Mark Bell's Power Project - Zack Telander - Olympic Lifting History and Gear Use in Sport and Fitness || MBPP Ep. 821

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

In this Podcast Episode, Zack Telander, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza dissect Natty or Not Videos, discuss PED's in Olympic weightlifting and talk about Zack's incredible process for creating content. Follow Zack on IG: https://www.instagram.com/coach_zt/ Subscribe to Zack's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC94_fvLx7abZgs9LIkM7jxw  New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://www.naboso.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 15% off! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject Code: POWERVIVO20 for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en  Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #ZackTelander #PowerProject #MarkBell

Power Project family, how's it going now? On this podcast, we talk a lot about getting great sleep. We've done countless podcasts on it. We almost talk about sleep every single podcast because of how important it is for your recovery, for your fat loss, for your muscle gain, all of that good stuff. That's why we've partnered with Eight Sleep Mattresses.

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8sleep.com slash power project. No code needed. You guys will see a banner across the top saying that you're going to receive $150 off your order. Again, so no code for that. Just head over to that link ASAP. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Does that mean I have ADD? Probably. Because that shit, it's the multiverse, I think.

What the fuck are you saying? I just think it's like, yeah, it's like you're going off in another dimension. Yeah. Yeah, you got the other dimension. Well, I can't even get into our own dimension. Well, maybe in the other dimension. I can focus. You can focus better?

I think so. I don't know. Maybe not. Anyway. So this is where, yeah, this is where things get weird and awkward. Do you do the countdown thing and then, you know? Three, two, one, we're live. Hey, everybody.

Hey, Zach, give us a speech. Well, all started when I was four. Are we live? Yeah. Wait, what? We're four. Are we live? Yeah. Wait, what? We're going. Really? We're going.

We recorded everything you've done so far. Okay. Including the shit that you took right when you got here. They got everything. Slingshot headquarters. Audio and everything. We got it all down. The stuff you're saying about how much you hate your audience was really shocking to me.

I'm fucking around, guys. The stuff you're saying about how much you hate your audience was really shocking to me. You hate all of them? That's so weird. Yeah, I want a new audience. I'm changing my content. This is the announcement. I'm changing it completely. Triathlons. Dude, on that note, the way your channel is, number one, we were talking about like you've garnered a really cool audience.

But your commentary on a lot of this stuff is really cool because I don't I haven't seen any other channels that are doing that as impressively as you are. We're like Greg does commentary, but it just seems that like the level at which you pick things apart, it's it's enjoyable and stimulating to listen to. Thank you. Thank you. So a couple of processes that I have when I make content, one of them would be like voiceover or like video essay. So I will write everything out and then I'll voiceover the top of it. And then I have an editor and I kind of make adjustments to the visual effect over the top. He has an editor. Oh, that was a huge pickup.

We thought you were doing it yourself. So I was for a long time. I was editing until I got to about 60,000 subscribers. And my editor, Alex, if you're out there, I love you. He's made my life a lot easier. And I definitely wouldn't be where I'm at without him. But yeah, so I do that a lot where I write everything out like, like you would for like an essay and then you read the essay and then you put visuals over the top.

But then there's other times where I just kind of want to go back and forth between an essay and then talking to the camera. And I actually find that to be the best. Uh, and then there's other times where I just click record and like, let's go. This is my opinion. This is what I want to get out of it. In all of those accounts, I try to be as middle ground as I possibly can, whether I disagree or agree with them. A lot of times I disagree with someone and they get to my head. It's like and then if I press record, I'll be ripping on them, you know? And then thank God I don't actually do that. Right.

But I, my, my second question is why is it getting to me? You know, why am I getting so upset by this? And so I think the, the best thing for me to do is to actually break down their side, create a steel man, if you will. And then try to understand what they're talking about and then really pinpoint why I disagree and let the audience determine what they think based off of that. And that has been much more successful than calling people out. It looks like a kind of documentary style and it looks like you are, I guess, drawing

attention much like a documentary would to something that maybe people weren't thinking about or they weren't thinking about it from the perspective that you're laying out. Yeah, that's mainly what I want to do because I also don't want to copy other people. Like I don't want to – we were talking about Natty or Notts before this. It's a hot topic given the Michael Hearn podcast that I ended up responding to. I don't want to do what Greg Doucette does. I don't want to do what Derek from More Dates does even though it seems like it would be a great opportunity for me because those videos do really well. How could I do it where it's me? You know, it's my perspective. It's me as a person. And I think that just being authentic is like, it's the only thing that

matters to me. And it's really the only thing that matters to my audience. Like they're here for, you know, my channel, my take, they don't want to see. And I've definitely, I can't think of any offhand, but i've definitely not been myself in order to get views and i regret doing that but it's like you know you live and you learn well you're being observed right and it's hard to it's hard to pretend that you're not being observed when you're making content that you want to be observed by a lot of people you know what i mean so how do you authentically be your true self i mean you would have to like uh not be in recognition you need to be lost you know the only time that you are really your true self a lot of well in my opinion a lot of times it would be like

when you're exerting yourself to your fullest is when you're probably just when you're olympic lifting and you're in the gym and you're kind of spent or you're frustrated you're trying to figure it out and you talk to your buddy next to you like you're authentically yourself like man sometimes this shit just fucking sucks doesn't it you know and you get in like good conversation you go back and forth and then maybe you start to troubleshoot and problem solve but it's kind of hard sometimes when there's a camera or you know you're going to create content for something yeah and this is something that i learned from my father so my my father is a really well-known sports writer, and his journey through sports writing is a really awesome one. But he played Division I football at Northwestern University, and then he was drafted by the Chiefs. And then he went on to writing after he got cut from the Chiefs at some point. went on to writing after he got cut from the Chiefs at some point.

And he was one of the bigger writers in Chicago when the Bulls were hot. So, you know, talk about like a lot of eyes on the things that you did. And I just always grew up like the Bulls would win and that was just my life. Like I just – I didn't – I took it for granted for granted like the most granted that was just like how things worked this is the jordan bulls yeah we just win like that's yeah cool another championship like that's that's how things are forever like now we look at chicago sports and it's it's nothing like that but what i'm getting at is my dad he would have these conversations at the dinner table about these things and then i would look at the paper and it would be like almost verbatim what he talked about. So, uh, a good, a good example of this was

there was like a Harvard men's basketball team and they were doing really well in the NCAA tournament. And his point was, look at, it's a bunch of seniors. They played together for four years. They're not getting drafted. This is a, a team, team you know and then i pulled out the newspaper at in high school i was just like i'm gonna read it i didn't really read my dad's articles too much and i read it and it was like i've already heard this you know and so when i'm thinking about content creation it's like what conversation do i have with my buddy when i'm spent like oh man this fucking sucks or how am i going to work past this? What conversation have I had? And can I repeat that in front of a camera

as naturally as I can without being nervous? And that takes, it takes a lot of time, but that is ultimately how I will, how I have and how I will always make content. And maybe that's the case with one of the videos and Seema just showed me where a lot of people are trying to mimic the way that that Chinese lifter is lifting. And you might have even just kind of thought about it maybe subconsciously like I've tried to mimic other people.

It doesn't work out great. Right. No, this – that is a direct conversation I have with my buddies in the gym. It's like everyone wants to fanboy about whatever it may be and they have no understanding of that person's experience, how robust, how many lifts that person has done. How many factors are there? And growing up in China and being part of their Olympic team, I mean, the list of stuff goes on and on and on and on.

By the way, guys, the video on Zach's channel is You Are Not Lou. It has four million views. It is an amazing video. It's incredible. So go check it out. Yeah. And the wild thing was when I made it, I was not,

I wasn't like, Oh, this thing's going to be awesome. You're like, no one's going to care about this. I was just kind of like, yeah, this is your interest.

This is it. This is, Oh, here it is up here. Yeah. This is a conversation that I had with a lot of people, you know, um,

is it's, it's good to have idols. It really is because like, I don't know who your idols growing up in strength with Arnold. is it's good to have idols. It really is because like, I don't know, who are your idols growing up in strength? Arnold? Wow, one of them's right here, Bo Jackson. Yeah, come on.

Bo Jackson, Jordan. Kobe. And how many times did you try to imitate them and do what they did? But the reality is, the stark reality is, you don't know what the fuck they did and what the fuck they're doing. know you have to really be your own coach and and your own athlete your own person at the end of the day and that is something that i'm consistently talking about yeah there's cloak off as well you also made a video you are not cloak off yeah and i think um

You also made a video. You are not Cloak Off. Yeah. And I think that's the main really important thing. You know about jujitsu and the blue belt blues, right? Yeah. And I think, well, oddly enough, I've taken a break from jujitsu. It was right after I got my blue belt, too.

It's because I'm trying to get bigger and stronger and back into weightlifting for a number of reasons by the way how much do you weigh so the audience knows i think i think like 245 yeah you're a big dude man he's a full-sized man over here say it again please yeah yeah so um so yeah so like the the idea of the blue belt blues is like you have this as a white belt you're just like oh it's okay it's all good if i suck you know then you get promoted and now you're a blue belt and the the idea is like you still suck but um they're not going to care about you as much because they're trying to develop white belts white belts are the one like that's the broadest audience you know you have to get them to continue now as a blue belt this is where you're on the island and that's the same thing there's no expectations of you for yourself and

from other people in the class probably right i wouldn't even go the route of expectations just yet it's more of along the lines of like you aren't just going to act based off of how your coach gives it to you. Right. So and this is something that I've dealt with as a coach like directly. So I worked with college students at Texas A&M. They get their syllabus at the beginning of the semester. It says do this by this time. Do this by this time.

And if you do it well enough, you will get an A, you know? Um, I can't fucking do that for you in weightlifting, especially once you get about a year, maybe a year and a half or two years in, I cannot tell you what you're going to do. So when they say, why did I miss? Why did this happen? Like I can't act unless you tell me, coach. How can I do that? It's that you need to be able to auto-regulate your training no matter what is given to you. And you need to hold yourself accountable. And those are things that a lot of younger people are not – that's a standard that they're not really taking, especially from schooling, especially. God damn it.

I just – I knew. Oh, I have to get this. This is the final. This is all that matters. OK. See you later. I'm going to study as hard as I can for that final and you told me I get an A if I do that and I got an A. Great.

That's not how the world works. And the allegory for the world is the weight room i cannot tell you how you're going to get anything no one can i can't even coach you to it you need to find ways to coach yourself ultimately in a sport where i'm a six foot four guy i was never the big strong guy in the weight room ever with a six foot seven wingspan and that is why i ever i that's why i had any remote success in weightlifting it was a constant finding out new things in a sport that there's only two things that we do i had to find new permutations and communi combinations to to train better and to optimize what i have and and so like this the you know that video the you are not lou video that is kind of what that is a metaphor for

it's a slippery slope when you have these idols and you want to copy them directly because you are an individual and um you know there's always obviously the other side of that what can we parcel out from the chinese lifters and from uh maybe the eastern block lifters uh that we could kind of copy like what's a what's a common denominator amongst them that makes them do well that that maybe is something that's uh more feasible and more in line with something that you could accomplish. They are incredibly thorough in their beginnings and how they start. Like incredibly thorough. The Chinese particularly.

So if you're patient, anyone could probably exhibit some of that. Yes. Yes. And it's like – When you say early, when you say early when you say early this is different early is like eight nine ten well early in their career but yes but nobody in china starts weightlifting like you just don't do it like you don't start weightlifting at 18 because you want to or or like the only people that do the sport it's's directly for the Olympics, and it's a program that you get into as a child.

There's really no recreational fun sport like that. I mean, basketball is probably the biggest sport in China as far as recreation goes. But weightlifting, there is no recreational weightlifting. What do you guys do for fun? Just like totally silent. No, no. I mean, they have recreational things that they do, of course. But weightlifting and Olympic sports are not one of them.

Whereas we would hear like it's all recreational. Yeah. And now there's – it's cool though. It's a different – Alexei Turokty said like you guys have the best system because it's so promising. It's happy. It's good. And you can develop some serious athletes in about a decade.

When he was talking about the US system? Yeah. Interesting. And now here we are a decade later and we're seeing those athletes and they are substantially – I mean you were around the strength scene in 2013. You were around a long time. I'm sure the USA weightlifting, it was intermixed and you knew how shitty we were at weightlifting because no one was a weightlifter. CrossFit, that was the boom, 2013, maybe actually 2011, 2012, 2013.

Actually, it might have been earlier here. I grew up in Chicago, so it took a little bit. But that exposed people to not just the gym but a style of training that has a serious amount of intensity but without the guidance of machines. And then those people's kids started doing CrossFit. Yeah. then those people's kids started doing CrossFit. Yeah. And now those kids are not adults, but they're junior level and they can compete as seniors.

And we're seeing that for sure. Yeah. I think there's also the benefit of those kids. Like there's a lack of specificity. Like, yeah, they were doing weightlifting stuff, but when they're doing CrossFit style workouts or anything, they're probably doing a bit of running. They're doing a bit of plyometrics. They're doing a bit of weightlifting. So they're building different capacities

along with what they're doing with the barbell. You know, have you ever read the book Range? No. We've mentioned it a few times on the podcast. It pretty much kind of goes into how, like there's a, who's that tennis player? Federer. Roger Federer.

He's one of the greatest tennis players ever. But when you look at his athletic history, he's done a lot of different sports before he focused on tennis. And it kind of goes into how a lot of elite level athletes have had a lot of different athletic experiences that allowed them to build capacities with different sports. And then when they come to this specific thing, they bring a different level of skill to it. Yeah. GPP and that's been proven time and time again i mean that's really what the soviets like outwardly said first it's like guys um specificity is it's not the enemy but it's like there's so much more here that that was it right i mean like um that's what louis found was like the the soviets he's the one who brought that all those methodologies to us here in the states when we were you know training

powerlifting and and uh weightlifting out of all of that and the the main thesis behind that was like if you want to be a better javelin thrower like you don't just throw different weighted javelins like you learn how to become more powerful so how can we become become more powerful well we can develop gpp and we can get a little bit more specific and we can develop power out of that we can develop strength before we develop the power and then you'll be able to throw the javelin further or you'll have more fitness to be able to take on more volume of throwing yeah and and ultimately like if you're not doing that as a child like that you're really really really missing

out and honestly on that note dude did you see that 15 year old kid that pulled 705 no i haven't i'll find it please that that's crazy there's been some mutants in his comments there's a lot of crazy shit but the the interesting thing you were mentioning for example the uranat lu and people have a lot of athletes that they look up to i think because of the age of social media where you can see what a person is doing all the time currently you miss out on what that individual has been doing since they were young for example these chinese weightlifters and some of these russian weight lifters have been doing something they were picked for they were bred for this sport since the age of like seven eight they've been doing something as it pertains to that in oh this is this is crazy so his name's

nick you i couldn't remember but that's there he is now he has straps and it's sumo 15 yeah like right yeah what was that about. It's like hard to even like, like grasp when you see videos like this. It's like hard. Like, oh, that's not that much weight. He's not that young. Like, I can't tell. Even though the numbers are right there.

You just can't tell. It's one of those things. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of that in strength sport. We were talking about Lasha. It's too mind boggling. Yeah. Lasha snatching 220. Can you pull that that up lasha snatching 225 kilos and what an amazing and incredible athlete

that guy is the way that that guy can move is absolutely insane i have broken down his technique on my channel plenty of times his uh squats and stuff like that like just watch him like front squat and then he just like drops the weight and does other shit with it. Like it's enough. So here's two 25. Like just watch this. If you please just walk like you have no idea what that is. No one,

no one sees that. And they're like, okay, that's a heavy weight. He he's, he's, he's kind of big. Like he's,

someone would call him fat, but like, the reality is, that is five pounds less than 500 pounds. Lasha in this video weighs probably 170 kilos. Come on. And he is moving that weight in a way that no one can fathom. It's just,

he's off the ground, clearly off the ground by several inches. and then squatting down underneath it and then just making it look flawed like the weight was weightless is that fair to say like i think it was weightless for a moment right so there there was a um a magazine called o-lift they discontinued it but they did vector uh force vectors on the snatch in different stages and they did it with this guy luis mascara if you could pull up a video of him snatching luis mascara um and they talked about different stages and the weight i'll get it to that one spot just for a second there's feet are up yep and it's weightless right like he this guy just

made 500 pounds completely float well and his body at the same time yeah what the yeah and the 300 something pounds he weighs so that this is why um i actually made a video called it's i forget what it is but it's like beyond triple extension that's what it's called so a lot of people they think of this term triple extension extension the ankle knee and hip and how valuable that is for sprinting athletes and that's why we do weightlifting but when i looked at the force vectors of a snatch um there's far more value in a in a in a weightlifting movement than just that initial triple extension and what you see is when it passes the knees, it's a certain weight. And then when he explodes and pulls on it, this is actually force.

So if you were to measure his force output, it goes almost to double. Wow. So the weight goes almost to double. Yeah, let's see if – and by the way, this is my editing too. This is way different um i'm wondering what part of the video keep going keep going fat just go like this oh i just want to see that there's a lot that goes into this i mean even just the fact that a but but sorry what i was

saying was that the amount of force that you put in to a barbell in a snatch changes four or five times and it also doubles like so upon receiving it you know it's 150 kilo snatch and when he's receiving it they measure the force of being almost 190 kilos and then when he stands up it goes back to being 150 kilos that's why it's such a crazy sport there's so much coordination and there's timing of you getting underneath the weight you're dropping down extremely quickly and then you're also absorbing you're also absorbing a lot of force and like it's kind of hard to think about other lifts that you might do in the gym where you would encounter something similar like on a squad or

bench deadlift it almost doesn't seem like those same attributes are there because in olympic lifting you're like throwing the weight up and then you're getting underneath it you got to catch those weights it's um the force velocity curve of a deadlift is constant pretty much uh but the one you know in a snatch so bar force at extension this is 147 kilo snatch bar force at extension was 280 kilos bar force at the catch is 250 kilos so these this varying you know coming on to you and going away from you that is the value that this could have. But obviously I'm not going to sit here and develop robust snatching technique with general athletes.

I understand that. I understand that this is a sport in itself and that we don't want to spend a ton of time teaching people how to be perfect at the snatch so they can get better at their sport. However, there are variants of both movements, of all of the – there are like cousins, distant cousins of the snatch and the clean and jerk that we can use and we can transfer over really fast to athletes. The girls in Olympic lifting are phenomenal by the way. Yeah. They're beautiful. I mean, they look jacked.

They're able to lift some heavy-ass weight. And I know sometimes people, you know, females and people sometimes are worried about, like, gaining too much size or getting bulky or something. But these girls look awesome. Yeah. I think just, like, in general, powerlifting, you see it a lot, weightlifting. The idea of having a number is really helpful to somebody who wants to enjoy the gym. Pursuing the number first, you know, on the bar, and then seeing how your body changes, how your mentality changes after.

changes how your mentality changes after it's a it's a it's a nice little side effect to see your physique change to see all these different things happen to your body when you're chasing off having like the perfect deadlift or getting your first pull-up i think that a lot of women and honestly men need to get into that mindset of having a number to chase of or progressive performance yeah progressive right performance yes both absolutely because um so many people want to look a certain way or or maybe feel a certain way and their way of approaching it it's still archaic it's still to this day archaic. And it's, which is odd because there seems to be more and more influencers and more and more coaches online and people with really good information telling them, all you got to do is if you work hard in the gym by putting

on muscle and have like more of a protein heavy diet, like you don't have to do these crazy crash diets. You don't have to be a cardio bunny. Like you're going to look great. And the greatest thing is you're going to feel great. And like, it's hard. Cause like, I don't, I don't understand how else we could put it. You know, I think, well, the progression performance, right. Focusing on what you can actually do when anybody starts lifting, it depends on where they are, but most people are maybe looking for a physical transformation. And it's very difficult to take your mind out of how you look every single day. But as we know,

we look the way we do at this point, but we also enjoy the fuck out of this. Despite anything, we'd be doing this every single day, despite what we look like because of how enjoyable the gym and performance and progression is. Now the look is a byproduct of that, but when athletes are truly able to focus on progressing somehow and they truly learn to build the habit of enjoying the gym or not even just the gym, the gym or any sort of physical activity, the body will come. You can't rush the body. It will come. But the first thing you've got to focus on is learning how to love this shit

and having it become a true habit. That's the big deal. Yeah. So do you know that clip with Jocko Willink where he's – it's actually – it's with my buddy Chris Williamson, my roommate. Shout out, Chris. What's up, Chris? Great podcast.

He did a podcast with Chris and he was talking about the difference between discipline and motivation. And he said motivation can come and go, but discipline is ultimately what matters because you're going to do whatever the fuck it is no matter what, no matter how you feel. And the way that i see the weight room i don't see myself as disciplined and i look at i look at jaco and i'm and he's talking about discipline he's talking about all these things and i it sucks because i'm like fuck i'm not like that i'm this isn't hard for me yeah you know like i so'm motivated and, and this is what I found out. It was like, I, um, I outsource my motivation. So, uh, Chris, what are we doing today?

Are we going to the gym? That's my motivation. Chris right there. He'll literally, we have two separate doors and I'll be like kind of in bed still. And he'll ring my doorbell, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, you know? And then I'll pop up out of bed. He'll rip on me for like you know five minutes straight we get in the car we go to the gym and we just go as hard as fuck in the gym that's my motivation i'm his motivation but we're up early

we're going to the gym but wait you don't enjoy the gym but no and that's the thing i enjoy that but it's some would call that disciplined but for, I'm just creating new forms of motivation at every turn. If I don't feel like going to the gym, how can I make it so that I feel like I want to go to the gym? And I realize I do this a lot in Olympic weightlifting too because when you don't have a day where you can lift heavy and feel like you lifted heavy, it is really, really discouraging. lifted heavy, it is really, really discouraging. So if you go in there and you kind of have this feeling of like, I'm going to do something hard today that I don't have very high expectations of myself. So, um, one of them, like, it's just a workout where we just did power snatch, double just power snatch, and then you power snatch. I'm working out with one of my training partners. His name's Dylan Cooper. He's a great weightlifter, really, really solid coach as well, and really smart guy. And I already did hypertrophy training in the morning with Chris. And I was like, I just want to go in and go hard. Like, I know I'm going to suck. I know I suck today, whatever.

So I walk in, I put my cell phone completely away and I just start power snatching. And the only thing I focus on is like, here's 50 kilos. Let me do this perfectly. Boom. I did it. And I walk back and forth. I just walk back and forth, put 70 kilos on. This is the only weight I have to hit today.

70 kilos snatch, 70 kilos snatch, walk back and forth, 90, 100, 110. Then I got 115 for a double and I'm like like that's like some of the best lifting i've ever done in my life like i've i can't remember the last time i did a power snatch double at 115 so cool question you weren't putting any pressure on yourself to keep doing more you were just like let's see what i want to work today somehow i don't know what that is i don't i'm not i'm not fucking disciplined you know what i mean it's there's something – and then all of a sudden I get an amazing workout in and it's whatever. So that's – this is actually a video that I'm currently working on right now. It's kind of trying to work in some nuance to what Jocko says because what he says scares the shit out of me, you know, if I'm fair. You know, if I'm fair, like I like it. I want to think that I'm a badass and that that I'm disciplined and all that shit. But I don't I don't feel like that. And maybe for someone else, it's like, no, no, no. What you in your life. Uh, you know, as an example, maybe, uh, you're probably in a phase where you're trying to turn things more businessy and maybe there's

aspects of that that you don't really love. And then, so you hire, then you hire somebody, right. And you bring them on a board, but I mean, uh, you know, when, when it's things that you like, you, you either like them enough to where you do them often. and it appears that you're disciplined or you don't. And if you don't do them, it just means you're not as interested as you thought you were. Whether it's to diet for a bodybuilding show or whether it's to power lift or weight lift or anything really. First off, the reason I said goddamn is because you hit the nail on the head with the fucking business stuff. Yeah, once we just go outside of like your actual like niche thing then it gets all fucked up yes um but also the the the idea of not enjoying it um what i what i like to think i do is create that joy somehow or create a game or so so the best diets i've ever

i ever did ever was i would take a picture of my food and post it to my instagram story and i put the number one okay then i took another picture number two three four five all the way up to 100 meals in a row and that was so fun and like everyone's like oh man meal number 99 like you you know like ate pretty well for 100 meals in a row something like that it was so it was so cool and gamify i didn't really have and i'm horrible with nutrition in that way you can't get me to weigh shit out you know like the one thing i do is i will stress out about getting enough protein i figure this is a good time at Try that shit at some point. Let's get high too with some Kratom. We'll do some legendary.

But that's what I'm saying is like I will try to outsource my motivation in some way so that I do like it. I want to pull this up because – I'm also going to steal your hand from my foot. Oh, this guy? Yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, this guy? Yes.

Oh, yeah. I think of discipline as like the distance away from your goal, either with time or actually really not being able to see the potential of it coming true. Yeah. Can you say that again, please? And still fucking doing it anyway. So I actually wrote it because I – Well, here's a thought process I've had for a while. Like I don't really consider things to be hard necessarily or maybe I think that people should reinterpret what they think is hard because the difficulty level that you think something is going to be, by the time you get closer to it, it's going to have decreased. It's going to dissipate a lot because you already did the work to get there. paid a lot because you already did the work to get there and so it we it feels badass and we feel like badass is sometimes doing something and that's probably why we record a run or record a lift and like hey man you know there's a motivation to yes recording yeah yeah yeah you're motivated you're

fired up but it's again it's motivation within like a bubble of something that we already love to do right i'd imagine like this weightlifting thing didn't come out of nowhere. You probably did some other sports and you either found out that you were halfway decent at them and got some good feedback from it, or you found out that you sucked at it and you found weightlifting, but either way, it led you to this conclusion that this is what you like to do now. And then you start to just do it. So I think, I think, I think hard work and motivation a lot of times are um and even discipline i think they're all misunderstood and i think they're all

little almost uh mythological in a way because if you were to take you know somebody like jaco willing is so well rounded so you're like i don't know where i would place that guy to try to put him in fear probably nowhere but if you were to take uh the ufc heavyweight champion right now and you were to drop him off somewhere where there's a war going on and give him night vision and put him you know he's got to drop down from a fucking helicopter or whatever they're gonna be terrified yeah if he took a navy seal that's already been in war that's already been doing those things he would be just as scared to probably go on the morning news and talk as an anchor because they've never done that before they're gonna feel like they're gonna shit themselves while they're sitting there ready to talk so

a lot of it has to do with exposure and what you've been exposed to in the past but i think it just always goes back to what do you like to do yeah and i guess i just struggle to understand that like dry definition of discipline and like what does he really mean by that. And we don't have to come up with an answer, but these are the things. I wrote this on the plane ride here, and this is going to be in my next video. This is really cool. I didn't really realize at the heart of it you're a writer. Yeah, and it came directly from my dad. I never thought I would be ever in a million years. You probably always it you're a writer yeah it's yeah and it came directly from my from

my dad i never thought i would would be ever in a million years probably always thought he's a nerd no so so like this is one of the things that i i've said a lot as well the most valuable thing i ever learned in school as it as it pertains to making content was the five paragraph essay that's great did you know the five paragraph essay i do not great. Did you know the five paragraph essay? I do not. That's why I don't have the writing going on. Yeah. So your intro is topic sentence.

Then you have your three reasons or three points. Look it up. And then your closing statement. And then your next three paragraphs fall in line with those three points. And then you have your closing thing. Like I can't, I've actually done a five paragraph essay like multiple times on my, but it's just,

it works right. Because if you have something you want to say, you need, you need to point out what it is, like what your thesis is, right? That's one of the points in the, in the gold for making YouTube videos.

Can you read some of that to us? It's just private stuff. There we go. Introduction, there we go introduction body body body conclusion five paragraph it's all right there yeah this man has built a whole business off of the five paragraph essay i just realized this i think i was like at dinner and i was like what the hell don't you hate realizations like this they just make you feel so dumb school isn't useless i learned this in third grade you know that's how you write that's how you write things and and i remember my teacher saying well look if you tell me um the sky is blue and i say what could i come back to disagree with you with and i go well it's not always blue it's sometimes it's gray good good point now have

a be ready for that point so it's like you're already making the argument against you right and so you have to be ready for that now you can counter it before they can even make it that's just all i try to do is like most people out there everyone has an opinion okay to make that opinion a thesis you just need to write about it and if you have a thesis people will always want to listen to it because it might confer or deny what they already believe and i've just found that this outlet of doing this is so goddamn fun it's really interesting because like when he was showing me the olympic lifting video i was like i don't even know how interested i am in this but as i was watching it was great yeah i totally got drawn in so this is one of the things um that i said in here

if we look at discipline as the antithesis of motivation we might start to think that disciplined actions are the things that not only we don't want to do but they do not confer a benefit with regards to motivating factors. And then I give an example. If my goal is to bench press 225 and my current max is 185, the motivation to get in the gym is inherent, right? So you, no matter what I do. Yeah. Why did you say that goal? If you're not going to follow through with anything. So, so, but like, this is the thing is like jaco says discipline eats motivation for breakfast you know discipline is the one that matters but all of my disciplined actions are they really disciplined if i'm motivated directly by a goal and that's what

i'm questioning is like i know that i want to bench press 225 so when i wake up in the morning that's not out of discipline. That's out of motivation. Right. So what if there was a way for me to continually create motivation for things that maybe I don't want to do for actions that will make me a better person? Right. Is that its own form of discipline? And that's the question that I'm trying to ask. And it's like, there might not be an answer. And I'm not disagreeing with Jocko Willink. I love the guy. I'm also scared shitless of him. He'll kill us all.

Yeah, we got to delete this. Delete this part of the book. But I have a question for you guys. Could we, and this might be stupid, but couldn't we just say that habit is synonymous with discipline? Like if we just thought about all of those things, right? Like the, because at this point for us, I'm not disciplined to go into the gym and exercise.

It's my habit when it's not, when I don't do it, I don't feel as good. And I know that because that's a habit of, and not even just the gym, just physical exertion. I know for me, when I don't have enough physical exertion, I become depressed. It's happened to me in the past. So I don't need just the gym, but I need something to exert. So I feel good. It's a habit now. So the thing is though, it's like, what if it didn't make you feel good? This is the thing though. That's what I wonder because initially, right? For example, running, we've picked up running my first run. I knew that I wanted to have the ability just to be able to run a few miles right and and for that my goal was that running could become habitual okay so my first few runs shit sucked it was painful my my gait was bad my upper body was tight after the run the next day

my calves and ankles and achilles all that shit was sore but i knew that over time this will feel better because we all have the experience of the gym feeling bad at us at first you're really sore and ankles and Achilles, all that shit was sore. But I knew that over time, this will feel better because we all have the experience of the gym feeling bad at first. You're really sore. The doms are rough. You don't want to get up and do it the next day, but you know that it can become something that doesn't have you feel pain, that becomes beneficial. So my goal with running was to have it become habitual. That was my goal. And now it is habitual where I can do a three-mile run and I'm not wrecked the next day. But it took initially my perception of the pain after the run. I was like, this is just something to get through to get to the point where it can become habit.

Yeah. But did you need motivation to turn it into a habit? Did I need motivation to turn it into a habit? to turn it into a habit. Do I need motivation to turn it into a habit? This is the thing. I think James Clear did a good job of describing a lot of this in Atomic Habits. Tim Ferriss has talked along these lines before,

and I think maybe what we're trying to describe right here sometimes is that if we can lower the barrier of entry into whatever it is that we can do if we can lower the hurdle down enough then maybe we're cool with jumping over it and maybe it doesn't feel like discipline because we lowered it you said hey chris you want to work out if he said no now the hurdle just got a little higher yeah and you look outside and there's it's a storm it's raining it's fucking cold out you're like i don't know and you just maybe sit there maybe it makes everything a little bit harder but you're saying that it might be a skill set to listen to that youtube video where someone's yelling at you or you find something motivational or maybe even you find motivation in music or playing the drums or playing the guitar

and you lean on that and once you do that go for that walk or whatever it is right then your mind is back to being a little bit more clear where you're not as frustrated you're not as worried about what's going to happen with the day and you're like you know what i do need to go fucking work out because that's the best thing for me it's good for me i guess i guess my only argument against jaco would be that it's not – you can't place so much weight. Like it's – the way that he says it's discipline is here and motivation is down. And I feel as though it's more of a duality. It's more of a yin and yang type of thing, masculine and feminine.

It is a balance between both is what you need. That's how I feel. That's how I've operated because – yeah. That's fair to me to put them all in a blender. Utilize whatever you got to. Right. Get through each day. Yes.

I just – I need more of that gamifying and whatever it may be for business. Did you ever struggle with kind of like switching over into being more business-minded? I never had to. My situation is unique. with kind of like switching over into being more business minded? I never had to. So I, my situation is unique. You know, I, I invented something.

So it's, uh, it's just different. You know, it's, um, I don't even know how to describe it, but it's like,

uh, it almost feels like just being super lucky. You know, I know some people are like, Oh, you know, not lucky, but it's a really crazy blessing to create a product, to have a thought in your head, and then to make it, and then to put it out in the world.

And the world receives it well, and they purchase it, and it turns you into a millionaire. It's really fucking weird and hard to describe. But luckily for me, my wife is also my business partner. So she handles a lot of that side of things. Right. I've had to navigate some of it. But we just learned early on that that wasn't my going to be my main place to hang out. And even stuff like dealing with employees and stuff was difficult for me because I'd rather just be like your homie rather than to be your boss. like your homie rather than to like be your boss.

So I guess like one thing that could happen for you is like, you know, you can be so grateful for going like this, right? All of a sudden like that, you're like, wow, I shouldn't be here. I'm a millionaire now, you know? But at some point you're like, okay, well, this is my level. I'm here and I want to go there. The only way to do that is to have some sort of practice that I might not be so good at. That's kind of what I'm struggling with right now.

You know, it's like there's aspects of this that are beyond being just creative. As you guys might be able to tell, I'm more of a creative minded type of person. Um, and I want to be able to hack certain algorithm things and whatever that may be. Like I would love to, to make some sort of business moves. be able to hack certain algorithm things and whatever that may be.

Like I would love to make some sort of business moves. And that's where like maybe I don't have the discipline to prepare for taxes, to prepare for all of these different things. And that's where I would like to gamify that sort of thing. But I think in your situation, it's like when you take that jump, you still want to keep going, right? Yeah, absolutely. So it might take some work that you're not used to or not ready for, even though, I don't know, five, ten years ago, you'd be like, there's no fucking way I'd be a millionaire. What are you talking about?

It's a lot of effort. It's a lot of conversation. I don't always want to approach my wife with certain ideas or concepts until I have them locked in a little bit better. And so, cause like she'll explain why it's not going to work, but that's kind of like her job. We have to, and we have to go back and forth as you were talking about that negotiation of like what color the sky is. We have to kind of go back and forth on stuff. And some things are just, they don't make sense to make at this particular time or sometimes it doesn't make sense to hire somebody at a particular time

but we're just trying to like you know weigh out the pros and cons of it to keep navigating to do exactly what you're talking about you know constant some sort of constant uh improvement is like a hard thing to like always quantify but um we just want to feel really good about what we do and we want to um i feel like there's still more inventions and products and ideas i have to assist with exposing people to certain things so that's a big mission for me nowadays is just to try to not necessarily more exposure for myself, but more exposure to some things that I think can really help people. I think that this is an awesome thing, the improvement, the idea of like not really being

able to quantify it or knowing the answer. And this is where being creative minded is like actually really fun. Something I say with people who don't know whether they should split jerk or power jerk, right? Like which one should I do? And a power jerk variation for those listening, watching, the bar comes up off of your front rack and then you get underneath it and you lock out your elbows. You do not move your feet at all. You just kind of catch with bent knees. If you think about a push press, you bend your knees and you just lock them out and you just do an overhead press. That's a pretty simple one.

And then an overhead press, you know, there is no leg movement at all. There is the power jerk and then there's the split jerk. The split jerk is a little bit more technical. And a lot of people say, you know, which one should I do? Should I do the split? Should I do the power? I feel like this when I do this. I feel like this.

And I say as long as you're training, as long as you're experimenting, you're going to be fine. As long as you are thinking, not just thinking, you're doing. You're out and you're exploring. Like you're putting in work and you're not just paralysis by analysis type of thing. You'll be okay. And that's where I think like for someone like you, if you're worried about improvement and you don't know whether you are improving or not, the fact that you are acting is good enough. It really, really is. That is one of the biggest lessons that I have

told people repeatedly in my videos. I made one. Do you guys know who Kiriakos Grizzly is? Do you guys know who Kyriakos Grizzly is? Yeah. Okay. So look, I made a video about it, about Kyriakos Grizzly. And he has the saying, for the difficult. Somebody asked, why do you train so hard? And he just said, for the difficult.

It's really funny. It's iconic actually um and i think that just exploring hard things and exploring difficult things when you don't know the answer is so much better than doing nothing at all it's ridiculous you know it's the i've seen this guy before yeah the well it's to make everything else it It's to mitigate. Everything's a stress mitigator. You know, you make yourself strong to mitigate being weak in certain times of your life and you do things that are difficult so that when things come at you in life that might be interpreted as being sad or difficult or whatever it might be, they're going to be easier and easier for you to handle the stronger that you are. But, and I think that getting to that difficult spot is simpler than you think. Like, because I have been at places in my life where I will be like, I can do this, this, this, this, this, except I'm going to do nothing. I'm going to sit right here and think about all the things that I could do. Right. Um, and the best parts of my life is I

would just do something and then I would realize, Oh, that's not the thing. And I'll go this way. And then I'll go that way. Um, and so what, you know, back to motivation and these things is like, as long as you can take some sort of step, something else is going to happen. And then you create this chain reaction that is just fucking glorious. And it can help so much with anxiety and depression and a lot of problems that people face that keep them out of the gym. And one of the things I said in that video where I talk about the difficult is like if you literally take a step with your right foot and then you go, okay, now I'm going to take a step with my left and then my right. And then now you're touching your car door. Well, you might as well open up your car door.

You might as well sit in it. You might as well turn the key. You might as well go to the gym my best times weightlifting ever i've been so nervous about the weight that i need to hit so nervous like i'm shaking and i'm like i don't want to be here i'm so scared but i get to the platform and i go okay well here's the barbell i'm going to snatch it this is all i have to do today snatch this fucking barbell by itself 20 kilos okay then uh i feel good with that 50 kilos goes on you know i've already given this analogy you know 50 kilos goes on 70 kilos all i'm focusing on is that tiny little step in front of me

every day and and all of a sudden that step gets bigger and bigger and bigger it's like we we think of progressive overload we're down for that we're bigger and bigger and bigger it's like we we think of progressive overload we're down for that we're down for progressive overload when it comes in a pro when it comes in a program when with a methodology but we're not down for it when it's practical everyday things people if they want to lose weight they want to go all in okay well then if you can't go all in then what happens happens? I'm not fucking going to the gym. I'm going to get pizza. I'm going to go,

you know, it's like, dude, you actually, the 10 minute walk, like that was so far ahead of its time. I don't know if, did you get that from somebody?

I know that's like, we're talking about walking here, but it came from a study. There was a study done, uh, where they did, uh, multiple bouts of 10 minute walks versus metformin, which is a pharmaceutical that helps regulate your blood glucose.

And then they also did it with like maybe like an hour walk. And what they found was that the intermittent 10-minute walks were more valuable. Walking. Right. Walking. That's like – i love walking you know and i'm a i've snatched 143 kilos like you've deadlifted how much seven something seven it doesn't matter whatever you know but like you people would expect like oh a workout session for you it's got to be fucking intense right

no dude i will consider going on a long walk or playing pickleball a serious workout for me, you know, and you should too. I think when we get people like an example of this is like people who are having weddings, you know, and they're like, I need to get in shape for the wedding. So they have to do something crazy. Gym membership, personal trainer, crash diet. So they have to do something crazy. Gym membership, personal trainer, crash diet. Okay. Like none of that is going to lead to anything with longevity at all.

Yeah. You never hear anybody say like, I'm going to get in shape because I'm about to get married and I want to be around for a really long time with the person that I care about. Like people don't say that and they're like late twenties or early thirties. Yeah. Not thinking that way. They're just getting better for that one picture and then they're going to get fatty. Exactly. Yes. But, but that's the thing it's like it's funny a lot of things you're mentioning zach are things that we talk about like all the time on the show that a lot of this stuff comes down to number one starting small but then slowly increasing what

you're doing to have it become a habit like for for example, years ago, I don't know if it was 2017, we picked up the habit of fasting, right? And initially it was quite difficult to just go half a day without eating. It was horrible at first. Yeah. Like, like even just skipping breakfast felt like shit, but now it's to a point where sometimes we eat one meal a day. Some like, sometimes we won't fast at all, but it's to a point where we can just dip in and out of it without it feeling the least bit stressful. And the benefits I've found that even for myself, the benefits for me have been like, I don't have a problem with my,

like I don't attach any type of emotion to hunger. Like I used to before when I get hungry, I'd be like, fuck, I'd be kind of stressed. I got to get some food in my mouth. Now it really doesn't matter, but it's because it didn't start off that way.

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And at checkout, use the code POWERVIVO20 20 to save yourself 20 off your entire purchase enjoy the episode you know what about just like not attaching emotions to weights and not attaching emotions like okay you know the weights don't need an assignment you know they don't need that attachment i mean i totally understand what you say i used to write shit down and that's why i stopped writing shit down i'm like like, I don't even need to see this. I just want to go in and feel it. Yes. A hundred percent.

And this is, okay, so I guess we can end up starting to talk about this, but in SEMA had voice messaged me on Instagram following the video that I made about Michael Hearn on the podcast. Great video. And, and, um, one of the things he had talked about, talked about was the expectation effect and just expectations in general. And something that I've said a lot that might be kind of contrary to what you guys were talking about with Mike O'Hearn is – I say this a lot. I say low expectations, high standards. So it sounds horrible to say have low expectations.

But the only reason I say that, and again, this isn't, it's not an ism, but it's a saying, you know, you can't put all your chips onto a saying. There's so much nuance here. But the reason I say that is the word expectations has expect. And just like you were saying, you know, you have these numbers on a paper, those are your expectations. Now that sucks if you don't meet those expectations and so here is where i actually found the middle of the road with this the crazy elite and really hard workers can and should have expectations and those expectations will take a fucking mental toll and those expectations are the edge

i have a video um i can't think of what it's called it's with the one on jordan yeah okay so that is it right people think that greatness is virtuous greatness in sport is virtuous when it is almost the exact opposite yeah a great man is not a good man right oftentimes oftentimes but or they are a good man they just have to change into a fucking monster that is not good to be around to do what they want to do and it's really you know another guy matt fraser is a guy who i like to think about he talks a lot about the stress that he puts on himself and to every person i've ever met i would tell them to do the exact fucking opposite never do that to yourself especially if you want to learn

how to go to the gym if you want to get stronger if you want to get in more shape never do that because you will shut down right unless i mean we could do it to a thousand people, tell them to act like Jordan, Matt Fraser, and you would find like 10 of them that would rise to the top. But in general, you don't want to go with that approach. So that's why I say low expectations, high standards. But if you're at the advanced level, you might have to put on some serious personal pressure that will be mentally damaging. This is what we've seen time and time again. And it might not be as visible in some athletes. Like I don't really see it in Steph Curry. I just, I don't. And some athletes, he just seems too happy. Yeah. But there's something there. I don't know him. We don't know him. We don't know

what he puts himself through. And it might not always be outward. It might not just be how they treat other people. It might be how they treat themselves. Yeah. I think for some people it also might be a little bit of just – I'm going to crack this, by the way. Yeah, go for it. Crack and open some mind bullet potion.

I think for some people it's just mathematical sometimes. Yeah, just try to figure out half. It doesn't really matter. Or maybe it does. Even if you do the whole thing, you will be okay. He's a big guy. The taste is really good. I just did the whole thing.

You did the whole thing? Okay, now I just want to warn you. He loves the flavor. We're getting an update about how much he enjoys the flavor. Loves the flavor. He looks like he's... Okay, my friend, my friend. Zach, look at me. okay we're getting an update about how he how much he enjoys the flavor loves the flavor he looks like he's okay my friend my friend look zach look at me when your palms get sweaty and your toes start to tingle do not worry it's totally okay and if you feel my thumb that's not gonna happen

by the way no no that's not gonna happen my thumb i was joking that's not gonna happen now i'm just gonna finish it he did full I gotta follow Zach's footsteps he's like it's so bright in here what's going on and loud what's that noise can you turn this off I was gonna say oh

I think for some people sometimes it's just mathematical almost you know Curry his dad was a basketball player too, right? Yeah. I think sometimes for some people it's just like a mathematical equation. Like,

um, you might know some, I mean, Olympic lifters are sort of known for this, especially the Russian lifters, right? Where it's like, these are the inputs and this is the output.

So it's like, there's not even almost maybe like if the coach knows the way, you know, and I realize I could change if the coach knows the way and the athlete knows the way. And it's like, this is the way like we're just going to go this. This is the way that we're going to go. And there's not really a deviation from it. There's probably not a lot of reasons to get nervous about it because we know that you're going to hit this lift on this particular day because all the inputs were there. And maybe that's what also separates out some of these other countries is that all the other

variables that you might have in your life if you're an American and you're going to like a public school, I mean, that's got to look way different than what some of these athletes might encounter if they're Olympic bred athletes from the time they're really young. Their whole life might be set up to just do that. And so therefore, the three sets of three they did in the previous few weeks, you know, is going to lead to this result. Whereas maybe an American athlete just had like too much fuckery going on in between to where they could really zero in on that. I definitely want to talk about this because this can lead right into the Michael Hearn thing and the main kind of stress test that I have had with that. But I have one thing as well that goes with the toxic mindset.

And this is a theory. And again, this might be a video that I want to make. There is something that the best athletes are working against. Something that we might call a genetic disadvantage, a lifestyle disadvantage, and they work against that. And it gives them an edge.

Someone who used to be fat as a kid uh too short you know steph curry has a you know he has good genetics for this sport like by all by all accounts yeah but if you put it on paper he doesn't he where do you play basketball he played western kentucky or something like that. Right. He was, he's six foot four, not any six, three, six,

three, not any particularly long wingspan. Like he had to work against that. You know, Michael Jordan had a lot of things that he had to work against. And there's something about that, that I find fascinating. A perfect example is whiplash. You know,

um, he knows, uh, jk what's his name jk simmons character oh he knows that it's not the most talented guy that i want it's the guy who is fighting against something it's like and it's not always just like you know we always think of the classic who who's the guy that works hard and versus the genetic one it's not always just like, you know, we always think of the classic who, who's the guy that works hard versus the genetic one. It's like, no, there's something fucking deeper than that. That's so, I find so interesting. It's, it's not just that Miles Teller's character works harder. It's like, he's battling when he, when he, when he's on the drums, he's battling every day.

And in doing so, he like creates these different styles of genetics that are actually working for him like and that's why i really dislike the the overarching term genetics because what the fuck does that even mean like we can one of the tests, the vertical, is like probably the simplest test of power as far as genetics go, right? And it's likely that somebody we would say has better power genetics will be able to have a higher vertical. We can say that, right? But every step of the way, the factors get more and more and more and more and more. Every sport, there's added factors i would say tom brady like if i saw him in a business suit walking around i'd be like that's a good looking

dude he's got good genetics for looking good you know he's six foot four whatever but if i said football genetics what when in fact he might have the greatest genetics of all time for football do you see what i mean yeah aaron rogers i. I think Aaron Rogers might be one of the best athletes on earth. And people be like, that's crazy. Best athlete. What are you talking about? Like he can't run that fast.

It's like, but his brain, there's something in there. There's something, there's something right. Mikey Musumechi. Oh yeah. He,

his body type. I mean, he's got some crazy dimension. He's dimension doing it since he was a kid though yeah that's the thing and i i'm i can guarantee you he's working against something yeah but but that would that was my my theory around working against something in what way what are you i don't it's again this is something that i have to like write i have to write it out and i have to create this kind of back and forth between myself but i see what you mean but i'm just trying to help you express it even further maybe yeah like

but like i mean shaquille o'neal like his dad walked out on him type thing and yeah but you're gonna know my name type deal right yeah and just how many how many good athletes got their asses kicked by people at their same age same and, and somehow they just went, and it just kept going up for them. And whoever was beating their asses kind of stayed the same. Maybe they improved, but nowhere near as much as, uh, as, as the other guys improved. Or maybe it wasn't like another player that kicked their ass. Maybe it was just their own brothers.

Yeah. Or themselves or themselves. Matt Fraser constantly talks about how much he beat up on himself which i would never ever ever tell anyone to do but it worked and it worked really really fucking well i wonder when he talks if it's almost a little bit like uh like a reinforcement of like when he talks about how hard he works i've seen him talk about that stuff too uh maybe it's like a reinforcement of like i know this is what hat what it takes for me to be the best so i'm gonna go and fucking do that i i when i hear him speak

it's all like i'm so i'm so worried about my competition i'm he's like i if i don't fucking work as hard as i can like i don't know i don't want to leave anything to doubt it's the way that he talks is like it's like he's gives you anxiety he's like scared he's scared he's fucking scared and it's like you know you back uh an animal into a corner any animal and they will fight to the death and so he's creating this scenario it's like this is so obvious i mean i said this in the toxic mindset thing michael jordan created that scenario every fucking day yeah he said hi to someone and the other guy like kind of went like this to him and looked the other way and he's like okay now i'm gonna beat this motherfucker personally i took that personally the meme that everyone knows i barely said hi to me he kind of

did yeah but he didn't and he said didn't he say something he's like don't mess with black jesus or someone some some shit like that or you know it's like jesus christ michael fucking chill out dude but it works you know it's like that's how he's winning that's how that and and those are things so so you know that's where i think if you look at a guy like mike o'hearn okay he is at that white jesus level no he is at that level as far as as far as aesthetics and and strength and and gym culture goes he has so many hours of training and eating and sleeping the gym it's like actually hard to fathom right and one of the things that he said in the video was like i when you look at somebody and you think well i can't be like them i want to be better than them that's that should be later that should occur later whereas the other thing that he said was you shouldn't care about what i do you need to look at yourself right that's what people

should focus on is look on your own improvements so those two things don't have to be mutually exclusive they just happen in different stages that's i think the overarching thesis behind that video how do i focus on myself when i think that you're fucking cheating so so like you cheated to beat me in the clean and jerk and and i i'm glad you brought this up because in weightlifting there is so much nuance to this and what i love about both of you guys talking about steroids is like you're always kind of operating on the other side of this thing that we see on the internet constantly everyone is on steroids everyone a lot of people might not know this but uh my ex-wife uh was a two-time olympian and was a finalist in the olympics and was as clean as a fucking whistle what sport swimming oh cool yeah yeah

elite elite athlete and i know there's a lot of athletes in her world that are clean i know it to be true shit about performance dancing but here's the crazy thing is though somebody out there is going to move the goalposts and say, how do you really fucking know, Zach? You know, and you guys talk about this, the the testing, you know, well, they could have cycled off, so on and so forth. We know that debate, but it is important to know that there are people on steroids and that steroids do provide this massive, massive, massive advantage. steroids do provide this massive, massive, massive advantage.

And I think the only time anyone should really give a shit is at the elite level. Everyone else needs to fuck off and worry about themselves. Right? So I think, I think another thing too, that people are going to all the, all the time bring up is if you're selling something based off of your body that you got off of the use of androgens. and i think there's definitely some validity to that yeah if you're

being lied to it sucks right right and that's what that's what people ultimately felt about michael hearn was that he may be selling things he may be doing things based off of this idea of being natural when in when that is in question constantly i'm honestly like we were talking about it before the show like i don't want to do actually i might have been talking about it with your brother um i don't want to copy the natty or not call out things it is nice to talk about it because it goes my all my revenue and everything goes boop oh great you talked about being natty or not right everyone loves to see that but the reality is what i like to discuss is is it important and how does it change the way that we think about training is what important real quick calling people out on this level okay doesn't make a fucking difference you know um the rock uh what's the one of the hemsworth brothers yeah commonly

commonly called out for being on steroids the idea that one of them would even ever consider admitting to doing steroids is laughable. What good would it provide them or anyone around them if they did that? A lot of people go to the movie theater, hold up a foam finger, watch The Rock, watch Liam Hemsworth smash into shit, and then they go home. They don't give a shit about how many reps or sets they did they're not part of our sphere this work this tiny little world we need to understand that pop culture is so fucking massive like if we went on the street like you and you start to talk to people about weight training you realize how small this world really is and how small this world of people who actually give a shit about natty or nots are i'm sure there are people out there that wouldn't even think that Arnold

was on steroids. They wouldn't even, they probably think he's natural still until someone says, well, he took steroids. Right. So, so I guess the main thing I'm getting at is like,

it's important to point out if someone's lying for their own benefit, it's important to let people know that. I have a question for you then, because this is where, this is where the water gets murky. How do you know? Like how, how,

how would you judge? Like if, if you were like, this isn't a natural physique and you took a look at somebody, what would be the, and they're, this is a person that claims that they're natural. Pull up Alex Eubank, please. E-L-a-l-e-x last name anyone that looks better than zach is clearly on tons of

shit yeah but but the reason i'm the reason i'm asking you i know a lot of people like that though they think i do i do especially in weightlifting and i would love to talk about the the disparity and drug use and weightlifting because i do have a lot on that, but yes. Yeah, like this kid, I'm pretty sure Greg just made a video about him too, but Greg is telling people that he's on drugs. And I don't know how old this guy is. He's a teenager. I think he's like 18, 17, 18, 19.

Right. I mean, dude, think about he's a lacrosse player. I played lacrosse my whole life. Sick. Yeah. I mean, he's a lacrosse player. I played lacrosse my whole life. Sick. Yeah, I mean. He looks awesome. So all I can say about this is lighting, pump, what you eat before these pictures, every last one of them is dolled up.

Everything makes a difference, yeah. That makes a massive difference. And how much does he weigh? I don't know. Dude, I have pictures. I have like video of my back and like I look ridiculous in this cinematic lighting. We just did a quick little test shoot for this thing, and it looks ridiculous. I'm like, I'm not that big.

I know I'm not. So look, if you're asking how do I know, how would I know? Man, we've discussed this so much in – like between weightlifting coaches. The one thing I would know about is if we look – if we laid out all the stats because it is a numbers game. So we're lucky enough to know what numbers kind of cross that threshold and the likelihood of androgen use. So we're talking specifically within the realm of like weightlifting. Yes. So that's –

But in bodybuilding, how the fuck would anyone know? You mean there are, there are the hints, there are, you know, the, the thinness of the skin, the discoloration, sometimes they have acne sometime, you know, but it's so, so ridiculously varied. You know? Um, I think what we see now is that there's people coming out and being like, yeah, I use steroids. I do TRT. I do this. I do that. And that puts a lot more pressure on supposed fake natties.

The discussion has changed a lot. Like all these different things have changed a lot, especially since you've gotten into this world. Were you the first person to like openly talk about steroids? Like on, you know, I think I remember the Alan Thrall video from a long, long time ago, but maybe even before that.

Yeah. And I just remember the internet going ablaze being like, this is so fucking cool. There's finally somebody, finally. Yeah. I think, uh,

that's why Derek is who he is. Right. I think in bigger, stronger, faster. I mean, um, Yeah, I think. That's why Derek is who he is. Right. I think in Bigger, Stronger, Faster, I mean. Yeah, you said it in the. I mean, yeah, I said it like forever ago. So, I mean, I even think that that movie, I don't think anybody up until that point. From what I can recall, like there has been players,

there's been some people that have like said some shit after the fact, like Lyle Alzado talked about it and like talked about a negative way. Arnold did say like, oh, I use them like when I compete type of thing. He alluded to it. But yeah, there really wasn't anything real definitive. But also for me, you know, I was not a I was not like a celebrity. Like I didn't have everything to lose. Like you said with The Rock, it's like that is so damaged. That would be so damaging. Yeah, there't have everything to lose. Like, like you said with the rock, it's like,

that is so damaged. That would be so damaging. Yeah. There's no point to anybody. Everyone around. Why would you want people discussing it? Anyways, people aren't even thinking along those lines.

No one gives a shit. Only a handful of people in the lifting community. Yeah. Which I love you guys. Uh, what Mark said about you earlier is not true, but it is a small community. It is.

It is very small. And i talk about that a lot um i did a video on the liver this is it like look at like my back ridiculous that's not how it looks you know um so uh you're gonna say something about the liver so like so actually my first i think the first video i made about liver King was again to follow up with your experience with him. And it was really is what we're doing helping anything? Right. Is the natty or not call out? Does it confer any benefit to the world that we're in?

Because we see people succeed regardless. I think what's more important is open discussion about androgens. So I'm not entirely sure that the natironoc callouts are good or bad, but I think the more that we just discuss it and its use and there's hormone therapy and it's much more widely attainable and understandable we can begin to say i want to be natural or i want to i want to try this there's risk obviously we all know this now we we don't have just idiots just peddling bullshit information because they're

the only ones who are willing to speak they're only crazy enough to speak we have people with actual information like you know derrick changed the fucking game and and he took you know you kind of were the first to just be like hey fuck it i'm gonna tell the truth and derek went okay well let me explain these things to people because why don't we talk about it why don't there's really no point in not talking about it the only reason people wouldn't is because they feel like it might damage their careers or the idea that they work hard and so on and so forth so that video of the liver king is what i brought up and i i think like that's that's an important discussion right and i i felt when you guys had mike on and

he was kind of going in circles and and all these different things, like I really wanted to drive home like the importance of just like opening it up to everyone and just being truthful around these things. No matter what, we'll never be able to prove somebody is on or off drugs or whatever the excuse is, even at the Olympic level, even in sports that are tested. And this is – you talked about the difference between Russians or typically good countries versus the US and this is something that we face a lot and I actually have a reasonable kind of explanation of that if you care to hear it. Go for it.

Before we skip to this though, because again... Because I feel like I ignored that. That's why I was... Oh, it's all good. Yeah. Okay, so let's not forget that. Yeah.

Russians. Not just the Russians. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll know what we're getting to. The thing is, it is important to talk about uh androgens and all of this but the thing is is that within the lifting community anybody that looks quite impressive is then there's a video that's then made about them and then all the community is like oh this person's on drugs the lifting community it's interesting because i don't think't think we understand the amount of genetic diversity that, number one, there is throughout the world.

And the types of people that are in different places. Because Greg has made, like I've mentioned the one that he made about Russ Swole, which he made initially. And then he came back and made a video later about, oh, actually, because in the video where he made, you said Russ Swole was on drugs. Greg's like there's 99.99 he's on something right and his audience whatever and then he realized this is actually a powerlifter who gets drug tested uh all the time and then he came back and he went went behind he's like okay okay he's he's that one percent that one percent um and he's he's made videos where he's made those types of mistakes before.

But the thing is, is he will take any physique that seems a bit too impressive, and then he'll purport that physique as being definitely not natural, definitely genetically gifted, and definitely on drugs. And everybody will pile on behind that. Whereas that is very dangerous yeah that is not that is if somebody and i get it because there have been so many people that like i think cali muscle came out later and said he was on stuff but i don't think anyone was surprised but before he was saying he was natural and there are people that are doing that and that is fucked

up but the thing is there's a difference between calling it like things like that and what greg was doing was like anyone that is even good looking he's gonna be like he's natural he's not natural he's genetically gifted any there's a difference between the two yeah and and again it's like the physiques the people that are typically chosen within this are number one people that have great followings because it's going to get clicks but these are also people that's like well uh they don't look like they're crazy roided out but i'm just going to call them out because well they look like they could be so let's say that they're probably on something and everyone's going to because of the culture we've created with this

natty or nothing everyone's just going to say of course that's that's a fake natty right right and i was we were talking about this on the podcast prior. Man, look at the NFL. If anybody chose to just come into the lifting community from the NFL, they'd be fucking huge. They'd blow records out of the water. And it's very odd how we can take this speculation. And one of the things you mentioned we're looking for truth well this speculation is purported as truth people take those videos and like this is fact this is the truth greg's spitting it as as as it is he's being truthful with me and he he uses those words during his videos i've been very keen on how he how he words things i just want to be honest with you guys i just want you

guys to know the truth where it's it's breeding this thing where it's like oh yeah greg's the guy who's going to tell me the truth and then this guy he's making a video on that's a fake natty liar it's dangerous especially when you're not actually right it's fucked up right so in in weightlifting the only thing we can go off of is passed or failed drug tests that's it everything else is all speculation and you're going to kill yourself over the goddamn speculation and that's what i've learned uh after considering and pondering this you know how i i always talk about i kind of started this episode with saying that if i'm upset about something and i want to start barking about it i'll actually go and do more research and find out why i'm upset and this is this is one of the things of two the other one is like

charlatans on on the internet but this one, doping and weightlifting is one of those things. And it always ends up at the same place. We can only rely on WADA and USADA and other drug testing. And so the main place where there is still disparity, so all things considered, is that the national level testing

is incredibly varied from country to country. And that is the biggest goddamn issue by far. So the likelihood that China would pop one of their own within their own country is insane. They would never in a million years do that in the sport of weightlifting, in probably any other Olympic sport. Could you imagine China being like, sorry, we can't send our best. He got popped at a local competition. Yeah. Or, you know, the Chinese, I don't even know, whatever, whatever you call it, anti-doping. Do we all just regulate ourselves? Is that kind of how it works? Like in the U..s is it a u.s governed body that

does the testing and in china is it the same way yeah i mean it should be right i'm there there are some bylaws in place that the only way that you can compete in the olympics is if you had a certain number of tests done and they had to be split up uh certain times and i think um some of those times you don't even have to post a total. You just have to weigh in and it counts, which is fucking crazy. But that is one of the ways where you have to, where you make sure like that in each year of the quad, you have to compete a certain amount of times. And at every one of those, you have to be tested. But if we're looking at USADA, once you get good enough, and this is all for weightlifting specific.

This is my world of weightlifting. I know the people at the top directly. I see them all the time. I know often when they get tested, they tell me. And so this doesn't have to do with every other sport because a lot of people hear this and they go, Oh, here's an American bitching about, uh, you know, other countries. It's such like,

uh, you know, high, like America's high and mighty. If only we were allowed to take drugs, we'd be better at weightlifting. Like that's not what I'm saying. I promise you,

I promise you. Once you get selected to be in a testing pool, you saw to you, you sign up a slot and you saw to will come at any point, 365 days a year. Um, and they will knock on your door and collect a sample. Not only that, you're highly, highly likely to be tested at every national event that you go to, which means you – which you have to, right? Because in order to qualify for Pan Ams, for Worlds, for the Olympics, you have to compete at these places. USADA does not give a flying

fuck about any athlete they want to get them in trouble they want to pop them okay so there is no corruption there uh involved as far as weightlifters being able to get away with doping through usada usada wants to catch you okay. There's also no help from the American government in, or sorry, governing the NGB of Olympic weightlifting. So USAW, there's zero help from them to try and get people to get away with doping. The likelihood that that is happening in other countries is extremely high. And in fact, if we look historically at some of these countries, high and in fact um if we look historically at some of these countries azerbaijan and kazakhstan are the two that i can think of um predominantly if you could could you pull up a picture of team astana weightlifting team i love how you know this shit gonna be yoked out of their fucking

so team astana this is uh is i i don't know if Astana is a place in Kazakhstan or it was a company or something that sponsored, I don't know. But this was the Kazakh team that was kicking ass. Ilya Ilyin, debatably one of the goats of the sport. These guys right here. So every single one of them pissed hot. Every single one of them at an international competition. Every single one of them served bands. Every single one of them at an international competition. Every single one of them served bands. All of them.

Okay. So off the top of my head in the last 10 to 20 to 30 years, there's only been one American athlete at an international competition to be popped. Okay. That does not mean we can also go to USAW, not usa w usada and you can look up all the sanctions and weightlifting i do it all the time um and you will find people who've been popped in weightlifting but the ones at the top are just they're just not getting popped maybe they're getting away with it maybe they're doing test suspension maybe they're doing things that i

don't know uh but that that seems to be the issue. The, somebody said this, his name's Nat Aram. He's the owner of hook grip. Do you guys know hook grip? Yeah. Yeah. So he said it is a net zero. It's not a net negative for these people. So getting popped is, doesn't really damage their country or their team.

Now it kind of does, but, um um in the past it never did okay so this lifter can't lift anymore pull one right up next doesn't make any difference we started to sanction countries so uh and and you know the lack of competitors at the olympics so like a country like romania was only allowed to send one lifter um whereas america had eight total so that's the disparity i'm talking about i'm not trying to say that if we did stare like it would be very interesting to see there's a famous american lifter ian wilson and this is all public knowledge i mean he uh he was popped so that's actually the second one that i'm thinking of he was popped but he was a notorious 170 kilo snatcher at best 170 maybe a little bit heavier and then anywhere from 200 to 210

210 i think is what would be his best ever. After he was popped, he posted on Instagram some of the lifts that he had hit in training. 187 snatch and a 227 clean and jerk. So, I don't know what 187 is, but 227 is 500 pounds. He always wanted to do that. That is a 10%

jump in both lifts after lifting in the sport for 12 straight years. These are the sort of things that steroids can do you know take a big leap like that what about uh dimitri cloak off uh did we see a similar jump in him when he stopped competing or was he about the same strength so the issue with competing is cutting for those guys. So, yeah, there was – he had some fucking crazy lifts. Right. But mainly in like odd types of things.

They even benched 500 pretty easy and stuff like that. He did this pause snatch at 200 kilos. Pause at the fucking knee snatch at 200 kilos. He did that. It is one of the most famous training lifts ever um in that sense he probably weighed like 115 kilos there and his weight class that he competed at was 105 so in that sense like it took off a little bit but the intensity at which he trained when he was competing was much higher i mean you cannot repeat that i got to see him lift one time and

he was just doing some demo stuff before like a seminar. And he just did this lift. And my friend comes over to me. He goes, I think that's the most weight ever lifted in the United States. He's like, honestly, I think it might be ever. Most of it. Yeah. And I was like, what the fuck?

So yeah, he's just messing around. He was having a good time. So, so like to answer your question, i don't think it jumped up too much because he kind of always had he was already on shit he was already on shit but but but what's more important than that what's more important than that is there is no way he could replicate the amount that he worked going up to the olympics there is no way and i would honestly say that he probably did way less drugs but he would be a better athlete just because he's fucking grinding for that thing i got to show you an

article i got a chance to interview him for power magazine and it was just amazing the way that he talked about training yeah i love the guy like i said he would like go to the gym and then he would like try to do something and every once in a while his dad or the coach or whoever it was would tell him like no and then he would get like massage work and then he'd go back to the bar sometimes it was there if it wasn't there he'd split and then he'd come back you know just keep going and uh you know sometimes these guys are working out two three times a day yeah he's an animal so look it's really hard and the hardest thing for me is just seeing comments just go cut and dry, black and white. Everyone's on gear or whatever.

You know what I mean? Like there's so many different factors. The tough thing is at the elite level in American weightlifting, it's really highly unlikely to get away with it. It really, really is. I promise you guys out there. I promise you. It is very difficult there is a i just noticed this um recently and i just go oh fucking god of course right um there's an

american weightlifter he's actually i think he's sacramento based um he's a junior and he went to junior worlds snatches 145 clean and jerks right around 190 those are fantastic for june like a junior snatching 145 that's 325 pounds or 320 pounds clean and jerking over 420 pounds as a 19 year old that's tremendous right he goes to compete at junior worlds the winner of the snatch snatched 190 kilos okay the winner 19 year old kid he's um ukrainian snatched 190 now just to put this in perspective that is pretty much where klokov that's near klokov's best lift ever in competition okay so at 19 at 19 19. So that is a situation where I go, either this kid is – like just – I don't know how else I can explain this. Or like he's just on drugs because we know that Dmitry Klokov was on drugs his entire career. Okay?

And he also got retroactively popped. I made a video about that. It kind of actually got a ton of views. He was retroactively tested, which is fucking hilarious. We could talk about that as well. They take B samples out of the freezer and they use new equipment and they can pull out certain things. So anyways, Dmitry Klokov over his entire career, 190 to 195 kilo snatch is fucking good. Okay?

That's really, really good for him. Like, he will medal likely because his jerk is good as well. Okay? Now we have a 19-year-old and we're cleaning up the sport. And it's 2020 or 2021 when this happened. 19-year-old snatching what Dimitri Klokov did. And this was a competition, right? Yes.

Was he drug tested or no? I mean, who knows? You know, it's like I supposedly Ilya Ilyin in Almaty. So Almaty, Kazakhstan. This lift, by the way, we need to pull this one up. Ilya Ilyin. I don't know what worlds it is, but it's just I ilia ilian in almedy and it's like a side angle view and you can see the crowd it's his home crowd okay and this clean and jerk is to

win the fucking thing yeah and he hits this and the crowd stands up it's like like thousands of people cheering on for the sport it's an iconic lift he walks off and wada does not fucking touch this guy they're like what i'm just turn walk away the other way like they're not gonna test him are you kidding me they're not gonna fucking test the winner and his home crowd on the final lift and the most epic lift of the entire worlds that year how would i spell his name sorry uh ilia uh i l y a i l y i n and then almedy worlds Ilya, I-L-Y-A, I-L-Y-I-N. And then Almaty Worlds. It's a side angle video.

But that's sort of the thing that you can expect from WADA, right? USADA, dude, I've seen them. They nab you. They literally just wait. So like the session is finishing, and they just see like – they just stand there like this with their clipboard, and they're just waiting for you. And then the moment that the competition is finishing and they just see like they just stand there like this with their clipboard and they're just waiting for you. And then the moment that the competition is over, they're glued to you and they walk with you and they walk with you everywhere you go. And then they're like, all right, we're going to go to the bathroom, collect your sample, blood sample, piss sample. We don't fucking mess with that at all.

So who knows if this kid was tested, but tested but high high high likelihood that he's on steroids that's where we have an elite athlete in america going against somebody who's definitely on drugs and that's where we see uh well this is not um not sure not that not this one there's another one but this is the lift oh okay so okay. Oh, yeah, right there. So the top right. 2014 Alameda. Oh, no, no, no. No, top right.

Right there. There we go. Top right. That one. This top right. Look at the crowd. Nice. Oh, wait.

This is his snatch. This show is clean and jerk. Hopefully. What about someone like Alexiev? You know, some of these lifters from like a long time ago. Alexiev is awesome. Yeah. I mean, I think it wasn't even illegal to do Diana Ball back at that time.

Yeah, a little Diana Ball, you know. No, I'm actually curious about this. Okay, watch this. Watch this right here, guys. Look at the crowd on this one. If we could pump in audio watch this watch this right here guys look at the crowd on this one if we could pump in audio that'd be crazy but look at this nice god damn that's that's probably my favorite competition lift of all time now this dude walks off stage wada does not fucking touch this guy. Okay. You know, so that's that's general.

That's the general disparity. I'm sure I'm going to get murdered in comments. But yeah, you know, kind of. So this 19 year old kid, right? Looking at the numbers. Okay. Yeah. High, high likelihood he's on drugs.

But I think about like the 15 year old kid that we showed at this podcast, right? And there have been so many lifters that are like 15, 16, whatever, doing stuff with powerlifting and from just squatting and deadlifting, immense amounts of weight. Number one, because like the sport is becoming more powerful and kids are able to start much younger. But then there's the visibility aspect where you can just post this online and people can see what some of these people are doing. So I really do wonder

because like LeBron James is another example. When he was young, when he was 15. He should have been in the league when he was 14. Doug, he could have been playing in the leagues

and truly when he was 16. For sure. We look at size and muscle different from athleticism, but there are and there have been just young people doing things at a much higher level than adults in sports. The craziest youth sport that you wouldn't think is swimming. Now, you would think that gymnastics, like for for women on the women's side right so gymnastics is the one where you're like okay well we have to put an age limit to how young we use have you seen that and china fakes like their birth certificates i've heard about that so

actually though um there are a couple swimmers right now who are the best in the world and they're like 14 15 16 years old that was like a decade was like that she oh yeah smashed everybody oh yeah and and that's i think that's the thing too it's like just like looking at someone's physique is a slippery slope looking at their numbers is a slippery slope as well i hope i i hope that's kind of what you were saying but yeah yeah because like again it like what it that's exactly what i'm saying. Yeah. You know, because you have these visual metrics potentially and then you have these numbers you look at. But you you can assume. But that that truly might not be the case.

And that's that's where it's really fucking iffy. You know. Yeah. This is dude. Like, I'm telling you, this is why podcasting as a form is so important to me because when i talk about these things like i i have kind of this issue where like i can't even agree with the thing that i said like five minutes ago because i want to argue against the fucking other side so much yeah you know what i mean and i think uh people people can end up hating that a lot in politics a lot in the philosophies and the way

that you live your life and um i don't know if it's a blessing or a curse but it does make for some interesting content it's about just letting it go just like in terms of drug use just like fuck it no no that's that's so ultimately um do you know who Max Ada is? Yeah. Yeah. So Max is someone I would consider like my first mentor ever. 7'33 squat at 220 pounds and a powerlifting meet. Fucking badass. Yeah. And he and I were just kind of like, look, this is how it works in this sport. We can get better.

So you look at somebody, if they get, like this kid, he got the shit beaten out of him by somebody who was likely on drugs, right? He snatched his clean and jerk, the guy on drugs. If I asked this kid, hey, could you have had a better meet? He would have been like, yeah. Okay, well, let's do that. It's all you can do. And if WADA doesn't had a better meet he would have been like yeah okay well let's do that it's all you can do and if WADA doesn't do a better job fuck them

because you're not doing what you're saying you're doing you know what I mean because USADA kind of is at least in weightlifting guys there's going to be a lot of comments being like oh he's saying USADA so not corrupt when there's UFC this and whatever it's like no no no like I know in weightlifting what they do and it's hard as shit to get away with anything.

Yeah. You don't want to fuck with USADA. They'll comment at you really hard. And another thing too is if you do it internationally, you can do time now. You know about this. The Rodchenkov Act. Have you heard about this? No.

So the Rodchenkov Act is – it was an act started because of Grigory Rodchenkov, everyone knows heard about this no so the rodchenkov act is it was an act started because of gregory rodchenkov everyone knows uh from icarus so icarus uh documentary yeah and by the way the best documentaries are the ones where people set out to make a documentary and then something fucking happens and they make a totally different one queen of versailles is another example have you seen that one no so queen of versailles i think it's queen of yeah is the wife of a massive real estate broker and they were building the largest home in american history okay and right in the middle of building it the real estate collapse happens in 2008 then then this guy's got his camera and he's filming it it's like the whole thing she's

eating mcdonald's in a in a fur coat in a house that's like the biggest house ever because your problem right but it's a it's a great it's a it's a great thing so if we look at icarus this guy was like well i want to see what the advantages of taking drugs are so i'm going to do it so he took drugs he competed in amateur cycling and and he employed Gregory Rodchenkov. Not only did he – he could have employed someone else, but he employed the foremost person in RUSADA, the Russian Anti-Doping Association. The person who's supposed to be working for RUSADA was actually providing the guidelines and stipulations for the russian team to be able to pass drug tests and what icarus uncovered a lot was i mean after that that documentary people started looking more into russia um and then they suffered some bans i still

think they are not allowed to compete at the olympics or last time they were it was called the russian federation or something like that. I think so. And so the Rodchenkov Act is something that came from this and it was passed in Congress. And the thing is the precedent is very loose because like not many people have broken it. But the idea is if you are – I could be wrong about this. I could be wrong about this you might have to look look this up just some sort of like uh overarching thing but you can get criminal charges now for testing positive or uh like at international competition and and I think the first charges were from a track coach, not a track coach, a doctor or a massage therapist for two track and field athletes who ended up getting popped.

They were able to subpoena the doctor and they actually looked in the texts and they mentioned androgen use and he was the one providing it to him in all those cases. And I believe it's a fine potential jail time for this man. And it's the first Gregory Rodchenkov act thing. So it's very interesting. Yeah. You know, kind of going back to the steroid thing a little bit is one thing that's also kind of interesting is within lifting and gaining muscle uh people have different abilities right people have different abilities on the higher end of muscle that they'll be able to gain natural or not and

one thing that you see is people will be like okay well this person arnold was this size and this person was this size um and they'll reference individuals who clearly did use androgens. And that will be a reason why other individuals that maybe have been that size or have gotten there cannot be natural. Right. Yeah, yeah. That's the same thing with numbers. Exactly. I was thinking the same thing with numbers because people will reference these lifters who have lifted and are clearly on.

But look at this lifter doing that naturally. There's no way. But would you not say that the likelihood is low? Likelihood that they're low is – that they're natural is low? Yes. Man. you say a random kid out of ukraine um which by the way another very interesting thing wada announced that they would not be testing ukraine because of the the uh the war for certain you know yeah yeah yeah um so they were much more lenient during those times but that's you know that's another branch of conspiracy theory okay he just happens to be ukrainian yeah but wouldn't you say

the likelihood is low that he's natural if i could could just interject, and I could be way off, but I just searched junior weight lifting 190 clean and jerk. Oh, no, not clean and jerk. Oh, okay. Snatch. Snatch. Very important to discern. Yeah, okay. There's quite a few.

So what I was going to say was like, well, if there was one, then yeah. But I'm coming up with a bunch of answers. Okay, gotcha. The reason I brought it up was because the junior lifter from america was clean and jerking 190 and this kid was snatching 190 same session okay um and 190 was what klokov those guys and that era were nuts yeah and i think you you brought up vasily alexiev and i love thinking about vasily alexiev because my my grandpa didn't know anything about weightlifting. And back – this was back when weightlifting was spectacle and it was converging on technical, spectacle, technical.

And Alexiev was like the goat at the time. And so my grandpa knew about Alexiev was like the goat at the time. And so my grandpa knew about Alexiev. He was on Sports Illustrated and they would watch what was called the Wide World of Sports, ABC Wide World of Sports. They had some really cool stuff. I love watching that on YouTube. Sometimes I do reaction videos. But Alexiev and those guys, I think – I don't know what the drug was that they were using. But it was likely Dianabol just because it was simple.

It's just an oral. And at that time, it became really popular. I'm not – Is there any truth to him lifting weights in water or is this like some of these mythical things about him? Have you ever heard of it? I love that stuff. Yeah, so do I. I fucking love the lore.

Yeah, he used to take a barbell and just throw it like a couple hundred times over backwards or whatever in the field you're like dude i'm true i i can't remember the video i made but i talked there is a picture of him lifting in the water but like you know oh yeah it's like a one-off thing or did he actually practice that pakistani stone lifting have you guys heard of this shit no oh my god pull this shit up it is fucking awesome these guys so there's one handle on the boulder just one it's a bold it's a sphere yeah there's one handle and we're looking at 170 kilos and they fucking they put it and um they they put it in their in their lap and you know when people lap things yeah they lap it ass to grass and then what was it called pakistani stone lift stone lifting my bad and they

they basically clean and then they catch with one arm underneath and the other on the way yeah and they hit their asses basically to the grass this is it how much weight on this one uh doesn't okay so this is i made a video about this right fucking great this is fucking dude this shit blew me away um and i made a video about this and the there was a couple other there were guys doing this so he lapsed it as the grass this one has two he's gonna catch with one hand underneath no way but that's not I mean

some of these guys get so low and then they get back down he's gonna do two reps oh maybe he's warming up breaking his fucking wrist and his shoulder

oh my god look at that mobility though that's some David Weck shit right there there's one of these guys that picks up a fucking motorcycle

what and he and he gets it overhead in front of these kids and i was like dude those kids are never gonna fucking forget that moment they're gonna tell people that that motorcycle weighed thousands of pounds you know that's the shit this is the shit that i. It's like a bunch of people. These are farmers, you know, and, and they're, this is a sport that's like kind of dying and it's traditional and it's about lore. And like you were saying about Alexia of lifting shit in water, like I'm so attracted to that. I also made another video about the Basque stone lifters.

So Basque is part of, uh, it's a country that actually, or not a country. They, I don't know. It's like political or part of uh it's a country that actually or not a country they i don't it's like political or whatever but it's a region part of spain part of france and actually the basque language is not romance like not a romance language so it's got to sound kind of pretty crazy right we know like italian uh spanish french like they have this romance base to it this doesn't but they there's uh stone lifters they call them like the levantadores and um there's part of it that's so cool it's like different regions of this basque place uh basque territory are better at certain things like there's um like ax men and then there's guys who are good at carrying stone and different people in the different regions are good at different events

and then they all come together and they do these events and they lift these like crazy stones but the lore we're talking like thousands of years of this shit it like charges me up man it like it really fires me up i almost get like i almost cry in one of the videos that i made because these guys are just like i fucking love it so much i'm a school teacher by the way you know and i'll never not do this how long have you been into like strength history in different places like has this always been an interest of yours or did you get into it after i don't know you started lifting or something i i'd say yeah this is it man god damn it i love that shit you know painful yeah all doesn't all of the strong like coming from a barbell sport

you're like fuck strong man you're making it harder for me to pick up more weight i want to make it easier for me to pick up more right absolutely you know what i mean uh and and but there's something about this like these dudes and the first thing i say in this video like these guys aren't aren't on fucking drugs they're not on drugs they don't fucking you know it's about it for them it's like about respect for their culture it's about it's. I don't fucking, you know, it's about it for them. It's like about respect for their culture. It's about, it's just, I don't, I don't know. They talk about their families in it and how much it means to them. They talk about their jobs. It's just, there was this feeling that I got and I swear to God, I was like wiping off tears because it was so, so meaningful. And to answer your question about the history of, of strength, I'm not so sure, like it was probably pretty recently. Like I started making these videos this summer about,

um, these like historical strength stuff, but, um, it really actually came from my grandpa who, who liked Alexiev. And then there was another one, um, Paul Anderson, you know, Paul Anderson, absolutely. Of course, right? That was a guy that my grandpa knew of. If my grandpa knows about you, you're fucking important in weightlifting because no one knows anything about weightlifting. No one knows anything about powerlifting or strength training. And if my grandpa knew about you, that means that you were something. You were a magician.

We know about Eugene Sandow. We know about these legends. And I think that that is so cool. When you take a sport and you refine it and you make it super dry and you want it to be in the Olympics and you get children doing it and there's all these rules and all this bullshit, it doesn't become a spectacle anymore. There's no more lore. There's no more like fantasy around it. And that's where it can start to lose its magic.

Judo is one of those sports that it's kind of happening in. There's no more takedowns with the legs. I've heard from judoka like a lot of complaints about the way that they've kind of taken the battle out of it and all of these things but it ends up happening you dry up the sport because you want to make it specialize more and more and more and more and more even the UFC the early UFC was like these are guys that just want to fight each other

and they didn't have a skill like there's something cool about that yes like it'd be cool to see another league start up and the rules are that you're not allowed to have any training and you got to be fucking out of shape and you gotta be fat you get five minutes rest in between rounds and each round's only a minute long yeah and drink beer in between the the make it nuts i think the ufc though is probably he's amazing but i think it's i think it is you're right it absolutely stage was different right yes it's different yes but i think the u the UFC is the best sport at going into the drier phase of it and still being

a good spectacle. Right. You know, it's, it's, we used to, the UFC and MMA used to just be like, all right, let's put this fucking massive guy versus small one. Like, let's have fun. Let's make a spectacle, like a circus show. No weight class. Yeah.

No weight class where we would put the jujitsu player versus the whatever. And that was really really cool four fights in one night but it's still pretty fucking cool right it's still amazing right but some sports they become less and less cool the farther you get from the meaning of them i talked about sumo in one of my videos sorry um i talked about sumo and the argument against it and for it we always find the silly argument of someone being like oh it's cheating really it doesn't fucking count you know but it's important to know that that side still exists right the side where it's like what are we really trying to accomplish here what was the point of power lifting in the first place? You know, somebody came up with a great example of like zero to 60 in cars becoming the one thing that we care about.

But that actually doesn't point out which one is the better car. It's the same thing in powerlifting. Oh, so you did a 700-pound deadlift, but your range of motion was like literally four inches yeah which is the video that i end up utilizing right what are we getting at here but at the same time you look at jamal browner and what he just did you can't you have to fucking respect which thing that he just do because he's done so many it was 1100 1100 he did 500 kilos yeah we saw that 500 kilos fucking randomly by the way yeah it was just a random day yeah how dare you you know at that body weight and and people are gonna be like well i have this thing it's like he pulled sumo you know no there's there's ebbs and flows to these

arguments but he had a deadlift bar and straps dead sumo. This is it. Fucking crazy, dude. This guy not only is lifting these kind of weights in the deadlift, he's also an amazing accomplished power lifter as well. Squats, bench, I mean, everything. He's a specimen. Bro, that is fucking insane. Yeah. It's super weird where we'll see these amazing feats of strength or we'll

see people doing really cool just just any really cool feat and within this community it's just almost an immediate thing to try to discount what was just done like i don't know if he's using straps there but if he was there's going to be a comment of oh use the straps or that 15 year old kid oh uh he was using straps it wasn't in competition it wasn't like why can't we just be like that was dope and maybe if you're someone who wants to go towards that how can you figure out maybe aspects of what he does to emulate to try like what what is this weird what is that shit even if you're jealous even if you don't like him even if you hate him can you like think for a second that there's probably a lot of good information that person can have to

help you and if you think they're lying or cheating or you think it's bullshit just fucking watch somebody else yeah yeah there's a lot of shit out there that you could consume elsewhere something i i was thinking is you know don't let the detractors co-opt the argument. So just because someone is a blockhead enough to take the argument being like, oh, it's sumo, it's stupid. Don't let them say that that is the argument against sumo pulling because they might not be a good representative for that argument. Right. I think the argument.

Saying it's dumb isn't isn't a good explanation. Right. And now I don't want to be that person. So sumo might be OK. Well, no. There's still something there in saying that like it's kind of less of the point of finding out who is strongest. We are gamifying this movement that we've determined is what determines people's strength but we've gamified it so much so that it doesn't utilize as much strength or the whatever it may be functionality

of it i think it's important to think along those lines now the the blockhead that said it's sumo you know you just don't let him or her ruin that potential argument. And I think if we look back at the Michael Hearn thing, the people that won't even attempt to get into the gym, that will quit because they know they can't look like that. that those people should not ruin the potential argument that natty or nots are valuable potentially right because that is bullshit if somebody looks and they find out that someone's on drugs and they decide i don't want to do that because that's not realistic i don't want to be on drugs that person should not steal the argument that, you know, not being on drugs is or sorry, being on drugs and lying about it is damaging. And that was really, I guess, the point of the video that I was making. uh online and we will see comments and be like god damn it you know like i is that the side is that what people think when in reality that's just that what that one person thinks it's not a large subset of people because there were a lot of there were a lot of comments people being like it's it helps me to know if someone's on drugs or doesn't but either way i'm going to the fucking

gym no one's going to stop me from that. Yeah. Power Project family, how's it going? So no matter what diet you're on or no matter what supplements you take, it's necessary as you get older to know what's going on under the hood. That's why I've partnered with Merrick Health. They're the Pimentel Health Clinic owned by Derek from More Plates, More Dates. And we have a panel that will allow you to get all of your labs done and checked in a

super easy fashion. Andrew, how can they get it? Yeah, you guys got to head over to merrickhealth.com slash powerproject. That's M-A-R-E-K health.com slash powerproject. And at checkout, enter promo code powerproject to save $101 off of this comprehensive panel. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. And if your average person looks at some of these things that we're talking about, they just have no idea how they even benefit them.

And they would probably say something negative. Like, what does that prove? What does that do? Why would someone do that? Yeah. Like, they don't have any. They have zero reference point of somebody deadlifting 700 pounds and having veins coming out of their arms and stuff. I just think it's like, it's too extreme for them to even like.

Yes. Yes. You don't even know the fucking world of what it takes to pull 700 my friend don't even think that you would ever begin to understand it i'm sure that you get that feeling a lot looking at you know knowing how strong you were and the the amount of not just actual physical work but the amount of mind space that power lifting took in your fucking brain did you did you find it was tough to sleep because you were like like lifting in your brain while you're sleeping i literally was lifting yeah in my sleep i'd wake up like

benching or you know doing like a movement almost i mean it was weird i but, it was on my mind all the time. Yeah. This is what we were talking about as far as I think that clip where I said people are just going to quit, right, because they hear that, okay, this person's on drugs. And going back to what you mentioned about how individuals, when they start their journey, shouldn't necessarily be setting expectations. Right. They should be, what did you say? They shouldn't be setting expectations. They should be standards. Standards.

Yes. And that's the thing I wonder, because we were talking outside of this about Jordan, and we'll come back to that. It was a podcast before. But I don't know. When I look at it, for example, when I started jujitsu, I wasn't a former grappler. All I did was I played soccer for 16 years and I lifted. When I started jujitsu, my goal and my expectation initially was we're going to hit the mats four or five days a week. Two or three weeks in, I realized I cannot hit the mats four days a week.

I'm going to try to hit the mats two days a week. And that was my expectation of myself to just do that. And then over time, build up the ability to go more. Now I can do jujitsu four to five days a week and I can lift almost every single day. But I did have an expectation for myself at the beginning. And I course corrected. We talked about course correcting, right? So as you start the lifting thing, when you're new, you're going to find you may want to go to the gym five days a week.

And you could if you, you know, deal with your intensity well. But you'll find that if you go too often, you're not going to recover well. So you'll course correct. Yes. Right. So what I was kind of getting at there was if someone sees somebody's strength levels or they see a physique that somebody has been able to build it's never safe to be like i want to look like that person because we're all different right you could live for 20 years you'll never video right exactly right um you might have been playing basketball all your life but you'll never be able to to jump like jordan or whatever but if you look at something as like that's's, I want something, I want something there. That's

a goal. Like, how can I get aspects of that? Or how could I maybe even achieve that? And as you head towards that direction, you'll find five years since lifting eight years since lifting, you'll be like, okay, this is more so what I want to head towards. But for a lot of lifters, by looking at certain people and thinking that that takes steroids, to achieve that, it would take steroids. My thing is it already sets up this thing in your head where you're like, that's cool, but I did want that. But I know now that that takes steroids. And if I want that, I'm going to have to hop on. Right. I, that is wonky. Cause again, I just, I remember when I started lifting, I remember the goals I had for myself and, and they were, you know, I did want to get jacked. I didn't want to get big, but I'm lucky that in my mind, there wasn't this idea that maybe certain physiques I looked up to, maybe they were on shit.

You know what I mean? Because early on I would have thought that I needed to get on drugs to be able to achieve that type of look and I didn't. So I get more of what you're saying here. I get – actually I get it a lot. I can give you my experience in weightlifting i never had a single goal of a weight that i ever wanted to lift um and maybe i just had the advantage because i was obsessed with it yeah and i had the advantage that uh improvement is just too fun it's like it's just too fun doing this i don't know why

i just i have too much fun i was able to see people doing things and i knew they were on steroids and it never like i remember someone saying i want to snatch 275 pounds, 125. It's a great number to snatch because it's two reds in a clip or the two reds in the, we have the 2.5 kilo clip. And I just remember being like, I don't care. I don't give a shit if I snatch that ever in my life. I mean, I want to get better, but right now I got to snatch, you know, if I'm snatching a hundred, I got to snatch 101. And I'm lucky in that.

So it's hard for me to have the perspective of somebody that might not have that. And I, what I want to know from you is what does that look like? Like somebody who just thinks like, like, do they not go? So let's say they do still go to the gym.

Do you think they don't train as hard? Right? Cause it's like, i think that the likelihood that somebody sees someone on gear and says i don't want to lift is low so let me let me kind of correct but maybe in the future they might not go to places that they could right or yeah let me correct because like that that clip and we talked about it in our response podcast i don't know if you saw yeah i did i did yeah i mentioned like okay, like maybe it was going a bit far saying these people aren't going to lift, but what these people will do is what you see going on on TikTok fitness and what you

see a lot of younger guys doing. You see a guy like Brandon Harding that chose to hop on three years in. Oh, he's honest. You know, he's forward. But then you start to see all these young kids who are getting on TRT two or three years into lifting when there's no fucking reason you need to you're still young you have the ability to progress there's so much more you have so much more of a cap what results is you do it for a little bit you don't get the speedy results that you'd want but this is the thing this game takes a long time and it's hard to give yourself the time to get to those goals where you see a lot of people just hopping on some HRT or TRT or taking a little something to get there a little bit faster. So, hey, why not? I think what like and again, I'm not saying that the Natty or not or whatever that they're bad. or whatever that they're bad okay because again i've said they are necessary but i do think that it does implant in some youngsters minds that hey i've been doing this for three years i'm doing this

for five years i've reached my genetic potential let's hop on and let's go to that next level so then it is greg's derrick's anyone else who's prevalent it is their fucking duty to tell those kids not to do that and greg does and they do and they do right yeah so but yes i now i actually like that because i do see that shit and it's on tiktok and it's fucking nauseating yeah to see a 19 year old kid on trt like that is ridiculous you know how fun it is to fucking lift at 19 years old? Yeah. I remember that shit. It was the greatest shit on earth, you know? And to just think like, well, I can't be like that guy unless I'm on steroids. Now let's do them right now.

Might as well if it's going to happen at some point and I want to look like that. I completely understand. I completely understand that point. That's what gets a lot of people into lifting in the first place is insecurity, right? It's like insecurity might drive you to take steroids or what have you. The interesting thing about some of this is that aside from certain types of steroids, if you're talking about something like testosterone, to me, it's not any different than a supplement and i understand where you could get into a weird category if young people are

taking it because they're going to be shutting down their own production when they're in the process of their their body is still um it's still trying to peak itself out like their their testosterone levels are starting to get to the highest levels that they're probably ever going to be. And then maybe by 25, they start to maybe make different decisions depending on the health of the person and so on. But it's an interesting thing to argue about. It's an interesting thing that these drugs are even illegal.

It's an interesting thing that they're even tested for in the olympics like it sometimes just makes me wonder like what what would be the harm if they just weren't tested for so the the biggest issue that i always bring up with that is kids so uh egypt was just banned from competing because they had a system where they were doping up 12 year olds and 13 year olds so it will happen right you know it's like that kids do a lot of drugs though yeah i mean it's just the fucking the idea that it's not safe but just banning it like it doesn't seem like it's helping it's true but it's this is something where we're not, this is, um,

yeah, I mean, you could make the argument that like, yeah, well kids do fucking heroin, you know, and I shouldn't be doing that. It,

it, what about the supplements? You can just keep going. You can keep going. But I think that you have to start thinking about things in lesser of two evils. And that is the worst fucking scenario. And anti-doping is very fucked up um i did a video about a guy who um now this is his personal account so it could be wrong but the regime of this president uh thomas ayan was proven by an independent group and they uh investigated him as like quite literally the most corrupt thing i think i've seen in sports for decades and it's the

weightlifting he was the weightlifting president of the iwf and um there was an iranian and his account of what happened at the 2008 olympics his name is shaheen nasrinia and in his class in his class was um piros dimas who i'm sure you guys know you know piros no i don't very very decorated very very decorated very famous lifter lighter lighter weight guy. to essentially not get tested. And because they didn't pay their way in through this system, through this corrupt system, they were basically told Shaheen cannot put together a total in this meet because, and if he does,

your entire team is going to be suspended where you're going to have, you know, so Shaheen goes up and he fakes an elbow injury and it's actually really funny to watch i bring it up in my video i have video of him warming up in the by the way he in his own words he's like i was in ridiculous shape bro i was in insane shape and in the warm-up room or not warm up the training halls training halls leading up to weightlifting competitions are fucking awesome yeah some of the best content you'll ever see is the training hall leading up to competition and he was crushing it okay they went up to him probably somebody saw somebody from the greek federation somebody from the georgian

federation or wherever was like hey uh this dude's win. And that's bullshit if he didn't pay. So he's warming up now. This is before his session. And he kind of was like this with his elbow. You can see it in the fucking video. It's crazy. Do you know what the video is called on your channel? The buying and selling of gold medals.

Okay, I need to eat. Okay, so then he goes up on his first snatch attempt, fakes an elbow injury, and goes out. That's the corruption that we see in sport. It's nauseating. Yeah. Just to throw some more conjecture out there, what does an Olympic lifting routine look like? Watch. The elbow!

The fucking elbow, dude! What does an Olympic lifting routine look like for a really, really high-level Olympic lifter, especially younger kids? Is it common to work out multiple times a day? Is it common to sprint and jump and lift? Yeah. Kids are – it's games. We just play a lot of games. Same thing in jujitsu.

Most of the things you should make the kids – I think this is the injury here that he fakes. But kids mainly just focus on having fun and just being athletic and – there we go. Totally fake. And he said this himself. Jeez. And it went completely under-wrapped. I'm the only person who's reported on this. Oh, really?

Yeah. Wow. Literally the only one. That's insane. Wow. So, yeah. So, kids in weightlifting, jumping, sprinting, all fun stuff. And might train multiple times a day, things like that?

Like as you get a little older, 15, stuff like that? I would say once you get into probably 15, 16, you might do two times a day maybe. So my point here would be that seems pretty unnatural as well. So, I mean, people are going to take things to an extreme. Yes. And these kids that are in Olympic sports, let's face the facts, especially the kids that are in sports in other countries, are probably not treated so well. Oh, yeah.

And it's not that they're not treated so well. It's not their choice. Right. They're not fucking taking these drugs. Their coach is just saying, take these pills. It's fine. Just take it and then go train. That's it. Yeah. I don't know find it i find it all to be really interesting i wonder what difference it would make like would would there be a lot of kids

that were juiced up and would it have you know a lot of detrimental effects or are there already a ton of detrimental effects from forcing a kid, even here in the United States, to do gymnastics from the time they're four and fuck up their hormones and fuck up their growth. I would say – I'm glad you brought this up because I think that there are – My conjecture here is like why not have these little fuckers on some growth hormone because what you're doing to them might be suppressing everything so hard. Why not have them on a little bit of testosterone? The craziest is probably cross-country or long-distance running long distance running especially density and oh my god that shit is nauseating man and the the ass backwards coaches um in in gymnastics uh ballet um and and long distance running their coaches are so toxic man did you guys see the nike team

the team nike um coach uh this this woman there was a piece i think i don't know if it was sports illustrated but it was a team nike long distance running coach was like the most abusive piece of shit jesus ever to his like all women's team would call them fat or like they needed to lose weight this one woman just like didn't have her period for like four four years or something um what's is there something it's called the tri-fect the i know it's yeah shin uh they get uh shin fractures, the triad, the triad. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That is the sort of shit that pisses me off to no fucking end because, so those same, um, gymnastics coaches that make their athletes throw up on the toilet or lose weight for whatever fucking reason,

those are the same people watching Simone, Simone Biles fucking dominate you know and there are a lot of old school coaches that look at someone like simone biles and go she's ruining our sport why because she's more explosive she's better yeah she has a body type that you don't enjoy fuck off like this is the pinnacle of sport and she's healthier she's healthier so it it's it's the same thing that we see in training. When you would want someone to gain muscle, like you would tell a woman, I don't know how many times, like you actually don't need to get on the treadmill

and like eat just like no calories at all to look the way that you want. If you actually gained a lot of muscle, like approached it like a bodybuilder, you would look exactly how you want and better. And they go, I don't want to look like a bodybuilder. I just said approach it like a bodybuilder, sweetheart. You're never going to look like a bodybuilder because there are bodybuilders who have been working for 15 years who will never look like the bodybuilder

that they want to look like. It's their job and they won't look like that. look like the bodybuilder that they want to look like it's their job and they won't look like that but there there's this you know there's that ass backwards mentality that we see perpetuated especially by these coaches that just frustrates me so goddamn much yeah you know mark i i do get what you're saying i i understand like because for example like there are some sarms that help with recovery correct i'm not here saying SARMs are good. But what I'm saying is if athletes, if it was legal for them to take certain things that allow them to actually be a healthier athlete, right? If it were somehow, if they could rule on it and make sure that everything was safe, it could overall be beneficial.

and make sure that everything was safe, it could overall be beneficial. I think in my head, though, the reason why, like, again, an adult man can do whatever he wants to do. If you're 19, 20, 21, you want to do TRT, you're an adult. You can make whatever choices you want to make. And I am not judging you for it. Well, I'm kind of judging you for it. I definitely am judging you for it.

But I've talked about this in a podcast a long time ago but when i was a trainer in my early 20s uh i was like 21 or 22 i had this client and he was like 27 or 28 and i was doing skin caliper tests on him and we were trying to lose weight but for some reason i could not pull his skin away and he wasn't making progress for months i'm like uh dude you need to go to the doctor because for some reason i don't know this shit shit seems weird he went to the doctor uh and he came back and uh he mentioned how like he did steroids and he did something when he was younger but he never did a pct never did a post-cycle therapy so he got tested he did a bunch of stuff and the doc literally said he after he did what he needed to do things didn't go back to normal he was never

able to get shit back to normal he was told he's never going to be able to have children and he was 27 at the time right because he didn't do that shit responsibly um and when i think about also that doctor could be wrong. Doctor could be wrong. Right. That's only one opinion from – I mean how many times have we fucking seen people think that they'll never be able to walk again because the doctor says it and then they go to someone else. And also we've seen in steroid athletes that that could have been the case all along. Right.

Because we don't know previously, right? Cool. And I get that. Sorry to interrupt. No, you're totally good. I get what you're saying. But I also don't think that younger cats are paying attention to the potentially long-term detriments to something as whimsical and as non-dangerous as TRT. Because it just seems kind of odd when you're young and you're manipulating your own ability to produce this hormone, right?

What happens with prolonged use? What happens if you choose to do it for 10 years and you want to come off later? Will things function like they should? Yeah, exactly. Will things function as they should? And most people aren't trying. We talk about the habits all the time on the show. Are you getting good sleep? Are you getting good nutrition? Most people aren't dealing with all these things before they go the route of I want to use some TRT or HRT to gain muscle. And then there's the other thing about it. If you're a younger person and you're using whatever, if you do choose – and I've seen this happen to guys. Guys go on a cycle for a meet. They come off.

They go into a depression and don't even feel like lifting anymore. Do you think about what life is like when you're not? Will you be able to function normally? And that's why I'm just like do the shit first. Like build the habit first. Right? And then if you want to do that shit later, that's your prerogative. But I just see there's too many people getting on it young because of how normal we make it seem.

And how much we make it. You're saying the negative aspect of exposure to on this level. The exposure is good. It's like, no, no, no. But it's necessary. Like someone being like, hey, guys, I hopped on TRT. Let me explain to you it. Just by that person coming out and saying that they did it.

But they should. That's the thing that I know. But it's a doubleedged sword, right? It is. Because someone will take what that person says and then they'll be like, well, I really like this person. Yeah. Well, yeah, there's definitely been so much exposure to the point where we could make the judgment of there probably has been a lot younger people over the years taking performance-enhan enhancing drugs probably than ever before whether it be SARMs or steroids or uh maybe even getting TRT which would be weird because like how the fuck are you supposed to get that if you're uh not in need of it at all but um I think it does raise a lot of awareness but here's my thought on it is my thought on it would be that unfortunately you go through a period of time where a lot of people would potentially get hurt.

A lot of people would potentially get might have long lasting effects. But I also think over time it would course correct because if it was really that detrimental, you would have people five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now saying, hey, listen, I did that when I was young. It was a fucking giant mistake. I just don't think sometimes, like because in bodybuilding and powerlifting, we don't have WADA. We don't have WADA trying to regulate bodybuilding

and powerlifting. And we also don't have an Olympic gold medal in there either. And you can make an argument, maybe having a gold medal is more dangerous than having steroids because having a gold medal gamifies the fuck out of something so much that it makes people want to represent their country. You know what I'm saying? I agree with everything you said 100%.

I would hate to see anybody hurt themselves. I don't fucking think that anybody below the age of like 25 I agree with everything you said 100%. I would hate to see anybody hurt themselves. I don't fucking think that anybody below the age of like 25 should mess with any hormones. Like there's really not a lot of good reasons to mess around with hormones when you're young. SARMs you don't know shit about. Maybe there's some safe over-the-counter supplements you can try to kind of like see where you're at. I do believe you have to go in the gym and like feel shit out completely on your own because it takes so long to even know the correct feedback from your workout, much less, you know, trying to put performance enhancing drugs in there. But I, I, I kind of see, like,

I just wonder if you're just like, Oh, fuck it. Like, let her, let her fly. I think over time, it would maybe course correct, but maybe I'm way off. And then another thought, and again, like I still personally don't know too much about SARMs, but when I did Sarmageddon, the amount of messages I received when I put out how much I was taking, the amount of messages I received was fucking crazy. People saying like, I'm taking 10 times as much as you were taking because the gym bro told me that that was safe. And I'm talking like I was taking, I think, like 20 milligrams of Osterine. And people were like taking grams of shit.

And I'm just like, oh, yeah, you probably shouldn't do that. He's like, yeah, I'm wondering why I'm feeling like shit because I've been doing this for six months. I'm like, oh, my gosh. So the exposure side is like, okay, maybe if somebody does put out some good information. And I'm not saying that it was like positive or negative what i did but i potentially did help some people like understand like oh you probably should be taking much less if you are going to yeah but it is a double-edged sword for sure yeah yeah it's like because how many people went from zero to 20 milligrams after

that all anyone all anyone got after seeing bigger stronger faster is that they need to be on steroids people like that movie was great man i hopped on right away it's fucking awesome it's like uh so so that is okay let's let's consider this let's consider this fucking question then because just people talking about their use. If I admire that person talking about their use, no matter what the warning signs they give me, does that detract, does, is that,

is me hopping on because of that person? Is that more likely than if that person never talks about it at all? Yeah. I think it's probably going to infiltrate your world somewhere. Like if you like lifting, you're following a specific influencer, maybe they didn't have direct influence on you, but maybe they had influence on your buddy. Your buddy starts to get a little bigger, stronger guys start talking about it. Yeah.

I've started this cycle of something. So I could see how it could be something that, uh, I think over time will infiltrate and probably influence you, uh you quite a bit. You just totally fucked up our microphone, by the way. Am I good? Yeah, you're fine. So I actually – yeah, I talked to Derek quite a bit. Like I would venture to say that like the stark, vast, vast majority of my audience doesn't do any steroids and they're very – but they're still very interested in it.

It would be really – like he has a really – you could do some really cool studies with his group of people. Just polls. Massive polls. Just polls. Like massive polls. Massive. I bet you probably more people than not will really enjoy his videos, that pay attention to his videos, not just watch his Instagram, but also kind of pay attention to his YouTube,

I would say. I'm just going to take a wild guess. About 70% of those people will probably experiment with something that's not over the counter. Yeah. Some sort of performance-enhancing drug of some kind. But I mean –

At some point. That's where it is helpful, the exposure. And this is why like it is necessary because this stuff, when done in an uneducated way, can be very dangerous. You know what I mean? Yes. So that is why like the stuff that Derek's doing, talking about that stuff. And even these guys, if you, if a lot of people follow you, right, and you are getting really big and you're using something, you should mention it.

Right. You should mention it because like you're going to get the question consistently. Are you natural? Are you natural? Yeah, Zach. Right. Are you natural? Guys, how much shit are you on?

We don't want a soft pedal. Okay. Because we get accused of doing that all the time. I cannot tell you how awesome it was to come in here. You're a lot bigger than I would think you are. I need more people to think that. And also, I do got to mention the soft pedaling thing. We did mention the reason why we didn't ask Mike, are you on drugs?

Is because the guy has said countless times he's natural. It's not going to be, are you on drugs is because the guy has said countless times he's natural. Like, it's not going to be, are you on drugs, Mike? Yeah. Like, we know he says he's not. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I mean, whether you believe it or whatever, we know that. So it's not the conversation is going to lead.

The crazy thing is I don't fucking care if he is or if he isn't. And I don't even care if he's promoting something and he is on drugs. Like, because I know what I believe and care about. I'm more interested in the discussion around the discussion. And it seems like you guys are as well. Yeah. It's like we're almost – like we come to the point where we're arguing against ourselves. Yeah.

We're on the same team and then we're against each other. It's like that is ultimately like the coolest thing to do steel man your your foes argument right and like when you start to do shit like that you can it's again like what i was saying no matter what you're doing as long as you're moving and not just ignoring it so like if you don't know let's say take like toxic masculinity it's hard it's hard to define what exactly that means what are masculine things that are toxic and what are you know but if you explore it and you steal man the argument against it and for it you're doing the right thing i feel like i'm always there i feel like i'm always in the middle yeah yeah and like somebody asked me about something i'm like

take you away from the middle you know what would take you away from the middle to not fucking think about it right right to not think about it at all and then to have to come up with i want this side or this side my family will get into these like discussions and sometimes the discussions will get like a little heated you know people talk about politics and stuff and i'm just like i have nothing to say because like as soon as i go to say something i'm to even disagree with that in some way. You know what I mean? How literally? Like I partially agree with it and I partially disagree with it.

I'm like right in the middle somewhere. Don't you love when you're like coming up with a point and then you just go, well, actually, now that I think about it, you know. But that's – I swear to God in training, it's the same way. I don't know the answer. Okay, just fucking move. move please don't stop moving for the love of God just continue to move and you'll be alright you will

maybe the answer comes maybe it doesn't but I promise you you'll be okay so why don't you use steroids do you still compete in the USA do you still compete in that I could also say, why would I? You know, it's like Chris has a quote that was quoted by Huberman on his Instagram. He said, you know, alcohol is one of the only things where if someone says they don't drink,

the other person asks why. You know, like something must be wrong. That's what I'm thinking. You said you love strength and you want to be as strong as possible. There's something out there that exists that's part of the program. No, I actually don't. I don't. It's just, I don't know.

I might consider it, you know. Oh, there we go. At least we got something. It's that no thing that gets me. then because because it's that no thing that gets me it's it's hard to discuss nuanced things like this when people have taken up so so like taking up arms on on either side it's one of those things with like the use of actual like drugs or like you know um when you say drugs you mean like meth what are you talking about like steroids or no no like mushrooms mushrooms acid things like that there's a lot of it's tricky wording there and i don't want to come across as like saying hey kids go do drugs they're actually okay for you

there's too much variance in the way that people think in the way that they approach things to give any sort of absolute answers or any sort of absolute suggestions. But to say that it's impossible for somebody to take drugs and experiment with themselves and experiment and say that that person's a bad person, right? You cannot say shit. Like I do not believe that people should be saying shit like that. And that's where you can get in trouble on either sides.

So that's where I'm like, yeah, maybe at some point. I don't know. I like the idea that people are their own people. They can do their own thing and they can handle what comes at them. And I like to think that I'm one of those people. Yeah. You know what I mean? And it's like Joe Rogan on his show.

He's like, look, we've battled against cigarettes for a long, long time. And that is there is definitely reason for that because something needed to be said. Like advertise. It really was about advertising it's not actually so much about uh like the precedent set for advertising it's not really so much about the health conditions which were occurring but it was a result of the advertising and this is where you know potentially if there was advertising from guys i mean if we look at the old muscle magazines and all these things like you have a guy who's ridiculous looking and he's selling creatine or whey protein

that's where it's like okay we need to fucking put an end to that shit okay that's bullshit that's always going to be bullshit yeah you know look like this guy if you take this supplement but but inspire young kid to hit the gym it could and to take some creatine yeah but it could also inspire them to take steroids but i guess i'm kind of like going off into these little tangents but joe rogan was talking about cigarettes and he's like like a little bit of nicotine you know if you're not addicted like there is a line to these things there has to be we can't just simply say we can't just stigmatize everything or take up arms against something. Yeah. There's that saying it's like stand for something or whatever.

Fall for anything. Fall for anything. How can that be true? All like all the time. Yeah. That's dangerous. How can that be true like fall for anything like i guess i guess there are certain times where you like i guess then maybe i'm a fucking

gullible person or maybe i'm i'm somebody like i'm definitely very forgiving like i've had people do you know fucked up shit to me and i've forgiven them and um maybe that's the type of and that's not always a good thing you know there are people that you should get out of your life no matter what they're able to do later on but maybe that's kind of the idea where like i don't always stand for something yeah and but that might be what people are interested in me for it's like i don't fucking know the answer guys come with me on this journey while i fucking find it out or hopefully try to find it out and write a five paragraph essay about it something i think that can be important is to share experiences with people on your own

like what you've experienced with something so like for myself with like mushrooms like i don't feel like mushrooms are addictive for me. I don't even really like taking them, but I still take them here and there just to kind of go on a journey. Drugs, music, exercise, these are all things that can help take me to different places. And so sometimes I want to end up in a different spot or have my mood kind of change to a different spot. Maybe I'll do it with kratom or maybe, you know. By the way, this was fantastic. It's amazing, right? How do you feel? Great. Seriously.

I feel like I want to train pretty hard. People use it as a pure weapon. What did you think of the legendary sweet roll? It's gone. Yeah, cinnamon roll, right? I like that it has carbs in it, actually. Five carbs? What does that mean science he's like

i need i need more carbs something about this is 22 grams carbs there we go yeah yeah i like that i like supplements with carbs in them you know because that's what gives me energy to drink yeah you want a little oomph yeah i'm gonna add in real quick to you you asked him why he's chosen not to. There's something where I've thought about if I was 16 or 17, because when I started lifting, I remember it. I remember my motivations. I remember what drove me. I remember the videos that I pulled up to pump me up before going to the gym. And I remember that I was always someone who wanted to figure out the bestest, the bestest,

the bestest way to do it. I wanted to figure out the best ways to optimize everything I was doing. Like I had my mom get me fucking, um, like the bodybuilding.com whey protein from Costco. She got me some creatine. She was like, are you sure you should be taking that way? You're getting kind of big, you know? But I also know that if i was in this generation like if i was a lifter in this generation i would have absolutely

been on test pretty fucking early because i wouldn't have had the time to see what my development would have been like right and the reason why i've never done anything is because by the time i learned about a lot of that stuff i already put on a good amount of muscle. I was already so deep into the game that I was like, wait, why, why would I start now? Progression's good. I'm feeling great. But I put in the time and I like, I've thought about this. Like I thought about what I have and I, sadly, I think I would have hopped on TRT if I was,

if I was in this information age where it's so normal and it's something that can speed you up to look like the person that you you you enjoy the person that you look up to if they're doing it i i would have and i that's not i don't think that's a good thing personally because it would deter me from putting in the time what do you guys think about the idea of like hey it's none of your fucking business because like it's like it essentially can become like a uh like a medicinal type of thing so you know people take drugs all the time to do better at the things that they might be to be poor and yes and they get prescribed them so say i want to be on TRT and I go to a doctor and they get me on TRT and I feel fucking good

I sleep better wake up why do I have to fucking announce that to the world you know it's the same thing it's like I started taking Viagra and I have a lot better sex with my wife now you know like someone could say that but it's like why would I have to announce that to the world

I think when you're in fitness when you're in fitness and you're showing off your body right when you're showing off your body and when you're mainly that's it like this is what i'm showing off to you yeah that's where the pressure of like i have to announce that to people but if you think about Joe Rogan, it really is no one's fucking business if he's on or if he isn't. Because that's not what we care about. Him being on testosterone? Sure.

There are a ton of people not in strength and conditioning or in this field, if you want to call it industry, that are taking testosterone that we don't fucking know about. And I don't give a fuck if they are, that's a, that's a drug that their doctor prescribes to them that they get and they are out, you know? So at what point can, would we look at things like that?

You know, it's an important thing to think about. I think Joe Rogan talks about it just because he talks so much about like health and nutrition and stuff. I think he feels compelled to share that. But obviously we're not going to like share everything out with people. But there are like weird lines, you know, there's people. Arbitrary lines.

Well, people sell a lot of stuff that they don't believe in. I mean, it's been done forever and I don't have any, like if Michael Jordan didn't go to McDonald's, I don't have any judgment against that. Who gives a fuck? He got good money from it. Exactly. Maybe he always hated Nike. I don't i don't have any like if michael jordan didn't go to mcdonald's i don't have any judgment against that who gives a fuck he got good money from exactly maybe he always hated nike i don't know like me these different people that receive uh you know finances and a living and then some uh you can't always like you know pinpoint it but i think sometimes when i think if you go out of your way to be deceitful, that's when things get a little weird. That's when I think some people will be disappointed.

I think one of the Kardashians was selling something with your eyelashes or something. And she was swearing by this thing is the thing that made her eyelashes grow. But she had some other procedure or some other drug or whatever the hell it was done. And I think things like that is where people get upset. Yeah, you got to go really out of your way to lie. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the same thing here with steroids. If you're trying to sell a product, this is what I use.

This is how I do it. But you're leaving out like the X, Y, and Z of how you actually really did it. And it can make a huge difference. I mean, I— Make a huge difference, yeah. how you actually really did it. And it can make a huge difference. I mean,

I, a huge difference. Yeah. In the short time that I've known you, um, and even before that, I don't give a fuck that you're on or were on because you've proven yourself to be a worthwhile person, a nice person, and you speak well,

you have talents, you have art outside of just your body and your performance you know you have your same i'm not just a body but you're you're treats me like it treats me like a piece of meat but you're you're you're like you have things out that are like you make sure to develop things outside of performance and what you look like. And I think then if that's the case, then it's okay. Like I don't really care. But I think maybe someone who is literally just a fucking insanely good-looking person because of the drugs that they take or they can lift a lot of weight because of the drugs they can take, that's where the pressure becomes a lot harder on them, right?

To say something, to say something. You know, but this – OK. So this is interesting. When I first got on social media, it was like 2014 or whatever, and my first few posts, I was always getting the question, are are you natural are you natural the answer has always been yes but i got tired of having to answer that question so i made my username the natty professor because it's in the fucking name you don't need to ask me anymore if i'm natural it's right there right yeah but also within that i was trying to put forward content that could get people interested in training yeah yeah yeah and yes i wanted people to know like hey i wasn't saying hey you can look like me but i will say hey if you do these habits if you make the gym a part of your life if you do

this for years because when i started making content i was already nine years into training if you do this for years you will be able to achieve a physique and strength levels that you'll be very surprised about. But it's going to take time. It's going to take time. So I'm someone who on everything I've made, the question's always there, right? The funny thing is that since I had that username, people thought that since I had Natty in my username, that automatically said I wasn't natural because if you announce that you're natural, that means you're lying.

You're lying, yeah. Which is a weird concept. But then I changed it to Nseema Inyang because that started getting like, you know, that Natty Professor username just got too much fucking hate and it was detracting from the content about habits. Build this, make this your lifestyle. Do that for amount of time.

But I will also say, uh, I put a lot of importance on that because, uh, I think that it's important. I think it's important to, if, if you're just doing this to gain muscle strength and size,

um, you need to give yourself the time. You, you don't need to just hop on like that, that like, yeah, that might speed some certain things up for you, but you need to love to love this shit first i mean this needs to be part of your life it's not if people are following you for your fitness prowess they should know one way or the

other how you're getting there yes right and the question's always there man the vanity gang game is a tough one and i'm so happy i don't have to be in it when you say that what do you mean i have to be in it. When you say that, what do you mean? I have to take your shirt off. Like you are your, like if you take your shirt off or, you know, a woman like just being sexy, just like looking good and that's it. That's your game. Like that's got to fucking suck at some point. This is just an off the cuff thought.

Like you're not a person you are a body and that that's a crazy thing right because now we're looking at performance and we're looking at the body and developing it and say you are on drugs say you're not on drugs it's always going to be in question because that is you your body that's it there's nothing else we know about i i personally if you had something to develop if you're a good looking person and you had something to develop that would prove yourself elsewhere like go fucking do that as soon as possible please make yourself multi-dimensional because fucking looks fade and the world is a cruel cruel place i mean i i i swear to god i didn't know um because i you know

before having any sort of prevalence in social media i just like i i swear to god i didn't care what people looked like so much and it's crazy how much that changes based off of how many times and how many comments you continually read like i would set up my camera and i'd record a video and people would point out things in the background um they point out like crazy shit and you're like wait a minute is this how the world works because i'm never in that space ever i'm never never never in that space at all and then when i went into weightlifting i was even more not in that space like there would be a woman lifting in the background and people be like damn who's that you know like i'm a wedding ring holy shit

i don't give a fuck so hard about like i really really don't care about what people look like in weightlifting you know why because all i fucking care about is the total yeah what's your fucking total that's the only thing that matters people are dressed in singlets it's pretty skimpy if you think about it like very tight form-fitting shit we don't have enough i swear to god as coaches and as athletes in the back room we do not have time to think about oh that person's fat that person's jacked that person's hot that person's ugly like we just don't have time or the mind space and if you're thinking that get the fuck out because the only thing that matters is the weight on the bar.

That's it, dude. And it was so wild. Not for sponsorship, though. Well, it was wild. If you got a big ass, you're going to get more sponsorship. Taking that, though, and presenting it. Like, I had a woman athlete, and I was teaching her a couple things in the snatch. And, like, I posted it posted it like without thinking about it

you know and then like endless comments talking about her looks and her body and i'm like oh fuck like this is how it how it is you know um and it's definitely warped like i don't understand she was doing stiff legged deadlifts i'm not sure what the big deal was yeah i was filming from like a downward angle no and i'm not i'm not doing this to be the fucking white knight. I look at women and I'm like, oh, she's hot. Yeah, but it is a very, very weird world. And I'm really like, I'm glad that I was able to develop something outside of like the way that I look in this. Because it is a fast track for sure looking

good oh my god can get you so far in this industry and fitness it's like you know it makes a big difference the one thing I actually really I I don't mind Greg so much and I know you guys don't either um and I the one thing I do like about him is when he says – he talks about like – he likes to take down a lot of charlatans and I like to do that as well. But he talks about like the looking good aspect of it and how much success it brings that person. Yeah. It's like a factor that he factors into everyone right like just being a good-looking person can get you so so so far which it shouldn't by the way because that's insane that's ridiculous to be like that person knows more that person is smarter that person you know what they're selling

is more legit yeah just because they're good looking but that's just how the human brain ends up working. But that is one thing that he talks about that I enjoy thinking about. Go ahead. But that's the thing. In fitness, I think that's why I don't know how people can actually do natty or nots where they actually truly make sense, where there are no holes. But that's why that stuff makes sense because there's a lot of people where you when you start paying attention to their information outside of how they look when they start speaking about the the topic of fitness or gaining strength or whatever oh yeah you legit listen someone newer may not understand what to look for they might just be like oh that's great

but you will listen to somebody you'd be like oh j oh, Jesus, this is fucking horrible. Right. Yes. Right. It's so, you know, that's why. Lux is where a lot of stuff starts. It's where a lot of stuff starts. I mean, relationship wise, you see somebody that looks nice. That's how you start a conversation. Yeah, man. You're not like trying to pick out the worst looking person. Yeah.

Sometimes I think about this. I just realized it says Zoolander's pad on it. In our text threads, we were going back exactly zoolander yeah what was it something about good looking he mentioned relationships start um oh right right i never really honestly there's one thing about my looks that actually gained me a little bit of traction and it was that i don't look like a weightlifter and when i would lift something people be like whoa shit that was surprising yeah it actually probably made a big deal that you're tall right yes because people are like oh i'm tall too i didn't think i would be able to do some of this stuff yeah Yes, 100%. And yeah, I mean, I just, I fucking hate the idea of like, do you even lift? It's like, well, yeah, I just fucking did.

I just showed you. Like this guy looks like a D-Y-E-L, you know, the whatever. Like, but I lift. I just did. I just lifted for you. You know what I mean? Like, that's the shit that bothers me. People got to see you in person, bro. Yeah. Once bro yeah once they do they're like oh you do lift but yeah like dude i don't know if looking

looking at me now and i said i deadlift over 600 pounds would you believe it nope really really really he was joking, dude. Okay. Well, that did not work. His heart sunk. He was like, well, what? I'm like, well, then this fucking, you know, fuck. I got you down for a 315 deadlift with a belt.

We need to clip that because your face was like, really? Fuck, you guys are just telling me how I actually look big in person. You're got big old mitts and stuff yeah of course you can pick up 600 pounds that was so good so so but like in in in general like well i just i actually did just pr my deadlift it was 620 it was awesome let's go and uh like the main comment is like wow that's so crazy for a guy that looks like you you know and that's where like sporns are hurtful

well no but like here's a guy who's deadlifted for for you know forever as long as I've been born

nice it was a grind for sure it's pretty smooth though yeah it was and and you know you're someone who would say oh yeah I fucking believe he would do a 600-pound deadlift, right? Right.

But, no, don't take his word for it, right? It's like you know more because of how people look on the internet, which is just ridiculous. And that's also why I love weightlifting. I wonder, do people think you're like thin, like real thin or something? Yeah. Yes. Because you're what? You're real thin or something? Yeah. Yes. Because you're what? You're 240, 235?

I think we got to weigh myself. Do you guys have a scale? Probably like, yeah, probably. I want to say 245. Yeah. Yeah. You're a dense dude. A big person.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, I haven't been anywhere near 200 pounds in forever, I'm sure. Neither of you guys. You said you got pretty heavy too, right? Yeah, man. I was really buying into weightlifting. And somebody at my height, you got to have a frame.

I mean, you have the frame. You got to have the body weight behind that. Mm-hmm. Lasha is a great example. Lasha six foot six oh shit yeah and we have the same size he and i have the same size hand same wingspan wait let me see your hand big old mitt right there jesus we we have the same size hand same same wingspan yeah but he weighs over 60 or 70 kilos more than me right so that's kind of like where we're at uh so for me it was like i was doing some crazy eating and i love i it's like i'm almost nervous to talk about how much i was eating like it was a big deal with this fucking guy next to me

because like the legendary shit of like you would talk about that you would eat and put yourself through just to fucking lift more weight like you know that grind more than anyone how much did you eat zach so i don't know so like the breakfast my favorite breakfast was six eggs two bagels with cream cheese on them and then a half of like a roll of Jimmy Dean's sausage mixed in. Yeah, there we go. And a protein shake. The breakfast sausage just made the calories go. Yeah.

Oh, my God, man. It was so many calories. It was absurd. And then I would have a protein shake after like an hour after. And then an hour later, I'd go train. a protein shake after like an hour after and then i and then an hour later i'd go train uh and so i got up to 120 so that's 265 and it was uh i could feel like my blood pressure was getting higher i could feel oh that's strength yeah that's the feeling of being strong that feels really good yeah i have uh a 45 pound plate feels like a frisbee

I'm sure people watching have seen like the eye have you seen me pop my eye oh did you oh shit I did it at Jujimufu's house that's brutal when that happens being that heavy is not comfortable

go to Jujimufu I saw Spongebob. I saw Spongebob. Search. I love Spongebob. Jujimufu, Zach Talander. And there's a part. Oh, it's Talander? Talander.

I thought it was Talander. Whatever. Actually, you know what? Talander. Talander would be more close to the actual Swedish pronunciation, I think. But we always went with Talander. Being Swedish, is most of your family fairly tall or no?

Yes. Three older sisters, all of them over 5'8". So, yeah. Are you the tallest? Yes. My dad, he's shrinking. But this is it. He's about the same height as you. This is fucked up, by the way, guys.

Oh, God. See, I should have let out but he this is it he's about the same height as you this is fucked up by the way guys oh no see I should have let out air I should have let my air out you see my eyes yeah so I figured out this thing where when I get to that point of grinding I should let out

I have to let air out as I'm like passing my knees and i've actually found it out i was so nervous i was like guys wow have you ever seen something like that i've seen a guy bleed out of his eyes did you have blood come out of your eyes no i could feel it happening though inside my skin man it was fucked up super not healthy not healthy at all didn't have it doesn't have anything to do with like i mean when i was here i wasn't like very heavy yeah show it one more time that was crazy um did you kind of like yell or scream as you were lifting is that part of it or no again like i was able to pr with nothing to my eyes. There's a moment where I'm like really grinding and I hold my breath, like take a breath in

and I hold it. But then I'm starting to grind really hard, right? It about the knees. And what I've started to do is just go like while I'm passing that point, nothing, nothing happens. So it's just a, it's just an internal blood pressure that i'm building up here super fucked up man did your eyeballs turn all red the next couple days and stuff bloodshot no it's just that area i used to in crossfit when i would do handstand push-ups you cross it yeah

oh man that's how i started oh everything yeah okay um i started doing handstand pushups. This guy. And I would get like the little sprinkles of, you know, pops. Have you guys ever seen that? Yeah. It's happened to me in jujitsu. The capillaries. You blow out the capillaries. It's happened on my neck before.

Well, no. Like just the blood pressure buildup from getting choked. God, he went crazy. Yeah. I thought he was bleeding there, but it looks like, oh, Jesus. I bet you the jaw. You looked pretty jacked in that video. The jaw might have played into that, too. How bad is bleeding?

Yeah, you do look jacked. It's just crazy how it turned. Who else is lifting with you? You got some pretty fucking strong guys. You know Joey Satmary? No, I don't think I'm familiar. Juju. One guy was real jacked.

That's Marcus Leone. He's done 400 kilos. Damn. And then. There was a guy there. Ian Daniel. Yeah, there was a guy. Rhino.

He's done, I don't know what he is. That's Joey. Jesus, these guys are lifting some weight. Yeah. Strong dudes. Big dudes. So that's that. I don't know how we got onto that track.

But yeah, so I was heavy as shit when I was at that point in my life. But, you know, I worked all the way back down to like 97 kilos body weight for jujitsu, which was cool. That was really cool actually. Yeah. I was in a crazy, like you know when you can feel like

you can just run around a lot? Just like run. Yeah. And in jujitsu, like, I mean, it sucks for me when I try to get back into shape for jujitsu because I can't not put in, like, big bouts of effort. Like, big, just like, it's not even like I'm being a spaz. It's like, because I have a lot of force in what I do just from lifting, it's hard for me to control that. So I, I can feel the exact moment when I lose my fitness almost entirely.

And once it's gone and you're in a role and like someone's on top of you or there, you know, even in a slightly more dominant position, it is really, really unforgiving that sport especially in the gi like um you guys had huberman on here which by the way he did the cool mitt thing that was fucking awesome because what that said to me was like the gi is essentially the ultimate uh

like it it's the opposite of what you want in a sport. You're wearing a sauna. Yeah. Right. And if Huberman's point was muscle fatigue is not actually being tired, it's just heat. Well, then you're kind of fucked.

If you, you know what I mean? Like you got to get used to having that heat on you because I never played a sport where as hot as jujitsu not even close football all the pads in the world under the sun not even fucking close i swear on my life it's not even close probably makes it more resilient at a certain point the the gi yeah for sure i've never thought about for sure yeah because it's hot it's heat right it's like you gotta you have to learn how to adapt to not just performing but in the heat you're

creating the hottest possible place. I was thinking about like I've thought about that before in jiu-jitsu with the gi. But I've also thought about it like out on a run. I'm like how do I like – I mean if I bring water with me and dump it on me, like that would help me. Sometimes you're just getting so fucking hot. It's like part of the dehydration thing is like you can only take in so much liquid it's hard to keep up with the amount that you're losing yeah the cooling down is like so important right that's why that cool mitt thing was so cool that video that he did with you guys as a guy

who's you know you've done weight lifting and a bunch of other stuff what how long ago did you start jiu-jitsu and why so uh ian daniel the guy in that video he and the rhino guys yeah check him out on ig yeah so he um he came for my birthday for my 30th birthday and uh he's like i'm taking you to the gym because my professor at my gym says i gotta go to this place while i'm here i really want to train while i'm here i'm like fuck yeah i've the coolest thing about when i started jujitsu was like i knew i knew a decent amount about it it hard to – if you don't know the rules, it's kind of like chess in that it's hard to understand the purpose. Like if you don't know what you're trying to accomplish in jujitsu, it's fucking weird. You're in someone's clothes guard and you're like, okay, what now?

Like I don't get it. Like what am I supposed to do now? But the good thing was I knew what to do. I knew – I didn't know how to do it. I just knew what the point was. So I was able to catch on a lot faster. Did you like coach? No, I just watched a ton of the sport just because I was interested.

I just watched it. So I started to understand those aspects of it. So I had a little advantage. But he took me. He left, and I just kept going. So that was two years ago. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Cool. And, uh, it was, it's, it, that was one where I don't know there's ever been such an intense takeover on

my brain in my fucking life. I lost countless nights of sleep because I was just thinking about jujitsu in my brain. I couldn't stop it. I could not stop it. It was crazy. I don't know if you've ever felt something like that. Like even. Absolutely.

Yeah. Are you new to jujitsu? Extremely new. Yeah. And it's like, it's wild what it does to your brain, man. You start like, even just looking at like regular like like dumb shit like street fights or whatever where somebody knows a little bit about grappling before i would look at that and be like oh this is terrible or whatever but then if they have like some skill like rewind it how did they get into

that position yeah i just look at everything differently and then you start like following like shit on reddit like in jujitsu and it's like you just really dive all in and yeah it's hard to imagine anything else that's quite like that so one thing i realized that about jujitsu in the gi your low back is going to be fucked in no gi your neck and your shoulders are going to be fucked so that's what i've that's what i that's my theory because in the gi if someone's putting pressure on you they have handles on your legs and they can just fold you with the amount of force that's really unnatural just because of the handles. Oh, you mean if they grab your legs and they stack you? Yeah, but then there's also other times where they can hold your pant and pull you.

The forces at play, specifically on the low back, are much more intense. specifically on the low back are much more intense um and then when why i say uh nogi a lot of it's a lot of yeah uh ties yeah and and and like russian collar like all these collar ties and then even when you're playing guard you should pull someone's head down you should you should be manipulating their head so it's always like this so you know your shoulders because of this hunching so it's like i really lately i've been wanting to build uh just get bigger and build my weight lifting again i just couldn't do it at all with jujitsu how long did it take to get your blue belt uh a year and a month nice yeah that's fast yeah i'm watching it a lot yeah Yeah, I was going like crazy, man. I was going sometimes two times a day and stuff like that.

Yeah. I really went probably too hard at first. And I was competing, doing pretty well in competitions. But yeah, I'm going to make my way back to it. So this is something that I can't believe I haven't mentioned yet. This guy approached me four or five years ago. He emailed me and he said, I want, I'm making a, I want to make a feature film, um, about weightlifting. And if you want to read the script, I'd love to send it to you.

And, uh, if you want to be involved, I'd love for you to be involved. So he sent me the script. I read it. I was like, that was fucking amazing, man. I love it. I love the script i read it i was like that was fucking amazing man i love it i love the script i did not even from a weightlifting you could insert any sport into it and it would be good and i was also from a film and television background so i um i have always been in interested in creating content whether it be story-based whether it be documentary-based i want to make something and present it to people with with visuals and editing so that's where i went to school for so i was like oh my god this is a chance for me to get into the thing that i had a dream to do outside of sport outside of like

it was sports for me all the time but if there's one thing i wanted to do was make movies or make content it's like holy shit this is it that four years ago. So what happened was he said the main character, it's going to be very difficult, um, to cast the main character for this movie because we are not going to use a double. And it, it's one of those things where we can't really fake it.

Um, the, the movement. And so much of this is going to be about sound design and mixing the sound with the visuals is so, like you guys know, like watching weightlifting, there's something about the synesthesia of the sound and the visuals of it, the grace and the mobility and the power. It truly is a visual spectacle that makes you think.

Yeah. And he's like, I need that. And that's going to be very difficult. And so I was like, well, look, I've done a few auditions.

I've been in production for a while. Like I, this is what I used to do. Give me the sides and I will read them. And you determine if I can fit the bill for, for this character. Okay. So,

um, he, I, I practiced a week with one of my buddies who's an acting coach. And then, uh, we read, we did a reading,

a table reading of it. And then I sent the video to him and his team, the cinematographer, uh, the, the director of photography and then another producer and then another guy. And they're like, you know,

look like we can tell you're not really an actor. But we think you can do this. So if you were willing to do it, we would have to – there's a lot that needs to be done before all that. But yeah, we would like you to be this main character. Oh, shit. So my idea was i want to produce movies like i want to you know i don't care so much to be about to be an actor you know but i was like wow this is a really rad opportunity but since that happened four years ago we've been trying to raise

money and trying to build this thing up and now now we're finally really like, like we're getting down to the wire and we're getting very close. We, over the pandemic, we made a Kickstarter, uh, and we, we hit our goal right when COVID started, which was probably the worst time to start a fucking Kickstarter.

I would not suggest it. Uh, and we made, uh, we made a hundred K from that. Um, we then got a lawyer and we got – we've hired a couple other people to build out the back end of this thing. So like we can shoot right when we get all these things together.

And one of the reasons why we got a lawyer was because we then created what's called a WeFunder. And the WeFunder is not something like a a kickstarter or a go fund me we funder you can actually invest and so when the movie makes a profit you make a profit as well so that's something that we're building right now but he he set the date for february so fingers crossed we'll be shooting in buffalo new y for, I don't know exactly how many days, but we'll be shooting and we'll be getting this fucking thing done. Um, and, uh, the moment he said that, like, it's all just been like, ah, yeah, we'll get the fucking, you know, we'll do this movie one day for sure, man.

And so I was like, I did jujitsu for two years. I'm not worried about looking the part, but I am six foot four. Like I said, I have a long wingspan. In order for me to look like a 105 to 110 kilo weightlifter, I actually have to be 120 kilos. So about two months ago, I said this on my YouTube channel. It's like I'm going to do hypertrophy training and I'm going to do weightlifting training. And I've been sticking to that for a long long time so I've actually put on a lot of weight but it's all weight

that I lost from doing Jiu Jitsu and so that's mainly why I'm doing what I'm doing and that's why you're going to take steroids for the role no no and I god damn it we got the anabolic handbook right there

just in case he wrote it I think that's Mark's original copy Damn it. No, I got the anabolic handbook right there. Yes. In case it's in Seamus. Whoa. He wrote it. I think that's Mark's original copy. Holy shit. This thing's huge. I thought it was going to be like a little handbook. This is a fucking real book.

Dive right on in. Well, yeah. So, so look like that is is that's where I'm at in my training and I was like, I gotta give up jujitsu for this. I can't go into the gym and do that and it's tough because I do look like I'm just

having the blue belt blues. It's like perfect timing for that. I wondered why you stopped. Yeah, that's awesome. Alright, get ready for smelly's tip everybody coming up andrew take us on out of here buddy all righty thank you everybody for checking out today's episode for everything podcast related where you guys can find us just head over to powerproject.live but make sure you guys are following and make sure you guys drop a comment down below on the

youtube side uh at mb power project on instagram tiktok and twitter my instagram tiktok and twitter is at i am andrew z and sumo where you? This was a thick podcast, man. Three hours. Let us know what you guys liked the most. What Zach talked about or what you hated from me or Mark. It's on steroids. Mark, well for president. I didn't see any on Instagram, YouTube. I didn't see any on

TikTok and Twitter. Make sure to check out the Discord. MrZoolander, where can people find you? Can I call you Zoolander? Sure. YouTube. ZachTelander, that's my name. Z-A-C-K-T-E-L-A-N-D-E-R. Also go to coach underscore ZT.

That's my Instagram. I also have some programs. If you want to get better at weightlifting or learn how to weightlift, go to patreon.com slash Zach Talender. And if you would like to check out this feature film that we're trying to make, go to wefunder.com and just search The Weight. We'll have it in the description. That's the name of the movie, The Weight on Wefunder. And just check it out.

Just look at it. You'll be like, oh, maybe I want to invest in this thing. It'd be cool. Fuck yeah. That's cool, man. Smelly's tip is for you to get yourself a negative role model. This was said by your roommate, Chris Williamson, on the Joe Rogan podcast. Oh, yeah.

And I thought it was really interesting. There are probably people in your life that you don't look up to that are the opposite of a role model. And you can look at some of those things that they did and say, I don't want that life. Think about the things that they did and say, I don't want that life. Think about the things that they did. Think about the way they treated people or whatever the things are that they did, the bad habits they had, and get yourself going in the opposite direction. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength.

Catch you guys later. Yes. Thank you so much. That was fantastic.