The Nick Bare Podcast - 068: Debunking Nutrition Myths, A Different Approach To Pain Management & Exposing Fitness Lies With Layne Norton

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

This week, I am excited to have Layne Norton with me on the podcast. Layne has been a huge inspiration and a source of knowledge since my health and fitness journey began. After years of study and research, he obtained a PhD in nutritional sciences, and his extensive knowledge is evident in our conversation. We'll be delving into topics ranging from the science and psychology of pain to navigating misinformation to the science behind our eating habits. You're bound to come away from this episode smarter than before. Save 10% at BPN Supps: https://bit.ly/nickbare10audio Follow for more:  IG: https://www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ YT: https://www.youtube.com/@nickbarefitness Keep up with Layne:IG: https://www.instagram.com/biolayne/ Topics: 0:00 Intro 0:47 Welcome 5:13 The science of pain 19:21 Injuries during training tapers 25:13 Consistency is an equalizer 36:34 Mechanistic studies 46:51 Do the research 54:51 Identifying who an expert is 59:06 Why we’re addicted to negativity 1:04:41 Managing the misinformation 1:15:47 Types of testing and research 1:25:10 Intermittent fasting 1:39:37 Eating habits 1:32:21 Cell autophagy and fasting 1:36:40 Blood sugar levels 1:45:04 Eating frequency 1:48:48 Tracking serving sizes 1:54:34 Stepping over rocks to pick up pebbles 2:10:00 Deadlifting

Psychological stress, I feel like, is the killer that nobody wants to talk about because like managing it, it requires you to actually do like a lot of internal work. And people don't like that idea, just like they don't like external work. And even us as athletes, we'll like, we'll go to the gym three hours a day, but it's like, oh, journaling and therapy and yeah, you know, like. But man, that's the stuff that works. And it's been a real game changer for me. And psychological stress has been tied to basically a dose response increase in the risk of mortality from all causes, from cardiovascular disease, and from cancer. Back on the podcast for a second time, Lane Norton.

Thanks for having me, man. What's going on? Just doing my thing and got nationals in two days, which is why I'm here and excited for that. but life's good. Just lifting heavy, doing science and putting out social media contents, pretty much my life. Let's talk about nationals. Yeah, sure. What are you got going on?

What are you shooting for? How are you feeling? Where's it at? Yeah, so it's here in Austin and at St. Edward's University. And I, so for those who aren't familiar with my powerlifting career, I was a bodybuilder first, got into powerlifting. and won two national open titles in 2014, 2015, went to Worlds in 2015, the IPF, got a silver medal overall there in the 93 kilo class,

set a world squat record at the time, which was 668 pounds, and was kind of eyeballing like trying to be a world champion, and then I went through a bunch of injuries, like we're talking multiple herniated discs, multiple bulge discs, in both my lumbar and cervical spine, torn muscles in my hips, partially torn a doctor, partially torn peck, like, it just, it seemed like every time, I just kept having failures

to launch. Every time I tried to come back, it was like something else. And just a few years ago, I really got dug deep into like the evidence-based pain management, and it was a complete game changer for me. and got some really good people in my corner in terms of a really good evidence-based physical therapist and my coach, Zach Robinson. And we just kept moving the puzzle pieces around to figure out what I could tolerate and what I could work with. And in 2022, I was able to go back to Worlds as a master's lifter and dethrone the three-time world champ in my weight class and won that meet.

And that was still in late 2020, I was still like really having to kind of hack together my training because even then like my back and my hip would still give me, would still act up. Now and then so I won Nationals 2022, one World's 2022, one World's 2022, one Nationals, 23. Didn't go to Worlds for a few different reasons, but I went to North Americans, mostly because all the toughest guys were actually going there because Worlds was in Mongolia and nobody really. felt like going to Mongolia. So we all kind of went to North Americans because it was in the Cayman Islands and ended up getting the guy beat at Nationals actually beat me by one pound at Caymans. It was awesome.

It was awesome battle. We both went nine for nine. And but even like getting ready for those meets was still like dealing with some kind of chronic stuff. And then like latter part of 2023 and then into 2024. it's the first real six-month period of time where I have felt good in training and haven't been dealing with really any kind of nagging pain. And man, it showed. Like I was hitting numbers that were super comparable to when I was at my absolute peak when I was in my mid-to-early 30s.

I'm 42 now. So I'm excited. I should, I don't know if I'll hit a PR at this meet. But I should be pretty close. So I'm very excited for it. After all the stuff I've been through and just how much work it took, like most not just physically, but mentally as well. Yeah, I'm super excited.

It's also why my nails are painted because my daughter and I have a tradition that she paints my nails before every big meet because she likes watching dad on the TV have his nails painted and feel like she has some connection there. So that's fun for us. Is it always the same color? Does she switch it up? We switched it up this time. So usually it's red, white and blue.

This time she wanted the sparkly one. So we put the sparkly one in the middle. Love that. We got red, blue, and sparkly. Well, I think last time you were here, you were actually nursing an injury too. Yep. My back was acting up when I was here. I remember because I was trying to squat.

I got up to like 300 pounds. And I was like, well, that's it for today. I'm curious. You know, and I've been following your journey for years and years now. Even before I got started in the whole fitness industry, you're one of the reasons I actually got started in this whole space. I remember sitting in my dorm room in college. I think we talked about this last episode,

but sitting in my dorm room in college trying to figure out this whole flexible dieting, bodybuilding, competing lifestyle, and came across a lot of your content on bodybuilding.com at the time and the series that you guys were documenting. But I'm curious from your opinion, why do you think you've experienced so many injuries?

Is it just because you were injury prone or was it because you're pushing so hard? So I think there's a few different things. I actually don't think I'm that much more injury prone than most people who do a high level sport. I think a lot of people get injuries. It's just I've been much more open about what I've gone through than a lot of people are

because most power lifters at least, if you don't see them post lifts for long periods of time, they're injured or in pain. I was just super, I just tried to be super transparent about it because I figured, well, maybe this will help other people like normalize this stuff. Because I think a lot of times people, it makes it worse, the fact that you're, you know, thinking about just you feel very isolated when you're going through injuries and whatnot. And as far as like the period of time where I was getting injured a lot, this ties into like a lot of

the, I want to call it research, reading I did, because research gets a term that gets abused. But pain science, and I consider myself pretty well versed in it. I wouldn't consider myself an expert at all, but I've talked to experts. And for the most part, I feel comfortable in what I'm about to say in my take on this. There's probably as much or more quackery around pain. than there is with nutrition science. And there's a lot of quackery. So a lot of the things that we think are important for pain, like really good form,

like stretching, warmups, like massage, recovery, stuff like that. I'm not saying they don't make a difference at all, but the stuff that actually makes the biggest difference is the stuff that most people don't even pay attention to. one of the biggest things that affects pain, because pain, we used to think about like,

if you have pain, it must be because there's some sort of tissue damage, right? And we just automatically tied those two together. And now we know you can have pain with no tissue damage and you can have tissue damage with no pain. Because if you, there was a study where they MRI'd, like adults over 40 who were asymptomatic,

had no back pain. And I think over half of them had disc abnormalities, like herniated disc, bulge disc, dis, but they didn't have pain. And so then you think about the fact that people who lose limbs, like who have amputees, you know, they have phantom limb syndrome or phantom pain. And it's not, I think people misinterpret this.

So if I have a stump here, people think, oh, they have pain at the stump. No, no, no, no. They feel pain literally where there's nothing. And then if you consider how long it takes soft tissue to heal, soft tissue will heal within six to 12 months. Like whatever healing is going to be done has been done to the soft tissue. And so how can there be people have continuous pain for years in an area when there's healing?

And by the same token, people can, um, have actual legit injuries like hamstring tears and whatnot, and then a year goes by and they're totally fine. Like, how does this happen? So what you find is pain is an experience. And there are a great study to kind of give this example was they did, I think it was a skin prick test. And they asked people to rate it zero to 100.

And they applied the same pressure to everyone. So they standardized the pressure. So zero being absolutely no pain whatsoever and 100 being the most painful thing you've ever experienced. I think the average response was around like a 40 or 50. The range was 4 to 96 for individuals. So for one person, they didn't even hardly feel at all. And for another person, it was one of the most painful things they'd ever experienced. So how can that be true?

Because we have different experiences with pain. And so things like one of the biggest things that opens up what they call the opens the pain gate to like strengthen your experience with pain, make things more painful, is psychological stress. And there is very close associations with psychological stress and fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome. In fact, a lot of autoimmune disorders. And if I look back at the times of my life where I was having the most pain, it was when I was the most psychologically stressed. And honestly, like the past year, one of the biggest things that I have done has been to

completely alter my perception of stress and really do a lot better job of not letting myself get so spun up about quite frankly stuff that doesn't even really matter. And then the stuff that does matter a lot of times when I think about what can I actually control, there's not much. And so I have just gotten much, much better at being able to relax and just kind of, like I said, control what I can control and the rest of it just watch the movie. And the difference that's made in my recovery is quite frankly, it's been insane. I'm handling three to four times the volume that I was able to tolerate two years. years ago. And like I still, I still will get pain. But, so another thing is people who believe

they need good form to prevent injuries are actually more likely to get injured, more likely to perceive pain. Additionally, and I'm not saying, like, don't try to have good form. But when you look at the actual research literature on, like, that does examine form and the rate of injury, like think about spinal rounding during deadlifts, it is very underwhelming. It's very underwhelming. And people who believe that they are strong and resilient recover from injuries faster and have less pain.

So a great example. About six weeks ago, I was squatting. I did 590 for a triple. Top triple I've hit in probably almost a decade. And I tweaked my adductor on the third one. It was pretty sore walking out. And I mean, it felt like at the time, I'm like, oh, man, I don't think this might last for a long time. But I told myself, if I recover, if I don't stress about this, if I don't hyper fixate on it, things will be fine to come to pass.

Two weeks later, I was back squatting to depth with almost no pain. And like, it's been, even four weeks later, I was hitting 700 on a deadlift. and 615 on a squat and no pain. Juxtaposed that with 2016, I injured my hip in a training session. And it wasn't really that bad. Like at the time, I was actually able to finish the session, which looking back was dumb. The other thing I did when I tweak my adductor is I said, okay, that's it for today, you know, just walked out.

But I finished the training session. And then instead of going, you know, I'm going to back off. on the weights and I'm just going to let my body recover for a few weeks and I'm going to maybe like do some modifications to my exercise selection or my range of motion or my tempo to see what I can tolerate a little bit better. I just kept trying to hammer away at my normal little program. And I got to the point after about eight weeks where I couldn't even do 135 below parallel without 10 out of 10 pain in my hip. And that's when I actually started getting closer to the path of evidence-based pain management.

I got to a PT who is not my PT anymore because she moved. But the first day we come in, she's like, okay, so we're going to recreate this pain. So I can see what triggers it. I'm like, wait, well, we can't do that. And she's like, like, whatever damage has been done to it has already been done. Like, we're not going to make it worse. It'll be fine. Okay.

And then at the end of the session, she's like, okay, we're going to go squat. I'm like, I can't squat. And she goes, when does it hurt you? Does it hurt at the top? Does it hurt in the middle of the movement? Where does it hurt? I'm like, it hurts at the bottom. She goes, okay, so we're not going to do the bottom.

We're going to take you to where you feel it a little bit, but it doesn't get worse. So we're basically like going to a squat that was like six inches above parallel. We started there. And gradually, every week, we added weight and we increased the range of motion. And after like 12 weeks, I was able to squat again. And turns out in the literature, this is called exposure therapy. So one of the worst things you can do when you have like an injury or pain is just completely like not do anything. Like sometimes you have to just to get it under control for like a couple weeks.

But once the pain is under control, you're better off doing something, even if it's just like walking or being active for active recovery. And ideally you start progressing back doing some variation of the movement that's causing you pain. So they actually have this in psychology. If you had like an intense fear of spiders, for example, if I took you and just threw you in a room with a bunch of spiders, that would not help you. Like that would actually be traumatizing for you, right? So that is like I've injured my hip.

It hurts on heavy squats, but I'm just going to go in squat heavy anyway because this is what I need to do. And then on the other side, if you never address that fear, it's not going to get better, right? So if I just stay out at the gym. But if you had a fear of something, spiders, what somebody might do is put a spider in a glass jar, put it on the other side of the

room, and put you in the same room with it. And so, okay, maybe you feel comfortable enough to do that. And then gradually over time, they bring it closer to you. And then at some point, maybe we take the glass jar off. And at some point, maybe we have two spiders in the room, right? And over time, you are desensitizing yourself to that fear. You can desensitize your body the pain in the same way. But the problem is, a lot of people just do all or nothing. And that's what I did. was either completely resting or I was just trying to do my same old thing. And I had the same thing with my, with my back. I had this pain in my back that was kind of like really getting triggered.

It was interesting. It would be at the top of the movement when I was finishing a squat, but only after I'd gone below parallel. And so I was like, okay, well, what can I, what can I do? So one was a trigger for it was like really accelerating the top of the squat. when I finished. So whenever I would squat, I would go down, come up,

and I'd actually slow myself down as I got to the top. Right? And I stopped myself just shy of parallel. I was a little bit high. And I was able to tolerate that. And then over time,

it was like, okay, slowly got myself below parallel, slowly was able to increase the speed at which I finished the squat. And now what's interesting is I can still feel that like,

Not pain, but do you know what I mean when I say like I can feel it, but it doesn't hurt? For sure. You know it exists. But now when I squat, I don't have pain because I've desensitized it in that range and that movement. So this has become something I've been fascinated by because we used to think of like your brain, your body's a bag of meat connected to your brain. And if you punch the bag, cut the bag, burn the bag, poke the bag, your brain goes awry. and now we know it doesn't work that way.

What happens in your body affects your brain and what happens in your brain affects your body. So example of that, look at all the research studies on exercise now showing that they lower the risk of depression. They help with psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia. They reduce the symptoms of that. And they improve cognition, even in kids.

There's evidence now that exercise, resistance exercise in kids from like age five to 12 improves their performance in school. and again going the opposite direction, we know that psychological stress affects your ability to recover and recover from injuries and your perception of pain. Another great example is sleep. One of the best things for injury prevention is sleep.

So they did a study in Army recruits where they had them, they're either getting four hours of sleep a night or eight hours of sleep a night. The relative risk of injuries in the group getting four hours of sleep was 236% greater than the group that was getting eight hours. So the stuff that works is overall recovery and stress management.

And I feel like it is very rarely talked about. And honestly, it's been a huge game changer for me. I have a lot of thoughts around that. I'm sure a lot of other people, anyone who's an athlete, but I know specifically a lot of endurance athletes experience this.

Where in a traditional endurance build, say for a Marathon, Triathlon, Ultra, Iron Man. Just like in probably powerlifting too, you have a build where volume and intensity increases. Then you hit a peak and then you taper going into the event. What happens for me every time I taper going into an event every single time is I reach peak week. I feel great. I start tapering, volume intensity decreases, and then something flares up.

It's an ankle, it's a hip, it's a knee, it's something. And now I get in my head, I'm thinking, oh my gosh, I'm going to race in like five to seven days. I have this massive injury. I can't even walk sometimes. And by the time race day comes, it's gone. So it's this mental. And I always now know going into it, I know that going into peak week and then moving into the taper, something is going to flare up. And it's probably mental as opposed to physical.

Do you tape your caffeine when you're heading in? I don't. Okay. Interesting. So that was something I, like, I taper my caffeine off when I, when I go into a meat so that I hopefully get a little bit more boost on meat day. And I'd always be like, same thing. Like, a week of the meat when I'm tapering off everything, I'm like, why am I getting these like all of a sudden? And also, it turns out caffeine is a mild analgesic.

So I'm like, I didn't even realize that that could be part of it too. So, once the pain response. Yeah, the pain experience. So, but also I think, I don't know how to describe this. I don't have any evidence to back it up. But in my personal experience, when you are close to something, it's almost like a lot of times your body will hold out just as long as it needs to. And then once you relax, it's like, okay, now we relax too.

And you're just going to experience all this stuff, right? I've had that so many times with exactly what you've described. And then it's happened so many times and now I'm like, it'll be fine. It'll be fine on meat day. Like I've had this peck has been real tight. Like, and we, we had been redlining volume on my bench press for like a month. And, like, we got to the point where performance was going up, you know, it's like the stock market. So, you know, from running every day.

It's like, who knows, the wind blew the wrong way, the barometric pressure. You have no clue. It's just like it goes up and down. But overall, you can look at the arc of your performance and kind of see it's going up. And then once you hit that kind of threshold where volume and intensity are so high that you're always kind of managing fitness versus fatigue, right? Yep. So your fitness is going up, but your fatigue is also going up. And fitness and powerlifting is your one rep max.

Your fitness is going up. Your fatigue is going up. When fatigue starts to overtake that, now you start to see a drop off in your performance, not because you're weaker, but because your fatigue is masking your fitness. And so like this week, I've been like, man, this peck is tight. But whereas previously, I would be like checking it all the time. I'd be rubbing on it. The research shows that hyperfixation makes pain worse. The more you, like rumination on pain makes it worse.

So now what I do to reframe is I go, been here before. It'll be fine. And you know what? If I've got a little niggle on competition day, I'm not even going to notice it with the adrenaline. You know what I mean? And that has served me so well. You know, like I'm not saying that.

You know, you can, you can tear a muscle and be like, that doesn't hurt. Like, no, there's limitations here. But you can drastically affect, you know, your ability to recover from things, your perception of pain, just through your mindset and ability to manage psychological stress. And if you, man, I kind of went down the rabbit hole with this literature. And I actually just put up a real yesterday about it. but psychological stress, I feel like, is the killer that nobody wants to talk about because it's like managing it. It requires you to actually do like a lot of internal work.

And people don't like that idea. Just like they don't like external work. And even us as athletes, we'll like, we'll go to the gym three hours a day. But it's like, oh, journaling and therapy and yeah, you know, like. But man, that's the stuff that works. And it's been a real game changer for me. And psychological stress has been tied to basically a dose response increase in the risk of mortality from all causes, from cardiovascular disease, and from cancer. And then if you look at people with, are you familiar with the ACEs score? I'm not now. So ACEs is kind of, I'm not super familiar with it, but I know my friend John Deloney talks about it a lot. It's basically a questionnaire that answers, you answer some basic questions about like, you're safe.

growing up, your ability for basic human needs. Like somebody with ACE's score of 10 basically means they had no safety growing up. They were physically, emotionally, and mentally abused. They did not know where they were going to get their next meal, like all the worst things you can possibly think of. Right. ACE's scores, like, I believe a dose response association with mortality and disease risk later in life. and psychological disorders. So it's like,

I just feel like this is the great killer no one's talking about. And I think one of the reasons I do so much nutrition content on debunking stuff is because people get hung up on these little minutia and they stress about stuff

that doesn't matter. And I'm telling them like, hey, like the amount of time you're spending worrying about like your intermittent fasting window, that worrying and ruminating, and ruminating you're doing, it's probably going to kill you faster

than if you just screwed this one little thing up. You know, like focus on the big rocks. The stuff we know works. Works. Consistency. You know, doing the, if you're wanting to lose fat, got to be in a calorie deficit. If you want to build muscle,

you've got to be consistent in the gym. Like, consistency is such a great equalizer that I just feel like if people truly internalized and understood, like most people overestimate what they can do in 10 weeks, but drastically underestimate what they can do in 10 years. Oh, trust me. I know. I know.

A great example is I was talking to a friend of mine, super successful guy financially and in his career. And he's been kind of going through a rough few months. And he's like, you know, I'm not getting anywhere. My business isn't growing. I've had these setbacks. And I was like, and I know I've been there. I've been there where like not just weeks, not just months, but years felt intractable, felt like I was making no progress.

And I said, just look at the data man. You continue doing the stuff you've been doing. The data says you're going to continue to be successful. Like this isn't a house of cards that's going to crumble. Like, you know what to do. But the same thing goes for training. There have been weeks and months and years where it felt like. I was making no progress.

But the interesting thing was, it's like the fatigue masking fitness, right? You continue to do the things that work. You continue to be consistent and show up. And invariably, I'm not saying every time, but invariably, eventually things tend to work themselves out. You know, like difficult situations and stuff.

Like all that passes. And I just feel like if people could internalize, like the idea of being just bone-crushingly consistent. They would be shocked at what they could do. But so many people just don't trust that. You know, they put in a few weeks or a few months and they go, ah, you know, I'm sure you can appreciate this. One of the things I'll tell people is a lot of people will work hard when they know there's a guaranteed outcome, right? Like, I will go to work and I'll do my job well because I know in two weeks I'm getting a paycheck. What people really struggle with is putting in work when there's no

guaranteed outcome. But if you actually boil it down, there's never a guaranteed outcome. No, there never is. Right. It's just that entrepreneurship or training or those things make it very apparent that there's no guaranteed outcome, right? But I just wish that people could focus on the big stuff that matters and be brutally consistent with that. And they'd be shocked at what they could do. But I'm sure you've had the same thing where you felt like there were weeks, months, and years where you weren't making any progress. But then you look back 10 years later and you go, Holy shit, look at all the stuff I did. Yeah.

You know? Yeah, that's the thing with consistency. I do believe it's a competitive advantage. And, you know, consistency has become like this hot term that lasts like a year or two. But I think a lot of people are framing it in the wrong way where they think because they went to the gym five days in a row or they did a fitness challenge. It lasted 30, 60, 90 days. Like they were consistent and that's going to pay off for the rest of their life. but I'm sure you can test to it.

Consistency is not like this 30-day challenge. It's not a 60-day challenge. It is years and years and decades and decades. And that consistency compounds so massively. They look back 10, 20, 30 years later, and you'll be mind-blown, not just surprise, but mind-blown how far you can move in that time. For sure.

I mean, you've followed me for a long time. I mean, I've been around in this industry 20 years. and I just now feel like I'm starting to get like some real traction in terms of like getting more in the mainstream and being on some of these really big media outlets and whatnot. And, you know, there are people who shortcut that process by, you know, making insane claims and, you know, doing the stuff that we've seen, you know, many years over. But you're not going to see them in 10, 20, 30 years. And that's the thing, right?

I always, I've had people say, look at this guy. I'm like, well, wake me up in 10 years because I'll still be here. Yeah. You know, because I'm, yeah, I've seen the hairs, you know, running, sprinting past me on the street. I'm just over here, the tortoise. The other thing, people will be like, so do you like work like 12, 14 hours a day? I'm like, no, I work like 6 to 8 hours a day. They're like, what?

I'm like, yeah, I do that every day. I rarely take vacations because I don't, I know, no shade on anybody who does. But even though my vacations, I still typically work a little bit. I still do my social media content. Like, I enjoy what I do. and the fact that I don't burn myself out, I feel like I can actually do a better job, you know? And the fact that I can be present with my kids

and I can enjoy going out of my friends and those sorts of things, I look forward to going to work. I look forward to doing the stuff that I do. And I'm not saying, like there was a period of my life where I definitely worked 12 hours a day, you know, but like you said, compounds, right? Like now I am, I fatigue was masking fitness. Like now I'm starting to actualize a lot of that stuff and a lot of the relationships I built in the industry over the years.

And, you know, just the, the, if you go back and look at my content, I'm talking about a lot of the same stuff. I've been talking about for a really long time. But I'm just like, it takes a while. It takes like, you don't just put out a video in the first time people are like, yep, yep, that makes sense. we're going to do it that way now. It's you just, you have to hammer at home, you know? And I think not only that,

but I've gotten better at delivering my message, but this has been, you know, a long time and a lot of practice. And I saw you put up like your first video you ever did. Yeah, a few years ago. Man, I saw James Smith give a great talk in Australia about this. He put up like all his first videos and he's like, look at this trash.

He's like, this is horrible. He's like, but it was necessary. He's like, I would not have learned, like, you can't read about what kind of social media content to do. You can't read about some of this stuff. You have to go do it because, like, especially on social media, if I try to do content like you, it would come across as very disingenuous because we're different, right? And if you try to do content like me, it'd come across as very disingenuous. So you've got to find your space where.

you're good at it. It feels like it's genuinely you. And then you work on refining that. And then you do what you do in almost anything, whether it's business or lifting or whatnot. You try stuff and the stuff that works, you do more of it. And the stuff that doesn't work,

you do less of it. And it's funny when it comes to social media too because like some people will like ask me like, how do I grow my social media? I'm like, are you looking at your insights a lot? No? Are you reading your comments? No? Like, well, there's your feedback right there. Like, you need to go look at that stuff. It's objective. Yeah. Go look at that stuff. And again, like, very rarely now do I post a video or a post where I'm like, this is going to be a banger?

And it's not a banger. And very rarely do I post something where I'm like, you know, this isn't going to do great. But, and that's okay. Like, sometimes not every post is going to be a banger. And that's fine. Like you need consistency in your content and you need some like not placeholders, but just stuff that goes there. And for the most part, I know when that's going to happen because I know my audience and I know what does well. But I try to do more of the stuff that does well versus the stuff that doesn't. I'm the same way. I know before I post something if it's going to crush or if it's going to be, ah, this is so-so. But the stuff that I post that is so-so, it's not sexy, but it's important to me and I want to share it.

For sure. And again, every post can't be a banger. Just like every running session isn't going to be a PR. And just like every lifting session isn't going to be a great one. But I'll tell people, like, especially when it comes to lifting, I'm like, I was super fatigued last week. Most fatigued I've been in training in years. And I, and like my numbers weren't great. But I actually put up something like, these are the sessions that really matter. Because anybody can crush it when they feel good. People who champions find a way, when they feel like crap. They find a way to have a decent session when they feel like crap. Yeah. And that is the difference. And again, even social media, business, whatever,

no matter what's been going on in my life, I have always been brutally consistent with showing up with that. So again, people will be like, man, like I'll get this sometimes. People like, man, you blew up.

And I'm like, people like, you know, I didn't blow up. It has been a very slow, steady progression, you know. And it's been through being consistent. But now I look back at like what I did

And like, you know, I told people, I'm like, you know, reaching a million followers was, it was cool. It doesn't change your life. But I am proud of that because I never did it the way most people do it, which is just putting out this clickbait, you know, garbage content that doesn't really help anybody. And I love what, you know, James said was he's talking about closing loops. And he's like, most people are too scared to close a loop. You don't start because you're afraid you're not going to do it right. He's like, I got news for you. You're not going to do it right.

Like, you're going to fail. You're going to screw up. And that's okay. That is part of the process. Just like for me, I went through all those injuries to find something that actually worked. And I went through years of not having social media content pop off because I had to find what worked. And I went through a long time of doing speaking engagement. Like, I think it's been, I did my first seminar in.

2012 in a supplement shop in Tampa that was free and 13 people showed up. And I just did a talk in Australia for an amount of money that even a couple years ago would have seemed insane for me. And it was sold out. And there's like pyrotechnics on stage. It's like a hype video going up. And I'm like, this is cool. You know. But you earned that. But I earned it. But I earned because, and again, it was by, I'm like, when I first started, my talks were horrible. Like, not in that I didn't know what I was talking about, but there's a difference between knowing what you're talking about and being able to present that in a way that somebody else understands. It's the articulation.

Yeah. And over time, I would give a talk. I'd be watching the audience and I'd something would, oh, that landed. That, that comparison landed, right? Like one of the things I do now that I came up with this last year, I was always trying to explain the difference between like mechanistic studies. Honestly, I was going to bring that up in this podcast because I've heard you talk about it in the last couple podcast episodes and interviews I've heard you be on.

And the first time I heard you talk about it personally was on the Rich Roll podcast. Yep. And, you know, you started talking about like the mechanisms of foods or ingredients or certain nutrients. and the analogy was a mutual fun analogy. Yep. Is that where you were getting at? Yep. I shared that on a podcast, and I'll give you credit a few episodes ago, a solo one,

because for me, that made so much sense. And then it exposed all these other people online that are trying to use these mechanisms to create a narrative to sell a product or build a brand. So I would love for you to personally explain that analogy because I think it is so dialed. in. So one of the most popular forms of content right now is a creator goes in a grocery store, holds up a food and says, look at this that's in this food and here's what it does. Right. So they pick a chemical compound, right? Like a great example would be Paul Solidino does this a lot. So he'll go in and he'll say, well, you don't want to eat broccoli or cruciferous vegetables because they have

isoscyathanates in them. And isosyothanates bind to ice. iodine, and it's going to lower your thyroid function because thyroid needs iodine in order to function well. So it's going to reduce your thyroid function. It's going to lower your metabolic rate, and you're going to gain weight. The mechanism he's talking about is accurate. Okay. So are isosyanites in cruciferous vegetables? Yes. Can they bind to iodine? Yes. But then there's a lot of leaps between those two, and there's no thought given to dosage or does this actually make a real difference in outcomes? So it's kind of A equals B, B equals C, C equals D, D equals E, and therefore A equals E. And when I was just, when I was a biochemist, so my undergraduate

degree is in biochemistry. And then I went to nutritional science in grad school. When I was a biochemist, I'd do the same thing. And the first example of this I got exposed to was I remembered finding out that caffeine inhibits glycogen phosphorylase. And I was like, oh, we should have caffeine after exercise because it's so glycogen phosphorylase is the enzyme that breaks down glycogen. So I'm like, oh, this will help with glycogen resynthesis. And then I was on a message board talking about this. And somebody who I respected who was pretty smart was like, well, Lane, why don't you think about like the whole body physiology?

Like caffeine is a sympathetic nervous system activator. And the large scale outcome of that is redding the body and making fuel and liberating fuel. So you've got opposing signals here. And I was like, huh. How old were you this time? Probably like 21. So you're kind of just getting started. Kind of just getting started. And it didn't really hit me about that stuff until I got further into nutrition and I would sit down and have discussions by PhD advisor. And I would say some of the similar things. And he would just crush so many of them. Because he's like, yeah, that's true. But you haven't understand how it affects this over here. Oh. Or this food also has.

this in it, which does this. So let's take this example, isoscythanates and broccoli. If we look at human studies where they have people eat cruciferous vegetables, does it negatively impact thyroid function? And the answer is no. Very ubiquitously, does it impact metabolic rate? No. Does it impact weight loss? If anything, people eat cruciferous vegetables actually lose a little bit more weight. So there's a mechanism that exists, but it doesn't affect the outcome. Well, why? Well, what he's essentially doing would be like, somebody brings to you, Nick, a mutual fund is like,

hey, you want to invest in this, it's doing really well. And I go, mm-mm-mm-mm. Look at these two stocks that are down 50% in this mutual fund this year. And you go, oh, man, yeah. But I don't tell you that the mutual fund overall is up 20%. what do you care about? Do you care about the two stocks that are underperforming or do you care about the fact that the overall mutual fund is up 20%?

Mutual fund. You care about the mutual fund being up 20% because all mutual funds are going to have some stocks in them that don't do well. Like that's why they're like that. That's why they're diversified, right? So that you can absorb some of that risk. All foods, all foods,

will have compounds that activate both positive and negative biochemical pathways. The question is not, even organic foods, you could find, because everything's a chemical, by the way, everyone listening, everything is a chemical. This water chemicals, microphone chemicals, everything. We're all chemicals. You can find a chemical in there that there's a pathway that activates that would be negative for health outcomes. or is associated with negative health outcomes. And positive.

The question is not whether or not they activate those pathways. The question is, what is the summation outcome of that? Because outcomes are the summation of hundreds, if not thousands, of biochemical pathways, all summing up to one thing. So, for example, so I could make it a compel. I do think that's actually one of my single greatest post of all time. I was joking with some friends of mine who were scientists. I'm like, you know, I bet I could make a convincing argument to eat shit.

And then I was like, one day I'm like, fuck it, I'm going to do it. So I looked into what are some of the most common compounds in human fecal matter. And one of them is a volatile fatty acid called buterate. Bouturate in scientific research is one of the main products of the gut microbiome, of a healthy gut microbiome. It's been shown to increase fat oxidation, improve insulin-sensitive. reduce inflammation, it ameliorates non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Everything I just said is 100% accurate. What I didn't tell you was most of them are in animal studies giving high-dose supplemented

buterate. You'd have to eat 50 to 100 pounds of poop per day to get that much buterate. But it's literally the same template. And then what's also really disingenuous about some of this is I tell people you have to apply skepticism symmetrically. Your argument has to be symmetrical. Meaning, if I'm going to make an argument for one food, I have to make the same argument for other foods.

So in the case of somebody like Saladino, who's arguing against cruciferous vegetables, okay, well, are there compounds in meat that might negatively affect the thyroid that there's a pathway? Oh, wait, there is. NUE5GC is a compound present in meat and they've actually shown in human studies that you have,

that you create antibodies, your thyroid creates antibodies to this. Now, do I think that meat is going to harm your thyroid? No. Because again, there's no thought given to like dosage or anything like that. But what you have are these,

this logic on social media, which is applied very asymmetrically. And I think that, boils down to people believe what they want to believe. And if we hear something that aligns with our personal belief system, our level of skepticism is basically non-existent. We're like, yep, sounds legit. If we hear something that doesn't align with our personal belief system, then our level of skepticism is very high, right? And so what I have tried to do over the years is be more symmetrical with how I apply this logic, because even I've been guilty of it. But

you need to look no further than just look at how many Facebook posts get shared about politics that we later find out are completely not true. And it goes for both sides, Republicans and Democrats. In fact, another great study on that, they took, I think this was in 2009, and they took Republicans and Democrats, and for both groups, showed them information that would either confirm or refute a belief they held for both parties. got the same treatment. And we're talking hard, irrefutable proof and hard supporting evidence. What they found was, and it was no different between either of the parties,

what they found was both things were equally as effective at simply reinforcing the beliefs they had. meaning when they were showed things that countered their beliefs, that refuted their beliefs, they actually just believed even stronger. And I don't know how you fix that. I don't know how you fix that. That's why I try to be so consistent with my message. And, you know, I'll often give devil's advocate arguments for things because I want,

I want people to understand, hey, here's the argument behind this. But here's why I think my position is right. And one of the things I'll tell people is I'll change my mind on stuff. I've done it before. And I usually try not to make super strong statements about things unless I'm very confident. Which means when you see me plant my flag real strong,

you should probably pay attention. Because I am always trying to disprove the things that I believe to be true. Because I would rather me come out and be like, hey, guys, I had this one wrong, then somebody else be able to put me up on a on an Instagram reel and debunk me you know I think I don't think I know that's why I really appreciate the the message you've been sharing for decades now and the way you've been approaching

your content and your business and your brand is because as as more people who don't have the level of education care or knowledge around nutrition or training or fitness in general and they find one of these mechanisms and they turn it into a narrative, so many people absorb that, buy into it, believe it. So when people come to me asking a question of,

or maybe not asking a question, but pushing back on something that I do or I say, and then I have a response for it, their rebuttal or their response is, well, here's this person who shared this study and has this claim. Did you read the study?

It's like, do I spend the time trying to win this argument or narrative? Maybe, maybe not. I could spend all my time there. So I think it becomes very difficult for people to understand where to go for what information, who to trust, because if you turn this mechanism into a headline, and then you put some sort of study behind, it doesn't matter what study, You just put a study behind it. Most people are going to believe that.

Yeah, people don't read the studies. That's enough. So I, um, I'm thinking of, uh, there was a video that Gary Breckett did where he's like, well, you don't want to take synthetic vitamin B12 because it has cyanide in it. And I remember like seeing that. I'm like, oh my God. Yeah. So synthetic vitamin B12 is cyanocobalamin.

There is a cyanide molecule there. By the way, it's also chemically bonded in a way that doesn't make it toxic. But let's just say. it was, right? Let's say it was, that it was hydrogen cyanide. How many of these vitamin B12 pills would we have to take to, if we're talking about like 100% of the daily value? So I did the calculation. You know what the, you know what it was? About 43,000 pills. I think you'd probably die from something else before you'd die from. For sure. Which by the way, it's probably not toxic anyway because it is chemically bonded.

So it's so easy to share this short clickbait content and people go, well, it sounds legit. And they'll say, well, you decided the study. And I'm like, have you read the study? So on biolane.com, my website, I'll do like every once in a while, I'll do a big article kind of like either addressing a topic or usually it's debunking something somebody said. And like, for example, for Paul Solidino's appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, I think I had. I want to say it was 50 pages typed out in a Google Doc. And I might as well have written a book. And I want to say 280 citations somewhere around there.

And our citations are all, you can just click it and it'll take you right to the citation. Right. Less than 1% of people click on a single citation. I would believe that. Less than 1% of people. So when somebody says, well, they cite studies, I go literally don't care. Like, have you actually pulled it up in Reddit? Did you even read like the abstract?

You know? Like I remember Dave Asprey was on a podcast. And he'll never address me by name, which is smart for him. But he, I'm pretty sure he was trying to like get a jab in and was like, because we had, he had made a bunch of posts about Aspartame and whatnot. And he, he said something to the effect of the subject. So here's a red flag. When somebody says subjects instead of people, it means it was in rats, just so you, just FYI.

It's good to know. Yeah. So he said the subjects fed artificial sweeteners are aspartame. So I may not get the quote completely right, but the just, the jest will be correct. They gained more weight than the other groups. So I went and he said the PubMed ID, which usually they don't say the study. They say a study, right? Which is smart because then people can't look it up.

So actually went and looked it up. And it showed the exact opposite. The rats that got aspartame, lost more weight, lost more body fat. Just another time. Actually, I was speaking with Stephen from Dyer of his CEO, really like him on a personal level. I think he's trying to get things right. And he's dealing with whatever. else deals with. Like, there's all these different opinions. Who's, who's right? And, um, like,

we were talking about Robert Lustig, because he was just on the show. And Lustig was on Andrew Huberman's podcast. And I did a long debunk of that as well, addressing some of his claims. But the most egregious thing I saw was he said, there was a study out of Copenhagen. And I'm really glad he said out of Copenhagen, because I would have never found it if he hadn't said that. study out of Copenhagen where they gave people they had people drink i think it was a leader of either water cola full fat milk or um diet cola a leader of each for i want to say it was six months and he said there was a hundred people in the study and he said the the the cola drinkers gained 10 kilos the art of the the diet cola gained two kilos

the milk, full fat milk lost two kilos and I think water lost two kilos. I could have gotten the specifics wrong, but I know the cola and diet cola ones are correct. So I went and found the study. It took me a while, but I found it. And I know it was that study because he had referenced it in a blog article as well. And it was in 47 people, I want to say, not 100, but I mean, people forget numbers all the time. But it was with semi-skim milk, not whole milk. And the conclusion of the study, when I heard him say 10 kilos of weight gain, even for a

liter of cola, I'm like, that is a lot of body weight in six months. It's like 22 pounds. Yeah. The conclusion of the study, and I'm paraphrasing, was there were no differences between any of the groups in body weight or fat. And if you look at the raw data, I think the cold. The Chola group gained 1.25 kilograms of weight. The milk group gained 1.29.

The water group gained half a kilo, and the Diet Cola group gained like 0.1 kilos. So actually, if you go off the raw data, Diet Cola was the best. But again, there was no statistically, there was not statistically different between the groups. But it's like, I was literally the only one who brought this up.

probably over a million people listen to this podcast, one person, a single person, went and found this study. Everybody else would have just believed it. And shared it. And shared it. And shared it all over social media, right? And so it's really, man, that's one of the problems is who is checking the experts, right? And the problem is, too, people have a hard time disconnecting somebody being intelligent from them being accurate. Okay. And when, here's one of the other problems.

We have trouble identifying who an expert is because of the following. If you and I are talking about a subject, like if we're talking about the supplement business and shipping and logistics, like very quickly, I will be very apparent that you know a lot more about that than I do, right? We're talking about endurance running, very quickly become apparent.

You know a lot more about it. that than I do. If we're talking about nutrition, powerlifting, whatever, it'll become apparent that I know more, right? Like if we're having a conversation, where it's really hard is when two people, both of whom are more knowledgeable on a subject than us are disagreeing,

it's almost impossible for us to figure out who's accurate. Usually what we do is we just go, we end up going with the person we like personally better or who fits our bias better. And so, I don't know how you get around that. And again, people will say, well, he's a, he's a PhD at this, or he teaches at this university. I go, it doesn't matter. Look up, you can Google Nobel Prize syndrome. And you could find a laundry list of, without question, some of the most intelligent people in the history of mankind, who, many of whom believed in absolute quackery in other areas of science. like eugenics, um,

healing crystals, astrology. Like, you can find a laundry list of these folks who are very intelligent. Like even one of the, I think one of the people who discovered DNA. Like the, like,

which completely changed modern science. Um, they were on this list. And people go, well, they're smart. They wouldn't believe in bullshit. Yes.

they would. Anyone can be victim to cognitive dissonance, especially when if you've built an entire identity around it, if you've built an entire brand around it, right? Like some of these people who are, it's carnivore this or low carb this or glucose that or sugar this, what can they do when they're presented with information to the contrary? You know how hard it is to change? a brand? I mean, Nick, you know this. How hard is it to change a brand? I mean, it's one of the hardest things. It's like you're starting all over again. Yeah, you're, you're having to turn an oil tanker in the ocean, right? Like, it is going to take, you know, if I'm in a little boat, if I'm in an oil tanker, you're not making, you're not turning on a drop of a dime.

No, it's like 50% chance sink or swim. Right. Well, here's part of the issue that I see is People will turn their identity into this narrative and this narrative has some sort of scare tactic to it. For sure. It has to grab someone's attention. So these individuals blow up overnight and they have this narrative they're pushing. And then you have the people that host the podcast who they want their podcasts to grow. So they bring on people generally who are the loudest, the most contrasting, controversial. They have this new system that has this narrative.

So they bring them on. So that voice and message grows and spreads. And it's like this wildfire that we've created that is almost impossible to distinguish at this point. Yeah. Eric Helms referred to it as a fire hose of misinformation. And I think when I was younger, I used to get really frustrated because I felt like I was playing whack a mole.

Like one Charlton would pop up and I'd whack them and then two more would pop up and I'd whack them. And now I've realized I'm in an infinite game. Like, there's no winning this game. You know, it's just, there's just playing the game. And I feel grateful that hopefully, I mean, again, like I have gotten over a million followers. That's a lot of people to have their ear, you know. And so I want to expand that reach. So hopefully I can help offset some of the Smith's information.

But there's no, there's no winning the game. And I really like what you touched on about the negativity part of it, because that is really important. People listen to and share negativity because we are addicted to negativity and stress. If every, and people go, you know, the news just likes negativity. No, no, you like negativity. You like it because you watch the news. Because I promise you tomorrow, if every single person in this country stood up and said, if a negative story comes on the news, I'm not watching it. I promise you within months, every major news station would change the their content without question because their dollars depend on your eyeballs. So they don't care

if it's positive or negative. They just care what you're going to watch. So guess what? You're the one addicted to it. You're the one who is allowing this. If like people want to, you know, they'll talk about the food industry and how evil it is and everything. And I'm like, am I saying that they are morally, am I saying that they have no. Am I saying that they have no moral steak in this whole thing. I'm not saying that. But their product, what they sell is what you eat. If people tomorrow were like, we're not eating junk food, guess what? They would stop selling it, but they would sell way less of it. Where is the inherent personal accountability? If, if, and I tell this to young creators, like some, like, especially with our coaches, like I'll do like a kind of like a

a seminar for them or like a not a seminar about I kind of teach them like the social media game a little bit and I said one of the things you've got to keep very in mind and I'm sure you can appreciate what I'm about to say make sure the tail doesn't start wagging the dog and what I mean by that is a lot of times these guys do this content because they do something really extreme

and it pops off so then that becomes all their content So now that's why they're in grocery stores with their shirts off, yelling at the camera about toxic ingredients. But guess what would happen if everyone tomorrow was like, I'm not sharing this shit, I'm not liking this shit, I'm not watching this shit. They wouldn't do that shit. But negativity and fear sells because I'm not a sociological anthropologist, so I probably can't say with definitive. but I think the reason it sells is as humans, we have survived by being very adept at scanning our environment for threats.

And today, if we walk outside, I'm not worried about getting mauled by a bear. I'm not worried about getting attacked by a lion. I'm not really even worried about most communicable diseases. I'm not worried about hardly anything in terms of safety. like for the most part, we are very safe on our day to day. So what happens is our mind,

that part of our brain didn't stop working. It just ramped up what we perceive as a level of threat, right? So now it's like, oh, that coworker said that mean thing about me and I'm going to be spun up about that for however long, right? Or, you know, my spouse didn't do this thing that I wanted them to do.

So I'm going to be spun up about that for a long time now. and that translates into the content we consume as well, which is we see something negative or it makes us afraid and we share it because we also want to protect the people we love. Whereas when there's not fear-based content, when there's a lot of nuance, it's just not sexy.

It's not going to go viral like to those stuff. And one of the things I've really tried to do a good job is balancing, okay, playing the game enough to get eyeballs, but never crossing the line of just making it clickbait garbage. So like, you know, I'll tell my video guy, I'm like, what is the sexiest we can make this title without misrepresenting it, right?

What is the, and part of the reason why I do my what the fitness is and people are like, oh, you know, do you really need to like make those jokes or whatever? Yeah, if I want to get people to watch, yes, I need to make some jokes and be funny and like make the exaggeration. eye rolls and all those because I'm not going to do it by lying. Okay, I'm not going to lie to sell my content or I'm not going to misrepresent the truth to sell my content. But you need a hook to give people the right information. But I got to get a hook, right?

And so, and I was talking about this with Eric Holmes and Brad Schoenfeld the other day, two people who I respect and I think are experts. If you're not following them, you should. But, you know, Eric has, you know, he said, you know, I just made peace with the fact that I'm, I'm never going to have a of followers. And I'm like, good for you, man. That's good. He's like, but I do like, he said, he's like, I like that you're willing to fight the battles that some of us just aren't willing to do. You know, that you're willing to do it that way. He's like, but if I did it, it just wouldn't feel genuine to me. And I'm like, totally get that, totally get that.

But yeah, it's hard. And I mean, again, I go back to the personal responsibility piece, like, stop consuming that content. If you stop consuming it, they stop doing it. what is kind of full circle where I remember getting like I was talking about earlier, getting involved into the meat and potatoes, the fitness industry, 2012, 2013. And at the time, the way I got into it is because I signed up for my first bodybuilding competition. And I had to learn how to diet down to step on stage at a lean weight. And I had no clue where to start.

So I was studying nutrition in college at the time. And the nutrition department fell under the dietetics department. So I went to my head of dietetics, you know, a leader. I'm about I know where this is going. And she was 200 pounds overweight. And I sat down with her and I was like, I have to lose significant body fat in order to step on bodybuilding stage in 16 weeks. Can you help me write a plan to get there?

And she's like, oh, absolutely not. I have no clue how to make that happen. We just work on disease intervention for diabetes and cardiovascular. So I went to the internet and I came across your stuff and I came across 3DMJ. Alberto Nunez. You got pretty lucky then with your first two then. Eric Holmes was when Matt Ogis was really sharing a lot of information. So I really just studying, I started studying a lot of your guys stuff.

I say it's full circle because I would argue that the emergence of the fitness industry and the growth started on a pretty strong foundation coming out of this. old school bodybuilding wild wild west era and then it just got absolutely crazy and we're still in the craziness where it's you never know in any given day what information is going to come out pitching what kind of narrative but i think that people are starting to realize that a lot of that's bullshit and we're moving back to these foundational figures that are preaching moral ethical and just concrete information like yourself and the things that 3DMJ crew.

Yeah, I mean, I think what I've seen, people ask me now, is it, is it worse now than it was 10, 20 years ago? And I go, no, I think it's actually better for the most part. The reason being you can actually find good evidence-based information now 20 years ago when I started the industry, there was like literally just the muscle magazines, which were 99% crap. The problem is like knowing how to find and identify experts. So, you know, I think what I have seen is. is the claims keep ramping up, right?

Because there's, I think I saw a study that estimated there was 50,000 fitness influencers. I think that's probably a low number, to be quite honest. I would say so. I would bet it's more than that. And up to 87% of the claims from them were false. And so I think one of the problems is if you are, I just see people, and I've been around people who are like,

like, well, I just want to get where you are. And I'm like, I've been doing this 20 years. Run the marathon, dude. Now, but if you are walking into a very crowded space and you want to get attention and you don't want to have to do the way, because I tell people, like, like, guys, I actually did shit. Like, not only did I, like, put out content. Like, I did a PhD in Nutritional Sciences that was, like, very legit at a top three

university for Nutritional Sciences research for graduate school. I won pro bodybuilding shows. I won powerlifting meets. I won a world champion. Like I've actually done stuff, you know. So my following wasn't just built on like nothing. But if you're walking in, you haven't really done anything and you don't really have the credentials. Like, how can you stand out?

Well, you can scream really loudly about crazy stuff. And people will walk over to see what all the yelling's about, right? Great example. time somebody sent me Liver King's profile. I think he had like 12,000 followers. I remember, I came across Liver King early on too. I think he had like 25,000 followers. Yeah. Just thinking, who the hell is this guy? Well, I remember thinking, this is a joke. Like, this is, like, this is actually, like, I actually thought it was like a parody account, right? And I'm like, nobody's going to follow this. And then the next time I look up, he's got 1.8 million followers.

And he's on all these major podcasts. I'm just like, guys, this is, this is, this is, this is, not actually a real person. Like, this is a marketing company. And actually the emails that came out later showed that it was basically all concocted from the beginning to be a marketing company. I'm like, guys, this is, this is a marketing company. Like, even, you know, it was funny. The thing that killed me more than anything was there was a video he did where he like spears a fish, right, like supposedly spears a fish. And he's walking out of the lake with this fish. First off, the fish is discolored as hell. So it's, I don't know if you've fished much. But you know, when they get rolled as colored, it means they,

been dead for a long time. And it was a sheep's head. It was a saltwater fish. Does not exist in fresh water. I'm like, I couldn't even got the fish right, guys. I'm like, you know,

it's kind of like watching the movies. Like, after you've actually shot guns, like the right way, and you see the way they're like holding it. You're like, oh, God, you know. But I just remember thinking like,

who's going to believe this shit? But then you saw the numbers he was doing and it was talking about. And it's like, how it does work. Yeah, it works. And even now, like it all came out. Like obviously all the stuff that came out about him like was.

I mean, color me not shocked that he was using copious amounts of anabolic, uh, things. And, um, then put out the apology video, but it was like,

while he's still shirtless sitting in a throne and talking about men's mental health, which I'm like, it's kind of a gaslighting apology, I guess. Um, but, um,

Now, like, he's still doing his thing. Well, goes back to like once you, once you create that identity around yourself, you got to own it. Right. You can't go anywhere else. Right. And I think I like, I've never met the guy. I mean, I know people who have met him who said he's nice.

I'm sure he's nice to people. But I'm like, one of two things has to happen. Like, I just know for me, the reason I can do this so much is because I don't get tired because I'm just being myself. Like, this is, you know, We've talked off air and I had a lot of people who have said, yeah, you're pretty much what I expected.

You're like you are. So it's easy for me, right? But I've known people who don't do it that way where it is, they have a, there's a front word facing and then there's a behind the curtain and they get real tired, you know, because it's tiring to be somebody you're not. So either like when you're doing it that way,

you either have to become that character and you're that way. and you're that way all the time, which I feel like would be very rough on your life. Or you're going to be pretty exhausted doing that. Yeah, you can't do it for 10, 20, 30 years. Right, exactly. And so, yeah, it's just, it's a frustrating thing. Like, it is a frustrating thing.

But I think I've, you know, it was funny because people, I have people say, well, you're just jealous of all these people. And I'm like, look, have I. made as much money as I could have doing things differently, no, I could have made way more money. But I've done pretty darn well to the point where like, I'm happy. Like, I'm happy. I don't really have to do much things on a day-to-day basis that I don't like doing. I actually consider myself semi-retired because all the stuff I do, I pretty much like to do.

One of the things I told my team earlier this year was like, like, what do you want to do more of and do less of? I'm like, I want to do less business meetings. They're like, all right, you just get one a week. I'm like, cool, I can handle that. But, you know, if I made less money, but I got to be me, I'll take that all day, every day for sure. And like, also, like, I want my kids to like their dad. Like, I want them to have a relationship with me.

And I want my friends to like me. I actually, one of my best friends, you know, actually my best friend, because he always tells me the truth. Sometimes he's really freaking hard on me. But even recently, it was like, because I know I do this, I'll get triggered and I'll go in my comments and I'll get a little snippy with people. And he's like, dude, I know you and that's not you. I don't like it. Stop it.

And I'm like, fuck, he's right. You know. Be neat people in your life like that are going to call you out and you're bullshit. Oh, yeah. Well, sometimes I, you know, I'm like, you can remind you. me the stuff I'm doing right too, which he actually does. He's actually good about that. But I've got a few people in my life who do that. But it's, you know, it made sense because I'm like, oh, that's right. Because if you meet me, I am nice. And I do treat people really nicely. And sometimes I just get so

tired of the misinformation out there. I end up getting defensive from being attacked a lot. And I end up turning it on the wrong people, you know. It's exhausting. After a certain point, it's, I'm sure. sure it's exhausting. You're trying to spread this positive, right, moral, ethical message. And then you see people watering it down. But the voice becomes louder because of the standing on a rock, beating their chest, shirtless approach. Sure. It's got to be exhausting. Yeah. And I mean, those, those, like, those kind of, I always say, like, when you're, when you're nuanced and you're in the middle about a lot of stuff, it means that everybody hates you. You know, like, a lot of sides don't

like you. Because, you know, to the point of like the extreme claims, I remember the first time the carnivore movement came about. And I was on a, and I started getting accused of like, well, you're just biased because you're biased. I'm like, whoa, whoa, guys, they don't know that they, like, you realize that people don't you for very long, right? Like, that there's, there's such a rapid turnover because I'm like, do they not know?

Like, my research was on high protein diets. It was funded by the National Dairy Council, the Egg Nutrition Center, National Cannabins Beef Association. If anybody has a bias towards that stuff, it's me, right? And I said the first time I debated Sean Baker on Mark Bell's podcast, I was like, never in a million years did I think I would be on the guy, I'd be the guy in a podcast being like, you know, maybe less meat and more plants, you know, defending the virtues of plants. I just never in a million years I think it would happen. But things got so crazy that here we are. Yeah. You know, like never, never did I think that vegetables were now going to be the thing

that was making you sick and fat. Like, here we are. Here we are. I'm curious, this is one question I did want to ask you. I'm curious with all the things that you learned over the years and new researches come out and new trends popped up. What are some things you've changed? your mind about in the last couple years? Yeah, so LDL cholesterol. That was probably about

five, six years ago. I changed my mind on it. So when I got to graduate school, the opinion of the lab I was in, and my opinion on reading some of the research studies was LDL doesn't really matter. It's more about the ratio of HDL to LDL. And one of the problems with nutrition research is, especially with this particular subject, heart disease isn't the difference between you dying at age 80 and 40. It's the difference between you dying

at age 80 and age 73, right? And so you have different tiers of evidence. And typically, what we need to prove causation is what's called human randomized control trials. And sorry, I'm going to go down the rabbit hole a little bit on this one to explain. The reason randomization is important, is if we do a cohort study, cohort studies are great because you can do them for

really long periods of time, which is we're going to track these 100,000 people. We're not going to do any intervention. We're just going to track them. And we're going to see, okay, people who eat, say, more fiber, who gets, is there a relation to heart disease, to cancer, to all these sorts of things, right? And then we can make some association. So we can say, oh, well, look, if you eat more fiber or if you have a few more fiber you have a reduction in the risk of cardiovascular disease. If you eat more saturated fat, there's an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. But the problem is you can have what's called healthy user bias as well as other biases. People don't do behaviors in isolation, right?

People tend to couple behaviors together, right? People who eat more fiber probably also more likely to exercise. They're probably also more likely to do other health promoting behaviors. people who eat high saturated fat, probably more likely to do other health negative behaviors, right? The reason randomized control trials are helpful is because let me do a different example because I think it'll make it a little bit more clear

if we were doing a study on high protein versus low protein intakes and we had a, we're going to do it in bodybuilders. If we have them self-select which group they're going to go into, they're all going to go into the high protein diet, right? But let's say we had people that were a mix of trained and just everyday gen pop. And we're going to do high protein versus low protein. Well, you could bias the study because if you let them self-select, the trained people are probably going to go towards the high protein and the untrained people might go towards

the low protein, right? That would be a very likely outcome. And so then you would see, oh, people who eat more protein have more muscle mass. Well, because it was it because of the more protein or is it because they just already have more muscle mass, right? So randomization is important because in that case, we would say, okay, like literally there's tools that do this, but think about just flipping a coin, right? You this group, you this group, you this group, you this group, it doesn't matter. Like, it's just totally randomized. So you can assume that any other inherent characteristics that

could bias it are going to be equally and randomly distributed across the groups. Does that make sense? Makes sense. And so then you can assume that it will be, if there is a difference, it's because of your treatment and not because there was some inherent characteristic that biased it one way or the other. The problem with randomized control trials is they're short. Like the longest randomized control trial in nutrition, I think I've seen as like a year or two. It's just, it's hard to do them for a long periods of time because I think people think there's like this infinite pool of people just sit. around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for people to call them to do research studies.

And people who do research studies as subjects are like you and me. They're like the average everyday person. So like when people are like, why didn't they do it for longer? Why didn't they control for more stuff? Okay, do you want to go sit in food jail for three years? Like literally where like they're controlling every single thing you eat. And would you get paid for something like that? There's the other thing.

It's expensive because if you're going to control people's lives, you have to pay them, right? Well, I'll give you an example. Not the same thing. but NASA wanted to do a 70-day study on bed rest because, you know, astronauts lose a lot of muscle mass. So when you're on bed rest, you lose a lot of muscle mass. They're trying to replicate, you know, some of this. So you had to do 70 days of bed rest.

So for 70 days, they were offering $18,000 of participant. All you got to do is lie in bed, right? Honestly, it sounds horrible. Exactly. It is horrible, right? Because after like, first day, you're probably like, okay, cool, TV, video games. whatever. After day three, you're going to be like, get me the fuck out of here. Exactly.

You know? So you got to pay people to do this stuff, right? And it's expensive. So you can't, if you want high control, you're not going to do it for a long period of time. And if you want a lot of subjects, if you want it for a long period of time, it's going to be very little control. So cohort studies, right? If you want high control, high subject number, it's going to be short duration. If you want high subject number, high control, short duration.

If you want high subject number and high control, it's going to be low subject number, right? So if you want all those things, it's going to be animal studies, right? So I probably screwed up my, I have a Venn diagram in my head that I'm going over and I probably repeated something. So hopefully people get the jest. But the problem with the LDL research is the longest randomized control trials. They had were like two years. Okay. If you and I invest in mutual funds and yours does 9% and mine does 8%.

We look after two years, you'll have a little bit more money, but it won't be like statistically different. Right. Right. But what happens if we look after 40 years? You're going to have a shitload more money. Exactly. Right. Heart disease is kind of the same way because it is a lifetime exposure risk to LDL.

Sorry, not all heart disease is just LDL, but LDL is a lifetime exposure risk. So how can we test this? Well, in 2009, they started doing what's called Mendelian randomized control trials. Now, what's cool about this is, you know, for these other studies, they had to do treatments. But there are people with genetic polymorphisms on the LDL receptor or on LDL secretion who just naturally have higher or lower levels of LDL. And because it's a polymorphism on just one section of genetic code, it doesn't tend to affect any other area of metabolism. So it's not like, oh, they've got high LDL and they have high inflammation or something like that, some other risk factor. It doesn't affect the other risk factors, just LDL, okay? So they can look at basically their lifetime exposure to LDL cholesterol and then look at how does that affect heart disease risk.

And you can draw a straight line through it. I mean, it is very, very clear. And it's honestly quite crazy how tight. the association is. And then if we look at, okay, is there a mechanism for this? Yes. So LDL has been shown to penetrate the endothelium. And when you penetrate the endothel, that's what causes damage. Now, it's actually the lipoprotein, apolyproprotein B that is on each molecule of LDL that causes the damage to the endothelium. And then the LDLs can penetrate the endothelium. And some people have said, well, see, it's not actually like all LDL. It's really the small

oxidized LDL. If you've heard this before. But people will say, well, you don't have to worry about LDL, like the big fluffy LDL. You got to worry about the small oxidized LDL. So what is true is that small oxidized LDL does penetrate the endothelium more easily than large LDL, but it carries less cholesterol. Large LDL still penetrates the endothelium, not as easily, but it carries more cholesterol. The net is that they equally are atherogenic. because again, if you have a large,

let's say you have a particle that carries twice as much cholesterol, it penetrates the endothelium at half the rate, but the net effect, as it's like maybe a small oxidized one, but the net effect is the same amount of deposition in your endothelium in the arteries. So that's one thing I changed my mind on after those studies started coming out,

but I didn't change it fast. It wasn't like one study came out. I was like, oh, whoa, because I want to see the consensus of the evidence move, right? and over about a eight-year period, I was like, man, I can't, I can't really make these claims anymore that LDL doesn't matter.

So that was one thing. I changed my thoughts on intermittent fasting, like more your traditional intermittent fasting, like 168. I used to say, well, if you want to build muscle, it's a bad idea. But the, there's a few good studies out of Grant Tinsley's lab

now that have shown that like, people who did intermittent fasting, built as much muscle as people who didn't when they ate the same amount of protein. Now, the other caveat was they ate three meals, three protein containing meals during the eight hour feeding period. And they trained during that feeding period. So I don't know if it would have been different if they trained during fasting period and didn't get those three meals in.

But you're not necessarily pro intermittent fasting. You're just not anti-intermitt fasting. Yeah, I'm not anti anymore. And I mean, I think I've always said like, hey, if it helps you to control your calories, great. I just not with all the crazy claims about what fasting does and on long. longevity and all this stuff, which by the way, I did a great, if I give myself props, a great debunk of this in my talk in Australia because people have said, well, you know, you're not doing fasting for

the fat loss benefits. You're doing it for the longevity benefits. What benefits? What? There are no human studies that show this. There's literally one rodent study, two rodent studies I might be aware of where they equated calories and had one group fast and they saw a difference in lifespan. Rodents are a very poor model for lifespan and for longevity because rodents grow throughout the course of their entire lives. Humans don't. And eight hours of, or 16 hours of fasting in a rodent is like three weeks in a human.

So when you look at the. the strongest evidence for longevity and nutrition. It's actually in recess monkeys. Because, again, you can't do a lifelong randomized control trial with people, right? You just have to look at like, what do people who live longer tend to do, eat more fiber, eat less saturated fat, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But when it comes to fasting, you know, the strongest evidence for nutritional lifespan extension is in rhesus monkeys where they put them under calorie restriction.

Now, people also misinterpret this. And because I know how animal studies are done, because I did a lot of them, I feel like I'm very well equipped to interpret this research literature. So they put them under 30% caloric restriction. When they do restriction in nutritional studies, typically what they're doing is they're just letting the animals eat however much they want. They're weighing how much they eat, and then they're taking whatever percentage off. Okay.

If you look at the bar graphs of these monkeys, they didn't lose weight throughout the course of their life. Like, they weren't always in calorie restriction. Some of them didn't lose any weight. And most of them, if they lost weight, it was for the first few months and then they just plateaued. So they just didn't become obese. Like, that's the trick. That's the longevity hack. like it's not fasting and it's not even really calorie restriction because these animals

weren't in calorie restriction for the majority of their life. But animals in captivity with free access to food, guess what they do. They overeat. And so if you restrict them by 30%, now they don't overeat, now they don't become obese, and they live longer. Tadda! Like we could call up in these biochemical mechanisms, but if you look at the, if you look at the hazard ratios for obesity on mortality. I mean, I think the only thing that even really

comes that exceeds that is like smoking or heavy drinking. Obesity is very strong risk factor for mortality, cardiovascular disease, cancer. So anyways, all coming back to fasting, I still think you can build muscle on intermittent fasting. But if you inject me with truth serum and ask me, do I think it's the best possible thing you could do? If your goal was to be the most muscular person you possibly could be. No, I don't think it is. But I think in a 12-week study, you're not going to pick out that difference.

And I think if somebody just wants to build muscle, obviously you can build plenty on intermittent fasting. I just, I don't think if you wanted to be Mr. Olympia, it'd be what you would want to do. What's your personal eating window? When you start eating when you stop eating? You know, I used to be like one of these people

who like, as soon as my eyes cracked open, I'm like literally grabbing something because I got to get out of catabolism, you know? Were you ever at a point where you would wake up in middle of the night, haven't you? Yeah. I remember when that was a thing. Yeah.

I mean, I'm like, what, you're going eight hours and protein synthesis is going down. Now I'm like, now I did start doing something where, pardon me, I got to the point, I'm somebody who wakes up every night. Like, I probably will sleep eight hours through the night once every couple months. I just always have to, like, I don't know what it is,

like my bladder is directly connected to my brain. As soon as I got to pee even a little bit, my bladder's like, wake up. wake up. So always wake up. So at that point, like I was, like for a time, if I woke up and thought about it, I'd grab a shake and slam like half a shake or something like that. But I don't think it's a good idea to like wake yourself up purposely to feed. I think that's over the top. I remember when that was a thing. And like they were, they were, I was one of the people who did it. There were certain protein shakes and companies

that were launching powders that were made just for the middle of the night. Oh my God. It's like my favorite is the proteins that are like it's um you can cook with this protein. I'm like, you mean just protein? Yeah. And they're like, well, you know, when you cook it normal protein at denatures. I'm like, you mean what happens during digestion anyway? So just anybody out there, if somebody sells like a cookable protein, they're full of it. I remember I was when I was in college, early on in college, I was buying this protein.

I think it was by MHP. It was like the blue bottle with the yellow lid And it was called like the 12 hour protein And I would drink that before I'd go to bed Missile Arcadian Yeah Yeah yeah Yeah I remember drinking

I mean I was I was reading articles online I was on body letter.com I was like the supplement log and forums But for me I wake up at 420 every morning To go run I have at least something In me as soon as I'm up for it to fuel that run Yeah

And I'll eat until an hour before bed typically Yeah, I mean, I'll usually wake up. I'll like get a shower, have a coffee, and then I'll eat. So I'll usually eat within like 30, 45 minutes of waking. And I'll usually eat within an hour of bed, you know. But like I used to be like literally like eating my last meal, then with like brush my teeth, get in bed. Yeah. Now I'm like, you know, that little amount of time that you're spending stressing about that stuff, probably negatively.

impacts your recovery more than if you just were a little bit more, you know, zen. What are your thoughts around all the claims of cell atophagy and fasting? I know that's a huge claim that people make of why they fast. Yeah. So they actually don't know what atophagy is. Like every person who says this word, I'm like, okay, explain it to me. And they go, well, it's like, cellular remodeling. I'm like, I know.

Explain to me how it works. And then they can't explain how it works. So it's basically lysosomal protein degradation, which is you have lysosomes, which they engulf, like it's called phagocytosis, different like organelles and misfolded proteins and things in the cell that need to be broken down, right? But it's protein breakdown, essentially. And so the autophagy response. people think it's like the way they talk about it's like well after 18 hours you go into autophagy mode. Autophagy mode's always on bro.

Like autophagy is not an on or off switch. Biochemical processes are not like light switches. You don't just like flip one. It's like, oh, let's ramp everything up. Let's go. It's like protein synthesis degradation. Both things are always happening at the same time. Just like you're always burning and storing fat at the same time.

It's the relative rates of each that are going to determine the net. gain or deposition or the net gain or loss. So in the case of autophagy, well, guess what increases autophagy? Exercise and plain old calorie restriction. And people go, well, you know, I don't calorie restrict.

I fast so I can get autophagy without having to calorie restrict. I'm like, okay, let's play that logic out then. All right. So let's take somebody who does alternate day fasting. Okay? Like real extreme form of food. fasting, right? Alternate day fasting versus somebody just eating the same amount every single day.

And both are eating the same amount of calories, right? Over the course of a week, they're eating the same amount of calories. So on the days where they're fasting, yeah, their rates of autophagy are probably higher. Their rates of protein breakdown are probably higher. What about the day where they're having to eat twice as much to make up for the day where they just fasted? Oh, autophagy is going to be much lower. The net being nothing in terms of compared to some somebody just eating the same amount every day. And then what they'll always come back with, it's like they can't, these zealots can't listen. Well, what if you don't compensate the next day? Well, then you're in what's called a calorie deficit. We're not comparing apples to apples.

Right. So if we're talking about, like, let's say two people are, one person's eating 2,000 calories every single day, 14,000 calories a week. Another person's eating the same 14,000 calories a week, but doing alternate day fasting. When I say compensating, say what I'm talking about is they're eating equal calories as somebody who's like if they were eating the same amount of calories every single day. The point is on the days where you're fasting, yes, it would be higher. But then if you're maintaining your body weight because you said that you weren't doing calorie restriction, you said you were doing fasting. So you're having to compensate. That means your orthophagy will be lower on those days. And there are no studies.

Zero. Zilch. Nada. showing that fasting improves or increases autophagy more than normal eating the same amount of calories every single day and equating weekly calories. Now, I am not saying fasting has no benefits. For some people, it seems to be a great way for them to control their calorie intake. But we just had a really great randomized control trial that came out where I think they actually provided all the food to participants and either had them fast or feed. Yeah, they provided all the food to participants and had them either do like your traditional kind of 16-8 intermittent fasting or just normal continuous feeding.

And at the end of 12 weeks, absolutely no differences in any marker that they measured of insulin sensitivity, body fat loss, nothing. So it seems to be a great tool to control calories if that works for you, but it's not magic. What are your thoughts around? Because there's a lot of companies popping up promoting products and software. around just controlling blood sugar. Well, I'd love to hear your thoughts and break down and potentially attack against some these companies or people that are promoting a diet or devices or even wearing continuous

glucose monitors to control your blood sugar response to certain types of foods throughout the day. Okay, so this is some scientists, many scientists even have difficulty disconnecting the idea of an acute response from long-term disregulated signaling. So I will give you an example. Nick, if I told you I was going to make you do something that was going to raise your blood pressure, raise your heart rate, raise your levels of inflammation, raise your oxidative species or your free radical production, and raise your cortisol.

What would you say? That I'm probably about to go for a workout. That's exactly what exercise does. But if you didn't know that exercise did that, you didn't know exercise was good for you, you'd say, hell no, right? Like all that stuff's bad. That's exactly what exercise does in the short term. So obviously, we cannot equate short term responses with long-term outcomes. But again, remember when I talked about symmetrically applying logic? We have to symmetrically apply this logic. So, okay, after a meal, blood glucose goes up if it has carbohydrate, right?

insulin goes up. We know glucose being elevated long term, insulin being elevated long term, very bad for you. So some people are saying now, well, we don't want them elevated at all or minimize them as much as possible, right? You can't eat protein in either because that elevates mTOR and IGF1, which are associated with cancer. Can't eat fat. Fat impede flow mediated dilation after a meal.

A high fat meal will impede flow fat. A high fat meal will impede flow mediation, which, is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. So, should we all just like lick ice cubes and photosynthesize? Like, I'm not sure what point is trying to be made here with these acute postmeal responses. And actually, if we look at, does even the short-term responses make a difference on long-term outcomes? Well, we don't have any metrics on long-term health outcomes. But what about glycemia?

Like, just blood sugar control. I think most people promoting this would say, well, if you're having bigger glucose excursions and you're not controlling those, that's going to lead to worse glycemia, worse glycemic control over time. And this is one of the things that, like, glucose goddess has said, well, you want to watch your food order, right? You want to eat your vegetables and proteins first and then eat your starchy carbohydrate last because that will blunt this response. So this is a case, again, of like going in and actually reading the literature. So the study she always cites, I've read the study. And yes, the food order did affect the rate of glucose and insulin response. So there was a faster rise, a higher peak versus the group doing the protein and veggies first,

had a slower response in a blunted peak. But they measured for three hours. and if you look at the graph, yes, the glucose response went up and peaked higher and faster. It also started falling down much faster. And at three hours was basically back to baseline or close. The other group still had not come back to baseline. And so I remember thinking,

what if this is just extending the overall area under the curve? Like they measured area under the curve and it was greater in the starchy carbohydrate group first. But you haven't gotten both groups back down to baseline and you're taking area under the curve. So area under the curve is like, you know, if you measure insulin at a snapshot in time or glucose in a snapshot in time,

it doesn't tell you a whole lot about how much overall was secreted, right? So when you're looking at area under the curve, what you're doing is like a calculus integration to determine what is the overall response, right? But you can only do that if both, have come back down to baseline. So the same author of that paper just did recently a randomized control trial with food order repeating that experiment over 16 weeks.

And they found no differences in any of the markers they measured. They found a trend for significance in HBA1C favoring the food order, the vegetable protein first, but it was like a 1% relative difference. And what I mean by that is like, you know, HPA1C is measured in percentages. So it's not like they went from six to five. That's not what it was. It was like they went from like six to five point nine. So there was like I could have butchered the actual number. But it was not statistically significant. And it was also, this is important, clinically not relevant. Meaning, you can have statistical significance if you get high enough, right? Like, so for example, Nick, if we had like a thousand subjects in two different

groups, we could see statistical differences of like, like take, like strength gain, okay? So both groups trained for however long, for 16 weeks, right? Let's say one group, we had so many people, that there was a half pound difference on average in the bench press. Statistically significant because we had so many people in the group and maybe we had a small amount of variance, but practically kind of irrelevant. Are you going to do a training program that's like something you don't like for a half pound? You know what I mean?

Right. So the point is the difference was so small that it was clinically irrelevant, and it wasn't even statistically different. Now, what's interesting is the group that was doing the vegetable and protein first lost more weight, which they said they equated calories,

but I'm sorry, they're not breaking the laws of thermodynamics. Those people ate less, because they do see possible benefit on satiety with food order. So, yeah, that might make sense to actually... So it might make sense, if you're trying to lose weight to eat your protein and veggies first,

before you start you carbohydrate, but now for the reasons they're talking about, it's because you just feel more satiated and you end up eating less. I mean, I find that with me personally. If I eat my steak and veggies first, I'm going to eat less than my potatoes. I'm going to eat my potatoes first.

I'm going to finish that steak, but I'm struggling sometimes to make it through all that steak because they eat all the potatoes first. Right. So again, I just, and with these things, it's like the mind space this is occupied, pying is problematic, right? Like you're spending so much time worrying about this little stuff.

Like, hey, if you like, if you don't mind eating your food in that order, go for it. There's no downside to it, right? But like, I've seen comments, I like to mix my food together. Then do it. Like, consistency, consistency, consistency, right? Like, that's what you should be focusing on. So it's stress that we're creating around the actual. choices is actually causing more issues than the food itself.

That's exactly right. And so, again, I am not concerned about short-term, acute, normal blood glucose extursions after a meal. What we need to be concerned about is long-term dysregulated insulin signaling that usually comes from overfeeding, getting too much body fat, and not exercising enough. Is there a concern with eating too frequently Where you're not allowing your blood sugar to come back to baseline? So The idea would be like, oh, you're getting more insulin spikes throughout the day Like say, for example, like you have a big meal

And then an hour later you snack And an hour later you snack And then an hour later you have another big meal And maybe those snacks are higher Say you go to the pantry You grab a handful of raisins That could be like 60 grams of carbs Right.

but your blood sugar never comes down a baseline because you're constantly feeding with a sugar without the entire day. So I don't know because I've ever really tested that a bunch directly. My suspicion is it wouldn't really matter that much. And the reason is, let's take all the food you just mentioned.

Somebody eats it in like two meals versus somebody eating it kind of sprinkled throughout the day. Sure, their blood sugar may stay elevated, but it's going to be elevated at a much lower level than the response of somebody who's having two big meals because they're going to have a massive response to each one. Right. The area under the curve has to clear.

Maybe it's different. I kind of doubt it. I'm not familiar with any research out there examining it. Maybe there is some. But yeah, I just think more, so I advise people who want to lose weight to not snack, but not for that reason, more of a basic level of,

we don't remember our snacks. And we're often very snacking, unmindfully. And there's a lot of research to show that your appetite regulation is better when you're engaged with your meal. We remember our meals. We don't remember our snacks. And actually, in a systematic review of successful weight loss maintainers, people

who would keep weight off for like over three years, one of the number one things that kept coming back up as a consistent attribute to these people was they didn't really snack. They ate their meals and they didn't snack. I think a lot of that is because people just don't remember their snacks and they're not, they don't have the same satiety hit because you're not engaging mindfully with them. That's like I was traveling yesterday and I never snack either. I have like my four to five meals start of the day. It's usually pretty consistent.

I eat the same things pretty much all the time. I love the meals that I eat. And I picked up just a pack of pistachios as we were kind of walking through the airport. And I just started snacking on these. He's just eating them around when I was about to eat a meal. You flip over a pack of pistachios. You can have three servings per pack, 45 grams of fat. People don't rise.

Some of these snack, healthier options are very dense in calories. Yeah, I mean, man, I can tear up some cashews. You know, I can tear up some cashews. Cheese, I'll tear up some cheese, you know. Yeah, I think it's more about the unmindfulness. I mean, like on a plane, when I'm flying first class, they'll give you like a, you know, a little cup of nuts. No jokes.

And I mean, there's probably 20, 25 grams of fat in that little thing. And people are just throwing them back, you know? Now, again, there's research. Here's where it gets segue. People are like, but there's all these studies that show that nuts are beneficial for protecting from heart disease. Yes, there is. as long as that's not making you go over your calories and gain excessive body fat, right?

But in the end, most people don't gain body fat because of the nuts they ate. They gained body fat because they ate the nuts, plus they ate the fatty steak at dinner, plus they ate some junk food, plus they had the salad with the full fat dressing. Like, it's the compounding effect of all these things. Texas Roadhouse.

Do you remember when Texas Roadhouse? The bread, dude. Dude, they would give you, I remember when I was younger. That bread is, I don't believe in food addiction, except for that. It's dangerous. but I remember when I was younger, they would actually bring you a big bowl of peanuts. Yep.

And then you could actually throw the shelves on the ground. Still do that, yep. And, I mean, you eat probably, I love peanuts. I can crush peanuts. You know, you probably eat 50 grams of fat before your steak comes. You have the butter with a roll. You have the steak. You have the sweet potato that's loaded with, like, more butter.

I mean, you could probably leave one of those dinners having 200 plus grams of fat. easy in a meal i mean look at um if you ever want to be mind blown just go to cheesecake factory and just look at the the calories on the meals i mean find one that's under a thousand that's not on the light menu you know what i mean it's tough like the salad some of the salads have almost 2,000 calories in them you know like you you have to realize that this is one of the big things i tell people why i think tracking i tell people i don't think that for most of the people weighing and tracking their food is a long-term solution for things. I do it, but I'm kind of a robot, you know, but I think auditing your nutrition every once in a while is a very useful

practice, just like doing your budget and looking what your expenses are can be very eye-opening at times. And so I tell people, if you've never had the experience of weighing out every single thing you put in your mouth for just a week, just do it for one week. It will blow your mind if you're honest with yourself because either one or two things happen because we know that when you monitor things, you change behavior, right? So usually what happens is people stop eating a bunch of crap and stop snacking on stuff that they're not taking care of. And then the first week they're tracking, they lose three pounds, you know, two or three pounds. Or they get through one day and they're like, oh, crap, you know. I actually had the opposite because I was skinny,

had trouble putting on weight growing up because I didn't have a big appetite. And I remember when I was in bodybuilding. And I first got to be eating 3,500, 4,000 calories a day, right? Because I just felt like I was eating so much food. First day I tracked, it was like 2,300 calories.

I was like, oh shit. And then like, it turned out, yeah, there were days I was having 4,000 calories. And then the next day I'd have like 1,500. You know, a lot of people have the opposite problem. And we see this in research studies. There was a very classic study in 1992.

I think it was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. they had people who were self-reported weight loss resistant. So these people said, I can't lose weight no matter what I do. And they claimed that they were on 1,200 calories a day. So they had people sign up who claimed they were eating 1,200 calories a day. On average, and they monitored them in a metabolic ward, I believe. On average, they were underreporting their calories by 53%,

and overreporting their physical activity by 47%. and I think a lot of people hear these stats and it feels very attacking for a lot of people because people are like, well, they're lying. So people who are obese, they've got to be lying. I don't think it's lying. I think people have really poor idea of what a serving size of food looks like

because like dinner plate size affects how much you eat. Even plate color can affect how much you eat. The size of your utensils affects how much you eat. Like all this stuff matters in scientific studies. when they look at the stuff. And if you ever want to be depressed, weigh out a serving of peanut butter, way out a serving of ice cream,

way out a serving of cereal. And you will realize that, oh, that bowl of ice cream that I thought was a serving was actually four servings. That bowl of cereal was actually three or four servings. That scoop of peanut butter was three servings of peanut butter. Like,

people just don't have a good, understand. I mean, I talked to one person who was like, they're like, well, but cereal is good for it. The cereal only has 110 calories in it. And I'm like, dude, you literally ate half the box. They're like, well, how much are you supposed to eat? And I'm like, look on the side. See that 30 grams? Why don't you go weigh out 30 grams on my scale over there? They're like, it barely covers the bottom of the bowl. I'm like, exactly.

Yeah, one of my favorite granolas is purely Elizabeth granola. It's so good. But I try not to put it in the house because I will crush it. And it's a smaller bag. You flip it over. It's, I think seven grams of fat,

15 grams of carbs, like six grams of proteins, something like that per serving. Doesn't sound too bad. But there's 11 servings per this small bag. And for me, that bag is two to three. servings max.

So I won't put it in the house because I know I'll crush it. And I'm crushing easily 600 calories sometimes when I don't need an additional 600 calories from granola every night. Right. Yeah. I mean, I just think or people think, well, granola, it's healthy or nuts. They're healthy. Yes, there can be some health promoting things to those things when you're eating a

reasonable amount of servings, right? But anything, energy toxicity is a thing. eat anything too much and it can be bad for you. It's just some things are virtually impossible to overeat. Like, good luck overeating celery. You know what I mean? Right. Well, the last thing I'd love to really lean into.

One of the things I've been saying in these past couple months, and I heard it in a book or heard it on a podcast and it just really has stuck with me is the concepts are few, but the methods are many. and it's very applicable to fitness and even the things that you've been talking about and practicing for years now. But I heard you say something on the podcast, a podcast that was listened to a few weeks ago. And he said so many people are walking over rocks to pick up pebbles.

Yep. And I would love to hear that broken down in terms of just the way people are approaching nutrition or what they're focusing on as opposed to what they should be focusing on. Yeah, you call it majoring in the minors. you can call it stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. What I tell people is I'm like, if my goal is to pick up as much weight and rocks as possible, I'm going to pick up the boulders first, right?

I'm going to the most bang for my buck. And if I can get some pebbles after that, cool, because it's more, right? But if I have to drop a boulder to pick up some pebbles, then the pebbles weren't worth it. And great example of that. let's take let's take nutrient timing

like there's some evidence that if you eat more of your food earlier in the day it has a better effect on satiety right some people will postulate that it increases energy expenditure more but based on the human randomized

control trials we have right now it doesn't but what if you just like eating your food at night and you actually feel more hungry by doing that and you actually by eating more earlier in the day you end up still eating more later and overeating. Whereas if you just kind of tracked your nutrition and did your thing, you'd be fine.

You're stepping over. You're trying to pick up a little pebble and you're dropping the big boulder. You found out that lengthened partials were really good for hypertrophy. And so you're trying to put in lengthened partials. in your training, but you hate it and you end up training less. You're stepping over boulders to pick up pebbles. Like, it's that brutal consistency. I love what you said.

What was it? The concepts are few, but the methods are many. Yeah. Concept, want to lose weight, calorie deficit. That's it. It's indisputable. Like, there are people who dispute it, but they have a narrative to push and they do not understand the research literature and they have not read the research.

search literature. But there are many paths to roam. There's many ways to get a calorie deficit. Intermittent fasting, tracking your calories, if it fits your macros, carnivore, low carb, low fat, ornish, like every which way you can imagine, right? The methods are many. But that's the concept is pretty much the one thing. Right. And I think I've often wondered, Why do we have like, because I, it is kind of frustrating that we spend so much time arguing in the margins about this stuff. I'm like, I really want to focus on like, hey, let's like, I want to do a lot of content on, hey, here's the mindset you need to have. Hey, here's the behaviors that are important. Hey, like, like talk about behavior modification.

Like, if I was going to go back to grad school now, I'd go for psychology. Like, I'd want to like truly learn behavior modification and behavior change because I think it's fascinating because. many of us are on autopilot and we don't even realize what our habits and behaviors are. And we don't even realize how much they affect us on a day-to-day basis. And I think Les Brown had a quote and it was something like, people are 90% their thoughts, their habits, and their behaviors. And if you think about what you do on a day-to-day basis, how often are you actually mindful and really engaged.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, but that is a mechanism where you develop certain habits and behaviors to allow your brain to focus on the things that you really need to focus on, right? But that's why when you first start any kind of diet or any kind of restriction, it feels really fatiguing. You know what I mean? Because it's not a habit.

You have to keep forcing yourself to do it. Eventually, it becomes a habit. And so that's where the consistency piece comes in. like and just man if i could if i could tell people one thing like you're going to screw up start walking the path like you're going to have side roads you're going to get off track you're going to have things not work you're going to screw up you're going to fail but just start walking the path and keep walking the path like just be willing to learn from it i think um You know, when I started walking the path, my goal was to be a world champion natural bodybuilder.

I never got that. But I actually got something better, I think. Like, this is better. I love being able to, like, reach more people and try to affect change. But I never would have gotten to this point if I just hadn't started, you know? I think so many people, one of the things I say in a motivational talk I do is paralysis by analysis. And planning have killed more dreams than failure ever could. Most people just don't go.

You know what I mean? Like, I'm sure you know this, Nick. Like, they're in business, indecision is way worse than a bad decision. Because at least with a bad decision you learn, with indecision, it's like, like, I've found that to be far more detrimental to my businesses whenever I couldn't make a decision. because at least like, okay, well, let's try this marketing campaign. Didn't work.

Okay, well, put that to the side. We're going to try something else, right? But if you just kind of stay stuck in limbo and never go, then you never, one, nothing's going to happen, right? Nothing's going to happen. And you're not learning anything. So you're actually in the worst of both worlds. And I think one of the things that has been a game changer for me

is just embracing the idea of, like gather information fine but like there's a certain point where the information gathering just becomes an excuse to not do the thing 100%. Like I mean you can always like God I don't know if this rings true

but like God I remember one time in my company we were like agonizing over an image we were going to use and after like an hour of this. I'm like, what are we, what, what are we doing? What we just spend an hour on this? Like, for what? Five more people might like it versus the other one. We're doing that one. You know what I mean? I'm like, meeting over because I'm like, I'm realizing like, oh my God, the amount of time we're spending agonizing over every detail of this is costing us so much time

and money right now, you know? That's one of the things I've learned through entrepreneurship is just leading and managing people is, I'm sure all businesses go through this. If you allow your team to focus on the pebbles, they will focus on the pebbles instead of focusing on the rocks. So you have all these different people, all these teams picking up pebbles and you take a step back and it feels like everyone's moving the needle because everyone's picking up these small pebbles. But when you get some sort of perspective on big picture situation, nothing's moving forward.

So it's like, okay, we're working on all these things that actually aren't doing anything. Let's put the pebbles down. Let's go pick up some rocks. We're going to pick up far fewer rocks when we are pebbles, but we're going to carry some much larger weight forward. My godfather, I referred to him as my uncle. He used to be vice president of Meade Johnson. And he said, I remember one time he was talking about he was in a business. business meeting where the marketing department wanted to spend X amount of dollars on something.

And they were talking about all these metrics that was going to improve, right? Like we're going to get with this demographic and it's going to do this. And he goes, and at the bottom line, he was like, what do we project this is going to do for us income wise? And it was projected to lose the company like $10 million. And he goes, yeah, I don't think this dog's going to hunt. You know, like you can always, when you get into the pebbles, especially with marketing, I'm sure you know this.

Like, oh yeah. It's like marketers, no disrespect to any marketers out there, but they love to talk about every other metric other than bottom line, right? Because it's like, if we can talk about all these other metrics, then it doesn't matter if the bottom line doesn't move.

And it's like, we're talking about our app. Did we increase our subscriber number? No? Okay. Moving on. You know what I mean? We're talking about sales.

Did it increase our bottom line? No. Okay. Moving on. But like a great example is we did a, um, we hired a, uh,

marketing company. to help us with promotion for our coaching team, for team biolene. And we did see increased revenue, but it didn't cover, basically we're spending more on the ads than we were getting back, right? But one of the things that we saw, this is where like when you do stuff, you learn stuff, one of the things that we saw was that it looked like the marketing team wanted to hire a closer to just do calls with people who were thinking about getting coaching. And that seemed to work pretty well.

And we go, why don't we just hire her? We just hire the closer. And we did that and it improved things. But if we'd never like done the thing to learn that it didn't work, but then learn something from it, we never would have gotten that outcome. That's because everyone wants to, everyone wants to optimize but create this massive system and process to optimize.

And when you finally realize, well, to get from, you know, step one to step 10, I can actually eliminate step two through nine. So funny you're talking about this. I can just streamline from one to ten. So funny you're talking about this because we just had a call yesterday with our app. And actually my best friend is the president of our app now. A very, very smart guy, very successful in business.

And he was, we were talking about some system that we could put in for something else. And basically the end of it was, he goes, this is just going to create a lot of extra. work for not that much return. And it doesn't make sense to complicate things more. Because then we got to hire people who can manage that system. And then it becomes its own beast, right? Like the government, right? Like, one of the things I always tell people,

like, when did the government create a department for something that it later dissolved? Right. Never. Right. And, I mean, businesses can become the same way. I think the biggest thing, the hard. thing for businesses as they scale and get bigger is how do you not become completely bogged down with utter bureaucracy, right?

Where you are so slow to pivot because you can't because you have so many systems in place, but you also need those systems as guardrails to keep people, like it's the great balancing act with that. But yeah, in our company, I think one of the things I really figured out in the last couple of years was stop agonizing over every single decision. You don't need more information. What you need to do is make a decision, make the best decision you can make,

like a hypothesis in science, observe, and then change. Right? Like I talked about like, this will sound bad, but I've been single for a while now. And I was really bad at talking to girls when I was younger,

like really bad. I was very low confidence, whatever. And now I'm like, I've just applied the scientific method of, oh, you see what works, you do more of that, and you see what doesn't work, and you do less of that. Business is the same. Lifting is the same. All these things are the same. But I never would have gotten good if I hadn't gotten over my fear of going up and talking to a girl.

You need repetition. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I never would have gotten to where I am in lifting if I just hadn't been like, well, I don't know what the right program is, but I'm just going to start, you know. I never would have gotten to where I am nutritionally if I hadn't been like, well, I don't know what the right macro breakdown is,

but I'm just going to start doing stuff. You know, like, if you stop agonizing over that stuff, what you realize and what you'll come to realize is when you, if you actually observe people who are world class at something, don't listen to what they say. Go observe. They're world class because they do some very simple things,

repeatedly every single day. Absolutely. Kobe Bryant his work ethic was legendary. He never really talked about some special system he did and someone. No, he's like, I was at the gym when everybody else was sleeping. I saw one guy who showed up

when I was like finishing up or I know some guy was describing and I might butcher it, but he was like, I wanted to like get there early to show that I was like a leader and show Kobe like, hey, I'm going to, I get there and he's already in a full sweat. You know, like, he did those things repeatedly every single day. You know, and so many people spend so much time worrying about all this little stuff. And it's what's the quote, don't fear the man with a thousand swords who swings each one

once. Fear them, I know, I apologize. Don't fear the man who's practiced a thousand kicks one time. Fear the man who's practiced one kick a thousand times. And if some of you could just get that in your system and just fucking go, it would make all the difference in your life. Blaine, I appreciate you, man. I'm rooting for you this weekend. Thanks, man. I'm excited.

I hope you kick some massive ass. I plan to kick massive. I plan to take ass and kick names. No, I'm excited. It's always fun to get, be able to like turn that like turn that whole thing loose. And I'm very excited and it would be, you know,

that would be my fifth national title in one form of another. So that would be cool. Well, it's fun to watch you train and compete because you can see it like the intensity behind every action and intention you have. It's like you are there and everything else is just, it's not, it's, it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist.

Like you are here for one thing, one mission. You can see it in your eyes. You can see the way you approach the platform. It's pretty epic. So I'm excited to see it. Thanks, man. I've been lucky enough to have some pretty epic moments in my life. And it's funny, you talk about blocking everything else out.

Like I had a, somebody asked me one time, they're like, so I was like, really yell for you. Could you hear me? I'm like, I'm going to be honest with you. I don't hear anything. And when I grab that bar, everything goes white. Like, it's, I, like, it is so, I'm so internally focused. And what's funny is people will be like, man, like, are you listening to like, are you like really angry and stuff?

I'm like, I'm not angry at all. Like, I'm not, I'm not angry at all, at all, not even a little bit. In fact, I don't lift well when I'm angry. I am fucking excited. I love that. Like, um, and I, I just want to leave with one quote because I, I, I think this, changed the game for me. I played baseball in high school, all through high school, and I was okay. But I always get so nervous before a game. Like, you know, the butterflies and like you feel like

you're going to get sick. And I would try to like suppress that. I'd be like, I would try to call myself down and it made it worse, made it worse. And I go up to bat and by the time I got out to I had like jelly legs and I'd be like, don't strike out, don't strike out, don't strike out. And the thing that clicked it for me, very few things in my life have ever been like a switch flipped. But this one was a switch flipped. I was watching the ultimate fighter, like season five, I want to say, when it was Matt Hughes versus Matt Sarah. And before one of the fights, one of the fighters is like getting sick over a bucket, like throwing up because he's so nervous, right? And he's over the bucket. And he's like, I may butcher the quote a little bit,

but the paraphrase will be correct. And he's like, I can't do this anymore, man. I hate this. I hate the way this feels. And Matt Sarah looks right at him and goes, what are you talking about, man? That's the feeling of being alive. He goes, you care about something so much that it's causing you to have this physical reaction. Most people never get that. And I was like, oh, shit, that is exactly what it is. Yeah, I love that. And physiologically, there is zero difference between excitement and anxiousness and anxiety. The only difference, is your perception. So now when I start getting those uncomfortable feelings in my body,

I'm actually like, hell yeah, it's go time, baby. This is my body getting me ready to do the damn thing. You know what I mean? It's like turning on. It's firing. Yeah. And I'm just like embracing that whole thing, right? And I love it.

I love the feeling of being able to just cut it all loose and see what I got. And to me, there's something about, you know, powerlifting is a lot like golf, right? Like I can shoot a really good round and somebody might just be better than me that day. But when it's you versus a barbell, ah, it's like, I just, I remember one of my favorite lifts of all time was actually a meat I didn't even win. It was at Caymans, North Americans last year. So Mike and I, Mike Grasso, he got second at Nationals. I beat him on the last deadlift at Nationals. Eight weeks later, I added, I want to say 21 pounds to my total in eight weeks, which is crazy.

And he just had a better day. He caught lightning in a bottle and crushed it. Like he went nine for nine two. But we came down the last deadlift. We're both tied. And this is actually the only time that's ever really mattered. So you have what's called lot number in powerlifting, which is where the order you weigh in at. So a lot of times people want to lower a lot number because they want to weigh in earlier so they can start rehydrating.

But the advantage you get with having the higher lot number and weighing in later is in this one specific case, if two lifters take the same put in the same attempt, the higher lot number goes second. Now, why does that matter? Well, on your last deadlift, it's the only lift that you can change. You can change it twice. So you can put an attempt and then change it to something else. else. So I had the lower lot number. And so we're both tied. So I know and Ben, my coach knows, whatever number we put in, he's going to put in the exact same number. If I miss it, he can just back it all the way down to whatever he needs to beat me by two and a half kilos.

If I hit it, he can chip it by a half kilo because we were both going for the North American deadlift record. So we had to put a lift that we felt was going to push him, but something I could get. And Ben, he's been my game day coach for over 10 years now. He put in 706, which was the heaviest deadlift I'd hit in the last five years. And he told me later, he's like, dude, I was very unsure if you were going to get that or not. And I just like, I've got the video. It's my favorite, like, lift video because I'm like so excited my first over 700 pound deadlift I'm going to get a crack at in the last five years and the time before I'd hit it I was actually at a heavy butterweight class as well and went out and nailed it and I mean at that point like yeah I wanted to win but

I didn't even care if I won because it was like I after all the injuries and everything I'd been through to come back and hit that kind of lift was so awesome I believe it and And yeah, it was just, and then Mike went out, put 707 on the bar, and he pulled it and he got the win, you know? And people are like, oh, you really disappointed? I'm like, how can I be disappointed? I hit every single lift. That's one more thing I want to touch on. So I've been lucky enough to hang around some really successful people, really successful people, world-class people.

And one of the things that I found interesting that I took away is if you're not careful, The goalpost never stops moving. Like, you go, if I just had this thing, I'd be satisfied. If I just got this, I'd be satisfied. If you have that mentality, you will never be satisfied. Now, people will say, well, I don't want to get satisfied because I want to keep pushing forward. There's a balance there. Strength and weakness.

Yeah, there's a balance there. I think I've struck a good balance of, I think you've got to give yourself credit. It's okay to want to strive for more. But if you don't give yourself that credit, man, it's going to grind you into pulp and you're just going to be unhappy, you know? Because I've, I've met people who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars who were like, yeah, it never feels, I never felt like I thought I would feel, you know? And it's that balance between ambition and contentment. Yeah. So many people struggle with. Yeah. And like, it's like people feel like, oh, if I'm happy,

I'm going to lose my edge. It's like, no, you can like, like I said, I live better when I'm happy, you know, because I'm fired up. Like, I'm fired up to go do some. epic shit, you know. But like when I set that world squat record back in 2015, I remember I was out of my boat on vacation like two weeks later. So before, all right, one more story. I promise and then I'll be done. So I'd have been having back issues even before that meet.

And 12 weeks out from that meet, I get an email from Matt Gary who's forgotten more about powerlifting than anybody else knows. He's the most intelligent, most accomplished game day coach in the history of powerlifting. And he's the head of the U.S. coaching committee. And he sends me a list of everybody that's in my weight class for worlds, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, what their tendencies are, breaks it all down at the end. He goes, you have the chance to get on the podium. You have a chance to be top three in the world. But you have to be perfect. If you miss a lift,

you're going to be out. And I had never gone nine for nine to meet before that. And so, and at the end of the email, he said, train like you'll life depends on. I was like, oh, don't tell me that. Don't tell me that. And I did. I mean, the training I did before World was insane, like insane. Squatting four days a week, like over 25 heavy sets a week. Like, it was crazy. And I went out, set that World Squat record, 668 pounds. I went nine for nine. I was projected to finish seventh and I finished second. And after it was all said and done, I come back downstairs from drug testing. Ben is still sitting on the same five-gallon bucket where I left him. And he's like, crying. I'm like, dude, we did it. He goes, how the fuck

did you just do that? He goes, you were the kid with skinny legs on bodybuilding.com forms that everybody made fun of. And you just set a world record in the biggest powerlifting meat in history. I think I actually have heard you talk about this. Yeah, yeah. Now, there's been bigger meat since then, but at that time, that was accurate. And then two of us. weeks later, I'm out in my boat in the Florida Keys, fishing by myself. I'm on vacation. I put my, like, it kind of like washed over me and I put my rod down. And I went, damn, lame good fucking job. Like, damn, you did the best job you possibly could have done. Like, the guy who won, if he hit his opening deadlift, he was going to win. Like, there was no,

he was far away at that point better than anybody else. Second place in the world was the best I could have possibly done. Nine for nine was the best I possibly could have done. And I did it. And I sat there for 15 minutes and I just let myself revel in it. You got to be proud of that. And I was like, hell yeah. And then when I was done, I was like, okay, now we can think about what are we going to do next.

You know? And I remember reading, there was a guy in the bodybuilding.com forums. I don't want to say him by name. But this guy had a terrible physique for bodybuilding, like just horrible aesthetic. but he would get he was he got he built so much muscle and got so lean that he would he did well like he had no business turning pro like this guy had no business turning pro he turned pro and then he finished top three at wmbf worlds and everybody on the forums was congratulating him because it's like dude top three for this guy like you would never think he could finish top three and he just got so

freaking lean that he did it and his response was was, hey, thanks guys, but anything less than an overall victory is an absolute failure for me. I was like, damn, this dude sounds miserable. I'm like, if that's your marker for success, I'm like, hey, you can still push forward without like, just like denigrating everything you just did because, dude, you did a good fucking job, you know? And I wish as much as I want to push people who are not doing the thing to do the thing, people who are doing the thing, when you do the thing, give yourself the credit. You got to celebrate it.

Absolutely. You got to recognize that you got to celebrate it or you'll be on that road of just chasing nothings for a long time. Go post is never going to stop moving. Yeah. Elaine, I appreciate you, man. Honestly, you were a foundational inspiration for me to get in this industry in the first place years and years ago.

And it's awesome to see that you, one, have stayed so true to what you've been sharing and practicing for years, but also you're getting the recognition that you truly do deserve. Thanks, man. After doing it for so long. I appreciate that. I always love to see

to hear these stories of people who did follow me or who use my stuff who go on and become really successful. Like, I do think I've got a pretty good tree of those people. And I'm super happy for them and it's awesome to see like what you've built. It's incredible.

Thanks, man. Awesome. Thanks for having me on. Well, good luck this weekend. Kick ass. We'll see you soon.