take it away. And then I don't know if it's the body getting worse because of it or more so you're just now more aware. I think that's part of it. It's a bigger contrast. So when you're healthy for a longer period of

time than when you feel unhealthy, it feels worse than it did before when you were unhealthy more often. But I do think there may be an immune response going on. I know that when you look at studies with, you know, children who have food allergies, for example, or adults with food allergies, that small, there's now these studies being done with these little bit of exposures of these like microscopic exposures to these types of foods, where the body actually becomes more resilient. And if food intolerances are in fact an immune response, which most experts would think at least the immune system plays a role in a food intolerance that may be completely avoiding may enhance that immune reaction. And you may be better off eliminating and then slowly reintroducing and then keeping a small amount in your diet to prevent the, that strong reaction that you would have if you just

abstained and then had it every once in a while. So there's, there's some, there's some speculation around that right now. I think it probably would put both probably plays a role. That makes a lot of sense. What do you think was the main thing that, uh, helped? Cause you, you don't have acid reflux, uh, as much anymore, much anymore unless you go back to some of these foods. You mentioned the wheat and gluten and things like that, but there's people listening right now that are like, fuck man, I'd love to be able to get rid of this. How did you ultimately kind of put it behind you? Well, there's part of it that I realized was I wasn't producing acid at the right times. And a lot of what Paul Cech was talking about with drinking water at the same time of eating.

And then a lot of this was not allowing me to produce acid at the right timing. And there's some things like HCL pills. Sal introduced me to supplement-wise. I was like, okay, I'll try this out. And I'll try to stimulate that ahead of time. So that way my body's starting to process the food. So before you had a meal, you'd have a supplement. Yeah. And so I, I saw a little bit of benefit to that. What stuff was that? HCL. Oh yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's like hydrochloric acid. Yeah. And it's like

increasing the acid, the acid, uh, you know, acidic properties of the stomach. So a lot of people think that acid reflux is too much acid when in fact it's actually the opposite. It's too little. Yeah. And it's acid kind of ending up in a spot that it's not supposed to, and that's why it burns, right? Yeah, exactly. And so, uh, and then timing of when I ate to play a factor, uh, and just giving my body enough time to really digest the food was huge. Uh, so I ate bigger meals earlier in the day and then also, you know, allowed my body to kind of process that. And that kind of allowed me to, uh, when, when I would lay down, I wouldn't have those, you know, back memories, man. Oh,

just the gurgles. And it just, so it was awful, man. I used to just, just suffer from that and just wake up in the middle of the night at like two in the morning and just, just burning. And, um, spaghetti and meatballs is the best for that. Oh, it's the best. Yeah. It just burns our pizza. Yeah. So, and I was a big pizza eater, so that's, that was definitely not helping my cause.

Um, so yeah, that was the main thing. I mean, really. And then narrowing it down to a lot of these specific foods that had gluten in them and then just staying on that and then reintroducing it just showed me so much of it was coming from that. It was pretty substantial, like the reaction I got. Whereas you thought it was like acidic foods. I was like, oh, man, maybe it's from all these spicy foods I was eating or, or, you know, like something with like a lot of tomato paste or whatever. It wasn't even the case. So I would, I would eat that and I was like, fine. So it was interesting, but it was a process and I had to, uh, you know, slowly kind of reintroduce and like really wait to see how I responded. What are some things you guys do for recovery? Like just recovering from your day, recovering from your workouts. Um, how do you get yourselves to, you know, uh, have a high quality

of life? You guys are very busy. This podcast has become a thing for you guys. It's become a, become a business and I'm sure there's some stress that surrounds it and a lot of, a lot of responsibilities and things like that. So how do you guys, uh, uh, get some rest, relaxation and recovery? Infrared sauna and masturbation. Those are like my same time. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. I get to watch secret for all y'all. It's terrible too because the sauna is in our studio. Doug has to clean it. Yeah. So they got to watch every once in a while. No, I think it, it, it really depends. Right.

So, um, some, some things that I i've i've started to create in in my life as a good habit like uh for these for what you're asking um about every two to three months uh katrina who's my fiance my partner she is really good about getting me away so we now live in this we're so connected we're on it does help to have someone do that for you no it does hey like you need to you know because because if you ask me i'll always say no yeah if we if i oh don't worry we'll take one we'll take one and then it'll never happen so we agreed a long time ago before mind pump even was to the size that is now that hey you know i don't want to be consumed by all this tech and consumed by

this business that, Hey, when I'm grinding away, you know, I need you to just book it ahead of time, you know, make sure it's slotted in the calendar. And when that time comes, I go somewhere. And a lot of times it's by the beach or up in the mountains. And I read a book, I get rid of my computer, I get rid of my phone and I completely detach from those things. Uh, for me that, uh, that has helped me out for like, when you talk about managing like stress, uh, workout wise, uh, you know, for me, if I'm, if I'm really sore, that's always like my indication that I'm overreaching and I didn't need to, you know, have that much volume or I didn't need to push that hard. And so I just kind of, that's like an ebb and flow for me. So when I'm feeling the stress on my body,

if my joints are aching, that's normally, so when we talk about this on the show a lot, we tend to gravitate towards the things that we like, we're good at, like my power lifters normally have achy joints. Why? Because they stay in a strength phase for too long and they don't transition out of a hypertrophy phase. My bodybuilder guys, you know, they don't do enough strength training. They're always pumping, pumping, pumping, and then they're wondering why they don't have this dense, hard muscle. It's because you don't strength train. You don't transition out of a hypertrophy phase. My bodybuilder guys, you know, they don't do enough strength training. They're always pumping, pumping, pumping. And then they're wondering why they don't have this dense, hard muscle. It's because you don't strength train, you don't deadlift, you don't do these great things. So, you know, just being aware of that, I have my own same habits. You know, when I was bodybuilder guy, I was chasing the pump all the

time, not strength training enough. When, you know, I was chasing PRs and trying to catch up to Sal's deadlift, I was strength training way too much. So normally if I'm, if I feel aches or pains or things going on physically from my training, it's normally a great time for me to reflect on my programming. Where am I probably? And more often than not, it's because I'm stuck in a phase of training that I've been enjoying. And that's normally my, my time to transition myself out of that. That's a really good point. I think people miss that. You know, they, they think like, oh, well I use these, uh, muscle stem machines and I take amino acids and I, and you know, these things, Hey, if they work for you, then that's great. But how about you just program,

you know, something that's more logical and stop lifting like a goddamn idiot. Right. Right. That's the biggest one. one. Yeah, my training follows my life. So there have been times in my life that were very stressful. You know, if I had a loved one that was sick about five years ago, and so I would go to the gym and it was just to take care of my body and feel good.

So I wasn't chasing PRs. I wasn't trying to build tons of muscle. I was just trying to move and keep myself healthy. And then when my life is going good and things seem to be flowing pretty well, then I'll go in the gym and I'll challenge my strength. I'll challenge my gains and I'll push the intensity. Um, sleep is another big one. I prioritize sleep. So I make sure now to get at least eight, seven to eight hours every single night. Um, about two to three hours before that we shut off all the lights in the house and we either go by candlelight or we go by real, real dim light and we'll wear blue blockers.

That actually makes a big difference. It sounds woo-woo, but it actually makes a pretty big difference. We make sure the house is the right temperature and we prioritize sleep every single night. I always try to wake up at the same time every morning and go to bed at the same time every night as well. A lot of people don't realize that staying up real late on the weekends actually throws you off more than you realize. So I try to wake up at five or six every day and I try to go to bed by nine or 10, uh, nine 30 or 10 every night, uh, as well. Um, spending time with my family is probably the best thing, uh, that helps me with recovery. Being present with my kids is a big one. Like if I sit down and we're playing a board game or we're at the park, just being there at that moment, not on my phone, not worrying about work, not stressing over

anything. I think about ideas, but actually paying attention and, and being with my kids is one of the most recuperative thing that I, that I can do. I can totally echo that. Definitely. And then, and then taking vacations. I was for, for most of my life, never took a vacation, worked 12 hours a day. And now I prioritize leaving, uh, and unplugging at least, uh, once to twice a year, maybe three times a year where I'm gone for four to six days. And I'm just, you know, enjoying what I'm doing at that moment and actually, uh, improves my productivity at the end of it, which is, which is kind of interesting. You're actually spending less time working but being more productive when you are.

And those things came with age. I learned as I became older what's important and what makes me a more productive human being. And so those are the big ones I'd say that are for myself. I'm really fascinated with fasting. Not fasting just from food, but fasting off of things. Abstinence. Yeah.

Yes. It's, what do they say? It makes the heart grow fonder, right? Right. And how much fonder are you of diving back into business after you fasted away from it for a period of time? Every major religion and spiritual practice includes some form of abstinence, whether it's abstinence from food or sex

or from whatever. Family, whatever. Friends. Disconnecting and just abstaining from things is an incredible practice. Isolation. It makes a huge difference. You know what's one of the big ones? You're going to start to see this. We made this prediction

a little while ago, and I'll make it on your show here. I predict that the next big fasting trend is going to be unplugging from electronics. Social media. It's already happening right now. What was the term? Going dark. Well, and the education will come from Facebook and Instagram, probably, right? Just like drunk driving ads. Where do they come from? They come from the beer company. Drive, you know, drive responsibly, all that kind of stuff. It will probably come from them because if they give a shit, you know, if they fucking care, they're going to share this message of, yeah, look, it's great.

You use our product. We love that you use our product. We love that you find advertising on our product. There's a lot of, you know, social media does a lot of great things and it does a lot of horrible things like does downright evil things to some extent. Um, but it does things that are wonderful and helps make people wealthy and helps, uh, do all kinds of cool things. But, uh, yeah, you do need to like fast off of some of these things here and there. Like any, like any powerful tool, uh, there, there can be great benefits and great, uh, negatives. Great reads around that.

Irresistible, iGen, Unplugged. Those three books talk all about all that. And I think they're really, really good reads for anybody who has kids for sure or educators or anybody that's just curious or has a job like we all do where you're consumed by social media and YouTube and podcasts. You can easily justify it because of that. Yeah. There's a lot of really good studies and research that are coming out on, uh, how addictive they can be. And

like we talked about the processed foods, you know, tech was designed for us to, you know, the, the, the feedback loop and to get addicted to it, to keep using it, to go further and further. Like, I don't, I don't know. Likes are dopamine. I love to share this from the book. Uh, and this one, I think, I don't know if this was IGN or Irresistible, but I didn't know this. Like Instagram releases your likes to you with a special algorithm. For example, if I do a post and let's say my posts on average get about a thousand likes, but, and let's say when I do that post, I get 500 of them, but I don't get to see those 500. Instagram gives me 300 of them. And then when I come back, it trickles them to me. So it keeps me coming back and,

you know, watch yourself. If you're somebody who's on Instagram and these platforms a lot, pay attention, like real quick. Uh, you know, even someone like me, who's aware of it, I find myself checking back and back and back, going back and forth. And I'm like, these motherfuckers, they got me. You know what I'm saying? I'm aware of it, and you still got me. Well, again, it's a response to negativity. You're like, I didn't get as many likes as I want, so I'm going to keep checking on it.

It's the same thing as that negative comment that's sitting there. You got 100 comments, and 50 of them are like, hey, man, Mind Pump is the best podcast in the world. You guys are killing it. You changed my life. You did this, you did that. And one guy guy's like i think you're a fucking idiot i can't believe the diet information that you shared the science is total bullshit and and that's the guy you focus on that's the guy that you're like well actually you know there's a study and you're like you're doing all this research and you're looking at his instagram you're checking out all this shit and it's like don't don't pick up the brick no these electronics are the processed food of this generation.

It's taken us a couple generations to see the negative effects of heavily processed food diet. We now see the obesity epidemic. It's going to take us a generation or two before we realize just how dangerous this can be. And it is for a lot of kids. I just read a study that showed that for every two or three hours a child is on these electronics, they're noticing actual changes in the brain. They actually image them now with MRIs. So we don't know necessarily what the negatives are, but I think we're going to see it in about a generation or two. Yeah, it's definitely affecting these kids.

And that's something that's constantly on my mind, having two boys. And it's interesting because I live the furthest away from the studio. So I have like a 45 minute commute or so, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Like this is a way that I can sort of decompress from work. I can drive, I can listen to a podcast. I can, you know, either inform myself or I could relax and like have some kind of classical music on or something like that to kind of get me down into that, you know, more of a parasympathetic state. And, um, so as I'm coming home, I get home and I live in the Redwoods. I'm, I'm immersed in this like real, uh, scenic, uh, uh, environment. And, and I did that purposely because it makes me feel a certain way. And so I have a dog and I'll take the dog right away when I get home and I'll take him on a walk.

And that's all these all like a ritualistic sort of part of my process of being able to be more present, like, you know, with my kids or be more present with my wife and like pay attention and be there. And so, I mean, this has been like a process. Your mind is your mind is recovered enough from the day you walk the dog. Your mind's recovered enough from the day that when you get back from walking the dog, that you can communicate well with your wife and with your kids and you can do all the things that you need to do. Otherwise, you know, if you, uh, you come home from a day, that's stressful. You guys did a bunch of podcasts. You did a bunch of commercial reads or whatever it is, a bunch of programming, things like that.

And you walk in the door and there's a problem with the kids and the wife saying, Hey, you know, you were gone all day and there's a lot of frustration and just, just shit just went down, you know? And, uh, yeah, it's hard to kind of get ready for that. So that's great that you, you know, just something like that. Something as simple as going for a walk. Yeah, it's simple. Can be like a cure almost for you.

It's very effective. Jordan Peterson, I think it was, was it Joe Rogan he was with when he did this? I mean, that was what he said. He talked about it on Rogan. He said something that was just extremely powerful for me and just kind of changed my thought process along the lines of what we're talking about right now. And what he was using as an analogy is like, you know, we, we plan for these vacations, these annual vacations, right? And it's eight months away and we save our money and we look at the map and we plan out where we're going to stay. We put all this fucking energy time, this effort in this practice in the first five

minutes that you walk in the door and you see your wife. And you're going to do that probably 10,000 times over for the rest of your life. And nobody thinks about that practice and that moment that you're going to do that, how much that compounds over, over your lifetime and how important that moment is. And it was like this. It's an excellent point. And think about the conversation that you had with yourself, you know, on your first date with that significant other, with your wife, your fiance, you definitely had a conversation with yourself before you rang the doorbell for this person. Right. And then each time that you went and each time you went on a date, you put a lot of thought into, I wonder how I can like, maybe you didn't have

this exact dialogue, but I wonder how I can make this person feel important. I wonder how I can like, maybe you didn't have this exact dialogue, but I wonder how I can make this person feel important. I wonder how I can make this person feel good. You want to put your best foot forward. And then once they're, you know, once, once they side the dotted line, then you kind of like, all right, they're, they're stuck with me now. Do the math, do the math. The first, the 15 minutes or 30 minutes you spend with your wife every morning, do the math. It way outweighs the five or seven days out of the year that you go on vacation. You, you try to enjoy yourself. That's a way more time. So why not spend more time into doing those things? Right. Then the, just the, no, it was, it was a mind blowing thing for you, especially, uh, you know, I can tend to be, uh, the, the workaholic. I think we all kind of have

the type a personalities and you know, it's, it's a, it's a challenge for me to work 10 hours in the day, be grinding around the business and then pull up to my house. And then you know, it's, it's a, it's a challenge for me to work 10 hours in the day, be grinding around the business and then pull up to my house. And then right away, I just shut that all off. Like, yeah, right. You know what I'm saying? Like show me somebody who does that really well without a practice. And so, you know, I've tried to get in the habit of when I pull into the driveway that

I'm just shut the car off and go running upstairs. And I stop and I just take a moment, like one minute to, okay, that's done. Now, everything that went on today, all the fires I put out, all the shit that might've been stressing me out, that's done. And now I'm about to walk in this door and I'm going to see my partner and how I greet her, how I talk to her is so important. And it's like just that moment of, you know, practicing that, of, of that awareness and being present before you walk in there, man, that's, it's been a world of a difference for me relationship wise, because I was, I was

certainly the guy and, you know, God bless my girl, man, because she's been so patient and loves that, that workaholic side of me. So she's allowed all this latitude for me that, you know, that's just Adam's MO. He walks in the door, he's, he might be on his phone still, or he goes straight to the computer and gets on emails, or he's still on the phone doing something, or I can't, she's trying to talk to me and I'm, it's all going in one ear and out the other. Cause I'm not, I'm not really listening. I'm still thinking about business. And she's been really patient with me that way. It took me until I heard that from Jordan Peterson to really stop and, you know, assess like what I was doing in my partnership. And man, that's made a world of a difference. And it's one of those, those small things, you know, you should never be so busy that you can't

stop and hug somebody for a second. I mean, like you walk through the door and like your first thing is, Hey, did you do this today? Like, did you pay this bill? Like, does that have to be the way that you kind of like greet the person for the day? Probably not. Like how about a hug? How was your day? Like, how are the kids or whatever the, whatever's going on for the day? Why not just, you know, talk about a little bit of that and whatever's kind of pressing and maybe you write it down and you save it a little bit for later. Maybe it's, uh, you know, maybe it's after dinner, after you had a glass of wine or something like that. Now it's time to kind of like bring up maybe some of the dirt of the day. Cause we, cause we all got to release it out to somebody else. We got to

kind of let it, get it off our chest in a way. What are some other things you do for recovering? Um, well, besides that, I, I definitely apply movement practices and I've, um, I spent a lot of time with my kids trying to just, um, be an example of, uh, like I'll go in there and I'll, I'll, I'll treat a lot of these exercises like a skill. And I'm like, just trying to just be an example of like, I'll go in there and I'll, I'll, I'll treat a lot of these exercises like a skill. And I'm like, just trying to sharpen like one thing. And so for me, a lot of times it's the squat or a lot of times it's like, I just got back into power cleaning. You just be like at your house and just squatting. Just squatting. Yeah. It's like real simple. But what I have there is I actually like built

out like a climbing wall and I have rings and things for the kids to kind of like come in and join me with. So I make it sort of like a family affair where they see me in there. A lot of times they're just drawn in there because it's more of a playful kind of an environment. for me, that's really, uh, recuperative, uh, because like with podcasting, this is such a weird thing because we used to all train and we would be in the gym and being a lot more active and not being quite as active has definitely, you know, put a toll on, uh, the amount of stress that I end up like keeping. And so I need that release. And I realized how much more of that, uh, you know, I needed to, to, to add, uh, as I got home or, uh, whether I had time at the, uh, at our studio, we have a gym, but it's like, uh, I'm more motivated to do that at my house when I'm there. So, um, so I got a

squat rack and everything that folds out and it's real convenient, uh, for me to just kind of go and, and do my thing. And so I'll, I'll do that or I'll work on different things. Like I may spell swing and I do these things that kind of interest me in terms of movement practices are concerned, uh, and just expressing, uh, you know, movements I haven't done in a while. That's always keeps me interested and stimulated. Uh, but I mean, I could just, I could do a meathead workout any day. Like that's a two. I love doing that as well. Um, but, uh, in terms of also like recuperating, it's like essential that I manage my phone time and electronic time. And, um, this is something that I've, I've had to, I struggled with that quite a bit, bringing that into the house. And like, when do I, when do I take my phone and go

hang it up and like plug it in and versus versus because there's always something like there's a text thread we're all on there's instagram there's uh people responding to that asking questions it's tough because you want to kind of see what's going on for the next day and so it makes sense like at the end of the day you check your phone but you you know, probably not a great time to like, you know, be looking through text and like, you might get into frustrating conversations or you might get stressed out about how you're going to schedule certain things. And then you're looking at that right before you go to sleep, which is not great.

It's like causing a cascade of a, of a bunch of, or checking some emails and then you're going back and forth and you now, well, now you've got to kind of like restart your brain and now you're screwed. Now you're behind the eight ball. Exactly. Yeah. So I do that. And then at the same time too, I've really tried to enjoy just getting after simple things like washing the dishes, like, like tidying up, uh, just being a busy body.

You just killed all of us. I'm sorry, man. I just recently started doing this. I'm like, why haven't I been doing this? It pays off like tenfold. Oddly satisfying. It is. It's weird.

Once you just own it and you start doing it. It's not like most of it is that you see it and you're like, oh, my God, I don't want to do this. It's this anxiety immediately that's going to take forever or whatever it is. I don't like doing it, but me keep saying, I don't like doing it, uh, is something that I just want to. It's reinforcing that. Yeah. It's reinforcing that I don't like it.

But it's a good example of a ridiculous thing that would cause anxiety. Cause all you got to do is wash the dishes, which is not hard. Just do it. Yeah. It's not hard to do, but then I think a lot of people are like, quote unquote, leaving their dishes dirty, you know, like on a daily basis. And they're kind of going into each day like that.

And each day is just a little bit. Piling up. It's piling up. It's, it's, uh, each day is not as clean as, as crisp, uh, as it should be. We can all make improvements, but I think that a lot of people are kind of behind a little bit every day.

So not doing some of the things that you guys mentioned. Oh yeah. And that, you know, that transfers into, uh, you know, me coming back to work and being energized and motivated. Cause it's like, I've, I got a handle on the chaos in my own house. And I feel like that's just little things. Uh, it helps, it helps my mind to clear again. And I'm able to not have panic in this anxiety that's attached, uh, it helps, it helps my mind to, to clear again. And I'm able to not have panic in this anxiety that's attached, uh, to things that are just in, in sort of in disarray at my house.

Do any of you guys track your sleep at all? Ever get into it? Or a ring? Yeah. Yeah. You know, what's funny about that? Our, our producer, Doug, he started tracking his sleep a little bit and, uh, it actually caused them to sleep worse. Oh, well, I can throw you for a loop and you gotta, you gotta, uh, it actually caused him to sleep worse. Oh, well, I can throw you for a loop and you gotta, you gotta try to, if you're going to do it,

you gotta try to do it for a while. It's. He got like competitive with it. Yeah. I gotta get better. I gotta, and he stressed him out. I'm sleeping too hard though.

Yeah. It's, it's, it's tough. Cause you don't want to put too much into it, but at the same time, you're like, you're getting this feedback and you're trying to do better.

Like my sleep has kind of always sucked. Um, but more recently over the last couple of years, since I've lost some weight and I, I, I just feel better. I've been sleeping better. It hasn't really felt like it's been a problem, but I do wake up at like four o'clock every morning. I actually like, I wake up at like between three 40 and 4.

Every single morning, uh, like clockwork without the alarm uh going off and it doesn't really matter if i go to bed at 8 or 10 i just that's just when i wake up and so i'm like well you know i i'm not getting that much sleep like i'm not sleeping for that long i'm like let me start to track this let me start to see what's going on here and like you know my deep sleep is like 18 minutes long my my overall sleep is about six hours. I have an hour that I'm awake. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing with myself. Probably whacking off or something like that. Uh, sleep, sleep whacker, uh, anonymous, or I guess it's not anonymous anymore. Um, you know, so I definitely have been like, okay, these are things that I need to work on,

but you're right. The, this, uh, tracking, it can be, it can're right. This tracking, it can be, it cannot be, well, it can be productive. It can be good, but it can also be maybe negative. It's making me, it's giving me anxiety about my sleep. When I work with clients, the two things that help them sleep the most are eliminate all stimulants. Even a little bit of caffeine can actually influence your sleep. Eliminate stimulants. Caffeine can stay in your system for like 10 hours or something while. And even when it's out of your system, there's a process of recovery that goes through where your body has to get back

to whatever it's normal. And people don't realize this because they drink coffee every single day. Eliminate caffeine. My girlfriend just did this. She just eliminated caffeine and now she's sleeping

better than she ever did before. She's like, I didn't realize it was just the coffee I had in the morning at 6 a.m. So eliminate caffeine or all stimulants and literally either turn off your lights and go buy candlelight. Most people can't do that. Just not feasible for them. Wear blue blocker glasses about two to three hours

before bed and watch what happens. I mean, the studies now support that, that actually increases melatonin production and people have a dramatic improvement in their sleep just by doing that, because we're on electronics so much and we're under electric sunlight so much just putting these glasses on and blocking out the blue light makes that big of a difference about turning off your wi-fi you guys get that deep into it or you know he uh i've been doing that i've been putting my i've been putting my phone on airplane mode and asking my wife to do the same thing and she's like she's like oh great she's like, she's like, oh, great. She's like, what information are you digging up now?

I was like, well, I was like, I don't, I was like, I don't really know or care that much about like the science. I'm sure there's like there, I know that there's science supportive. I've heard a lot of people talk about it, but regardless of that, I think that this is going to help. So let's just do it. And she's like, I'm in. No, that's where, that's where I'm at with it. I don't get all woo about it. It's like, it's a simple practice.

And if it even helps me in the slightest way, why not? It kind of makes sense anyway. Yeah, it's like, why not? I'm not, I'm not fucking using it at two o'clock in the morning. It's, it's really, you can, our iPhones now and the, the, uh, wifi setup I have at my house through Xfinity, I can actually program it to do that all on its own. So I just have it set to where, you know, 1030 at night, it just automatically shuts all the wifi off in the house.

And then it re kicks back up at six o'clock in the morning. And so, you know, I don't, I don't get into debates. You don't have a tin hat. Yeah. I don't get into debates with people. You don't sleep in a Faraday cage like Mercola? Yeah. I'm not like Dr. Mercola where I won't even talk on a cell phone.

Yeah. So, but I, but I mean, it's like, listen, if, if we're starting to see if research is coming out and we're starting to see that the possibility that there's some negative effects from this and there's ways that I can put into practice that simply just mitigate that or reduce it. Why the fuck not? You know what I'm saying? It doesn't make me woo woo or weird.

It's like, why not turn the wifi off? I'm not using it anyways, but I'm also someone who's not so weird about it that I won't use the wifi. Cause it's, uh, I mean, it's obviously so allows us to do so many other things that are, that are positive. So, but I, I do, I turned mine off and I just started doing that. And my partner, Katrina, she says she feels like she knows the difference, you know? So, and even if it's, I, I, even if it's a placebo effect, you know, if it's improving her sleep, knowing that she's turning the wifi off, I don't give a fuck if it's placebo or not. Placebo effect is still in effect. Right.

It's still, it means it works. It means it's doing something. How'd you guys meet? Tinder. Yeah. That never gets old. It's Grindr. That's the worst.

That's the worst. Yeah, never gets old. So, uh, Justin and I go back really far. That's the worst. So, uh, Justin and I go back really far. So Justin, uh, worked for me as a personal trainer at 24 hour fitness almost 12 years ago. Now it's been, it's been a long time. That's where we first met. He, uh, he was my right-hand man. He was my assistant. And the reason why he was my assistant, aside from being very talented, a really good trainer, really smart, uh, he really complimented me. So a lot of his strengths are my weaknesses and vice versa. So we made a really good team and we made that connection years ago.

Sal and Doug, uh, Doug used to be a client of Sal's. And I think the thing that attracted the two of them together, very similar to Justin and I, is a lot of Sal's weaknesses are Doug's strengths. And so both Sal and I had partnered up with guys before we had ever met that I think were a really good match for each of us. And Sal and I started communicating on Facebook about, I don't know, six years ago, Sal, would you say? Five, six years ago? Probably about six years ago.

About six years ago. And I had heard about Sal from a lot of people because we worked in the same company at the same time, but never really crossed paths. And the people that knew him and knew me, every time I would run into them, they'd be like, oh, you and Sal got to get together. You and Sal got to get together. You guys are going to hit it off and da-da-da-da-da. And, you know, it just never really happened. And we connected on Facebook one day and we started talking. And I was like, oh man, this

guy, the thing that actually connected us at that time, I was running cannabis clubs and he is pro cannabis and a fitness guy and actually understands the science behind it. I'm like, oh shit, there's actually a health and fitness guy that gets the benefits of cannabis and is pro cannabis like I am. And so we kind of connected on that level first. And then I told him like what I was doing at that time, I was making a transition out of the medical marijuana field and I was getting back into fitness, which I had missed. And I was starting to build a social media business. And I was just starting that with Instagram and showing and documenting my transformation. And I

was telling him, you got to get on Instagram. You got to do this. He's like, well, I'm working with my partner, Doug, and we're writing this digital program. We want to get into online sales. And he's all, I'd love for you to take a look at it. And he sends it over to me and I'm like, oh bro, this is, this is gold. This is the message that, you know, took me 10 years to piece together that should be given to people, which is really a simple, simple concept of how they should be training. And that was kind of how we connected. We all decided to meet one day at my house. And then it was just absolute fireworks. I mean, a minute we all sat down, it was each of us talking over each other and yelling and all this and that and saying what's wrong with the fitness space and what we would see and do differently. And I think Doug might

have piped up at that time and said, man, we should put this on a podcast. And that was really how it all started. He had some of the equipment to we should put this on a podcast. And that was really, uh, how it all started. He had some of the equipment to get us started in his living room. And we had a little fold out chair. And at that time it was purely driven by passion. I mean, we, we all were successful. How many years ago was that? Five, four. Well, five years ago. Five we just started. Yeah. And then four years ago was when we launched the podcast. When we actually launched it. Yeah. So it, you know, and we all had all had different you know companies and businesses or stuff that people that we were working for and doing and so nobody needed the money it was a message that we all agreed that needed to get

out there and we saw in the podcasting space there really there really wasn't anybody that was trying to present the message that we thought we were trying to present, which was kind of blending the performance, aesthetic, bodybuilding world with kind of the health and wellness. It's like there was this division of health and wellness, which was like the woo-woo, hippie, crunchy people that all they talk about is, you know, you know, scared to death of gluten, meditation, and saunas. And then you have the other side, which is sports performance, meditation and saunas. And then you have the other side, which is sports performance aesthetics, which is like, take whatever it takes, beast mode, steroids, supplements, everything. And there's like, there's something to learn from both of these groups and neither one is right or wrong. And we kind of wanted to be somewhere in the middle and kind of merge the two of them.

And we all agreed on that. And that was kind of the beginning of our message was to, to share the pros and cons of both and help people figure that out for themselves. And it was pretty much magical. The first time we got on, I look back now and listen to the episodes and cringe. I think we were absolutely fucking terrible. You didn't know what the hell we were doing. But it was the content. It was the message that we were giving, I think resonated with a lot of people. And there wasn't a lot of people at that time that were, I think, delivering the message that we were delivering. It helped too that we, I mean, I'm all jacked in on steroids at the time and, you know, Sal's all super buff, Justin's a buff guy. And, you know, we're a bunch of bro looking dudes that were dropping a lot of science

and knowledge and talking about the woo-woo side of fitness, but not looking the part. And so I think that really ended up working in our advantage was to kind of look like but not looking the part. And so I think that really ended up working in our advantage was to kind of look like a bunch of bros. So we attracted those people that are attracted to that. But then the message that we were delivering was kind of counter to the average bro. What, what looks like, um, you know, you guys have been in business together for a long period of time now, and, uh, you guys, uh, have some, um, uh, good advertising going on with the podcast and stuff. What's effective business look like for you guys?

Cause like, you know, I've been in a lot of meetings myself and sometimes like, you know, just like going to lunch, sometimes not a great idea because you got food is like a distraction or what are some things that you guys have noticed that have kind of made for good, uh, business transactions? I mean, if you there's, we prioritize, uh, the creative process, which I think is really important. Um, when we write programs, for example, we actually go away to do so. And that whole process is really important because the creative process,

you guys go away to different places or yeah, it's usually about an hour away. We'll drive somewhere. The car drive itself, a lot of good conversation, going to Tahoe or some shit like that. It was one of our favorite. In fact, a couple hours away typically.

Yeah. And we'll get there and then we'll lock ourselves in a, in a house and then we'll work and it's just free. It's free. It's creative. We, we, you know,

that process really comes through on the podcast and everything that we do is that, that, that energy that we, that we foster. Well, it's, it helps us to work like outside. So, yeah. So we were able to see the business as a whole, because a lot of times we end up just working in the business and we need to work on the business as well. And so the only way to do that is to really pull ourselves out of that, that, that comfort zone is showing up to the studio. Okay. You know, what's the game plan? Everybody's like, there's just way too many things and tasks that are going to be there to pull us. And so we got to get out of there. It's also, and I'm sure you've definitely dealt with this. You know, when you get to a certain point, um, you know, and you're scaling a business of this size or bigger,

you know, the, one of the hardest things that we have to do is to, to learn, to say, and you're scaling a business of this size or bigger, you know, the, one of the hardest things that we have to do is to, to learn, to say no and to not do things, which sounds kind of weird, right? Like there's always opportunity. There's always a place to make money or there's always a good idea. And it's really tough sometimes to not get, you know, get caught up chasing all these great ideas and not executing some of the ones that we've already agreed on really, really well. It's great that you have each other. Cause you know, you might come in one day, I'll pipe all fired up about something. And these guys are like, like, maybe you didn't think about it that much. Maybe you were just like thinking about like

the benefits of it. And you didn't think, think it through all the way and you're all fired up and you tell these guys and they're like, well, that won't really work because of this or that. And you kind of start to, and then you're like, oh yeah, now that I said it out loud, it does sound kind of stupid. So let's just avoid trying to even do that. That's a, it's a, it's a great point to your question of like a good business practice for us is, you know, and I, I think we kind of run our ship like a, like a Mark Cuban does, and he's got a great book on, I think the business of sports or sports of business. He's got a great book on, I think the business of sports or sports of business.

And we encourage this, you know, almost argumentative combative type of environment, as long as we, because we all agree on the ultimate vision of what we're trying to do. And, you know, we don't want to be, uh, this type of place where it's like, oh, I, I say we're doing this. So we do it. It's like, no, it's not how this works. Like we're all equal partners. There's four of us in it. So Doug has just as much of a voice as the three of us in anything

that we do in business. And we'll come in a room and it's exactly what you said. I might come, I just saw someone else. I met up with you and you told me something about your business. I'm like, fuck, why aren't we doing what Mark's doing? And I get back to the meeting and I'm like, we're doing this. And then Sal or Justin go like, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's, we've got this going on. And then we, and then we'll argue, you know, and it'll be back and forth. No, no, no. But what's great about it is, you know, everybody has this ability and this is probably our age and wisdom, right? Like we have this ability to separate our egos out of it and know that we all want the same thing. We want to be successful. And so we don't take it personally when we're passionately yelling at

each other for what, what we believe is right. And eventually and ultimately what always happens is we settle in on an agreement that, okay, we're going to go do that or no, we're not. It's not the timing isn't right now to do that. Even if we agree that maybe that'll be a good idea. It's not right now. We have these other things to execute. And I think we've created this open environment and forum. And we've extended that now to our staff as

the, as the team has grown. I mean, we just had a meeting the other day and this was the way I closed the meeting out was encouraging even the guy or the girl who's packaging shirts for us to like, Hey, if you see something in the process of what we're doing that you disagree with, and you don't think we're doing it well or doing it right. Like you come and tell me this fucking sucks, Adam. Like, I don't, I think we're not, we're doing this wrong and we could doing it well or doing it right. Like you come and tell me this fucking sucks, Adam. Like, I don't, I think we're not, we're doing this wrong and we could do it this way would be better. Like I want that from, from our team and we encourage that. And I think that's fostered a really, a really good environment and a strong team. So I'd say that's a really good business practice for us. Definitely. I think at the end of the day, whatever decision we make, we're all

in on it, you know, cause there may be a situation where, you know, someone comes up with an idea and I disagree or Adam disagrees with it. And, but at the end of it, more of us agree, we should do it and disagree at the end of it. If we move forward, you're bought in because I think what you see a lot of times with, with groups, uh, where they start to have problems is they start to blame each other. You know, everybody wants to celebrate the successes and take credit for it. But then when something fails, it's easy to point the finger. But if we move forward with an idea that maybe I didn't have and I didn't agree with and it didn't work, I'm not going to be like, hmm, I told you.

We all own that idea. I mean, like, look, I owned it. Like my porn ad idea. No, we all own that. They all own that with me. Yeah, you saw Adam try to palm that off. He owned that too. Later on, it's better for storytelling that way. But I was just as bought in. It's content. Yeah. There you go. How do you guys end up with some of the content that you have

on the show? I know you have a lot of guests on the show as well, but you guys do podcasts on your own in addition to that too, right? Right. Man, we could talk about fitness and health forever. I mean, I've been doing this for 20 years professionally. These guys almost just as long. We have stories of clients and gyms we've run, stories of our own training. We, you know, we understand, we know different scenarios. We could talk about almost any, any topic or subject. We're not experts on all of them, but we definitely have input. Um, and then the other thing that this is real important now, we enjoy talking to each other so we can have good conversation around pretty much anything because

it's like three buddies sitting around having a good conversation. Just start shooting the shit about Tom Brady or whatever. 100%. Pro wrestling. Yeah, he's a great sports ball player. He's a sports baller. Yeah, that's it. And the other one is our audience. So we do Q&A episodes and they'll often ask

us questions. So they'll often ask us questions. So they'll provide us with content. You know, this person wants to know the best way to burn body fat. Yeah. And so that works really well. Um, but I mean, to be quite honest, uh, I don't think, I think we could sit down and talk about almost any topic. Well, I think a mistake, cause I like sharing the mistakes that we make in the business that, um, that we sometimes make and that I've seen other podcasters make. And I'll pick on my, my good friend, Ben Greenfield on this. Cause I think he's, this was something that he did. And you know, the guy's been doing this for 10 years and you start off and you have like this core audience of people and you kind of educate them and you teach them like everything, you know, like you pour your heart onto the

podcast, you teach them all this stuff. And then what ends up happening is you start to, to listen to your audience and they want more and deeper and go deeper and go deeper. And then, you know, get more into the biohacking shit and more of this crazy stuff. And they want, and what ends up happening is you lose the general population that made the basics. And they come in and they hear this crazy infrared shining on your balls and injecting the shit in your dick. And, and it's like, well, it's just like nine years ago, this guy was talking about the importance of a bench press, a squat and things like that. And so we revisit this conversation a lot because we can even do that to ourselves. Like, you know, we're very fascinated with gut health right now.

And there's a lot of emerging science on that. And so this really piques our interest. Well, you know, we also are in our own little bubble and think that everybody else wants to hear that too. Now there, we do have a portion of people that want that, but it's also really important for us to continue to revisit the basics. And so, and we always kind of, you know, have these conversations where like, you know what, it's time that we do, uh, what, what the proper bicep curl, you know, or isolation exercises

versus compound. People are going to care more about you guys, uh, you know, talking about, you know, or. Isolation exercises versus compound. Yeah, people are going to care more about you guys, you know, talking about, you know, who's a better rapper, Kanye West or Drake, versus you guys talking about the gut microbiome. Right, sometimes. So there's definitely a balance that we've tried to learn to have, you know,

to where we are stretching our audience, we're teaching them new things, but then also not to get lost in the weeds and forget about some of the basics and the simple conversations that why people are tuning in. What's the coolest thing that's come from having this podcast? The relationships. Easy. 100%. Not even close.

Relationships and personal development. Yeah. I was having this conversation with my girlfriend the other day and I said, I get to go to work and have really good conversations with really smart people for hours, almost every day. That's like the best growth scenario. It's like hyper learning. Oh, it's crazy. It's like therapy. It's learning. It's mentoring.

It's teaching. And I get to do that every single day. So selfishly, I would say that on top of the relationships. I just, we're all so much different than we were even four years ago just because of that. You grow so much being around these people that are intelligent in their space, right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, looking back as far as my own personal growth and development, it's insane in three years or even four now who I am as a person versus who I was four years ago.

It's a completely different person. Yeah. So relationships for me, for sure. I mean, we've, we've now done, um, well over 300 interviews and, you know, most of those interviews are brilliant, brilliant minds and like all fields and aspects from, and not just health and wellness. And we kind of go all over the place too. And we get business people and authors and, and man, that's been just, it's, it's a, it's a plethora of knowledge and information that we get to consume at a very rapid rate in comparison, I think, to the average person that doesn't have the same resources that we have because of this podcast. And I am, I'm forever grateful for some of the, I've made some bonds that will be probably

lifetime relationships, uh, with some of these people that we interviewed because we ended up interviewing them and we connect. And then afterwards we ended up talking so much, we exchanged cell phone numbers. And then now we're talking forever. And then I, and now I feel like I have these incredible resources at the, you know, at my fingertips that if, man, if I, if I'm stuck with a business idea, like, I mean, I've got a couple of people that, you know, are running 10, 30, $50 million companies that I can text and say, Hey, we're thinking about doing this. What are your thoughts? It's fricking awesome that I can get a response right away. And it's a great way for, you know, for me to detach myself from my little bubble when

I'm inside of, so I love relationships have been everything. It gives you a lot of perspective. You know, you meet so many different people and then you start to get feedback from the fans as well. And, uh, hearing their stories and, and hearing some of the stories of some of these people that, uh, that you rubbed elbows with that have been successful in their field or made a lot of money or whatever the case is. And then you kind of learn like, okay, well the recipe for success seems to be identical amongst, you know, the 300 or so interviews, uh, that, that we've had, uh, maybe their story's a little different, you know, maybe, um, I think one thing I think that happens

when I, from what I've seen from a lot of successful people is they maybe start their process of thinking a lot earlier. Uh, and I mean like thinking outside of like school and thinking outside of, uh, hanging out with their buddies. I think when you're a kid, like you're, you're fairly busy. Like if you're in a sport, um, school consumes a crazy amount of time. So it gives you no, uh, your personal development is, uh, on lockdown. You don't have time to really develop. Now you are like learning like English and whatever else you're learning, math and history and stuff.

You are learning some stuff, uh, but you're not like personal, personally getting developed. And something that was hard for me in school, which I didn't even learn until recently. I always had a learning disability and school was just really hard for me. It's even hard for me to like bring my kids to school, like to, you know, parent teacher conference and stuff like that. I just, I fucking despise it. I hate it. It was just a sore subject with me. And so, but what I didn't realize, and I wish I knew it at the time is that the word education comes from the word educo and education has to come from within. And so I wish I knew that as a kid, because, you know, maybe, maybe I would have, maybe things would have been a little easier for me, or maybe I wouldn't have had such a rough time

if someone said, look, man, you're not retarded. All that's happening here is that you just don't give a fuck about some of these subjects. That's really all it is. And when you find the things that you like, you'll be totally fine. I wish somebody kind of pointed me, you know, in, in that direction. But what I see from people that are, uh, high level and they're really successful is they kind of start this thought process earlier. They start their own personal development earlier and it could happen from getting the shit beat out of them could happen, uh, you know, from the parents being alcoholic or

turning them back on them could also happen from them being hugged a lot and them being encouraged a lot. And the parents saying, Hey, you should be creative. That's great that you can do that artwork. That's fantastic. I approve of that. That's awesome. Or that's great that you can hit the ball like that. Let's, let's practice some

more. Right. And so, but the common thing seems to be that, uh, you know, people that are successful, they work hard every single day. They figure out a way to kind of put one foot in front of the other. What are some things that you guys have seen that have been common amongst some of these savages that you guys had the opportunity to interview. They enjoy the process. If you were to talk to some of the most successful people and ask them if they enjoy the day-to-day, they would say absolutely. If you absolutely love climbing, climbing a mountain isn't going to suck as much as if you just want to get to the top. I love working out for the sake of working out. I like the results too. Don't get me wrong. I like looking a particular way and getting stronger on that stuff.

But would I still work out if I didn't get those things? Probably. I enjoy the process, which means I'm probably never going to stop doing it. And so when you meet really successful people, uh, and you hear them talk about the process, you can see that they have a genuine passion for what they're doing. The other thing too, is I think is, uh, having a purpose. Like what is your purpose? And your purpose is, it's gotta be bigger than yourself. It's gotta be something you really believe in. Years ago, I had an argument with a, or a debate with a coworker of mine where we were

going back and forth talking about what motivates people. And she was saying how most motive, most people are motivated by money. And that's what gets people to work the hardest is if they make a lot of money. And I thought about that and I totally disagreed because I thought about the hardest working people I've ever known were volunteers. People who volunteer for a cause. They're some of the hardest working people in the world. And they're doing it because of a purpose that they have. So I think those are two big things you'll find with successful people. I was going to say to build off of that and the purpose part of it too is as you're going through that process being open to iterate.

So like that where your purpose drives you, but whatever your goal was or whatever product you were, you know, building with this team is going to look completely different and you're okay with that. building with this team is going to look completely different and you're okay with that. And so going through that process of realizing that, you know, maybe you're getting feedback and it's not what you'd like, but you can take that feedback. You can change and shift and you're, you're, you're available to understand, acknowledge, you know, the criticism or praises or whatever it is, and adjust and weave and keep going along that path towards the destination. But, you know, being comfortable with the fact that it's a constant process, that every day you're going to be iterating and sharpening and going forward. The things that you are setting out to do might end up looking quite different.

and going forward. The things that you are setting out to do might end up looking quite different. I think there's a common theme of them all being kind of fear and failure chasers. I think almost anybody that I've ever met that's extremely successful looks at fear differently than other people. I think a lot of people allow fear to consume them

and not allow them to move forward where those that are really successful have failed so many times and got back up again that they embrace that feeling of fear and they almost go towards it. And I think that's something that they all have in common because I've never met somebody who's a millionaire or a billionaire that doesn't have a story of at least 20 to a hundred failures that came before that. And so, you know, and that's, that can be scary to fail. Failing is scary to, to try or push all in and to lose. And I think the ones that are most successful, the thing that we have, they all have in common is they're not afraid of that. They're not afraid.

It's not the end of the world. If I lose all my money or I get this bed, this business work, or I pour my heart into it for three years and then it doesn't pan out. It's part of the process, you know? And so I think that's a very common theme amongst really successful people is they don't fear fear. They, they go after it and failure is just part of the process. I think Jay Cole said that. Yeah.

Do any of your parents listen to your podcast oh man so my mom my mom listens here and there and uh our show is extremely uncensored and raw and so uh it's funny she the first time she messaged me that she listened to the show she sends me a message and she's like i didn't know you had dirty magazines under the bed when you were at our hell whatever oh shit. She must have heard one of my stories. So, yeah, both my parents will listen here and there. I actually have a lot of family members now that listen. What's kind of cool is I'll have cousins who I don't really talk to that much who will message me and be like, oh, man, episode 845. That was such a good.

Like, oh, shit. If I have family members who like the show, then I think we must be doing something right. Because those are the hardest people to convince sometimes to check it out crazy you get in conversation with uh somebody that is in your family like maybe you see them at thanksgiving or christmas or something and they start saying the same problem that a fan just came up to you and said hey like i can't believe you guys went over that subject man that really helped me it helped save my life or whatever crazy story they tell you. Right. And then meanwhile, this is like your cousin or your aunt or whoever. And you're just thinking you should listen to my goddamn podcast. You know, it's all there.

I send them links sometimes, like they'll ask me a question about like nutrition or whatever. And I'll just like, boop. It took about like, oh man, I got to listen to it for two hours. You know, it took about four years, you know, to where we're at now, or maybe three or so for my family to come full circle to where all of them, my mother still doesn't listen. And I know why my mom doesn't listen to the show because well, besides she, I think she, I think she uses that as a, as a reason to not listen, but I know why she really struggles with the show is, um, I'm very, uh, transparent on the show and, uh, in any, any of you I do. So you can ask me the deepest,

darkest questions. And, you know, I, I had a less than privileged, uh, childhood. My father committed suicide when I was seven years old, my mom married into an abusive relationship. Um, we didn't have a lot of things. We also grew up in a very spiritual and Christian home with a lot of hypocrisy in there. And I talk about that. So if people ask me questions related to that, I share my story. Probably makes her uncomfortable. Yeah. So I think my mom gets really uncomfortable when I touch on topics that are related to my childhood. So I think she blames it on the F word, but let's be honest. I don't think we even swear that much on the show.

It's more of a tough reflection for her, I think, to probably listen to her son. Because a lot of this is therapeutic for me too. You know, I don't get asked that question every single day. I'm not a therapist and not everybody's asking me for, or wasn't before the podcast came out, asking my opinion on these deeper type questions. Well, now I get these questions a lot and I'm not afraid to share and talk about them, but you know, some of them are hard, hard conversations and I've been through a lot of shit. And so I don't know if I'll ever convert

my mom into listening, but all the rest of my family, you know, what it took was them hearing about the podcast from somebody else. So like my best friends who I grew up with, they didn't listen to the show until like one of them, who's the principal at a school kids are, you know, in a school talking about mind pump or my buddy, who's a physical therapist, who's got clients that are coming in and like,

you know, if you got to listen to this mind pump guy, he's like, Oh fuck, that's my best friend. Like, so they all came on after they heard it from other people that had no connection directly to me.

And so then it became cool to listen to our show. So you could talk about it and you're related to me, but I think the first three years that hardly any of my family actually didn't listen to the show. Uh, does your mom, uh, kind of maybe try to deny what happened or, or, or she. Yeah, I think she's, I don't think she fully denies cause there's certain, obviously my dad committed suicide. There's no denying or debating that, but I think, and, and what I fully acknowledge is that, you know, both her and I saw this whole thing through a different lens. You know, she saw it as a 20 something year old mother who lost her husband, who then married into another relationship with an asshole who ends up being physically and verbally abusive. And so she has her lens and I, and I, and it's taken me years

to process this and to forgive my mother for that, that I do believe that she was trying to do her best with the resources that she had. But as a child, when I went through that, of course, I didn't see that I blamed her for it. I had a lot of animosity towards her for that. Um, I feel like I've definitely been able to, you know, I've worked through a lot of that. I think my mom is still having to work through that part. And I think the, the podcast is just so in your face for her that it's, it's tough for her to swallow. Do you have any kids? I don't. Yeah. When you have kids, um, you'll even understand on a more powerful level, you know, cause you're, you're not like, it's so hard for a parent to, um, even in like, even in any way, like in any way, shape or form to think that anything that you're doing for your child is

wrong. And also in addition to that, thinking that anything that your kid does is wrong. Like, you know, for a loving parent, for a parent that's, that's present for a parent that's there, uh, my brother, uh, you know, he abused, you know, every drug that you can think of. I actually one time saw him, uh, uh, stick himself with steroids through a sweatshirt like you're wearing right there. He was, uh, you know, he was off the wall. He was out of control.

And, um, my mom, you know, she, as she actually listens to this show, so sorry, mom, if I'm going too deep here. We love you. We do immensely, but you know, my brother did some crazy things and, and she wants to kind of sometimes try to, she doesn't completely deny him, but I think that, you know, she just, she wishes so badly that those things didn't happen. And she wishes so badly that her son, uh, wasn't hurting that much inside. And so for her, the easiest thing to do is just kind of almost pretend like, Hey, none of this happened. I mean, remember when my dad called me, it was, it was terrifying. My dad called me and said, your brother's he's, he's gone, you know, he's dead.

And I kind of always thought that that would happen at some point. So I was, I was somewhat prepared for it, but my mom in the background is screaming no no it's not true you know and so that's you know your mom probably went through a lot of that like she just doesn't want to even though she's hearing it and even though she's smart and she's registering it it's like no no no no none of that's happening none of that happened in my you know under my roof it's it's too it's like being a parent is a really sure as you guys can relate over there it's a it's a wild fucking thing man it's like being a parent is a really, as you guys can relate over there. It's a, it's a wild fucking thing, man. It's tough. How about you?

Is your, your parents listen? No. No. Yeah. I mean, I, my parents are very conservative and I grew up, uh, you know, very much in that environment of, uh, like, uh, drunkenness is prohibited and uh like swearing and all these types of things were very much like um you know no-nos and taboos and so from the devil yeah just from the devil but i mean it was strict but at the same time like i i would i would catch them laughing and i would

catch them you know moments of of where i could get to break. And so that was like half of my, uh, what I, what I would try to do to, to sort of lighten the environment that I was growing up in was to, to joke about it and like present it to them. And like, you're being ridiculous. And so my whole, you know, uh, childhood was really just like looking at it as this is, this is absurd. You know, I'm a good person, you know, like what, what, what the fuck does it matter if I say fuck, that's just, that's just how I feel. Right. And I, I went through the, you know, I went to church and I definitely got a lot out of it. And I went to a real, uh, conservative, uh, college.

And I did a lot of things to, um, sort of, you know, make them feel good about like my character and they think that they did a good job raising me. But at the same time, I, I, I just slowly started to figure out who I really was. And like, I became more comfortable with that. And, uh, I don't, I don't, I don't need to be the ned flanders like you know like they want me to be and that just doesn't that's not who i am and so like the podcast for me is really uh presenting information that that people will find super valuable in whatever form that is that we're presenting it and so uh if we can be funny and and uh you know, you know, be vulgar and, and, and have like, like sexual things that are awkward to talk about. And, you know, like I, it, to me it is therapeutic. It's, it's something,

it's like, I, it was repressed, you know, so much growing up, uh, that, uh, I get, I get a ton of, I get a ton out of it because I feel like I'm more myself than I ever was. And people respond to that. And I feel like that's, that's something that when you, I don't know when you see that in somebody else, like we mentioned Kyle Kingsbury earlier, uh, in this podcast.

And I recognize that about him right away. I'm like, oh, that guy really is who he is. You just see it right away. Like he owns it, uh, you know,

all aspects of it. And, uh, that's something that all hang out, so to speak. Yeah. You just got to put away. Like he owns it, uh, you know, all aspects of it. And, uh, that's something that all hang out, so to speak. Yeah. You just got to put it out there, man.

And, uh, admirable. So, I mean, uh, the thing is they're proud of me and it's like, it's it,

they know that I've, I've made my own decisions and it, it's just like, I know that at some point it'll come to where they listen to it and I'm going to be cool with it. And it's, it's not like I'm going to avoid it, but it's not. I'm not like, yeah, come on, listen to the podcast because it's going to be a nice, awkward Christmas.

So that's kind of where that's at. Adam, you mentioned it being therapy for you. In what way? You know, like if we talk about my childhood, right? I mean, I did plenty of therapy actually after my dad's suicide, but then once I got into adulthood, I really didn't do a lot of therapy. And, you know, I think you've, because I've moved on with my life, I don't feel sorry for myself that I went through any of that stuff. In my eyes, I've probably, I'm fine. I don't have any issues there. issues there. Um, but as, as we've gotten further and deeper into the podcasting and I get more and more questions and I have to kind of revisit some of those old feelings and stuff like that. It's definitely, uh, like it's improved my relationship with my mom. Like I mentioned that, you know, through my twenties, I had a lot of animosity towards her. You know, I blamed her for my rough childhood and the shit that we all went through.

And as I got older and as, as I've heard myself on air and listen to myself express it, it's so different than like when you, when you say something, a lot of times, much of that's driven through emotion. You know, like you, you ask a question and my emotional response, I spit something out with the podcast. it allows me to go back and kind of listen and really ask myself, is that how I fucking feel? Like, do I really, am I really that mad at her? Recognize how much like hatred or resentment is sitting there and you're like, what's it really all for? And what a, maybe not a great way to live out the rest of my life and the rest of my mom's life. This is not maybe a good place to be. Let's maybe try, try the best we can to move forward. It's been a giant mirror, you know, for me, it's been this incredible tool for me to,

and I love it because we, we did build it on this platform of, you know, radical honesty and authenticity. And so I do speak emotionally. So if you ask questions, which I think when we first were talking outside of the room, you know, Sal talking about, I can be kind of the polarizing personality. Cause I, I will, I'll speak emotionally first, but I'm also first to be quick to, to correct myself. If I said something like, Hey, I said this on the podcast the other day, because I was really passionate about something. And a good example that just recently, like I went on a rant about how group fitness should die, you know, and I, and I said it like that, like group fitness should fucking die. It's terrible.

It's terrible for people. And of course there was an uproar of people that have found group fitness to be very good for them. There's a lot of great leaders that kind of speak in absolutes, you know, because you need someone who's absolutely positive of what they're saying. And so sometimes someone like you, uh, even though it might be brash and it might go against, at least you're choosing a side, at least you made a decision and a choice. Right, right.

What's it, what is it? What's that? How does that saying go? If you don't, uh, stand for something, you'll fall for anything. Right. So, you know, and that, so I do, I'll, I'll say things emotionally like that, but then we also, I love that what we do on this podcast is if I get an onslaught of people that are talking shit back to me, cause I said that, like I will address it and explain, uh, you know, my feelings and my emotions and why that is. And I think, uh, having that

ability to do that, I mean, it's been so therapeutic. And then in my relationship too, like we, I openly discuss on the podcast, you know, if, uh, Katrina and I are going through a rough patch or we're in a transition, like I open, I put it all out there and you know, sometimes I hear myself saying things, uh, about her or how I feel about the situation. And then when I go back and relisten to it, I go, fuck, I'm kind of an asshole. You know, like that's, I don't want to be that guy. You know what I'm saying? And then, and it gives me a different attitude now when I go and I talk to her or revisit that topic. So yeah, man, it's been incredibly, uh, therapeutic for me. And then also to like, you know, finding more of myself. Uh, I, I had a lot of challenge with the

beginning of this, the podcast, because if you started listening on day one, you came in as Adam, the amateur bodybuilder trying to become pro. And I really don't identify with any of that. I, I chose to show people cause I was actually fat just two years before that. I wanted to show people and document my journey from fat to fit. I got so much traction from that, that I thought, oh shit. Okay. Now I'm really fit. I'm 7% body fat when, when I, when I had built my Instagram or whatever, I'm like, well, let me show people what it's like to be somebody who doesn't know anything about bodybuilding to get on stage and compete. And then that got a bunch of traction. And then I was like, people were like, oh, everyone's rooting for me. And like, holy shit, this guy's doing this all on his own and

doesn't know anything really about it. And then I'm like, watch me go pro. And so a lot of people came into Mind Pump with Adam, the bodybuilder. I couldn't be further from that guy. You know, I'm competitive as fuck. You know, I'm definitely a sports athlete type of guy and I like to win. And if I set my mind to something, I execute. And at that time that was on my mind of what I was going to do is to show people how this can be done. But then I started to, and of course I'm taking selfie pictures of my body. Cause that's what that population of people want to see. They want to, they don't want to hear me talk about how bad-ass I look. They want to see how bad-ass I look and change. And so I kind of, I started to, uh, you know, become this person, uh, on social media and on the podcast.

And it made me dig really deep inside of myself. Like I don't want to be known as that guy, you know? So there's, there's so many things I can go on and on about the podcast of, of what it's done therapy wise, uh, for me on all aspects. How about for you Sal? Oh, I mean, I couldn't, I have to echo what he's saying. I mean, think about it this way. How many people have a tough time just hearing their own voice? You know, because they're not used to what they sound like, just the sound. Now imagine what you sound like from, in terms of the content of what you're saying. So just hearing yourself have conversations with other smart people, that alone is a powerful tool for change. Cause you can hear or growth. You can hear what you're saying and be like, wow, I, uh, I thought I sounded this way, but I communicated that completely the

wrong way. Or I sound like an idiot or wow, I'm getting really angry over for no reason whatsoever. So just hearing yourself have conversations is an incredibly powerful tool for growth. As far as the therapy is concerned, I mean, how, how often do people make time to sit down with other people that they trust? And I really trust these guys. I trust these guys like, like family. How often do you make the time to sit down and have good deep conversations with people you really really trust to the point where you'll trust their opinion even if it's if it differs from your own and someone said like you know in passing you know if i was to see one of you guys you know at starbucks or something like we don't know each other that great i might say hey how's it going and you'd be like oh it's

going good and then we kind of go about our day. But with these guys, no, Sal, I'm asking, no, how are you doing? Now you're full of shit. Now you're not doing good. Exactly. Sit the fuck down and tell me what's going on, right? And it's our job. So, you know, we're all motivated to be successful. So we actually sit down and do it for four hours or five hours.

And so it's literally therapy. I get to sit down and talk to very smart people who I trust about what's going on during the day. I mean, I went through a divorce through the beginning of the podcast. And the podcast served as a very powerful tool for me to move forward and move through that, being able to talk about it, getting questions asked and be able to communicate that. Whereas most of the time, especially this is more true for men than I think for women. I'm being very stereotypical here because I think both genders suffer from this. But men in particular, we tend to not talk a lot about, we don't like to sound like we're complaining either.

That's the, the idea that we have, or you got to pull it out of us or we don't want to face it. And sometimes talking about something makes you, makes it real. I probably had the hardest time with that. Yep. Yep. I mean, that was the biggest part of my personal growth. Now look at you guys.

You guys are all sappy. I'm crying all over yeah my nipples hurt yeah um yeah it's from the clamps but just communicating like it's hard it's it's one of those things because like i mean being in sports and and trying to be a not necessarily just trying to be the tough guy, but actually like, uh, you know, testing myself against like my friends. And it was very competitive, uh, growing up and my older brother, uh, you know, it'd pick on me and like beat me up. And so it's just one of those things like you just, uh, you just bury it in and power through. And that's my operating mode forever. And it worked, you know, and it worked and it got me places. And I, and I did better in sports when

I could summon that, you know, that fire and that, that, that way to overcome like all these like forces against me, whatever it was. Uh, but to communicate how I feel and like to, to articulate, uh, like what, what's currently going on with myself, it's like impossible for me. Like it's just not a practice I, I implemented. Now you have to embrace, to embrace being uncomfortable too. If you're going to sit down and be recorded and talk for hours with other smart people are going to challenge you.

You got to be comfortable being uncomfortable. You have to, but that's where growth comes from. Growth doesn't come from being comfortable. Nobody grows, you know, it's like building muscle. You're not going to build muscle from relaxing and laying down all day long.

You have to kind of challenge yourself. It comes from personal growth is the same thing. So, you know, we build muscle from relaxing and laying down all day long. You have to kind of challenge yourself. It comes from personal growth is the same thing. So we sit down, we challenge each other all the time. The show itself is a challenge because we have to produce content that's both entertaining and informative. You talk to smart people who challenge your ideas. You challenge yourself by listening to yourself talk later on after the podcast has aired. It's funny.

I'll listen to old episodes and I cringe because of how, how far I've come. So I'll hear myself talking like, wow, I was really, that's how I sounded. That's, that was where my ideas, but you know, it's, it's also awesome because it kind of shows you how far, how far you've come along. So, you know, as far as the therapy aspect of it, look, if you sit down and record yourself having great conversations with people every day, and then listen to those conversations watch what happens yeah we've talked to you guys a lot and so i'm just gonna ask uh one more question and it kind of goes a little bit along the same lines but um do you guys have internal dialogue do you guys uh you know you guys i feel it's an important step and it's something that i've been practicing for the last several years now. I fucking interview myself, which sounds weird, but I do it all the time. It's something that's really helped me with a lot of personal growth.

How about for you guys? I think that emotional intelligence and self-awareness arguably could be the two most powerful tools in personal growth and just overall success. I think it's, uh, and I think all of us can practice it more. I think you can never practice it too much. And part of what that looks like is just what you said is, is a constant inner conversation that I'm having. And this is also why I think, cause one of the number one questions that we get with the four of us is like, you know, how do you have four alpha leader guys and not butt heads? And I think that's because we just so happen to be all in a very similar place in our life where self-awareness is so important to each of us that anytime a disagreement happens, when I walk away and I know these guys are the same way,

and I walk away from that meeting, and I mean these guys are the same way and I walk away from that meeting and I mean, we could be fucking heated and I could be passionate about it and I could not get my way. And when I walk out of that room, I am not thinking about how wrong I think I am or trying to go prove them right. I am now looking to confirm what they believe and see it from their perspective and really truly look at it that way. And I think that's hard for people to do. And this is something that served me not only in business and on the podcast, but in my relationship, like with my partner, like when, you know, your partner talks and shares their feelings and tells you this, instead of being combative and defensive and

trying to defend yourself, you know, try putting yourself in them shoes and really understanding where they're coming from. So yeah, I think the self-awareness thing has been huge, huge, huge. And it's something that I think we all practice. And it's the only reason I think that we all work. Cause I think it would with four alpha, you know, leader type personalities, you would think it would be inevitable that we would self-destruct somehow or pull apart from each other. But because I think every, every one of these guys cares that much, uh, and is, is always looking inside after every conversation that we have. That's why it works. Long time ago, I had a client who, uh, very intelligent woman who, uh, was just an exceptional, uh. A subject would come up, and she would be able to articulate her side so well. It was actually quite impressive.

I love to debate and discuss. Actually, one of the ways I learn is through discussing and debating. I love doing it. Some people would say I'm more argumentative, but I actually enjoy that whole process. It's a great way to learn, too. That's my favorite way.

It's to really question people and sometimes question them in a way that causes argument. It's my favorite thing to do. I belong to all these groups and forums. I disagree. Very good. I see you're a father. You got the dad jokes. Yeah.

Strong. I belong to all these forums on Facebook, for example, and I'll get on there and debate other topics I'm interested in besides fitness and health, like politics or economics or philosophy. Politics is always a good one. It's my favorite. And we'll go back and forth. And so this woman asked her, she said, how did you get so good at being able to discuss and debate your side? And she said, well, what I do what I do is I try to learn, I have an opinion, everybody forms opinions. So I have an opinion. And then what I try to do is I

try to argue the opposite side in order to do that. I have to learn it really, really well. I have to learn it well enough to argue it very, very well. And now to be true with this, you have to know what your original position was and know how to argue against all those positions, come up with own counters, counter yourself and learn the other side. And then only then are you able to fully understand your side and debate properly. And so I started doing that and two things happened. One is I discovered that some of my opinions were wrong. Um, and that the other opinion, the opposing opinion was actually right, which was, is actually kind of awesome. I like that. I love figuring out that I was wrong about something because now I don't have to be wrong

anymore. And then the other thing that happened was I found out I was right, but I became better at my position and more, and I understood the opposing position better so I could argue it better. So that's the internal dialogue that I'll have with myself and with people around me. If I have a debate or a discussion with one of my partners and I completely disagree, I leave. And my goal is to try to understand their side as well as I understand my own, see if I can understand it from their point of view and try to argue it better than I could argue even my own side. And sometimes I come out of it. And in order to do this, you have to really, you have to dissolve your ego for a second, take a step back and be like, okay, you know, they said this about me.

I'm going to assume that they're right. I'm going to assume they're right. I'm going to assume that I, you know, I am disorganized or I am whatever. And look at it from that perspective. And then the whole world opens up and you start to see like, oh shit. Okay. They were right about a couple of these things. And the funny thing is I think people are afraid to reach that conclusion

because it challenges who they are. It's also, it can be fear. It can be something that's kind of scary because sometimes you need to admit to people that you were wrong, but what you'll find is you get more respect. You get way more respect out of it. It's a better place to be.

It's actually more empowering than people realize. And it's not, it's actually scarier now that I know this, it's scarier to, to dig my heels in the sand and to not do that. That's more scary to me now. It's actually like a scientific approach. Cause like a lot of scientists, they will set out to prove themselves wrong when they're, when they're a good scientist, a good scientist sets out a, a test, you know, let's say they're going to do, let's say it's

Dominic D'Agostino and he's testing keto. Well, if he's really trying to do it the right way, he's going to try to test proving that a lot of his theories are wrong. That's right. In some way. Yeah. And if it replicates it. Right. Yeah. And for me, like a lot of it is the internal like thought process for me is desired outcome.

And I know Adam's actually like brought this up on the show a couple of times, but that's a constant chatter that's going on in my mind all the time. What is the intent of this conversation? Where's the end of this conversation? Where does this lead us? And where do I challenge and where do I sit back and let it work itself out? sit back and let it work itself out. And, you know, all these things, I'm just like constantly assessing my thought process and where to interject and where to pull back. And I'm probably, I might be the most self-critical, you know, in the group. I don't know. I might just be saying that, but that was one of the biggest problems, why I had a hard time with the conversations because I would sit and I, and I'm like, yeah, okay, well you make a really good point there but then over here like i could see where sal would differ in his thought process towards that but you know and he's got a good point

because maybe we shouldn't spend money here but you know this actually will long term you know produce x y or z or whatever and so there's, it's just one of those things that just constantly is just running all day long. And then I've brought that into with my relationship, my wife and kids and like what I say, what, what's going to happen as a result of what I say. And so like, it's, it's just taking a sort of a more like a chess approach, like, okay, if this, then, then this, and then, but, but if this actually happened now, how can I steer it, you know, a little bit more towards

where I want to go. So it's, it's a, it's a crucial process for me to always, uh, you know, like have that chatter going on in my head to, uh, create where I want to go. Desired outcome and intent is great. I mean, you can think about that towards anything, right? Just towards your workout, towards your nutrition. And, you know, when you have this internal dialogue and you start to develop this, these, uh, belief systems, uh, it can really help you throughout the day. Like when you need, uh, encouragement or when you need a little boost or you're kind of wavering on your diet, like, oh, maybe I'll cheat today. of wavering on your diet, like,

oh, maybe I'll cheat today. Maybe that should be the thought process is like, what's the desired outcome of this? Like, do I want to sit here and enjoy this? Cause it's entertainment. And because I have people coming over the house and you know, so-and-so is making their favorite pie or whatever. Maybe I should just enjoy it. That's, that's really good, positive internal dialogue to have. And it's a good conversation to have with yourself. And then that way you can kind of arm yourself with whatever you need for that day. Or, you know, if it's a holiday coming up and you didn't want to cheat on your diet, you have this conversation going into it. Like you give yourself like a pep talk, almost like you're going into a football game and

you get yourself all fired up and say, I'm not, I'm not cheating on my diet. I'm going to try to stick to it the best I can. And maybe you'll end up with more desired outcomes that you want rather than you don't want. Right. Perfect. Um, where can people, uh, find a mind pump? Mind pump is the podcast. We're on all, all podcast platforms. Uh, we have a YouTube channel where we teach exercise technique, exercise technique and give workouts oftentimes. That's Mind Pump TV on YouTube. And then you can find our website, mindpumpmedia.com. That's where we have all of our programs.

You can find all our blogs on there. And then something we try to do, we like to give as much free information as possible. So we have a list of guides that we've written. Some of them are, you know, help you squat more or burn more body fat or build more muscle. And it's just long form information that we find valuable and it's totally free. Um, and that's at mindpumpfree.com. Awesome, man. It was great having you guys on the show. And if you could each one of you, just share your, uh, Instagram handle. Oh, that's easy yeah mind pump justin mind pump sal yeah we try to make it simple and then the main pages yeah the main page is mind pump media awesome man great having you guys on the show you guys uh you

got anything coming out that you want to announce or you guys heading somewhere you guys going to a trade show or anything like that a seminar no you No, you know, honestly, and you know, to Sal's point about, we really, we built this business on trying to deliver as much free content as possible to the point where we're at now, where I think it's impossible to actually be able to read and watch every bit of free content that we have. So I encourage people to use the tools that we've created to, to try and get as much free information as you possibly can from us. And then as a by-product, the business tends to grow from that. We have a free app, um, that allows you to search specific topics. So if you go to mind pump media, uh, under, under the app store, you can download that and then you can search a topic. If there's

a topic and we interview all kinds of experts and great thought leaders in our space. And if you want to learn about a specific topic, that's a great resource is just go straight to the app and then search a topic. And then, uh, the, uh, different podcast episodes that we've done with, uh, those people will populate. That's fantastic. Thank you guys so much. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength.

Catch you guys later.