RAWTALK - The Problem w/ Elon Musk’s Neuralink, Mark Bell Benching 850lbs, Taking Steroids & What Not to do!

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

This podcast is sponsored by Better Help, go to https://www.betterhelp.com/rawtalk and get 10% off your first purchase!This podcast is sponsored by Transcend, go to https://www.transcendcompany.com/rawtalkThis podcast is sponsored by Manscaped, go to https://www.manscaped.com and get 20% off everything with CODE: RAWTALK plus free shipping!0:00 Intro 0:18 perspective 3:00 doing something hard and difficult 4:42 mark bell being capable of doing heavy weight lifts 5:07 part of the brain that overcomes and grows 6:03 fasting 6:59 different versions of hard 7:43 body building being hard 10:34 brad wants to fight 11:44 being athletic 15:23 mark and his unbreakable experience 17:56 people need to exercise 19:27 elon musk releases neuralink 21:09 everyone has a voice 22:30 hiding information 24:13 how are people identified as special 28:41 certain things being a lot of work for some people 30:08 the difference in people who really succeed 31:29 women can be reactionary 32:05 balancing your mind 33:12 why people don’t speak on problems 34:26 better help ad 37:24 why are people afraid of work 39:35 needing a health scare to make a change 42:22 being disciplined 43:25 needing to do the hard work to get what you want 46:03 can't control the way people feel 49:03 employee, employer relationship 50:50 mark bell removed from youtube 57:30 making sure things are happening 1:00:14 why brad started zoo culture 1:03:03 mark bell growing up 1:04:48 brads regret of not doing stuff sooner 1:08:29 being scared of unfamiliar things 1:09:28 people ripping off mark bell 1:11:51 1400lb bench press 1:13:33 mark bell health scares 1:22:09 the most important thing mark bell learned 1:25:30 over complicating workouts 1:28:48 transcend ad 1:30:44 steroids 1:32:49 mark coming off of test 1:35:24 marks brother mike, and how he took his life 1:43:48 brad speaking on his father, and what he went through 1:52:03 making the change 1:54:10 learning to love the difficulty 1:58:24 manscaped ad 1:59:31 the thing mark bell ate the most at his fattest 2:01:10 the worst part of being heavy 2:05:40 mark bell on joe rogan's podcast 2:11:19 social media having people speak their minds more 2:12:52 live action learning 2:13:32 brad not being really into consuming content 2:16:51 all the content mark bell has done 2:19:03 Zoo Culture 2:22:17 invest time into yourself 2:29:53 be in control make the change

Damn, who wrote this? Yeah, who is that? Yeah, he didn't write that. No. Isn't that sick? Yeah, that's great. I love it like that. Wow.

I mean, it's all just perspective, right? 100%. It's your perspective, your interpretation of stuff. Yeah. And then your, but your perspective, someone's perspective has a lot to do with so many factors. Yeah. Where they've been, what they've gone through. How much money they have, how much money they don't have, where they live, where they grew up.

What they think they should have, what other people have. Yeah, it's interesting. I always think this is wild is if we were kids and we grew up in Nazi Germany during World War, two we would kill people because you were yeah you were convinced it was right because you could you were convinced that what it should have been that is insane well bro that's you don't even have like a choice but I think there's a lot of people to a lesser degree they don't feel they have a choice you know yeah I'd go so far to say it seems like that's the prerogative of a lot of people in power and in control is to continue that sort of feeling of people not having a choice for people to feel like

they don't have a choice that they should just fall in line i feel like that's the overarching thing that's been happening in like the world and you just see it more so or you're maybe some people are coming more awake to it because of social media i think people are seeing that more i wonder if it's um like there's powers that that be that don't want certain things to happen or if it's more like it's just too long of a story so I'm just going to give you this metformin for your diabetes.

I see. You know, like you could get outside and go on some walks, but I know that you're not. So here's this drug. Yeah. Here's a solution.

And maybe people want to pay, like I like paying for, I like buying stuff. I like buying something that if you were like, oh, dude, this magnesium is awesome. Like you're going to get these sick pumps

when you work out. yeah i would want to purchase it i don't even really need much validation for i i i want to invest in that product that i think is going to help or assist in some way yeah shortcut or not you know even if it's not necessarily a shortcut yeah that's when it gets interesting then because it's like some moves obviously are the right moves and some aren't the right moves and it's just like this whole thing of life is like how are we making sure we're making the right moves and i guess ultimately you can't always make sure you make the right moves it's just kind of what you know to that point how much you know to that point it's interesting i i guess i when i started talking about

stuff like this i'm just like how do you make things better for people who maybe they're at a point in life where they don't think it could be better because they haven't reached that perspective that it could yet i think it needs to have like some stickiness to it it needs to like resignate with them in some way. Something that, I think everybody has it within themselves to do something hard and difficult and to get themselves to kind of breathe hard and work hard. It might look different from one person to the next. But that's what I'm obsessed with is like how do I get people you know, I feel like I'm screaming from a mountaintop sometimes and maybe sometimes I come off the wrong way. But I would love for people to feel what it feels like.

to pick up a heavy deadlift and to shake with it and then to finish it yeah your body tells you not to do it your brain tells you not to do it and sometimes it's like a one two three count until the weight even moves off the ground and your body's like no dude don't don't do don't do your brain's telling you don't don't yeah but all the training is the accumulation of you being able to do that i don't know how to get people to that point because a lot of people are so far on the that they feel paralyzed. Well, you could speak directly to that. Let's say for the bench.

What was your best bench ever? I did an 854 equipped bench press. Yeah. What about raw? 578. So massive numbers, both ways, right? Like, to your point, at one point, you 100% were not capable of that. What helped you feel like you could be capable of it then?

You have to give yourself wins. you need to build confidence and you need to lift in this case with lifting you need a lift within your means so i'm a big proponent and big fan of and i've always been this way i'm a big fan of doing things that you love but not doing them so much that they are to your detriment i keep for some reason i keep having these conversations and it was after i watched the podcast with goggins and huberman and they were talking about this part of the brain that either grows or shrinks based on you doing things that like physically happening doing things that you really don't want to do but you know that you should but if you say yes to the thing you really don't want to do and overcome it that

that part of the brain like is is gradually growing and sharpening your ability to continue to do that or vice versa where it's like if you if you do the thing you pick the easy route you pick the easy route you pick the easy route you're that's kind of your ability to overcome the thing that's hard that you know you need to and you really don't want to the next time is a little bit harder to overcome. So I don't know why I keep having this conversation. I keep hearing this idea, but it makes sense because I think before we got into this conversation about your benching, it sounded like we were going to start talking about doing the hard thing and choosing to do the hard thing. There's so many versions of the hard thing, though. Do you mess around

with any intermittent fasting or anything like that? I've sense, like not purposely since I was a kid basically like my whole i'd say all throughout high school i probably didn't eat until like i got home and then it became this habit and then i wouldn't even eat i would workout and i wouldn't even eat for like an hour sometimes an hour and a half two hours and then i would eat after a workout like middle of the day and now that's evolved into i don't eat until about an hour after my workout my workouts normally around like 12 1 o'clock so i don't eat until about 3 o'clock most days and I've done that like my entire life pretty much my entire dole light I do a lot of the same thing obviously I didn't do it when I was power lifting and I weighed 330 pounds yeah which

that's a whole other that's like a whole other crazy story I'm 220 nowadays but um too 60 if you didn't know if what I think I think is uh really interesting about what you are mentioning there is like there's different versions of hard you know how hard does something need to be and I think that's where people get lost is that they think that they need to go out and kind of kill themselves in a way they need to do something so difficult that it's like dangerous and when it comes of strength you are going to do some things that are dangerous when it comes to sport you are if you're competing you're going to do some things that are a little bit dangerous but for your body to have a good response to it for your body to get stronger or to get better at that thing

it doesn't have to be dangerous the reason why I brought up intermittent fasting is because intermittent fasting and the reason why I do it as well versions of it is that it's easier bodybuilding is is hard walking around like a jabroney bodybuilder with your tupperware everywhere that stuff is really like I bow down to those guys those guys are those men and women that do that that is incredible discipline but I want nothing to do with it I don't want like rotten chicken in my to eat that many meals in that gym bag and everything yeah so to stay tethered to your food like that is a discipline i don't meal prep you probably don't meal prep no i have a meal prep company but i don't meal prep yeah right the foods you have you have you still have uh access to convenient

stuff 100% yeah same here but i don't particularly prep my meals the way that a bodybuilder might prep their i had at one point for probably about six years of my life and i was like competing yes back back in 2011 and i was like to to whatever that would have been six years after And then I was just like, dude, this is, I love it. I loved it and I enjoyed the process of it. But when I started to develop other businesses and other like focuses as far as like content and things outside of that, I was like, dude, I don't, I can't have time to do this. I just like, like, even if I woke up five in the morning and like went to, it had all this good schedule, I just didn't have time to do it anymore because of all the other stuff that was taking my time and pulling my attention. So if you and I wanted to make things harder, we would actually probably go the other route.

and we'd probably eat a little bit more like a bodybuilder for a while, which would probably have probably yield some really good results. For sure. For sure, right? Like you would instantly you're kind of thinking like, oh yeah, if I did do that, I'd have a little bit more muscle. It'd be probably a little easier to be leaner. It'd probably be easier to not binge at night or to, you know,

want to order DoorDash or whatever. I'm not going to lie, the hardest thing for me is just eating at night, dude. Because I don't, I think part of the intermittent fasting thing has got me not eating maybe just total enough in general. so sometimes in the evening i'm like i'm super hungry and i sometimes have a hard time getting up and got to got to make sure i don't have the snacks at the house i think it can be difficult too i think you like since i've known you you've been in amazing shape and then so when you're in good

shape and you feel like you control those variables pretty easy we're like i'll just have some pizza today but i'll just like i'll train tomorrow and like everything would be good you have the ability to flip a switch and to like get as lean as you would like but that's almost a little bit of a curse because on the other side you're like oh i got it i got this i'm going to take care of it no problem yeah it's funny because truthfully i could say looking back on like the time when i spent really focused on bodybuilding i was i was 100% for sure never my best never like because i was so like it was so focused on other stuff outside of it that i was not good at like because i knew if i just had my consistency with my diet i would have i would have been way better but i just

I was, like, too caught up and trying to do all the other stuff. You're a real athletic and stuff. Do you have any desire to, like, compete in anything? I'd love to fight, but obviously, it's like, it's such a, it's such a weird. There's so many people that you can beat up out there. Well, yeah, it's such a weird space because, obviously, I'm not a professional fighter, so it's like, I'm not going to go fight professional fighters, you know, and then you see the influence yourself, and you're like, oh, I want to do this thing, but it's like,

no one's doing that, no one's doing the MMA thing. And I've talked about this plenty of times. I'd love to do MMA with Logan Paul. But it's like the same thing where like I probably wouldn't necessarily entertain a fight with some guy. Same reason why this guy's like Logan Paul, WWE superstar guy, probably not going to entertain a fight with me. And I can respect that. So it's like I kind of just find myself in a spot where I'm like, well, I can't really do something like on a stage, but maybe I can do things. And I have done more stuff like just training.

But like, you know, it's not a camera. It's not here. It's not there. But I really enjoy that. And I was probably spent the last, like, a good amount of time. I don't like to say how much time, but a long amount of time, like just boxing. Because I was, I was always better, like, physically, like. How old are you?

34. I think it's awesome. I hope that you continue to keep that athleticism because that's something that I, I didn't continue to pursue my athleticism from when I was young when I was powerlifting. And then, like, I'm trying to unwind a lot of that. So if you don't have to unwind. it it's it's going to be a lot better for you in the long run so if you're still jumping and still doing some of the things you do you do those things just because you like them which ones the jump

yeah just like i mean dude it was weird because like you're good at it and you're yeah you know it's really because i you know how you should i probably at this one i probably still could like jump vertical jump i remember a guy came to my gym once and he has the world record in vertical jump and he was a fan and he's crushing on the internet now but he came to me at my gym and he goes you know you were like an inch away from the world record and i never knew it wow i never knew it back then he has the world record now he was a guy who came to my old gym and he told me he was like damn like if you just jumped this much higher like an inch or inch and a half like you would have had the world record and i'm like completely oblivious that's fascinating because you're not a light

guy yeah no i'm not so he was telling me this he i think he now is like a couple inches above that but i had no idea the point is i never really trained for that like i trained olympic weightlifting before I really got into bodybuilding and then in body for a while for a while for yeah okay so I was doing the snatch and clean and jerk like just you know hyper extension with the barbell on my back and then front squats back squats and all the variations of those and that's all I did and then I got into like physique and bodybuilding and then that kind of turned in like physique bodybuilding like power building whatever you want to call it but it's interesting because we were talking earlier about like just genetic people who are just genetically gifted we're talking about LeBron James and stuff

I'm a shack yeah I'm just I never trained to be good at jumping I just jumped one day and was like well I'm good at this and then I would just do it a little bit more but I was never like oh I'm gonna jump five times a week and I'm gonna do to try to progress it I was just good at it and then I just did every once in a while I'm like I was getting a little higher it's like I wasn't training it I think that's normal like when you hear from other people when they're good at something I have a similar story the first couple times I bench pressed with my friends and my in in our garage in our basement. So we had weights. Your environment is going to dictate a lot of these things. Maybe you played a bunch of different sports and stuff. And maybe there's more jumping and more explosiveness in your history than you even remember because, again, you were doing it, A, because it was fun and B, maybe because it was part of a sport. Well, dude, I remember one time, interrupt you. I was sorry, but when I was in high school, I was that kid, I was a stupid kid in, like the lunchyard and like I would like jump over people so I would like line people up and like how to put myself over people and I wish I could find this clip because it must have been filmed

on a like toaster at the time where I remember jumping over like it must have been four or five people and I cleared them and then like we just went crazy and I just this clip is some it might be on a razor phone somewhere somebody's got it somebody out there I wish dude and I wish I could find this clip because it was again it was back in like 2000 in your head it was like 25 people that you jumped over no no no no no it was like it was like four it was four or three and I just remember everyone went crazy

but I was always I always did like weird yeah I was always just weirdly good at things that I never tried to be good at and I was like let me just try this so but I wish I could find that clip man because I swear to you bro like I still I still remember that I'm like damn I really did that and it was like a weird moment really weird moment I think uh I think the name of the movie might be unbreakable. It's got Bruce Willis in it. And there's a scene where he's bench pressing and he starts adding more and more weight. And his son is in the basement

with him. His son is really little. He tells his son he's like, he should back up a little bit because like this might be kind of dangerous. And so he keeps adding weight and adding weight. Then they have no more weight. This is him discovering like how strong he is. And he keeps putting more stuff on there. And then he's putting like buckets on there. And now the kid is like hiding in the closet watching him bench press. I had a similar experience. I had a similar experience. My brother told my cousin. My brother is four years older than me. My cousin is about four years older than me.

My brother told my cousin, I think I was around 13 or 14. He's like that my nickname is Smelly. That's really like, smelly can bench 205. And my cousin was like, yeah, like 13 or 14 years old. Yeah. That's actually insane. Keep in mind, I probably already weighed like 180, 190. Like I was a big kid.

I was 240. Either way of that, that age is insane. saying yeah so i bench around around that weight so my brother puts the weight on and we're in our basement and he's my brother's trying to be real safe with me because just using little incremental weights just two and a half pounds on each side each time so i did like 195 200 205 all the way until we got to 240 pounds and i did that you know it was a crazy you know crazy weird lift or whatever right and i put the weight in the rack and my cousin's like he's like that's going to turn into something. He's like, I don't know what you do with that, but he's like, I think that's

going to be something for you someday. And then boom, slingsrap. Yeah. I mean, dude. Yeah, that's, that was, that's kind of my origin story. Now, it doesn't go without any work. Of course. It doesn't, it doesn't mean that I didn't, it doesn't mean that I didn't, I didn't, I didn't lift and stuff, but I didn't, you could make an argument that people work way harder and never bench that weight. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I was just, I was doing it young. And I also had a good, uh, I had two older brothers. they both were into lifting and then we also had a friend that was a power lifter he squatted 700 pounds at like 198 older guy and he was a guy he gave us like five by like we were doing all that stuff bulgarian workouts man i remember being pumped i remember being so pumped to get out of school

for the summer because like this is going to be sick i get to do the bulgarian training program because they train three times a day yeah like school would be in the way of my like middle of the day training session. Dude. I was doing that stuff like forever ago. Yeah. It's crazy because this working out seems to be not, I mean, it's coming back.

It's really popular, not coming back. With young people, it seems to get really popular. Yeah. Which is cool because for a very long time, it was like not popular at all. And I don't know. I just feel like kids should be pushed towards more of that kind of stuff

because nowadays it seems like kids are just, I don't know, they're soft. People spend 90% of their time inside. Yeah, probably on their phone locked in. I'm like, holy shit, that's a lot. So even sometimes in a gym, sometimes you're still inside. But people need to exercise. I mean, there's no, there's no question.

I just said the other day, and it's a totally meathead statement, but I said if you don't lift, you don't count. Bro, I think that's a fact. I think we have to make that a thing. You got a, we got a bully again. I don't want to hear, I don't want to hear. We should bully weak kid. No, seriously, we should be like, you should stop being weak.

Like, obviously, you don't got to be as strong as that guy who's super strong, but like, yo, let's get, at least try to get stronger. Well, it's interesting you were mentioning about, like, fighting. That's an interesting thing. Like, we don't really need to fight anymore. Yeah. We don't need to fight, but what if you do? What if you do have to fight?

Yeah, just, I don't know. I just feel like innately humans need something that's, like, strenuous to your body. Otherwise, like, what the, like, are we just going to evolve into, like, putty? You know what I'm saying? Like is I just understand I don't I don't get that. I don't understand like for example right this neuralink Elon Musk recently like yesterday was like the neuralink's first thing that they're working on an app within the neuralink is called telepathy where if you look at your phone right

your phone because somehow it's going to connect to the phone is going to do what you think without you doing anything get out of here yeah bro yes You didn't see this? That's wild. So if I open my phone and I'm like, and I'm thinking in my head, if I have this neuralink on, apparently,

I don't obviously know all the details, but what it's, he made it sound like, if I'm looking at my phone, I'd be like, I'm thinking of Twitter. It's going to open up Twitter. I'm going to think of compose a tweet.

It's going to start composing my thoughts. So then I was like, wait, like that level of like automatic, listening to my sort of like thoughts, creating action on my phone. then i'm like well what if there was a way where there's some app called download and you just download let's say like Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt skills like the matrix yes you download

like connor mcgregors boxing skills or mayweather box like what if there was a way to synthesize that data and then you to be able to download that data with this sort of device and then you just know those skills that's coming But then it makes it really weird because then you go, another example, like I was having this conversation last night, Beethoven, right? Or even these fighting skills. Let's say you have these skills now.

What makes anyone special? Like to say I downloaded Beethoven's ability to make music. And I'm just like, I'm, I'm Beethoven now, right? So then what makes anyone special? It's the podcast world, right? Like the podcast have exploded. Social media has exploded. Who has a voice?

Everybody. Yeah. Now everybody has a voice. That's interesting. Should everybody have a voice? Should everyone, not everyone, but like should a lot of people have influence? That's an interesting or should there kind of be more like one guy to kind of look to? I don't know what the answer is, but it's an interesting thing when you start to kind of walk your brain through it. You're like, how many different people should we listen to? Maybe it's more helpful when you have multiple people because maybe you get, you know, some information from Huberman and he says these things, get some information from Joe Rogan he says these things and you got kind of stack some of that

information up with your own beliefs but with like AI coming down the pipeline and some of the stuff that you're talking about if you can think about it and it gets like basically transmuted back to you what does that turn into and then also is there influence of uh advertising is there influence of you know what i mean is there an influence of um you know uh what's the word i'm looking for is there politics involved yeah you know is there politics involved which there kind of always is it's kind of like i don't know if you've ever had this experience but i have had this happen a bunch of times i'm listening to a podcast i'm really focused on paying attention to it i'm like wow this guy's saying it's a really good and then all of a sudden it's like a whole thing

or I've had this happen with documentaries. It's a whole thing about being vegan. And I'm like, man, they had some nice information. I'm not going to dismiss the information now that I found out that they're vegan, but damn, I didn't see that coming at all. And then the whole rest of the movie, I've seen this on Netflix a couple times now,

the whole rest of the movie is like politically charged. I'm like, this is strange. Because then they're not sharing facts anymore. Wait, wait, how something changes real time. Wait, what are you saying? Something changed real time for you? No, no, no, no. It doesn't change in real time.

The film is the film, but as I'm watching it, they're sharing information. They're getting you to buy in. I'm like, oh, this is really cool information. Okay, cool. A documentary about? Most of them have been like nutrition. Okay. Most of them have been in the nutrition space.

I can't remember you are what you eat or something like that. I think that came out recently. And they did these studies on twins and things like that. They had some great information. Another one was on Blue Zones. They had some really great information in the beginning. but then once it was kind of revealed that it was more of a plant-based initiative

it just went in completely different direction it just went all politics almost from the rest of the movie and I'm like that's crap they're hiding a lot of great information from people yeah so that's the concern I think with some of these things

being able to like think something and then have it come back to you are those things going to be like politically charged is there going to be a lot of advertising in there I mean I think that's already happening but that's definitely Yeah, I mean, it's happening on our phones all the time. But to answer my, I want your opinion on my question,

more specifically, like, if everyone could do everything at the highest level, right, they were just given this, like, ability, then what is special? You see what I'm saying? And how, like, how do you progress forward as a society where, like, people are still identified as special? Not that you need to, I guess, in a sense, but I don't know, is like, if everyone could do it,

let's say at some point everyone had that. everyone could just be like, I could play Beethoven's music. Then Beethoven's, not Beethoven, it's everyone. It's an interesting conversation because is everyone special? You know, like my belief, my personal belief is that everyone has a godlike feature within them. Everyone has like a little chunk of divinity. It's kind of our job for us to try to find that. I don't know exactly how someone finds it, but finding the things that you're good at.

I think those are all things that can be really helpful with it. but yeah i don't know what the answer is on like having you know if everyone's skilled what is the difference i guess the difference could be creativity yeah i think i i think it then comes down to perspective i think then your own perspective on how you take which then just goes back to the same thing in general in life now that's relevant to success and having success or succeeding at a high level is what you do with it because just because you receive information And you play like Beethoven that doesn't I guess that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to like create another song that's like just as much of a hit you know or like maybe I don't know like but then again that's different because if we started talking about fighting let's say I downloaded my ability to like be an expert at this and an expert at that. And then I already had the physical strength capabilities that when I just smoke everyone. You see what I'm saying? So then it's like that's like more physical application of like this sort of downloading of expertise we'll call it. But. yeah i just keep going in circles with it where i'm like then we're just all this we're all just

the same at some point if that ability is there to download and i because dude i feel like if there's a device in my brain that's reading signals or like nervous system like cues and it's creating movement on like a platform how could the inverse not be a thing i think we're simultaneously getting smarter and dumber at the same time so like we don't need like i have no idea how I got here today. Like I just used a Lyft app, you know, and I got here, but I don't really know, I know sort of where I am. Yeah. And I know sort of where I came from, but I don't need to know a map. I don't need to be able to open up a Thomas guide and be like, oh, I'm going to get to Bradley's this way. And so I think simultaneously we're losing some of those aspects. And I think

what could potentially be the divider would be the people that not only learned how to fight, but could actually fight not somebody that knows about fishing but somebody that can actually fish someone that can actually hunt yeah someone that actually knows how to like skin an animal somebody that knows how to fix things and I think maybe those things would be a dividing factor because at some point but what if you could just download that information then you just knew it yeah I think I understand what you're saying but there's going to be people with this like weird and tangible like there's people that just sort of know how to fix stuff I know you you can learn it, but I think that might be a little bit of a separator is the person that's

a little bit more creative and the person that is maybe a little bit more resourceful and the person that's willing to do it because just because you learned it doesn't mean you're willing to do it. So you can learn everything about fighting, but if you don't go out in a jog once in a while, you don't exercise in other ways, it would be, if you only fought, you'd probably build up enough conditioning to where that might be okay. But if you're only like reading about it and you're only just practicing it a little bit, I don't think that's going to really be a thing that would that would have you be expert level because you only like know it, but you're not actually doing it. Applying it. You got to apply it. And I think that

is like what's the biggest problem with people being fat these days, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Especially nowadays because everyone I feel like knows to to a very vague idea, but enough to make it happen or not. Like don't eat so people have the knowledge and how come they're not applying it but everyone's in a different spot you mentioned earlier about perspective your perspective your interpretation if you start rattling off how you eat and especially how you ate years ago and how you kind of built yourself up and now you maintain this physique you would lose somebody after talking for two three minutes not not because of what you said was complicated just because they don't want to do it Yeah, you would be saying, you'd be saying too many things or eyes get glazed over,

you can see it. I've had so many conversations with so many like really well-known influencers who aren't in the fitness space. And I'll have these conversations because they'll be like, yo, bro, how do I, I have like, all, every single one hits me up because I'm kind of like in both spaces. And I'm like, oh, it's like this and that. And like, you could tell like a lot of it the time they're like exactly what you said. They start going like, hmm. And then they start looking like, not that they're disinterested, but they're just like, because sometimes. like a lot of work and they're just minds like shuts off like I was on the phone with my buddy uh jennie on the other day he's talking to me multiple times about losing weight

and he talked to me again and he's like no but they always appreciate the motivation it's super grateful guy but same thing it's like yo you know what you got to do you've done it he even has been in a place where he had already kind of been a gym bro and kind of fell out of it somehow for content and you're right people always know the truth that just like I guess that this is it this is it the difference between people who really succeed and i think if even if you download information it had it like that it's the people who are who are willing to actually apply it still every day moving forward because those are the same people that whether they got to download or not they wanted something and they worked for it every day in some way and that's why they have it

apply it and learn from it and then also let's not forget it's not just you in this world you know So you, like you learning a lot of stuff is really helpful, but you being able to interact with other people is massive. Yeah. The impact that you have on people, the way you talk to people, the way you share stuff with people is huge. And for myself personally, I have worked on this for a while now. I worked on equanimity. I worked on trying to have like a balanced mind. Is that what equanimity means?

I think so. I don't know. So I have a... So the first time I've ever heard that word. Yeah, equanimity. Yeah, I haven't basically. having a balanced mind, uh, even in the face of adversity, even in the face of like, you know, I don't know, I get a text on my phone that's something crazy happening and I'll just spike the phone

in the ground. Yeah, being able to like, or I just tell you, hey, man, Bradley, something, you know, happened to my family and I, you know, I, you know, I appreciate you, but I really have to, you know, I have to go. Yeah. Like handling it. You know what I mean? And it, you know, so like women have none of this. That's what you're saying. Well, I think that, uh, women, uh, are, they are they can be they can be reactionary which sometimes is and there's some guys that do of course but i think uh i think that emotion and that reactionary instinct i think can be good sometimes because what i'm talking about it i'm not talking about like taking a plunger and just stuff in all my problems down into my guts and then like never sharing anything with that's bad

it's fucking terrible yeah that's that's gonna that's gonna that's gonna probably be the most unhealthy thing you can do yeah regardless of food and drugs and everything else It's just that. Like, you're going to explode. But equanimity in balancing your mind. And so this is something I've been working on for a really long time. I went and I basically, what I would say is I sort of cleaned out my closet, which I actually has to literally clean out right now.

Well, no, I had to make space. No, I had to make space for the closet so I can come out of it and have a grand, a grandiose entrance. But a lot of people would just be like, I knew it. I knew it. Dude. Jim Rose. in the gym they're all like 10% gay oh yeah everyone's feeling each other oh those are nice triceps like okay yeah this how it starts you want to touch them yeah exactly oh that's funny man

i like what you said about the plunger thing i think and i want to ask you this question because um there's definitely been times in my life where i fully did the plunger act where i stuff things down and slowly over time like revisit it and then i worked through it and obviously it's made my life incredible but there's also been times when i didn't work through it, and then the things that I should have worked through would come up in a different relationship, in a different friendship, and cause the same sort of issues because I didn't deal with it. Why do you think people tend to just stuff that shit down and not speak on it and not share it and not try to process it?

I think a lot of times people want to try to, especially a lot of men, I think they just want to try to solve their own problem. And you and I are in, we're similar spots. We're in the fitness industry. And if you share something, if you share something with me that you feel like you drink way too much and you're out of control and your family and stuff like that, I think that you might view that as like being something that would disappoint me. But if you actually think about it, if you think about your friends that tell you certain things, I mean, They can disappoint you with certain, with certain actions and certain things that they do. But if they were to tell you that they're going through a really hard problem,

imagine that a family member, a friend telling you they have this issue. And you wouldn't be disappointed. You would be, you'd be flattered that they came to you and that they talked to you and say, hey, this is really good, man. Let's get this out in the open. All right, guys, quick and orange for the podcast. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Check this out, guys.

I've talked about this many times, but it never. is not important. If you guys are looking for outside advice, unbiased advice from someone else who's going to be able to help you kind of work to what you're going through, whether it's a relationship thing, a personal thing, a business thing, a friendship thing, it doesn't matter. Better help has got your back. It's super simple, super easy. It allows you to do it from the comfort of your own home. You don't have to drive anywhere. You don't have to worry about traffic. You can do it at your convenience set of the times. It's easy for you. I promise you it always helps to get a different opinion other than your own and other than some sort of biased opinion on

someone, you know, from someone that's like in your circle on some sort of topic that you're trying to like work through. It always helps to get like an outside view because it helps you to look at the whole situation from a little bit more of a bird's eye perspective. So if you guys ever thought about getting help, I promise you better help is there for you. Go to betterhelp.com as betterhelp.com slash raw talk to get 10% off your first month. Betterhelp.com slash raw talk. Let's get back into this podcast. Well, if somebody is, you know, around your age 35, 34 or something like that and and they don't have a significant other yeah you know they their mind might be racing about what's my future oh man I always wanted to have kids and

they might build up a lot of anxiety towards something like that yeah and I think that's a that's a it's good for us to share these things I just think you feel like a wimp or you feel like sometimes when you share those things if I if I come to you and I say hey man I notice that you're you know rocking out on like deadlifts and stuff and you've been doing it for a long time i want to build my deadlift back up i have a trouble with a lockout it's like that's no big deal for me to like share that with you yeah like i don't have any trouble sharing that with you but if i'm like oh man i can't get my dick hard or whatever like yeah that's what i mean it's more personal for sure yeah yeah i think people i think people develop i don't know i mean

we develop so much when we're younger and i think i think when we're younger maybe that's where we develop the oh i don't want a kind of mentality of like i don't want to be in trouble or i don't wrong and then it kind of just transitions to the rest of your life where then sort of those things that have happened to you where you feel sort of troubled or not necessarily wrong or maybe you did wrong or something done wrong to you maybe you don't want to really share it or be vocal about it because you maybe somewhat ashamed there's also a lot of work involved so if I go to you and I say man I know you're able to get in good shape and I want to I want to you know do a bodybuilding show or something well if I open up that can of worms I know you're going to you're going to you're

to hit me with so much information which is great but now i got to work on this problem i say man i had this issue with my wife and uh we're just not seeing eye to eye and and you mentioned a bunch of things you said i went through something similar dude and i went to a therapist and they told me these five things and you give me this great information well now i got to go and work on work i'd rather just take a broom and just sweep it under the rug yeah it's the work why are people so afraid of work and not have to do it sometimes working on something that they're not familiar with and that they're not good at. So for you to work on jumping or lifting or for me to work on running or lifting isn't really that big of a deal for me to make these kind of small changes. Like I did a bodybuilding show.

I went from powerlifting and then I lost weight over a really long period of time. I remember that. And then I ended up doing a bodybuilding show. But and then people are like, those are way different. It's like, well, they're different, but I mean, it's still, it's not like I immediately jumped into like a triathlon or it's not like I immediately became like a chemist and like learned chemistry and like, you know, now a professor at Stanford or something crazy like that. Like that's a, that's a crazy shift. So I think sometimes for people, they're worried about the work, which is really smart. I think especially we go back to talking about. people that are heavy they know it entails a lot and they don't want to work on it and i think the other factor too that is in here too is like your lifestyle your lifestyle starts to get question

and that's that's kind of offensive that's why the that's why the diet is uh so cult like is because it's like you're you're trying to tell me how to live my life and that's like that's offensive to me Like I want to be able to 7 p.m. 8 p.m. I want to be able to relax. I want to be able to have, why can't I have a dessert? Why can I have a beer? So I think people get offended by that. It's like you can have those things. But the situation that you're in, you're behind. You have body fat to lose. And so you have to go in a different direction. Yeah. I guess it all just does come back to the fact that people are seemingly afraid of doing hard work, choosing the thing that's harder. Like the we were talking about earlier. And I think the more you choose. the thing that's easier and you keep choosing the thing that's easier it's so much harder to the switch get it and go so that's what's like what do you think someone needs to like it seems like a most people need like a real health scare in order to like really make a change they say that

people need to have three health scares before they before they make a considerable change so somebody has a heart attack or something like that a lot of times that's not enough like a bunch other stuff has to happen. That seems insane. Like if I had a heart attack, I'd be like, everything's changing. I think it's,

again, the word perspective. Perspective and interpretation, I think so much lies on that. And if you, it's interesting because a lot of people I talk to and you probably end up with the same thing is people that come to me

for diet advice and come to me and they want to make these changes and be healthier. When they start to unpack some of that and they start to tell you about it. And they tell you how lazy they are with stuff. I'm like, you're not lazy. You have three kids.

Like, and you're always picking your kids up from school. You're always taking your kids to these different sports that they play. I see you all over town all the time. I see you walking on your dogs. I see you doing all these things. And you start to point out these things that people do. And it's like, dude, you're eight out of ten in so many categories. You know, you're not total maniac and you're not, you know,

know, 10 out of 10 on everything, but you're, you're very disciplined in a lot of ways. And I think that when they have this weakness with their nutrition or with their fitness, I think they just think they're a total failure. But it's like, you haven't, you haven't really practiced it. This is a practice. They, you know, they call it jujitsu or martial arts. They call it a practice. Yeah.

That's what we're in. Like fitness is a practice. Lifting weights is a practice. And to go back a little bit more to the beginning when we're talking about doing hard stuff. A really interesting thing when it comes to powerlifting is it's the practice of powerlifting that will get you incredibly strong. It's not necessarily the one rep maxes and those types of things that are really at that highest level of intensity.

Not that you don't need that because you need that and you need to learn it. It's a skill to some degree. But the answers lie in the same place where they lie everywhere else in your life. The answers are in the 70 to maybe 85% of a. intensity effort yeah yeah of effort that's where i mean that is in every that's in every aspect that's in every sport if you're playing baseball and you're just at bat and you're like trying you know so hard but if you're a little more relaxed and you just recognize that with this free throw or with this practice that you're doing this is a practice i'm going to be here tomorrow and i'm going to be here

the day after so accumulation yeah you're 100% right and i think the reason why it's teams from the outside looking in like obviously for me this training stuff it's not a problem right i have other problems that i'm not as great at and things in my life that i that i actively work on and know that i need to like put my energy towards to be better at i want to interrupt just for a second to say that i think that people think that you and i are so disciplined and we might be in in we might be in a broad uh category a bunch of areas but we like to lift we like the lifestyle we liked the results so if if you had us eat like crap for 90 days and you had us like not lift that would feel like discipline to us we probably wouldn't even accept any amount of money to do

something like that because we're like that's crazy i didn't doing that yeah so for us we're just sort of flipped the other way discipline wise on our heads yeah insane um But the point I was trying to make was in regards to the way, and I talked to your brother about this and he was interviewing me for the film that they're working on, the bigger, faster, stronger, it's number two. The way that people have been conditioned specifically in the West for so many years now is like, by this thing, it'll do this for you. And it's all kind of like commerce based. It's all kind of money based. so I think people have been convinced over time that it's like you need a supplement you need this you need that you need all these things that you can buy or this pill that you could take that's going to

fix your problems and I think people have been conditioned to like not think of the fact that they need to do all this hard shit to get what they want physically and just not even just physically we're talking about like business stuff all everything comes down to the same sort of like are you focused on it are you putting the time towards it is it something you're working on every day to get better at And I think that we've been conditioned just as a society to just go, that pill, that's all I need, cool, how much, I'll take it. And that's part of the problem in all of this where it's just you're pushing people towards look for the easiest, simplest, like pill, buy this thing, and then that's all you need. And that's just not, you know, like even in conversations about steroids and stuff, it's like people think that, oh, you just do this and you look like Ronnie Coleman. It's like Ronnie Coleman, one of the most genetically gifted specimens ever for bodybuilding,

still cannot just take a thing and just show up and never touch a weight, never put intensity, never put effort and just be Ronnie Coleman at his peak. It's not, that's not what he did to get there. And I think people just have this misconception that everyone's looking for the easy way out in so many facets of their life, whether it be like a relationship, like, I'm just going to avoid this conversation because it's easier, even though the conversation needs to happen so that the two people could understand. understand, oh, hey, this is how I feel. This is how you feel. Okay, we can make it work or we

can't. I think people are so conditioned by just our society and the way everything's presented to us that we need everything as easy and as fast as possible. I think everything is within us, like all the tools that we need, all the answers that we need. Now, you're also going to get a lot of answers from other people too. And that's what I was trying to illustrate earlier when I said I cleaned out my closet so I can come out of it. When I was talking about cleaning out my closet, it's something that has helped me a ton, right? And it has helped some other people around me, especially the people that are in close proximity. But what I've learned is I still can't control the way other people feel. I still can't control someone else being super

reactionary. So then now how do I deal with somebody being reactionary towards me? You mentioned those hard conversations. That's a weak point of mine. Yeah. I don't like those. My wife runs our company she deals with those we've we've lost many employees over the years just it's the way business goes hire people fire people it's the way it is and people have been pissed when they didn't get fired by me but i don't handle that part of our business because that again that's not a strength for me but that is something that i should work on probably get more disciplined with i think i have the same fear as someone going to you or going to me with a weakness where I don't want to be super disappointing to somebody.

I don't want to hurt somebody. I don't want to hurt their feelings. I don't want to because it's hard for someone to separate it out. Like, I'm not telling you that you're a person, but this just isn't working business-wise anymore. Yeah. Like we're not getting out of what we need

or we're moving on or we're trying to move in a different direction. So that's kind of the way, when I worked on those things and I worked on getting myself balanced and have an equanimity, it's like there's still a lot of rumbling going on because I still have so many other people in my life

and I'm sure you probably ran in similar situations helping out friends, helping out family especially financially like financially first of all I've never cared about money I still don't care about money and if something can be solved by just chucking some money out here and there I don't mind doing that

I don't mind like someone is in a compromised position don't mind just you know given that support but then at the same time things like that can cause a lot of really uncomfortable situations within a family having having a family member work for you or or um or even just sharing your wealth it's like it's just things get things get more tangled up than you would think yeah well in cases like that that people become like almost almost like kids to you if they're like reliant on money and it's like you know some people shouldn't be in positions like that you know um god i've had so many situations like that just like old employees and people that i've worked that have worked for me that i'd like oh i'm gonna go

out of my way and try and help them in these situations and then looking back i'm like this totally fucked me out and fucked me financially and then it's like the guys over here being like oh he's the bad guy and you're like what the fuck i just i've dealt with a lot of that kind of you stuck your neck out for somebody for a while and just didn't make sense anymore and then yeah lost money while doing it

then got you know treated while it was happening while it was ending like it's just it's a weird I guess that's part of having money or making money or having power it's interesting I find it so interesting that you're the employee employer relationship

you know the employee always thinks that they're not getting paid enough and that they work way too much and the employer always thinks almost the exact opposite. It's like, man, I'm paying that guy of that amount of money and he's not doing all this stuff, you know?

It's, but yeah, I've had that tons of times, but then I've also had situations where like someone consistently goes above and beyond and it's like, man, I want nothing more than that person to like make more and more money because like they're adding so much value. I think, I mean, this, the genre, like the area that I work in, it's all kind of based on that.

that you know like it's not like a typical job and for me and what i've seen over the years of like being in the social media space and building businesses within it it's just about getting someone who like really sees the vision and to as much as you do if not more and from a different perspective and putting people in the right places for them to really succeed and excel at what they're doing because i've had times where i just put people in the wrong place and it just turn into it show or then move things around and it's better so it's interesting because like as the boss or as the person in charge, I think the number one goal is like putting people in the right position. And sometimes, obviously, trying to let go of a little bit of control because you have

to, because for me, if I'm not doing all the things that I know that I should be focused on, like the creative and like, you know, pushing forward the needle in that direction, then nothing starts to work because I'm double back trying to make sure they're doing this other job that they maybe just shouldn't have been doing. Someone else should have done it. And that's been just a learning curve for me, my life in a lot of ways, man, tons of ways. ways um but i want to ask you a little bit about your business but also right now currently you got removed from youtube and you've been on youtube for what 10 years uh i think like 16 years yeah i started in 2006 i started so i used to have a put file account do you remember put

file yeah what the fuck holy shit you're old yeah i'm i'm dinosaur dude that's that's dope though So, so what happened? Like you, I've known you for a very long time. Obviously, we've had tons of interactions together. We filmed content together. You were at, like, around my gym first opened eight years ago. We filmed content. We've had tons of conversations.

And your content over all the years has never been, in my opinion, controversial. I mean, you talk about steroids. You've never, but you've never done anything like, in my opinion, from, I've never seen anything that was, like, against guidelines. Right. And so how did you, it's like, how do you get kicked off the platform like that? I think you're going to get canceled now for having me on the show. No, I don't think so.

I think, well, this is interesting because I, I, no, it is interesting because there is, there is something called ban for life, ban evasion, your band for life. Yeah, that's crazy. Because same thing with Steve will do it. He was banned. And then, you know, I had him on a few episodes and they were like, yo, you can't keep having him on episodes. And I was like, okay, like, he can't even be on YouTube.

Wow. So you're a band for life? No, no, I'm not banned for life. Luckily, we got the channel back. Okay, so you got it back? Yeah, it was my podcast. So what did they say? Why was it banned?

They didn't have a lot of good reasons. First of all, I just want to say that I love YouTube. Dude, me too. I mean, that's where I started. I listen to YouTube every single day. It's the way I consume information. And whenever I'm looking something up or want to find something out, it's i always go to youtube and so i've been doing that forever and i i've always appreciated

youtube and then on the creator side i've always loved being part of youtube like it's a great platform it's allowed me to uh get a fan base it's also helped me with my business it's helped me in like so many different ways but how cool is it that there's this free uh this free app that you get to use where you get to express yourself for pretty much as long as you want there's nothing that compares to youtube and you can upload as many videos as you can upload as many videos you want it's crazy and then on top of that they'll pay you so it's wild so like when it happened i wasn't i wasn't like oh my god i can't believe this you know how dare they i was like well it's their company they can kind of do whatever they want where i was disappointed and frustrated

was i didn't get any information just the just the channel was gone we had dr sean baker on our podcast and I was excited to kind of see that if it was up and I wanted to share it back to him and I went and I looked and I was like there's nothing there I got information from our podcast team and they're like the channels it got erased and I was like and so we had to we had to contact YouTube we had to try to figure out what happened and what they say and I don't know I mean is just what they're saying. I have no idea. It doesn't seem to make any sense,

but we supposedly got, we supposedly got the ax from YouTube for a link that was in our, that was in like the description. Yeah. And it was a link to a, to a peptide company. And I guess they have a hard rule about

you can't have any, any sort of sales of anything that normally needs a prescription. And so that's, that's what that's what we got dinged for and I had no idea I never I never heard of that rule I didn't know really but I mean how often I mean people are always talking about peptides you know so I didn't I had no you need a prescription for peptides I didn't yeah I mean you don't need a prescription you can order them online but they want you to use a prescription so that's where you start to get into want you to use a prescription I think so but that's where you are you to use a prescription I think so but that's where you start to get into like i don't know maybe a little conspiracy theory going on with big pharma youtube everyone's you know i don't know interesting i don't know but yeah it was stupid i was like and so you got you got it back and yeah we got it back because uh we just have awesome fans

and this guy contacted me he's like i work i work at youtube he's like i'm in the sports department and i'll i'll investigate this i'll look it up he's like i watch your show all the time yeah massive fan and he's like i've never seen anything on your show that would warrant you being uh he he's like it's kind of weird you didn't get like a strike or anything or but because i thought it was three strikes i always thought there was three strikes that's what i heard that's what that's what people were saying that there's uh strikes and stuff like that but we never got any word of anything like that was just just gone and so we were thinking like okay well maybe maybe we'll restart you know and then we're like well maybe we'll go on twitter

We were trying to figure it out. But yeah, this random dude on Instagram reached out. His name's Jorge, and he hooked it up. And the next thing you know, we were back. So that's even strange, though, too, right? Because it's like, I don't know if there was an infraction or something, you figure they would give you more information so it doesn't happen again type thing. I don't know.

It's weird. Yeah. Internet, man. It's like the Wild West nowadays. Have you ever had that happen? Me personally, no. I think I maybe had a strike once because I was like burning something

in a video and it was like dangerous on one of my other channels but never never never like never for any of my content specifically like for me and I've never had anything where it was like you're going to get removed I've always had a good communication with YouTube

as well so maybe that's part of it. Yeah I also take full ownership of stuff you know just being a business owner and doing things as long as I have the person that put that link up you know it's not their fault i just take i take full responsibility it's it's my fault i wasn't aware of the rule didn't didn't know it worked that way and so i try to do that with almost everything i'm

involved in because it's like well you appointed these people you hired these people to be in these certain spots so it still comes the way that's the way i look at it still comes back on me if something bad happens in the company or things are sliding downhill that's on me if things are going up I'll take some credit for it here and there too. Yeah. I think it's important. Yeah. I think it's really important.

Do you do that with your business a little bit too? Yeah. I remember earlier on I had a little bit of a hard time. Like sometimes it much easier. Like for most people, and most things easier to blame other people when things go wrong. But then I realize like, okay, like if I want this to be what I really wanted to be, then I'm going to make sure of these things happening or not.

And that's what I said earlier about like finding the right people, put them in the right positions. Because I could specifically remember. a couple instances where like I had certain people in certain jobs and like I kind of knew that it wasn't the best fit but like it still was like most comfortable and it's again going back to doing things that are uncomfortable or like making those decisions or like going towards the stuff that's more difficult or having those conversations those communications and sure enough when I go and I actually do that and press that stuff forward everything's better but I had a I probably had

a problem sometimes just like letting things drag on for too long and causing more damage than it would have if I just stepped in and was like hey like I have to take ownership of this sort of problem or issue here and can't just say hey it's that person's fault I did the same thing probably like 10 times over yeah just let things go for too long like oh this guy has these other good qualities and he's good this and not and what I learned from it was that not only was it not working for me for us for the company it wasn't really working for them either And so I think each person has their own story

and sometimes one person's story is because they got fired from a company or their boss or their manager or whatever told them look man you don't work hard you show up late too often you're out of here and it's like that changes that person's life forever in a good way

you know hopefully it's in a good way and I've noticed that with a lot of people that we employed too they went on and they did great on their own as well. So I think it's when you're in those positions, it's not easy to kind of put your foot down and make that decision, but it's the best thing for you. It's the best thing for your company. It's probably the best thing for them. Yeah. It's always harder when it's like friends. There's people you, you know, you have like a longer relationship with where in your mind you kind

of think like this person would want the best for this company, not just because of, you know, their job, but also because of the relationship that you've built, you know. And it's hard to come to that conclusion to be like, okay, that's not the case. Or maybe they just didn't know enough to make it the case. And then it's just making that decision that it's always a little tougher when it's someone that you consider like a friend. Right. So friends in business is always kind of a hard thing for sure, unless like they're like really in the right role, I think, which is, is, you know, not always easy to just find it and streamline it. What made you start zoo culture? Oh, man. Well, originally, and maybe we talked about this before,

and one YouTube video, but originally I was never going to have a gym that had like members. It was just going to be a gym that I could film content at because I was getting kicked out of gym just making stupid content, like lifting girls or jumping on

or whatever I was doing. And then, you know, I started to realize like a lot of the reasons why I had my success, all of the reasons why I had my success other than me doing stuff was because like people were accepting of it or like listening to it

or getting something from it. And I was like, okay, well, I kind of want to have a space that I could have these people come and be a part of this with me. And so that turned into obviously the gym as I know today. And it's also turned into like a really cool place for a bunch of people who are wanting to be creators or fitness influence to also now become a part of it. So it's cool to see how it's evolved into like sort of like, I don't know, spawning ground of, influencers or creators who are like in that space as well so it's developed a lot more like because like I said originally it was just like I was just going to use the space to make content and it's

cool to see what it's developed into for sure and for so many reasons and also it's just cool to go there and just meet people who have like go I've watched you for 10 years I've watched you for six years I watched for four years two years whatever it is and share their sort of perspective of I guess what they've seen me talk about or what I've said and how it's affected them or made them start a business. I can't tell you how many places I went where people were like, oh, I've been to a gym,

really nice gym. And the guy's like, yeah, I opened this because I saw you open that. Cool. You know, it's cool, man. This,

I guess because I've been in it for so long and from like the inception, pretty much of like a social media influencer. I've been, you know, blessed a lot to, I help a lot of people. Obviously,

that comes with a bunch of negative as well. I don't know. I'm trying my best to try to not to talk about it as much because like I realize reliving that sort of story is not really beneficial to like the story I want to continue to write. You know, just the thing that I want to continue to like present and give to to people or people who watch me. Because it's tough to like because you have to find a balance. You do want to share it. You do want to you explain what you've been through. Because that's also how I got to where I was where I'm at is I was explaining my hardships but there is a part of like really kind of moving forward and letting go of the things so that you can tell a whole new story I couldn't

agree more you know for my story is like it just grew up kind of a dumb kid I just you know and in school like I was on like a fourth grade reading level I just never never did well in school but I don't talk about that that much anymore because I'm like well I'm just that was that was my hardship like we all have like a hardship some some people have it worse some people have it better some people are more in the middle um but for me and and also too like that was um you like buy these stories you know like that i bought that story now i was just a kid so maybe i didn't feel like i had a choice but that's something that later on in life as you get older you have an opportunity to like not buy that story anymore

and go, hmm, I was able to do this with my strength. I was able to do this with my body. I was able to do this and that. I learned a lot about nutrition. I learned a lot about strength training. I've learned the science of it, and I've learned all these different things. Maybe I'm not as dumb.

Or maybe I should just stop saying that I'm dumb. Or maybe I should just stop thinking that, regardless of what anybody else said. And so that's, I'm in a similar position where I don't really share. I don't talk about that that much anymore. because it's an area that held me back for so long and it's a story that I that I kind of wanted to keep because I couldn't do this I couldn't do that there was a lot of can'ts and a lot of like won'ts and don'ts and shouldn't kind of all lumped in there because I thought I had this uh

I thought I had this like ceiling I couldn't go any higher than that ceiling so I think it's I think it's important to try to you know turn the page on some of this stuff yeah yeah because for me I know it's mine's largely related to like I don't want to say I mean I guess the word is like regret regret of not not doing something sooner that I know I should have done and like I'm very hard of myself for a lot of ways in a lot of ways and I think like there's there's definitely this regret in a lot of situations that I've been through I'm like man I wish I just had this conversation sooner I wish I I did this sooner and then I wouldn't be you know that's that's that's where I get kind of caught up sometimes where I'm like but then it's like what's the point

Like, what is the point of living in that? Because that's not getting me further. Right. So I think it's tough. I think it's hard for people sometimes to just, like, fully let go of things that, like, they feel wrong, dinner. Something was done dirty to them. Because I've gone through it in this dumb-ass industry with people who just, like, leverage you to all hell for their own benefit. And it is hard to fully let go of it, you know, because I think when I think about it, I'm like, damn, you know, certain people really took me for a ride, like, took my.

time like took a whole portion of my life and for for a very long time and really benefited themselves and you know did everything in their power to make me look as bad as possible because they knew what they had done and it's like that hurt for so many reasons and but then i think it hurt mostly because i think like damn they took eight years of my life for their own benefit and then treated me like dirt so for me it's like letting go of the that regret of not stopping it sooner not you know what i'm saying not coming to a point being like why am i letting this happen you know um or just wishing that and thinking that oh no this will be good regardless because why would you know why would someone do me that dirty and you have a different look on it now um do you kind of think like all those people

that were doing that, they, that's just, they felt that was the appropriate way for them to act at the time. Yes, I think that those people that I'm speaking to don't think about goodness the way that I think about goodness. I think they think about money and that's, that's the extent of how they're, what they're focused on. And I think that in their mind, they did good because in their mind, money was all that mattered in that circumstance and in that situation. Yeah. And it's frustrating because that that wouldn't have been the same story that I was like understanding of through the relationship that I had with them. It wasn't like I didn't think it was just money because I thought like in the sense of if we're all succeeding together like why would you do me so dirty

to just take for yourself when you were already getting so much benefit from it. And I guess it just comes down to a difference in personalities and people like what people focus on or where they put their effort or what they think's truly important or what they think is truly important or what they truly matters. I've seen that same scenario happen to a bunch of different friends. And I remember one of my friends in particular, I remember talking to them and saying, why do you feel like you need these other people? You know, and they actually like paused for a minute and they started to cry. I was like, holy shit. Like I don't, I didn't mean to, you know, spawn that emotion from you, but they just kind of felt like they couldn't do it on their own. And I was like, you,

You ever looked at your own YouTube channel? You ever see how many views you have? You ever see how many comments there are? You ever see like, I mean, people are, they're all over your channel. They're watching it all the time. You have all these watch hours and so on. It's like it seems like you're successful enough

to just kind of go off on your own and do it. But I think, you know, we're scared a little bit of some of the things that we're not familiar with. And when you start to get into some of the stuff that we've gotten into in fitness, You're thinking, yeah, I got the fitness side down, but I don't really know anything about business. So I'm going to, I'm going to like partner up with some people. And if I partner up, like they'll take care of me, that part will be taking care of because I'm going to, I know how hard I'm going to do the fitness side of it.

And they'll probably be equally as passionate in business as I am about fitness. And a lot of times it just doesn't, it doesn't pan out that way. It doesn't work out that way. But I think for a lot of people, if you're already making some headway with what you're doing, it's a great idea to start to think about, I wonder how I can kind of pull this off on my own, like to try to have it be your own idea, your own product, your own.

The more that you can do that, the better. And especially the better it's going to be as you go on longer and longer. You have the slingshot. Have you ever had anyone try to like take advantage of you in that situation or try to rip off your thing? People do. I mean, people make versions of the slingshot.

shot you know it's something that like pops up on amazon all the time yeah i have a united states patent so taking care of the people in united states and communicating with them that this is a patented product isn't that hard and any of the other companies are just they're just super small and from a business from a patent perspective um i actively have to defend my patent like x amount of times anyway so they kind of just doing me a favor i gotta just shoot them a shoot them a letter and it's usually not a huge deal where it gets more complicated is i don't have like there's no such thing as like an international patent you have to be registered in in many different spots you know it's funny about that in order to hold your patent dude there's i swear there's a a gym

thank you soby there's a gym in um in india that's like straight up zoo culture Holy shit. Like a hundred percent ripped off my gym. Like, I'm like, what the fuck? Is that windstrel water? No, I wish, dude. No, no. Just anavar for me.

No, no. It's just some artist. How many milligrams of antivar? 50. Not enough. Yeah, I've had people, you know, rip off the products and stuff. It's, it's more flattering than anything. You know, I feel blessed that I was able to make an invention.

it's honestly cool so it's a good product thank you it is i appreciate it you know there have been other things that i've created or made that were harder to protect you know like the hip circle and stuff like that and yeah and then you see all these like booty bands and but i don't really care about any of that i actually like i want people to move i want people to lift i want people to exercise so if people are able to make their own booty band and then other people buy it and like i just i think it's great like we just we need more people like we're losing people are fat dude i'm coming out with the product called shot sling so it's looks oh is that the one that attaches no no it's it's for the chest dude right here people are going to

get jacked yeah you know what's interesting about the slingshot is that the current bench shirts are now made and they look a lot like a slingshot so it's just like more of like a shirt but it's made out of like the slingshot material and some guy recently benched like 1,400 pounds. I don't know if you ever saw that. What? Yeah, 1,300 pound bench press. What the fuck? I have to see that video.

I can't remember like Cole business last name. What the what does that even look like? Like, dude, it's wild. They can barely fit, you know, kilo plates, those red 55s. I mean, there's a ton on each side. There must be like, I don't know, 10. Well, I really want to see that video. It's wild.

He's a strong dude. You know, like everyone's like, oh, it's a shirt and whatever. How much you think he does outside of the shirt? He probably can move around five plates for some reps and stuff like that. That's insane. Yeah, that's a huge carryover, yeah. It's doing a lot. But equipped lifting is just different.

Yeah, I know. You know, I squatted 1,080 in a squat suit, you know, and a belt and knee wraps. And then my best squat out of that was, I did 705 in the gym. I forget what I even hit in the meat. what body weight 677 or something in a meat what body weight were you there um because you were big yeah yeah my my well my heaviest for power lifting was 3 30 but i did my best between 270 power lifting is amazing because it has a 275 weight class and a 308 weight class and then there's a super heavy weight you know in uh the ufc it's like anyone above 265 or anyone above

whatever the john jones weight class used to be that 205 i think anybody above 205 is in the heavy heavy weight yeah heavy weight had you ever had any health scares i've had a bunch of just i've had a bunch of like things happen over the years maybe two or three different things so one day i did a uh i used to do chain suspended good mornings i would do a good morning with a cambered bar and there's tons of videos of this on youtube and it would be suspended from a rack and be in in in these chains swinging in these chains so i could get myself wedge myself underneath there and then good morning the weight up i think i would sometimes often use five six sometimes even close to seven plates on that exercise which is a killer exercise a good morning is a brutal movement wait a bottom of a good

morning to the top with like what 700 pounds yeah how high of a good morning sometimes it would be sometimes it would be as high as my hip so it'd be so low that i'd have to like duck i'd have to have have my you're doing this to improve just like your squats right it's because i squatted like so i squatted i called it lifting like because when i squatted and i came up out of the bottom of squat i'd round over a lot so i was like wanted to correct it yeah i was like screw this i'm gonna just grind them out that way so i'm just going to kind of learn how to do this and and have my back intentionally uh inflection where i'm slightly rounded and i'm going to like power these weights out. And so it's something I worked on that for a while, and it worked amazing. Like my

squat went from 942 to 180. Do you never get your backup for that? Well, here's what, here's what happened. I didn't mess my backup, luckily, but I did a good morning one day and something just, I got done with the rep and something just kind of hurt. Like, you know, you have a belt on and everything. Something kind of hurt like in my ribs. And I was like, man, I was like, that's kind of weird. I didn't think much of it. After the gym, after the workout, the pain got a little worse. And the next morning, I sneezed. And it hurt like crazy.

That brought me right down to my knees. And it was in my side. And I was like, holy fuck, what was that? So I kind of shake it off. And then I'm like, you know, trying to breathe. And my breathing is like a little short. I'm like, I can't get quite enough air. And I'm like, oh, it's probably okay.

It's probably just some, you know, rib. thing or whatever. Anyway, the day goes on and it's now like the evening time. My wife went to like a musical. I don't go to musicals. I told her that when we got together. I said, I will never go to a musical with you. But you feel awkward or what? Yeah, I don't want to go to a musical. I don't get it. So anyway, I had to call her why she's at a musical and have her come home and bring me to the hospital because it just felt like it was breathing through a straw. What the fuck? So I felt like where the pain was, now I can kind of remember. little more clearly. Where the pain was, it was more like in the upper rib, more like on the left

side. I'm like, is this a rib thing or is this my heart? You know, what is going on here? Like, this feels like I can't breathe. I got shortness of breath. Anyway, I went to the hospital. Everything checked out to be okay. They just think that I slightly tore something in my ribs. I had another incident many, many years later, preparing for the only marathon that I ever did, the Boston marathon and I was out on a run and I just you know runners call it bonging I just like just started to feel like it while I was on this run I was running faster than I ever have before I was doing these intervals I felt great uh I actually I actually never felt that good on a run before I'm like this is awesome I get into about the eighth set I think I'm supposed to do about 12 sets for the day

I do eight the eighth set and all of a sudden I'm just starting to really feel like it wasn't just like nauseous. It wasn't just like, oh, you're overtrained. It just felt really weird. And I don't know if it's like pre-workout or ketones or like, you know, I took a mixture of stuff before I went and worked out. I took some cratum. And I just wasn't feeling good. And I was like, well, I still have a few more sets. I was like, let me try. So I try to go. And my legs were just, they weren't under me. Then I started feeling like kind of dizzy. And then I'm as I'm walking, I'm like, okay well you can either try to finish this and like and maybe die out here or you can walk your ass over to Starbucks and see like because I thought I thought my blood sugar was crashing

maybe your blood sugar is messed up which doesn't really make any sense because I had carbs before I worked out and everything so anyway I go to Starbucks start down in some juice that they have there and then I start like shaken and a guy kind of noticed I was shaking I was super pale the guy came over and sat next to me. He's like, what's up, man? He's like, you don't, you don't look so well. You okay? I was like, no, man, I don't know what's going on.

And my body's like, I'm just trembling. I started to shake so much that I couldn't even, the cup that I was drinking out of, I put a straw in it to try to sip out of it. And I could barely get my hand to my face accurately enough to use the straw. Yeah. And luckily my wife was in the area.

So she came over to start. Starbucks. Now this is becoming a big thing. Like everybody in my town, everybody in Davis, they know who I am. They see me running all the time. People cheer for me when I'm running down the street. Like I'm Rocky Balboa or something. Yeah. And so this is just like insanely embarrassing, but I'm feeling like so I'm not even noticing any of that.

My wife comes and I kind of tell her what's going on. I was like, I think we need to call 911. Because I think there's something going on with my blood sugar. And I was like, I can't, you know, I can't wait in a waiting, like I, I need help, like, you know, right away. So she, uh, and when I'm talking, I'm like, uh, like, I'm talking like I'm like 105 years old. Like it's really hard to talk, but my brain's still good. Like I'm still, still know what's going on. Um, anyway, all this juice and stuff that I drank, I barf everywhere in Starbucks.

I tried to have my wife grab like a garbage can, but she couldn't find one that didn't have like a, a lid thing on it you know and so i just puke everywhere the ambulance comes what did you think was happening the blood sugar i didn't i i thought for sure it was low blood sugar but when the ambulance came and when they pricked the finger and stuff and they checked my glucose it was like 540 so my blood glucose was spiked you know maybe your blood glucose is at 80 or 90 or something yeah it was way up it was at 540 and i could barely stand up and get on the gurney they wheel my out of starbucks and then they check my blood again when i was in the um in the emergency vehicle and now it's at like 400 so my blood was already starting to like come back down i i never learned

exactly what happened on that day and i never learned like what it was so i have had some weird They check you out EKG and everything? Yeah, they did all that stuff. Both times, both times at EKG fully checked out the heart. I get blood work done regularly. So I've never had anything. I never broke a bone.

I've never had a surgery. Yeah, I've never had a surgery. Well, in that case, what they, it's hard to tell exactly what happened, but some people said that sometimes when you run or sometimes you do something strenuous, sometimes your blood sugar can be high which i've never heard of before but my blood sugar was high and i did more damage to myself by drinking more of those juices and jacked it up even higher

made myself even sicker but i was up for i don't know man like six or eight hours and finally got out of the hospital and everything you don't know so you don't know what caused it don't know exactly what happened though but health wise i mean in general i've had those two things happen and never have had anything happen, never had anything, never had any, like, real injuries with lifting or, you know, I, I, I fell with 1,085 squat and that fucked me up for a while, but nowadays I feel really good. I run almost every day. Yeah. I'm working on being more mobile and working on jumping and working on some shit like that because I, you know, I still want to, I still want to be able to do cool

What uh through everything like you've trained and I guess just learned in general in life and in training what do you think is I don't know the most I don't know I would say like the most important thing that you've learned

as far as like working through I guess the difficulties whether it be life or training I think it's important to have a lot of patience with stuff and maybe some of the opposite of what's shared out there about because I do think you can you can very easily work way too hard you can very easily put too much in and I'm not necessarily just talking about like overtraining but I'm talking about

just the overall amount of work that you put in in a given week or in a given month you can certainly you can certainly overdo it and what I see a lot of people I've had so many different people on my podcast and when sometimes people come in i see that the way they walk i see the way they move and i'm like okay they are older than me or they're similar age but i'm like i don't want to be that stiff you know i don't want to be like that so that's something that has helped me over the years is i i've made some changes i made some dramatic changes i did powerlifting and i was powerlifting that's that's what i did i focused in on that honed in on that i did bodybuilding for a little bit honed in on that and now with running i'm working on like running being healthier in general i do realize

that peds throw a monkey wrench into that whole thing i don't necessarily think that uh taking testosterone don't necessarily think it's the safest thing in terms of like your blood work and your cardiovascular there are safe ways of doing it i don't always subscribe to that sometimes i take a little extra but I do other things to kind of counteract that because I like testosterone I love the the motivation of all of it but just to get back to answer your question I think patience and persistence

and you may be like this today you may be doing this today you might be this way right now but what's it going to look like two years from now or three years from now if you consistently are doing these exercises how's that going to look over over the course of a handful of years.

It's going to benefit you drastically. It's just you're not going to notice a whole lot in the beginning. And I think one more thing to add to that is if you're kind of just starting out or you're trying to get yourself locked into this stuff, do your best to be a little bit more performance-based rather than just physique-based because that part, it's hard. And it takes a long time to learn that. and most likely most of the people that that you'll know that learn the aesthetic part no learn learn learn the strength part learn learn the um yeah learn the um the performance side of things like what you're trying to get

you're trying to be able to do an extra set or you're trying to be able to condense your workout have less rest do more weight be a little more flexible do an exercise with a longer range of motion i think that these things are really good pillars to have and then what you'll notice is that your aesthetics are going to get better. Yeah. Do you think that people overcomplicate like functional workouts? Like you know like so you know there's obviously squat bench deadlift right. It's a huge movement right now is yeah all these movement people yeah. Yeah where it's like do you think it's somewhat over just overdone for content almost in a sense where it's like some of these things could be just you know you could do a good morning you could do a squat you can get these things from it instead of like

doing this movement that movement that movement that movement to get like the same. same effect you're 100% right i mean bench squat and deadlift are the big three for a reason you know they are really powerful and if you bench squat and deadlift it could probably and this is just potentially but it could most likely make you know my daughter is 16 she plays volleyball all her her and all her friends would benefit tremendously from some squatting some benching some deadlifting but what would a coach, you know, think for them to do? A coach would have them jump. But they jump all the time.

And so it's not like jumping wouldn't be beneficial. Someone teaching them how to jump, when to jump, someone teaching them some plios and stuff like that. But as you pointed out, you didn't really work out of a ton. You got yourself stronger. And your strength in regard to your body weight is going to be something that's going to really improve movement and athleticism. And it's something that's not talked about enough.

I also think it will help a lot with longevity. The easier it is for you to move around your body when your own body feels really light to you and you can do 10 pull-ups and you can do 100 yards of lunging and all these different things, or you can bear crawl and do all these different movements, I mean, it's going to be a lot easier, I think, for your body to stay in shape

and for your body to stay in good condition. I do think that I do think that a lot of fitness is it gets conflated and confusing because if you follow people on social media, most of the time those people are showing you what they're good at. Occasionally someone's like, look how transparent I am. I'm going to show you this failure. Sometimes you see that, you know, but most of the time you're going to see like the flexible guy or the flexible girl is going to be showing you an active flexibility. Most of the time the bench press guy is going to be showing you him you know bench pressing you know that and so i i kind of like to

look at everything with a little a little bit of a critical eye and and think i think a lot of times people see something on social media and they think oh i want to do that or that looks really cool i want to do that yeah and i think what you should recognize is just that that's a skill set and that's cool that you're going to use that as an inspiration or motivation to do something but you should also recognize that person may have been doing that for a while. The person that's benching 405 for 10 reps, there's absolutely no way, there's no way to bench 405 for 10 reps without lifting for 10 years.

Like it's just a, that's it. It takes 10 years to be, it takes 10 years to be good at anything, and it probably takes another 10 after that to be great. Yeah. 10 year minimum. All right, guys, Crippenorunch for the podcast,

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that? And they got your back. Let's get back to the podcast. Yeah, but everyone wants that shit right now. They're like, where's that pill? Take those steroids. That's what that's what they think, man. It's funny. I think I don't know it's the confusion in it like the or the the ill perception that the I don't know people just I don't know why people think that it it is just that simple especially when it comes to steroids it's very much like a maybe because in sports like historically it's like people say it's cheating this and that which like when bodybuilding and all these strength sports it's like it's like literally just a part of the sport you know um and just people have that misconception that it's like you you know i can't even tell you how many people that i know who've gotten on and then they're like oh this isn't at all what i thought it would be like they got almost nothing out of it yeah because they probably didn't put much into it yeah it's like always comes back to that same thing of like just the effort you're putting into the thing

every day i do think that testosterone is a is a wonderful like motivator yeah you know it's a good drug in those terms and it can be something that for someone that feels a little kind of wishy-washy about training and those kinds of things it can be like they call it sometimes people are like this person just needs like a shot in the arm right you hear that

it's like yeah a little shot of testosterone might boost somebody in a good direction but I always wonder could testosterone be a therapy sorry interrupting you for like depression there are people that do that I actually I know a guy who's a clinician who utilizes it but he won't talk to me on my podcast because it's like

you know it's not it's it's not um i guess it's probably studied a little bit maybe it's a little more acceptable now you know who gets depressed when they take testosterone and they come off of it who everybody yeah i think everybody i think everybody gets wiped out by that like if your levels were pretty high and they were pretty you were cruising pretty good and you come off it you got to be really careful. You've got to be really cautious. I came off years ago. I've been on steroids like on and off for 25 years, or since I was 25. I'm 47, so 20-something years. And when I had my daughter Quinn, I came off, I came off everything for a few months and then, you know, got my wife pregnant and then and then we just went right back to it. But in that time span, when I came off,

I have never even I've never even felt when someone talked about depression I didn't know what they were talking about that's how raw it was to me I never even I never really got it I never really understood what anyone's talking about and I just felt like crap for a handful of days I was upset I was I was also I was also a little angry which is really rare for me too I don't usually get mad and so I was like what the fuck is going And I was like, oh, all these side effects, the steroids that you hear so much about, they seem to hit you pretty hard when you're off of them.

And I got acne too. I don't ever have acne. Yeah. It's like all this stuff happened to me when I was off. And I was like, holy. And yeah, I was super like melancholy. Like you said, like just numb. Yeah.

And I've only felt that similar numbness one other time in my life and it was a couple years ago when my mom died when my mother passed away i told my wife i'm like i don't know how to explain this to you i don't understand what i'm going through but i'm just probably going to be a little weird for a little while and she's like well that's fine you're thought to be weird your your mom died you know and you were really close to her and i was like yeah i don't know how to just i don't know how to describe this but i just feel so numb i don't i don't seem to care about anything one way or the other at the moment and luckily for me just over time it sort of started to you know work itself out but that was a I would rather have like a feeling

you know it's like a feeling you sort of know what to do with but that middle ground that kind of gray area was just it was terrible yeah real depression is I think that's what real depression is you can't it's like hard to pinpoint or label it yeah it's like a it's like a it's like a feeling of nothing and that's like a that's like a scary thing because yeah like you said i'd rather feel upset or i'd rather feel sad than like completely indifferent to anything and everything my brother mike was bipolar and he he committed suicide as well yeah and my brother he utilized performance enhancing drugs but he was real like up and down with just about everything and when he killed himself he was at a treatment center

and you know I believe that he was off testosterone at the time and they were giving them like other medications and stuff like that too but he always seemed to have a rough go of it when it came to that sort of stuff he was also addicted to drugs and I what had happened with him is they said we can't give you treatment unless you're sober and he's like but I need

he needed treatment for being bipolar on top of needing treatment for there's separate things you're bipolar and you're addicted to drugs like you need treatment for both yeah but they wouldn't treat his bipolar disorder unless he was clean he's like i can't get clean because i'm bipolar like what part of this do you not understand so it was it was always super frustrating with him mental health i think still hasn't moved far enough along even nowadays but this is you know about 10 years ago when some of this happened and he was always uh conflicted and he was always um he's always real up and down with his emotions and that's what happens when someone's bipolar but i think on top of that it was exaggerated um because he because he took hormones because he took testosterone yeah and i think at

that time he was off of everything and so not only was he like you know manic with his mood go up and down but I think now he was way down which sucks too because it seemed like at the time in communicating with him I mean I talked to him the day before and he told me not to be a yes he pretty much told me all the time being my old old advice beat beat me up all the time but uh I talked to him the day before and he just you know he seemed so he seemed like up you know like not he didn't seem up like manic in that direction either he just like positive i was like this this is this is cool man this is a good spot for him to be in and then uh the next day the reason why i told me not to be a is because i told him that

i was going to power lift the next day and i was going to break this record that was in the uspf this federation that was around at the time i don't think anybody competes in it anymore um and i was telling him as i said it's going to come down to the deadlift he's like yeah you're kind of a with your deadlift and he's like hey well okay when it comes down to it's like you know makes you kind of stick stick that deadlift you know makes you push all the way through the whole meet and he's like i'm sure you'll break the total record and stuff and yeah i went i competed i did the meet and i broke the record felt amazing and then the next day my dad called me and you know i i think i i think i had run that scenario through my head a bunch

that i was going to get a phone call or something like that where he's you know i i received other phone calls where he was like going to jail because it was violent with somebody or whatever in those situations but you know i still have that like i have almost like PTSD over it like i can still hear my dad's voice saying your brother he's dead you know i was just like it's just a horrible thing for a family to go through mental illness addiction to drugs and you're just seeing so many people now that that are dealing with with both and it's uh it sucks and i and i hope that i hope for some people they find they find uh some comfort in some other things they find some comfort in getting outside and lifting

and i realize that those things can seem like total bull things when when you're behind and when you're yeah when you're stuck like i you know i get it like if i told my brother yeah let's go for a walk be good for you to get sunlight he would have said fuck you right like and i i i again i don't pretend to understand the way that he felt but i can only imagine it must be it must be crippling yeah how did your brother take his life i when someone like that dies a really unfortunate thing is i remember when we went when i went to the place where he killed himself I went to this treatment center, and there's a bunch of names on the wall. And I'm like, what are these names, you know?

And someone like, oh, it's all the people that died over the years that came here. I was like, holy fuck. It's like a World War II Memorial or something. You know, with all the names on it. I'm like, oh, my God. This is terrible. And there was like tons of names there. But my brother died.

They think because he did, he huffed, he was huffing. like dust off, something that you use for, like your computer. And I think a lot of times when people like that die, not that I think personally that there was like foul play. I just, I just think that maybe they're not going to like investigate that thoroughly because it's like we're at a drug treatment center and we're wheeling somebody out of here you know, every month or whatever the rate is, you know. and my mother you know she always kind of felt that he was killed i mean i don't really necessarily

think that but um he he did the point the point is is when i think about that he was always rolling the dice anyway yeah so i don't really think too much about how he died i like to try to think a little bit more about how he lived right and then even when i think about that there's like not a ton of positives that I can reflect on because he had mental illness and people that have dealt with mental illness before or have it in their family. They know what they know what I'm talking about and it's just it's uh it's really hurtful you know because my my brother he he's my he was my idol you know he taught me how to lift he taught me how to fight you know he taught me so many things I learned so many things from him the only reason I'm the only way I'm able to sit here and kind

to talk about it like plainly and stuff is you know number one is i've i've run through this so many times i've talked about it openly many times and that's been cathartic um but he also has said many times he just didn't want to be here and so when i think about that he had just a he just had a life was very very difficult for him for whatever reason and uh for me to want him here is almost like um you know for me to want him here is almost like a selfish thing because he just couldn't he couldn't take it anymore he didn't like you're talking about like kind of people backstabbing you and stuff he he hated that that stuff like broke his heart so much he

he was the kind of guy he wore his like heart and his emotion on his sleeves yeah if you told him something and then you went back on it it didn't matter what it was could be the smallest thing he would not understand that it would you know really make him super frustrated so that's kind of the way I look at and he was a big big reason why I'm sitting here today with you talking to you is because he got me into lifting in the first place yeah that's amazing man I did I just losing family members and it's I guess kind of at some point a complete inevitable obviously but uh I guess losing them in ways that it's just like you know you talk about it

being selfish to want him in your life is like is it though you know because i want him here because i love him but i know how hard life was for him yeah and so that's what i mean it's like i don't want him you know to have to agonize just to keep me at peace how do you get it's like it's so tough because you it's like how could you have gotten someone to change their perspective on life you know can't that's the thing you know when i think about my dad oh man oh man i wasn't gonna do it it happens to me all the time you know i i remember going to do it but i had it happens to me all the time you know i i i i remember going to shows and uh just randomly someone would come up and they're like hey man you know i listen to you i follow you i'm a fan i have mental illness in my life too i'm sorry about your brother you know

they're still saying it many many years later and it's just something will hit me sometimes or i'll be in my car and a song will come on yeah that that he was cranking you know my brother was he was he was the coolest guy in town he was like he was again he was my hero he was he's uh was six years older than me you know so when you're a little kid and you you get to kind of be around like bigger kids and stuff it's everything to you yeah so the music he'd listen to um the things he would do i was into all of it he loved pro wrestling he loved football i love pro wrestling i love football it's like whatever he was into i was super excited about and super into so sometimes now even just watching football or or he was into uh pro wrestling like i'll be watching a wrestling match and i want to

I want to grab my phone and call him because I never deleted his number. Like I'd never had it in my heart to get rid of his number and my phone. I'm like, no, I'm keeping that in there. And so it's just these little things like that that just, you're like, no, it's not going to get me today. It's not going to, you know,

but I think crying over it, I think is healthy and powerful. You know, it's what I was going to say what's so interesting to me is like, I have the perspective now that I have in my life debt that i that like that like i only have so difficult that like i only have partly because of him not being here. like that's wild yeah almost actually almost entirely because when I it's like I think in my head I wish I could like how could I have or how could someone have obviously I couldn't have being the kid that I was at six I couldn't I didn't know any of that I know now but it's like

you wish that you could have showed them like a different side of things but it's so difficult right now it's it's weird because i only know the different side of things because i was forced to see it a different way and for everything that i've learned now i have the perspective that it's like damn i wish i could have given that to that person but i only have that perspective because of what i went through so it's it goes back to the whole thing we're talking about earlier about like why people do this and that and all these things is because they they only know what they know to that point in their life and I know something that I wish I could have given to someone but I wouldn't have known it if I didn't go through it you know and he just

he didn't have the people around him or enough know how to be like okay I can try to look at things differently even though this is happening to me right now to know that there's still so much more for me or for me maybe directly things in my life are like almost like I felt like I had to prove to my father or to people in my life that I'm good enough I'm going to be good enough but that only spawned because of what I went through that was the passing right so it's like I could sit here and talk about it all day about how I wish it was the thing that he could have known but that's just that's also just life like you can't you kind of just know what you know at that point that you know it and you make your decision based on it and you know that's what he chose

so it's it's it's it's just weird like sadness but at the same time sort of like i don't know joy that i have around it that like at least i know this now at least i can give it forward you know do you want to be a father yeah yeah it'll be your opportunity to show that perspective that you're talking about be your opportunity you know it's so hard to just i mean just just think about just think about your worst day think about you know anybody listens right now just put yourself in that spot think about the worst day of your life and then just imagine if that just went on every day or it felt like that or that was your interpretation of the day every day was kind of a cloudy day

I think sometimes that's what happens when people have a mental health issue. I think a lot of the days are like that and they just, they don't, they just feel like, and a lot of times people try to get help and it's like, what kind of help can they get? They're just going to get pills. They might get some treatment and treatment can probably benefit a lot of people. But even treatment, like we said earlier, it's like, it's a lot of work. It's a lot of like digging through your soul. and a lot of people in general don't like doing that it's like um it's it's almost a little similar

like putting off a surgery that you could use that would probably be helpful but you just don't want to get because you don't want to like you don't be up for a bunch of months like and for some people it also might take like literally someone might have to like not work for like a year and do all this like deep work and talk to a therapist and get outside and do like all this stuff for themselves for them to start to feel strong enough and start to feel good enough to be heading in the right direction and who who has that time you know who's able to kind of do that so I think you know being able to show people perspective you must have had this happen I've had this happen a bunch where people come up to you and they like give you a big hug and they're like you saved my

life your show saved my life or i'm like holy how like that's that's amazing that some people they found powerlifting and they found something through me that they could anchor themselves to and that was something that allowed them just to get through the next day and i think that that is i think that's something that you and i can do pretty easily we can share like enough stuff with people to where you know maybe they don't want to do all the different things that we do but if they can find some satisfaction they can feel better about themselves ultimately that's what so much of this is about is about feeling better about yourself being able to build confidence being able to have something sustainable that is

repeatable because you can also get so deep into fitness where you don't even feel that good about it like you can go in a gym and deadlift 700 pounds and be like I wish I'd deadlifted 715 you know or you can get yourself super shredded and like ah i'm pretty good but like i got a little fat over here yeah you know so you can get yourself into these kind of weird pitfalls but you'll have to get yourself to a spot where where you at least feel way better that way better about yourself than you do having a lot of negative interpretations about yourself yeah i guess it's why do you think it's so difficult for most people

to like start making the change to like figure these things out i i think it starts with like being uncomfortable it starts in a place of fear they don't know how to do it my wife actually she started working out with a group of women we actually we set up a gym at my house and stuff like that and she just invited a bunch of friends and family and now there's like 12 or 13 people there working out all the same time and they all kind of said the same thing like they they like lifting they're loving these training sessions they're having a great time with it and when I talk to them like oh why weren't you you know lifting before like kind of you know and they just said they didn't know what to do like they felt dumb they felt stupid about it they felt too new they it's just like out of

their wheelhouse they don't get it they don't understand it and so now that they have people that they click with and that's what I would advise for a lot of people to try to start with but I think again, it's tough because you think of about your cousin or your uncle or so-and-so that runs on the weekend or whatever. Like, we're all kind of maniacs, you know, or at least we appear to be kind of crazy with what we do because we love it. Like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to call Bradley. Like, he's way too advanced. You know, I don't want to, but if a family member or a friend reached out and said, man, you know, I need to put more time myself. Would you mind if I tagged along with you this week you know i'll just i'll just show up at the gym whenever you show up and i'll just do

it do what you're saying or do what you're doing and you'd be like yeah come on like you're not going to be like bro you can't even come close to hanging with the amount of weight that i lift i i you know yeah it seems like because you can't you know to get something done difficult right or training whatever right you got to kind of love it a little bit but i think for most people to first start something like they're not probably loving it because they probably had an issue with it in the first place right because it's like they're overweight or they're what if they're behind so it's almost like you have to learn how to love the difficulty right you have to learn how to love that thing that's going to be hard for you to do and like not just training whatever it is like you have

to think about like i said we i keep talking about this for some reason is learning how to like fall in love with something hard to do like you should be trying to do things that are hard when you go to work out sometimes is it hard yeah it's yeah it's kind of hard right and uh you start talking to your buddy i mean you own the gym and everybody knows you there and everything right i'm sure you've had this happen you probably've gone there and not lifted a weight oh yeah tons but you in full and you had full intention the night before or or the day up you're like man i'm I'm going there. I'm going to go over now and throw some weights around.

Yeah. You're all pumped up and then that's not what happens. You kind of talk yourself out of it. I don't think people realize that that happens to us frequently. It happens to us quite a bit. And so while we're sharing this message of like doing something hard, it's not really that hard. It's there's a difficulty level to getting started with it. But if you're someone that exercises, even if you just, you know, go to the gym a couple times a week right now. If you do like three sets of lap pull downs, there is just no possible way.

I challenge you to do it. Go to the gym, do three sets of lap pull downs and leave. There's no way that you're only going to do one exercise for three sets. It's impossible. So talk yourself into like if I just, if I just do that, that's going to encourage me to do more. Yeah. I oftentimes tell people do more, be more. Motion is the lotion. Like once you get moving, once you get your body going, then And you're going to be encouraged to do more. And you might see someone else there. Hey, mind if I work in with you. And you just like kind of, you, it's almost like social awkwardness of like, you know,

kind of breaking the ice. Almost every single time that you ever work out, no matter how much you love working out, there's going to have to be a little bit of an icebreaker in there. Yeah. So can I, I like to tell people, just convince yourself to do one body part. Yeah, that's a good ass.

convince yourself do one body part and maybe even take it back from even there and only one one body part and only one exercise i'm going to go in i'm going to do lateral raises i guarantee that's impossible you would not i mean it's not impossible someone could do it right and they could be like i did that yeah yeah yeah right but you get my point it's like it's hard it's got just get started it's like eating a potato chip you know it's hard once you start potato chips are so good dude that's like chips are my biggest weakness man sweets or no sweets chips i like oh you got all kinds of weeks but chips are the worst though like if i get a bag of chips what kind of chips bro jalapeno chips man there's this the best chips in the world i get if i crack a bag of chips open i don't care if the

bag is like Costco size i just eat the whole thing i saw a ladies potato chip commercial that uh and gronkowski was eating the chips and he said it's like winning the super it's it tastes like winning the Super Bowl. God. It's like, that's pretty good. They do tastefully good. God, that marketing's insane. Do you dip them in anything?

No, normally not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's when it's like, dude, what am I doing? Like, who am I? If I'm, do you see me dipping chips into, like, cheese? I've done it. The next thing is for you to be like, on the sidewalk with a cup, asking for money. Bum, I'm a bum now. Like, I'm just dipping, like, imagine me dipping jalapeno chips and, like,

nacho cheese. Oh, that sounds so good, though. It does sound good. not a hot lino chips the kettle ones you know that green bag those are incredible yeah the salt and vinegar I like those a lot too you know what when I was young I used to eat a lot of salt and vinegar

chips and drink soda and then I just like can't do it anymore I can't eat saltine vinegar no more I just had so I saw like completely all the way out I've done too much I've always loved probably my favorite thing I saw a commercial for it yesterday and it almost it almost threw me off my diet I saw a commercial

for peanut butter cups I'm like, that is my, I don't know what it is. I love peanut butter cups. I'm such a fat kid. All right, guys, quick and doors for the podcast, Manscape. Listen, Valentine's Day is coming up, and you do not want to be caught lacking. I promise you. Trim yourself.

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when you were your fattest what was like the thing you ate the most burritos yeah giant burritos that like the size of like an infant baby you know like and someone's taking a baby home from the hospital it was like you know what I mean it was just massive double chicken double up on rice get that protein in i was like i'm getting my protein in you know and i was just you how much are you eating a day you think three or four chins um i would eat i'd probably eat about five times a day yeah it was mainly at night so i would i would eat sort of like regularish and have kind of like a regular breakfast i'd eat some eggs and some stuff like that and it wasn't insanely unhealthy but it was at night

I was like I need the extra calories I'm trying to get big you know I would do all that stuff and it worked I mean it did help me to get stronger but at a certain point I just I just got like big and fat yeah I got big fat and red and unhealthy you've seen the pictures and you even knew me

you know through some of that just my face that blood pressure was crazy oh yeah yeah blood pressure was high I remember my blood pressure was so high that I couldn't even. So people told me to donate blood. They're like, oh, when you're on steroids, you should donate blood. Yeah.

And so I went to donate blood a bunch of times, but I couldn't give my own blood away. Like it's too radioactive, bro. Now, it was because my blood pressure was too high. They wouldn't take it. Isn't that wild? Yeah. Damn. That was hefty.

Hard to wipe my ass. What was the worst part about that? And what was the, obviously, the best part is going to be your strong. what was the worst part about it the worst part about it ended up being the habits that I developed you know being that big being that heavy yeah and and obvious stuff like I mean look just your day to day everything's everything's different everything's compromised you know we put a hundred pound or we put an 80 pound weight vest on you or something like that like it's gonna slow you down it's gonna be annoying right and so having an extra weight lugging that

wait around traveling was you know you sit in a seat on the plane you can't you know I was like oh it's kind of great getting myself big but now I can't fit anywhere um but the worst part was the habits because I always kind of felt like all right I'm going to do this I put a lot of time and effort into this for about five years you know I power lifted from the time I was like 12 competed in it for a long time and then played football and did a bunch of other stuff in between but lifting was like the uh annoying girlfriend that would always come back like it was just it was never going to go away it was meant to be and so uh i think it was probably maybe around 30 is when i kind of decided like i'm going to go all in on this and i'm going to do it for like five

years as hard as i can yeah and so i just did anything and everything to get as big as i could it wasn't acceptable you know it was the mission was to get as big as strong as possible and if it meant that i had to gain weight then i i did but in that process of gaining that weight i gained a lot of bad habits and those habits were hard to spin out of i see so when i started to try to like diet again like that's why i've been a big proponent of low carb style diets is because i got so addicted to carbs not necessarily like um not just sugar but like chips and pizza and bread and like all that stuff so for me i needed that i needed that like dividing line of like this means you know if you if you eat under 50 grams of carbs a day

this means you're on a diet like for me personally and that's what felt good and that's what it worked really well it took a while you know kind of to figure it out and to get you know more comfortable with it over time and stuff like that but yeah the habits that I developed were awful because still to this day I wake up I wake up multiple times in a night but I'll wait wake up and think that I'm hungry. I'm not hungry. It's impossible. I wouldn't the same way I hate that. I wouldn't actually, I'm not actually hungry, but I always eat. I still eat in the middle of the night. But now it is that dude. Yeah, nowadays, I'll be a meathead about it. I'll have like a protein shake. I'll have, I, it's rare for me to like binge and

eat unhealthy. So I've done a lot better with that, but I still eat in the middle of night. Yeah, which sucks. I can't have a problem with that too. I think most people I think there's a lot of people that suffer from binging more so than they do any like people are always looking for oh Bradley how do you eat how do you do this how do you do that people are going to ask us a lot of questions

about particular what do you think of carnivore what do you think of this what you think of that and for most people most of the people that are really heavy it's like you need to find a diet that allows you to keep with it consistently for a long period of time, whatever style of diet that is, and you need to figure out something that prevents you from binging.

Yeah. So if you haven't, like, I'm not saying you have to have a variety of foods in order to not binge, but it's helpful for most people. Like if you satisfied that thing for a burrito, then you're, then hopefully, you know,

you're not binging at night. and if you fed yourself enough during the day, hopefully later on in the evening, you're not binging. But I think for guys like you and I, I mean, if you're over like 200 pounds and you start to kind of get into this world, this fitness world,

and you've been lifting a lot, I mean, we can pack away a lot of food. And so even if you ate in the morning, just because you ate in the morning and it should satisfy you from like a caloric and energy perspective, it probably like you're still probably going to want to binge at night yeah i have a hard i do have a hard time with the food at night yeah it's something i want to be better at um switching tops a little bit

you you were on jo rogan what twice yeah i was on there with my brother a couple times yeah would you guys talk about steroids we did we did talk a little bit about steroids we talked a lot about like nutrition i was on there as well to like rap about training and diet and stuff like that And one thing I am proud of, one thing I think that's really cool is that my brother and I, we were the first mention of a meat and fruit diet, not that we invented it, because people eating all kinds of different ways has been around forever. Yeah. But I always thought that was kind of cool.

We talked about that with Joe Rogan, and he has such a huge platform. Mass. You know, that's anything, anything someone talks about on there, that's, you know, a good initiative or a good idea. Like, he's going to be able to get the ball rolling on that pretty good. Yeah. it's crazy what he's done man he's like he's like the number one dude it's not mainstream media like producing media i think he's one of the few people that you can actually like i think having

like role models that you don't like uh have good personal rapport with i don't think is a great idea you know like a lot of times um people look outside the home for their like idols and stuff and I don't know what your relationship is with your mom, but I'm imagining she's probably somebody that is probably like a rock for you or you have some other family members that maybe are like that, especially because of the circumstances you went through when you were young. But sometimes we have a tendency to kind of like idolize people, maybe a little too much.

And then we find out that, you know, they do X, Y, and Z. But we should know that about people because everyone has their fault. Everyone has. that but Joe Rogan is somebody where even though I know him we're not like buddies I don't know them know him we don't hang out a lot or anything I do think that he's someone who's admirable I do think he's someone to like look up to I admire the hell out of him I think what he's doing is awesome it's it's impressive like not just the podcast stuff is impressive but he also has his wife his children he really doesn't talk that much about that side of himself on the show

yeah i admire the hell out of that i think that's cool i've never even heard him maybe i've heard it maybe once i listened to a lot of shows um but he never even mentions like the names of his kids and stuff like that and i yeah i think he's good he's good at the whole balancing of like privacy and i mean i'll just suck him off for an hour i mean no he's he's he's great man he seems like an incredible person and i admire it yeah and i think he's just done a really good job at just being super genuine like what he believes and not being sort of no dictation from what other people want him to say or not say and I think that's why he has so much success for sure and that's you know at that level to have that much sort of like power and not kind of sway in a way that I don't know

maybe you know most media want you to sway he's just kind of like this is just how I feel and this is what I think based on what I know and what I've experienced And I think a lot of people, I mean, he's like, he's the epitome of that, in my opinion. And I think people really gravitate even more and more towards them because, you know, all the sort of misinformation or disinformation that is coming from mainstream that people are like, you know, where can I get some sort of information that just doesn't feel like bullshit? He'll also tell you, you know, actively go out and listen to other stuff. Yeah.

You know, active, like, don't just use me as a resource because if you only use me as a resource and you're only getting this certain subset of people. Yeah, well, that's the biggest problem, I think, just in society nowadays because of social media, or not so much because social media is kind of mending it, but it was just people taking things for exactly what someone said and just being like, that's it. And it comes down to just not critically thinking about anything

or not being willing to and just going, my friend said this, so that's what I believe. And not being like, well, why is this that? And he's just done a lot of that. And he seems to be highly interested in, certain things and he goes down the rabbit hole to try to like understand as much as he can so that when he comes and he speaks about it's like not like a complete expert but well well versed enough to have a conversation in like so many different facets i love that stuff i love like kind of

questioning the knowledge you know just he's had guests on you know he's had some guests that are like you know way way kind of over here with their beliefs or some of the things they say and you're like man that's wild but then you think about a little bit more and you're like well maybe the guy has like a little bit of a point you know you can kind of see like I like trying to you know you play devil's advocate sometimes you go on the other side and you think the opposite of what someone's saying and then other times you start to pair up with them a little bit and think yeah I wonder like as an example you know somebody talking about um landing on the moon like that is a really interesting thing did we really land on the moon or like was that produced like it seems wild because like if I FaceTime you just from Sacramento to L.A., like, I can barely get the damn thing to work. Like, it's going to be sketchy, it's going to be glitchy, right? So we barely have, I mean, we can stream, but like even streaming and we watch a podcast streamed,

there's a little delay, it's glitchy, like, stops and all this stuff. I think it's perfect now. Well, it's gotten a lot better. Yeah. It's gotten a lot better. But there still can be like interruption. I guess my point is, is that if we go back five years, it was kind of, you know, it wasn't great five years ago.

Yes. So how in 1969, was it so dialed in that we could watch someone land on the moon? I mean, that was also like a whole race against other countries to say, who's there first? And it's like, based on everything I know about countries and politics and governments, it would make sense for us to be like, we did it first and it not happened. Like it just like, that wouldn't be too far fetched to believe that happened. I'm not even saying I believe one way or the other. I just think it's interesting, right?

And when you start to think that way, then you could start to think about. like anyone that's put in front of you, whether it's social media or on a podcast and you say, I want to look into that more. That's what it is. Yeah. It's the I'm going to look into it instead of just my friend said this or that guy said this and I just believe it to be true. Like that's, that's seemingly what it looks. It's looked like, you know, people have been taught to do for so many years.

Just like, we said this because it's on CNN, this is the truth. Just take it to the bank. Yeah. And now, now because of social media, I think you're having a lot more independent people come and say and speak. their mind so that more people are waking up and being like, huh, maybe it, maybe it is not exactly just this. Because truthfully, like nothing is always just that simple and cut and dry. You should probably question everything. Probably question a little bit of everything. Why not try to find out for yourself? And it's also how you really learn something. Right. Like we even said

earlier about learning, downloading information, but then like really applying it is a completely different thing. So that's, that's what all kind of comes full circle. And it's like, are you willing to put in the effort it takes to apply something even when it's hard and that's how you find success at anything in life how do you usually learn what are some of your processes hard the hard way yeah after the fact yeah after you when i'm like i've got that up enough times yeah that is that is a great way to learn that's how i learned so i've always live action yeah like exactly live action learning yeah because i you know i've i've you hear from people all the time they'll be like yeah I know, be careful for this.

I'm like, yeah, okay, okay. And then, sure enough, the same exact thing hits me straight in the face. And I'm like, okay, now I get it. But let me fuck it up again and get hit one more time. And then now, okay, now I'm not going to do it again. I don't know. I've always learned the hard way.

What about books or podcasts or you listen to stuff on tape or audio or whatever? I'm pretty, dude, like, I've never really been super big and consuming content. I think because I've always kind of been in the content game and like making content. But I have lately been reading, just reading more books. I get these things I'm like interested in. And I think that's very beneficial just because like, again, it's just you're learning someone else's take on something.

And I think that that's just essential in developing your perspective on it instead of Just like I said, just what I see is the only way, because it's also not realistic in so many ways. I like to consume, you know, some other stuff. You know, like I'll do it via like audiobook or YouTube, a lot of YouTube. I'll listen to podcasts. I try to find out, you know, information about all kinds of different things. And I might like research something for a little while and trying to learn it years ago when I was working on equanimity and balance and stuff like that.

that I listened to a lot of just flat out, like motivational speakers. There's one of them in particular, his name is Jim Rohn. I listened to a lot of his work, and I would actually just sit there and I'd journal. I'd like write stuff down, almost like I was in school, which is really interesting, because I hated school because I struggled in it. Yeah. And then later on, I kind of took myself to school, but I like consuming some information like that. I don't really write stuff down as much I might make a note in my phone here or there,

but I found it really useful and I try to use my my runs that I go on or driving in the car. I try to utilize that as like a classroom. Like this is just another opportunity to learn. And yes, I'm concentrating on like what I'm doing, concentrating and driving and concentrating and running and getting out of it, what I need to get out of it that way. To you're in the car, just riding out. So you're driving on a load of it. Yeah.

I'm also, you know, you know, simultaneously learning something and, I don't know, I just, for me, that's been something that's been really productive over the years so that I'm not like, when I'm in like a learning phase, I'm not just like, I don't know, so just sitting still. I'm like doing multiple things. Yeah. You see you have like overachiever OCD shit. I've done that too.

Like I'll like walk on a treadmill. I'm like listening to an audio book or something. I saw your treadmill. It's like right in front of your TV. That's great. And it's funny. But why not though? Yeah, but it's funny because I was talking to a friend and then they were like, why don't you just walk?

Go for a walk. I'm like, you're right. Well, you definitely, yeah, pop outside or something. Still do that, of course. But it was just like more so if I can do this in this specific location while I can focus on other things was in my mind at the same time. Right. But yeah, it's funny. What you were saying about like when we were talking about consumption is I do agree with you.

they're like, I don't consume, like, a crazy amount of stuff from other people. I feel like I'm busy sort of like writing my own book. Yeah. And I'm busy, like, putting out my own content in a way. You know, when you do as many podcasts as I've done, or you just... How many do you think you've done? Oh, I've done probably around 2,000 podcasts and then, I don't know, thousands of videos on YouTube over the years. Yeah.

So while I like the other content, I like consuming content, um i also like creating it like i like i guess what i like the most is to take some information that i hear and i like being able to put that into my own content or utilize that when i get an opportunity to be on a show like this so i'm not just sitting here going oh yeah you know yeah we were talking earlier about huberman's and in that that episode i guess with guggins i would love i'd love to talk to that guy that guy's really i just lifted with him this morning with really yeah i just came from his house else we trained some legs he's strong actually strong yeah like what's strong like you

squat well he was uh let's see he was uh the hacks hack squat machine you know i know machines or whatever but he did like five plates on the machine damn did some reps did a stack on some leg curls it can't tell is he like jacked yeah he's jacked yeah he's in great shape damn yeah i was like we were off camera anyone that's got a neck i got some respect for he's got you know he works his neck all the time he's got a neck machine i like people who are that smart who are like jacked and for me it makes sense because i'm like if you're that smart like you could probably make yourself jacked and then i'm like i'm like really more prone to listening to that guy than someone else then because i'm like oh it's not just here he like applied it it makes it more relatable for us yeah like he's it's

cool when someone you kind of like recognize like oh he's like he's kind of one of us like this this is perfect yeah but when someone is lifting and they're they're putting these things into practice it's it's just that much more beneficial i think like you're getting i think you'll get more out of content from somebody like that they're not only researching it but they're actually using it practical application always comes back to that yeah actually doing the work damn dude it's been an honor it's a pleasure got to have you come back um any questions for me before we end it you know i i like i loved uh years ago go you called me up and we we were talking a little bit and you said uh something about like zoo

culture like you're just you're about to open it up or something and i was pumped for you i remember because you and i were in contact a little bit you were asking them you were like man i got these like permits and like this is taken forever and this happened and then you were pumped and you're like hey i'll give you an update like it's like we're open the doors tomorrow and i said like congratulations now it gets now is this is the start you know what i mean it's like Like, a lot of times when we, when we start a business or you start something, it's like you feel like, oh, thank God, all that hard works behind me. It's like, no, now now it comes. You know, here comes the razor blade coming at you a full speed.

Once you start that business, there's no stopping it. Yeah. It's, it's, dude. It's been a lot. I wish I opened up more sooner, like sense. Oh, do you have two? Well, the old one is now a trainer studio. So we have trainers.

They rent the space and they use a space with their clients. And we helped them, like, build their business and stuff. It's called Zoo Studios. And then I'm looking at spaces. I've been looking at spaces in Miami, but, like, I'm probably more closely going to get a space in Vegas. Just because it's easier for me to, like, be back in between. But I wish I had opened up more sooner, but it's just so hard with, like, logistically for, like, I, like, in an ideal situation, I'd have an operating partner. would be a partner and like help me operate these locations because I can't you know put my finger

on everything all the time but yeah dude it's it's been so much fun honestly like having the gym has been the greatest thing because having people come in and like I said earlier like talking to people and like hearing people's stories it just like almost fires me up more more every time I like have those conversations makes me want to do more are you able to be consistent with your workouts and stuff no that's been one of the hardest things but I've more recently found a better balance with that when the first two years of that thing opening i was like my workouts were all trash if that like non-existent was like working out just for content at that point right because people would come and there'd be so many people to talk to me

that i would just like you know if i talked to someone here then there's like five more people who wanted to talk and they kind of just end up lining up and i end up like doing like almost like a meeting greet where i thought i was going to go work out but that's just something i understand i just had to change for myself and balance and just kind of like if i was going to come into the gym now just like put my headphones in and lock in and just say hey when i'm done you know get a photo or talk later but not everyone likes that but i just realized i i just got to like i do that otherwise i don't i'm not doing what i need to do for my own just mental health you know i love that uh thing you posted a couple days ago or maybe it wasn't even posted by you it might have been somebody else because

people share your stuff all the time but yeah you were working out with your friend and it seemed like he was going through a rough time. Oh. You're like, come on, dude. Like, don't be a, you know, like. And then you got like more serious for a second and you said, what else you're going to do? And I love that because even if it is falling apart around you, it's still in your best interest to invest time into yourself. It's still in your best interest to go to the gym.

It's still in your best interest to go hit up that run. it's not going to it's not going to assist you any further by being lazier it's going to make it's going to make it worse it's going to make things way worse every time and especially if you're out of shape so it's not helpful to get fatter and so you need to try to like just like a fight you need to protect yourself at all time and you keep your hands up you need to keep you need to keep fighting even on days when you don't necessarily there's days you can take off you know but you kind of need to earn those days

off you need to earn the right to be a little inconsistent and still stay in change yeah yeah i mean i remember having that conversation with him and obviously i've i've had much more in-depth conversation with him about like what is actually he's going through and based on everything i know and based on what he's told me it's like you you what's your other choice you know is your other choice to like let it all go and quit and just end it it's like or are you going to try to fight back you're going to try to keep doing this and just focusing on this because in that moment it was more like you might be dealing with all this other stuff mentally but like you're here right now just focus on this just do this get some water breathe do this get some water

breathe like that's all you can really do and the thing about life that you realize when it comes to like you know all these like dark thoughts or these moments where like it's really up is like the only thing that's going to get you out of it and get you to where you think you want to be because you're tired of feeling this way or being this way is just by like right now putting in that effort in whatever it is you're doing right now whether it's a conversation with someone and like really being in it because all those moments where you're like distrauded the back of your mind is like it's taking you somewhere else and it's this this fear or whatever it is it's bringing you there but if I'm having a conversation with you

I'd say even about that I have to still be right here to like process it going forward otherwise I'm just living off of these thoughts that are pulling me in a direction that I don't want to be in anymore. So it's like, that's huge. You don't have a choice. Your choice is to be here right now in this moment, whether you're talking it out or you're working out or you're doing something to like go forward. Otherwise, you just keep going back. And like that's the, that's what I was trying to get him to understand. I was trying to get him to see that because there is no other choice. Your other choice is leave here, go home and just continue to think about the things that are tearing you apart or not. And why would you

choose that and you could choose this right now so i think that's the medicine of of the hard work yeah put in that hard work it's it um you know if you and i were in conversation and we're in the gym and we're lifting and let's just say we're doing like leg extensions or something we're going back and forth we can be talking about other stuff our mind can be in other places we can be talking about these other gyms that you're going to open up oh my open up in miami you're going to open up over here but once we start getting into the workout if you're doing some crazy drop set or something you have no choice but to be locked into that present moment i think that's one of the true values of hard work you go out on a run or you just you're pushing yourself to a spot

where you can no longer really even think about it you it's a it's a thoughtless it's a thoughtless moment in time and i think one of the of huge benefits of that, in my opinion, is that you get to lock yourself in with literally just being with yourself. Sometimes you might be, you know, with somebody else in some of these moments, but I think people have a really hard time sitting still. I think people have a really hard time being with themselves. And if you have a hard time being with yourself, it's because you're in the presence of bad company. So that's something to really think about. Like, Why do you not like, what makes you so anxious about being by yourself or with yourself

or with your own thoughts? It's something to really think about it. I think it's something for people to really work on. Yeah, that's a fact, man. It's true what you say because that idea, it's almost like you're avoiding it. And the thing about, I think the gym that's giving me so much perspective to be able to be here and to share this stuff is that that's what I really really. realizing that you can't think about anything else but like when you're pushing it to that level

but like what you're doing but it does at the same time it makes everything so present because for me it was a weird like double edge sword where like for me it was like I was escaping all these thoughts because I could only focus on this but then you kind of get to a point where you realize like yeah you're you're able to just focus on it and push yourself in that direction but that doesn't me the thoughts were just going away you still have to deal with it yeah so then i realized okay like the same way that i'm dealing with like what i just said the same way i'm doing with the gym because i i i enjoy this feeling of escaping and like but and it's making me better physically because i'm doing this time after time after time i have to now apply this to myself and those thoughts

and those feelings that i've been avoiding i have to have to sit with myself and that's hard it's not an easy thing to do being still being quiet being silent there are things that i've only recently started to like practice more i don't mind you know being by myself like i'll walk a lot i'll be by myself i'll run quite a bit and i enjoy that i enjoy that time being by myself but something i've been practicing more recently is to even get rid of the headphones get rid of the phone and just go out on my own. And it's like I said with the workout earlier, like it's difficult at first. And it seems like, it seems like I can't do it. You know, it seems like, oh, I'd love to listen to some music right now. I'd love to listen to a podcast. But once I get

moving, I don't know, maybe once five, ten minutes goes by, then I don't even think about it anymore. Now I'm just kind of off and I'm going and it feels incredible. I realize that people probably they don't want to necessarily pump the brakes on their life and they they don't want to practice some of these things but some form of meditation I think meditation can be done in some different ways but even if you can just take two minutes just lie down on the ground you know lie down on the floor put your feet up on your couch put cross your hands over and just close your eyes and just breathe for like two minutes just just give it a try just give it a shot does it improve anything do you feel less less anxious when you're done were you able to block out a lot of thoughts

or was your mind racing the entire time you can kind of take it as a challenge you say oh man i the whole time i was just thinking about all these other things maybe next time you try it you're able to think a little less and maybe over time you want to try to just sit there be quiet and be silent and be thoughtless yeah you know it's it's it's it's it's hard but i think this in life like we're kind of you're either going to be forced to make that change like somehow whether it be like a physical like a a health force or or whatever or death whatever this is it's either you get forced to that point or you decide to be in control and make that change. And I just think everyone really doesn't even have a choice.

Like you're either going to get forced to make a change or you're going to make the change. And I think it's just accepting that. And just like being, okay, I'd rather not like be forced. My choice should be to want to be more proactive than just be reactive when I'm forced to do something. because it's going to come one way or another health-wise or relationship-wise, like you can get forced out of a relationship or you're going to get forced into some sort of like health issue that you're not combating because you haven't been doing the things you need to do to fix it.

So the choice is yours. You either get forced into something or you take charge and you make the choice and do it on your own. So, yeah, the life's been crazy, man. It's really well said. I think, you know, being proactive is something that can help someone not be reactionary. You know, if you're proactive and you have things sorted out and you're continuing working on yourself, then it's going to be that much easier to not overreact the shit. Yeah.

Man. Well, that was a little therapy session for me. That was great, man. Thank you so much. Yeah, I appreciate you coming, man. Sincerely for sure. I've known you for years, dude. I'm happy for all your success.

I know you've been crushing it for a really long time. I'm glad you're back on YouTube. Glad they reinstated you. yeah and yeah i have to come up do the pod sometime i'd love that yeah i appreciate you coming mark all right man thank you brother thank you yeah