Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 58 - Taking Your First Step

Episode Date: May 24, 2018

Getting a bit of a history lesson on Mark's younger days when he was afraid to speak in front of people and how hard it is to take your first step to becoming something different. Re-watch the Live Stream: https://youtu.be/ltcKViWsZYA ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

And we are live. Oh my God. What are we doing? We're going to go ahead and record a podcast. No, you shouldn't start now. A lot of this stuff is proprietary. We were just talking about Kratom and stuff like that. I don't think we should be talking about that now.

Well, the thing about it is we've already started. Where are we live at? Right now we're on powerproject.live. That would be the YouTubes. And we should be live on? So right now we're on powerproject.live. That would be the YouTubes. And we should be live on your Facebook right now. When would then be now? Then is now-ish. The answer is soon.

That's what he says in Spaceballs. You ever see Spaceballs? Yeah, it's just been a while. It's when he's watching the part where he, Lord Helmet, he smashes into the He smashes into the thing cuz uh the freaking door flies open or whatever. Yeah, and he watches it and like rewind He's like never play this part again And then they end up watching now and he keeps moving around and as he's moving around he's moving around in real time He's like well, what what time is this and the guys like it like, it's now. He's like, now, now? He goes, yeah, it's now.

He goes, okay, well, when will then be now? And he goes, soon. I just remember the part where like your Schwartz is as big as mine. Yeah. How could anybody ever forget that part? Any of you kids out there that have never seen Spaceballs? It's a must watch. You got to go do your homework and watch Spaceballs.

I was always upset and I'm still upset actually that they never made a sequel to it. I know sometimes sequels kind of ruin things but man I just thought that that movie could use an encore. It was so damn good. Fucking Spaceballs.

Some movies that are funny have had pretty good sequels to them like uh ace ventura comes to mind um dumb and dumber had a really bad a really a really bad sequel to it so it's not always it's not always good to have a sequel with some of these comedies sometimes they run out of they run out of ammunition. The most recent one was pretty good. I don't even know what the title was, but it was like the third Dumb and Dumber. It wasn't too bad. They just keep making them Dumber and Dumber. Dumber and Dumberist.

Anyway, we hopped on here today because of a couple things. I want to update everybody on what the hell's going on. I was in France, and it's true. They actually, when I went to the other side of France, they actually don't wear pants. And there was ladies doing a dance. So, you know, I've heard that as a kid, that they don't wear pants on the other side of France.

And it was true. Were there any hairy armp, that they don't wear pants on the other side of France. And it was true. Were there any hairy armpits? I don't know. I wasn't really looking at the armpits. I heard that was a thing. I did see some very beautiful women. But I also noticed that there was just, for whatever reason, just a lot more guys. There's a lot more dudes.

There's a lot more sticks than there are chicks, at least where I was. But yeah, France and England, I mean, it was an unbelievable trip. Family had a really good time, and we were able to do it up fat, which was super cool. I also wanted to point out that this power project,

the price of admission to get into this power project is, uh, is not free. It's not, uh, it's not cheap. It's not inexpensive. It is always going to be worth it. That's all you need to know is that we are here for you guys. The power project, we're, we're making it live. We're doing lots of things. Andrew has been working really hard. you guys the power project we're we're making it live we're doing lots of things andrew's been

working really hard um andrew had to go to space x which we can't talk about where that is but uh he had to go to arizona and uh he had said too much you said too much did i mess it up you're already halfway there so go for it yeah andrew had to go to arizona and he nearly got arrested but he had to go to this uh space x facility that they have there let's just say and he had to acquire a special satellite and so now we're going to be doing more stuff live and uh we're going to be doing more stuff kind of in correspondence with other people around the globe so that i don't always have to have them here in person. Uh, there is nothing better than having people here in person. Um, but sometimes it's just not possible. There's people that are just too fucking busy. Um, you know, some of the people that I'm getting to know better,

they just simply don't have the time to make it here as super training gym. And by the way, who the hell wants to come to Sacramento, California, right? I kind of like it. I love it. I love where we live. I really do. But other people are appalled by it, let's just say. The other thing I wanted to talk about, I'll just touch upon it a little bit before we move on, but having some family time really gives you some good perspective.

As I'm getting older, I'm starting to recognize that perspective is really crucial. Having perspective on how somebody else feels, having perspective on how your wife or how your husband, how your significant other feels when you do certain things or having perspective on how your children feel about you and with you and all these different things. It's just really, it can really be an eye-opening thing to go through as a parent and to really, you start to just have an appreciation for things on a much higher level. Obviously, when you travel, there's going to be some stresses, but, you know, we were able to kind of go first class and we were able to do things on a much higher level. Um, obviously when you travel, there's going to be some stresses, but, uh, you know, we were able to kind of go first class and we were able to do things on, on, on a large scale. Now, the thing that's important about that and the reason why I bring it up is not to show off and like the pictures of, uh, of us, you know, in that, you know,

in that first class suite, basically all by ourselves and some of the treatment that we got, um, because of the tickets that we got and things like that. It's not, of course, of course, I'm very proud of it. And of course I'm dying to share it with everybody, right? Because it's fucking cool. Um, but it's not really just to show off. It's also to show you guys that hard work can pay off. And I, I don't do that. That's not

something, uh, that I do all the time. I don't splurge like that all the time. Um, I have a nice house. I have an, I have nice cars. I have, I have some nice clothes, but I don't, I don't feel like, uh, and maybe as I become wealthier, who knows, I don't feel my lifestyle's too extravagant. Although on occasion when it's time, we spend the money and we splurge on things such as, uh, we have a beach house in Malibu that we're going to in July or such as, uh, flying overseas first class, um, you know, and, and the different hotels that we got while we were there, but it's taken me a long time to get to this spot. I'm somebody that, uh, as a kid, and even, even as I went past being just a kid and moved past high school

and tried to go to college and failed at that, tried to become a professional wrestler and failed at that. I'm somebody that has just like many of you guys and girls, um, somebody that was scared at one point of somebody that didn't know where I was going. I had, I didn't really have any clue. I would say, I will say this about myself. I will say that I've always been resilient and I did always believe in myself. I always had almost like, almost like an unreasonable, it's almost, it's almost unreasonable for me to think that I was ever going to turn into anything because I didn't really have a particular skill set, but I always knew that something would turn into something over a period of time if I just put in work. And so I, I hung in there long enough. And as you get older, you start to see that that's what matters is just hanging in there. Like let's, uh, let's take Michael Hearn, for example, right? Michael Hearn is, uh, in his, uh, in like his late forties, right? Late fifties.

as Michael Hearn. Let's, let's take Mark Sisson, for example, Mark Sisson is like 60. I want to say Mark Sisson's like 63. Um, Mark Sisson has primal kitchen. Mark Sisson is a big time keto proponent. Um, and also very, very well off. And, um, it does really well in his, in his own right, in a lot of different respects, but Mark Sisson is jacked. And my point is, even though Mark Sisson is not nearly as jacked as michael hearn he's not nearly as big what if mark sisson's life when you go back and look at it say man shit mark sisson was squatting 185 and 225 when he was in his 70s and michael hearn was able to hold on to that until he was 50 and then everything kind of slid downhill which i don't see happening for him he'll probably hold on to it my point is, if you can just fucking hang in there,

you can out survive people. My mother-in-law kind of says this all the time. She said, she's always felt like she was ugly. She never felt like she was real pretty. She goes, now I'm 70 years old. And I look at the other women are seven years old. She's like, I hung on long enough. And she goes, I'm the hot one now.

That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that goes for anything in life. If you can just fucking hang in there for long enough, you she goes, I'm the hot one now. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that goes for anything in life. If you can just fucking hang in there for long enough, you're going to be good at squats. If you can hang in there long enough,

you're going to be good at photography. You're going to be good at videography. You're going to be good at you. You name it. If you hang in there long enough and it's something that you really desire, you're going to end up being good at it. Yeah. It's kind of like standup comedians,

you know, always talk about hard. Would that be impossibly hard? I can't imagine, but you know, they up being good at it. Yeah. It's kind of like standup comedians, you know, always talk about. How hard would that be? Impossibly hard. I can't imagine. But, you know, they, they talk about all the time, like they have to go up like night after night after night and they'll be horrible for who knows how long, however long it takes. But then eventually they kind of, they crack the code or whatever, and then they start

killing on stage and then they just love life. But yeah, that's i was uh talking to name dropping coming up i was talking to uh joe rogan the other day we were texting back and forth and uh my brother and i have been talking to him a lot about kratom and uh he's excited about it and he took it and he was like he's blown away he's like i don't know what the hell you know is happening but uh you know i took the dosage that you guys told me to take. He took the type of kratom that we told him to take, which is from a company called Urban Ice, if you want to look it up and investigate it yourself.

And he was like, dude, my anxiety is fucking shot. It's gone. It's like just non-existent when he's taking kratom. Now, I'm not going to sit here and promote it to you guys and say that that's going to be the result for everybody. That's what he has felt off of it. And I just think that, you know, people should do some of their own research, do some of their own investigating, poke around. There's some, there's quite a bit of negative information on Kratom on the internet, and there's quite a bit of positive information look it over check it out my brother talks about it quite a bit my brother just did a kratom movie i was just in los angeles this morning actually flying back from seeing the premiere of his movie last night movie so cool how was it it was fucking great yeah he did it he did

a good you know my brother my brother in some in some weird way is like he's kind of unassuming sometimes i mean now he's his figure you know his body his physique and stuff is getting a lot better and he's a lot leaner and he's always been a strong guy but he's getting stronger um but he's a little bit of a sleeper in terms of uh i guess i guess you wouldn't think that he'd have like an artistic side to him. And he really does. He, he, there's an art to making films and there's definitely an art to making documentaries and does a fucking great job of it. There's a really good job. He does a really good job of, uh, of making movies.

And so, um, I really was impressed with the film. Um, you know, it talks a lot about, you know, the, know, the ups and downs of Kratom, the positives and negatives, in addition to talking about, you know, why people would use it. So a lot of a lot of the film talked about the opioid addictions that are going on and all the deaths that have happened from that. And in addition to that, it was also, you know, just just talking about how the different effects that people had with Kratom. And so my brother did a good job. And all of his films always have a personal touch. And that's what we're working on with our nutrition movie that we're working on. We're working on adding a personal touch to it.

Because right now we just have a lot of interviews. And so we have to go back and uh we got to interview uh we got to interview my mom my dad and we got to get just more of a personal story in there which is not hard which is the reason why we haven't filmed any of it yet because we know that it's just there whenever we want to film it but from an emotional standpoint it would be difficult because talking to my mom about uh you know her losing weight and everything else is it's, it's, uh, it's a loaded, it's a very loaded topic. And, um, you know, it doesn't do anybody any good to, to go in and say, you, you know,

you, you eat like shit, you know, just, you know, it's gotta be a, uh, a more general approach. My mom, just like thousands and thousands and maybe millions of Americans, um, have tried, she's tried to lose weight a bunch of times and she's succeeded many times. My mom in the course of her life has probably lost 200 pounds or so. She lost 20 here, 20 there, 40 there, 60 there. Anyway, that's kind of a long story kind of associated with all that. But what we're going to talk about here today is we're going to talk about here today is we're going to talk about breaking out. We're going to talk about how you do it. You know, how do you execute some of this?

And I also wanted to show you guys, because I think this is important. Like, I prepare for stuff, right? But I also am a big believer in just fucking going with the flow and having stuff come from your heart and not have a lot of stuff rehearsed and so when we do this podcast sometimes i'll take more notes but as we go i'll take more notes right now all i have is this sheet which has this on it right here which i'm showing to the i got us on instagram live for a few minutes but it just says breaking out and it says aka starting out um and that's pretty much what's on there that's pretty much all that's on there i wrote down one other thing on there which i'll

get to in a few minutes um my point of showing that is is that uh this is not like a rehearsed thing this is not like a speech that i'm, I'm preparing. I feel that it's important to have it just kind of flow. Um, little Wayne actually, you know, I thought like what little Wayne said is amazing. A little Wayne is obviously an artist, a recording artist that's on a, uh, you know, just on an amazing level. But he said, Hey, if I write stuff down, that's the stuff that people can take. And he's like, you know, he didn't believe in writing shit down. Um, he said every once in a while, he'll write down a word and then he'll play off the word. And, uh, he would kind of just, uh, he kind of just go from there, but I kind of feel the same way. I don't feel like I

need to have a whole script over here to talk about breaking out. So how this kind of came to be is, uh, here at Slingshot, we have, uh, we have Joey who works in, in our, in our store. We have a store here at 855 Riverside Parkway, suite number 10. If you ever want to come check out Slingshots, hip circles, gangster wraps, knee sleeves, all of that. We sell everything here. Stores open every single day, Monday through Monday, and you come check it out. But Joey was watching an old podcast I did with our boy, Tim Ferriss, who now lives in Austin, Texas. He used to live out here in the San Francisco area. And in that interview, I actually think it's one of the better interviews that anyone's

ever done with me. It really gives you some insight as to who I am because we talk about the powerlifting career. We talk about the business and you get to kind of see most people don't really talk to me that much about the business side of things. And I think that as I was mentioning with my brother, my brother's not assuming I think that I might be similar when it comes to this side of me, because I feel that, uh, I've been clever. I've been creative and I've been mindful. I've been paying attention the entire time. Um, you know, almost, I almost, I almost feel like I've, I've been, uh, I've been kind of like waiting for this moment to like explode. And I still don't feel like I've, I've like explode. And I still don't feel like I've fully exploded yet. I still don't feel like that I arrived yet.

There's a Mike Tyson clip. And I don't know how you can look it up or how you can pull it up. But there's a Mike Tyson clip that is very like, it's very close to my heart. There's actually two clips of him. One is him coming to the ring, and it's a documentary that was made on Mike Tyson. And when he's coming to the ring, it's in black and white. And I think, if I can remember correctly,

this is all in the same scene, maybe. So before this happens, before Tyson starts going towards the ring, he's a Golden Gloves boxer. He's an amateur boxer. He is in a parking lot. He's got his gloves on. He's got his shorts on.

He looks ready to fight. His coach is with him, Teddy Atlas, who I've met before. I used to train at the Catskill gym in Albany or in Catskill, New York. I used to train at that same exact gym. So I've met Teddy Atlas before, but Teddy Atlas is talking to him and Mike Tyson starts to cry because Mike Tyson's about to fight. And Teddy Atlas is like, Mike, what's wrong? He's like, man, I don't know. Like I just, he, he, Mike Tyson is, is folding up right before his very eyes. He's a 17 year old kid.

He's, uh, he's getting really upset. He's probably, probably has a lot of anxiety at that point. Probably thinks that he can't win. He probably is terrified that the other guy is going to beat him. He's probably, uh, scared that all the training that he did is going to blow up in his face. And this other guy is going to punch him out. I mean, he's going in a rent in a ring, right? And he's going to, he's going to duke it out with somebody else. So there's even just a prospect of getting hurt. But more so than anything, he's folding up because he's lost confidence in himself. And his trainer comes over to him and just starts rubbing on the back of his neck

doesn't really say much at first and he's like mike calm down he's like this is going to be your this is going to be your event it's going to be your day and you could see mike tyson start to kind of calm down he goes mike i know you have a lot of anxiety. I know you're upset, but you did all the training. He goes, what happens when you get in that ring? He goes, when I get in that ring, I'm the killer. He goes, that's right. When you get in the ring, you're the killer. And he goes, so what are you going to do

when you get in the ring? And he goes, I'm going to open up like a son of a bitch. And he says that, and he does his little nervous tick with his neck, and he's fucking on his way. When he goes to walk to the to open up like a son of a bitch. And he says that, and he does his little nervous tick with his neck, and he's fucking on his way. When he goes to walk to the ring, it's black and white. And the music that kicks in, the second that he gets into the ring, the second he slides and dips underneath the ring ropes, boom,

it turns into color, as if now he can see more clearly, right? Yeah. And Reyes, he says, as soon as I step in that ring, I'm the killer then. And the music hits and it just shows him just fucking people up. Yeah. And I feel like my, I feel like my life feels similar to that. I feel like I'm that scared kid. I feel like I'm the guy crying, who's upset, who's ready to explode into something.

Cause I've been fighting and defending everything that I've been doing and working so hard towards stuff for so fucking long that people don't really have an idea of the amount of rejection and the amount of, uh, things that I deal with on a daily basis, man, I get stiff armed and fucking Heisman trophied every day of my life because I'm trying to get people on the podcast, trying to get people here to super training gym. Um, I'm trying to communicate with people. I'll fly to them. I'll fucking interview them in their bathroom for if they got three minutes in their bathroom. I don't care where it is. I'm trying to just to figure it out.

And, um, and, and it's, that's the way that it should be. You guys shouldn't fucking care. Uh, any, any of the, uh, effort, any of the different things that I'm working towards, those aren't your problems. You're, you're just tuning in because you want to see a good show because you want to see, uh, you know, what we have to offer you. And that's, that's the way it is. I don't fucking give a fuck about your problems either. I'll try to talk you through some things. If I have experience with some of the things that you're dealing with, because I'm the people's coach and that's what we do here at super training gym. Um, but it's not your business to be, uh,

overly concerned with the obligations that I have or with the amount of things that I try to do. The point is, is that you have to know that if you put yourself out there, you are on the front lines and you're going to get fucking hit. You're going to get shot at and you're gonna get fucking hit You're gonna get shot at you're gonna get grenades thrown your way And i'm not trying to by any means to make any sort of real comparison towards war because i'll never downplay that I appreciate All the people that fight for our country But you get you catch my drift if you put yourself out there There's gonna be a lot of stones thrown at you're gonna be made fun of People are gonna talk shit people are gonna say all kinds of stuff

and so the question that we're dealing with for today's podcast is how do you take that first step? Why do you take that first step? And when? Like, well, how do you know? How do you know when you're ready? How do you know when you're ready to even to even take that first step? even take that first step. I'm still on Instagram live, so I'm going to pop off here because we are on Facebook live and we're also on YouTube live. And you guys can go check that out over there. Anyway, a power project that live. So I'll hop off that.

Bam. That's just to give our little IG followers a notification that we're, that we're live here on Facebook and we're live here on powerproject.live, which is on YouTube. Appreciate you guys tuning in. And what we're talking about today is breaking out, starting out. How do you know when to take that first step? Uh, how do you know, you know, when you're ready to do any of that and, uh, how do you even have the balls to do it? Um, before we do that, uh, Andrew, you got any questions that you want to kind of add before I go diving in? Yeah, well, I mean, it's along the same lines of what you're already talking about.

But my question to you, because you kind of mentioned it, that you always felt you were going to be something or do something. But, like, when did you know that people needed to hear your voice? people needed to hear your voice um you know uh there's been a couple times where uh i kind of i mean more recently it's been more it's been crazier because there's been more people saying that uh i've helped them with addiction and some different things like that which is i would say that anybody that becomes popular on youtube or instagram or or really, uh, you're probably not going to identify as much with like Tom Cruise or some of these huge celebrity actors. Right. But some of these people that you get to see more humanized through Instagram and through YouTube, I think when they

start to relate to you more and they hear my story about my brother Mad Dog who passed away from drug addiction, when they hear my brother Chris's story, we were able to save him and he's been sober for four years. When they hear these things and they hear about the diet that we choose to do, the war on carbs, and when they start to hear and see a lot of the progress, that's when I started recognizing just how powerful it really is. So that's actually kind of more of a recent occurrence. But what I would say is I always felt that the proof is in the pudding. You know, the proof is in like, what can you do? Who are you? You know, it's very simple. People are out there and they're looking for, uh, things that they want to hear about things that they want to learn about. And if you wanted to get stronger, I was the guy to go to, to figure out how to get stronger. Um, I still can be that guy from time to time, but I just don't, uh, coach as much. And there's a lot more sharks in the water and I've chosen to kind of move

aside. I got a lot of friends that execute really well with programming and stuff like that. So I choose not to be in that space to make room for them because I think that they deserve their opportunity to work hard and to be able to get paid well for it. But in the different things that I'm trying to execute, when I start to think about why people needed to hear my voice is as simple as they wanted to get better. And what I didn't really recognize at first was, and I, I sort of recognize it, but I didn't recognize it through and through. I didn't recognize it in the message I was putting out. Um, I didn't recognize that it had nothing to do with getting stronger for me. I thought that that's all that

mattered. And now I recognize that that is a large percentage of it. It's a large chunk of it because that's what people associate me with. Uh, but the weight and the strength and the different things people seen the thousand 80 squat and the eight 54 bench, and even weight and the strength and the different things people seen the thousand 80 squat and the eight 54 bench, and even some of the stuff I did raw, um, those are all in a really confined space of my life. I'm 41 years old and those things only really happen in a, about a four or five year span. Um, the amount of time that it was up over 300 pounds for me being 41 years old probably equates to about two years worth. I don't even know if it was two consecutive years worth.

I'm just saying it's probably, you know, whatever is probably around 800 days worth or whatever that would equal out to be. So some of the so some of the things that I'm even known for. They're not a true representation of who I am exactly. It's just what people have seen because that is kind of some of the stuff that we put out there. So it gets to be a little bit confusing at times. have made me recognize just how much people want to hear my voice and just how much people are looking forward to the different things that I'm writing or the different things I'm putting out there. When I worked for Dave Tate and I worked for EliteFTS.com, I had a blog on there under the name Jackass, which was just, it was just for fun. It was just me fucking around.

I messed with everybody else all the time. I talked a lot of shit. Dave Tate thought it'd be a good idea because I had the wrestling background. And so I was able to kind of come out of my shell a little bit through some of those things. I can talk more about that in a minute. But what ended up happening, what ended up being a, uh, a joke ended up turning into something very serious. Uh, I was jackass and it was like, I would write these absurd workouts that weren't even true. I would talk about like doing burpees and bench pressing four Oh five in between doing

like, I just wrote these crazy things and the stuff is still there. It's still on the website. It's like buried deep in there, but it's on there somewhere. Um, what started to happen though, is I started to learn, I was already very obsessed with exercise. I was very obsessed with the nutrition. I was very obsessed with, uh, how performance enhancing drugs play into everything. I was very obsessed with powerlifting and powerlifting gear. I was just fucking nuts about it all. I was probably about 22 years old or so. No idea of any sort of direction that I was going in, but I was also very happy. I wasn't at around that time. Actually, I should say I was probably 23 or 24, just a little bit older because I was already with my wife at that time. My wife, I should say I was probably 23 or 24, just a little bit older because I was already with my wife at that, at that time. Um, my wife I've mentioned many times been a huge, uh, integral part of, of everything, uh, that has been going on. And I, I don't know,

I never, I've never really had depression or, or anything like that. I don't. Um, and I think a lot of that has to do with finding her when i was pretty young you know i think that that's played into it because i've always been relatively pretty happy um but anyway as i was working for elite and as i started kind of messing around i'm talking shit with all these people well dave tate kind of outs me and lets everybody know that it was me that was fucking with everybody well now everybody hates me and there's people actually at west side barbell that hated me which is a problem because there's some big freaks in there and uh he was uh it was weird for a little while going in there and they'd be like you said this about you know me and da da da da and it just got to be it got to be awkward

but uh what started to happen from there is i start once once he kind of let the cat out of the bag i was like all right well i'll stop fucking around with the workouts and i'll just post my real workouts well in some weird way this is gonna sound really weird especially due to the various circumstances that have happened uh i became like a uh a uh an earlier version of silent mike you know a lot of people tuned into what silent mike was doing here at super training gym because he was very relatable because he wasn't a giant fucking monster he didn't look like uh he didn't look like filipino thunder he didn't look like brian shaw he didn't look like me um. He didn't look like me. Um, he was a strong in shape kid, weighed about 200 pounds, which the 200 pound mark is a really good weight because if you're

one 70, you can relate to him. And if you're two 20, you can relate to him. Even somebody who's two 40 can be like, Oh, he's still even a smaller frame guy. Somebody like Ryan Spencer, who's buck 65 or so. A lot of these people can really relate to somebody that's in that weight category. And for me at the time I was, uh, kind of hovering around 200, you know, 220 pounds or so. And, uh, you know, I, I was able to put in a lot of work in a short period of time with my workouts. The workouts were, um, the, the work I got through a lot of work during each workout, I was getting stronger and stronger. People started looking at this and they're like,

wait a minute, this guy was like, not really squatting that well with, you know, 365 just a few months ago. And now he's squatting, you know, you know, whatever it was, 485 for reps or something, you know, there's just, they're seeing a progression. And how old were you? I'm about 24, about 24 at that point. And they're starting to see, uh, some pretty good progression. I think at one point I pulled, uh, like a 675 deadlift. The squat started to kind of come around too. Then I started wearing a little bit more powerlifting gear. And, uh, you know, in, in my time at Westside, I started, I started moving around

like six plates, uh, which is like 585 pounds, 600 ish somewhere in there. Nothing, nothing crazy. I was not, uh, remotely close to what the guys in there were doing, but it was the start of something. Um, being in that environment, that environment is so tense. It's so intense. People might walk into super training and go, oh, fuck, what's going on here? Oh, man, the music's loud. Those guys are pretty big. But we're a bunch of pussycats compared to what they had going on at Westside Barbell.

uh, we're a bunch of pussycats compared to what they had going on at Westside bar bill. Um, Westside bar bill would be if you were driving across the country and you stopped in like Arkansas and you, uh, you're just really needed to take a piss somewhere. And you walked into like a biker bar that had a particular biker gang in

there. And you went to walk in and it just like the music stopped the second you walked in that's what it was like to walk in west side barbell you're like you're just like i do not belong here i'm the odd man out i got i got no and for me you know being 215 220 being in that range it did feel like i had no business being in there because everybody else, the whole gym, everyone's 300 pounds. Louie Simmons was really big into the guys being as big and as powerful as possible. You know, he talked about conditioning work and stuff too, but he wanted them to be heavy. And, you know, like some of the, some of the lighter guys in there, they were just bench only guys.

And Louie didn't even pay attention to half those guys. Louie wanted guys being, you know, three 20 and up basically. And so being in that environment and kind of forcing myself to be in that environment, being in an environment, uh, really, uh, uh, just being super uncomfortable was, was a big part of all of it. Um, I remember at Westside, Westside barbell was so intense that the monolift isn't towards the back of the gym. And when new people would come in, they'd always hang out by the garage, by the door. They'd hang out by the doorway. And you knew when people were legitimate to have to walk through the gym.

And a big builder of strength at Westside Barbell was the squat. So if you were too scared to get anywhere near that, where these guys are squatting, you know, nine and 10 and 11 plates on the bar with bands and screaming and bleeding and yelling motherfucker at each other no one's really talking but every once in a while there's random yelling and screaming um and there's chalk flying everywhere um then you then you at least had what it took to learn from louis simmons because he's not going to talk to you if you're not if you're not uh proactive the other thing that would happen in there is that if you, if you weren't going to sweat, then he wasn't going to talk to you either. And I remember, you know, I'm a huge fan of Charles Poliquin. And at the time, I remember Charles came into the gym and

he checked it out and Louie's story to people whenever Louie, cause I was kind of like, almost like a right-hand man for Louis for a little bit, not, not business wise, but just, I was just, uh, I would just stay by his side just cause I wanted to learn from him. So I was, I was hanging with him a lot. Um, cause I wanted to learn, I wanted to learn as much as I possibly could. I wanted to absorb all this. And I think that that's a key factor in, in me being successful in some things is I always wanted to rub elbows with the best people that I possibly could. And so as other people would come into the gym, these other strength coaches and people that wanted to coach in the NFL and people that wanted to coach professional soccer teams and with strength training and stuff and utilize some

of Louie's principles, uh, these people would ask Louie about other coaches and say, Oh, what do you think about this guy? What do you think about, what do you think about Pavel testosterone's and this guy and that guy, everyone's got their favorite guy that they, that they referenced. Right. And, uh, whenever he was asked about Charles Poliquin, he would say, Oh yeah, yeah. Charles Poliquin. He's like, he's nice. He's, he sat right there and he pointed to a chair and it's like, the guy was like, yeah, well, you know, like,'s like the guy was like yeah what you know like um the guy like tried to rephrase his question he's like no no i mean like you know what like you know he he's really big in like tempo training like you you know you go slower on the way down and

you know slower on the way up to build hypertrophy and louis go yeah he's real nice he sat right there meaning that meaning that when he came into my gym, he didn't do shit. He didn't do anything. And he's like, that to, that to me always stood out. Cause it's like, you just didn't even have the balls to even try anything. And that, that's how Louie, you know, uh, kind of marked you. And I always kind of took note of that because if I don't have the balls or the guts to talk to you about my book, the war on carbs, then maybe I'm not the right person to be selling it. Maybe I'm not, like, maybe I'm not even that confident in it. Maybe I don't care about it that much. The only way I'm going to be able to really truly sell these products and to really try to blow things out is to have the strength and have the courage to communicate.

I gave a book to my Uber driver and that's not the first time I've given out a lot of books. I just throw them in my backpack and people start talking about nutrition or training or whatever it might be. And, you know, I'm, I'm telling them about the slingshot and yeah, I mean, you've seen it firsthand. We'll just put somebody in something. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh fuck. Here's this guy.

You throw a hip circle on some random chick. Right. Yeah. And all those things are are huge factors and what broke me in even before that though because i was i was um as as a as a younger kid i was really shy um and i can go back to that in a minute but um when i was uh when i was pro wrestling is was probably around i was probably around 21 so that was pro wrestling is, was probably around, I was probably around 21. So that was before I, that was before I got to West side.

And while I was at West side, I was pro wrestling and a little bit after, but that was kind of the, towards the, towards the tail end of my quote unquote wrestling career. Um, I think I started wrestling probably at about 20, 21 years old. And that really, that really broke a lot of barriers for me. So if you can kind of envision this, imagine just having to go, um, you're, you're, you're very fearful of, let's say talking in front of a camera. Right. Um, but now you're asked to, uh, like, I don't know, recite, recite a script for a play or something like that in front of like, you just, you just go to some random bar and,

and, and, uh, that's your homework for the day is just to like recite some fucking poetry or something. Right. That we never did exercises like that necessarily. But, but the point, the point being is that if the wrestling that i was doing then is not directly related to this because there's there's so many different formats of of all these things what broke me in and what uh helped make me less scared to get in front of cameras and to get in front of people uh was to be physical in front of people was to so the lifting that i did at west side which came

later after wrestling after um yeah after the wrestling career lifting that i did at west side that ended up breaking a lot of these habits of me being shy too because the the liftings performance when we do max effort work even just as you got stronger and stronger more and more people would come around you more and more people would would uh would look at what you got stronger and stronger, more and more people would come around you. More and more people would, would, uh, would look at what you're doing and, and even just competing and getting into meets and getting on the platform. Uh, those things kind of broke down some barriers, but even before that with the pro wrestling, um, which is getting in the ring, getting in the ring, being physical and in pro wrestling, you're trying to tell a story with your actual match.

There's a good guy, there's a bad guy. And the good guy is always going to play by the rules. The bad guy is always going to cheat at every turn. The good guy is always going to outwork, outsmart the bad guy. And the bad guy, every single time that he's getting the short end of the stick, he's going to cheat time and time again. He's going to do something while the ref's not looking. And his cheating's going to get worse.

He's going to cut every corner. Yeah. Yeah. His cheating's going to get worse and worse as the match progresses. And then he's going to tell on the other wrestler once the referee turns around. Yeah. That was always annoying. You've seen this story too many times.

But, like, again, so that's like me almost, like, going out and doing a play. And I guess it's like an expression of yourself, right, in some way. How you acted in the ring was a character. And you had to try to make a character. And you try to you try to uh like believe in that character yeah you try to believe in that character you try to create a character you try to create um you know strength is never weak this week this never strength and some of these different like sign off things are all you know when i was wrestling i'd say i'm

smelly and i'm sticking to it because the the that that came about is like, they were like, what do you want your wrestling name to be? And I was like, well, I don't want some weird name. I've been just called smelly since the time I was a kid. So let's just roll with that. And they're like, that's stupid. I'm like, yeah, that's okay. A lot of the other names are stupid too. You know, like the ultimate warrior. I mean, think about it. It sounds kind of stupid. Macho man. Any of these names are all kind of weird right i think they got to be a little silly yeah it's yeah it's theatrical right yeah and so that's why i'd say i'm smelly i'm sticking to it because when i mentioned that to the agents

and the people that put the matches together they were like that's a stupid name and i'm like no i'm smelling i'm sticking to it that's just the way it's going to be. Ended up becoming like a tag, a tagline for me. And then, you know, you develop, uh, you, you could, if you develop in, in, uh, speaking in general, if you start to develop a rhythm or start to develop certain, maybe like catch phrases almost, especially for like YouTube, it's popular. That's what people do. Um, people always sign off the same way. You know, Omar Esaf, he always says, if you like the video, like the damn video.

Right. Uh, and they have these things that will kind of stick in your mind. Well, that's all that comes from pro wrestling. We've been doing that for a long time. And even some people on TV will have a specific sign off that they do every single time. Um, you know, I would say I'm smelling, I'm sticking to it. I'd also say I'm going to bring the pain and leave a stain. That's great.

Because it's like, you know, just, uh, I don't know. It's just, it's kind of, at least there's like a little bit of humor in there. You're like staying, you're like, what the fuck are you talking about? Um, but yeah, you're trying to develop a character. And then also when it came to pro wrestling, uh there's a theatrical part of it where you have to get up and give a promo. And I've talked about that here on the podcast before. You guys have seen me do a wrestling promo type thing when I did the thing on Michael Tren. That was kind of a full-blown wrestler mode almost there.

And I learned how to communicate in front of people and i learned how to think on my feet because they would just say hey you know you're doing this uh you're going to talk about a b and c you need to hit all these points you got 30 seconds and so that's also how i became aware of like the time you know sometimes when we're videoing uh you, you'll be like, okay, well we've got to make back when Instagram was like 15 seconds and some things like that. Or we try something for a minute because we're making an ad or whatever it was that we're doing. Um, I'm usually pretty good about, you know, cutting it right around the right time. And a lot of that is just practice too. And a lot of that comes from wrestling.

Yeah. And that was all usually like freestyle off the top of the head type stuff, right? Yeah. You know, for me, I, there's probably some people that, you know, if they wrote it down and really tried to memorize it, that it probably really do them some good. Um, but for me, I never really, I never really liked it, but I have talked about this on the podcast a little bit before. Um, you don't have a topic that you, that you feel confident in. If you're going to talk about something you don't know much about, I'm going to sit here and try to rattle off information about force production and the central nervous system. I'm going to fall short. You guys are going to quickly see that I don't really know what I'm talking about when it comes to that.

about when it comes to that. I only know, uh, I only know the peripheral stuff on that. I only know kind of the outer layer of it. I don't know the inner workings of it all. And so if you're going to talk about something and you're wondering, how do I come out of my shell? Um, how do I, how do I break out the way that you break out is to just, first of all, you have to just start. That's why it's called starting out. You have to literally just go. And when you start out, you're not going to break out. Breaking out happens at a, at a much different time. Um, but you are kind of, when you're starting out, you're breaking out of your own shell, but you're not like breaking out and breaking into anything because you're not anywhere yet. You're going to have like 10 followers or 10 people that watch, uh, what you're doing. But my advice is to pick something that you feel strong and pick something

that you feel comfortable about. If you know cars, talk about that. If you know a lot about training, talk about that. Or even if you just know, even if you just have another way to look at it is for, let's forget knowledge for a second. Cause who because who really cares about knowledge? What do we really care about? We really care about experience, right? We don't really care about knowledge. We don't really care about some guy talking about, you know, what he would do to some really hot chick. We want to hear the experience, right? We want to hear, hey, man, I tagged that shit over there.

And we want the guy to give up the goods and tell us what happened right details bro yeah yeah we need the details well speaking of girls uh joey eastlick not our joey out front uh he wants to know how he can gain uh confidence when with talking to girls now i know you've said in the past that you your nephew asked you about talking to chicks or whatever and you're like oh yeah't know, man. I've been with the same girl my whole life. Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. Yeah, yeah. He's just one, because people, he's saying that, like, at his age, in his 20s, it's kind of a little tricky to talk to girls these days.

Yeah, I had a, this is years back, I had a kid ask me about going on a date and, like, talking to a girl, and he, girl, talking to a girl and he like didn't know. Yeah. He didn't, he didn't know. He didn't know. Uh, this is, this is like a cousin of mine. He didn't know what to do.

And I was like, man, I, you know, the only advice I have is like, don't say too much. Cause I think that, I think guys in particular, I pretend it's girls. It's expected. I think girls talk too much period, right? Guys, we can admit it admit it and they just say they say way too much most of the time but just nod your head and pretend you're into it um but i think guys have a tendency to say too much too you say something that's dumb or you say something that's like rude or like you you just want to like put your foot in your mouth sometimes because Cause something that you said was, was stupid. But the main thing I told him was like, man, just don't fart.

You know, just like have a good time, you know, see if you can make her laugh here and there. And, uh, be polite and stuff, but just try not to fart. And he laughed and I was like, dude, you're laughing. But he was, he was going to a movie. He went to like dinner and a movie. I'm like, that's a long time to not fart. I was like, you're're gonna feel like an explode and then i talked to him a few days later and he was like man he's like my stomach was killing me he's like i thought i was gonna die it's so true but how to

how to build you know how to build confidence um you know how to build confidence comes to anything that's actually a That's actually a, that's actually a really cool question because I actually think, you know, in some, in some ways, uh, society has been changed. Well, in a lot of ways, society has been changed because you can just communicate through text messages and stuff like that and through apps and through different, uh, you know, dating things and stuff like that, which makes everything way different. And also, um, it's really insane to think about, but if you think about it this way, it's creating human beings that otherwise wouldn't exist. And you can make the argument for that, for airplanes and for, uh, you know, cars and trains and all these different things. Those are all things that are making human beings exist that maybe otherwise wouldn't exist. Because, you know, if you, uh, if you, if you, if like for me,

for example, I moved from New York to California and met my wife out here. If, if cars and planes and stuff weren't invented, I would never met my wife, right? If phones and the technology that we have today to text people and the apps for dating and things like that. Uh, a lot of these people wouldn't be together and the children they have obviously, uh, wouldn't exist. Like things would be, things would be changed forever. So a lot of people just find it easier to communicate through, uh, through a phone. Now I would say that, um, there, there's an, there's an element to the whole, uh, there's an element of people going somewhere and then picking out, basically picking out like who they like in the room and then talking to

them and then saying, Hey, like we should be together. To me, that sounds like very primal. And it sounds like, like things should be that way. Um, and I think that through dating apps and stuff, I think that that's, I'm just, in my opinion, I think that that's gone. I think that that's lost. And I think that eventually what we might have is we might have, like, I, I actually think that society might slide downhill because of that in some ways, because I think that, uh, you know, the girl, the guy that has the confidence to get that conversation rolling, um, is definitely a different person than the person that has the confidence to just send a text message or dick pic, you know? So I think,

I think, uh, this things are, things are just different now, you know, things are different, but in terms of actually figuring out a way to, to work up any sort of confidence, I think the main thing is if you have confidence in yourself and you don't have to really worry about it too much. So for me, uh, lifting has always helped with confidence. Um, it was really just lifting. I didn't have anything else going on. And in that way, I didn't have to even pursue anybody. She just came and she talked to me. I never, I never really tried to chase after a girl in my life because I just didn't know how to go about doing it. And I was too shy to even mess with it. So I was just like, Oh, some girl at some point, well, you know, they'll get tired

of all these other guys that are around or all the other guys that are around will be taken up and somebody will like me at some point. So just get super jacked. Don't be an asshole and wait. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. basically yeah that's cool um so now that we kind of we we understand like where all this came from like you needing to get your voice out when people do come to you whether it be like by you know sliding into your dms or whatever you know yeah um do you ever get nervous about giving people advice to follow no you know i think some people say oh you should talk to a doctor or whatever. I, you know, I've had people tell me that they're, you know, they want to kill themselves and all

kinds of stuff. And I, I don't have any problem communicating with them. I think, uh, that's the world that we're in now. You know, that's, that's what people, um, think about this. You don't think about how crazy this is. There's some 16 year old kid DMing me on Instagram, uh, while his brother and his dad are in the other room. And he's, he's sending me a message about how he's had thoughts about killing himself. And he's probably never told his dad or his brother. Right. Right. So as much as I'd love to say, oh yeah, you should see a doctor and you should go tell your parents.

It's like, you know, he, he probably, there's a reason why he asked me the question rather than his parents. And so I usually don't mind, um, you know, giving out advice. And obviously I'm always, if it's a kid that's that young, I'll always advise them to communicate with, uh, an adult about it, that, that, that lives with them. But for the most part, I mean, what I ended up recommending to a lot of people is for people just to, lives with them. But for the most part, I mean, what I ended up recommending to a lot of people is for people just to, is to go see a therapist. And I think that everyone's so reluctant, so scared to see a therapist, but I think that it could really benefit a lot of people. Um, and there's no shame in it. Like, um, if you wanted to get in better shape, you don't have

a problem like getting programming from somebody or, or, or looking at a book, right now, looking at a book when your head's messed up about suicidal thoughts, I don't know the impact that that would have. I think talking it out would probably be superior, but that might be another option too, is to look into reading about it. Like, why, you know, why do you, where are these thoughts coming from? Um, but what I usually communicate with people is like, just any, it could be any problem. You know, people have, people have problems with their mom or their dad, or people have problems with in their, the relationship that they're in, or they have problems with themselves. I'll always, I'll always ask them to go see a therapist. Cause I think that most things can be talked out.

Most things that can be worked out. I mean, even think about, most things can be talked out. Most things that can be worked out. I mean, even think about, think about a situation where you were just fucking pissed. You're really, really furious. Let's say, let's say you got into it with your, with your girlfriend and you just, you know, she hurt your feelings.

She said something. I mean, usually girls that listen to the show, guys are usually mad because you hurt their feelings. That's usually, usually what happens. It sounds like such a baby thing, but like we're a lot more sensitive and we're a little weird in some way. Not me, bro. Yeah, not me either, bro.

Other people though. Yeah, a bunch of pussies. But what happens, you know, you get really, really mad and girls do a great job of just kind of confronting it and guys kind of suck at it. Yeah. But my wife, and i don't know how everybody else is but i'd imagine your girlfriend's probably similar where she doesn't have any

problem saying andrew i'm so sorry i didn't i didn't realize it's gonna affect i didn't mean anything by it like and then it's and then it's and then everything like you were just so mad and it's like just like blowing out like a candle he was like whoosh yeah it's just like it's over with and a little smoke that comes off the candle goes up in the air and fucking dissipates and you're fine but as men we don't really we don't really do yeah we don't really do that same thing that that often yeah yeah my thing for sure is she knows right away if something's wrong and i'm always like nothing i don't want to talk about yeah you get quiet you get quiet. I just get quiet. Wish he knows right away.

Yeah, guys just get quiet. And then it drives a woman crazy because women are nosy. And they want to try to fix. So nosy. They want to try to fix shit, you know? Yeah. So do you think the confidence in giving advice just comes from, like what you said, putting points on the scoreboard? Because you have the track record to prove that like you know you've been through some shit with your

brothers um you know family stuff and then also accomplishing so much like you're okay with telling someone to yeah having having experience yeah there you go the experiences yeah that's what i was getting at and then even before all that happened like like, uh, I went to Australia years ago and, um, uh, did, did, did some seminar stuff. And, uh, I was talking to my dad and this was before I did any sort of like public speaking stuff. I was like, I, you know, I don't know what to say. You know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't really know what to do.

And, um, I was halfway decent at, at some of that stuff at that time, but, um, I never really got like a paid gig for it you know i never never had anybody offer me money they said hey we don't we'll give you like 10 grand if you want to come over and do this and i was like like no i don't want to like go on a 14 hour plane ride you know and um even at the time i didn't have any money really at the time but i still was like i don't fucking care about 10 grand i don't want to to go to, I don't want to go that far, you know? And, uh, most people are probably listening on what, like, why wouldn't you? But I just, for me, I just think of it more as like a hassle. I'm like, fuck that.

I don't want to go do that. Yeah. And, uh, so I just, um, my wife was like, well, she's like, why don't you just tell him, like, tell him 20 grand, see what happens. So I told the guy 20 grand and he paid it and then I was screwed and then I had to go. And, um, so yeah, so I talked to my dad and I was like, I was like, dad, what do you know? What do you think I should do? And, um, my dad just said, you know what? All people really are going to care about as your experiences. He's going to talk about that. You know, he's like

between your lifting knowledge and you just talking about your experiences. You don't have to talk about anything else He's like you don't have to try to be funny You don't have to try to entertain anybody He's like you just need to talk clear concise. Keep it simple and just talk about You know, hey, I used to squat You know 804 but what happened? What got me to squat 804 was not the same thing to get me to squat 931. What got me to 931 wasn't the same thing to get me to 1003.

Some of these basics have always been there, but I had to change things up as I got, you know, just very, very, very simple. And just talking about the experiences that you have now, people that are listening right now, they might be like 23 years old. And they might say, like, I don't have shit to talk about. Yeah. That's okay too. It's just that you, you're going to want to try to figure out how to kind of like, you know, split some of it up. You know, hopefully you don't have to talk for two hours or whatever. You just, um, you, you find a specific topic and you stay in your lane and you just talk about that. Um, again, I was able to even have the confidence in the first place to start talking in some of those old videos that I did at, again, I was able to, to even have the confidence in the first place to start talking in some of those old videos that I did at, uh, yeah, well there's, yeah, there's a lot,

there's, there's, there's many original super training gyms, but, um, some of the videos I've, I did from, uh, the gym that we had in a Thomas, uh, off of Norwood. Um, some of those videos, um, I w I mean, they're on videos, I mean, they're on YouTube. You know, they're on YouTube, and you can look them up. I was really nervous to talk in those videos. And you can kind of see it. You know, you can see that I was nervous. But another thing that helped, too, is voiceover work.

So, like, what an amazing piece of equipment that is, or what an amazing tool it is, I should say, to be able to do voiceover. So if I, if I lift, let's just say I did some deadlifts, I did some hamstring curls, I did some stiff leg deadlifts, and I did some bent over rows. I did like four or five exercises. If I cut the video up and show each lift and I do a voice over to it, I think that anyone can do a voiceover. Now, when you listen to your voice back, you might be like, oh my God, I sound like a freak. That's terrifying. You'll get used to it over a period of time and everybody else get used to it too. When people first hear your voice, they feel the same as you do it's an uncommon

voice to them they're like who is this that's why the celebrity voices work so much you see john cena or you hear john cena on some uh on some stuff where he there you go you see john cena on some stuff where he's a um he's an elephant and shit like that's because people recognize his voice. This video is from 10 years ago. It's amazing. I look pretty fat. Yeah. You know, 10 years ago. And I remember like we had to do takes on this and stuff like that. We had to, you know, it just wasn't easy for me to talk.

But, you know, to like, I guess, you know, the main, the main question, like where this all started was, um, you know, how do you even have the, that's great. We're in a wrestling ring. How do you even have the confidence in the first place? If you want to look this up on YouTube, it's team super training, uh, apostrophe, never enough bloopers and outtakes. But, uh, yeah. How do you even get started started how do you even get momentum in the first place the only way you're ever going to get momentum in anything is is to oh my god yeah I'm watching this video of us wrestling the only way you're going to get momentum in anything

is to build confidence the only way you're going to be able to build confidence is you're going to have to start to have habits that are reflective of your goal so you have to when you have goals that you want to to have to start to have habits that are reflective of your goal. So when you have goals that you want to set out to do, when you start to actually accomplish those things, it gives you momentum. That momentum will carry you into building the confidence that you need to do some of these things. When I start to think about somebody like Joey, somebody like Joey, who, who is the one that kind of proposed this question, uh, she's a young girl.

She works in this store at super training and I'm sure, you know, she would, would either, you know, want to work her way up the ladder in, in terms of what we do here at slingshot, or maybe she has aspirations to do something much larger. in terms of what we do here at Slingshot, or maybe she has aspirations to do something much larger. But whatever it is that you're trying to do, you're just going to have to figure out a way to find what it is that you're good at. Where's your strength?

You kind of hear, like I remember when I played football, the coach would say, hey, you know what? If you're getting whooped up on, let us know, right? when I played football, the coach would say, Hey, you know what, if you're getting whooped up on, let us know. Right. And, and that was, it was really rare for a play to ever do that. Right. But really that'd be the sensible thing. Say coach, Hey, you want to put somebody else in? Cause this guy's kicking my ass. What if the guy's too fast or whatever it was, right? Um, we don't really do that in life. We don't really do that in work. And the other thing that we would do on the flip side of that, uh, we would go to the coach when we thought

we could handle something, we could do something like, uh, when I played basketball, you know, you can see the other teams out, out rebounding and maybe say, coach, let me get in there. I'll, I'll fucking elbow people. I'll get scrappy and I'll, I'll figure out a way for us to get rebounds. Yeah. And it's the same thing goes for here at super training. The same thing, same thing goes for, uh, any job that you have. You're going to have to let people know what you do.

And if you don't let people know what you do, uh, you'll never get enough light shine on you. So it doesn't being shy and being reserved. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Um, it's, it's just, it's just the way things are, but you're, you're going to sit there and wait a lot longer than everybody else. You're going to have to develop a lot of patience to be able to handle the fact that you're not jumping on opportunities when they're in front of you.

But again, you can think about what are some things that you can do and what are some things that you can't do. It doesn't do you any good to focus on things that you can't do, but some of the things that you can't do, maybe at some point you'll be able to do them. Maybe you're thinking to yourself, I am so fucking terrified of public speaking. I will never be able to do it. But if you want to be able to do it, then you're going to have to be able to do it. And your level of scaredness doesn't matter. People that aren't afraid of stuff, in my opinion, are fucking stupid. When somebody is like, I ain't afraid to fight that guy opinion are fucking stupid when somebody's like i ain't afraid to fight that guy it's like what are you talking about you're not afraid to fight it maybe you're confident in your skill level that you can handle yourself but it doesn't make any sense

to not be scared to do something you should always be a little bit scared uh of anything that you're anything you're trying to do that's going to be uh you know a situation that might compromise you right yeah do you think that uh when people feel fear it's because they care they care about the outcome yeah well yeah they care and they're also smart enough to like realize hey this you know yeah something weird could happen i mean you should be like scared and concerned at least a little bit about just about everything whether you're making a product or whether you're starting a website or um it doesn't really matter what is this you're doing public speaking anything i mean you should be concerned about the performance that

you have when it comes to actually public speaking though what i've learned is that it is a mistake to try to to try to really to try to really view it as a performance, um, because then you put too much pressure on yourself. Something that's always worked well for me is to, again, as I talked about earlier, I was talking about, um, just talking about experiences. That way you don't have anything to forget because you can just go off of the things that actually happen, the stories that actually happen. You're not like rehearsing something that's scripted. You're not trying to, another mistake I've made is like,

I really like quotes a lot, right? But if I try to, if I try to reference a quote that I just heard, that's not going to work. And it's going to keep my mind, my mind's going to keep thinking about that fucking quote that I want to, that I want to use

but i'm not gonna be able to spit it out and it's gonna kind of distract me from like communicating exactly what it is i want to communicate what about like uh you know when you don't prepare you're preparing to fail or whatever but you're talking about like you know just going with the flow kind of freestyling it like yeah so yeah you i mean just because with reps that you've done it so much that you kind of are prepared yeah yeah having having the reps in there uh is critical when i went to the creative movie um yesterday for my brother um at the end they had a q a going and uh everybody sat down their chairs and my brother called me up and he's like, okay, my brother's going to run the Q and a, and I was like, all right, I'm running the Q and a. And I just started like fucking pulling shit out of my ass, asking them questions.

But I mean, I did sit there through the film. I did, I did see what was going on. I did have some questions, so it wasn't hard. And then I just, uh, like MC to, I hosted it. And then I asked the audience if they had questions and interacted with then I just, uh, like MC to, I hosted it. And then I asked the audience if they had questions and interacted with people and it, it, it went well. And I think that, you know, when it, when it comes to these things, I think people get so scared because they're trying to like rehearse something. They're trying to remember something. Sometimes you have

to, like if you're in school and you got like a specific paper, you got to go over, then you're, uh, you're sort of stuck with that but even even with that you can still um if it's appropriate you can still reflect on stories and still reflect on things that actually happened it might be easier to communicate about those things rather than talk about something that you're trying to like uh completely memorize you know yeah dude there's a papa Bell sighting, Mike Bell. Oh yeah, he's watching? Yeah.

Hey now. He said something actually really fucking awesome. He doesn't like that word. Sorry, he said something really awesome. Sorry, sir. He said he just wants to remind everyone to be who they are and not die a copy of someone they look up to. Yep.

Yeah, I mean, he's taught me a lot of those things. Part of the reason why people, you know, have looked up to Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Michael Jordan, and Bo Jackson, and any political figure you can think of, George Washington or anybody we make monuments of, they all have like one thing in common. And the main thing they have in common is that they're normally, trying to make sure that's accurate. Yeah, they're almost always original.

They're almost always pioneers of whatever it is that you're talking about. And they do things that people look at and they scratch their head and they're like, you know, Elon Musk buying rockets from like Russia, you know, and Elon Musk, you know, years ago, America looked at how much it would cost to go to Mars. And they were like, it's $500 billion. And like, we don't have $500 billion. That's a lot of money. We can't figure that out. And Elon Musk is like, you know what? I don't care how much it costs. We're going we can't figure that out and elon musk is like you know what i don't care how much it costs we're going to try to figure it out and so he rather than looking at the hurdle

or rather than looking at the obstacle i think people look at obstacles as if they're fucking brick walls they should really look at them as if they're hurdles it's not going to be easy to get over it but if you get enough momentum you can jump over that bitch. Right. So I think that's the way people need to try to view some of these things. It's not, it's not a, it's not a brick wall. The $500 billion. Well, maybe who, who, who researched that? Right.

Maybe they didn't look it up the right way. Maybe they didn't find out the correct information. Maybe there's a better, maybe there's a better fuel source. Maybe there's. They didn't carry over the one. Yeah.

They didn't carry over. They didn't fucking carry the one. Yeah. Maybe they they weren't maybe they just weren't as passionate about it you know like um the other thing i learned from pro wrestling was somebody would do a match before you and there's only so many different body parts you can work when you wrestle i've mentioned this several times but there's only so many body parts you can work one guy's gonna work an arm one guy parts you can work. One guy's going to work an arm. One guy's going to work the back. One guy's going to work the neck.

Not every wrestling match works that way. Cause some of them are faster than others, but any match that exceeds like eight minutes is going to have somebody working on a body part. Right. Uh, you know, it's usually the bad guy is the heel and he's usually working on the guy's

leg or whatever. Right. And he rams it into the ring post and puts them. Yeah. I always liked it when they'd go back to the same body part yeah oh no he got his ankle again yeah he's going back for the ankle yeah when you stay on the same one and mysteriously it's always the left side not really sure why it's always the left side but anyway you can fit you can figure that out on your own but that's where all the pain is associated and that's where they always work is on that left side. But when you saw somebody go before you, you're like, oh shit, they just, they just, uh, work the arm.

Now I got to think of something different. Well, if you're really good and you can reorganize the match. And if you didn't overly prepare and rehearse your match, you can go out there and fucking wing it. match you can go out there and fucking wing it and the level four of a shit show match that they had won't look anything identical to the level nine that you just put in where you rearrange the order of the match and it looks totally different and maybe you did work the same body part but so what the ability to think on your feet and the same thing goes for promos that we did and the same thing goes for work you know one person one person shows you a level of work and you're like, oh, okay, that's pretty good. And then maybe you hire somebody else, you bring somebody else in and you're like, oh my God, I didn't know.

I didn't know it could be on a whole nother level like this. This is fucking crazy. Right. And so I, I think, you know, when it comes to, um, when it comes to these kinds of things, I think we're just, we're, we're always just kind of, uh, we're looking at, we're looking at the things, the roadblocks that are in the way. And we're not really thinking about, uh, the possibility of, of being able to get past them. And I think that's when you, when you're talking about like starting out and how do you have the confidence to, um, to even start. Remember I made that, uh that Mario reference a while back talking about when you're playing Mario Brothers

back in the day and you make that jump to try to get on that flagpole. It's a little risky, right? You gotta jump at the last second. You gotta time it just right. You gotta time it just right. Otherwise you end up with a lot less points. You end up at the bottom, right?

And so when you're trying to make that leap towards whatever it is that you want to do, you should at least make sure that you're close enough. You know, sometimes I hear people say stuff that's outrageous. You're like, what the fuck are you talking about? You're not going to bench 600 pounds. You haven't even benched 450 pounds yet. So you're going to want to make sure you're a lot closer to your goal before you start talking out your ass and not making any sense of it. Of course, it makes sense that you wouldn't have confidence towards such a large goal. You want your goals to be

a lot shorter. And for people that are trying to start out in anything, it's going to have to start with you just putting one foot down. It sounds repetitive, right? I say it all the time and get one foot in front of the other. So what? You did something and it sucks. That's okay. It sounds repetitive, right? I say it all the time and get one foot in front of the other. So what you did something and it sucks. That's okay. It's a start. You started, you went, uh, go back and listen to some of Andy Frisella's early podcasts. They suck. He'll tell you they suck. Um, you know, listen to some of the early podcasts I did. They, you know, they they're going, hopefully if you do things for a long time and you care about it, hopefully over a period of time, you'll get better at it. And if it comes to like public speaking, which can be really challenging, you're also going to find out like maybe that you're not good at it, which is fine. You're going to, you'll, you'll, you'll find your way and you'll find your own thing.

You look at somebody like Carrot Top, right? Who's made money for 20 years doing standup comedy. But what does he do? He has props, right? So it's like, he has his own thing. Maybe without the props, maybe he doesn't do a very good job. Like maybe he's not funny. Is he still jacked?

He's fucking jacked. Yeah. Bring him up. He's, yeah, he's, he's really jacked. He actually trains at Gold Shim in Venice and he's like, I don't know. He's got some arms on him. I'd say, uh, 17s, 18s, and he's pretty lean. He's probably on a little bit of carrot juice.

Carrot juice. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, look at those shoulders. Yeah, he looked like he might have injected something in those shoulders. No. A little pocket sticking out of there. He's just on a vertical diet with carrots.

Oh yeah. That's all that is. That's gotta be, that's gotta be it. Yeah. And then, I mean, you know, I know I talked to kind of quite a bit about public speaking, but in general, you know, to get started, there has to be some sort of backbone to something. And that's what I've always prided myself in is that I had a lifting career, so it made things easier. It made it easier for me to talk about a squat when I squatted 900 pounds. When you go back and you look at those videos, um, that, that I made

with Jim McD, um, those are 10, 11 years ago, but I was, I was already lifting something. So it wasn't hard to talk about it. Um, if I sucked at it, it would be a lot more, a lot more difficult. And also something I forgot to mention earlier is that when you, when you're thinking about what it is you're going to do, and one way to build confidence in it is to, uh, it picks something that there's not as much competition in. So for me with powerlifting, how many powerlifting coaches were sharing information at the time? And the answer is really none. Even though there was Louie Simmons, all he did was write in Powerlifting USA. He didn't really do much else. Dave Tate was somebody that took the reins in that

field. And he was somebody that I worked under, um, under the name Jackass. And that's kind of where I got my vagina wet. I mean, my feet wet. This is amazing. Watching me try to set up because I'm like so fat that I can't, uh, get down to the bar.

I got to like pull myself down into position. How much, look at this. How much were you weighing right there? Look at these terrible lockouts. It's oh blew out my back um i'd say right there i'm probably 280 so 280 or so most of the time when i wasn't competing um I didn't really see a reason to be, well, actually, I'm sorry at this time. Um, I competed a lot. So I was going to say like a lot of times I didn't see the reason to be 300 plus I'd stay a little bit lighter. Um, after every meet I'd, I'd always lose weight. I'd,

I'd actually, even though I'm fat as you know, bloated as fuck, I'd always get on a diet and just try to lose some of that bloat. I just always felt it was unhealthy, and I didn't really like the way that it felt. But obviously, I'm still very bloated, but if you can imagine, I'd be even more bloated on game day. Jeez. I mean, now, like, since, you know, I've been here, I actually can't imagine you forcing yourself to be bloated. Oh, it's awesome. Yeah, some of it was fun. You know, people just, they don't, as I kind of mentioned in the beginning of the show, is that people are going to be oblivious to the sacrifices that you go through.

But then one day they're also going to say, hey, man, what you're doing is great. And you go, what? Because you're kind of oblivious to it too because you've been doing it for so long. When somebody says, oh my God, you know, benching over 500 pounds or doing it for some reps is great or the message that you're sharing is great.

It's all the byproduct of doing it for a long time. It's all the byproduct of practicing it. It's all the byproduct of caring about it. It's the byproduct of making choices it um it's the byproduct of of making choices to choose one thing over the other you know i'm choosing to be here uh right now instead of being at my house with my family eating dinner you make make these choices and i the word sacrifice is like almost too too uh too severe because it's like i i don't like have to be here it's my my choice to be here. And I

would say that a sacrifice is probably more like, uh, you know, when you're kind of more forced to do something like if you're in the military or something like that, but it's, it's the, the choices that you make are going to kind of guide you through some of that for some people that are lost and that don't know where to turn and don't, don't know where to start. Um, it's got to start with you're going to have to build confidence in something whatever it is that you're trying to do or if you're trying to start a business or you're trying to start a youtube channel you really won't have anything to talk about if you're not confident in whatever it is that you're doing so hopefully

you'll have some experience in doing that if you you, if you feel like that you shouldn't do it, then you shouldn't do it. And you should just wait. You should, there's nothing wrong with waiting. I didn't know what I was doing for a really long time. Even in those videos that are 10 years ago, I'm still 31 years old, you know, which, so I, it takes, takes a lot of, takes a lot of time. And if you're 35 or 40, when you figure it out, so, so what, as long as you can hang in there, as long as you can survive. Yeah. And as you can survive yeah and being ignorant or whatever ignorance is bliss right yeah i know

ron penna said that about starting quest like if i knew what it took to actually make a bar we never would have made it yeah i was and i was definitely very ignorant in in starting out because i really it's not like i felt like i knew it all, but, um, I felt like I just felt like I had something to offer. And so I was able to go from there. And if you feel like that, you're not going to provide a service to people, uh, then maybe you should choose to do something different or do something differently. It doesn't mean you have to like give up on whatever it is you're trying to do.

Um, there's some people and we've, we've had people here. We've had people on our show that fucking suck. We've had people on our show that fucking suck. We've had people on the podcast that absolutely suck. They're great on Instagram and they suck on the podcast. Or they're great for YouTube, but they're not good for the podcast. Or vice versa, right? And it's because you're only going to be good at so many different things. And you have to figure out what those things are.

What does that look like? Maybe you're somebody that can build a good following on Instagram because you're in really good shape, but maybe when it comes to talking on camera, you, you just can't figure it out, right? You can't figure out how to, and then you have some people that start to kind of figure out multiple platforms, multiple ways of, uh, communicating. And you got like, um, you end up with like a Bradley Martin or some of the guys that like, I don't know if you ever seen six, six pack abs, uh, um, on YouTube, they got like 7 million followers or something. Um, they got, they got crushed and they got ridiculed a lot years ago cause they were doing some weird stuff, but they, uh, they put out

really good, they put out really good content. There's, there's other people too, but it's a combination of, uh, they, they look good. They've been working hard for many years. They're shredded and they're able to speak upon the topic that, and then, then that's when you have, you end up with a very professional looking product in the end, rather than just, uh, you know, rather than just being good at one you know one thing you end up being good at multiple things it ends up starting to kind of turn into something stronger when do you know uh when's a good time to kind of turn it off like you're talking about like working through all these things outlasting everybody like i know you just got back from like vacation but even on vacation you were still working yeah recorded a podcast out there too yeah i don't think you

ever turn it off i think you just i think you just keep rolling man i don't think there's any reason um you know when when does stan efforting you know when does stan efforting go off the vertical diet right he doesn't right he just he just keeps the that that train rolling now you don't have to be a psychopath about it like he he's in a different, but that's what he likes to do. You know, so you'll have to, you know, you have to kind of balance it out with what you like to do. And I think that a lot of stuff that we're trying to do, um, at least all I ever try to do, I try to just figure out ways to mitigate stress. Cause I'm like, I just don't, I, the job that I have is something that I chose to do. I chose to do it this way.

And I just rather not overthink stuff. I'd rather, if I feel like eating ice cream, I, I, within the next three days of me thinking about it, I'll probably eat it. Right. Cause I don't even, I don't even want the stress of that. Um, and, uh, I work very hard towards my goals and i do the best i possibly can with them but i think my life works a lot better if i'm at like an eight rather than like a 12 right that makes sense you know if i'm not fucking crazy about it it seems to work out better anyway uh the harder that i chase after it the faster it seems to fucking run away from me too

you know if i'm like you know what i just have to weigh 220, I have to weigh 220. If I just keep pounding that in my head, I probably will never get there. Or I probably will not be even that excited about when I get there because I'll probably just have to like not eat to get there. If I take my time to get there, then I can do it as I have been doing and do it in stages and just let it happen. Let it happen in spurts, right? And then that way I can go off the diet. I can come back to the diet. I can keep switching things up. Same thing with increasing my strength. You know, I made a post the other day that I'm going to start working on trying to build that back up again. I am going to work on building that back up again, but it's probably realistically probably going to keep going downward for a little while.

Um, because I'm going to still try to lose some weight and I'm trying to incorporate running. So, um, you have to be realistic with all the different things that are going on and, and, uh, take all those things into consideration. Um, I'm not going to bench 500 pounds tomorrow, but I will bench 500 pounds at some point. Again, um, it's just gonna, it's gonna take a little while and I'd like to do it, you know, at 220 pounds. It's just a goal. You know, I've benched over 500 pounds for the last, I don't know, 12 years or something like that.

So it's not, it's not, it's not anything hard for me to do, but it does take a hell of a concentrated effort. I need to really pay attention to it. And if I chase after it too hard, I'll get hurt. You know, I will get injured if I don't take my time. And really, a lot of times when you're trying to get to a goal, a destination, you know, you ultimately, first of all, you find out that it's not a real destination it's it's just a number just a goal that you have and it doesn't really doesn't really mean a whole lot it just means that you got to your goal um but powerlifting is almost like a race that doesn't

have any finish lines because every time that you quote unquote cross a finish line you're like oh there's another 10 one on the horizon another fucking 10 pounds and smoky keeps ordering more and more weight here so yeah it's impossible to lift all the weight that we have here at super training he's curled all the weights but you're never you're never satisfied you always want to you always want to lift you always want to lift more there's always new and different goals that that uh that pop up but if you if you go after him too hard you're gonna get you're gonna get punched in the face for it um uh Mikhail Kokulev in a uh in a seminar he took a uh he took a uh what was it, an Olympic lifting or Olympic gymnastics ring.

He took the Olympic gymnastics ring. It was out in front of him. And he reached forward for it. And he grabbed it. And he pulled it towards him. And he said, lifting weights is like pretty girl. So he grabbed this ring again. I'll say it again,

and pulled it towards his face. And this was representing pretty girl, right? And he said, the more you reach for it, the more you pull it towards you. And he opened up his hand. He said, the more it goes away from you. And that's the way a lot of your goals are too. When you just sit there and try to fucking pound them into your head,

it doesn't really work that way. Um, you want to work towards them every day, but you can't make it happen any faster. Um, there's only a certain amount of stuff you can get done in a day. Um, you,

you need to sleep eight hours in a day. You need to have time for eating. You can't turn your eight hours sleep into hours in a day. You need to have time for eating. You can't turn your eight-hour sleep into a six-hour sleep. You can't turn your 10-minute walks into a four-minute walk. You know, things just take a certain amount of time. It takes a long time for people to develop, too, as human beings. And to be able to have perspective into other people's lives is a huge element. It's a huge game changer for me.

I mean, I still think people are a piece of shit. I don't like a lot of people, but I'm lightening up as I get a little older and starting to understand, well, maybe the guy's not a total piece of shit. Or maybe he is. Now, having perspective uh is is is a crucial thing and just understanding where people come from people i i'm very fortunate i grew up with um a mom and dad that loved each other my dad fucking winked at my mom on the bus when they were 12 or 13 years old and they've been together ever since um, there was a lot of love in our family. There was a lot of food in our family.

That's why we're all so fat. Um, but like everything was, was like easy. There was nothing hard. I mean, I remember my, my brother, Mike, his situation was hard, but he was bipolar. So it's like, you know, what are you going to do? Um, there's going to be some adversity kind of mixed in there. And we tried to do the best we could with it as a family. Um, but other than that, I mean, everything, you know, growing up was, was awesome. My dad worked really hard. Uh, he wasn't always around, you know, when I was maybe like in my teenage

years or so, or maybe even a little bit before that. And I started wondering like, where the fuck is he? And then as I got, you know, maybe another year or two older and got a little more mature, I was like, oh, that's why we have all this cool shit, because he's working his ass off. I'm like, okay. But I mean, my mom was always there. My dad was always there.

They all went to every game. My aunts and uncles and grandparents would come to games we all hung out for christmas and thanksgiving and and all these different things so when i start to think about why somebody acts a certain way or why somebody does something or why somebody um uh maybe he's just pissed off. Like maybe somebody is just mad or maybe there's, I can start to kind of think, well, maybe, or, or if they act a particular way all the time, then I can start to say, well, you know, maybe they, uh, maybe they didn't pick the same parents that I did.

You know, maybe they didn't, maybe they weren't fortunate enough to have, to have some of that. And I do think there is a time, Hey, you know what? Tough shit. Yeah. Right. Like it's life, whether you, whether you were abused or it doesn't matter what happened to you, you ultimately have to be an adult.

You ultimately have to be responsible for your, your own actions. And you cannot be an asshole just because you were molested as a kid. You know, it's like, it's a horrible thing to say because you know people are dealing with different circumstances, but You do have to still be a fucking human being you still have to figure out a way To survive you still have to figure out a way to be good to other people, right? You still have the same 24 hours to get shit done. You still got the same 24-hour clock bitch Anything else? Anything you want to add?

Yeah. Whoa! Holy shit! Look at those biceps. We just pulled up a picture of Smokey, and he's looking huge. He kind of did the people's eyebrow in that picture. Double bicep and a people's eyebrow. Yeah. Yeah.

Dude. Dude, I've been working on trying to get Jay Cutler here. It's been tough. And I think he's intimidated by it. I was going to say, he scared him away. Yeah. Look at the peaks on those biceps. Those are no joke.

Those are up above the shoulder. They're up above the delt. And some people might look at it negative and say the delt's not big enough. And other people are going to say, look at those biceps. So the smoky shirt goes on sale tomorrow at noon, right? Yeah. Does he have really big biceps, or his forearm's just really scrawny? It's hard to say.

Let's see here. Whoa. Wow. Look at that guy. That beard's looking good. He left a bunch of... Oh, never mind. I don't even want to talk about your pubes or beards on the white backdrop.

We were taking product shots. It looked nasty. It was all bad. Yeah, his beard is a little puby, huh? I never felt his pubes, but I did feel his beard, and it felt puby to me. Probably similar. Yeah, they are are good to know anyway so i brought up this this picture because those shirts go on sale tomorrow so if you're

listening to this live hey with uh this is a this is an interesting question with uh white people aren't aren't our our hair on our head and our pubes are different right but now that we have a mix in here, we should maybe have... Take a poll? I mean, he's got like, kind of like, he's got like, kind of an afro on his head, and maybe he's got a, you know, maybe he's got an afro around his, I don't know. Anyway,

so tomorrow at noon, head over to Mark Bell Slingshot, get your smoky t-shirt. While you're there, pick up a slingshot. Enter code POWERPROJECT for 15% off all slingshots. Damn, Smokey's jacked. I need to start lifting weights. That's all I got for you, buddy.

All right, that's it. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.