Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 550: Look into the Future with Ryan Munsey of the Optimal Performance Podcast
Episode Date: July 13, 2017Ryan Munsey of the Optimal Performance Podcast stopped by the Mind Pump studios for a lengthy conversation about a variety of topics including health, the future of the fitness industry, the impact of... technology on humanity and much, much more. Find Ryan at ryanmunsey.com, ryanmunsey_ on Instagram and of course, check out his awesome Optimal Performance Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher and other popular podcasting apps. Get our newest program, Kettlebells 4 Aesthetics (KB4A), which provides full expert workout programming to sculpt and shape your body using kettlebells. Only $7 at www.mindpumpmedia.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get your Kimera Koffee at www.kimerakoffee.com, code "mindpump" for 10% off! Got a beard? Condition your beard with Big Top Beard Company’s natural oils and organic essential oil blends to make it not only feel great but smell amazing! Get Big Top Beard Company products at www.bigtopbeardcompany.com, code "mindpump" for 33% off. Add to the incredible brain enhancing effect of Kimera Koffee with www.brain.fm/mindpump 10 Free sessions! Music for the brain for incredible focus, sleep and naps! Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts!
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It got kind of deep, right?
Yeah, Ryan's been in the industry for quite some time.
So we had a lot of stories to share back and forth
as far as the industry, technology,
where we see the industry going.
Talked about things that were even non-fitness related,
like how technology's gonna impact humanity
and some of the challenges it's gonna present.
Really good conversation, great conversations in this upcoming podcast.
Some of the stuff we talk about will get you thinking for sure.
Now you can find Ryan Muncie on his podcast, Optimal Performance Podcast, or you can find
him on Instagram at Ryan Muncie, that's M-U-N-S-E-Y, underscore, and you can find his website at www.optimalperformance.com.
Also, this is the last day to register for our free webinar.
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Here's what I found.
I have found that in our sphere,
and maybe you can add to this,
but in our world here of podcasting,
there's a lot of weird people.
Like most of us are kind of...
Just out loud, you're sure.
I think it's almost given everybody,
it's almost like a green light to fly your freak flag.
Yeah, you know?
Yeah, because it's yours, right?
It's not censored, it's not filtered.
You can do whatever the fuck you want.
You can get crazy on your podcast,
you can have whatever guests you want on your podcast.
There's no, it's podcasting right now is awesome.
I hope it stays this way.
I do too.
I hope that someone doesn't.
It's still kind of the Wild West though.
Yeah, because it's still a baby, right?
It's still kind of a emotional here soon.
I mean, I still meet people all the time
where they're like, podcast, what?
What's a podcast?
What do you do?
What do you do for a job though?
I think maybe part of it too is that those of us,
and I say us, because I'm pretty sure I'm in that category,
who are a little bit weird,
and by the way, I love weird people.
Every day normal people are boring to me.
But weird people, I think we get,
there's a key, what's the word,
a cathartic effect from talking on a microphone.
It's almost like therapy.
We've talked about this when we first started Mind Pump.
We're like, God, this is so therapeutic.
And it's very much so is.
Do you think that's the weird side of you,
the narcissistic side of you?
Which one do you think that is?
It's not because I like to necessarily hear myself.
No, I think you do.
I think you fast forward Justin and I anytime.
I think you can.
Well, catch up with the car.
We'll be like listening to the podcast and like,
Justin and I start talking and
sound fast forward just to get to where he's at.
Yeah, well, I mean, mostly that has a little bit of that.
That's actually false.
I don't do that.
I listen to you guys a lot.
All right.
But when I'm being critical, I criticize myself more
than you guys.
Okay.
Cause you guys are perfect.
Yeah.
I hate listening to myself.
Like when you finish these episodes and you go to record them
and or you edit them afterwards and you go to record them and you edit them afterwards
and you're here and yourself and you're like, God, I hate that. And then people have come back
to like, you know, you have a great voice for podcasting them. It doesn't sound like that to me.
No, you do. You have a very good, Sal has an awful one, but you have a really good one for sure.
You have that like lean-in effect. I got you glistening up. You up. You just brought something up about being in this connected world now.
What are your thoughts on that?
Sometimes, I find myself and I don't express this out loud to anybody else, but I find myself
battling and struggling with this.
Once you start putting out information and connecting to your audience and followers and
listeners,
it's like it becomes a necessity and that they want more and they want more and they want more and sometimes I get frustrated because it's like, man, you know how much work it takes to provide
all this free information and you're giving me shit because I didn't get on my Instagram today
or something. Absolutely and my wife, she gets so upset with me sometimes because, you know,
especially now that Instagram has initiated this story. I mean, those my wife, she gets so upset with me sometimes because, you know, especially now that Instagram has initiated this story.
I mean, those are amazing, but I feel like I have to post something on there two or three
times a day so that there's always something on my story.
And like even on this trip, you know, I was sitting out there this morning, I was drinking
coffee before I came over here, and it was just a chance for me to have 30 minutes to myself,
which, you know, I consider myself an introvert.
So I love going on these trips and every single day
I'm hanging out with amazing people,
I'm learning stuff, I'm recording these shows
and we're sharing stuff.
And I feel as though I have an obligation to document that
and put that on Instagram Stories and show every little thing like so you know yesterday
I got to go we did cold water immersion right under the golden gate bridge and we were climbing in trees doing the
MoveNet stuff and then you know we had lunch at
Mission heirloom and you want to share all this with people but then yeah, I'm sitting there today and I'm just like
What am I gonna post today? What am I going to post? It's like,
am I, are you living your life to document it and share it, or are you just documenting what you're
actually doing? Well, I think it's this weird thing. There's two things. Once you feel obligated,
it doesn't matter what you're doing, it loses, whatever it is, it loses its lustre. There's actual,
Obligated it doesn't matter what you're doing. It loses whatever it is it loses its luster. There's actual there's an actual term
That's I call just used for this phenomenon. So let's say you love playing baseball You're just like baseball my favorite thing in the world
Then it becomes your job and now you're expected to play and you lose it loses a lot of its luster and some people actually
Start disliking the thing that they like very much because they have that sense of obligation
So a lot of that I think has to do with our own mine
or own perception.
And so if we perceive that we're being obligated,
then it's gonna make it, you know,
it's gonna make it a negative thing.
If we perceive it as I like doing this,
then it makes it a positive thing.
The other thing is, I think it's real important,
especially today, and this is all relationships, by the way.
Friendships, spouses, whatever, and this is all relationships, by the way, friendships,
spouses, whatever, there's a certain level, there's a certain level of separation that
you should have before, otherwise you become very codependent.
And you can actually become codependent on this faceless audience that you have.
And that's what a lot of people have that make that mistake.
When you become codependent on that audience to make you feel a certain way,
make you feel happy, make you feel vindicated,
or worthy, then you have a problem.
So it's important to keep, at least that's what I do.
I keep a clear division, and I present,
you know, what I think is important for my brand
and to my audience,
but I also make sure to not share the fuck out of everything.
Yeah, you want it to be authentic too,
because I mean, you can get into that trap
where it's like, well, I have to post something today.
I have to do it, because it's like the business side of you
is like, you know, this is, it's volume.
Right.
And it's frequency that's gonna win,
but at the same time, like, if you don't really have anything
that genuine to say, or something to share,
and you're just putting it out, like,
it's just gonna turn out like to be this like,
like, just, you know, whatever, like,
just random idea that you
had that like people aren't really going to connect with anyways.
It would almost be better off putting nothing out that day.
Right, exactly.
And that's okay.
Yeah.
But to what you're saying, Sal, I think anytime we are seeking that external validation,
you're removing your locus of control, you know, your happiness, your satisfaction with,
you know, who you are or how you're living your life or what control. You're happiness, your satisfaction with who you are,
or how you're living your life, or what you're doing, you're voluntarily handing that over to
somebody else. And that's a very dangerous place to be for your own health, happiness,
your long-term feeling of fulfillment, and are you really doing what you're supposed to be doing?
And I mean, I think you guys know this. Like you said, you guys have sort of found your superpower.
You're gonna do this regardless.
And I think as long as we're staying in that realm,
then it's okay.
Well, you know what's challenging about it is
something in this great book right now called Irresistible.
And-
You got a picture of you, honey?
Yes, I was gonna say me.
Big picture of your face on the screen.
Well, I taped it.
I taped a picture of myself, honey. Yes, I was gonna say me picture your face on why tape to I taped a picture of myself on it
No, it's just my glutes. So the the story or the book is about
Tech right now and the addictive properties and that it's actually how much of it is engineered to be that way of course
And how much science goes into that and that no one's really talking about it because really, you know,
Facebook and Netflix and all these things, they're all less than 10 years old.
So we really haven't seen the long-term effects.
And in the book, they interview this psychologist, right?
And she's sharing some of her experiences when she's interviewing somebody that's in like
their mid-20s or younger.
And she always has to ask them, is this a person
to person conversation or is this on text or is this on a social media platform? Because when
they share their problems, their issues, the struggles, the fights, all these things are going on.
Nine times at a 10, it's not even really person to person. And they don't, their brain doesn't
disseminate the difference of that to them. It's the same thing as if they were getting in a physical altercation with somebody in
real life.
And so they were going into, you know, a lot of us don't realize what this could lead to
in the future as far as it's addictive properties and how much they're engineering.
To the point, which is crazy to me, I didn't know this until this book, that Steve Jobs
and many of the other tech moguls,
do you know that don't even allow their kids to have an iPhone
or an iPad?
Is that a trip or what?
And didn't want them to use it.
Yeah, I mean, that should make us all think twice
about living by these things.
Right, that should be our first flag right out the gates
is like, the due to invented it says,
no, it says it's the greatest thing ever,
but it does it's kids. It's just like those, the Monsanto memes, where you, it says it's the greatest thing ever, but it does get.
It's just like those the Monsanto memes
where you see the guy out in the field spray and crops
and he's wearing like the bio hazmat suit
and like like contagion movies and shit.
It's perfectly safe.
Yeah, I don't want to breathe this stuff in.
I don't want it touching my skin,
but you go ahead and eat.
Yeah, you'll be fine.
Didn't they try and corner him to like drink it?
Oh, I saw that on that interview.
That was a French interview, I think.
Oh my God, I was like, yeah, drink it.
I think, you know, when it comes to technology,
first off, humans we are, we're dopamine
and serotonin seeking creatures.
Those are the only two things that make us happy.
Yeah, and we're constantly seeking them out.
We're constantly seeking novelty.
We're constantly seeking some kind of growth
or learning or to satisfy some kind of either primal urge or to run away seeking some kind of growth or learning or to satisfy
some kind of either primal urge or to run away from some kind of pain.
And technology is this like, it's like the cigarettes of, you know, communication in
the sense that the reason one of the reasons why cigarettes are so addictive is because
you get a quick hit, you smoke it, it's gone, you need another one right away.
And drugs that tend to do this tend to be more addictive
than longer acting drugs.
Like less people are addicted to like eating marijuana,
more people are addicted to smoking marijuana
for that particular reason.
Tech hits you fast, hits you hard,
you get that dopamine release, it's gone quickly,
you're seeking more novelty, and so you seek more of it.
And that's why it blew up so fast.
It exploded out of nowhere.
We just haven't really learned how to control.
We haven't learned how to control it because we've never been in this position before.
And the best example I can think of of where you can see this playing out is pornography.
Pornography online demonstrates this very, very clearly and very easily because it's a very
clear, it's a very specific thing. And you're finding now,
you hear that kids write that down.
Kids need biographies.
You're finding now young men in their 20s
and teens having erectile dysfunction
because they're literally training their brains
to react to this extreme novel situation
and seeing this visual stimulation that changes
with every click with with unlimited
supply of of stimulation their brains are literally changing to model after this and
nowhere in all of human history did this ever exist unless you were maybe some kind of
like king with access to like thousands of women at your disposal.
You'd never experienced this so it's ruining their sex life.
You talked about how hard it used to be to see porn.
Yeah, I mean, like, can I say something?
When I was shamed, like walking back
in the back of the video store,
you know, going through the curtain.
Dude, when I was 15 years old,
you could literally trade like three dirty magazines
for a bike.
I'm not even exaggerating.
Like kids, kids would give you their fucking bicycle.
How funny is that?
That was the whole thing.
The kid that had the magazine, you're like, oh dear.
That's how valuable all my candy.
And now we have access to all of it.
And tech kind of represents that.
Tech represents that because of its ease of access.
The fact that we can share so much.
So all of a sudden everybody has a voice,
including all the idiots out there.
And it amplifies some
of the ugly in humans, but it also has a power to amplify the good. It's also driven a
lot of these. Well, you use the analogy of cigarettes. The book actually gets into this
and they actually claim it to be worse because with something like cigarettes, alcohol,
you know, drugs,
you have these side effects.
Like someone who does a lot of drugs, like you can normally tell.
Like you look at them like, that guy does a lot of drugs, you know, or they smoke a lot
of cigarettes, right?
Or he's always drunk.
Like you, there's these side effects that the average person can see, which actually makes
it more difficult to be addicted to it and it be an issue because you actually kind of
have to conceal it and hide it.
Where with tech, it's become so normal that and accepted that everybody uses it and it's the norm
that these people that are really, really addicted to it have no idea.
Like, and in fact, the average person, like, think about this, and I was actually going to do,
I'm going to do a post on this on social media sometime this week,
because I thought this would be interesting to do with my followers, which is here's a test
If you had to guess how many times do you actually pick up your phone
Throughout the day what would that number be and then if you had to total up the total minutes and hours
That you are on your phone surfing the web. So that's not talking on it. That's not listening to music
That's literally Instagram Facebook web. So that's not talking on it, that's not listening to music, that's literally Instagram, Facebook, web browsing,
YouTube, that type of stuff.
How many minutes or hours do you think
that would total up in the day?
Mm-hmm, that's great.
I just did a solo episode and we talked about
five ways to increase happiness
and one of them was to ditch social media.
So we may have seen different studies,
but the study I saw came out in March of this
year, and the average person spends 116 minutes a day on social media. That's two hours, four
minutes shy of two hours a day. So that's 10 to 14 hours a week, and it came out to be over
five years of your life on social media. And that was YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
on social media, and that was YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
All the main areas. The last time I can think of where humans have all,
got went through a fundamental shift
where something that we desired so much became just super
plentiful in our face all the time is, was with food.
That's the last thing I can think of where,
for most of our human civilization
we're seeking out food and it's scarce. And look how that's messed us up. Right, right.
And now we're learned, but I think we're learning. You know, it's funny. I'm looking, I know
we work in fitness, right? We're in the fitness industry. And I know the statistics, right?
Obesity, rampant diabetes going through the roof, like people are getting sicker. But
there's some interesting signs that are starting to pop up. Like soda consumption has dropped for the past couple years,
for the first time in a long time, in decades.
People are starting to change their habits a little bit.
I think it just takes time, and in the grand scheme of things,
it's actually a short period of time, so BCD epidemic really didn't kick into gear
until about, I don't know, 60s to 70s.
So I think we may start to see some shifts,
but there's that period of learning
that we have to go through that takes a few generations.
And I'm hoping we don't go through that with technology,
because like food, the abundance of food
solves starvation, it's solved malnutrition,
it's solved a lot of these huge problems.
It just presented new ones that we've never encountered before.
Tech has solved a lot of problems.
It's the greatest decentralizer of power that man has ever seen, which is a fucking great
thing.
Any time power centralizes, you have problems.
But there's some side effects that we're seeing a little bit now, some unintended side
effects, and there's some side effects that we have no idea.
I was going to say, I think there's more that we don't have any idea like
Think for a second when I when I was reading the book I'm going God
Think about that if these kids are these young adults that are in their you know early 20s that
Don't even know how to disseminate the difference between a conversation on social media versus an in-person one
What are their kids gonna be like? And what's the communication and conversation that VR makes its way to make?
Yeah, when those kids today become parents,
like how are they gonna raise their children?
Right.
Here's a question I have for you guys.
So recently I was in Sweden for the Biohacker Summit
and one of the movements that I'm seeing in that community is an affinity towards implants chips
So I mean we're well aware of the rise of wearable
fitness trackers and things like that so
you know the next evolution of that may be implants and
To me that's a very very scary thing because I've always seen these sci-fi movies,
like Total Recall or Gatica
and the powers that be are controlling society
through these technological advances.
And I was watching those movies
and you're like, how does it get to that point?
Are people, however these people being oppressed in that way?
But with chips and with wearable technology,
we're opting into this, to that state.
And you talk about decentralizing power,
we may be opting into actually centralizing it
and giving the powers a control.
You could, I mean, I'll tell you what.
That's like a conspiracy theory.
It's actually a fear thing.
It is a very valid, very valid point.
Look, Facebook was a common humanum tinfoil hat.
If Facebook was a country,
it'd be the most populated country on earth.
And it would have the most by far detailed information
on every one of its citizens, period and of story,
far more than any spy agency could ever do.
Any communist regime could ever do with its citizens.
And it was all voluntary.
That's how gangster faced it.
And it was, but it was all voluntary. I's how gangster faced it. But it was all voluntary.
I mean, you're posting pictures,
what you like, what you don't like.
Wearables and then implants,
and then eventually hybrids,
and then eventually, probably not.
Being on organic, you know,
that is 100% gonna happen.
It is our evolution.
We've been doing it forever.
The airplane, the car, your shoes, your shirt,
the dishwasher, all these things are technology that did that.
I mean, we can't fly, we develop something that made us fly,
we get in it and it becomes a part of us,
and now we're flying through the air, your car does that.
The headphones that you have on your head right now,
amplify your ability to listen to sound in your head.
It's a 100% natural progression of mankind
to do that. Now, is it scary in the sense that it's increased the ability of one person
to influence or control us? Perhaps it could also be the opposite. If you look in the
past, when information was less available, so let's say during the Middle Ages,
when the church ran everything,
and they were the disseminators of information.
They controlled information.
You wanna learn something?
That's where you went.
You didn't know how to read, they'll read it for you.
It was a lot worse.
When we had access to information ourselves,
I mean, when books were first printed,
that was actually one of the things that the church was said against books. Oh, who's going to write these
books? They're going to control your mind. They're going to tell you what to do. And it's
not good.
Yeah, we can't have people thinking for themselves. That's right. So I think, I think it's
a valid concern, but it still has never played itself out that way. I think what's always
happened is every time we see an advancement advancement that changes what it means to be human
The current generation is scared
There'll always be a counterculture and then it'll always be about balance and self-control, right?
You even on the analogy you just gave of the car the headphones the airplane if you spent your whole life
Always in an airplane and you never touched the ground
You'd have you probably'd probably be very disconnected from society and what the world
was like and it would probably be unhealthy.
If you always walked around with headphones and you only heard sound amplified, then if
you ever tried to take them off and have a real conversation, it would affect the difference.
You're talking about implants, it's like, you like, how do you turn off access to you?
So like, yeah.
So versus like, we've always had the ability
to opt out of something.
Well, or can you?
Maybe your implant has on an off switch.
You know, you'd be like the James Bond character
thinking about what the knight is.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you what.
Maybe it's Bluetooth to your computer,
just like my fit that is is and I can turn it off
The turn the access on or off here's the bottom line. There's let's say there's an implant right now invented
You could buy it for you know 199 you put it on and now you have telescopic vision
You can see like a fucking telescope how many people would say no to that not very many at all
There's also there was you know
There's this this question posed in you know like a scientific philosophy
It's been around for a long time, but it's becoming more and more reality and that's how at what point do you do become more machine in human?
Is it when you're 50% machine 51% machine when your brain starts to get augmented?
What does it mean to be human? These are all questions that I think philosophers have been posing for ever
And I don't think we'll ever really have the answer and it definitely isn't gonna slow down. There's no way in hell Yeah, well to bring it all back full circle. I mean you you said the the printed book
Was a revolution of sorts at that time and allowed people to hear things that they weren't hearing from
Orthodoxy and podcasting is doing that now
Mm-hmm. You talk about people are we more weird now? hear things that they weren't hearing from orthodoxy, and podcasting is doing that now.
You talk about people, are we more weird now?
No, you just have more voices,
and more people are able to share what is in their head
or what's going on or what information needs to be.
We are seeing, if you really pay attention,
we are seeing, when I say the greatest
decentralizer of power,
I mean it.
We've already seen industries that were untouchable,
that ran shit be completely turned upside down.
Look at Uber and Uber and Airbnb.
Music, look at music.
Do you know that 30, 40 years ago,
music ran the world?
You go to third world countries
and you Michael Jackson and Madonna was.
It was one of our number one exports.
It still is, but the music industry could not stop it.
They had all the money and all the power in the world.
They could not, and they still cannot stop people
sharing music for free.
In fact, they had to join them rather than fight them
because they would have lost.
Movies now, and Hollywood is encountering that same.
These are hugely powerful industries,
probably two of the most powerful industries in the world.
You're seeing that with media now.
Look at news networks.
You know that a record number of Americans
do not trust mainstream media anymore,
and their numbers are dropping.
I think CNN just fired like three or four of their top
editors or whatever because of some story came out and everybody's saying fake news.
This and that's this war of media.
And don't think for a second that that war of media
isn't caused by the availability to just share information.
Anybody with the phone is a journalist, right?
All of a sudden, so,
well, they're getting all their leads from Twitter anyways, right?
Well, you, I think it's a good thing.
Have you watched like news today?
It was so crazy.
I was, we were somewhere we were traveling and news came on. I never watched news. And I was like, holy shit,
like half of the news was reporting on tweets. That's fucking crazy. You turn the new like just five
years ago, nobody was even tweeting. And like now the new half the news is centered around what's
trending on Twitter right now and
it's like whoa that's fucking and it makes sense why they're doing it because they got
to right because if they if they're not it's gonna sir it'll it'll surpass it like people
want to see people want to know what to say if you can't join them beat them yeah I mean
if you can't beat them join them sorry yeah the other one yeah exactly that's where people
are going they're going on Twitter They're going on social media.
You can get online and see, you don't have to wait for the USA
today to come out tomorrow to find out what's happening now.
Now, do you, Ryan, do you have, we talk a little bit
this on our show.
Do you have practices that you put in place to try and keep
that balance?
I'm assuming you're probably like our age.
So you were probably before and after it. Yeah, I, I, I, assuming you're probably like our age, so you were probably before and after it, you know, so yeah, I'm 33. I remember, you know, to your point about porn earlier, I remember in elementary school, we had a recycling bins outside the elementary school and, you know, one day a friend of mine and I, we took the newspapers or the magazines out from the classroom and we found dirty magazines in the recycling bin and we actually got inside,
like, you know, those, like, I mean,
it's like a 20-foot long thing.
The big green ones, yeah.
Like, we got inside there and we were like,
oh, I was like, you found gold.
Yeah, you're like, I mean, you're in like,
fourth, fifth grade, like, you'd never seen this stuff before.
Sheezy!
Whoa! Yeah.
So, I mean, I remember dial-up internet, you know,
somebody calls and you get kicked off the internet
and you're like, damn it, mom, I'm on the internet.
And then when instant messenger came out and, um, yes, well, you can see the same thing happening with, uh, with fitness,
the fitness industries now getting completely turned upside down.
We're seeing it in the small world of like bodybuilding and aesthetics.
Like a few years ago, wasn't that long ago, you go go to these huge fitness conventions, and the top competing bodybuilders
have these long lines, an hour, two hours long
to get a signature in a picture
with Ronnie Coleman or whatever.
Not anymore.
The people with the long lines now
are the Instagram stars, the social media stars.
And they're the,
Not even an autograph,
it's let me get a selfie with you
so I can post it on social media. Yes, that's right. And now it's not even an autograph, it's, let me get a selfie with you so I can post it on social media.
Yes, that's right.
And now it's the people who are kind of spreading the new information for fitness,
or people like us, people on podcasts, and people on social media.
And I think that's, actually, I think it's a good thing.
I've heard more good information, although there's still tons of crap information.
I've heard more good information today
It's already get an idea before yeah
But I wonder sometimes too is that because you see lots of many vans because you drive a minivan now
You know is it is it is it because this is the topics we talk about we I don't know
We connect with other like-minded individuals. We haven't so we all have these similar ideologies
It sounds like we see it all the time,
but really the same amount of minivans have been sold.
Maybe, but I picked up, when you pick up a magazine,
like Flex Magazine and there's an entire article
on intermittent fasting, like you know that there's an impact
that's being made right now.
Right. Bodybuilding.com.
They're pivoting.
Is writing articles on this kind of stuff.
They would have, they would never have touched fasting.
Fasting means you don't take protein powders.
Why the hell would they ever put on that?
Yeah, to hear a bodybuilding mag talk about not, you know, you might not have to eat protein
every three hours. I mean, that's a huge paradigm shift in that world. Very, very true.
Then when did you learn that one? Because you were in the strength, you know, industry,
right? You had a gym. You said, yeah, I started my gym in 2012 my degree is actually food science and human nutrition
I lost some of them and I I changed majors when I was in college. It would have been 2006 when I changed majors
And that was my major
so for me
I did more self-education
Outside of the classroom
Then I did you know in the classroom even though that is my you know classroom degree
So when you take a nutrition course or
The curriculum is sponsored paid for by big food
So I'm in my classroom and you know half of the curriculum is every science imaginable biochem and molecular biology and all this stuff and
You learn physiology you learn metabolism.
And then you go to your nutrition class and it's, hey, if somebody's diabetic, we're going
to reduce their total carbohydrate intake from 60% down to 50% and that's going to fix everything.
And I'm the guy in the back of the class saying, no, that doesn't work.
I'm the only male in my family who's not diabetic.
I've got personal experience with this.
I've read about it on my own.
I've educated myself.
We just took all these science classes last semester.
I know that's not how the body works.
You've got this dysfunction in carbohydrate metabolism.
Why are you still going to keep that as 50% of their intake?
For me, I have always asked questions.
I want to understand how systems work.
And, you know, men's health was like,
that was my intro into lifting weights, you know,
in high school, I saw that.
But I never wanted to be the guy that had to rely
on them telling me how to train.
So I've always sort of wanted to understand those systems.
And in college, like I said, I did all that self-education.
And, you know, I'm reading at the time,
TNation was, I read all that self-education and you know, I'm reading at the time TNation was I read every article on TNation between like
2004 and 2010 and elite fitness and
You know all these places that we could go back then before podcasting to get that information
And I actually started I've tried every version of intermittent fasting
I've just always gravitated towards that it works for me
So I actually started that really, really early on.
I remember, I think it was the TNT diet by Jeff Volet
way back in the day.
That was, and even the precursor to that
was the anabolic diet.
And I started that when I was still in college in 2006, 2007.
Well, it's great to be that up on mind it.
Till I'll do that.
I've always seen myself as an experiment.
Like I want to touch everything and experience it
and see, okay, does this work for me?
Well, you know, you're telling your story
and two things really pop up for me
that kind of really anger me about our Western medicine ways.
Before I go into them though,
I will say that Western medicine is a huge revolution
in health and if you had to pick one. Yeah, if you're in a trauma situation, there's no better place
to be.
No.
And it's brought in us incredible advancements.
And the scientific method is part of that.
But we talk about the strengths of Western medicine.
It's also become some of its weaknesses.
And what I mean by that is we become so specialized in particular study like nutrition or biology or chemistry
that we learn these topics very, very deep, but then we don't understand how they all communicate
with each other. So you lose that holistic ability. You know, when you learn nutrition, how much
of the nutrition did you learn, how much of it came from understanding human evolution and
learning how humans ate as we've all,
probably zero.
In the classroom, yes, you're correct, but on my own,
I mean, I remember like Lauren Corden was like the paleo guy
before paleo was a hashtag, you know,
before it was a popular thing.
And I, like I said, I always sort of gravitated towards that
because I understood what I learned in science class.
And I think, I don't know how many people
have been down that road and have nutrition degrees
where there's such a stark contrast
between what you learn in science versus physiology
versus nutrition, right?
So I mean, I'm not sure what you guys studied in school,
but I mean, you have like the core classes
that you have to take, and then there's like the stuff that's relevant to your major.
And, you know, in food science and human nutrition, we had, you know, you had to learn food labeling and food safety.
And, you know, then you have all these, like, nutrition.
And so we had a medical nutrition therapy that was a two semester course.
And you have these specific nutrition courses.
And it's those courses, it's that program
that's paid for by, you know, General Mills
and all that shit, craft.
And the stuff that you're taught in there
just doesn't match what you've learned in physiology
or biochemistry.
Have you seen, so obviously, I'm sure you saw
over social media, the whole coconut oil,
it's bad for you, and then there's that documentary, that people are messaging us on. What the hell, what the hell, I don't know if you saw it over social media, the whole coconut oil, is bad for you. And then there's that documentary,
that people are messaging us on.
What the hell?
What the hell, if I don't know if you saw that?
I actually, somebody actually texted me
that and asked me a question about it.
And I watched the trailer for it.
And, that's probably not enough.
I got enough.
Yeah, so, at least that's all I would have watched.
We formed ourselves to watch it.
So, when you guys watched that,
did you see that it's by the same people
who did Cal Spearsy?
Yeah.
And you know who the funding behind CalSpiracy was?
It's Leonardo DiCaprio.
And he is, I don't know if it's him or if it's everybody behind it, but they're pushing.
There's a vegetarian or vegan bias.
To both of those movies.
To both of those movies.
And when CalSpiracy came out, I actually wrote a really, really big post about it
and it was well received, but basically,
they're ignoring, they're just looking at factory farming
and saying that that's a problem.
Well, we all know that.
All, even meat eaters who want to eat grass fed
and high quality food, we're against factory farming.
And all of the arguments that they make
about how that's a broken system are completely valid.
But they ignore, because of that vegetarian bias,
they ignore the fact that there could be a solution.
There is a solution.
We can sustainably, even regeneratively farm,
feed the earth.
I mean, I've interviewed Joel Salton twice,
been to his farm, I visited it,
and I know he's just one of the people doing these things.
We can, we already have enough food on the planet to feed everybody.
We do, it's huge myth.
It's not a production problem, it's a distribution problem.
100%.
And the best way to, that's so far that we have found is open markets, let markets be open
and the signals become very accurate and things become very efficient and people get more
food. We have plenty of food. In fact, we produce way more than we need. Americans throw more food away
than some countries eat. Yeah, and there's, I forget the, I love John Oliver. I don't know if you guys
watch it tonight, but he did an episode on the amount of food waste just in the state of California alone.
It's ridiculous. I don't remember the number, but like you said, it's more than some countries.
Greater efficiency and distribution is what's important.
Market systems seem to be, or not seem, definitely are the best.
You have other centralized systems.
Soviet Union, for example, had thousands and thousands and thousands of acres of wheat that
would go rotten because they didn't have accurate market signals to know where to send
them where and how much they should cost and all that stuff.
But it is a distribution problem.
It is getting solved as societies become freer
with their markets.
You're finding that they're shifting from food scarcity
to overabundance and then they ran into Western problems
like obesity of course.
But what the health goes so much further
than how spiritually what the health literally
tries to make the case that, first of all,
all animal products are poison
that if you eat animal products, you're racist.
I'm not making that up, by the way, that was in there.
That it's horrible for everything from the environment
to causing cancer.
It is a propaganda piece by people who are vegans,
and people who are people need to understand about vegans,
which by the way, I have no issues with vegans and people, people need to understand about vegans, which by the way, I have nothing wrong,
I have no issues with vegans whatsoever.
And if you're a vegan, for moral reasons, I respect you.
But you also got to understand the moral reason
behind veganism with vegans,
and that is that they firmly believe
that killing animals is,
some many of them believe it's equivalent
to killing a human.
And so if you put yourself in their mindset, you're going to do everything you
possibly can include, including spread propaganda that may be false to get people
to stop killing animals.
And that's what they did.
It's really vegan propaganda.
It's really there.
You know, they're really trying hard to just by all means necessary reduce the amount
of meat that people eat.
And so it's completely false.
A lot of the stuff that they say is false.
It's really unfortunate that the bias takes that story where it takes it because a lot
of the information in there is really good information that people need to know.
That's the problem is you get these documentaries and they pluck the information.
It's like, yeah, there's some truth to that, you know, but it will spin you just put on
it. It's fucking, yeah, there's some truth to that, you know, but it will spin you just put on it. It's fucking backwards. Right.
So how do you guys help your listeners
disseminate, you know, what's what's valuable there and how do you see that conversation? It is it is a constant
check. Yeah, we constantly check ourselves. We've we when we first started Mind Pump
we set the precedence that we would be
as open, honest as possible,
and that we were, that if we made a mistake,
or if we gave advice that was wrong,
and we found out later that we would come out
and we would call ourselves out before anybody else could.
Actually, we pride ourselves in doing that.
What's the biggest thing that you've had to call yourselves out on?
So, pre-workout supplements.
We actually wrote a guide initially on how to make
your own pre workout supplement,
because at the time I looked at pre workout supplements
and I saw the ingredients and what they were supposed
to do and I'm like, this is overpriced
and you can buy all these, what's effective individually
and make your own pre workout and it's not gonna taste good
but who cares, you're saving money and it's,
and then when you dive, when we dive deeper,
we realize that pre workout supplement,
you take out the caffeine
and for the most part, you know, it's bullshit.
It doesn't do anything for just a stimulant, it's a flavorful stimulant drink and that's
why people like them.
And then there's a lot of detriment.
It causes a stress response in the body, which is not conducive to building muscle.
It causes down regulation of receptors in the brain.
And so you end up getting this tolerance and this almost addictive properties
of some of these things.
And of course they're loaded with all this coloring
and artificial flavor and all those stuff.
So we actually came out and like,
hey, don't take a pretty workout.
If you want a little steamer drink some coffee
before you work out and you're set,
completely different from some of our early episodes
where we talked about like the benefits of taking
argonine and you know, citrally
and all these other things that we said.
We've also had to do things like,
which is a little bit different than what you're talking about,
but we've had to openly discuss this on air.
When we, after we had DOM last year,
we all decided to go ketogenic for them.
Dom Diagostino?
Yeah.
And so we thought, okay, this would be cool.
And I was a major carbeter.
So I was like, I mean, when I compete,
I'm doing four, 600 grams of carbs every day.
And I was totally fine on that.
I've never been someone really, really overweight.
And I've always been able to control that,
keep myself in pretty lean condition
and eat a ton of carbohydrates.
I love carbohydrates.
Why would I ever want to get rid of carbohydrates?
I don't care about this.
I don't care about the health benefits.
I'm fine.
Why would I do that?
But I thought, well, that's not being very open-minded
and I would love to go through the process
and after talking to Dom and stuff,
I thought, you know what, let's do this.
Let's go through it, let's commit to it,
and then I can talk about it afterwards on the show.
Well, we all did, and just I had some,
all of us had just an amazing response
that we got a chance to share and talk about.
Well, after that, everybody started doing all of our followers,
everyone who was on our forum started doing the ketogenic diet.
And then really quick, it went from us never really even talking about
to like looking like it was the staple diet for the mind pump.
And you know, we'd start to get people in boxing us saying like,
oh, I'm just, I'm getting like the flu from in.
I feel awful.
There's like, well, stop doing it.
You know, it's not for you.
We never said it was for everybody.
We just, and so I remember having to come out and be like, listen,
I just want you guys to know that like just because we say there's,
here's the positive benefits that we have noticed.
And we're sharing this information from you and sharing the science
that supports what's going on.
It doesn't mean that it's for everybody to do it.
It's that, listen, there's some health benefits
to doing this.
And in fact, like we had Dr. McCullough
and it's not the official diet of my pump.
Yeah, it's not.
And in fact, I don't eat ketogenic salt.
It's like a modified version
that Justin doesn't eat that way at all.
But we do have to, we have to have these checks and balances when we share things because even if we, we don't attach ourselves to anything,
in fact, we pride ourselves on not being put in a box, we still, if we are positive about
something, it's people want to put you there.
Yeah, well, even terminology too. We've had to kind of check ourselves. Like, I remember
even with self-mile, facial release, which is like, most trainers are pretty familiar
with that term and like how we describe like foam rolling and all the benefits of that.
Just listen to people like Dr. Angelus Pena and talk about myel fascial release and what
it actually takes to release you.
We just had to come back and revisit that and explain what we've learned.
There's still benefit, but here's actually ways to apply it.
And this is where it may fit in your workout.
And so anyway, stuff like that, we always tend to revisit, especially if we get new information
that is counter to what we've been talking about.
We're open to that.
One of the best things you can do if you're an open minded individual you want to grow,
and I'm sure you do this as well, is try to find evidence for the contrary.
So if I believe that protein is really good for me
and I need to eat close to a gram,
propound a body weight to build muscle.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go
and search for the contrary.
I'm going to search for evidence of the contrary.
And sometimes you'll find that the evidence is bad as as poor and you're right all along and that's cool
But it's not as awesome is actually figuring out that you were wrong. That's fucking awesome
It's so great to learn and be like oh wait a minute
This is something that I was wrong and the more often that yeah the more often that happens the more likely you are to start questioning
Everything and learning more and being more open. Yeah, that's really good.
One of the first things that I questioned,
probably the first thing that I really questioned
in my fitness career,
and I've been doing,
I've been professionally in fitness now for 20 years.
I've been doing this a month,
I'm eating multiple meals a day.
No, actually, that was later on.
No, that was later on.
One of the first things that I visited was,
so my goal was always building muscle. I ran gyms, love was later on. One of the first things that I visited was, so my goal was always building muscle.
I ran gyms, love, frequency.
Yeah, I love training clients,
love managing health clubs,
but my personal goals was always build muscle.
I grew up very skinny, so I was insecure about my body,
so it was always about being muscular
and getting as muscles I possibly could.
And all the information that you read or read about,
especially at the time, in terms of training,
was body part split.
This is how bodybuilders train.
Today's chest, tomorrow's back,
the next day's shoulders, and so on.
And you do your 12 to 20 sets per body part.
And that's just the way you train if you want to build muscle.
And that's the way I always had trained.
And training any of the way was just not nearly as effective.
So it was sold in my head.
Well as I was when I owned my personal training studio and as I'm training clients every
once in a while in that common most clients just want overall health and fitness.
Every once in a while you get someone who's like I just want to build muscle and I had
a couple of people like that.
I just want to build muscle but I can only afford you know three days a week with you
or whatever.
And so a couple times I would put them on kind of these full body routines and the
results were just incredible. So I took my own training and I would read old bodybuilders routines
and I found that a lot of old time bodybuilders did these different splits where they would hit each
body part twice a week instead of once a week. And so I started playing with that. And I noticed that I needed to reduce the intensity sometimes to be able to do that,
but I got an incredible aesthetic shape as a result of that.
So I'm like, oh wow, this is the way I need to train from now on.
But then I went deeper.
I started questioning everything.
And I went deeper.
And I started looking at the strength training routines of strength athletes and bodybuilders,
pre steroids, pre protein powder pre-creating and
First off when you read about some of these these people some of these men
Their feats of strength were insane legendary
Some of them photographed legit like they weren't bullshit. These are they looked incredible fake weights
You look at pictures of these people and I mean just in bodybuilding look at what sand out looked like
Yeah, I mean he's the guy on the trophy if you're mr
Olympia, that's right and he was so strong and did some incredible things and looked incredible and you look at their routines
And then of them were body parts blitz not not a single one all of them trained
More frequently they all trained with kind of a full body approach in other words
They would do full body like three days a week or four days a week and
That kind of opened my mind a little bit and then I looked at strength athletes and I said okay
Let's let's look at the top exactly. Let's look at the top strength athletes. Let's look at Olympic
Lifters let's look at powerlifters all of them train one more frequency
So I switched my split routine and the train movements not body parts right?
So I trained I switched my my routine out and I stopped doing's not body parts. Right, so I trained, I switched my routine out
and I stopped doing a body parts split
and this was the beginning of how I created
the first maps program, which is the programs
that we sell on MindPump.
And so I switched on my routine
for a basic full body routine.
I got stronger within the first three workouts.
I started building muscle on a frame
that I had been working out for years
and thought I had hit my limit. And little by little, I started building muscle on a frame that I had been working out for years and thought I had hit my limit.
Little by little I started changing and modifying my routine.
Now it's more of this kind of what we call the maps methodology.
That was my first foray into questioning what I had always thought was the truth and
common knowledge.
Now I find that to build muscle for most people in an approach that's more of a full body
approach or an approach that
utilizes more frequency of training is far more effective and now we actually have science
to support that.
We actually see now that when you lift weights, you get this protein synthesis signal, which
is telling your body to repair and build, but it lasts for 48-72 hours.
It drops after that even if you're still sore.
And so it makes sense to work out your body again
I'll be it with less intensity, but to keep that signal loud. So you just said
at the beginning of that to look for science that proves the contrary. Yes.
So give me what you just said. How would you reconcile something like body by science?
Are you familiar with that? No, I'm not. Explain. I think it's Doug McGuff. Okay.
by science. Are you familiar with that?
No, I'm not.
Explain.
I think it's Doug McGuff.
But it's basically a theory where, and he's written a book and a lot of people adhere
to it, a lot of the people, and we were talking before we sat down and recorded about ARX
and minimum effective dose, which I'd love to get into with you guys.
But the premise of body by science is once or twice a week, maybe once every six or seven days,
and you do extremely high intensity, like a full body circuit, but it's only like four moves.
I think it's like a hit workout. Yeah, it's like, and I've never actually practiced it, so I don't know,
but I think it was like an overhead press, like a lap pull down, a squat and something else,
but and it's not, it's usually done like on machines, like a lap pull down or a leg press and you're going to
extreme muscle failure, you're going to like, it's like a 10 second negative, maybe an explosive
concentric, I forget the exact preparation.
So, and he's only training one time a week?
Once, it's minimum, it's like once or twice a week, you only do one set.
Well, I could definitely argue and debate that for the good, for overall health, for
overall health, but not for muscle bill, not for high purchase.
That's not a new, by the way, that's not a new concept.
Arthur Jones pioneered the old Nautilus.
Yeah, the concept that, you know, the signal that you really want to hit to, or at least
the way you send the muscle building signal is you hit momentary muscular failure.
And from that point, the muscle building signal has been sent and you want to rest and allow
that signal to do its work and do its job.
And that was the theory.
And there's some benefit to that, or at least there is some evidence to show that it can work
sometimes, but definitely not all the time and definitely not as effective as sending a more frequent
signal. Here's an example and listeners can test this out on themselves. If that's the truth,
if that's really how things work, go hit your legs really fucking hard on Monday. I mean, go beat
them up and go to failure on four exercises for your legs.
Get yourself really sore and then dedicate the next six days
to bed rest.
Yeah, lay on your bed.
Lay in bed, don't move.
Don't damage anything.
Let everything just rest and recover.
Go back and do that workout again and I'll guarantee you
that you'll be weaker.
I'll guarantee you that you lost muscle and that you
back your feet.
There's no way you're gaining strength off of that.
No, it's all about which signal is working.
And yes, an intense workout sends a loud signal, but when you add up a lot of small signals,
those can overpower that loud signal.
What happens when you train less frequently, like he's talking about, is he's relying heavily
on intensity.
And by the way, intensity doesn't just affect muscle.
If it was just muscle, we wouldn't have a problem.
It also affects your central nervous system. And if your central nervous system is fried,
and if it's taking time for your central nervous system to recover, your muscles don't
mean shit. I mean, I've used this analogy a million times. Your muscles are like speakers.
And they don't produce sound without a good amplifier. The amplifier is like your central
nervous system. You can have the best speakers in the world, but if you're seeing us as fucked,
well, you talk about the biggest paradigm shift for you.
That was for me.
They come in from the athletic world
where every single workout is a max out effort workout.
And intensity is the holy grail of all your pursuits.
And so for me to then step outside of that
and realize, I wasn't in athletics
and I wasn't under that
same protocol anymore, but I had to stay in shape and I had to try and keep my lifts consistent.
And so just to be motivated, I would go some days like a little less intensity and I'm
just working on movements and skills and then realizing how much that charged me going
into another intensified day and then applying three days of intensity
versus five, six days of intensity and how much better
my body performed and then we dive deeper and I met
Sal and we got into more of what he coined as the
trigger session concept where we're going through
those same movements but we're going out of a load of
moderate type intensity.
And it's just band worker body work.
Exactly.
And so now my body is fully recovered,
and I'm going through these same movements
in the blood flow and oxygen is helping me to recover.
So it was just, it's a totally different mindset
because when you're in the gym, you wanna kill it.
And that's the athletic mindset that you have.
And then once I can kind of step out of that
and like stop too rep short of like complete failure,
you know, how much more effective
and my lifts would go up, my strength went up,
my PRs went up, so.
Don't just take our word for it, by the way,
this has been studied.
So they've already done studies on this
and shown that if you do, you know,
21 sets in one workout versus seven sets for three workouts, the three workout
will build more muscle and be more effective.
Here's what you want to understand.
The three main variables that you manipulate with resistance training or frequency of training,
the intensity and the volume.
There's volume per workout and then total volume.
If you neglect one of those, you have to really push the other two.
If you neglect two of them, you have to really push the other two. If you neglect two of them, you have to really push one of them.
And pushing any one of those variables too hard will result in lower or worse results.
So if I took out intensity and I just did frequency and I worked out three times a day, I would
build less muscle as well.
What he's talking about, what you just referred to, this one super intense once
a week workout, is eliminating frequency, or at least negating the hell out of it. Volume
is going to be affected as well, total volume at least, because you're only doing one workout.
So you're relying super, super hard on one variable, which is intensity. And that means
it's easier to mess up. I mean, you have one workout a week to get it right. If you don't have a perfect day, if something happened,
if you think of your using machines,
do you know what I mean?
Think about how you can injure yourself,
if that's your mentality,
and you're not hitting those movements all throughout the week.
Speaking of machines and high intensity low frequency,
I would love to hear you guys thoughts on
sort of the minimum effect of dose movement
that you're seeing in people that may not be
strength athletes like we are.
Like the four of us are always going to lift.
Like we just, that's what we like to do.
Not everybody fits that.
So you see a lot of people talking now
about how they're getting the benefits of,
you know, all the health benefits of working out,
but only working out for an hour or a I have I have two thoughts on that like I see I see the positive side because
Right now the average the average American steps less than four to six thousand steps a day
That's not even walking for fucking 60 minutes, right?
So and we know that anything under seven increases mortality all calls mortality
Mm-hmm, so if you if you have a fitness tracker and you get to 10,000 steps a day So, and we know that anything under seven increases mortality, all calls mortality.
So if you have a fitness tracker
and you get to 10,000 steps a day,
that doesn't mean you're healthy.
It just means you're not at risk to die sooner.
There you go.
Right.
So I feel like because that we are going so far
so far backwards, so fast in the grand scheme
of moving and exercising that someone doing
even something that bear minimum, I feel like, fuck, you know, it's a step in the right direction at least.
Right. But I think there's so much more benefits to moving more frequently with less intensity than
doing something super intense one day.
Like Sal goes back to the central nervous system, but I mean, everything from blood flow and
oxygen and nutrients getting into the body and just being connected to your muscles.
I mean, one of the things that was mind blowing for me getting getting older now at 36
years old.
And when I was in my early 20s, even as a trainer,
I never did any mobility work.
I never did any corrective stuff.
Sure, I told my clients to do it some of that
because they were old and they complained of aches and pains,
but I never applied it.
I really never did until I had to.
And then it dawned on me like, holy shit,
what's really happening here?
And we really just kind of graze over it.
We talk about aches and pains
and things like that. It's like, oh, I've got a bad shoulder. I've got a bad knee. So I've got a
bad foot. Wait a second. Like, how did it get there? And why did it get there? And a lot of it is
a loss of connection. We lose connection to our own body. That's fucking nuts. And I was blown away
just this last year or two when I had Dr. Brink
who's a good friend of ours, movement specialist.
And I hadn't break me down and picked me apart
where it would he sees and he just,
he like ate me alive on my feet.
He's a sight, too.
You have no connection to your feet whatsoever.
How crazy is it that we lose that connection to our body,
to our ability to move?
And I mean, you only get one body. Like this is the vessel that takes you through everything
that you're gonna do.
Like how do we, how does that happen?
The brain develops through...
It's trying to be more patient.
Necessity, use and practice.
So you take a child, you never speak a word to them,
let them grow up, never talking.
Once they reach a certain age, you can teach them language,
but they'll never be able to speak normally.
As children, we put shoes on.
As children were taught to sit down,
were taught to do certain things.
A lot of these things aren't gonna,
we're not gonna get like super, super good,
but we can make improvements,
but a lot of the damage, unfortunately,
but we talk about feet, Adam's talking about feet,
like you can work on your feet all you want,
you ain't gonna have the connectivity to your feet
that a hunter gatherer maybe had
because we've been in shoes for a whole lives,
but I have a great analogy for you in regards to,
what you're talking about with this minimum effective dose.
First off, before I get into my analogy,
minimum effective dose changes all the time.
It's very individual.
So, because you'll adapt to that.
Yeah, if you're super inactive
and you're on the couch all day long, the minimum
effective dose to get your body to change in the positive is very little.
It's like a 20 minute walk every day. The minimum effective dose for me, who's
active pretty regularly, is a lot higher. So that changes all the time. So that's,
that's number one. But when we talk about the systems of adaptation and make no
mistake, getting stronger, burning body fat, improving performance and mobility are all systems of adaptation.
Your body is adapting to stressors.
Believe me, your body needs a reason to add calorie expensive muscle to its body.
It's not going to do it for no reason.
So, these are all adaptation signals.
Now if we look at other systems of adaptation of the body
They all have this similar way of working. Let's use your skin for example
Your skin adapts to the sun and the way it adapts to the sun to protect itself from the damage that the sun can
Can produce is it gets darker you get a tan
So if you take an individual and you want them to get a good tan to build a nice even tan
what's more effective? one So if you take an individual and you want them to get a good tan to build a nice even tan,
what's more effective? One super high intensity sunburn day, you know, every other week, or a little bit of exposure every single day. Which one's gonna give you? Turn into bacon.
I've never heard that particular analogy, but the one I've always used was, like,
so take Tiger Woods or any golfer, and you tell him, you can only hit 700 golf balls a week.
Are you gonna hit 700 on Monday, and then not come back until the next Monday or you going to hit 100 a day every single day?
Especially like from a skill standpoint because you never reach fatigue, you never reach
compromised muscle movement.
You're more focused on the integrity of that movement and that nervous system
connection than, you know, swing 699 is going to be awful.
What are you learning bad with performance?
Well, and now we, and then you can take it a step further and we bring it all the way
down to learning curve and from the brain side.
Like, think of learning a language.
If you only had 900, 700 hours to learn a language, would you do it over the course of? Yep. So, or one day, you know, or yeah.
I am so lucky to be able to have met a memory grand champion,
Matthias Ribbing.
And if you guys want like to go on your show,
I will connect you to him.
Please, he would be a fascinating person for you guys to have.
Awesome.
But when I was in Sweden, we had dinner one night,
and he was explaining to my wife and I how we could learn a language faster.
And he absolutely despises all of the technology that's available to us to learn a language now because he understands how the brain works.
It goes back to what we were talking about earlier. You understand a system and then you can apply that to whatever it is that you're trying to do. But our visual memory is so much stronger
than verbal or language memory.
And that goes back to just how we're wired.
It's the first thing we probably saw things
before we ever learned to talk, right?
Yeah.
And so he says you do look up any language you want to learn.
You look up the 1,000 or 2,000 most commonly used words
in that language.
And then for however many days it takes, you break it down into chunks of 50 and every single
night you attach an image to those words.
Oh shit.
And he can explain like the process of using images to remember things.
Last year at PaleoFX, he's Swedish.
So English is like his third or fourth language.
And he memorized the Austin newspaper in a non-native language in like five minutes and then came
on the podcast and was just reciting things back because he's attaching words to images.
So like we wanted to learn Spanish. So you just Google Thousand most common words in Spanish and then you know the first 50 or you know
They're it's all like L and Lose and but you
Yeah, you attached those so like okay biblioteca is is library you would imagine like a giant book and you can remember a book
Much more easily than you can remember the word, But if you do 50 words like that every single night,
in a week, you're at what, it was at 350 words.
So you hit, it takes you like three weeks to learn the first.
Wow.
That's even more fun.
But then it's like singing it right now.
But then you, once you learn the words,
it's much more easy to learn how to use them in context
and converse because you understand them. And you can watch, like, watch something in Spanish, Once you learn the words, it's much more easy to learn how to use them in context and
converse because you understand them and you can watch something in Spanish, watch
Narcos in Spanish and you can learn or have these conversations and you learn.
But that completely matches what you're saying about frequency, small doses of exposure.
You never get tired, you are staying on point, you're focused, it's better quality.
I'll tell you, because if you're looking,
of course, if you're trying to maximize muscle growth
or maximize performance, there's a way you train.
And if you're looking for longevity and just optimum health,
there's a, the principles are similar,
but it's different, right?
If you look at studies of the world's longest living people,
you know, they call them the, these areas blue zones, blue zones in the world.
And they've done these studies and there was one huge one done.
I think National Geographic funded it.
They found less things in common than they thought they would.
They thought they'd find some silver bullets, but they didn't.
But there were certain things that they did find in common.
And none of it was super high intensity exercise.
It was daily purposeful activity.
So it was the old man, he's 85 years old every day,
gets out, goes on his little boat,
rose out in the ocean and goes fishing,
or the woman who climbs up the mountain
to collect berries or to milk or goats,
or whatever, it was daily purposeful activity.
So going for a walk, literally, if you're just looking for a health and longevity,
it's a very easy thing to do is walk everywhere every single day.
That alone will make a huge difference.
Now, if you want to add a strength component to it, which I think is hugely underrated,
I do believe 100%.
I'll make this argument all day long.
That strength training is the answer to aging more than anything else.
It combats all of the things that happen with age from all the way down to a cellular That strength training is the answer to aging more than anything else.
It combats all the things that happen with age from all the way down to a cellular hormonal
level all the way up to, you know, just mobility and strength.
You know, do some strength training every day.
It doesn't have to be tons.
You could pick two or three exercises.
You can work your way up to higher intensity, but when you first start, just do the movements,
feel a little bit of burn, feel what's going on, get used to the movements, do a little bit every day,
and you'll get tremendous benefit from doing that.
Now if you want to take it a step further
and you want to be more advanced and build more muscle
and whatever, then there's a little bit of a different approach.
So when you said, and I completely agree with you,
but I'm just looking at the trends
and what I'm seeing happening in the world.
A lot of the people who are the biggest proponents
of the high intensity minimum workout time
are people who are chasing immortality,
anti-aging longevity.
And it doesn't match to the science,
which is fascinating to me,
because everything else they do is so grounded in science.
Well, what it does is it it appeals quite a bit
to the, to the mentality of someone who considers themselves
to be a biohacker or somebody who wants to learn
and optimize, right?
So if you look at the mentality, it's all based around
doing the minimum of their freeing their time up
for all these other things are incredible.
Yeah, you're hacking it, right?
You're hacking it.
So, oh, I only work out one hour a month or whatever.
So I've hacked that particular thing.
Well, I feel like the problem is it doesn't work.
I think that's the argument where I said that,
why I said there are two sides to it, right?
I feel like you could debate that if it's better
than no workout, and if I was only gonna do
the bare minimum of 20 minutes, what would it look like?
And that's probably what it would look like.
Super intense, 20 minutes.
I mean, if that was like all I got,
but I mean, you can't compare it to,
you know, three hours spread out over three.
It's just not even comparable,
but if you're somebody who doesn't even wanna exercise,
but you recognize, okay, there's health benefits to it.
I'm too busy doing all the other biohacks,
like sticking things in my ears, my nose,
and taking weird pills and shit like that,
that, okay, I don't have a lot of time for exercise.
What it's the least I have to do
to get some benefits from it.
Okay, this is the science supports doing this one,
but not over three days a week of one hour of walking
and doing other movements.
I just, I think that's the argument, right?
Is that where they're trying to come from?
Yeah, no, yeah, it just doesn't work that way.
From a muscle building perspective,
that signal dies off pretty quickly.
Central nervous system takes a little longer to heal.
If it's more than what you're currently doing,
you'll see some change, but you'll quickly, quickly halt.
I think the appeal of it,
just like when Arthur Jones came out with this,
one set to failure, a per body part type deal.
The appeal is, I don't have to work out that much.
And it sounds different, it sounds opposing.
And anytime, I mean, here's a little trick,
if you want to sell a lot of anything.
It's always less is more, right?
Yeah, if you want to sell a lot of anything,
just say the opposite of whatever you want,
what else is saying?
Five-minute ads.
Yeah, and you'll see all of a sudden people are like,
oh shit, that's the answer, you know?
Like, you know, so carbs are bad, you know?
Like I'm real popular because fat was bad for so long
and whatever.
Yeah, or people always want to hear what's the least, right?
Yeah, I think that's what's the fastest, what's the least I got to do to get there.
Nobody wants to hear.
That's what has the appeal.
Everybody's trying to avoid the labor intensive stuff or like, they look at that as like
arduous.
Like I'm already working really hard at my job.
Why don't I need to work at my body and improve my body?
Like that's just another job that I'm adding to the mix.
And, yeah, what you have to understand
when it comes to optimizing your life is not a time,
you don't wanna look at things and necessarily say
time spent is time wasted or whatever.
You wanna look at the return on that particular time.
So I'll give you an example.
I don't know why.
Yeah, I'll give you an example, I'll give you an example. Meditation.
Meditation for me was, it still is rather difficult to do regularly, but it was impossible
before, because in my mind, I'm sitting there for 30 minutes and I'm not doing anything.
When I could be reading, I could be working out, I could be working, I could be doing something.
Something else, I'm just sitting there.
And for what, what's the big deal?
If I want to go to bed tonight, I'll sleep and there, like, and for what, what's the big deal? If I wanna be, I'll go to bed tonight,
and I'll sleep and then I'll call me down type of deal.
But when I started to realize that that 30 minutes
of meditation translated into another hour or two
of productivity, and I don't mean that I spent
an hour to working more, just that when I did spend
an hour working, I was so much more effective,
then I started to say, wait a minute,
it's not 30 minutes, I'm actually trading 30 minutes for 60 minutes. Imagine if you could
do that all day long. Imagine if you, imagine with money, what if I could give, what if for
every dime you gave me, I gave you 15 cents back, you would give me all the dimes you had and
you would continue doing that, because you'd make, you know, you'd make way more than you
invest. Absolutely. Exercises like that.
Now at some point, there are diminishing returns
and that's the extremes.
I'm not talking about that, but you want to build muscle,
you want to burn body fat, you want to feel better,
you want to move better.
It doesn't take a shit ton of time.
You're looking at maybe a grand total of,
I don't know, four hours a week for the average person
to get really, really good results, maybe five a week total.
That's not much time at all, but that five hours,
once it starts to show up in the way you feel your body,
the hormonal changes, all these different things,
it's gonna turn into something like 10 or 15
or 20 hours of better productivity and quality of life.
I like this topic too, because this is a lot of what
inspired maps is, we do teach the minimal effective dose.
I mean, that's really maps, maps red, our foundational
program, maps in a ballic is literally a two to three day a week routine. That's it.
And it's a full body. You're only doing like three sets of an exercise. It's, you know,
it's not designed to kill you. Which is funny because that's what been like the most criticism
we've had because we get the other side of you know
The audience of all the people that want to live in the gym like I want to be there
Like you tell me I have to work out only twice you know or three times a week
Yeah, you know like we had a little bit of oh it's that's the hardest people to convince to trust the process or the ones
That are already addicted in our over over training right they're going in seven days a week hammering muscles like crazy
Beast mode all that stuff, right? They're going in seven days a week, hammering muscles like crazy, beast mode, all that stuff, right?
So they've fallen into the sexy side
of all the marketing and stuff, right?
If you wanna look like me,
you gotta train harder than me, beast mode.
Or as people, you know, coming from your audience,
they're gonna see that message and be like,
oh, I can't do that, I can't have like,
live in the gym for seven days a week,
you know, that's ridiculous.
They've got a full-time job of getting kids, you know's like, like, so I can understand where they're coming from,
like, once a week, oh yeah, cool. That's all I have to do. Yeah.
Yeah.
When you, when you set those wheels in motion and really work with your body,
the body changes and it responds and it doesn't feel like you're forcing it.
It really doesn't. It's, it's because your body wants to change.
It, you know, I've said this before on previous
podcast, if you're fighting your body, you're loose. At some point you'll lose. Eventually
your body's going to win. You're going to either get sick or hurt or something's going
to happen to you. So you're not going to win. Learn how to work with your body. And proper
resistance training does not look like for most people, for the vast majority of people,
does not look like hours and hours and hours in the gym
every single day.
I think the people that, in fact, the people that respond
and do well with that, I think do well in spite of that.
I don't think they're doing well because of that.
For most people, I mean, if you,
and it all goes down to programming,
I wanna be clear now, if you go into the gym
four hours a week and you're doing shit programming,
you're not gonna get much out of it. But if you've got good exercise programming,
you're doing the movements that matter. You know how to phase your workouts, so you're
training for different types of adaptation, and you're organizing them properly. And you're
doing the right, you know, all of it. The programming is good. You're going to get a huge
return on that time being spent. And your body's going to change and the comments that we get
all the time for people
who've been working out for years is,
I can't believe I'm building muscle like this,
I can't believe I'm getting stronger,
I can't believe I'm burning body fat.
And I asked them,
why do you mean you can't believe?
And they're like, well, it feels like I'm not really
doing a lot to do it.
I'm like, well, that's because you're doing the right thing.
It makes a huge difference.
So, yeah.
Well, we talk about how you should feel
when you walk out of the gym.
You should feel better than when you walked in.
Yeah, you shouldn't feel defeated.
That's not what, but that's the message again.
A lot of like, before we even started my bump,
a lot of when I started my social media, like,
I was that guy because I was a men's physique guy
and I'm in this competing world.
And it's most, everybody's trying to be a fucking martyr.
Like, it's about who suffers the most, who trains harder,
who starves harder, come train harder than me,
beast mode this, no days off, like it's crazy.
So this is interesting on the flight out here,
I actually watched a documentary called
The Rise of the Suffer Fests.
Have you seen this?
No, have you seen this?
No, I haven't watched it.
It's all about like obstacle course racing.
And as I was watching, it's really fascinating.
I mean, there's some really interesting questions posed.
And I made notes and one of the things
that I wrote down was, is this,
is obstacle course racing, well today,
what bodybuilding and physique stuff was,
because I competed in that too.
So when you say suffering, like I know,
like, you know, you had that drop set
on the haxquat and you just had to go somewhere else
in your mind that you gotta find something
that's gonna get you through that.
Do you think that the rise in obstacle course races
and all these weird things,
maybe people who are not into bodybuilding are finding that?
I'll tell you exactly what this is. Why do we want to that. I'll tell you exactly what this is.
Why do we want to suffer?
I'll tell you exactly what this is.
And we do talk about this on Mind Pump.
Is a lot of people have a very poor relationship
with exercise and they don't realize what they're doing
and a lot of the times.
And this is purely from experience.
This is from training thousands of people and you get these clients and they look at exercise as almost like a form of
punishment and they're punishing themselves. In fact, most my obstacle course racers, most my marathon
runners, most of them did not have a good relationship with exercise. They did it because it was the only
way that they could get in shape was to prepare for this torture. And I would argue that it's not just the relationship with
exercise, but at that point in their own evolution, it's a relationship with themselves as well. Absolutely.
Absolutely. They go hand in hand. Absolutely. They go hand in hand. Now, that all being said,
because that's 100% true, and it does tend to attract marathons to this before obstacle racing.
That's not everybody. It does 10 to attract the person that wants to beat themselves up, punish themselves,
or needs an external goal in order to motivate themselves to go to the gym.
And to be fair, I mean, I think you guys have talked about this, and I know for me,
I mean, we all were at that point in our lives at some point as well.
I mean, that's why I got into lifting and strength and physique and, you know, modeling.
And that's why you guys got into lifting as well. I mean, that's why I got into lifting and strength and physique and, you know, modeling. And that's why you guys got into lifting as well.
Well, and I was just going to say that there is another side to that. There is a very
cathartic effect that comes from exerting yourself, reaching your limits and realizing
that you're stronger and tougher and more resilient than you ever thought possible.
And in today's lifestyle, I don't see, first of all, I don't see obstacle course racing
declining in popularity.
I only see an increase in the results.
And the reason why I see it.
The numbers that he presented are their sag.
The reason why I think it's exploding and we'll continue to explode is because our lifestyle
is posh.
We're all a bunch of pussies.
We don't experience temperature changes, air conditioning and heating.
We don't experience lack of food.
We eat three meals every single day, sometimes two or one, nobody ever fasts for a day, and
if you do, it's like it's scary.
We don't feel pain.
Our bodies evolved, experiencing these stresses, and so we develop all these nervous disorders
like anxiety and
paranoia and depression because we need to challenge ourselves. This is why contact sports are so
popular. Why do we like watching this freaking? Here's the argument to that and the positive side to
that and we just literally came off a great conversation about stressing the body for adaptations
and how there's a way to do it and not do it.
I feel the same way with obstacle course racing
with marathon runners.
I think there's even competing.
I think there's a lot, I got a lot of positive things
health wise from actually competing.
I think stressing the body intermittently
is actually really good.
It's keeping your experience experienced the peak of that,
which, but you have to go through the process
of training leading up to that.
Whereas you could see somebody abusing
the obstacle course racing, body building,
cross fits, whatever they're competing in,
but they're doing it way too frequently.
They're not really giving their body a chance
to live, adapt, and go through the training
and the strengthening and leading up to a peak.
Or it's like what he said,
it's the relationship that they have with themselves
with it, so I remember,
because I love asking, well, why do you do this?
Like what drives you to do it?
Oh, I get, it's normally, I get in great shape,
and they have this connection to how they look,
or whatever, or maybe the competitive side
of winning with it, where, you know,
like if you're doing it for health,
there is a healthy way to do it.
And there's a healthy way I feel like
to incorporate it into your lifestyle,
but most people don't get into it.
They get it into it for either the addictive properties,
or they get into it because of it.
It makes them look a certain way,
like, or it's the only way that they can be in shape
as if they're training for.
Well, they associate that with being in shape.
What was the moment for you guys
where you made that transition?
Because I think we're all kind of on the same page
that we're all down to suffer and we need that.
We're too comfortable,
but you guys got into bodybuilding or strength sports
as kind of the gateway into your own like self-evolution. What was the point for you that it mattered
more what you did with those lessons outside the gym as opposed to just how much you squatted or
what you looked like with your shirt off? So I had a clear event, there was a single event that
happened to me that made this fundamental shift for me.
And then I also happened to be in an environment
that fostered that change.
Before I get in there, I do wanna say though,
with what we're talking about,
what these races and intensity-based type events,
we can't discount the psychological
and emotional benefits that come from those ones.
No, that's why I think that's what I meant by.
It's putting the body through a stress.
There's lots of problems.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I mean, one of the most life-changing events I've ever done
was I did seal fit the 20X challenge.
I mean, it was 12 days.
Yeah, not good for your body.
No, great for your psyche.
Right, I mean, I learned lessons that I still go back to.
Exactly.
And that's my point.
And that's why I asked what that moment is for you guys
that because I'm not saying that obstacle course raising
is bad.
I'm not saying that bodybuilding is bad.
I mean, it's just it's how these people are,
it's our own individual vessel that we're using for that.
Of course, I had a fundamental shift years ago.
So I've been into lifting weights since I was 13, driven
heavily by insecurity.
I was a skinny kid growing up and I wanted to build muscle.
But I'm also very passionate.
I get to be very obsessive.
I tend to be very obsessive with subjects that I get into.
And I do this with anything that I really get into.
I got really into the science of the body and building muscle and I learned everything I possibly could. And I abused this with anything that I really get into. I got really into the science of the body and building muscle.
And I learned everything I possibly could.
And I abused my body quite a bit.
I abused it with supplements, with workouts, with nutrition,
to try to build more and more muscle.
So I did this for a long time.
And right around the age, I'd say I was probably
there 29 or 30, my body retaliated in a very, very big way.
So I've always had a tendency towards gut issues,
even as a child.
I was a little more sensitive to food than most people,
but I was okay, I could eat things,
and it wasn't a problem.
Well, now, I had been for 15 or 17 years
of stuffing my face with the same kind of foods all the time
without paying attention to quality of food,
with taking supplements, day in and day out,
several times a day, protein powder, bars,
you know, exotic supplements, pro hormones,
when those were over the count, when they were legal,
like, just going crazy, that my body retaliated,
and I had severe gut issues to the point where I thought
I had maybe Crohn's disease or something,
like I lost 15 pounds in a very, very short period of time.
I, nothing I could eat would stay in me.
I got very sick, very weak.
It was very, very scary.
Got lots of tests done.
Nobody could figure out what was going on.
And at that time, when this was happening,
I had owned a wellness facility,
or personal training studio slash wellness facility.
In my facility, I had some workers in there
that were very holistic with their approaches.
And I love the fact that they were holistic.
They were different than me,
which meant we could offer different things to our clients.
I also respected and honored their methods.
I didn't use them myself because I'm a meathead, right?
I lift weights and I know you're telling me about,
you know, avoiding certain foods
and don't eat artificial sweeteners
and, you know, I need to meditate on this,
but whatever I'm just here to build muscle on care,
that's cool that you do that and that was my attitude.
Well, now I'm sick, now I'm really sick.
And I was very reluctant, but I finally took them aside
and said, okay, like, I need help.
I can't figure out what's going on.
And we went deep, we talked about my relationship to food,
we talked about, I did gut testing and I found I had all these different food intolerances
and I learned about leaky gut syndrome and it looked like I definitely had all the symptoms
of that and I had to completely eliminate certain foods out of my diet and I had to reexamine
my supplementation which was at this point I was addicted to taking supplements.
And through that process of being forced to examine these things, I kind of examined everything.
And that's when I started looking at my training.
That's when I started looking at, I was able to open my mind and figure out that eating small
meals throughout the day is bullshit.
There's no science supporting it.
In fact, eating less frequently may be better for us. The ridiculous amounts of protein that I was eating, there was no science supporting it. In fact, eating less frequently may be better for us. The ridiculous amounts of protein that I was eating, there was no science supporting
it. High protein works for building muscle, but not the ultra high amounts that I was eating.
My training changed, all these different things changed, and my body responded, and it
was after that that I got, I mean, aesthetically speaking, the best and most fit that I had ever
been, but it was completely a side effect.
It was no longer my focus, or at least it gradually
became less and less my focus.
I wasn't really caring so much about what I look like,
and yet I looked better than I ever did before.
And so that kind of changed my evolution.
But for me, it required a massive wake up call.
So it wasn't, it was gradual after that,
but it was definitely like a slap in the face.
And if I ignored that, I'm sure I don't know if I don't know where I'd be
right now.
Yeah, I kind of remember a moment. So for me, basically, like what happened, I was like
such an intensity-based person. And so all my workouts, like I had mentioned, like it was
all about killing the workout, going max intensity. And really it wasn't until I had mentioned, it was all about killing the workout, going max intensity, and really it was until I had kids
that like my first son was born that I just,
and thinking about this now, I didn't even really realize
that that was probably the moment where it changed
because my mentality would bleed through
into just my temperament.
And my temperament always having to, you know,
rant myself up and get prepared to, you know,
do really well in my workouts and move weight around.
Like I had to really like keep that sort of intensity
and carry that with me.
And that just was not, I was, I was, I had no more sleep,
you know, it's like I was irritated.
It was just not gonna benefit me anymore.
The second your child is born,
your purpose in life completely changes.
Completely changes.
My whole mindset towards my own health,
wellness, and well-being shifted.
And even like leading up to that, I didn't even realize,
but like I had like a tumor in my adrenal gland,
like I had to deal with like all these things that things that were coming up as a result of the way that I was
treating my body.
That was a total shift for me in the way now I have to approach just working out and
having it benefit me more than me really trying to always increase numbers
and get better performance and take on my workouts.
It's this perform mentality always.
And the irony is that you perform better.
Yeah, it's like perform better.
It was crazy.
Yeah, exactly.
I've had many paradigm shattering moments
in my fitness career.
If I were to pick the first big one,
I would probably have to say steroids.
In my early 20s, I think I was about 23 or 24
the first time that I did any steroids.
And before that, so I'd already been,
I was a trainer by 20.
So I'd already knew, I was a trainer by 20. So I'd already
knew my way around the gym and could get myself in pretty good shape. But I never, I always
wanted to be like cover the magazine shape. And I'd never seen that. And after being a trainer,
after training consistently in the gym for a long time, I was just certain that those guys were
all in steroids. And that's the difference between them and me
I work hard in the gym, you know, I'm consistent. I've been doing this for a long time. I know what I'm doing in here
These guys just must be on test off-steroen and I'm not and I got I took a huge stack because I didn't know what the fuck
I was doing some some dude advise you right? Yeah body boy. You know, the nice gentleman with the Fanny Pack.
Yes.
The guy's telling you never take advice on how much you should take from the guy who's
telling you.
He has a mullet and all that sounds so obvious, but to a fucking young 23 year old, of course,
none of those light bulbs went off.
I was just at that.
At that, he was four times my size and by looking at him, obviously knew something more than I knew.
It's a terrific vein.
Yeah, yeah, you know, onion skin.
Yeah, so he knew something that I didn't know
and he had it, right?
So I dabbled in and out of that for probably three years
and did enough damage to where I have to have
hormone replacement therapy is a 35 year old man now
if I wanna have a normal sex drive and
For and when I did it I
I got bigger I got polo did looking like I got but I didn't get I didn't look like the men's health cover and
That really was like a major moment for me that I didn't have this figured out
There was a lot more for me to learn. And that sent me searching, I think.
And think before that, I think there was actually a little cocky arrogance.
I mean, I'm a personal trainer, I know a lot of this and that.
And I thought that those guys were all on steroids.
I needed to take steroids to look like that.
I didn't, ended up doing more damage than anything else.
Never looked anything close to what any of those guys on a magazine looked like.
And then I went on my journey of really diving deeper and letting and getting my paradigm
shattered many more times down the road for sure.
Yeah, it's most kids in that particular scenario like yours Adam, they end up just going
heavier and heavier and higher and higher doses.
And it's terrible to watch.
Well, that that was even me.
I mean, that's the reason why I said it went on for three years
because it wasn't like I took my first cycle and I said,
like, oh, it doesn't work.
It was like, oh, I just need more.
Yeah, I need more of it.
Like, actually, the very first one,
I still remember this day because I was the skinny kid trying
to get big and the very first cycle I took,
it was such a large cycle that all it really did was speed
the fuck out of my metabolism, the super fast one I already had and I couldn't eat enough calories. I was burning so much that I just
got lean. I got ripped. I was super strong. So I was like this strong skinny kids. I was
all sudden pressing, you know, I went from pressing 70 pound dumbbells, depressing like
one 30 pound dumbbells, but weighing a buck 85, you know, and I couldn't, it just didn't
make sense to me like what's going on here?
So there was even an evolution of my steroid taking
because I was just like, oh,
or maybe it's not the right stuff.
Oh, I need to do this more.
So I went through this progression
of trying all these different things
until the light bulb finally went off that,
that's not the answer, you know?
And it's not, and I think this is something
I share a lot on the show because of my experience in that
Because I'm trying to save a lot of kids that were that were my age when they were thinking like in your early 20s
Before you do something like that because nothing sucked worse than being in my 30s and
Realizing that I actually have to have testosterone
So I have just because as a young kid you don't ever think like you're such a horny kid that you don't ever think that you're gonna
Like I know we I know every guy in this room can relate to being a 17 to 20 year old looking at a 40 year old who says he never has sex
And you're going like that'll never happen to me like I fuck it. It's all I want to do in fact it gets me in trouble
I all that's all I want to do in fact I could probably use less of it in my life and then it happens to you
And then and so a guy like me who abused testosterone
ends up, you know, on the other end of the spectrum
where, you know, it killed my sex drive.
And now that has become something that has put stresses
on relationships, like try being in a relationship
with a woman.
Now she thinks it has something to do with her, you know,
so talk about all the problems that you just don't foresee and think about that it had caused in my life.
So I speak really passionately about that to people in our audience that, you know, it's
steroids aren't what everybody thinks they are.
They think they're a lot more than what they're, there's genetics play a much bigger role.
Nutrition and programming is king over all things.
And really that is the kicker that takes the elite bodies to the next elite level.
Yeah, you're starting to see this. So the reason why this happened with fitness with a lot of us with most people,
I'd say you really get into it is because fitness is so humans in general are like result driven and you know aesthetic and what I can do with it.
And so once you when you go into working out with that mentality, then it's not, you end up making
decisions based on that and the decisions end up being typically the wrong ones.
You're actually starting to see, and I want to touch on the subject, you're actually
starting to see that happen with a lot of the brain hackers and who want to optimize
their learning and optimize their mental performance.
You're seeing the same stuff where these guys and girls
are pushing it to the point where they may be
not only getting diminishing returns,
but doing things that may be detrimental to themselves.
Well, they can't eat enough new tropics.
Yeah, a lot of this stuff is so new.
We don't know what is gonna happen
after 20 years of taking the Daphneau.
Right, or that's like.
I cannot believe that people, like know, like, you know,
the certain people out there in our world
who talk about like,
it's this great and utropic, like,
take the Daphneil.
Daphneil's got, long term,
he's got some serious side effects.
For some people, it's as documented,
we'll create facial twitches that never go away.
So you want to create some weird shit in your face forever.
Most people, I know, who've experimented with it
are only using it very infrequently and
they know and it's only like a short term thing.
They're not using it every single day, but I do hear reports of a lot of people taking
it every single day.
And it's just crazy.
And like anything, we push it to a limit and we end up with negative results and so
we'll see what happens in 10 years.
But you know, something that I realized,
we talk about this online pump all the time,
is if you want to optimize all performance,
nothing, your body will always perform its best.
And maybe not, it's the most extreme in one particular area.
But when I say performance, I'm talking about
broad spectrum, full performance,
the ability to think, the ability to relax,
the ability to connect and love, the ability to be strong, to have stamina, to all the things that we talk about
when we talk about total human performance or optimal performance or optimization, all
of that comes from optimal health.
Not being super extreme in one thing and also not pushing yourself to a point where obviously you you hurt yourself
You get sick. So being healthy
You'll blow yourself away with how well you think and how fast you think and how great your metabolism is responding
Yeah, because you're healthy. That's it. It'll blow you away
So if you seek out if you're looking if you're truly looking for total
or full spectrum performance on the whole body, mind,
spirit, what you need to do is focus on optimal health, total health and
longevity. And then you'll achieve those things. It's not about the cause,
the cosmetic or the extreme performance.
Well, one of the things people don't realize when they're chasing those
other attributes, if your body's not healthy, it's not going to devote
resources to laying down new muscle tissue.
If you're spending too much time in the sympathetic state, your body always thinks it's being chased by a saber-toothed tiger.
It's not going to devote resources to recovery.
You don't see all those performance aspects that we chase are just expressions of,
that's the epitome of how we express the qualities
that we possess. You know, you want to have a 12-foot broad jump at the NFL combine. Sure,
we can train for that, but you're not going to develop those qualities. You're not going
to be able to express that if you haven't, you know, created that foundation to begin with.
It is, and that's why when I hear people, we get lots of people asking us how they can
improve their performance of their brain, and I'll ask them about the nutrition and work
out.
And they'll be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, to optimize your brain if you're not sleeping well and you're not eating right and not exercising right,
you're not gonna reach nearly your full potential.
Well, we say the same thing about people that ask us
what's the best muscle-building supplement
or what's the fat burning is that,
well, let's look at your sleep,
let's look at your nutrition,
let's look at your programming.
Those are all much bigger rocks,
before you decide to take something else into your system
that doesn't even make sense.
Yep, absolutely.
So that's a lot about what mine talks about, which is also what's fucked us, you know,
because these are the companies that pay podcasts like us to actually advertise.
Let's be at least transparent.
So, I mean, that's the dub part.
Before you guys walked in, we were talking about owning gyms.
And why- Bit of a great topic about owning gyms. And why-
For the grid topic.
Yeah, right, and it's funny, right?
So you walk in here and ours looks kind of like a gym.
But really what we are, we're the old,
retired guy who bought a bar.
Yeah.
It's not making any money.
It's just for us, it's just for us and our friends
to come on by and work out.
It doesn't need it.
No one needs to do anything to pay for it.
So that's literally, and I remember telling myself too, because of being a guy who operated
a gym for 10 years of my career, and it was always responsible for anywhere between
a quarter of a million to a half a million dollars a month of revenue. I know the stress, the hard work, the amount of people, advertising, everything that comes
with it.
And the fact that revenue does not equal profit.
Right.
Exactly.
Even a huge number like that, that was the big number, but we needed to hit at least 200
of that to be even making money, really.
Yeah, you know, it's funny talking about that.
So I started my fitness career with 24-Fitness right around
a little bit after when they kind of melded
or purchased Ray Wilson's Family Fitness.
So they were 24-Analyce.
They bought Ray Wilson's Family Fitness
and became 24-A Fitness.
And so I get in there and I remember learning
the Ray Wilson fitness model
versus the 24 hour Nautilus model.
Now the 24 hour Nautilus gyms were out producing
in terms of total revenue
the Ray Wilson family fitness gyms.
They were just huge numbers, but profit wise,
the family fitness centers, the Ray Wilson family
fitness centers were extremely profitable.
And it was all in the how,
it was all in how they set up
their pay scale and how they managed the facilities.
And at the family fitness facilities,
you were given a budget.
Whatever you say from that budget was yours.
You kept it, you pay yourself.
24th fitness gave you goals and gave you staff.
And so the 24th fitness clubs were hitting these big numbers,
but the profit was, you know, they had a lot,
they would have certain amount of loss
from supplements or whatever,
shit gets walks out the door.
They would have staff and they're not being super productive.
Lots of overtime.
Lots of overtime, lots of it.
The Re Wilson family fitness guys were in their Belle de Belle,
very, very bare-bone staff, saving money,
and they were making more money as a result.
And it was really funny to learn that as young kid
walking in going, oh shit, like that makes perfect sense.
That had to have been such a valuable lesson
as a businessman and entrepreneur.
Oh, we talk about 24-finity,
we all came from 24-finity, ironically none of us really,
well Justin worked with me,
but Sal and I didn't know each other,
knew of each other but didn't know each other.
But I talk about 24-finity as being like,
it's a formula. Like bad parents. That's what I say. Yeah, so and by bad parents
There are bad parents for sure and what why I say bad bad bad bad bad parents
I love them and I will always have a lot of respect for them because they taught me many things
But by bad I mean like they're a bad thing they hit us around every once in a while
Well, they then they gave us an ice cream app
They're similar to the rest of the fitness
industry of, of, of praying on insecurities.
You know, we were taught to sell to people, have, based off their insecure.
Like I, I got, all of us in here, all have records and sales.
We were really good at what we did.
From that aspect, I don't think I was a very good trainer.
I was good at selling you training though.
You know, I knew how to poke at your insecurities
to get you to invest in lots of money on me,
and I got really fucking good at that.
And I justified it and was proud of myself of that
because I got trophies for it,
and I got paid a lot of money to do it.
And you're doing a good thing, right?
You're getting them to work out and all that stuff.
So freaking them into fitness.
It taught me a ton about business with fitness.
It was an incredible teacher from that aspect, but I also think that back to the bad parents analogy that, you
know, we do things completely opposite and different, and that's a lot of our messages
against that. I'll tell you what, working for 24th and
they were the first fitness company to hit a billion dollars in value, and they did a
lot of things right. And I had never, I took for granted
because it was where I started,
but they had statistics and tracking
on so many different variables and they taught managers.
Managers were crazy.
They taught managers and staff,
had to read them, had to turn different knobs
and squeeze out revenue out of gyms.
They also taught the sales process
that was very, very effective.
And it wasn't just what Adam was talking about.
There's actually a structure to it
that's really, really effective.
And it's actually the base of excellent communication.
24 fitness did such a good job of that.
And then going into seeing other fitness organizations
and other gyms and seeing how shitty they are,
and what it takes to really make a lot of money.
When people ask me,
hey man, I want to open a gym. What do you think is that a good idea? I'm like, you have no idea. What it to really make a lot of money, when people ask me, hey man, I want to open a gym,
what do you think is that a good idea?
I'm like, you have no idea.
What it takes to make a lot of money owning a gym.
It takes a lot, and you're probably not gonna do it.
So, I'll cut out for that.
Yeah, not a good idea.
Oh, I remember all the time,
like, so, you know, at all times,
I had anywhere between 15 to 25 trainers
that were underneath me that I'd be hiring
and mentoring and training and developing.
And, you know, it was always the guy or girl who was on the bottom 10 as far as performers,
revenue, our service, you know, so that they were the least busy, they weren't doing a lot of them
that would approach me after a year or so of training there and go, you know, this place isn't for me.
I think I need to start my own, I'm gonna do my own thing
and I just be like, oh man, you don't wanna do that.
Like, you're having a really tough time here.
You have no fucking idea how much it's easier for you right now.
When you walk out that door, it's gonna get tough.
But I'd always be supportive and yeah, whatever I'm always here
and I continue to mentor a lot of trainers after they moved on.
But rarely ever did you see a
trainer leave that unless
They were like a top performer. They got it. They figured the business model out
They were appreciative that they had these 2000 workouts a day
So they looked at it like holy shit. This is 2000 leads. I'm getting every day
They were talking to members. They were booking free appointments
So they were doing all the things they had to do
to build a very successful business.
So that translated into the real world when they had it,
but they all of them, and Justin can definitely talk about this
because he went through this and tribute like
what a difference that is, you know?
Oh yeah, like even like you're explaining that for me,
like I recognized all those things right away,
like oh my god, I'm getting all these leads,
like my schedule is completely full.
Like, I'm making, I'm, I kept out at the amount of money
in revenue that I could possibly squeeze out of this company.
And, you know, just for me, it was all about the carrot
in front of me.
And it was the upper management that, you know,
the promises and this and that.
And I just, I was so self-sufficient and, and good at what
I was doing, that I was pretty arrogant
to where I was like, I'm out of here, you know, I'm going to do my own business.
And then immediately being humbled because knowing that, but realizing how much money goes
into just marketing yourself and then getting yourself out there, how much time that takes
to rebuild an entire business around just yourself as a brand.
And then, so that actually deterred me
from wanting to open my gym.
I was like, no way in hell.
You know, I see all the staff, I see,
you know, all these moving parts and, you know,
people like, you know, like for the majority,
it's the low performers that are gonna stick around, right?
So, you know, having to deal with that and manage a staff
that's like, all your best people are gonna leave.
And you have to realize that.
It's so fascinating to hear both of you guys talk about,
I was on the opposite end of the spectrum
for both of those.
So I was the guy, when I left Gold's Gym,
I was the guy who probably spent the least time
on the training floor and in the facility.
I probably brought in the lowest amount of revenue that a full-time trainer could bring in.
And I looked at, instead of looking at the opportunity for leads that were coming in,
kind of as like shooting fish in a barrel, all I saw was the limitation of, okay, I'm in this city,
and I can only potentially train people
who are members at this facility.
So I saw it as a huge limiting factor,
and in my mind, it was,
if I'm gonna put in, and as a trainer there,
I think at the time I was making like 47% or something,
so it's less than half of, you know,
somebody's paying me 50 bucks an hour for a session, I'm making like 2350.
So I see all these numbers.
I'm like, I can reach more people.
I can put 100% of that towards me and not somebody else, which again,
is one of the lessons.
Once you start your own business, you learn the difference in revenue and profit.
But I thought completely differently.
And I wonder how many people who are out there
as trainers look at it one way or two.
I would say you're the exception.
A people who didn't succeed in it.
Well also, yeah, how did it all work out for you?
Oh, well yeah, I mean that was the thing is I knew,
but I've always been sort of that person
that you guys read Stephen Pressfield.
Oh God, you gotta just start reading Stephen Pressfield. Oh, God. You got to just start reading Stephen Pressfield.
Turning Pro, do the work, and I always say this one backwards.
It's the War of Art, not the Art of War.
Okay.
So his book is the War of Art.
But he talks about something called the Dead Zone, where like when you finish a project,
you throw yourself back into the next one and you put yourself, a lot of people are
such that they put themselves
in a position where it's sink or swim. Like it's literally get this shit done or not
be able to pay your rent and put food on the table. And for me, I have always found that
comfort is the enemy of motivation. And if I'm in a position where I can work the minimum
and bring in the minimum and be comfortable and have that lifestyle like I'll kind of do that and I think that's human nature
But the second I put myself in that situation of shit if I don't get more clients if I don't build this thing
If I don't turn this thing into something a I'm not gonna be able to eat
You know, I've got a girlfriend. We just moved in together at that point in time
I've got to be able to pay my half of the rent got to be able to get groceries
I like eating grass fed meat meat, which is more expensive
than the bullshit chicken that you can buy at Walmart.
And I'm gonna be really embarrassed
if this thing fails.
There's that whole ego side.
Like people now see you're doing this,
they know you're doing it.
So I think those are huge motivating factors.
And it turned out really well.
I mean, at the time this was 2012 when
I started it. So you see all these people, you know, it's zero to six figures or like six figures
is like that threshold. Like if it's like, if I can get there, now I know like, okay, I made it,
I didn't. So yeah, I mean, it was there within a year. And I mean, I guess I could say it worked out.
But I mean, I quickly found and I told you this before we sat down to record.
I mean, two years into that, just the sheer, everything that you dump into it,
you put all you have into building this thing.
And two years go by, two and a half years.
And it's just like, and I'm so burnt out.
I'm so done.
And I just didn't want to do that anymore.
And I mean, I couldn't get out fast enough.
It's like owning a bread, I think the gym failure rates
probably higher than the restaurant failure rate.
It's tough to scale.
It's really tough to scale because especially
depending on you being there.
Yeah, and you only have so many hours a day.
If you build it around you,
there are a lot of people who are succeeding,
you know, putting the people in place
and building a business.
So if it can't run without you, it's not a business.
It's just a hobby that makes money.
And a lot of people don't realize that when they're building their gyms.
Or any business for that.
Or any business, right?
But there are a lot of people who do realize it.
And I think it's, when people start a gym now, there's so many resources out there.
You can find, get the done for you systems and marketing and all this stuff. But I don't think there are enough people educating
young gym owners on how to make it a business that can run without you and to avoid that
burnout and to avoid creating something that eventually you hate and, you know, because
it drains you and takes everything.
You know, who's doing that for the CrossFit community is Barbell Shrugged and Mike Blutsson
those guys, I don't know if you know them.
Are they teaching people? I know that they're coming up with the systems for these boxes to
operate for for building it so that they don't necessarily have to be there all day.
Yeah, lead generation and I mean just the whole business side of it. I'll say I'll say this.
Let's change since I managed Big Box Gems. What I see now and it's real evident now, is that the big box gyms are not where
the growth is in the brick and mortar fitness industry. The growth is in the small box,
more of the niche type training type stuff. So like yoga studios, pilates studios, bar
classes, cross fits, those kind of stuff.
Bar classes have just exploded in orange theory. Yeah, so if you're a trainer, first off, it's very expensive, very difficult to compete
with Big Box Gym.
So you can do it, you can open a Big Box Gym.
A lot of moving parts can cost you a lot of money and you're going to compete with companies
that have been doing this for a long time who are probably going to kick your ass.
So my recommendation would be to go small, focus on something that's a little different, whether it be spin bikes or yoga or whatever
that appeals, it's a little bit different, it's got that feel to it and have a little
bit of a higher cost per person coming in. So it's a high service, high cost, lower volume
type model, and then systemize that and learn how to get that in-
Crossfits a pervete example of this.
There are pervete example of that growth
in orange theory, all of them.
Why I think that is, my theory on that
has a lot to do with our ability now with social networks
to create this community, a different type of community
that we couldn't do 15 years ago.
Like our community was literally within the gym,
was only in the gym and didn't extend.
Expand.
Yeah, right.
Beyond that, it was your lifting group
and then the other guys that you knew that.
Right, where now, like you could,
and you can see it too.
So I was a part of the first orange theories
that came to San Jose, my buddy owns a bunch of them and helped them start. And you can see, even the systems that they put in place right now
to connect to the members. And I mean, they put a lot of emphasis on the social media side of it
and the networking and the connecting to each other and the competitions and the commit creating
that community. Well, that's why Fitbit like like they are leading the way as far as wearables are concerned
because their entire focus was on their community.
And that was so big because now everybody's connecting, interacting with family members,
friends, all this stuff.
Like it really wasn't about, I mean, they have a quality product as far as like step
count and all that's concerned, but really they just, they focused like most of their attention.
How can we get them to connect and interact with each other,
whether it's leaderboards or whatever it is?
They made it really like their entire UI is focused on that.
And I think that's 100% the reason why they just went
a bit ahead of everybody.
That's a great point, because there are a lot of wearable
fitness trackers out there, and fit it is definitely at the top of that market.
I'll tell you what though, the book that I'm reading is that was the one thing where I'm
kind of, the verdict isn't out yet with me on it because they actually think that when
we were talking about addictive and being connected and things that could be, end up
being bafferous, they actually talked a lot about wearables
and saying that they could be the worst
that this whole because of the steps and the leaderboards
and the progression of people
like just trying to get more and more and more and more
and you're becoming so dependent on that.
So there's definitely a side that is arguing
the negative side.
I'm a huge, I actually make anybody
who's ever been coached by me in the last three years.
It's mandatory.
I make you get aware of it,
because I have been able to coach so much more precisely
when I can tell what's going on.
Well, I mean, you guys have known this
from the very second you started in fitness.
If somebody, best case scenario,
you train them three or four times a week,
you get them for four hours,
you have no idea what they're doing,
the other hundred and 60 some hours a week.
Now with wearables, you can see how they're sleeping,
and it's not just when they come in,
you ask them, how do you eat, how do you sleep?
Right, because we know that's fucking way off.
Right, now you can look at this
and you can tell exactly,
it is beautiful for coaching,
especially like virtual and on the remote coaching.
Yeah, I think anything that humans adopt strongly,
they do it because there's benefits,
but there's also always with anything
with that much power, there's potential.
You still have to know when to put your tools down.
We can use it, but then we also have to step outside of it
as well, and I think that we're still figuring out
what that looks like, and it could totally, it could feed into your obsession with hitting metrics and numbers.
And that's the same thing as me chasing a PR all the time.
And always trying to get to that within my workout.
It's not going to benefit my body necessarily.
There's a quote.
We recently had Chris Dancy on our podcast, the world's most connected man,
and he shared a quote, I forget who said it,
but we don't know how to measure what we value,
so we value what we measure.
Mm-hmm.
And that can be said for squatting.
You know, if you're a power lifter
and you're always chasing a squat or a deadlift number,
if you're an obstacle course racer
and you're always chasing a time or a distance,
if you're chasing a number of steps or calories or sleep measures.
I think that's in part the probably the fault of what's been so glorious about modern
mankind is that we discovered how to measure and test and, you know, live in this world
of measurement and testing.
And it's benefited us in great ways.
I mean, you know, the unduschwari revolution and agriculture revolution and the scientific method,
these all came from being able to do that. But we may have lost our ability to sit quietly
and, you know, self-examine or to come up with those ideas or to connect with things other than things.
And this may be why, at this particular time, now in history, you're seeing people who have money spend it on doing that.
You know, you know, many people I talked to you now that are super successful like executives who fly down to South America to do Ayahuasca ceremonies.
Right.
Because that helps them out.
And that was one of the things that was positive in the rise of the suffer fest documentary.
The guy's like, you know,
it is the epitome of elite privilege
to pay $150 to go run through the mud
and crawl under barbed wire
and do these obstacles outside.
I mean, really, like,
we're paying for shit that we used to do all the time.
Exactly, exactly. Hey man
I pay a gym membership to go lift heavy shit and not do anything with it. I'm not building anything
I'm just lifting heavy shit putting it down. Yeah, yeah, and I mean
It's just I don't know. I just like farm work
I tell people right now placing farm work if you want a place to invest in invest in all of the
businesses that are popping up
that are counter this, right?
So that all...
Floatings.
Your float takes.
That's the one up, your day spot.
That's actually what I was gonna bring up,
exactly, because you were saying how hard it is
to just sit and meditate and think and be...
150 years ago, it was nothing to just sit on the front porch
and just watch the world go by and think.
Now, literally, I was thinking that as you were saying it,
and that's what just slipped my mind,
was we pay to go sit in the float tank.
We're paying for sensory deprivation
because we're so...
We don't know how to do that.
And we're more stimulated now than we've ever been.
There's a study, so I love this one, this is crazy.
19, no, so in 2007, they did a study
that found that we consume 174 newspapers that are like
85 pages in length, worth of information every single day.
Well, and we produce six of those newspapers with what we text and email and say, that was
in 2007.
There wasn't Instagram back then.
Twitter was a baby, Facebook was maybe in colleges only.
So, I mean, we're talking probably
in order of magnitude higher now with what comes in.
And that's just like communication.
Yeah, over stimulation.
Yeah, and it's called excitotoxicity.
So, your nervous, your nerves, cells are just constantly
being bothered.
Over stimulated.
Yeah, and so we have a neurotransmitter GABA
that is responsible for, it's the inhibitory neurotransmitter
that counteracts that, serves as the brakes.
And that's why you're seeing so many people
turning to alcohol or some other altered state. Marijuana raises GABA, too. This is why you're seeing so many people turning to alcohol or some other altered
state.
Marijuana raises Gabat to.
This is why you're going to see though.
You're going to see I'm invest in that for sure.
I mean, you see people like Elliot Holtz getting into his starting his grounding camp business.
You're seeing the float tank starting to pop up.
Your day spas are packed like crazy now.
I mean, I'm shit, our best affiliate that we have
and if everything that's connected to us
is our brain FM.
Why?
Because it really fucking makes a huge difference
for people right now.
We're so tapped in and connected.
And it was a game changer for me was to get this silly little app
that I can listen to that helps me focus or meditate or sleep
because through the sounds.
And it just totally
relaxes me and it was a game changer. We hit those guys on our podcast. It's
probably been over a year ago. How are you connected with them?
Oh, we interviewed. We interviewed
out of Kingsbury. So Kyle Kingsbury, good friend of ours, XMMA fighter, kind of
connected us and we met with them and we tried their app out. Extremely, we were all very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, But I do, I like anything else. I try to be intermittent about anything. Like I don't ever like to become dependent on something.
But man, it would take a day where my business brains fly
and light crazy and I know all entrepreneurs,
I know can connect to this.
Like you lay in bed and your body may be tired
and you're telling yourself you gotta go to bed
because you gotta get up at five or four in the morning.
But your brain is telling those things over here.
Million things going and nothing has been, and I'm pro cannabis for that reason too,
because that's been the one thing that's kind of helped me settle that down.
The only thing that's ever surpassed that was brain FM, was being able to put those
headphones on, put it in sleep, put it in meditate, and then I'll do like a little breathing,
like some box breathing.
It'll put me right down.
It's amazing.
Game changer.
Because of the modern world, we're just gonna have to plan.
We're just gonna have to plan and figure these things out.
It doesn't happen every day now because that's the way we live.
It's only gonna happen if we schedule it,
unfortunately, in plan for it.
Same reason why you have to make time to exercise
is because if you don't, you don't fucking move, but 400 years ago, nobody, in plan for it. Same reason why you have to make time to exercise is because if you don't fucking move,
but 400 years ago, nobody needed to plan
the exercise, yeah, movement.
They exercised on accident, you know what I mean?
Life was exercised.
Everything, exactly.
So today, you need to schedule and plan these things.
And again, the return on investment is,
in my experience, it's incredible, it's incredible.
So you will be more productive anyway.
So for those of you listening who are freaking out,
like I don't have time to schedule a float tank
or I don't wanna, you know,
and you'll learn more efficiently.
You'll do better with it.
You're the person that needs it most.
Yeah, exactly.
And you'll do better as a result.
Man, what a pleasure, dude.
I spent a blast, thank you guys.
It was a great time having you down here man.
We're going to have to do this more often for sure.
Very cool.
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