Barbell Shrugged - New Years Motivation: Most Inspirational Moments on Barbell Shrugged

Episode Date: January 6, 2016

Most Inspirational Moments on Barbell Shrugged

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we put together a special collection for New Year's. A series of the most motivating, inspirational moments from show history. We know you're going to love it. Check it out. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. First up on the show, we have the master of self- master of self experimentation, Tim Ferriss. Tim was pretty awesome to be man, because he had a big influence on actually why we ever started the show.

Yeah, that's true. He had a big influence on pretty much how I designed pieces of my life and the business, but also was a huge influence on Chris being able to break away from his corporate gig on Wednesdays. Yeah, snuck out of my job on Wednesdays. Yeah, I snuck out of my job on Wednesday so I could free up time to get with my best friends and talk about training. So Tim, thank you. Check out

this segment. You're going to love it. Welcome to Barbell Struggle. I'm Mike Bledsoe standing here with Doug Larson and Chris Moore. CTP behind the camera. We have traveled up to Malibu to hang out with Mr. Tim Ferriss. Tim, welcome, man. It's a pleasure. Yeah, thanks for coming up. If you don't know who he is, go pick up his books,

4-Hour Workweek, 4-Hour Body, 4-Hour Chef, 4-Hour what's next? 4-Hour Nap. 4-Hour Nap. Once you split your day up in these 4- segments yeah there you go um tim is uh one of the things that fascinated about uh me about you is that uh you serve uh you're always doing self-experiments and tweaking from there and i don't think that's much different than what we've all done, but you've documented it, put it in books, and kind of shared with the world what works for you. Right.

And it's always been a compulsion of mine. I think that it started with wrestling in high school, and I was born premature, so my thermoregulation has always been off. And what that meant was I would overheat, and I could only really give it my all for the first period or so, maybe the second period. So I got very good at cutting weight, and towards the end of my high school career,

got to the point where I was cutting 20 to 30 pounds twice a week to compete, which is obscene and not very safe, particularly if you don't monitor certain things. So I became very familiar with sodium, potassium sparing, diuretics, and things of this type so that I could do it the more intelligent way and also rehydration because dehydration

is just one piece of it. So then how do you rehydrate intelligently? I love a lot harder in high school wrestling than MMA where you've got 24 hours. What do you have, two hours maybe sometimes? Or you might have to step right on the mat in which case, depending on the regulations you that would change your strategy for cutting weight and rehydrating so it could just be a handful of hours and then it's like all right well why is pedialyte better than gatorade and what are the reasons you have to delve into the

science and you have to you have to log for instance uh one of the things that i did which i think is is kind of representative of my style of experimentation. It's not my style. It's just, I think, a good competitive practice, is that I would practice cutting weight for practices so that I could see the performance impact. In other words, I wouldn't do my experiment on game day. And a lot of people mess this up. A lot of lifters do that.

You know what I mean? Lifters do it. MMA fighters do it. I know a ton of MMA fighters that only cut weight for their fights, and they don't practice it one single time. Yeah, or they take Nubane, or they take some type of stimulant right before the fight. They've never used it in training.

They end up overheating. I have athletes who are like, oh, should I take this supplement today? And it's like competition day. I'm like, have you ever taken it before? They're like, well, no. I'm like, no. I always turn it to the red line. Never take a red line before a meet and have a heart attack on the platform.

We saw that happen to a dude. Really? Yeah, just off-label, whatever the hell they put in there. Don't shove it down and then listen to Pantera at 11, get yourself all hot and bothered. For your opener, I think go out there and just pass out the opening or whatever on the platform. Bad policy.

Exactly. So I think that experimentation, and we were chatting about this a little bit earlier, is really, it's just understanding the scientific method and controlling your variables. And an experiment isn't a success or a failure. You're either confirming or disproving a hypothesis. And that's it.

And so my whole life, my whole writing career, all of my work with startups, all of it is really about testing finding sort of absurd outrageous hypotheses to test yeah so you're not just doing the fitness every aspect of your life yeah it's reflected in everything that i do and there's there's a really good book not mine called uh bad science written Bad Science, written by a doctor named Ben Goldacre in the UK. And I actually excerpted one or two, no, I excerpted one of his chapters for The 4-Hour Body and then condensed certain aspects of that book into yet another chapter. But it really goes through how media compels people to misinterpret science and how you can separate the noise and the nonsense, the fact from the fiction and so on. Outstanding book. I really recommend it to people

because you hear folks all the time say, X causes this. And when you read the articles, if you've read this book, Bad Science, you're like, there's no way they can prove that. Right. Absolutely no way whatsoever. And so very, very simple things like correlation versus causation. And I think what it helps you to do is learn how to not fool yourself. And one of my idols is Richard Feynman, who wrote a world-class physicist, won a Nobel Prize, also was part of the team, and he made the announcement, but who discovered the O-ring was the the fatal flaw in the Challenger

that has to blow a certain temperature and He said, you know, the most important thing is to not fool yourself and you're the easiest person to fool So if I need to live that code and yeah, yeah just getting good at testing your assumptions It's like okay if you think that like a B C are helping you, Pantera plus red line plus this. R. Keep the Pantera. Keep Pantera. Keep Pantera.

Yeah. I look more and more like Phil Anselmo every day. Five minutes alone always does the trick on deadlift day. You don't need to test it. It's just obvious. That's right. It's a given. It's a universal law.

But getting good at just improving your thinking. And so the precision of your thinking is tied very closely to experimentation. It's like, oh, you think that works? Like, let's throw it against the wall and see what sticks. Actually measure it. And I like that idea, obviously. I just latched on to, like, Elon Musk was in an interview talking about, how do you do all these things, Elon?

Shit, it's really impressive. He goes, so I always just, what would a physicist do? Go back to fundamental thinking. Drill down into the most fundamental thing you can't get past through and then reintroduce complexity and variables from there and always be going back to the foundation of source. Test everything, make sure this is true.

It's probably not. Somebody says you can't do something, that's probably not the way it is. With respect to something, it's something I don't think a lot of people consider is that if you take something like creatine for example, that's widely considered to be something that works. Whatever that means. It means a lot of different things. But it might not work for you, though.

If it works for most people, that still isn't a guarantee it's going to work for you. It might not work for you at all. There's a large variety of people that are non-responders to something like creatine. So you still have to test it for yourself, even if it's generally accepted to work. Or the other way around. So you have high responders, right? Yeah. And you'll look at a study, let's just say.

And I also think the degree, the magnitude of the change that you need depends a lot on your level of competition. So, for instance, you could look at beet juice, right, or beetroot juice and its effect on endurance. Michael Askew threw up on beet juice once. Yeah, you don't want to do like a beetroot cake stand or anything. Yeah, like a beetroot and raw egg smoothie, then you went and ran or something. Yeah, it sounds horrible. Like 104 degree heat on Fourth of July in the park doing a CrossFit WOD. Yeah, I yacked up raw eggs and beet juice.

Was that punishment for something? He thought it was a good idea, Tim. It was one of those things I woke up in the morning, I was out of a lot of typical ingredients. I was like, ah. So you throw up on the hill and go, ah, I totally tested. And I'm throwing up all this red gooey stuff, and people around me are like, is Mike dying?

It's like, no, it's just beet juice. Don't worry about it. Well, Tim will tell you why to try it again. Anyway, go ahead. Well, if you look at the studies for beetroot juice, a lot of them show a non-significant, non-statistically significant response. And just to give you an idea of how to think of this type of thing, it might be 10 elite athletes who are in this, it's an N of 10, and they look at the response, they're like, oh, it

was only a, I'm making this up, it was a 5% improvement, it's not statistically significant. Well, it's like, hold on a minute. Or a 2%. Let's make it even like a 2% improvement, non-significant. And the reason that it's non-significant is you need a combination of magnitude of change, and then you need the sample size right and you can have a statistically significant study with very few people that's a misinterpretation where people are like oh it's only 20 people that studies bullshit it's like no no it depends if it's a super strong their strength that's significant but it was the study was underpowered so you start to look at

it you're like well wait a second okay didn't have enough subjects it was underpowered they couldn't it to look at it and you're like, well, wait a second. Okay. Didn't have enough subjects. It was underpowered. They couldn't, they would have needed like a 30% improvement to be statistically significant in the conventional sense. Plus, you're looking at elite athletes.

Yeah. 5% is meaningful, but what would the effect be on an untrained athlete? Right? You look at creatine, for instance, great example.

It's like, you could load someone, take them through a phase of creatine. They could put on for the first time 10, 15 pounds of lean tissue, right? Yeah. A lot of it will be retention, you know, water retention. But they will get stronger.

And that's another thing we could talk about. But like sort of intermuscular physics get really interesting when you start blasting out the sarcoplasm, like adding fluid to the cell. But the point being, beetroot juice can work, and it can work really well. And you only realize, you can throw the baby out with the bathwater if you look at a lot of the reports of these studies, even from people who should know better. But to trade you a story for your vomiting up beet blood in front of people,

I remember I was doing an experiment with trans-resveratrol. So people who drink red wine because they think it's good for them, it might be, probably for the social relaxation benefit and not the life extension benefit, but people talk about resveratrol and it's an antioxidant for the audience it resveratrol is a component found in red wine that that helps to turn on as i understand it a set of genes called the sirtuin genes s-i-r-t-u-i-n and those have been implicated for life extension and there are different ways to turn those on and off and uh you but you'd have to drink like 48 cases of wine or something to really get like a implicated for life extension. And there are different ways to turn those on and off. But you'd have to drink like 48 cases of wine or something to really get like a clinically noticeable effect.

Test the time I'm fired up. Dose always matters. Yeah, but what's really interesting about resveratrol is that it can be... I found this video of this rat called Super Rat. And it was nicknamed Super Rat because they fed it massive quantities of resveratrol, and it doubled its endurance. So they had a control rat and super rat.

It might have been a mouse. And these scientists put up a split-screen video of this mouse getting exhausted, and this one just going and going and going and going and set it to the Superman music. And I thought to myself, well, the life extension is really hard to test because you don't know until you die it's very uh it's very hard of as an n of one to test that but i was like i could test the endurance so i consumed uh what would be considered 60 days worth of transvestferatrol so two huge bottles in because i looked at sort of the milligrams per, like a milligram of body weight that they use with the rats,

and I just replicated it. Yeah. And so I downed 60 days worth of these pills. This is a bold move, too. Yeah, before one workout. So I just sat there and housed all these pills before one workout. And what I didn't realize, and then I

got to the training facility. This was in South Africa, like a very sophisticated sports training center. Yeah, they've got a huge sports science program. Amazing. And what I didn't realize, and I found this out afterwards, is that one of the ingredients, one of the sort of inactive ingredients, was left off of the label. This happens a lot with supplements.

Oh, no. And the inactive ingredient, and I'm still not 100% clear on why they do this, but they cut it into a lot of supplements. The inactive ingredient, and I'm still not 100% clear on why they do this, but they cut it into a lot of products. It was, I think it was Imodin, and that's a laxative. Oh, boy. So, I was sitting down, like, getting

the ground rules for this running test that I was going to be doing, and I just started sweating profusely, like Like the, oh, sweats.ely. Like the O sweats. Yeah, like the fear sweats. Where you're just like, God, oh, this like rancid just sheen of sweat coming out of me. And this sports

doctor's like, are you okay? I'm like, I'm great. Did you tell him what you had done? No, no, no. I didn't tell him. I didn't want there to be any like observer bias or anything like that. I think there's a terrible evil within me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I was like, do you have a bathroom? I, like, cut him off mid-sentence. And just, like, I did one of these, like, you know, butt-pinching, like, waddles, like, waddle sprint down the hallway.

And did sort of a reverse broad jump, like, through the stall. And I was just, I was total. I did the running test. Needless to say, I wasn't impressing anyone. Sounds like those little baking soda studies, man. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But experimentation, I think that this applies to

people who are considering starting a business, people who are considering quitting a job. There are ways that you can experiment that are not necessarily binary. If you're thinking about trying to negotiate with your boss for a remote work agreement, you can gather data over, say, a Saturday, Sunday,

looking at the number of hours required to complete client projects or whatever your metrics are that you're measured on. And you can gather that and you can make a case for it, right? It's an experiment. And so I view my life oftentimes as just a series of two-week experiments. I find two weeks to be a good period of time for a lot of things. That technique works, by the way. That was in the four-hour work week.

I did that and go, hmm, I hate sitting here in this fucking cubicle. So one thing I started doing was tracking some of those things. This reminded me. And I presented a case. So yeah, I got the right to start working home. Not every other Wednesday at first and every week. And then slowly, you kind of earn the trust and you show the data and they let you do it. It's amazing how it works.

That's awesome. Yeah. This shit works. It does. It does work. And you can apply it certainly to all sorts of physical performance, whether that be fat loss, blood testing. A lot of folks get very infrequent blood tests. I go through periods where I'll get blood tests every four weeks or do urinalysis every day.

I'm between six weeks and four months for blood work right now. And you'll hear from – there are some amazing doctors. Some of my best friends are doctors, but there are also a lot of really bad doctors. And there's an expression, P equals MD, which is pass equals MD. And it's like, just like you have the top 10% in the class, you have the lower 10% who barely scrape by. And you'll hear oftentimes, like, oh, well, these following markers aren't going to change for, like, 90 days, 100 days, six months, like, come back in six months.

And I'll be like, it's just not true. Like, you can change blood markers really really quickly um or just some things in your blood might take longer but there's a lot of things that will happen really quick and some things take a longer period of time i mean if you're looking at say i think uh spermatogenesis has like a 60 plus day cycle maybe it's a 69 day oddly enough or 60 to 70 day uh cycle So if you're looking at changes like that, you have to take those into account. But if you're looking at LDL, HDL, the first thing to realize is that those can change very quickly. The second thing to realize is that... The gusts coming in off the coast of Malibu.

Yeah, it is very refreshing breeze. The second thing to realize is that those variables change all the time. So people who get an annual checkup and their doctor will say, oh, my God, this is too high. Well, probably they shouldn't say, oh, my God, but they'll say, this is too high. Jesus. This is out of range, right? This is too low, too high. We're going to prescribe these medications. And the fact of the matter is, before you, say, go on statins,

and I'm not a doctor, I don't play on the internet, so work with your professionals, but you should verify that. Do it a second time. There's no harm. Pay the extra money if you have to. So verify before you go on a regimen of statins or anything else. Because I've seen people, for instance, who get testosterone replacement therapy and their doctors have drawn blood

at different times of the day. Yeah. That's a big problem. Because you could... It's like stepping on the scale at different times of the day. Oh, yeah. Especially when you're dealing with something

that is released in the way that, say, testosterone is or a growth hormone, for instance, which you would have to measure through a proxy. but with, with testosterone, you could see a difference of, you know, easily a hundred points if you do it on a different day of the week and a different time of the day. Uh, so you do, let's say you do a testosterone test on a Monday after a hard weekend of drinking at, and you, and you test it at 10 o'clock when you usually wake up at 7, and then you compare that to a before test, which was a Wednesday at 7.30 in the morning

or 8 in the morning, oh my God, you're going to think your balls have fallen off. Yeah, we were talking with Kirk Parsley on an episode a couple weeks back, maybe a couple months back now, who I think you had connected with at some point, and he was saying if you you can sleep deprive somebody, even just for one day, you might be able to drop their test by like 30%.

Oh, yeah. It's an insane amount. It wasn't much sleep deprivation, too. It was like a couple hours off. Yeah. Yeah, it's easy. Same with cortisol. Like, you can mess with all that stuff.

So if you think you have a big problem based on one of those markers, verify the test. Replicate the result. I mean, that's what engineers do in tech. They try to replicate the bug. It's like, well, okay, cool, you're reporting a bug. If we can't replicate it, it's probably user error. Or it's not a problem.

It's some type of glitch that you misinterpreted. Anyway, I could go on and on, but I think about that kind of stuff all the time. With all your experimentation and the way I view you after reading some of your books is you're real big on productivity and efficiency. What are some routines you do in the morning for that productivity and efficiency? And which supplements do you find are good for that?

So let me address this. I'll address the supplements first. The supplements are supplements supplements they're supplemental so i don't take any supplements all the time i think that's asking for trouble and if you think there's no side effect it just means you don't you haven't identified the side effect right and so i i take no supplements all the time i cycle on and off of everything because I think that the body is very sophisticated with negative feedback loops. I am currently taking a few things. When I wake up, I'm taking DHEA.

It's a very, very small amount, 10 to 30 milligrams. I'm taking – I will probably warn people in the crowd about that one, too. That's banned by water and USADA, so if you're competing in a sport that's being tested, just stay away from that one.

It's over the counter, but it doesn't mean that you can use it in competition. That's right. He's not taking anything illegal. The other thing I would say is just, this is context, is that I'm coming out of a very difficult period of about six months where I had severe

Lyme disease symptoms. Oh, man. And so I had deterioration of the joints. I had extreme chronic fatigue. I started having dementia-like symptoms where I was losing

my short-term memory. I had trouble recalling names of close friends. It's terrifying. My knees were so swollen that I had trouble getting up and walking in the morning. So my regimen is not necessarily your regimen, right? But DHEA, I'm taking calcium deglucarate or glucurate. I read these things instead of pronounce them, which is useful for many different things. I'll let you guys read up on it.

But pre and probiotics. So probiotics get a lot of fanfare. You don't hear as much about prebiotics. And I'll be talking a lot more about this at some point. But if you don't have, I think it's helpful to think of your gut, and there are many different microbiomes, but if we're talking about the gut biome, you can think of it as a rainforest and if this if the topsoil

has been depleted it doesn't matter if you're taking these amazing plants ie probiotics yeah and throwing them down your throat because they won't take root no substrate there right it's important to create an environment in which beneficial bacteria can grow and to to accomplish that, you can consume things like resistant starches, like baobab root is quite interesting. You can consume inulin, for instance, different types of fiber. Oligofructose? Yeah, that's oligofructose. Oligofructosaccharides. Yeah. And I think that is going to get a lot of fanfare and get a lot of attention in the next few years.

We should start marketing our product now. Yeah. He's like, no, no, no. I already have mine. We're not going to catch up with him. And part of my theory about Lyme disease and why it's so poorly understood is that people, there are many people who have been diagnosed or diagnosed themselves having chronic Lyme disease. If you talk to most infectious disease specialists or MDs in that area, they will dispute the existence of chronic Lyme disease. They will say, no,

there's no proof that that exists. And then that will be countered by thousands or tens of thousands of people who say, what about all these symptoms? It doesn't make any sense that it doesn't exist. And my pet theory currently is that chronic Lyme is actually chronic depletion of gut flora, among other things. So when people are diagnosed, oftentimes months of doxycycline or other broadband antibiotics to address Lyme, they fix the Lyme, let's just assume, for the time being, but they never fix their gut. And so they get depressed. What happens, right?

If you're producing if the gut is is assisting in production of neurotransmitters among other things they call right a lot of people call it the second brain you get depressed you get fatigued you have digestion problems you can have joint problems sleep problems sleep problems the symptoms overlap with lyme disease which makes it a fucking disaster from a standpoint of fixing. So in any case, my morning routine, just to talk about, I focus on effectiveness more than efficiency. And I think it's important. I think that our thinking is only as clear as the labels we use

and the words we use. For me, I think about it a lot also. Writing helps. But effectiveness is doing the right things. Efficiency is doing things well. So it's possible to be very efficient but be efficient at doing the right things. Efficiency is doing things well. So it's possible to be very efficient, but be efficient at doing the wrong thing. So I try to, in the mornings,

my routines are usually focused on a number of things, including clarifying and confirming what those few things are that matter. So I will wake up, I have tea every morning, but I'll usually wake up and I'll have, I'll do 15, 20 minutes of transnatal meditation. Then I will start my tea. I'll boil the water or actually it's 185 degrees. I get very specific. You have to be specific. Yeah. I get it to 185 degrees. Don't boil the water and toss on your tea and coffee, you animals. Savages. Savages.

What are you doing to the coffee? So I have a Cuisinart kettle that allows you to pick the temperature. Oh, nice. And to 185 degrees, then I usually have a combination that just like you guys

saw earlier, I have this stuff. So it's Puerh tea, which is an aged black tea, typically from China, combined with turmeric and ginger, and then I like to add in some type of

green tea, oftentimes a sencha. And if I'm feeling sick, or if I feel like I'm coming down with something, I'll add garlic to that. So minced garlic, usually. But otherwise, that is sort of my morning tea. And then once I have my tea, I will sit down and I will do one of two things. I'll either use something called the five minute journal, which was actually created by some, some readers who made it their, you know, their muse, their business after the four hour work week. But it's, it's five minutes, first thing in the morning, five minutes right before you go to bed. Right. And it's really, really helpful for, I think, priming your mind for the day. And it does that through three things you're grateful for.

Forcing you to re-identify your priorities. And then having basically a performance review before you go to bed. And either that or morning pages. So I will freehand journal. And the intention of that is not to be a good writer. And I think it's particularly valuable for people who never write or don't write, actually. Because it allows you to take the self-defeating talk or anxieties or worries that you have, your preoccupations, and trap them in the form of words on a page so that you can get on with your fucking day

Yeah, and and not have them ricocheting around in your head like a stray bullet so Usually one of those two things I like to so let's just say hypothetically Been trying to wake up earlier. I've always been a night owl, but let's just say I'm waking up earlier So that gets us to like that gets us but let's just say I'm waking up earlier. Struggle with the same thing. So that gets us to, let's just say, 8.30, 9 o'clock. At that point, I like to do some basic mobility work, focusing currently on sort of ratcheting up to an overhead squatting movement. Yeah.

And because I've had a lot of challenges with my thoracic mobility, and I've had shoulder surgery. So just this entire area has been frozen for a decade. It's pretty common for wrestlers, too, to have that. Yeah. I mean, it's like I have little Tyrannosaurus arms, and I also write. It's a conflagration of problems.

You wrestle and write. You're screwed. And then from after that 20 to 30 minute exercise block, I will like to focus on some type of content, whether it be writing, audio, interviewing, etc. And then lunch and then after lunch is where I do the grunt work. So if there's any grunt work I need to do, and by grunt work, I mean stuff that doesn't require me to really be walking a mental tightrope and all cylinders on. So interviewing, I sometimes, interviewing for research, I would put in that bucket, right? Not for broadcast, but for research. And on and on and on. So that's sort of the first three to four hour block of most of my days, at least in the last six months. So you try to be by yourself to be the most effective? You find like being alone with no distractions

is the way that you're most effective? For me, yes. So, and I'm actually, part of the reason I'm down here in California, it's such a goddamn huge state. Yeah, I feel like sometimes you're like Northern California and Southern California. It's a very contentious relationship.

I think they're trying to divide the state right now. It's very sort of like Texan in a way. It's like if you had a wimpy Texas, it would be Northern California. Didgeridoo playing, pot smoking. San Francisco's are like, we're so different, which is fine.

How the hell did I get over there? So being alone, I find one of my favorite ways to procrastinate is to talk and communicate with other people. So I need to remove the option to do that. And I do that by trying to isolate myself. I think that's another reason that I ended up being a night owl is that I found I was most productive very late at night where I couldn't procrastinate by IMing my friends. I wasn't getting phone calls. So from 10 PM to like 5 AM, I still, if I'm under the gun and I need to get a lot of high quality, hopefully high quality writing done,

I'll still revert to that. Well, there's some magic that happens like at 2 AM you've, you're in the zone, you're riding and the house is flat, kids and wife and anybody else in the house are asleep. It's an addicting thing. It's a magic place. And so when I look at the top, in my mind, like high-performing writers, and by high-performing writers, I mean people who kick out high-quality writing on a consistent basis, among my friends, without exception, that's not true.

There are a few journalists who have just been like had a gun against their head for deadlines every day at X point in time. Those guys are machines. They just – and women. They're just absolute machines. I can't identify with them. They're kind of terminators. But among people who have not had that journalistic trench warfare experience, they either go to bed very, very late like I did for a long time so they have

that quiet time when other people are asleep so they either work after everyone else is asleep or they wake up

before everyone is woken up and they fall into those two groups so my it's either the night owl camp or the people

who wake up at like 4 or 5 in the morning write for 2-3 hours and then contend with the family friends

business etc you just explained a lot of things that that seemed like people who are night owls, they're just probably trying to get away from busy people or the busy activities of the day. I feel like there's a fight between the night owls and the morning people all the time. They both think they're right and they don't like each other. I would say practically for people who want to be a writer, I write more now, but you don't get paid to write for a long, long time. You don't get paid to write.

You hustle during the day and because you want to create an opportunity for yourself, guess what? Writers write. If you want to be one, you've got to put in a lot of fucking writing. You will stay up or you will get up. If you don't want to do that, then that's probably not going to happen for you. You can't wish it to happen. You've got to sit down and do this for a long time. You've got to sit down and do this for a long time.

You've got to do the writing time. And I actually do my best drafting and editing by hand. So I do use a computer. Obviously, it would be hard to get by without it. But I always do my first drafting and my note-taking in the field by hand. And then I'll identify the pieces that I want to put in order for a draft. Sometimes I'll then draft on the computer, but I will always print out and edit by hand.

And in fact, you have a hundred pages of a friend's, one of my very close friends books. I'll give him a shout out. Neil Strauss, who's, you know, seven time New York Times bestselling author.

So his new book is going to be, his new book is going to be amazing. I can't say anything about it right now. I'm like, can I sneak in there while you're doing this and take a look at the cover? But I printed it out and I'll be editing, reading and editing today just to help because he's been super helpful with a lot of my books as well. Yeah. I met Neil in Sedona a few months ago maybe.

He was super generous. Gave me a lot of awesome advice and just was more than happy to share. Neil's really tactical and a very, very good writer. Really brilliant A-list interviewer as well, just from so much time at the New York Times and Rolling Stone and so forth. But yeah, just to bring it back to that point of sort of being alone, it's more that I'd say the writers who really hit home runs consistently, I'm not putting myself in that category, but just observing it,

it's like between 10 p.m. and sort of 7 a.m. And whether they're at the front end or the tail end, they find time when the rest of the world is asleep. And to underscore, I think think a principle behind that uh i think self-discipline is i think discipline and self-control are very overrated so or there's an expensive the the they're expensive they're cognitively expensive so you can have decision fatigue right it's like okay you could leave uh like all right left to my own devices like i like Triscuits sure you know I like ginger cookies love them you know

I could leave them just like laying around my house and rely on self control but no that's that's a fool's errand because I'll either tax myself cognitively or I'll break and so the I think the putting systems in place that prevent your lesser behaviors is more effective and more efficient in terms of energy preservation than just trying to get more discipline, more discipline.

And so by forcing myself to write in such a way that I am isolated, that I have a protected three to four hour block of time. I don't have to develop the self-control necessarily to stay off of Twitter or Facebook or not respond to my friends' texts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, because I'm simply choosing a setting and a system that absolves me of that responsibility. So, you know, the AT&T had a slogan way back in the day, which was the system is the solution. And I think that that's a really, actually a great slogan for life. It's like if you're finding things taxing and too hard, think about systematizing and process and not just like trying harder. Once you've identified those systems and you know that for input X, you're going to get output Y, then it's like, great. I have no problem with hard work.

Once you've built a machine that allows you to get the most leverage, that's great. But otherwise, it's just like your Sisyphus. You're pushing a boulder up a hill that's just going to keep rolling down and knocking your ass down to the bottom. You won't win that. If you don't want to cheat on your wife, you shouldn't hang out at the Playboy Mansion five days a week.

There's going to be temptation there that eventually you're going to crack on. That was only once. That was only once. In fairness. Let's take a break real quick. All right, guys. Up next, we have dr fred bishi he was suggested to us by joe de sena uh to interview i saw the guy i was like this old dude and but uh don't judge a book by its cover because once i got talking to him i was like this guy is amazing it's hard not to be motivated by a guy who's in his 80s

and to this day still lifts weights heavy and runs hill sprints and is still fired up to train. How could you not be motivated by that? Check it out. We are in beautiful Vermont

hanging out on Judd DeSantis' place. I don't even know what we're doing up here anymore. We're just having a good time. We're hanging out here with Dr. Fred Bishi. That's it. Yeah, I got the name right.

I'm pretty excited about that. We were hanging around, and Joe said, we need to hang out with you a little bit, and we started learning a little bit about your history. We're like, this guy is amazing. He didn't say it like that. He said, you have to meet this man. That's what he said.

What did I say? He said, you have to. He said, come on up. He said, you have to meet this man. That's what he said. What did I say? He said, you have to. He said, come on up. He said, do it. Just trust me. Do it. I think he was talking to Doug, so I don't know exactly what happened. I'm just making up stories at this point.

So we've got to talk to him. Yeah. You've been in the game for a long time. You have quite a history on your note. You said he has quite a history. You have more history than anyone I know in the strength and conditioning world. Well, you know, I've been at this. I started working out the weights when I was about 14 years old,

and I'll be 85 years old in 10 days. We were feeling like we had been in the game for a while. Yeah, I've been training for like 17 years. You're like, it's been like 60-something years. Yeah, I've been like 22. How long have you been in the game, Doug? 16. Yeah, so we feel 17. Well, I'm a littlesomething years. Yeah, I've been like 22. How long have you been in the game, Doug? 16. Yeah, so we feel 17.

Well, I'm a little different. You know, I'm a little different. What happened, I was really excited about working out with the waist, and I trained very, very hard. I was explaining to him. I devised a way of training I called the overload system. And for the days that I lifted weights, it made me very, very strong.

So I used a special power rack that I built. And we actually trained in an old barn. We dug a hole in the floor. So I used to stand in the hole and do deadlifts out of the hole. And we used to do partial deadlifts with 600 to 700 pounds. And when I was 17 years old, I was 200 pounds already, so training very, very hard. Then we had a power rack.

We'd hold things over our head, you know, just take it that much out of the power rack, much more than you could jerk. Everything I did was to build tendons, not only muscle strength, but tendon strength, and I used to train to exhaustion. Then I would not train again for another five or six days

because that's how long it actually took do you mind if we go back and get notepads and shit so we can write down these are great these are great old this is what's amazing

is what you're describing right now is people use these methods like cutting edge but they yeah yeah they'll say

this is new there's a new thing no no because they're using you know we now have racks that are built to where you can do exactly what you're describing. The whole thing. What's interesting is someone goes, I don't have the proper equipment. It's like, have you tried digging a hole yet? Well, that's what Paul is doing.

Well, you want to really laugh. Some of the weights we used to use, they used to come from the old railroad crossings. They would count the weights. Some of them were this thick, and they weighed like 250 pounds. So they'd bring up the railroad railroad crossing. They were counterweight. Some of them were this thick, and they weighed like 250 pounds, so they'd bring up the railroad crossing. So we used to actually take them when we were kids. So we had the most primitive setup in that barn that you ever saw.

But we used to train, there was a group of us, we used to train like crazy. And we had a weightlifting club called the Donovan Hills Barbell Club, and we always competed at a higher level. I mean, we were poor American kids. We used to come into a meeting.

We used to look like a bunch of ragamuffins, but we always – I'm telling you, we always placed, you know. We always did place work. Did you ever happen to train with Paul Anderson? Because he used that same hole-in-the-ground technique for squats and good mornings. Paul Anderson? Yeah. I knew Paul Anderson when he was the heavyweight champion in the worldthe-ground technique for squats and good work. Paul Anderson? Yeah. I knew Paul Anderson

when he was the heavyweight champion in the world. Good Lord. He worked with the York Barbell Club. Yeah. Yeah. Paul was really a great guy.

So for those that don't know, Paul Anderson's general regard, I guess, is the strongest man in modern history. He did a squat. He could squat with over 1,000 pounds.

I don't know exactly how much. He did it like every day for a long time, just for show. For the record, this is enormous. Is this the 50s, sir? When was Paul at his peak? I can't remember the exact date. Let me think a minute. I think it was more in the 60s.

It was after the Korean War. So Paul, he was rumored to have squatted a close to 1,100. I mean, the conditions are, it's hard to say, you know, depth and all this stuff, but he could put it on his back. He could do amazing feats of strength. The back lift was my favorite one he used to do. He left up like a whole audience on his back. First of all, his legs were so big,

he couldn't go down below parallel. It was impossible. So he could just barely squat down to parallel. He could do a push press with over 500 pounds, maybe like 500. I don't remember the exact numbers, but he used to just a slight dip and he used to push it

over his head. This is the days when Olympic weightlifters were some of the best. They were the best pressers in the world. Yeah, absolutely. Do you know Jack LaLanne? Oh yeah, I know Jack LaLanne. Yeah, was he a buddy of yours? Did you hang out with him while training with him? Well, when I was in California, I worked out in the San Jose White. He was a class by himself.

I mean, he could do 120. He only weighed 148 pounds. He could do a seating dumbbell press with 120-pound dumbbells, I think it was. No, he was. Just sitting there pressing dumbbells straight overhead, military press stops? Well, together, not alternate, together. He'd just sit there and do them.

And he could also... 120-pound dumbbells or shit. He could work out for hours. Mm-hmm. Hours. A lot of big guys couldn't keep up with him. It must have been those shoulder pads in his suit that gave him the strength.

He was a strong guy. Yeah. Endurance-wise, he was unbelievable. And I'm sorry to say he should have never died. He died when he was 93, 94. He got pneumonia, and somebody that was into health told him not to take the antibiotics and the ammonia. He should have took the antibiotics. A guy I knew in California said, he asked me if I would call him.

I said, I don't want to just call him. I don't know if the guy wants to hear from me. I said, if I was you, I would tell him to take the antibiotics. Antibiotics are no poison. In a life-threatening situation, you've got to take them, or, of course, you could end up the way he ended up. Especially for 93. Antibiotics are something that's commonly over-prescribed,

but there's still a time and place. The medical world does really good a really good job of treating short-term acute conditions so you break your arm or you get pneumonia you need antibiotics but chronic conditions is where most people have an issue treating diabetes diabetes and heart disease and obesity medical world doesn't do a great job of treating those compared to kind of the fitness wellness world it's a long-term problem that needs a long-term solution but a short-term problem like a car accident needs a long-term solution. But a short-term problem, like a car accident, needs a short-term solution. You got to go in there and fix the arm like right now. Well, my personal belief, I work with a lot of doctors. I have doctors that are friends of

mine. I believe they should be, where they should be really utilized is emergency medicine, surgery, and chronic disease, you know, should be left. I mean, I work with a lot of people who have chronic disease. And it's not really hard to deal with chronic disease if you understand lifestyle change and how to manipulate a person's chemistry and take their body to clean it up so it's not a good host for bacteria proliferation. I agree with you completely. You were talking earlier about detox. Could you describe to us what happens during a detox well a lot of professionals a lot of health professionals throw the word detox around

sometimes i'm wondering i don't even know what they mean right exactly well to be perfectly honest i think detox is the most poorly understood uh aspect of a person becoming healthy, especially in the natural field. Now, when I talk about detox, I think it depends upon what the situation is. If you have a serious chronic disease or an acute disease, in order to have a chance of your body overcoming it, either with the help of a physician or without a physician, the best way to detox is like,

let's start from a basic understanding what a detox is if you're smoking crack or snorting cocaine what's the best way to detox stop doing I was like I'm trying to draw my experience of cocaine use of course stop doing it anybody D your body is detox in 24 hours a day once you stop detoxing your limb system your whole your your body chemistry is going to be overwhelmed and you're going to get sick if your body stuff so when you fall behind from your lifestyle whatever you're doing that's wrong what you have to do is to um you know either clean up diet, and then there's things you could do to, you can go into fasting, you know,

like I had an extensive background in water fasting, so if you're not eating anything and you're just resting, and you're drinking water, your body, within three days, your body goes into a detox. In other words, it starts to feed off the, whatever's in your bowels, it starts to feed off the whatever in your bowels it starts to feed off the weakened dying cells

the aging cells then it'll go to like maybe cysts tumors and even rents it'll start to feed off that so your body knows how to detoxify itself you don't have to take some potent drink and sometimes you can do things like that you just sold me I've never heard anyone describe it, and sometimes you can do things like that. You just sold me.

I've never heard anyone describe it that way. Or you can go on a juice fast. Juice fast is very common now. I'm a consultant for a big bunch of juice bars in Manhattan, and everybody's doing like a, to do a, guys like you could do a 30-day juice fast like it was, would be nothing. I don't think so.

Michael would get very grumpy. Yeah, I would be grumpy I don't think so. Michael would be very grumpy. Yeah, I would be grumpy as hell, I think. Yeah, but the reason for that is because you'd be detoxing. After three or four days, for instance, I have a daughter. My daughter's a... You'd be surprised what you could really do. I'm wanting to try it now. I'm like, man, when can I do this?

Well, why don't you try it? Oh, here we go. He's going to set a deadline for me. Are you challenging him, doctor? And now I'm like, man, when can I do this? Well, why don't you try it? Oh, here we go. The first- He's going to set a deadline for me. Are you challenging him, doctor? No, no, no. Because I want you to challenge him. No.

The first, I'm telling you right now, the first 24 hours, you're going to be a grump. Okay? And you're going to be irritable and everything. Then, once you get past the third day, you're going to start and drink seven, eight juices a day. Don't worry about the protein. Just drink the juices because your body's going to, through the process of autolysis, the weight you lose is

going to be recycled as fat and protein. You have to look up Dr. Ragnar Berg. He's the most brilliant guy. So am I going to be super lean at the end of this? No, at seven days? No, after 30 days. I'm trying to time this for the beach. Well, in 30 days, you probably would lose,

if you drank nine juices a day, if you're drinking juices, you're not going to have to go to bed. You're going to have a tremendous amount of energy. You're going to be shocked. After about the fifth day, your energy is going to start going through the roof. You want to try this, Michael?

I'm trying to think about what day I could do this. In about 30 days? Well, why don't you just try a three-day juice fast the first time? You're going to be grumpy the whole three days, though, based on what you're telling me. My wife is not liking hearing this. What's interesting is the detox word, when anybody says detox, we all go to like, it's a taboo word, it's a gimmicky word.

You think you're going to push me on some product. But really, isn't it, if we think about what's, quote, unquote, I'm using my quotation fingers, what's most natural, in the vast span of our physiology as a species, there's going to be times where we would catch something, we'd have bounty. There's times when we're going to catch shit, and we're going to have to work that whole time for a long stretch with very little if a little bit of water but maybe nothing

else for maybe maybe a month is our would you say our physiology is sort of programmed coded to be triggered by these situations and go into a different gear absolutely to me that is very intuitive listen your body knows how to do do this. You're 100% right. There's no mystery to this. You don't even have to have a clue to what you're doing. Your body knows intuitively, in its chemistry, how to keep you healthy and restore your health. We have to get out of its way. The whole problem is to stop doing what we're doing.

We're intoxicating ourselves so much today from the standard American diet. That's why more and more people are getting cancer. Type 2 diabetes is out of control. Arthritis is out of control. It has a lot to do with our lifestyle. I hear people, if you go on the internet, there's so much confusion about what kind of diet

people should be following. You know, you hear people talk about the raw food diet now. There's a macrobiotic diet, the paleo diet. You name it, there's a coconut diet, whatever diet you can think about these wackos but the common denominator in all these diets is to leave out the processed food yeah i hear a lot of people that they kind of malign the paleo diet it's not that bad a diet at all because they're eating first of all there is no paleo diet. Paleolithic era was between 10 million years ago and maybe a million years ago. So if you lived up in Alaska,

the paleo diet couldn't be the same as what you're eating in Central America or Costa Rica. Up in Alaska, they're probably eating a lot of moose, a lot of bear. They may be able to eat some root vegetables. But were they healthy? Yeah, they were healthy because they weren't eating any processed food. They didn't have cell phones. They weren't drinking all that booze and all the stuff and smoking cigars, you know, Cuban cigars. Or just go a little bit more to the extreme of that environment and the whole diet of that culture would be fat, seal fat, a little bit of meat. But they would also be healthy. But again, it's the absence of the other things.

Well, healthy fats are not, listen, a lot of people are going to get mad at me for saying this. Healthy fats are not the worst thing in the world. Well, we all are on this page. We're saying that's a good thing. That's one thing that people are accepting now is true, is that at least we're getting people to eat butter again, doctor. Good, high-quality butter.

Well, try to give them the raw butter with what's called the Factor X, you know. But the Price Pottinger Foundation is very heavy into people eating, you know, plenty of animal protein that's pristine because of what Dr. Pottinger said. But, you see, I can take people way beyond that. But I try to meet people where they're at. I know where you guys are coming from. And if you ask me to help you, I could tell you, I know you're not going to, you know, get into anything radical.

I know you don't want to get as thin as I am, but you could be supremely healthy and maintain the same type of bills that you have now by eating clean food. You know, if you're eating beef, you've got to eat grass-fed beef. Because it's got all the hormones, the pesticides, the chemicals, plus the urea. Whenever you're eating, you know what urea is. You know what's going on.

So you've got to try to eat as clean as you possibly can, no matter what you're eating. You eat a raw diet. What exactly does that mean? I mean, I know some people are raw vegan. I know some people are raw as in like, I've heard of people going and just eating raw beef. Yeah, there's a guy in California who advocates people eat raw meat. That's not for me.

It's not necessary, you know what I'm saying? My diet consists of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, juices, smoothies, and some of it is actually delicious. People don't realize. I'm a consultant for a juice bar in Manhattan called Juice Press. If you ever went in there and ate the food, you could sit down and eat a cheesecake, and it's really... Twist my arm, doctor. It's really good.

It's called Juice Press? Juice Press, yeah. It's like 20-something stores in Manhattan. You don't eat any meat? No, I don't eat meat. How long have you not had meat for? About 50 years. I haven't eaten any cooked food at all, zero, in 50 years.

Holy shit. Do you have like a cheat every once in a while? Never, never. I can't. See, that's what people don't realize. You can't because if I ate something that I'm normally not eating, I would feel like if I ate a piece of meat, you know, about an hour or two you'd probably have to call an ambulance

because my body can't, it's not, it's not, it's stopped. You just don't produce the enzymes necessary to digest that. I have no desire to eat it, although when I was young I used to love to eat a steak or something like that. So logistically, do you bring most of your food with you when you travel, or when you go to a restaurant, do you just order off the menu and just tell them what to bring you? How does that work? Or do you just go to the grocery store and just buy some stuff and call it good?

No, what I do, when we travel, Rory and I, Dr. Rory Dean, it works for me, we usually bring our own food. We have a cooler, we bring our own food. And unless I'm coming to a place, a lot of places I go to speak, that's what they're feeding people. So I really don't have trouble eating because if it's not available, I don't eat. I'll go someplace and buy it if I have to.

I'll go buy something that's not organic. I'll go to a supermarket. But we always, always manage. It's not a big problem. And believe it or not, as bizarre as it sounds, some of the way the food is prepared and some of the type of dishes that we eat, it really is delicious. It's like eating dessert all the time. But you have to be used to it. You have to have that mindset to do it. And plus, with me now, it's a question of survival. Here I am at

85. If I start eating some of this other stuff, I won't be around very long, you know, to be perfectly honest with you. So I feel wonderful at this point in my life. I feel as good as I did when I was in my 50s. And I survived a very serious, you know, near-death situation about a year and a half ago. And not too many people thought I was going to survive. But bounce back, I'm ready to go. Care to share what that event was?

Do you care to share what that event was? I have no problem. What happened is I had never been sick. I don't remember being sick and I had some dental work done. I didn't realize I have a very small throat. What happened, because I was so busy, I wasn't masticating my food as well as I should, and some

food got into my airway, and it went down into my lung. The airway is in the front, your esophagus is right behind it, right? And there's a sphincter here called the glottis, and when you chew your food, your tongue goes into your roof of your mouth, it's an automatic reflex, and it just pushes it over the glottis, it caught it it it the epiglottis slides open and closes it right it wasn't working for me it went in there right i was gulping the food down i wasn't chewing it down it went into my lungs and i started to cough and the cough got just got more and more violent as time went on finally i said something radically wrong i knew so i went to a local doctor

who was uh he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer i come to realize it's a bad sign when your life's on the line so he said he said i had athletically induced asthma i said listen doctor i don't have absolutely i think i have pneumonia here you know so he said no you don't have it i don't know how here, you know. So he says, no, you don't have it. I don't know. How they made that mistake, they gave me an x-ray, and I went home. I got sicker.

Then a guy, a friend of mine, wanted me to go see a doctor in the city. I went seeing a doctor, and as soon as he looked at me, he said, I want you to go see a pulmonologist at Mount Sinai Hospital with a woman. I went to see her. She gave me an x-rayray and she says, you have to go into a hospital immediately. I said, can't you give me, because I never was in the hospital. Can't you give me antibiotics and I'll go home? She said, no, you can't do that. So I went into the hospital and what happened is that

they started to treat me. They gave me antibiotics, which I never had, which ended up making me real sick. My legs swelled up. I had all kinds of problems. They sent me home. When I went home, I got progressively worse because I was trying to eat some food. Every time I put food in my mouth, I would go like this, the cough,

and the food was going into my airway. Wow. Then I got to the point where I knew I was dying, so I told my wife, I said, I got to go back into the hospital. Well, my whole family was shocked because they know I wouldn't do that unless something was radically wrong. So I went back into the hospital. They put me in the critical care unit.

The first day I was in there, the guy next to me died. They were coming in. They were looking at me, and I know the way they were looking at me wasn't really that good. Like the crows are circling. Huh? The crows are trying to circle you. Yeah, right. So what happened, I ran into one doctor and he come in. He said, can I talk to you? I want to come in. I have to come in early in the morning about four o'clock. I said, okay, I'll be awake. He come in and he says, you know, I have a feeling you have aspirational pneumonia. Bingo.

As soon as he said that, I knew he was right. I knew exactly that the guy was right. So what they did is in order to take that test, they made me wait seven days. I had no food and they couldn't let me eat, drink water, chew ice, which was kind of ridiculous. I couldn't even get into any intravenous fluids of course my my legs had swollen up so I did that I think going that's called the drive fast is a lot of Russian people you know I've done some drive fasting I thought they knew what they were doing they would just make me they didn't have a time slot to put me in and they didn't want

me to eat in between why I don't really know so what happened is that that's what I had I had aspirational pneumonia. They put me on massive amounts of intravenous antibiotics, which really took its toll on me, and I went home. And I recovered from the pneumonia quickly, but what was done, you know, I had to take, they gave me, I did a bronchoscopy, and they gave me general anesthesia,

which did affect my short-term memory and had some real issues. You survived, man. I survived, yeah. I was really lucky. But that's the only time I've ever really been sick, and I bounce back. I feel good. I'm back into working out again and everything.

How do you work out these days? You're back into working out? Yes, I'm back into working out. What I do is I do ji gong I do and like Rory does it too he's much better at than I do I am so I'm gonna martial art you talked about martial arts right so I get up in the morning I do sit-ups I do all kinds and I have some light dumbbells that I work out what I do my ji gong and then I live in an area in Staten Island. There's a lot of pits and a lot of hills up there.

So some days I run. I do repeats, like up the hills, you know, run back and forth. You run hill sprints in the morning? Pardon me? You run hill sprints? Not every day. Some days I walk. It depends upon how I feel.

I'm getting stronger now. So I keep telling Rory I plan on getting back to some heavy running. This is an amazing attitude. That's badass, by the way. I want to run a hill sprint to 85. That's awesome. I could still sprint, though. I could still run.

You know what affected me the most being in the hospital, though? My equilibrium is off. Oh, yeah? Yeah, so it's coming back, but I don't know what. Balance is a little tough. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's harder for me to come down a staircase than to go up it. You know, because when I go down, but it's getting better.

So if that gets better, I'm going to get into a lot more stuff, you know, to. Not to be a less than, but he just said, I'm 85, I'm looking forward to getting stronger. This is incredible. Anyone who wants to knock anything about like raw diet or anything, I mean, you doing it for a long time you know you can't you can't knock it people that knock it have an experience if they listen i'm more than willing to say it's not for everybody in fact it might be for just people that are really you know striving for the highest ideals and everything and that's my my philosophy is not to settle for mediocrity in anything I do. So that was one of the reasons.

Shit, man, this guy's so amazing. That's one of the reasons I got into eating a raw food diet. And in the beginning, as I told you before, I thought I shot myself in the foot. But now, am I glad I did it? Yes, I absolutely am. I believe that somebody that knows how to do an all raw diet that gets into it, I believe you have a very good chance of living 100 or beyond. So that's what I always kid.

I always tell people I'm kind of living in a debt zone now because this is where a lot of people die, you know. So I want to see what a lot of people are waiting, and I'm waiting to see what's going to happen to me. But what I'm really doing is I tell my grandson, what I'm doing is I'm planning for the next 30 years I want to watch him

grow up more. So I'm kidding, of course, but whatever happens... Why not? Yeah. I don't put anything past you, sir. Yeah.

Dr. B, she's awesome, but next up on the show we have the mayor and the ringleader of the Maniacs from Pittsville, Vermont, Joe DeSena, who may be

the hardest working guy we've ever met. I love hanging out with him. No more than two days at a time. He's exhausting. He's very morning. He'll wake up doing 200 burpees with the guys. That's the kind of guy he is. Get ready to get motivated. Welcome to Barbell Strugged. I'm Mike Blitzer here with Doug Larson and Chris Moore with CTP behind the camera. Of course, we have traveled to the strange land of Vermont to talk about Spartan racing. Is where people come to get their asses kicked? Like we did this morning.

I remember a couple years ago I discovered Spartan race because there was like all these videos online uh people just going for days and days and days up in vermont and up in the mountains and it was the water and ice and all sorts of was there fire terrible conditions there's fire there's fire yeah that's fine you gotta jump over it so can you explain everybody what the spartan race is The first thing that ever popped up on my radar was the Spartan death race because that's like, you know, the most epic. Sometimes I see like 5 or 10K. I'm like, eh, eh. Doesn't really register.

It registers with me. Then I see something that's like two or three days long, and I go, whoa, that's serious, man. And I have got some friends that have done it since then. But can you tell us a little bit about the Spartan race and then how you got into racing? And I'd like to hear about kind of touched on it yesterday when we came in. You were in Manhattan at one time.

So I was running a Wall Street firm and knock on wood, doing doing OK. And but it wasn't fulfilling. There was everything was about uh the money each week and and how much you were making and the dinners and the drinks and uh really looking for something else which is why when i was doing the races i was looking for could i live here and the opportunity came up to pack it in leave the city life leave a lot of money on the table and come up here and just live a different life and so uh, uh, Courtney, my wife was interested. We did it. We pulled the trigger. Now the weddings are rolling. The general store is open. The farm's moving with steam and, but we need more people here. You can't, you can't, uh, survive on chickens. So, uh, we all wish it could. So, uh, I said, Oh, why don't we put on,

uh, a death race? I was with my buddy, Andy, who you guys haven't met yet. And he had this experience through life. He was a swim coach. And he would always look for great athletes, just like any other coach in any other sport. Swimming is pretty serious, right? These guys are putting in five, six-hour days in the pool. Huge training volume. Huge training volume.

And he'd be disappointed because 90% of them wouldn't commit at the level he wanted them to commit at. I had experienced the same exact things through my life but in business. I'd been running businesses since I'm 13 years old. Massive training volume with me because I like to work 20 hours a day and very few people could keep that pace. The only people I found that would stick with me were Eastern Europeans. They were animals.

They were a tough sort of person. They are different. I couldn't hang. I couldn't hang with them. And I just fell in love with their whole philosophy. And they had a different frame of reference on life. Like they were fighting. You ever see a Cinderella man with, um, Russell Crowe? It's an amazing movie, man. So he's a washed up boxer. He's, uh, he's going for heavyweight title fight. He breaks his hand like during regular work or whatever or maybe got in a fight and um he has no business going back in the ring he gets the title fight and the reporter comes up to him and says um why are you fighting like you're washed up you're out of shape you got broken hand he says i'm fighting for milk now

you can't compete with a guy fighting for milk he's got no money he's got Now you can't compete with a guy fighting for milk. He's got no money. You can't be with that. And that, and the Eastern Europeans were fighting for milk. And so, um, that just intrigued me. So Andy had this perspective on swimmers. I had this perspective on trying to find these great employees and partners. And, uh, we said we were out on a 12 hour snowshoe hike through these mountains one night. Why don't we create a race that just purposely breaks people, not unlike the military does. Like, we're not going to pat you on the back.

We're not going to have water stations. Nobody's cheering for you. This is just going to break you. And the one person or 10 people that are left when it's over, those are the people we want to hang out with. Those are the people you'd want in the swimming pool or running a business with you. So that was early 2000s, 2004, 2005.

And the race takes a turn for the better. All of a sudden, Olympic athletes are showing up, all kinds of people, 300, 400 participants. Well, New York Times picks it up. And they come out here and they film. And all of a sudden, reality TV show folks are calling my house my wife's like we're not doing a reality show as well hold on honey hold on let's listen to what the man has to say right and so um listen so uh marion remembers uh marion's walking around here with a camera and uh uh private jets start flying into rutland vermont and very rarely do private

jets flying throughout vermont, and they're the reality TV show folks. So the guys that owned Ultimate Fighter, the UFC, owned Orange County Chopper, Ghost Hunters, 13 hit TV shows, shows up, and he's like, I want to do this with you. I love what you're doing. Death Race, we're doing this this and we sell the show in five minutes at Discovery, 13 episodes. It's going to be a giant deal. This is like 2009-ish, 2008, 2009. So we're excited. And so I was thinking, you know, we're going to have this TV show.

We got this great race. You know, we got a big opportunity here and a big platform when this is on TV to change lives, to really go out to the masses and get people to experience the stuff we've been experiencing. It can't be over two days, three days, because the public's not going to participate. It's got to be something that's an hour, two hours, three hours, and we get people off the couch. And so Spartan Race was born. So we were on dual tracks. TV show's coming for Death Race so Spartan Race was born. So we were on dual tracks, TV shows coming for Death Race,

Spartan Race was born. And the funny thing about Spartan Race was I called up all those adventure racing buddies that had helped me with the barns here and stuff and begged Andy, begged everybody. And as exciting as the idea sounded, I begged my brother-in-law and my family. Everybody said, it's ridiculous.

No one is gonna go jump over a fire and crawl under a bar. You can't make that business work. So nobody wanted to invest. So, um, so whatever I said, I'm going to invest just a tiny amount of money and, uh, I'm going to get some friends to run this thing. And, and we did it and it exploded. It became, uh, as you know, a big business. We'll have maybe a million, a million participants this year. That's amazing. A million participants. You clearly put your finger right on something that people were begging for, people who are chained up in whatever life they're living.

We're not happy with the traditional fitness track of typical gym stuff. This just ignited something in a whole lot of people. Yeah. I think people needed it, right? There's people working in cubicles. They're sleeping on their couches. They're eating crappy food. And we gave them a vehicle to change that to be a navy seal for a day to um to be an olympian for a day being a tour de france for a day right just feel badass

to face themselves really yeah find out what they're made of we came down here because uh or up here yeah it's up not Not everyone here knew where Vermont was. CTP didn't even know what city it was. What city is Vermont? The response was, I had to Google where Vermont was and then I realized it was a state, not a city. But, you know, Zach Evanash, he said, hey, you guys got to come up here.

You didn't do the voice, man. Bro, you guys got to come up here. You didn't do the voice, man, bro. You guys got to come up to Vermont. Well, I was about to say what he said. And then, no,

Zach said, uh, bro, there you go, bro. You got to come up and hang out with, uh, Joe DeSina.

And I was like, who's Joe DeSina. And he's like the Spartan race guy. I go, Oh, okay. I know. I know. Okay. Yeah. I get, as soon as he said that, I was like, Oh's Joe DeSina? And he's like the Spartan race guy. I go, Oh, okay. I know. I know. As soon as he said that, I was like, Oh, okay. So, you know, I've been following that for a long time.

But when I was like, I don't know what, I had no idea. All I know is that you guys did this crazy race. And then you guys had the smaller races all over the place. That's all I knew. So we came up here and like, he's got a book coming out. Was it May 12th, May 12th, 13th, May 12th, 13th. He's got a book coming out. I was like, man, uh, those guys, I know they're doing great things. I've always followed. Obviously I keep hearing stories. I've got friends that have done the race. Uh, I was like, why not? Let's go up there and check it out. Interview, uh, uh joe uh but i want to hear about this book and why you wrote it yeah so the book i've been writing for uh 30 years in my head and um and

really it was it was a way um for me to solve this problem we talked about earlier which was um why did the eastern europeans work so well for me when i was building businesses why why were they the ones um that really crushed it and wanted to work the long hours? And, and so I, I've been studying that for 30 years. What makes, um, somebody that just fighting for milk successful. And so, um, the book recounts a bunch of those stories and it talks about helping you change your frame of reference. Like this morning, we killed ourselves in the barn and, you know, we killed ourselves. You looked fine. You're, you're recovered like five minutes after. So, so, uh, by putting yourself through that pain in the morning and each of us does it

in a different way. Uh, what it does for me is it helps me more easily deal with the headaches of the day that are going to come, right? Cause we're all going to have headaches. You're going to get a bad email that says this, or somebody you're working with quits, or a customer no longer needs your service. And it's tough, right? It's tough to get through that stuff. But if you reset your frame of reference in the morning, at least for me, that's my way of doing it, just makes the rest of the day easier. It's like, well, it could be worse. Could be doing 300 burpees, right? So that's one of the important takeaways from the book. Another important takeaway is just getting out of your comfort zone,

learning how to get out of your comfort zone and commit to something. I like to commit publicly because it really puts you on the hook. And so I don't know if you guys do that, but, like, even for your weightlifting, everybody has a tough time staying motivated. But if you're honest with yourself and you let your buddies know that, hey, I'm going to do this, whatever this may be, I'm going to, I'm going to marry that girl, or I'm going to, uh, bench press, uh, sounds like a terrible commitment. So, so, um, I'm just kidding. I love my wife. No, that's not funny at all, bro.

No one laughed at that shit, but, but making that public statement and that commitment helps you stay motivated. And then this other thing of just being gritty and being able to push through when things get ugly. I like to say when you go to do a 100-mile run, you're at peak excitement at the starting line. This is going to be great. It's all downhill from there. The second the gun goes off and it's not just a hundred mile run it's wrestling or you know whatever sports we come from it's just

all downhill what the hell am i doing here this is terrible i'm exhausted then the naysayers pile on like i told you you couldn't do this this is silly and um at that deepest darkest moment it's decision time you're gonna quit or you're gonna keep going and most people quit and uh look thomas edison right i don't know what the number was but but let's say it was a thousand it's decision time. You're going to quit or you're going to keep going. And most people quit. And look, Thomas Edison, right? I don't know what the number was, but let's say it was a thousand light bulbs, literally a thousand light bulbs he had to tweak and work on before he got one to actually work.

He could have quit at two and five and 10, but he didn't. And I think people are so close to success when they quit, they don't even realize how close they were. I love, I saw this cartoon once where there's this guy mining away with a pickaxe and you can see that the light, I mean, he's inches away. You know, he'd been mining for whatever, two weeks.

He's exhausted. He's just about to punch through and he quits. And most of us do that. So the book is, you know, how do you stay on until you get success? No matter how you define success. It doesn't have to be money. It could be, it could be anything. And it could be not dying in a death race. It could be not dying in a death race. Right. Yeah. Who said this has said that

most people's biggest successes in life come right after their biggest failure. Yeah. Because until you have your biggest failure, you don't learn what you need to know to have your biggest success. So a lot of people quit too early. They got to go through that failure. Once you have the failure, you shouldn't quit then. Cause that's when you actually like learned about yourself or about whatever your industry is or about whatever you need, you need for, um, you know, getting better at your workouts or whatever, until you have that failure and you push through it, you're not going to be successful. No, I was just, uh, uh, not being specific about which, which unit I was with. I was just down with the military, and I was with their commander. And this is a very elite unit, and he said they push for failure.

They want failure because it makes you better. And I believe adversity is the road to success. So I don't think you could have true success without having tons of adversity beforehand. So I think failure is great because it teaches you a lot. You get back up, right? So what's your favorite part of your book? What's the part that you're like, man, that's the part you got to read? Because Mike's not going to read the whole thing.

What part should Mike read? Maybe I should just have my wife read it to me. I think that would be more successful that way. Bedtime stories. You know, the thing, the last chapter came in quick um wasn't planned i i uh spartan race has a lot of advantages and somebody asked recently hey you know uh do you love what you're doing it's a lot of work a lot of emails but i get to meet guys like you got to do that that thing with the military the other day

and one of the things we got i got to go hang out richard branson for a weekend oh cool and i was down on his island island, and Chapter 10 talks about that. And there's a guy that leads from the front, and older, obviously. Terrible storm on a Sunday. I'm sitting in his house, and he says, I want to go out sailing. Who wants to go? So, obviously, I raise my hand. I'm in.

He's like a death race guy. Come on. All his sailing people and all the, and all the guests that were there were like, sir, you can't, you cannot go. It was terrible weather. And, um, I mean, everybody was telling him not to do it. And so we jumped in the boat and it was rough and it was, you know, and here I am, uh, it's not like I'm a great swimmer or anything. And we, um, hanging out with him and watching him go through that and see, you could see why he's successful. So,

so if you can't read anything else, read chapter 10. Got it. So he was there to smile and sort of, this is fantastic. It was just living. Just you two guys on that boat. That was great.

It's probably pretty nice boat though. It's probably not. No, it was a catamaran. It was a sailboat. I mean, he's, he's as wealthy as he is and as well as he's done and all the things he has. Yeah.

He's not that he's not one of those kind of guys. Just a simple boat, simple sailboat. Simple, yeah. Cool. That's Necker Island, is that what it's called? Yeah. Or where is that again? I hear people talk about it, but I don't know where it is.

So British Virgin Islands across from, I'm trying to think how far it is from Peter Island. I don't know how far it is from Peter Island, but Peter Island's nearby. Is that roughly what continent is that next to i really don't know no no no so you're going um right off florida you're heading right down there and british virgin islands okay so near near saint thomas near the u.s virgin islands nice it's not in africa it's no did you miss the friendly confines of your you know treasure treacherous mountain uh trails and you trails and barns and workhorse mentality here?

Because down there, I guess you'd have trouble running your recruitment strategy there with gorgeous beaches. I'll tell you what. I'm not a, and you may disagree hanging out here, but I'm not like one of these lavish guys. Like I've always not enjoyed sitting around and watching TV. That's not been my thing. I haven't seen a TV in your house, by the way. No, there's a TV over there. But I like to, once I torture myself,

like we're going to go on this hike when this is over. Oh, you're going to tell a story, by the way, about the Indian statue. When we go see Chinoa at the base of the stairs and we get that workout done, then I don't mind. Then it would be cool to hang out in Richard Branson's lavish living room. Yeah. By the way, before we do this treacherous hike, which I'm kind of nervous about,

by the way, because it's not like I'm not already pre-fatigued from doing a mile run warm-up, which the last time I ran a mile was in college. I'm ashamed to say it, but should I bring a peace offering to this Indian goddess? Say, please bless me on this journey. I'll make a small offering of respect to the mountain. Yeah, I mean, you should because the story with her is there's a stone staircase to the top, and the truth is that stone staircase was built by death racers, but we like to say that Chinoa used to live, we're going to go to her cabin.

She used to live up top and that she put the staircase in and that she used to pull her canoe by herself to the top of the mountain every day. And some people still see her ghost. So I would, if I were you, I would bring a peace offering. This is the kind of story that like 20 years from now or 50 years from now, people are like, there's this ghost, you know, this should be submitted into people's consciousness. This should be real. That's right. Well, let's wrap this up. What, uh, where can people find your book? Spartanupthebook.com. Spartanupthebook.com.

Do you want to tell everybody about the real title of that book? Can I? Yeah, go for it. Yeah. So basically we, we, uh, we got in a big fight with the publisher. We wanted to call it Spartan the fuck up, but, uh,. But the publisher, which we think is a great name. I mean, it's succinct. It says what it needs to say. It's catchy.

It's certainly noticeable. And it would be very noticeable in airports and things. But the publisher is old school and wanted to go with Spartan up. You went with a publishing company that was too big. It's too big. Yeah, you should have gone with a smaller one. We didn't. We didn't. I had no experience doing books. Yeah, you should have gone with a smaller one. We didn't.

I had no experience doing books. Yeah, me neither. That's just an assumption. I want to be just making shit up. I'll be in the airport, Joe, and I want to see your book right next to Bob Harper's Paleo Treats and Diet Cookbook. Spartan the fuck up. What we were going to do, we should do with you guys, we were thinking, what if we printed a bunch of them, Spartan the fuck up what we were going to do we should do with you guys

we were thinking what if we printed a bunch of them Spartan the fuck up and then went into airports and when the lady wasn't looking actually put those

on the shelves and switched them out we fly all the time we could do it wouldn't that be funny yeah that'd be great and then you can see the lady trying to scan it

and it's not scanning and she's confused we've talked for over an hour right now and she's like what the fuck and we've talked we've talked over like the last, you know, since last night. I can't remember if this was said here on the podcast or whatever,

but we can repeat it. I don't have a problem with that. You know, you just made the reference, you know, next to someone who has like these paleo treats, like, oh, you know, I'm making paleo cookies, which I love. I love to eat those things. Don't get me wrong, but you're not going to lose any fucking weight making paleo cookies and which i love i love to eat those things don't get me wrong but you're not going to lose any fucking weight eating paleo cookies i promise

there's still cookies you know so like no no no i love eating them don't get me wrong but uh if you're trying to lose weight that's definitely not the way joe was not eating any fucking paleo cookies before he goes out for his 5 a.m job no but one of the things one of the things we were talking about is just you know, you really encourage people to get in shape by just working hard. Like, you know, no shortcuts, no magic pills, you know. No math or science required. You know, people always publish these little diet books and stuff like that. And it's like, you're like, no, just work hard and don't eat sugar.

Well, we would sell a lot of books. Like, if it was called Spartan the Fuck Up and it was just like three steps to get in better shape, lose weight, be successful, we'd sell a lot of books. But that's not the book. The book basically says you got to work hard, asshole. And people don't necessarily want to hear that, but that's the book. That could be the subtitle.

Spartan the Fuck Up. You got to work hard, asshole. What's the matter? Get out of here. I should have hired, you guys should be publishers. You were going to print our publisher company. Up next,

we have Mark Devine, former Navy SEAL commander and founder of SEAL fit. He's actually one of my teachers and role models. Real life samurai for sure. Now, Mark, my first impression of SEAL fit was probably in 2008 2009 right logging on the website and we used to do seal fit sundays at my box me and a few guys um they were just like oh we want to do some extra hard once a week and we would do that there's a lot of fun uh but you know uh

i always thought about seal fit as just like high-volume training someone might want to do if they're preparing for the military. Right. But after getting to know you and paying attention a little bit better, I've learned that that's somewhat of the goal, but really the real goal is training the mind, and that's what you specialize in. Right. Yeah, I started with a premise that we've got to train the mind,

and we use, obviously, physical training methods to get to the mind. It's the most effective way that we found, really, to get into someone's mind and to kind of forge that mental toughness. So, you know, are we athletic trainers? Absolutely. But am I trying to train someone for the CrossFit Games? No. I mean, you guys do that better than me.

But training someone for special ops really is a mental game. And the body obviously has to be there. And it needs to be able to handle the volume. And it needs to be able to work, you know, in extreme circumstances. It needs to be able to work when it's cold, wet, and tired. Those types of things. Yeah. I want to give everyone, like, I guess a rundown of what we did this morning.

Sure. So, yeah, at 7 o'clock we came here. We did a pre-SOP, so pre-standard operating procedure. One of the things that I really enjoyed that I thought was unique about how you presented the entire workout was when you briefed us, was that you said, hey, as I describe what we're going to do today, I want to visualize completing this. And think about don't just sit there and listen.

Because I think a lot of people do that. You know, the coach is going over the workout. He's like, uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah, I'm going to do that, I'm going to do that. They don't visualize doing it. And then, you know, kind of like thinking about what problems might exist. It's like, oh, I'm not sure which piece of equipment I'm going to use. I don't know exactly how to do that movement. or how long are we supposed to rest between these things. Right.

There's all this stuff. And if you're walking through, as you're describing, I'm standing there thinking, okay, I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that. And then I kind of broke it down. And then I had some questions I might not have otherwise had. Right. Had I just been like, eh. So I thought that was just from the very get-go, you did it differently than most coaches where you said, hey, visualize it.

And I actually think that folds into being successful throughout the entire workout, too. I'd love to talk about that for a second, man. Yeah, go for it. Perfect. You know, we approach the workout, we try to win it in our mind before we start it. So that's an incredibly valuable component of the training. It may not take, you know, three hours. The real work is taking the other, you know, two hours and 55 minutes, but you can win it or lose it in that, in that

five minute pre SOP. Right. And like you said, if you're not paying attention, if you brought some baggage along to the, to the game and you're obsessing about it and you miss a critical component of the brief, then you may get injured. You know, you may fuck up a teammate. Um, and furthermore, you're just not going to be mentally prepared. And so you, you win, you win each segment in your mind. You're clear about what you got to do. You see yourself performing and all these questions come up. How am I going to do? Do I need to scale? What's my equipment going to look like? And you answer those questions before you ever start training. Plus when you get into the workout, you've had a very subtle performance indicator that you've been there before, which helps, you know, helps your mental confidence, your confidence. Do you carry that over to the rest of your day? Like when you wake

up in the morning, you see your schedule, you kind of like visualize the whole day that way, just like the workout, you can see what's in front of you. You visualize it. And that way you're more focused when you get to, even if it's something as simple as going to a meeting. Yeah. Yeah. We call, I have a, and one thing I teach to my unbeatable mind students is what's called the morning ritual. And part of that is to visualize your day and to make sure that what you've agreed to aligns with what you should be doing. And so it's kind of a last chance to make some course corrections. You see yourself going through the day, you see yourself rocking it. And then once again, as you step foot into that day, you've, you've already been there, you've already won in your mind and it has a profound impact.

You know, it's a fantastic idea. I think a lot of times, I hear this from a lot of people, and I've been there myself, is get done with a whole day of work, and you're, like, busy the whole time, but you don't feel like you did anything. Exactly. What exactly did I accomplish? Like, what did I accomplish? And if you visualize that at the front of the day, you'll go, okay, that lined up with what I visualized this morning, so then you'll have that feeling of accomplishment.

Right, and it helps you see, like, what is the, you know, what's the major accomplishment that I want to get done today? Like today it's hanging out with you guys and, you know, getting to know you and training together and doing this. I mean, done, you know, check and that's a successful day. We've won. Now, if I want to accomplish some other tasks, projects, that's all gravy, right? So you get very, that's a bonus miles, right? To get very clear on what it is, that's going to move the dial toward your goals. And those goals of course are, are tight and they're aligned with, you know, where you really need to go. Did you get any bonus stuff done today while we were napping? I got a nap. That was bonus. You knew that was happening, right?

No doubt. Yeah. So that was the first thing was, and you know, it was interesting. I met Mark down in Miami a few months ago, and I recruited Mark first to do like yoga and swim some laps for a workout in the morning. And then I then told him hours later that I'd recruited people, and he was leading yoga. And he was leading the workout, and he's like, Oh, right on. And, uh, but, uh, when we did that, we, we did like a little bit of a meditation visualization session. It was like really, it was really powerful for me. And, uh, I like doing a little bit of meditation, but I don't do as much visualization like that. And, um, you know, we, we did this visualization exercise, like a warrior thing. And, uh, I started using

that. Uh, I don't do it every day, but I use it sometimes. Like if I'm going to, if I'm going to in a workout, that's really challenging. I agree with you like that. Uh, you know, the breathing that, uh, we went through that day and just the visualization. And I visualize like completing each rep and hitting it hard and not having like that doubt in my mind, like whether I can do it or not, or, you know, the question of quitting or anything. And I've noticed that since I've done that, I've just been, like when I do that,

that visualization prior to workout, like I'm much more confident throughout the workout and I'm just like, I just feel better overall. I feel like I'm winning it as I go. Yeah. I feel like a lot of people talk about visualization. You know, we've been training it now for seven years or so, but, um, they don't really do it. You know, it's just like training, training, physical training. If you don't do it, your body starts to fall apart and

you start to atrophy. You know, you can't hide with the physical training, but you know, I can't see you guys visualizing. So I don't know if you're doing it and I don't know if you're doing it well. And so it's very difficult to teach it and to train it and it requires, you know, you know, feedback mechanism. And we do that in our immersive academies because I have a lot of time to spend with the guys. But if you train it and you do it every day, it does have a profound impact. In fact, I'll maintain that it's as powerful and it's an incredibly powerful complement or, let's say, an equal part to the physical training. And it's really the next frontier for growth, I think.

I was fortunate to have a swim coach at Colgate University who believed in visualization. I'd be dating myself, I told you, the actual years a long time ago. And I tell the story a lot because it was so powerful for me, but he had me visualize my event, which was a 200-meter breaststroke, which is kind of a painful event. And he'd have me do it at night with a stopwatch. And it took me several months before I could get through the entire workout. I mean, that's how challenging visualization can be, to actually hold your attention, hold that visual image from the gun going off, jumping off the block, doing your underwater pullout and swimming,

touching the wall, turning underwater, swimming, and doing eight lengths and then touching the wall. So when I finally was able to do it, I stayed with it because the coach begged me to. I actually tried to hang up my virtual swimsuit a couple times. I was like, Coach, I just can't do this, man. He's like, stay with it, stay with it, stay with it. And I finally settled on being able to swim the whole race. And my time settled out to a time where I was getting within a fraction of a

second every time I swam it in my mind. And then the last time I ever swam for the team was a championship race and I'd had a big break in between and I swam that time. I literally hit the time, which was three seconds faster than my fastest time ever. Oh, nice. So it really kind of hit home that, yeah, hey, there's something to this visualization. So, you know, I kind of rolled with it on faith at that point. Yeah. And it had a powerful impact.

It's not just anecdotal, but there's a lot of research to show that it's extremely, like, more beneficial than you would imagine. I mean, it's like 70 to 80% as effective as actually doing the activity. Like, it can be. I know with me, when I visualize things, I'm really trying to not just see it,

but I'm trying to feel it as it's happening. And I think that's one of the major benefits is there's some type of neural connections that are being made as you can feel your body going through that same range of motion that you're doing if you're swimming or if you're squatting or doing anything physical. So there's two ways to visualize. You have first person and third

person, right? What's your preferred method? Um, I switch off between the two, right? If I'm very, very comfortable with a skill, say, let's say I've mastered the skill, then I'll use the first person, you know, which is if I had a little helmet cam on, if I'm new, if I'm new to a skill, then it'll be third person is if I'm watching myself from a perspective. You could actually make the argument that visualization could be more effective than actually doing the task if you're doing the task improperly. Because you can have perfect form in your mind. And when you practice with perfect form in your mind, that's better than practicing with shitty form, you know, in a real world. Yeah. You can get perfect practice. Right. Yeah. So I think someday they should have the visualized CrossFit games where you just do the whole thing in your

mind. I can totally win that. I particularly like it if you're injured and you can't do the physical part. Well, now you can still kind of stay on your game still practice in your head right it's not as good as being able to practice if you're limited where you can't do anything at all definitely not as good but it's way better than than not doing any visualization at all good point it's going to keep you in the game keep you thinking about it keeps you alert keeps you fresh yeah so we uh we did uh he had us like visualize the workout as we went. We were just standing there. And then we did, so for the warmup, we did box breathing.

Right. Which is something I don't do a lot of. You should. And so I, you know what, I should. You know, I've done it here and there with some meditation, like with different people. Right. But I've never like kind of done it on my own. Right.

But I've done it with some teachers. I thought that was really good. If someone wanted to find out more about box breathing, what would that, where would they look for that? Sealfit.com and probably our online training. It's not something that we, that we throw a lot of that type of training out to the public

unless they come on and join, you know, it's like joining a newsletter at least. And so if you come and get on our email list and you'll get more information. It's not usually something like, oh my God, I'm going to go get box breathing information from SealFit. It's like you sign up for something else and you might get some information. Yeah.

You got to want it. You got to want to know what it is. You know, we don't leave, we lead with a physical and we want everyone to know that, you know, the physical training is pretty effective, but like at every, every workout, you know, it says pre SOP and box breathing. And so if you're doing the workouts, eventually you're going to ask, what the hell are these things? So what is it though for everyone that doesn't know?

Box breathing essentially is, it's a breathing method where we essentially breathe through our nose into our, you know, abdomen. And what we do is we'll just breathe in a box pattern. So we'll inhale to a certain count. And beginners, you know, I recommend four to five. You'll hold it for a count, four to five. So the same duration

and then exhale all the air out of your lungs for a count of four to five and then hold the bottom. And, you know, it's interesting. People are like, yeah, I breathe.

Okay, everyone breathes. But how often do you practice breathing? It's kind of like practicing visualization. If you don't practice it, then you don't do it very well. A lot of people

breathe poorly. You can watch them compete, see them breathing poorly. it very well. A lot of people breathe poorly. You can watch them compete, see them breathing poorly. Right. And I just can watch them melt down. Right. Yeah. There's a couple of key things here.

First of all, it helps you relearn or learn for some people how to breathe through your nose and to be able to maintain that even as your intensity thresholds start to climb, right? And so during most training, you know, stages of the seal fit, what I'm, I'm working on breathing through my nose and that deep diaphragmatic breath. And if you, if you breathe through your mouth, it kind of upsets the, um, you know, the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide. And so you can get a little bit of, a little bit of toxicity, which will then degrade your performance, especially over the longterm. Uh, the other thing, this is not known by a lot of people, but when you breathe through your nose, it generates a little trace element of nitrous oxide, which helps deliver the carbon dioxide and oxygen to your cells. So it actually kind of boosts performance.

Also, there are nerve bundles. This one's most commonly cited. They're nerve behind your solar plexus region, kind of I don't know exactly where. But as you breathe through your nose into your belly, then it stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, side. Their nerve, you know, behind your solar plexus region, kind of, I don't know exactly where, but as you breathe through your nose into your belly, then it stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms you down. It doesn't happen when you breathe through your mouth. When you breathe through your mouth, it goes right into your upper chest, right? If you breathe through your nose, it directs it kind of deep into your belly. So it's, it's, you know, constantly sending a signal to calm you down. And then the act of focusing on the breath helps you concentrate.

And so you're not thinking about what's for lunch or a big old pancake I want to have for breakfast. You're actually thinking about the breath. That was the toughest part. The toughest part is blocking out that. I was visualizing pancakes and not the training. The box breathing helped, I think. Later on, the pancakes helped too.

We're not writing off the pancakes. No, the pancakes are extremely beneficial for recovery. For part of the training, of course. Got to time up my nutrients here. From the author of Unbeatable Mind comes Run Towards the Gunfire. And we're back. Mark's giving us the greatest advice. We're running towards gunfire.

We're not breathing. Be prepared for the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. That's right. Yeah, so hopefully you enjoyed. If you're listening only, you probably didn't get to enjoy it. You missed out. You missed out, so you need to go back. Go to the website.

You know where it's at. Bartleshark.com. Watch that video. At least find that technique wad. Are we making a technique one? Yeah. In the notes, you'll see all kinds of helpful bonus information as well, so get your butt over there.

Yeah. So now that you've got to see, or maybe you didn't get to hear what we just did, we were doing a lot of breathing exercises. And you had alluded to earlier that breathing is... What's the big deal about breathing? Yeah, it's like the new frontier or the last frontier. Let's try that drill. Let's just stop breathing for five minutes.

We'll very quickly learn the importance of breathing. Now, all athletes quickly learn, right, any real serious athlete learns that the breath holds the key to higher levels of performance. It holds the key to higher stages of awareness, right? Intention, attention. I mean, there's a lot in the breath, right? It's amazing.

But it's got to be trained. Interesting. I mean, improper, crazy's amazing, but it's got to be trained. Interesting. I mean, crazy scattered, you know, weak breathing doesn't have to be trained. That's pretty common, right? But the way we normally breathe is kind of like being couch potatoes, right? We're couch potato breathers. Performance breathing or advanced breathing is complete conscious control of the breath. You know, being able to direct it the way you want it, where you want it to go, being able to use the breath as a center post

to ground you during training or during a firefight if you're a warrior, being able to use the breath to stimulate your nervous system, to charge you up for a workout, to charge you up for battle, or to stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system to calm you down or release, or to create a completely balanced, you know, kind of equimonious, what's the word?

I like both versions of those words. I have no idea what you're saying. I don't use that word. Equimonious. Equiminity. Equimonious synergization of the breathing and the body. How's that? Zachary.

Yeah, so nice and balanced and calm. So from a leadership point of view, you want to be calm. You don't want to be out of control, right, mentally or emotionally. And the breath can get you there as well. So there's a lot of practical uses, and it feels freaking good. You know what I mean? It did feel really good it was really good i feel like for me when when i'm trying to get something done really really fast

and i'm stressing about like if i'm working on something and i'm just like man i gotta eat me real quick and i try to just go in the kitchen and eat a meal in like five minutes i'm prepping trying to like just get back to work i'll find that i'm i'm doing a lot of kind of like upper chest breathing chest breathing yeah after a while i'll i'll recognize it and i'll go and i'll take like like a big deep breath and for the first time i'll feel the breath like like down here it'll feel like it's almost like like stretching it's been contracted for so long that i have to like stretch it out tissue right and after the box breathing i felt i felt like that was like as loose as it's been

right in a long time if not forever the box breathing actually felt like a stretch in my intercostals right there's like a resistance trend then you're trying to get additional sips in as you move the interval up up in time which will describe right and part of that is physiological you're you're expanding the breathing kind of vessel right you're expanding the chest a lot of times you know we just breathe in the upper chest especially if you're a mouth breather now mouth breathing is not you know this hole here was huge. Fucking mouth breathers. Come on. Damn mouth breathers. You see them all over the place, you can point them out a mile away. This is meant really primarily for eating, you know, stuffing food into our gullet and communicating, right? In both cases, you know, we could probably do less of each, you know?

Keep this thing sealed. And in breathing, the only time you really want to breathe through your mouth is if you need to take in massive quantity of oxygen in particular like during a workout right or a firefight or something like that and so you will mouth breathe then but as soon as you get back into the clear it's back into the nose now there's a few reasons the nose obviously will warm air will cool air that's important for us it'll clean the air out but it also um the nose directs the air into our abdomen or, or into our diaphragm or beneath that. So when, if you imagine, just go, you know, go like this through your mouth. Where's the air go right here, upper chest. Now breathe into your nose.

I mean, it's real. Yeah, it's real. It's going, it's going deep into our, you know, it's not actually going into our belly or else it'd be belching all the time, but it feels, it's real. It's real. It's going deep into our, you know, it's not actually going into our belly or else it would be belching all the time. But it feels like it's going deep into our belly. And you want to imagine it going down. Your belly is going to expand. And then your diaphragm will expand. And then your chest. And so you're literally getting a full measure of air.

Three times as much fuel. If you consider air, oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, to be your primary source of fuel. Without it, how long do we live? Yeah, it makes all life impossible. A few minutes, maybe. There's some life left. The new paleo diet is to breathe like a mother. Breathe well. And your secondary

source of fuel that's most important is fresh water. And it's, you know, hard food is your third, right? We always focus on the third source of fuel. It's true. And it's, you know, hard food is your third, right? We always focus on the third source of fuel. It's true. And the most important fuel is your breath

and followed by fresh water, right? So we want to base... It's too simple, Mark. I know. Nobody wants simple solutions for complex problems. Jeez. Enough with the breathing.

Tell me how to crush my water. Exciting stuff. All right. Wait, you Barbell Shrug guys completely lost it if you're going to do a whole episode on breathing. Which pre-workout? That's what's really important. Which magic supplement is going to help me PR? It's going to make me win the CrossFit Games.

I'll breathe. How many drugs as well? Give me the good stuff. All right. So the warrior breath, right? You're Rich Froning. He probably does this. I find that a lot of athletes just going

They naturally do this. Exactly. The highest performers they're like, oh, I don't really pay attention to what I eat or I don't pay attention to this or that. And if you were to just kind of observe them for a day or they talk about like, I really don't do programming. But then you follow them and it's like, well, they are. They but they're they're so tuned in and some people just naturally

more tuned in right and repetition of it and then other people and most that comes from experience and then a lot of people need like all these tools to know what their heart rate is or you know that's one of my explanations with hrv people ask for hrv i was like rich froning doesn't need hrv because he wakes up and he goes, oh, I need to go hard today. I need to go easy. And other people need like this metric. But anyways, I'm skipping ahead of you. The more in tune you are with your body through breathing and meditation exercise,

the more you can tell right away, like what do I need today? And that's kind of the way. I've gotten away. I have a loose structure of programming, but I allow myself to come in and kind of feel my body and get a sense for where I'm at. And then I'll modify the program, you know, to meet that need. So I find that that gets more and more important as I get older and older too. Yeah, sure. To have some flexibility. Right. Yeah. Not my body. Cause that doesn't exist there, but in terms of what I try to do with my body, be flexible.

Important. Yeah. So what you were alluding to, the kind of the charge yourself up, prepare you for battle, prepare you for that, you know, for peak performance in the WOD, we call that the warrior breath. And that's that forceful inhale

through the nose and then release. And that release is a complete relaxation just like, like in that moment, all is good. And then, right? relaxation just like like in that moment all is good and then right and we did a nine nine cycle and then in the ninth one now this is really interesting this is really more for the mind we held our breath not to the point where we get dizzy and you know

hallucinate or anything like that although that will happen on occasion um it's great it's to have that clarity and the concentration of in this space in this space we held our breath for at least a minute right i don't i wouldn't time it but a minute maybe a minute and a half and some of those uh there's not a lot of mental activity like you're not solving complex math problems you're not thinking about your workout you're just allowing your brain to like really really focus and and drop into that, that present moment awareness. One of the things I noticed was, and I, I like to meditate and, um, and my style of

meditation I've been following has been more like, you know, you just walk, you sit down, you follow your breath. Mindfulness. Yeah. And, and I noticed that, you know, it might take me 10 or 15 minutes to drop into a state that I'm kind of going for. Or maybe not going for. There's not really a goal there. Sure.

It occurs. Yeah, it's an experience. And then we came in here and I noticed that within a few minutes, in a very short period of time, I dropped right in. And I was way more aware of my body than some of the other stuff that I do. Right. And so I think that you hit on the head, this, the breath training is a, um, you know, it's a, it's a rocket ship to, you know, to concentration and meditative states, which then, uh, we anchor, right. So when, you know, at the end of it, you note that state, you know, you know what got you in there.

And then you eventually can get back there with a single breath. Right? That single breath can be a perfect breath. And your brain just goes... You're just training your mind.

You know where that state is and you just drop and then you're ready for anything. Right? All your senses are on full alert but you're present. That's when your power is going to be most available to you.

It's not... There's no concepts getting in the way. Does that make sense? Yeah. You don't have to think. All the thought has been removed, and you're just perceiving reality, and you're ready for action, whatever that might be.

And if you're trained, that action will flow out of you really well. Just in a simple, very practical way, if you do that every morning, because I could even feel myself towards the end. We were doing 10 seconds was the maximum. So 10 seconds in, hold, fix up. So by the end of that, I'm a little bigger. I'm consuming more. That was the box breathing, right?

I can feel myself having to go, okay, look, you can feel it getting a little short. You want to take a breath. Hold on. Stay, stay, stay. And I would feel my concentration sort of peak. Like nothing else get in my way, but really kind of a peak intensity. Then when 10 seconds gets to release, I just felt like I told i felt like my the you see just black space behind your eyelids but then that moment of just release it felt like the room was 100 yards in every direction it was just

me in a big black space it felt such like a powerful relief and i imagine if you just build that skill where you start feeling okay i'm freaking out with a little bit of my breath i'll just hold on hold on hold on then it'll be over yeah i mean how beneficial is that during a tough wOD where most people freak the fuck out, and that's what stops your performance. Not your body, you just lost control. You're training your willpower, your intentionality through the breath, and ultimately

if you look at a workout, that's what we lose. Obviously, you fatigue, but you lose it with the breath and your heart rate well before your muscular fatigue in most cases right and so that's what throws people off so if we can keep that under control and learn how to activate that recovery breath you know you know in an instant right so let's say you're in

the middle of a set you know let's say you're doing grace and and you you know unless again you can just bang out 30 perfect clean and jerks which i can't you know i'm going to be doing them and maybe three sets 10 as soon as that 10th rep right i'm not like going i am literally just going and it brings me back to the same state we were in in the mind gym. And boom, energy rushing back in. Mind's clear. There's the barbell. I merge with it again.

Boom, there we go. Actually, that's a clean and jerk, not a snatch. So we use the breath not just for an energy state management during the training, but in an interval sense, we use the breath to come right back to the presence because in the present, if we're in receive mode, think about this concept of yin and yang, in receive mode, energy can flow back in. And if we invite it in visually

so that we add a little visualization to that, boom, put the barbell down, inhale, visualize just white light energy just streaming into your body, just flooding your body. Right? Exhale that nice, calm ha. Next second. In. Ha.

All that light energy in. Boom. Guess what? You just recovered in about five seconds. Yeah. Back on the bar, go. So the breath can be a remarkable tool. This is Tim Ferriss, and you are listening to Barbell Shrugged.

For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. Barbell Shrugged is brought to you by you. To learn more about how you can support the show, go to barbellshrugged.com and sign up for the newsletter. Last but not least on the show, we have one of the most motivating moments we ever personally experienced on the podcast. And he's the only guy that can actually shut us up.

Tony the Fridge. Now, Tony had a tough year after doing the podcast in 2015, but in 2016, I think he's back out on the road with the fridge on his back. It's an incredible story. Let's show him some love. Let's help him get back out there. Enjoy what Tony the Fridge has to say. If you don't go to the gym motivated to hear this guy talk, you ain't alive, man. Enjoy it.

We are up here in Vermont. Today we've got Tony the Fridge hanging out with us. Hi, guys. How are you doing? Thanks for joining us, man. We're going to be talking about, you do some endurance, like ultra endurance type stuff while carrying a fridge. We're going to talk a little bit about that. Everybody's like,

whoa, whoa, whoa, what? Did I hear you correctly? Yeah. And, yeah, it never crossed my mind to carry a fridge that wasn't going

into an apartment or in a house. But, yeah, make sure you go to barbellshark.com, sign up for the newsletter before we get

too far into this. Just stop what you're doing, sign up for the newsletter before we get too far into this. Just stop what you're doing, sign up for that, and then we'll let you know when we come places like up here to Vermont or whatever. I'm having some issues. We don't know what they are. Tony. How are you doing?

Thanks for joining us. Hey, thanks for inviting us, guys. Yeah, we've been hearing a bunch of cool stories about you, strapping fridges to your back, running 100 miles at a time. Yeah. I heard you did 40 marathons in 40 days carrying a fridge. A fridge like that fridge. A big-ass fridge.

Yeah, it's a real fridge. The challenge you're talking about around the length of great britain and um what what you you don't you don't know was that on day five i broke my left femur which you broke your you broke your femur you broke your leg on day five out of 40 yes tony hardest bone toest bone to break. How'd you do that? Well, basically, all day long that day, I'm running down the road in Scotland through the mountains. And so there's hundreds of people, you know,

kind of fridge fans in Great Britain and come and say hello to me. Fridge fans. Are you more famous there than here? Well, probably yes. Okay. That's why I'm here. To get more famous here. Yeah.

People are going to be looking at it now, man. Well, you know, the whole thing about the fridge, and seriously, is that, you know, I want people to ask questions on why. Because the why is really, really important. And yes, it is that I've lost my mind a little bit. There's no doubt about that. But I would certainly recommend that.

We're in good company. Sometimes you really need to lose your temper, don't you? You know, I think the world was shaped by unreasonable people and I certainly fit into that category. So why do you carry this fridge? The wife wouldn't let me have the cooker. No, the truth is that I needed something really heavy. Cancer kept coming back, knocking on my door and taking another family member.

So, you know, I don't know, I hope you guys haven't experienced, but I know the listeners, there'll be people who've lost people they love to cancer and this awful disease slowly takes somebody you love and you watch them, you know, disintegrate in front of you. And that burden of that awful disease is on the whole family so you know the first time I ran with the fridge was for a crazy bet yeah I wanted to raise money for cancer charity and I couldn't because I was well known as a good runner and you know it was always the people in the office who didn't run, who got the donations, you know. So out of frustration, I said, I'll tell you what, I'm going to run that half marathon,

the Great North Run in England. I'll run it carrying a fridge. What made you think fridge? Is that the first thing you went towards? You know, I did think about it, you know, before I chose a fridge. And it was mainly down to moving parts you know a fridge is big and it's heavy cooker things have to be taken off the grills and that come off

to be cleaned i want i needed something big and heavy put it on a harness stick it on my back you know and that's why everybody knows how heavy refrigerators they can sympathize i was wondering how you did it you have a harness and it and it's there's a harness that holds it on you so you don't have to like use your hands or wrap your arms around it or try to balance it. It's strapped to your back. There's a great story about the harness. There's actually a phenomenon which all America will soon become aware of

and the phenomenon's called fridge love. Fridge love? Fridge love, yeah. Are these like fridge fuckers? It's spreading right now. Basically what it is, if you come across a chap who's uh when you see the magnitude of the task ahead when i'm carrying a fridge it's not easy you know it's a really really brutal thing to do i wouldn't recommend it and i'm not going to take your recommendation when people see what

what i'm going through and how passionate I am about what I'm doing then it has an effect because they most likely will know of somebody that's been affected by cancer when they know why you know traffic comes to a halt people are very respectful people help me everywhere I go it is a really wonderful uh sense of community that you get. You know, I lost a dad when I was 12, and, like, lots of people lose loved ones and lose parents. I didn't handle it very well at all, you know, and in our case, the community didn't come to our house, and, you know, my mum, the widow, you know, we were all lost. And I really didn't have such a good belief in community anymore.

I didn't like the world very much. And when I got upset, I would just run away. And I ran and ran and ran and ran and I never looked back. I never knew where I was going, so that wasn't a worry. I just lived in a moment and just kept moving. When I was tired, I slept. When I woke up, I started running again. When my mind wanted to think about my life,

I shut it up, clammed it up, and locked it in a box. The only thing I thought about was breathing, moving forward, living, surviving. Basic things, how do my feet hurt so bad? What can I eat? Just little things like that, no thoughts whatsoever. So when you see me running down a road on a motorway in the middle of nowhere, that's pretty much what's going through my head.

I don't, I'm no different. The doctors said as a child i was emotionally disturbed i still am i'm actually more disturbed wow so so the fridge is just a great way to grab people's attention and they identify you carrying that fridge with just raising cancer awareness yeah you know it's you know, what started out as a fundraising stunt, there was outcomes that you just don't expect. You don't expect that people from all around the world start messaging you on Facebook and Twitter

and, you know, sending you letters and photographs and telling you stories about, you know, how their children lasted a little bit longer because they wanted to see the fridge man in the marathon. Oh, God. You know, some really heavy, sad stories. And these things you just don't expect. And for me, it really took over my life, you know.

And for the last few years, I gave up my business, my job. I walked out on everything I was doing. I stood up from my desk and I knew I couldn't go back to work until I was finished this challenge and what I was going to do. I've always been heading to America. My uncle lived here for most of his life, came back to England. He was like a second father to me because I lost my father when I was young. And I was so excited, you know, 40-odd-year-old, and put my uncle Charles coming back from California, and he's going to settle down with his sisters, my mum and my aunt, and be close to me.

I'm going to take him to the football match and we're going to have a great time. And then mum has to break it to me that he's coming home to die. You know, he was like a cross between Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Evel Knievel. We called him Bumpsy. He was an adventurer, you know. That kind of got his spirit, I think.

You know, I'd say to anybody out there if you ever lose somebody you love keep them alive by doing something they would do be adventurous if they're adventurous read a book if they like to read buy a dog if they had a dog keep them alive you know do things take some of their beliefs and their moral

values and bring them into your life and then you're never going to lose them and that's basically what I did so I had this conversation with my Uncle Charles and said okay then you're going to die, what are you going to do I've got to do something, I'm going to run across America

as a tribute to your life and what can I do and he said well when you get to the other side if that's what you're going to do I need you to go to Lake Zaka inia i used to swim there with the boys and fish and log cabins this is whenever i'm in a bad place i just think about them days and beautiful sunny days everything was going great california was brilliant business was brilliant everything was great and we mean the boys would be swimming in that lake so go for a

swim for me so the first thing we've got to we need to rewind a little bit yeah i've run across you know countries and done lots of things before i don't know how i survived some of the brutality of and the the magnitude of the challenges i've done are really hard for me to even look back on at times. So pure luck and community got me through most of them. I'm not a superman. I'm just an ordinary bloke. I'm nothing more than that. I'm as ordinary as grass.

I'm not some crazy ultra athlete with all these support crews and what have you. No, I'm going to come across America and my wife and kids will be in a motorhome and our whole life will come to a halt. My wife's going to sell her business and I'm going to take six months of my life paying a tribute and hopefully giving hope to people fighting cancer. Hopefully all of America will wonder

why this crazy guy's running down the highway with a fridge on his back. But I'm going to run a marathon a day. Oh, man. You know, I will slowly be depleted and bashed around by this fridge. And, you know, it's something I have to consider my own mortality when I'm doing something like this. I've come close to the dark side a few times. I've been in trouble. I've been found in the middle of motorways unconscious.

All kinds of things have happened to me on my adventures. So it's not going to be easy. And I don't for a moment stand here absolutely confident that I'm going to make it to Los Angeles. But, you know, the whole Tony the Fridge story has been about me taking on impossible journeys. You know, how I got through to Land's End, 1,052 miles from John O'Groats in Scotland

all the way through England down the East Coast, popped into London to see the Queen and then off to Land's End. And, you know, that was 1,052 miles. I barely made it. In fact, three or four days after it had ended, I remember turning to my wife and saying, babe, is it really over?

I said, I don't think I'm just going to run across America because that's just not how it's going to be. I'm running 2,811 miles from New York all the way through Los Angeles. You know, the... To run across the country without the fridge is a Herculean amazing feat. We were at Princeton,

and a guy gave the keynote mike and i were there what was the name i don't know his first name oliver was last name i can't remember or he's he's i forget the name of the book i'm just it's been a long couple days but it was a herculean effort for him to get across the country just just running yeah just just with people around him no no extra load so it is quite the challenge it's extraordinary to hear you say you're gonna just boldly go into the void because this is what you believe in 100 and you're going to see your best effort will come i guess you gotta have faith that something will summon out of you that you'll rise you know the um you know i've only one times uh in you know in all the times I've been doing challenges, I actually come really, really close to death.

And, you know, I look back and I call it the rocky moment, you know, where, you know, I'm in the last round and I think I'm beaten. And, excuse me, because it gets a bit emotional sometimes. So I turn to the wife who's a supporter and a runner with me, and, you know, when you know when you've finished, you know, it's never like you imagine.

And in a way, the weight was lifted off my shoulders because I knew it was over. I couldn't go another step, you know. But the crowd, you know, in this half marathon, the Great North run the biggest half marathon in the world and 56,000 runners in it I started the race I've been celebrated by the crowd I had a broken leg I was in a

bad way I just ran the length of the country and I knew I couldn't make it a mile but then I heard that little Matthew spurs local lad cystic fibrosis big fan, was waiting at the time bridge, and that's a mile away. So I said to the wife, maybe I can make it to Matthew. And she's like, God, sir, you're not going to do it. You were supposed to just wave at the start of the race. So I'm just going to run to Matthew.

So everybody's cheering every single step, and the whole world's going crazy. And I get to the bridge, and I can't find Matthew, you know, I get lost in the crowd. And so I keep saying to the wife, well, you know, as soon as they stop cheering, I'll just, you know, a couple of miles down the road is where our business is. When we get to the business, I'll stop.

You know, as soon as they stop cheering, I'll stop, you know, as soon as it's stopped here, and I'll just walk off, but people just cheered louder and louder, you know, singing songs about me, chanting my name, and, you know, and cheering me, pat me on the back, and saying well done, and but I was finished, I was finished, and, you know, a few tears came came and I felt happy inside. I knew I couldn't have given any more than I've given. So I just needed to go a few more steps and I know it's over. And I wasn't going to make it to the end of the race, but people just kept cheering and I just kept going a few more steps. I learned something that day.

I learned that if you can get three steps, you can get pretty much anywhere as long as you don't think beyond the three steps. So that's all I kept doing. I just kept taking three more steps and eventually I made it to the end. But that was after a 1,000-mile challenge. So this is 2,811 miles, different temperatures,

different foreign country, you know, all kinds of different problems. I'm not going to know many people, et cetera, and people aren't going to know really what I'm about a lot of the time. So, you know, the magnitude of the challenge is extraordinary, and to be honest it's impossible but then again

I think it is possible I kind of hold on to that that it is possible maybe not be me that's able to do it but it is possible and I think it's possible to beat cancer

I think we could be just you know a few hundred thousand dollars away from finding the answer because only money can pay for research and you know so we have to feed that beast and keep taking it on you know cancer knocked on my door

I didn't start this fight. And, you know, I think if cancer was a human being assassinating children, parents, and how many graveyards have got, you know, Einsteins in them, people who could have changed the world, people who could have found a cure for cancer, could have found a cure for many things. How many amazing, wonderful people are lying in graveyards taken from us by cancer so you know we've got to make a stand as a as a the human race against this awful disease everyone's got

to take it on because it's getting worse in the next you know 20 years up to 50 percent of us are going to be affected by cancer you know what what if there's a tipping point what if it's a plague that's going to wipe us out so you know as far as i'm concerned i'm going to take it on and it's this crazy old bloke with a fridge now what i'm doing all that you know i'm not a fundraiser. I believe people go to work, some of them work in mines, some of them work in high buildings, some of them police officers risking their lives on a daily basis. These people go to work, they work really hard, and then they see this crazy guy with this huge burden

taking on this Sisyphus task. Sisyphus was a Greek mythology, wasn't it? With the boat up the hill? Yeah, he just had to keep pushing that stone boat up the hill yeah you just had to keep pushing that stone ball up the hill you know so that's me that's my task and so all the hard working

people realise what it's about and then they make a donation so we have donators and then we have people like me I'm a catalyst I'm here to cause a fire I'm here to start an fire. I'm here to start an argument. And I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, kick your ass with cancer is what I'm going to do.

You know, picked on the wrong, look, I'm that guy in the pub that you don't hit over the head with a chair. I'll still be fucking standing there looking at you. And so, you know, cancer came, knocked on my door and, and it's time I, you know i ended this this fight once and for all wow that is uh crazy inspiring uh i don't think anyone's ever almost brought me to tears or pretty much brought me to tears left us basically speechless so if someone wanted to help contribute to your fight and help you specifically is there

something that they could do that is there any place that you need help and there's something they could do to help you yeah yeah definitely um you know and if you ask my family they'll tell you i do need help as well but especially as my teenagers this year dad needs help but you know the uh you know i'm going to run across america i'm going to set off most probably in june i'm going to run the cannonball run and um we're going to be socially um interacting with with everybody through through twitter and podcasts and facebook um i have a, tonythefridge.com, and I carry a GPS, a military standard GPS, on me at all times.

So you can actually click on the page, find the fridge, and that'll zoom in. I actually met a great chap this weekend introduced to me by Joe DeSena, who was one of the top guys at Google. So there's still an opportunity and a possibility that I'm going to have a Google Street camera on me. Oh, wow.

So you can log in and actually see what I can see as I run along the road. Oh, yeah. Is that like a Google Glass or something? Yeah. So this is something that really could happen. The Google chap was really excited about it. So, you know, put a bit of pressure there

and see if we can get that we have a friend at youtube that does uh live streaming stuff yeah yeah maybe we could we could reach out to him and maybe you know he's probably listening to this right now you know if he is he should contact you yeah he should definitely you know i think the um the phenomenon that the the the fridge can cause. And I say the fridge, I mean the sight of this chap with a fridge. It's not me. I'm not a superhero or anything like that.

It could be one of you guys carrying that fridge. No, no. No, really, no, it could. No, really, it could be one of you guys. It could be all three of us, actually. But what happens when people see that fridge and they know what it represents, they know it's about fighting cancer,

and they can see the turmoil that I'm going through. It has an effect upon people, and a brilliant effect, a Spartan-like effect. You know, and I'll get to a busy junction where the traffic's moving fast, et cetera. That traffic will come to a gradual halt. It's like a parting of the waves. And the other thing about traffic,

when traffic's moving past you and you're running along the side of the highway, you get cheers from the cars. People jump, you know, they'll pump the air, go on the fridge and they shout stuff. If you're in Scotland, they shout like, what the fuck are you doing? But like the rest of the world, like in England,

it's like, go on, son, go on, son. You know, but the, but when traffic's like, go on son, go on son. But when traffic's parked, it's like those Spartans resting on the hill and the windows come down and they share your air and you can see that thought. No doubt they're probably thinking about people they've lost, thinking about the challenges that they've seen cancer put on their families. And there's an eerie feel to the air sometimes,

in a way, you know groups of people en masse going quiet because you're passing by. So it's not me. It's that demonstration of burden, that demonstration of that cancer. It just takes them back to their loved ones. That's what they're thinking about. I know that's what it is.

I get so many messages. If you ever go on any of my Just Giving pages and Facebook page, you know, watch the videos on my Facebook page on Tony the fridge you'll have some great fun some of them were a little bit brutal apologize for the last one that's just gone up but you know you really need to see sometimes what what we're really going through so but it is there is some quite tough scenes in there

so sorry about that but what I would really like people to see is the comments look at the comments that people leave and you realise that my sadness and my grief is the same for lots of other people. I'm not unique. We're being decimated by this awful disease and we've got to start demonstrating different habits to our children and we need to guide the the rebellious youth which you know you know i know when i grow up i'm going to tell all the adults really

what it's like to be young you know i'm 50 years old i still feel like one of those rebellious youngsters but the um you but we have to show them that to eat healthy and what have you, we need to beat cancer in lots of ways. We need to beat cancer by making donations to cancer charities. It doesn't have to be mine. I will not measure my success

by the amount of money in the bank for cancer at the end. How can you do that? I've met mothers of children. I could tell you so many stories. It's not about the money. That's an outcome that we can hope for. The more the merrier. Money will help beat cancer. But it's about hope. It's a symbol of hope. It's a symbol of me saying, you know what, let me take a bit of that weight for a bit

just for a little bit I'll run across America for you and when I'm finished, I'm going to disappear into the ether I'll change my image, I'll shave off the goatee, I won't look the same and you'll never hear from me again because, you know

just these things, they're whimsical tales. They only meant to last so long. I've ran my last runs in the UK. I've got a commitment with London Marathon next year, which will be a bit of PR and what have you,

promoting the run across America. But, you know, I'm still being asked every day, come and run in my marathon, come and run in my half marathon, come and run in my 10K. And I really, really appreciate all that support. But it gets to a point where, you know, I have to think, am I going there for the cheer?

And I'm not. You know, I'm going to see people who know what it's about. They've got the message. I need the drama. We need to put it on a new audience. We need to shake up America. This is how the whole thing began. My Uncle Charles, he made his home in Santa Barbara, California

and several towns around there over the years. I've got family all over the States and in New Mexico. All of my cousins and what have you are spread all around this beautiful country. So I made a promise to a man, which he wouldn't mind if I didn't keep it, but I would. And I made a promise to him

that I was going to run across America as a tribute to his life, and I'm going to go for that swim and I just hope that I just hope that people see it for what it is it's not a demonstration of you know I'm not Joe

DeSena, I'm an ordinary bloke as ordinary as grass and I'm really just going to take on this impossible challenge because cancer is an impossible challenge, and if I can get the end of mine, maybe you could get the end of yours.

That's all it's about. It's nothing else. All I'll ask is people follow me on Twitter, Tony the Fridge. Google Tony the Fridge, and you'll see all the crazy stories and daft videos on YouTube and what have you you know there's even me singing on stages with bands behind me after running multiple marathons there yeah

it's all a little bit nuts and a little bit surreal but you know we're gonna make a whole new story when we run across the states and i think that you know that this is going to be one one hell of a fantastic phenomenon i think that the you know we're going to take our mind off of the of the bad things and we're going to get together and um you know we're going to instill some belief to those people fighting this disease on a daily basis. And show the world that this can be carried. Yeah. All the way to the finish line.

You know, I do a little chat around the primary schools and that. And my chat's always headed, if I can do that, you can do this. Yeah. That's all it's really about. Basically what you do, right? You're climbing up, you do not allow your voice inside of you that makes decisions,

that congratulates you, that gets scared. That voice is not allowed to speak. So I don't know if you've ever been sat on a step at the end of your garden or whatever contemplating making a decision whether it's quitting smoking or quitting the relationship or wanting to buy this car or not, whatever it is, you're sitting there trying to make a decision and you're having a conversation with yourself, you know, and one's saying well, you know, I think you should get it, you deserve it and the other one says well Rwy'n meddwl, rydych chi'n cael sgyrsiau gyda'ch hun. Ac mae un yn dweud, Wel, dwi'n meddwl y dylai i chi ei gael, mae'n dderbyn.

Ac mae'r arall yn dweud, wel, ie, rwy'n gwybod, ond beth os bydd angen arall fylch fawr yn dod i mewn, neu un o'r hurrequin yn arall, ac mae'n ddewis y llen, a'r hyn a'i gael. Felly, rydych chi'n cael y debat hwnnw. Rwy'n meddwl i fyny, Pwy ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n ddweud, ydw i'n ddweud, ydw i'n siarad â nhw? Mae'r ddau ohonoch yn gwrando, ac yna un yn dweud nid,? Ydych chi'n ddweud na? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych chi'n siarad â nhw? Ydych allowed to speak you know that you know when I've run up a huge hill 15 miles of

climb all day whatever I get to the top I do not allow that voice to say well done Tony because that same voice that says well done you'd be very careful of that because your subconscious your subconscious is huge and your conscious mind is that. That subconscious, all it wants to do is protect you. You try and do a squat, it says, no, no, you'll fall over. It wants to protect you from yourself. It doesn't trust you with yourself. That subconscious is there just to help you survive. chi gyda'ch hun. Mae'r cymdeithas yno yn helpu i chi fyw. Felly, y ffordd unig i mi

fynd drwy'r pethau hyn yw beidio â'i gael i fynd i fynd i fyny. Oherwydd y sgwrs yw, rydych chi wedi gwneud yn dda iawn, rydych chi wedi rhedeg 20 o ffyrdd, y rhan fwyaf ohonyn nhw yn y dyfodol. Beth dydd da rydych chi wedi cael. Cwmgratulwch eich hun. Edrychwch yn ôl, edrychwch ar yr hyn rydych chi wedi'i wneud. Mae'r sgwrs hwnnw yn 10 munud congratulate yourself take a look back look at what you just did that voice in 10 minutes time comes back you know what it is you know what it is you've done so well today

I know you were going to do 26 miles but you've done so well today I think you can you can go home and have a sleep and a big smile on your face hey why not have a pizza and you quit.

People who quit feel good about quitting at the moment they quit because that subconscious didn't allow, it's a survival thing. It doesn't want you to feel bad. So it gives you reasons to quit. So my problem is when I do what I do, say shut the fuck up don't even speak to me I'm not interested the only thing I think about is assess my situation thinking about the am I running properly is my posture correct do I need to eat and I could eat anything when I'm in that mode I can eat roadkill I've got to get through it.

And whatever it is, protein or whatever, I don't think... You see, because I don't have that voice inside that says, do you know you don't like the taste of whatever that is? It just shut down. I'm a physical mass. If that's protein, I'm eating it. So I'm able to do that because I don't have that voice. Now what happens?

What happened in the 1000 mile challenge? After I'd finished, I let it out. And that voice is not very happy. It's been caged for 40 days. That subconscious has not been allowed to speak. And then it's out I think that's what happens to Vietnam veterans and soldiers

etc, it's not just about the experiences it's the fact that that scared inner child has been closed down you talk to war heroes I've been very lucky in what I do, I've met a lot so you speak to soldiers and you see how did you get through it You talk to war heroes, I've been very lucky in what I do, I've met a lot.

So you speak to soldiers and you see how did you get through it. Me doing what I do, I'm fascinated and I always get the ear of a hero. And I find out about what was he thinking. And he speaks like me and he says, well actually, you know what, you're very quickly, you're frightened for a little while and you realize actually can't have fierce around here that that will cost the life of my of my colleagues i need to be on it and in it and doing it i'm not here to think i'm here to do so that's the more that i have to get in but there's a post challenge stress disorder that comes ymdrech, y disodr ystres sy'n dod ac yn eich cael. Felly mae'n rn gwybod beth, nid yw hynny'n llawer i'w ffwrddio am y gwahanol ymdrin, y llaw arall y byd,

heb gefnogaeth, fel mae ganddyn nhw ar ffwrdd yn y tŷ, ac ati. Yn y DU, mae rhywun ond 10 awr yn mynd i gael rhywbeth sydd angen i chi o'ch dref neu ati. Rwyf yn ffwrdd gwahanol, rwyf yn wlad gwahanol. Dwi ddim yn gwybod unrhyw beth o'r lle, felly dyma'r lle y byddwch from your town or etc. I'm in a different land, I'm in a foreign country. I know nothing of the place so this is where you're really gonna have to rely on a bit of luck and the hospitality of the locals to help get you through you know so it's you're gonna be a dark and scary place at times it's not gonna just it's not just gonna happen

we'll see if we can get every crossfit gym in america to help you out yeah i think yeah yeah really i'm a normal blooper who's who's emotionally disturbed but i mean i must admit i think i think I should deal with t-shirts right emotionally disturbed I am emotionally disturbed yeah yeah I'm not superhuman I'm emotionally disturbed that's what it is so basically and that is true because my emotions aren't normal I genuinely don't have any fear. We've already lived through it. I kind of just think, well, whatever it is, it is. I don't hope for sunny days.

I don't hope for rain. I don't hope for anything when I do what I'm doing. I just get on with the shit in front of us. And like that little kid when I was once running away, I don't look over my shoulder. Doesn't matter how far I've gone and doesn't matter how far I've got to go. I just stay right in that moment

and get through what I've got to get through right there and then. And that's what I can do. That's what I'm, to get through right there and then. That's what I can do. That's my skill. You should be good and fired up now. I think Mike and I both want to wish you guys an amazing 2016. We hope you have an awesome year next year. Set big goals. Embrace change. I know we're taking on a lot of change. We have a lot of stuff we're super excited to show you. I know I have many, many awesome resolutions in mind, Michael.

Starting with to put a little boat into a tiny glass bottle. Going to write a spiritual book. I'm going to start making better shows. 2016 is the year that the show goes to the next level. Tune in. Barbell Shrugged is brought to you by you. To learn more about how you can support the show, go to barbellshrugged.com and sign up for the newsletter.