The Pomp Podcast - #1111 Alex Feinberg Debunks The Fitness Lies

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Alex Feinberg is an entrepreneur and a metabolic hacker. In this conversation, we talk about your metabolic health, the financial incentives of the fitness and food industry, why you're probably eating the wrong food, the wrong ingredients, and how that's making you fat and unhealthy. Alex and I had a great conversation. I learned a ton, and I now have a brand new routine on what to do in the gym when I'm eating food and also before I go to sleep and when I wake up in the morning. I hope you guys enjoy this one. After you listen to the episode, get on Twitter

Starting point is 00:00:38 and let us know what you liked, what you didn't like, what you agree with and what you disagree with. We enjoy the feedback. All right, let's get into the episode with Alex. I hope that you enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Alex here with me. I thought a great place to start would be you post all kinds of ridiculous photos on

Starting point is 00:01:16 the internet of food that you're eating. I'm like, this dude's eating pizza, fried chicken, burgers, tacos, like everything that everyone wants to eat, but you're in great shape. And so as I've paid attention, I'm like, wait a minute, he knows something that the rest of us don't know. Now you're here. What is going on? Why are you eating all this stuff but still able to stay in shape? Well, I think the first thing that people should know is I never expected to be 4% body fat. I never approached eating or training in a way where I thought I have to have abs.

Starting point is 00:01:44 First and foremost, I decided in my early 20s that I was going to eat delicious food every meal of every day no matter what. I think that that's my right as a reasonably successful individual to eat delicious food every meal of the day. What I found when I was working at Google in my late 20s is that there are a lot easier ways to achieve fitness results than what mainstream fitness tells you. Namely, how you approach training and how you approach eating allows you to eat in a way that doesn't require you to count calories, doesn't require you to avoid these forbidden foods, doesn't require you to live in the gym, and just so happens to result in muscle gain and fat loss, which is what everybody's going for. What I realized was that everybody has it wrong from a first principle

Starting point is 00:02:34 standpoint. Most people in the fitness industry think that calories in, calories out is their god. As long as you're burning more calories than you're consuming, you will lose fat. And I found through experience and through working with many individuals, that the human metabolism is a little bit more complicated than that. Our endocrine system is more complicated than that. And over years, I've found that as long as I'm eating protein-dominant real food with real clean ingredients, I don't have to count calories. I don't have to go hungry. I can eat literally pizza 10 times per month, as many times as I want, burgers, tacos, fried chicken, as long as I'm eating when I'm hungry. I'm not eating around mealtimes. I'm eating when my body tells me,

Starting point is 00:03:19 hey, Alex, I need food, put it in me. So what does this look like in a given day? Like what's an average day of what you eat and when you eat? Is there like a schedule to it or not really? There is no fixed schedule to it, but my body will tell me to eat at pretty predictable times, right? So I'll wake up. I'm typically not that hungry early in the morning because I eat late at night. I do what you're not supposed to do, which is eat before bedtime because that's my body tells me I'm hungry. So commonly, I won't have breakfast until maybe 11. I'll have maybe three eggs, three pieces of bacon, some, you know, organic bread. And then lunch, a couple hours later, on average, could be four hours, could be two hours, depending on how my resting metabolic

Starting point is 00:04:00 rate is that day. I'll probably eat tacos, you know, 10 ounce ribeye from Trader Joe's, steak tacos, you know, that's going to have another 60, 70 grams of protein in it. And then very commonly for dinner, you know, I'll eat another pizza. And the difference between my pizza and the pizzas that you get from like a Domino's or a Pizza Hut is my pizzas have about as much protein as they have carbs. Whereas if you get your pizzas or you get this quote unquote junk food from traditional fast food restaurants, the margins are in the carbs, right? The margins are not in the meat. And so if you just rely on third parties to create your menu for you, you're going to end up having a carb dominant diet. You're going to end up overeating because

Starting point is 00:04:42 carbs tend to make you hungrier. Um, and your, you know, your natural appetite is going to become dysregulated to where you think you need to count calories in order to eat the right amount. Um, I discovered how to do that. I, I actually leaned on the intuition skills that I built as a professional baseball player to say, I need to trust my body, right? I'm sure you went through this too, playing sports. You have to trust yourself. If you can't trust yourself, you can't succeed. And so I approach fitness and dieting and training in a way where I prioritize listening to the signals that my body tells me, because I started out with the hypothesis that they're right. When you think of a pizza, I'll start and go backwards. The pizza has just as much protein

Starting point is 00:05:23 as it does carbs. What does that look like? Like when do you make the pizza? Do you buy it from somewhere? And how do you think about making sure it has enough protein? Yeah, I make it a lot of times I'll use other people's frozen bases just because you can get those very easily. There's a brand I really like named after me, but not after me. Alex's awesome sourdough. Trader Joe's has good pizza bases too. Main thing that I try to do is I try to put as much meat on as possible. So you're never going to be able to buy a pizza that's already constructed with 80 to 100 grams of protein, but you can buy chicken breast, you can buy sausage, you can buy pepperoni. And you know, if you put to eight to 16 ounces on there, um, it's going to taste good and it's going to

Starting point is 00:06:05 have a lot of protein. So you're probably going to end up eating less of it than if you just got, you know, delivery from Papa John's or just watching football. So the pizza dough that you're buying, is there anything special about it or it does it not have things or have certain things you're looking for? Like why that specific brand? I like organic pizza. Um, you know, a lot of, uh, American carbs are made with glyphosate and we know glyphosate, uh, produced by our friends at Monsanto is a carcinogen. And so a lot of people, when they, when they come to the U S they end up having gut issues. And I think a lot of it has to do with the pesticides that, uh, we spray on our crops. And so I try very hard to avoid, uh, carbs with glyphosate or really any

Starting point is 00:06:45 food with glyphosate. So I get organic, uh, bread as much as I can. What does that mean? Organic bread. Like I think people know organic, but they don't think of bread being organic or not organic. So like, it just means that it doesn't have this glyphosate in it of, of among other things. Yeah. So, you know, if you're, if you're producing bread, you got to grow wheat. And, um, you know, if you're producing, uh, you know, you can grow Roundup ready wheat, which means you can grow the wheat and spray Roundup on it. And Roundup has as a, as one of Monsanto's leading products, it has glyphosate. They recently had a lawsuit about the actual effects of glyphosate. But let's just say we don't want to expose our bodies to excessive glyphosate. And this is why when people

Starting point is 00:07:28 go to Europe, one of the most fascinating things to me in all of the world at the moment is how many people over the summer that I know went to Europe. They ate like shit. They ate pizza and breads and croissants and all kinds of craziness. They didn't really walk more than normal or or anything like that. And they came back and like, I lost weight. Like I ate all these carbs and I lost weight. What's going on? And it goes back to, it's not the same type of carbs that maybe we're consuming here in America. Yeah. A lot of the pesticides that we use in the United States are illegal to use in other countries, not just the pesticides. You know, some of the products that we feed our pigs are, you know, legal in the United States and they help the

Starting point is 00:08:07 pigs grow to a marketable weight. They're not legal in like 150 other countries. And so if you understand some of the economics around both food production and also fitness, you start to understand why so many people have had kind of miraculous success doing things that aren't supposed to work and have had no success doing things that are supposed to work. As you go to the grocery store, so you buy the pizza, you get a bunch of just regular meat and you're basically putting it on there. The meat is bouncing out the carbs, but also it's cleaner carbs. And you're going to eat less because of the density of the meat that you're putting on the protein. Uh, when you think of tacos, the same principle, just like loaded up with as much

Starting point is 00:08:45 protein as possible. And the carbs, uh, while minimal, uh, are just outweighed by the protein you're eating. Yeah. So if I'm, if I'm going to make three tacos, you know, that's going to have about 50 grams of carbs. I'm going to use seed oil, free tortillas that I get from HEB in Texas. Um, and I'm going to put about 10 ounces of Trader Joe's organic ribeye on there, which is going to have another 60 or so grams of protein. And so, you know, I'm not a big macro tracker guy, but I'm aware of what the, what I'm eating. And so I put a little cheese on there. Uh, there's a little bit of protein in the, in the tortillas. So we're talking maybe 70, 75 grams of protein balanced out with 60 or so grams of carbs. A lot of times people will try

Starting point is 00:09:25 to eat this way and they think they're eating more, but they're actually eating less because protein tends to be one of the most satiating macronutrients that you can eat. So you don't feel like, oh, I can only eat two tacos. It's like, I just eat as many as I want. And if I want to eat two, I eat two. If I want to eat three, I eat three. If I want to make it fourth, I make four. But I just listen to what my body's telling me. I don't eat at one o'clock because it's lunchtime. I eat lunch when I'm hungry for lunch. And so when you end up aligning your food consumption with when your body tells you to eat, if you don't have underlying metabolic issues that are really distorting your hunger signals

Starting point is 00:10:02 and you're living life in accordance with a way that will help you produce viable hunger signals, most people tend to consume less food when they do that. Well, I read somewhere that I think you only want to eat maybe 1,200 calories if you're opting for longevity. Like the amount of calories that you should consume is so much less than the average American diet. And now that's a longevity-specific type of eating.

Starting point is 00:10:29 if you just want to be healthy, it's maybe not 1200, but it's also not, you know, whatever, 3000 calories, whatever people are eating on the average American diet. Not necessarily. So the average American is eating probably, I don't even know how they know this because they're not, what are they asking people? How many calories you eat a day? How many burgers are you eating a day? But the data that I've read suggests that the average American eats like 3,500 calories a day, which is insane. But like, if you're just drinking a bunch of soda and eating chips all the time, I guess you could get up to 3,500. Um, I've actually had success with having people eat more. I think a lot of times what happens in the diet and

Starting point is 00:11:05 fitness industry is people kind of neglect their health. They neglect what they look like. They sort of kind of lie to themselves that everything's okay until one day they look in the mirror and they say, oh shit, I got to change something and I got to change something fast. And because they've been neglecting it for the last two or three years, they don't know where to start. So they go Google something or they go on YouTube, maybe they try a fad diet. Um, typically a lot of these, uh, fad diets or fad programs say they do like a whole 30 or a 75 hard program or something where they're just, you know, training their body to not eat food, right? All of these, all of these do, well, they're, they're not eating enough, right? Like what's a whole 30 diet. You're not eating,

Starting point is 00:11:48 uh, you're not eating sugar. I don't believe you're eating carbs. You're just not eating things or not eating a lot of carbs, you're not eating things that your body craves, right? So you're starting in a deprived state, state of deprivation. You end up, you know, massively under-consuming food and possibly over-exercising. Your body doesn't like that. And if you do it for long enough, your resting metabolic rate will lower to acclimate to a lower food-consuming environment. And so what ends up happening if you under consume food too much for too long is your metabolism slows down. Right. And so, you know, sometimes I've worked with people who've been on, you know, salad diets and it's just like, do you rabbit? Yeah. Like rabbits. Like sometimes if I

Starting point is 00:12:34 work with a rabbit and I'm like, no, you should like eat a little bit more like a lion, they end up losing weight. Right. And that's not supposed to happen. So explain, explain why that happens. My belief, and a lot of this is a work in progress. You know, I figured out this fitness system years before I understood some of the science that substantiated why it worked. I knew this work back in 2017. I didn't start to know why this was working until 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. Um, but what I think is going on is the endocrine system is massively underrated as, as far as a driver for fat loss and for, uh, for, for, you know, muscle gain. And so what I think is happening

Starting point is 00:13:17 is if you approach life in a way that teaches your endocrine system, um, that, you know, we're in a very fixed environment. There's not that much food out here. Um, your resting metabolic rate slows down. And what a lot of people don't realize when they're trying to lose fat is even if you're working out intensely, 80% of the calories that you're burning are going to be burned outside of the gym. Right. And so a lot of times people will say, well, I got to go do all this cardio. I got to, you know, go lift all this, this and that. Well, they're not thinking about how is this affecting the 80% of the calories that I'm burning outside of the gym. And the same thing is true with how they eat. You can actively withdraw calories from your diet, but that

Starting point is 00:14:00 doesn't mean that there's going to be no impact on the amount of calories that you burn at rest. The most important two things for long-term, let's say, fat management or weight management is figuring out how to burn a lot of calories at rest in a training side and then on the diet side, right? So when you're talking about this, you're like, okay, if you go to the gym and you work out for 30, 45 minutes, maybe you're really dedicated and you go for an hour, hour and 15 minutes, you can burn however many calories, right?

Starting point is 00:14:35 If I go and I work out for an hour, maybe I burn 300, 400 calories, whatever the Apple Watch says, depending on what I'm doing. Maybe I can really stretch it and do 500 or 600 calories. But you're like, yeah, but the rest of the day, what's going on inside your body? And if you can jack up your metabolism, you can jack up kind of the calorie burn that's happening when you're not technically working out, that's going to have way more impact than what you're doing for the hour long that you're at a gym. 100%.

Starting point is 00:14:58 Okay. So how do you do it? So tell me all the secrets. So let me tell you what not to do first. The way you burn the most amount of calories during a workout is just doing cardio, right? Or turning weightlifting into a cardio event. If you're always moving, you're always going to be burning calories. So if I just went on the treadmill and ran, say I ran eight miles in an hour, right, which would be a 730 pace, I'm probably gonna end up burning like 1200 calories, 1100 calories doing doing that 60 minute run. But when I get out of the gym, I'm not going to really be burning any more calories. You know, this is this is sort of like having a high income and spending it every month.

Starting point is 00:15:32 why is it because you just ran right you're you're working out why is your body not going to continue to burn calories afterwards if you're the workout is running endurance doesn't translate into a higher metabolic burn as much as intensity does okay and so if rather than running continuously for 60 minutes you maybe you did interval sprints so maybe maybe you ran one mile worth of interval sprints, uh, on off. And that took 10 or 15 minutes. And then for the other 45 minutes, maybe you did, uh, some warmup sets, obviously, and then you'd four sets of squats. Um, literally if that's all you did, you'd have better results than if you just ran 60 minutes in a row for, for, for most, um, trained men at the very least. Why is it better? Is it

Starting point is 00:16:23 literally just the intensity? Do you have to squat heavyweight, lightweight? Like how does, how does that work? So you need to prioritize speed and force in your workouts. And so if you're prioritizing speed and force inherently, you need to rest longer in between sets. So if you approach, say you're doing squats and you're going to do four sets of squats, a lot of people will do 60 second rest, 120 second rest, similar rest periods to what they might do in like a Barry's bootcamp class. Unfortunately, if you're doing 60 second rest on squats, you're not squatting very heavy. You're not giving your body the message to say, hey, I need to build muscle to be able to accomplish this workout. And so guess what? Muscle's metabolically expensive.

Starting point is 00:17:08 Your body's not going to build it unless you're giving it the signal that, hey, dude, you got to put muscle on me. The easiest way to give it that signal that, hey, dude, you need to like add muscle is by lifting progressively heavier weights. But you can't lift progressively heavier weights, if you're constantly on short rest periods, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, or maybe you're squatting three times a week, as some people will do when they're starting out on their fitness journey. In order to give your body the proper signals to build muscle, you need to rest a lot, which is why the, you know, if you take a sustainable approach to training, you don't need to kill yourself in the gym. In fact, killing yourself in the gym will set you back in as much

Starting point is 00:17:47 as, as you want to lose fat. So you need to rest, need to rest both between workouts. You need to rest between sets. You don't need to do a ton of stuff in the gym, but what you need to do needs to be done well. And you need to feel your body in such a way that you can perform at a high level when you're training. When you go to the gym, how many times a week do you go? And for how long? Um, I'm going every other day. Um, I go for a couple hours when I go because I'm old now. I'm 36. I, uh, it takes a while for me to warm up, you know, my twenties, I could just go bang out and it's like, everything's good. And now it's not, uh, I got to do mobility work. Um, and I, you know, I don't have an office to go to, uh, at nine or 10 AM. So I can just kind of take my time.

Starting point is 00:18:29 Um, but in those two hours, you know, I might be doing 12 minutes worth of cardio, right? 60 seconds on 30 seconds off times eight measured. Um, and then I might do 20 working sets of lifting, right where i'll take i'll do warm-ups but you know if i'm doing a working set of squats you know i'm doing four minutes in between sets so it might take me 10 minutes to warm up for squats and then it might take me 16 minutes to do four sets of squats and so it's taking me 26 minutes essentially to perform four sets and if you compare that to how most people train most people might be doing 18 sets in those 26 minutes i'm doing four but i'm doing four in such a way that my body's given the signal that it needs to hold muscle, which gives me, you know, muscle is effectively

Starting point is 00:19:13 the passive income earner of the metabolic system, right? If you're talking to a financial planner, they want to say, okay, we want to get your passive income high because, you know, it's a lot easier to build wealth when your passive income is high. Well, it's a lot easier to burn calories when your lean muscle mass is high. It's the same analogy applied to a different area. And when you are doing the four sets, are you just lifting the heaviest weight possible? Are you progressively increasing, decreasing during the sets? Like, how do you think about what weight you're putting on when squatting in that scenario? So I want to be able to complete all the reps that I've assigned for myself.

Starting point is 00:19:47 So if I'm doing four sets of five, if I do as heavy weight as possible in the first set, I can't lift, you know, as heavy on the second set. So I'm going to be picking probably somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of my one rep max. And so that's going to be very hard. It's going to be very hard. If it's to failure, it's likely going to be the last rep of the last set. I'm not trying to take myself to failure multiple times per month, but maybe once or twice per month per lift I can go to failure. But most days, I just want this to be hard.

Starting point is 00:20:20 I want it to be as hard as it can possibly be while not detracting from my desire to show up in the gym tomorrow. And when you are doing this, so you go, you run for, you know, let's call it 15 minutes or so. you do the warmups, you do the squats. Is that the only exercise that you'll do or will you then supplement it with other things? No, I'll do accessory work. So, you know, I'll, as I get older and as I get stronger, I can't do the same training that, um, is programmed for most people. And so, you know, if you end up going to a power lifting gym or a bodybuilding gym, the great

Starting point is 00:20:51 thing about these gyms is they have cool equipment that allows you to train your muscles very similarly to traditional barbell movements, but doesn't put the same stress on your lower back or on your knees or on your hips or on various joints that will ultimately be the weak link to you, you know, continuing to develop as you get older and stronger. And so after I get done with my heavy squats, I'll do accessory quad movements. So, you know, maybe body weight, Bulgarian split squats, which is like a single leg squat variant. But I'm not adding weight to it. I could add weight to it. But the purpose of doing body weight Bulgarian split squats is more just to get range of motion, blood flow, tendon ligament strengthening. It's not to try to push myself

Starting point is 00:21:33 to failure. Um, after doing that, I'll do a variant of a Romanian deadlift. I want to train my posterior chain. So glutes, hamstrings, lower back, except I'm going to be doing that on a machine called a reverse hyper, which is something that a guy named Louie Simmons, um, who, uh, founded and ran Westside barbell for many years and trained many successful athletes, uh, including Larry bird. Um, when Larry bird has back injury, he got him on the reverse hyper, which is essentially very similarly structured to a Romanian deadlift in that you are targeting your glutes, your hamstrings, your lower back, but you're not putting that stress on your lower spine. Um, your, your upper body's fixed, your legs are swinging as a pendulum. So you can get

Starting point is 00:22:13 a very similar workout without compressing your spine, which is something that you got to be careful about as you get stronger and older. Um, after doing that, I'll go and do some more accessory work, focusing on hamstring isolation, adductor, abductor movement. So like the yes, no machine. And that's it. You know, it takes me a while to do it because I'm resting in between sets. And will you stack these? So you'll move from, you know, machine to machine, or will you go and you'll do all the abductor work and then you'll go do all the hyper work and then you'll go do another lift? Or will you actually try to combine the exercise in more of like a circuit type, uh, environment? Only the last few exercises will I superset or do more, more circuit-based

Starting point is 00:22:55 work. So the main lift, like I'm never going to superset, uh, around a compound movement. Like I see people at the gym doing deadlifts and like supersetting them with like pushups. I'm like, what are you doing? That's like, you're just trying to make it really hard and not get better. Cause that's exactly what you're going to do. Um, so I'm never going to be supersetting, uh, especially, uh, a lower body compound movement with any other movement. Um, and, and the reverse hypers, that's a hard movement too. I'm not going to be supersetting that for the most part, but like hamstring work, adductor, abductor work, which is like groins and hips for people who might not have the kinesiology background. I'll superset that, right? I'll go back and forth. And I know

Starting point is 00:23:34 you've talked about like the financial incentives. A lot of times people talk about on the food side, but the fitness side, you've got this like theory that there's financial incentives as to why the gyms and the fitness industry actually want to keep you unhealthy rather than make you healthier. What is that? Well, if you think about my business as an investable business, my business is a very bad investable business. It's a good business for me personally. It makes me decent money month after month. But when you're thinking about a business that you can invest in, you want customers who are coming back month after month, year after year, right? I tend to be able to solve people's fitness problems in like three to six months, sometimes sooner,

Starting point is 00:24:13 sometimes like 30 days. Where's my recurring revenue if I'm solving what could otherwise be a lifetime problem in 30 to 90 days? So if you think about most, uh, most mainstream gyms or whatever, or, or weight loss programs like, uh, you know, weight watchers or something like that. Um, the good part about them is they do work, right? If you go to Barry's bootcamp and you're out of shape, you will get in better shape likely for, for several weeks. Um, the downside of these programs is they don't feel sustainable for the user. And so what happens is the user does it for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 180 days, has success, burns out, stops doing it because they're burned out, blames themselves rather than the program. Oh, you know, if I just stuck to this

Starting point is 00:25:04 training program longer, it was working so well, but life got in the way. I'll go back and I'll do it next year. And guess what? Next year it's going to work too for the 90 days that you're doing it 120 days that you're doing it and then you fall off again. Oh man, I was such a bad boy. You know, I promise I'm going to get it together, together next year. Sign up again, go back to him again for four or five, six months. And so people think that their relationship with a training program or a diet, um, needs to require like an unsustainable amount of work. And so when that work isn't sustained, blame themselves, go back, pay the piper again the next year. Um, with, with my system, if you learn how to train and you learn how to eat, you don't really

Starting point is 00:25:48 need, um, any close coaching or you don't need to pay continual subscription fees, uh, month after month, year after year. And so, you know, I've, I've worked with people who are obese, pre-diabetic, had sugar cravings. And within two, three months, all that's not there anymore. And, you know, they'll pay me like 500 bucks for that. And it's like, wait, the, the mainstream medical industry, you know, would charge somebody like $300,000 to accomplish the same thing. And it would take 15 years and they'd consider it a success. Right. And so the, the more they can keep you as a, uh, actively paying customer. You know, how does a fitness company, how does a gym maximize the lifetime value, not a gym, but like a training system? How does it maximize the lifetime value

Starting point is 00:26:40 of each user? Well, it needs to keep them paying money month after month. How can it do that? Well, it doesn't teach them how to actually do it themselves. It keeps them dependent on the system, keeps them dependent on a system that kind of works, but doesn't work sustainably. What about like the gyms in terms of, you know, the joke is always like, hey, there's only two things that are really hard to quit it's comcast and the gym right like they just don't let you leave uh or also uh you'll see all sorts of uh things where they'll do you know a month free or whatever to get people in the door and they know hey they're never going to come but it's only 20 bucks yeah and so they'll keep the subscription because like i'm gonna start next

Starting point is 00:27:16 week type you know behavior what's going on there with the kind of financial incentives of the gyms themselves well they know that when people make fitness decisions they they tend to be in a place where they're not very happy about themselves. They're highly suggestible, right? A little bit emotional. And so if they put a piece of paper in front of you, say, sign this, like a lot of people are going to sign. But they also know come February, a lot of people have caught up in life again, right? Their New Year's resolutions are resolutions of yesterday. And so they get put on the back burner. And so if you understand, you know, gyms have resource management, just like a parking lot, just like an airline, right? And so the difference between a gym and an airline

Starting point is 00:27:58 is the gym's not going to be at max capacity every, you know, every minute of every day, it can't be. And so gyms just need to make sure that they have enough equipment for users at peak hours. And if they realize like, oh, actually, you know, only 10% of our members are going to be coming during peak hours, we can sell 1000 memberships, even though our gym is only, you know, 300 square feet. This is kind of an exaggeration, but like we don't need the commercial real estate space to accommodate for as many memberships as we're selling. We want to sell as many memberships as possible and ideally service as few as possible, but just enough to where they keep paying us money. This episode is brought to you by Arculus. Arculus is the next

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Starting point is 00:30:37 and trade without tax headaches open an alto crypto ira to invest in bitcoin and crypto tax-free go to alto ira.com slash pomp that's a l t o i r a dot com slash pomp start investing today and then what about like i'll call like the uh education slash entertainment slash fitness industry so i'm thinking pelotons the tonals those types of devices um maybe they're more entertainment than they are education. And then there's like this fitness component. Do those seem to work for people? Do people just buy those, uh, kind of like the treadmill of, you know, yesteryear and then it turns into a clothes rack in their house. Like what's going on there? Well, if it works, it works, right? I'm not going to ever tell somebody to stop doing something

Starting point is 00:31:21 that works. Um, the challenge with more Peloton than the tonal is, um, Peloton workouts can be hard. Like I'm, I'm not going to take away from, from the fact that they're challenging. Um, what I will argue with is, are they effectively challenging, right? Where one of the challenges with workouts and workout evaluations is most people will ascertain the efficacy of a workout by how hard it felt, how sore they got, and how much they sweat. And guess what? A Peloton can check all those boxes. So can a various bootcamp class, so can CrossFit. Unfortunately, those three metrics are not the metrics that ultimately are highly highly correlated with fat gain and or fat loss and muscle gain right and so what i've found with pelotons and other lower intensity longer

Starting point is 00:32:12 duration movements and i say lower intensity like you're not it's not the same intensity as sprinting 200 meters um a lot of guys find it challenging to get really defined abdominals doing those You can get in plenty good shape for, from a longevity standpoint, from a cardiac health standpoint, only doing Peloton work, but it's unlikely that you're going to want to rip your shirt off at a pool party, just, you know, going on the Peloton for even an hour a day. And is that because it's all cardio based and there's not a lot of actual weightlifting? Yes, there's, there's that. And then the fact that the cardio itself is only using your legs. And so the most effective cardio uses your full body, whether it's running or assault biking.

Starting point is 00:32:57 And so assault bikes have a few different trade names. They can go by the Rogue Assault Bike. Rogue Echo Bike is another alternative. Schwinn Airdyne is another alternative. But it's essentially the bike that where you use your hands at the same time as you're pedaling. That will allow you to attain a much higher heart rate than a legs-only bike. And what I've found is, you know, the harder I can push myself, the closer I can push myself to my VO2 max during training is very, very highly correlated with getting leaner.

Starting point is 00:33:26 And so rather than focusing on like, oh, I want to go on a calorie deficit, I'm going to go on a diet to lose fat. I just focus on how am I going to increase my cardiac output? How am I going to train cardio at as high of an intensity as possible for a short duration of time um and how do i make sure my metrics that i'm tracking are continually getting better so that i know i'm i'm improving in my conditioning and i can't really do that on a peloton or a legs only bike i fucking hate the assault bike i i've never told you this story before uh when i was in college i blew out my knee and uh if you were hurt you had to go uh on the sideline the entire

Starting point is 00:34:03 practice and they made you work out and the whole thing was like keep guys from basically bullshitting Like, right. It's going to be harder than practice. So let's, let's see how hurt you are. A hundred percent. Right. And so like, you're like watching and you're like, Oh, look at all those guys just standing there waiting to like, you know, uh, they're getting water and I'm over here working my ass off. And so for months, uh, I couldn't do anything with my legs. So pretty much 90%, 80% of the exercises they were having people on the sidelines who were injured do, I couldn't do. And so the punishment that I would do every single day was I'd get on the assault bike and would not pedal and i would just have to do with my arms only me and that assault bike we got

Starting point is 00:34:40 problems still to this day but that's that's the thing with training that's the thing with training is is oftentimes the thing you know if you look at like a frat bro right frat bros tend to you know have they drink so they have a little bit more fat on them than they want that want to but they also go to the gym regularly and so you drill down you're like okay you're training regularly your diet's not great but you're training regularly so like what what's going on there and almost certainly the frat bros are neglecting training their legs and they're not doing cardio right so if you go in the gym you just lift your upper body well your upper body as a man is only going to carry about uh 45 40 percent of your your total muscle mass and so by neglecting uh training

Starting point is 00:35:19 your lower body you're missing out on a majority of the metabolic benefit from lifting and if you're not doing cardio um what i found with cardio is and i didn't know this when i first got started on that path. But as I've gotten deeper into the fitness game, um, and, and delved further into my endocrine hypothesis for why, uh, why people lose fat is I really have found both with myself and other people that I've worked with and then studies that also exist that if you train your, your cardio at close to max capacity, and it doesn't need to be long, right? But it does need to be close to max capacity. What ends up happening for a lot of people is, uh, their hunger gets regulated better. So it's a lot easier to eat the right amount. Like people think that they get way

Starting point is 00:36:05 hungrier from doing cardio. That's typically from doing cardio at a lower or moderate intensity for a long period of time. If you do cardio at a lower moderate intensity for a long period of time, you'll almost certainly get hungrier. And this is people who like go on a 10 mile run at a 10 minute pace and they're like, Oh, I ran 10 miles today. And you're like, kind of, uh, yes, you did run the 10 miles, but your heart rate never went above, you know, one 20. You ran 10 miles, but you're going to eat it back or you're going to go hungry tonight. Right. So unless you're willing to perpetually be hungry and suffer the effects of that, because as we talked about earlier, that's going to disrupt your metabolism. Um, it's not sustainable. Whereas for a lot of people,

Starting point is 00:36:44 myself included, um, if you have an incredibly intense workout, sometimes you're less hungry, right? That's not supposed to happen based on the calories in calories out model. It assumes that hunger and training intensity scale linearly, and they don't at the tail end. If you can train at a high intensity, and again, it doesn't need to be for a long duration, but if you can train at a high intensity, what happens with a lot of people is their appetite becomes better regulated. I'm hungrier on off days frequently than I am on training days. Why is that? Well, I happen to believe, and there is some research out there possibly corroborating it, but we know research can change, is that the higher intensity you do cardio, you know, it does have an impact on your

Starting point is 00:37:29 lepitin levels, which have an impact on your hunger. So if you become less hungry from training a certain way, that's like a shortcut to dieting, you don't have to consciously not eat, you just have to listen to what your body's telling you. And if it's telling you to eat less, you're naturally going to be on a diet. So really, it's eat high protein, don't eat, you know, the horrible ingredients for you, lift weights and do high intensity cardio and you don't have to do it for that long. Is that like a fair kind of synopsis of it? And eat when you're hungry. Stop eating when you're full. Be careful about sugar consumption. Eat the amount of sugar that you crave, but not more. And that's for most people. If you have, you know, recurring sugar

Starting point is 00:38:11 cravings, you probably can't follow that model. But for most people who don't have recurring sugar cravings, it's, you know, if you're really craving a dessert, eat it, right? But eat the amount that you need to satisfy that craving and once that craving has been satisfied stop eating it you know be okay throwing away food right people feel like oh you know i paid for this i got to eat it it's like uh yeah but you're gonna go pay a trainer on friday to get you unfat so like yeah you paid 30 for the meal and you may be throwing away 15 worth of it but you're gonna go pay a trainer 100 bucks on friday so like what are we doing here we're working against ourselves um so yeah that's relatively true from a diet side you know the three bite rule no i have a

Starting point is 00:38:45 friend who will go unnamed. He's like, yeah, I eat dessert. Like, sure. He's like, anyone asked me, yeah, I'll have dessert. He has three bites though. He goes, cause the first bite makes you want to have a little bit more. The second bite, you're like, damn, this is good. And the third one's like, all right, I'm done. Yeah. And he's like, I just have three bites, no matter what it is. He didn't care if you gave him a whole pie or whatever, like he's going to eat three bites and then he won't eat anymore. And he's like, those three bites satisfy whatever I need. And I move on. Well, I approached sugar like a drug many years ago. You know, this was when I was working at Google where I was like, you know, uh, I started having a lot of success kind of switching

Starting point is 00:39:17 my training style to the way I do now, um, in about 2014. And that served as a catalyst to say, well, you know, what else can I experiment with in my diet? Oh, you know, I'm eating these M&Ms every afternoon. Do I need to, oh, what happens if I, you know, mix my M&Ms with almonds? What happens if I, you know, progressively overload the almonds relative to the M&Ms? So, you know, I'm starting with a one to one ratio and then it's a one to two ratio. Then it's one to five ratio. and I realized that like sugar is like a drug in the sense that you will love the amount you eat, whether that amount is, you know, a half pound a day or an ounce a day, like that's the amount that your body likes. And so it's just like, what if you want to be the happiest person possible,

Starting point is 00:40:02 what's the optimal amount of alcohol to consume? It's like, well, the people who consume 10 drinks a day, which is the top decile of Americans, they're probably not as happy as the people who were consuming like one drink a day, right? People who drink one drink a day on average, they might be happier than the people who drink zero drinks a day because they're like going out, they're being social occasionally. So I looked at sugar very similarly to any other drug where it's like, okay, consuming zero is not sustainable. I don't want to be a sugar teetotaler, but consuming more than a minimal amount gives no value to my life. So what do you eat? Like what, what sugar do you consume? Do you just like pig out on ice cream? Do you eat Snickers bars? Like what do you

Starting point is 00:40:39 eat? Um, it tends to be healthier ingredients. So like hue chocolate, I love hue chocolate. Um, that's the one that comes in like the brown paper bag looking thing. Yeah. Gucci chocolate prices, you know, you gotta be shelling out like eight bucks for these bars, but you know, if your chocolate's expensive, you can't eat that much of it. What, what is there? Like what, what's so good about that chocolate? Uh, there's only about seven or eight grams of sugar per ounce. Or if you compare that to a traditional candy bar, traditional candy bar will have like 15 to 20 grams per ounce. Um, so it's got a lot less sugar. Uh, it's got much cleaner ingredients. So, you know, it doesn't have like the, the soy lecithin as a, to act as an emulsifier.

Starting point is 00:41:16 Um, so it doesn't have like a lot of the ingredients that people will consume that may have adverse, uh, effects on their metabolism and their endocrine system. And, uh, but primarily it's the lower sugar. And then what about, uh, uh, a lot of the brands that make protein shakes or, uh, uh, C4 or NO Explode or like all those different brands, they now have come out with, uh, uh, peanut butter cups and like all these types of what appear to be desserts or candies, but they're, you know, less than one gram of sugar they claim and 15 grams of protein or whatever they're like, you know, pitches. Sure. Is that all bullshit or are these, uh, companies actually figuring this out? Uh, I haven't looked at the ingredient list cause I don't eat that

Starting point is 00:41:57 many supplements, but, um, I'll give you the pros and cons of the best case scenario. The best case scenarios are using clean ingredients. So they're using very similar ingredients to a huge chocolate and they're just mixing in a protein powder with it. Ideally a clean source, either, uh, uh, you know, an organic whey protein, they're probably not using an organic whey protein, collagen protein, collagen peptide protein. You can make delicious desserts, um, with, with those ingredients. I have some in my recipe book where it's like, I eat dessert. I just, you know, try to, uh, have a little bit of protein when I can, um, and not that much sugar. Um, the challenge that, that they have as well as the challenge with every artificial sweetener is I have found for me personally,

Starting point is 00:42:37 that artificial sweeteners actually make me crave sugar. And so you might not be eating sugar when you eat that artificially sweetened peanut butter cup, but if you're eating something that makes you crave sugar later, is it, you know, the, the impacts of that meal cannot be confined to that meal because it's going to dictate what you're going to be eating later that day. Um, most people don't report having their cravings substantially altered by consuming a stevia or a sweetener alternative, but I think they're wrong. I think they just don't understand the signals that their body's giving them. And I actually think that a much larger percentage of the population has their sugar cravings changed with the addition of artificial sweeteners. So I would not advocate

Starting point is 00:43:23 eating those uh you know ad nauseum what about fruit they say fruit got a lot of sugar you're not gonna eat too much fruit yeah well is that true uh if you're eating like whole fruit it's probably okay like uh if you go to the grocery store i do this right i don't know maybe tell me i'm an idiot i go to the grocery store and you know they got like the little uh plastic you know yeah i i touch the plastic uh but in it they got all the fruits cut up and it's like a fruit bowl yeah and i grab it and i eat like a whole one every day yeah is that good i think that's fine I mean, the challenge tastes good as shit. Yeah. Like, I mean, it's one thing if you're putting it into a blender and you're blending out like 64 ounces of smoothies, fruit smoothies in a day. I don't think you're doing that. If we're talking about like real food, you know, unless unless your consumption is just at the extreme tail end, which I don't think it is based on what you're saying, it's probably going to be OK. Yeah. Well, I think of it as, uh, there's probably is some sugar, you know, whatever,

Starting point is 00:44:19 like there's something in it that definitely, uh, I'm like, man, I could eat a chocolate bar or I could eat this. It feels like this healthier than the chocolate bar. Uh, and then also, um, a lot of times it like, that's a snack, right? So it's like, I feel like I am hungry, but I'm not hungry enough to eat an entire meal. And so this is something that like, kind of like holds me over almost. Yeah. To some degree. Um, and, uh, I usually eat it in the, uh, kind of middle afternoon also, because I don't want to drink coffee at like three 34 o'clock, but I'm like, Oh, I could use like a little bit more energy. And so I tend to eat, you know, like fruit or something like that, which I guess it just works for me. Well, if it works for you, it works for you. And I think

Starting point is 00:44:55 that's a great point that you brought up, you know, comparing it to a chocolate bar. It's like, Oh, this is healthier than a chocolate bar. A lot of the framework of my intuitive diet was actually influenced by, you know, my background in investing, um, being an economics major at vanderbilt and uh really approaching it like okay what additional value is this thing is this food choice giving me relative to the alternative and at what cost and is it worth it oh if this fruit tastes 95 as good as the snickers bar but only impacts my body let's say let's say it does impact your body negatively for example's sake but the negative impact to my body is only 10 of what the Snickers bar is. It's worth it. I should choose that fruit all the time. Yeah. What about coffee?

Starting point is 00:45:40 I love coffee. Yeah. How many coffee, how much coffee you drink a day? Well, today I've only had one, but I get an average day, uh, probably two or three, two or three cups of coffee. Yeah. So that's like, uh, maybe 350 milligrams of caffeine, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I've been trying to think of, uh, what the optimal amount of caffeine is this very long story, but I'll make it quick. Uh, I think a large at Starbucks, I know it's not called large, but whatever the large thing um has like 400 milligrams of caffeine supposedly if you google it but i'm like there's no way this actually has 400 milligrams of caffeine but if you google that's what it says yeah right and so if you drink that in the morning like you pretty much are tapped out

Starting point is 00:46:18 for the day like you probably shouldn't drink more caffeine later right uh but what i usually do is if i drink that then i'll have like a shot of espresso or something later around like one o'clock or so right so then you start playing and you're like well actually maybe you shouldn't drink the large coffee if it does actually have the 400 milligrams, which is questionable. Maybe you should just drink like two or three shots of espresso, which, you know, 90 milligrams or so of caffeine per shot, like, okay, now you're still in that 350, 400 range, but you're actually like spreading it out through the day, but you're not pushing too far into the late afternoon where then it affects your sleep. Right. So I tell people that the optimal amount of coffee or caffeine to

Starting point is 00:46:55 consume is the amount right up until it starts affecting your hydration or sleep. And that's going to be different person to person. Some people might, might consume 150 milligrams of caffeine, which is like a cup, cup and a half of coffee at noon. And they might not be able to go to sleep that night. I was like, okay, well you can't do that. That's too much for you. Other people can drink coffee and like go to bed right after. Now I doubt their sleep is as deep when they do that, but fine. If they don't know, if there's not an obvious adverse impact to drinking coffee, um, then it's, it's most likely. Okay. And if you look at a lot of the studies, like But the studies that told people to not drink coffee, they didn't isolate for alcohol consumption.

Starting point is 00:47:36 So what they found was that, oh, if you drink a lot of coffee, you die sooner. It's like, yeah, because like the people who are drinking a lot of coffee are hung over every morning. Yeah, but I also just saw a study that says the exact opposite. It says like basically if you drink caffeine, it could extend your life. Right. So I kind of feel like the scientists are full of shit because they do these different studies and they come to, you know, same study, different conclusions. Like what's going on here? Well, they're, they're improperly isolating for variables. So if you, if you look at caffeine

Starting point is 00:48:02 consumption relative to longevity, um, it's possible that it's negatively correlated. In fact, it's probably negatively correlated to longevity. You think so? Except for the fact that when you account for the fact that a lot of the people who are drinking a lot of the coffee are hung over every morning, right? So if you just say, okay, person, if you just look at the cohort that drinks like under seven alcoholic drinks a week, and then you look at their caffeine consumption and you compare their longevity, what you'd likely see is a positive correlation

Starting point is 00:48:33 between caffeine consumption and longevity. But if you include everybody, well, the people who consume the highest amount of caffeine are also commonly consuming the highest amount of alcohol. So the reason why their longevity is diminished is not because of the caffeine, it's because of the alcohol. But if you mix them all together in the same study,

Starting point is 00:48:48 it's gonna say, oh, wow, look at like, ooh, it looks like the high caffeine consumers are going to die young. Alcohol makes you dehydrated. That's one thing it does. And caffeine makes you dehydrated. So people who drink a lot of alcohol at night and then drink a lot of coffee during the day, are they just on like a wheel of dehydration and they're like severely and, uh, uh, just persistently dehydrated. That's one thing that they are. They're probably also persistently fatigued because if you drink a lot of, um, alcohol at night, your sleep is going to be at much lower quality. And then during the day, you know, you're, you're loading up with

Starting point is 00:49:20 caffeine. You're going to just feel like you're running on empty by the time you get to the, you know, the afternoon. How many hours do you sleep at night? Um, six or seven. I try to do better than that. Six or seven. Yeah. I want to eat. Well, you know, I got, you know, genetics to work through. Um, I stopped sleeping when I was like 17 years old. Um, cause you're not working hard enough during the day. If you, uh, I forget who said it, one of the, like the Stokes or whatever, basically said something to the effect of like, if you have a full day, then you have a full night of sleep. You just got to work hard and then you sleep better. Yeah. The challenge is the challenges come when you're lying in bed, thinking about the full day of work that you have

Starting point is 00:49:54 the next day and then you start spinning and you just don't go to bed. All right. So, uh, so the caffeine makes sense. Uh, what about pre-workout? Uh, when you and I have known each other for a long time now, uh, when I was, I don't know, maybe starting around the age of like 16 or 17, like i was in in high school i was uh playing sports and i was like this weightlifting thing that seems like that's important uh i'm a young kid how do i get as jacked as possible before i go into the weight room and then just do everything like that was literally my mentality i was an idiot it worked i would take whatever life whatever supplement you could find if it was in the store and it could get me jacked up to go into the weight room i was taken i tried it uh and so when

Starting point is 00:50:43 i got to college like you get smarter right you start to understand like okay like this makes me super jittery this doesn't whatever and um maybe i actually didn't get that much smarter uh the two things that most guys were taking in college um was uh uh no explode yeah and uh c4 and there was like debates of like oh the no explode yeah like your face tingles and like the your arms are tingling or whatever uh the c4 was like cleaner but guys would argue like the c4 didn't work because I couldn't feel it. Right. My guess is that both of these are horrible for you, but like, how do you, like, how do you underwrite a pre-workout in terms of it being healthy, not healthy, worth it, not worth it. It's like a total scam. Like, like, you know,

Starting point is 00:51:29 do these things help? Like maybe, you know, I've, I've read, you know, there's nothing else that made my face tingle like that before. Right, right, right. It's like, okay, so I don't take any of these supplements. I've never taken any of these supplements and people online think I take steroids all the time. So if you look at like, what is important to execute in a training plan or a diet and fitness lifestyle, it's like what you eat and how you train is way more important than the supplements you take. Um, sure. If you take a creatine or their creatine, HCL, creatine monohydrate studies show that that should positively affect your gains. Um, that being said, you know, I got to 4%, 5% body fat, just taking a multivitamin and like fish oil. Right. And my

Starting point is 00:52:09 only pre-workout was coffee and it still is my only pre-workout is coffee you think that pre-workout is a bigger scam than the multivitamins um i think the multivitamins are scams too you tell me they packed 64 different vitamins into that little pill well i'm telling you that i i take it with no expectation of its efficacy because i take it costs 25 cents or 10 cents or whatever and i think okay worst case scenario i piss it out yep right so i'll pop that in the morning no big deal and if some of it sticks it sticks and if most of it doesn't that's okay too um with the with the pre-workout you know that gets in people's psychology or like oh i need to have my no explode otherwise i can't train it's like dude you can train like and and if you have coffee in

Starting point is 00:52:47 your system well you know i know it's what has caffeine but like if you have coffee in your system like that to me is fine or if you you know if your stomach doesn't handle coffee that well cold brew or some other caffeinated i think that like the no explode specifically because that's the one on, uh, I used to take all the time. Uh, it was, there's caffeine, right. Which is, I think it's like actually the thing that really gets people kind of addicted to it is like, I want to feel like I'm caffeinated going in, uh, to go work out. Uh, the second thing though is, uh, there's all of the like oxygenation that's happening in the bloodstream, whatever. It's been too long. I've, I haven't looked at this stuff in a long time. Um, but there's like that

Starting point is 00:53:23 feeling of the pump. Right. And to some degree, it almost feels kind of like, uh, you know, it's like a drug high, right? Like you get the drug high, like, Oh, I need that again. If you go and you work out, I don't know if that actually affects like the training itself as much as it is the feeling. And it's like tricking someone into like, I need this again or not. It should impact training. You know, if you can get better blood flow, you know, what's the purpose of warming up? It's like a lot of it's to get good blood flow. So if you can get better circulation when you train, you should train better. Um, that being said, I think you're right in that it does lead to a better pump and that's what people you know to my earlier point for uh you know people

Starting point is 00:54:00 misjudging the efficacy of workouts the pump that people get from a workout is not that well correlated with the efficacy of a workout but it's what what the most proximal symptom is when you're done training you look in the mirror you got veins coming out of your arms and you're like oh okay yeah this i got a great workout in it's like you don't know that you're not going to know that for like several days whether you had a good workout is is there like high sugar in that stuff or anything that people should be worried about as well like in a lot of the pre-workouts like obviously there's the caffeine there's all the no whatever you know stuff um but is there also like the detrimental from like a diet standpoint where uh they should be worried um that would

Starting point is 00:54:35 probably be one of the least likely time periods that one might worry about sugar consumption and i'm saying go burn it yeah because you're gonna go burn it now if you're diabetic obviously you have like different issues than somebody who's not but um yeah if you're going to be consuming sugar the best time to consume it is right before right after during workouts um you know will that impact your cravings for for sugar later in the day yeah it probably will but you're you're doing it at a time where it's actually likely to lead to increased gym output which is okay in my book uh you ever heard of endurox no yeah you you didn't know you didn't know i was fucking well skilled here take me deep in the game endurox is uh something that a lot of athletes would use

Starting point is 00:55:15 especially like football players and things like that where uh it has a unique combination of uh really high intensity cardio sprinting all that type of stuff uh but then also a lot of physical uh like combat in terms of you know pushing and pulling and doing all that stuff during practice it's all about recovery so you would uh i know guys who did a lot of crazy shit before practice but after practice basically put the endurox in water shake it up and you drink it on your way to go get food or whatever and it's supposed to help you recover again whether it works or not who knows uh but it was like a hydration and a recovery whatever and so uh when i was in college uh i don't remember what year in college uh must have been over 21 given that uh this involves

Starting point is 00:55:56 alcohol uh somebody was making jungle juice and for those that don't know jungle juice uh you basically have like uh what do you call it like um uh kool-aid tub yeah like kool-aid that's definitely not what they're called um but that is what it is used for uh it's like a uh uh like a tub that you would get with like a a cap on it or whatever get it at walmart super cheap uh and you just pour a bunch of stuff into it and you make an alcoholic uh drink and so a lot of it is kool-aid and and uh kind of juices and things like that uh you could see somebody pour a red kool-aid then orange juice then all kinds of weird shit and then a bunch of alcohol and so uh i remember it was uh in someone's dorm room and they're sitting there making it and it was a full player's dorm room

Starting point is 00:56:39 and all of a sudden he was like looking around like what else could he pour in there and he just took an entire uh kind of um a bucket of the endurox and it was flavors like watermelon flavor or something he was like well this shit's got flavor in it and he dumped it in and the only reason why i remember this is because people were hammered really for the entire night but not like different than what you would expect from jungle juice whatever okay the next morning no one had a hangover because it had electrolytes in it. And so I remember thinking to myself, like kind of joking, but also kind of being like, ah, if I was like actually cared that much, I'd like go look at the science. Uh, I was like, wow, you're actually able to probably pour things into these

Starting point is 00:57:19 alcoholic beverages, which prevent the dehydration, which allow for better recovery, like do all this type of stuff. Um, and so it became like a joke of like, Oh, make sure the Endurox is in the jungle juice. Um, but like now that I think I'm probably a little bit more educated in terms of how this stuff works like it does seem like there are certain things that people can do if you are going to drink that could at least maybe not reverse the effects or completely mitigate it but like it could be more beneficial type of drinking than hey let me just go drink a bunch of beer and like hope i'm okay tomorrow morning right right right i think you know limiting mixed drinks is a big one because you know i found if i have more than one mixed drink i'm gonna have a

Starting point is 00:57:57 hangover the next day and because it's the juice plus or the sugar yeah yeah um sugar plus alcohol equals hangover. So Red Bull vodkas are bad. Correct. Don't know about the sugar-free Red Bull, Red Bull vodkas. Not, not, not prepared to comment on those. Um, but yeah, you want to make sure you're having a lot of water, um, because the alcohol will dehydrate you. One thing that I've also started doing the, you know, a couple of nights a month that I will have a drink is I'll, I'll consider having a little bit more melatonin supplement, uh, supplementation. I take a melatonin supplement nightly. Um, but I know that if I'm introducing something to my body, that's going to dysregulate my sleep. Um, I can either just have a night of shitty sleep or I can,

Starting point is 00:58:36 you know, maybe have an extra couple of milligrams of melatonin and I'm still not going to sleep great, but I'll probably sleep a little bit better than if I didn't have that. Um, damn, you just told me, I told you before we started, I had a bad night of sleep. I switched up my tea last night. Now that I think about, I was trying to think, what did I do differently? Why did I have a bad night? I usually sleep like a baby. Why did I sleep differently? The tea that I drink every single night is chamomile tea that has some melatonin in it last night i had run out and there was another tea was chamomile tea but there was no melatonin and i bet you that that actually had a bigger impact than i thought problem solved so conversations were just solving my own problems

Starting point is 00:59:16 no but like this is like actually uh uh interesting because like there is like inputs and outputs right and as you start to learn it and you know i was thinking i'm like i know i slept worse last night than, uh, in previous nights. Uh, and again, let's just hold constant. Like that is what it is. Uh, you can quickly just revert back and say, okay, I know I need to do this and then I'll get good sleep and continue. So it sounds like you pretty much know what your nighttime routine is before you go to sleep to make sure you have the best night's sleep you can. Yeah. And the more regular your routine is for anything, the easier it is to troubleshoot anything. Right. Um, if, if you consistently eat and train a certain way and something changes in your life, it's much

Starting point is 00:59:57 easier to say, okay, what did I change? I do the same thing every day. The only thing that changed was X, Y, Z. Therefore I must change X or Y or Z if I want to, uh, get back to, you know, where I was. So what do you do before you go to sleep? Um, well, if I'm in a state where it's legal, I, uh, I will consume some THC. Um, I've, I actually, what is that? How you do that? Like edibles. Uh, I found that, you know, that's weed for people who don't know. Yeah. Marijuana. Um, now if you say marijuana, they think you're a cop. I read the YouTube comments. They say marijuana. It means you're a cop. Oh, okay. Uh, yeah. So if it's legal, um, nothing affects my quality of sleep better than that. Um, and I just act like a melatonin type, like it's like

Starting point is 01:00:46 almost putting you to sleep a little bit. It just shuts my brain down or, or sometimes it speeds it up to the point where it shuts it down. And I don't know if that's like mild ADHD or whatever, but you know, from the time I was a division one baseball player to when I got drafted by the Rockies played a couple of years in their system, my sleep quality just went like this. And I was talking to some of the guys about this before we started about how like playing professional baseball, you know, every day can be your last day. And it's like, can you imagine coming to work or literally any day you can be fired like all the time, constantly, you're always on the hot seat. And, uh, you know, obviously it, it became challenging for me to sleep under those

Starting point is 01:01:25 conditions. And so, you know, early twenties, you're like, Oh, self-medicate, go have a couple of drinks or something like that. And then just makes your sleep worse. Yeah. It's a temporary solution that ends up with long-term problems. And, um, and so I found like, I never wanted to consume weed because I thought, well, you know, it lowers your testosterone, lowers your sleep quality, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know, like I was in San Francisco, I was going to consume what was available to me in San Francisco. And I just noticed in my late twenties, like, wow, I seem to sleep so much better when I consume this. And so eventually like in my late twenties, I just kind of basically stopped drinking like a couple of times a month or something like that. And just,

Starting point is 01:02:03 you know, switched over to, to consuming edibles. And that got my sleep schedule much more regular. Does it lower your testosterone? It may. My testosterone is very average, right? So that's something that, that people, uh, surprises people where, uh, if you look at, you know, you follow me on Twitter, follow me on Instagram, you're seeing all the food I eat, you know, looking at me with shirtless and seeing all the abs and everything. It's like, no, my testosterone is very average. And I think that, you know, it could be, I don't know if it's genetic. I never tested it when I was younger. Um, but it, it is possible that, uh, you know, introducing THC into, into my routine has lowered it at the same time. It's like, well, do I have any of the symptoms of

Starting point is 01:02:42 low testosterone? Like, no, not really. So it's like, all right, well, I think it's probably okay. Or mid-range testosterone. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by FTX US. They're the safe, regulated way to buy and sell Bitcoin and other digital assets. Trade crypto with up to 85% lower fees than the top competitors. There are no fixed minimums, no ACH transaction fees, and no withdrawal fees. Download the FTX app today and use referral code POMP to earn free crypto on every trade over $10. The more you trade, the more you earn. Go download the FTX app today and use referral code POMP. This episode is brought to you by Compass Mining, the world's largest marketplace for mining hardware and hosting. With Compass, everyone

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Starting point is 01:04:20 to try to increase the testosterone or not really? Just lifting heavy and kind of high intensity cardio pretty much takes care of it. Yeah, and sleeping enough and not overdoing it. So I'll tell you an example of a guy named Mason who joined the group training that I run. I started running it about a year and a half ago and online group. And he joined, he saw the program and he'd been following me on Twitter for over a year prior to then seeing all the food, seeing all the training and he liked me. And so he wanted to take the next step. He bought my masterclass. He wanted to take the next step and actually have me be his hands on coach. And so he looks at all the training materials. His first response is there's no fucking way it can be this easy. He just thinks, oh, this is like an online scan. This guy's like, you know, I don't know if he's taking steroids or whatever, but there's no way that you can train this way and eat this way and get those results.

Starting point is 01:05:09 But he trusted me, fortunately. He trusted me. He did the program for eight weeks. And after eight weeks, he tested his testosterone level before starting and he tested after. His testosterone at 47 years old went from 550 to 880, right? What's that mean? Which is about the same as taking a small dose of steroids. and so it basically it's the equivalent of getting like 40 years younger right you know the average

Starting point is 01:05:35 person who's 60 goes back to being 20 years old in their testosterone level and you know thinking about what he was doing before he was training too much right he thought he had to be in there all the time you know can't miss a workout small percentage of the population's like this they're hyper disciplined they think if they stop training for a day or a week they're gonna like regress to their fat self that they were 35 years ago. It's like, dude, it's not going to happen. And when they start resting more and doing less, they realize that they can train at a higher intensity and their metabolism and endocrine system re-regulates to where it naturally should be or could be. They just never realized that their entire lives. Is it worse to overtrain

Starting point is 01:06:16 or to not train? Ooh, wow. Polar extremes. It's probably worse to not train. Now, well, how extreme are, how extreme are we over-training is the better question. Ronnie Coleman over-trained, right? Ronnie Coleman's got 16 screws in his back. Is he less healthy than somebody who never trained and is the same age? He probably is. So if we're going to, if we're going to go extreme, extreme, then it could be over-training could be worse, but over-training in the, the more traditional sense, it's actually really dangerous. You know, I got my best friend growing up. his dad used to run 10 15 20 miles like every day he's addicted to running and this is true with a lot of a lot of people who are addicted to running you start looking at them when they're 60 65 their

Starting point is 01:07:00 joints start breaking down because and like they run on pavement because it felt fine in their 30s and all of a sudden it really hits them hard when they hit 60 65 well this guy used to be killer like he'd be running like 100 miles a week in his 40s and then by the time he hit 65 he ran a marathon when he was like 60, 65. And then like two years later, his back gives out because it's like his back just couldn't handle the repetitive stress of essentially overtraining for so many years. So is he less healthy than somebody who is basically sedentary his entire life? Possibly uncertain. They're both bad. They're both bad. Yeah. Yeah. When you think of, um, a lot of the food stuff as well, uh, men and women, any differences or older people and younger

Starting point is 01:07:43 people? Or do you think that the diet and training may be, uh, kind of the same thing works across, uh, genders and also age? My system, my specific system works better for men and athletic women. Reason being, um, the more muscle mass you have, the easier it is to diet intuitively, the less muscle mass you have. Um, you, you kind of either need to eat at a caloric deficit, which I know I hate, like basically go hungry if you want to lose fat and it's only temporary. Like you don't really have the muscle mass to sustain a powerful metabolism. So you first, in my view, most likely need to focus on building muscle first. What also happens, like a lot of times women around, you know, around their monthly cycle,

Starting point is 01:08:27 they'll get cravings for sugar. And it's like, okay, if I'm, if I'm telling people, listen to your cravings and be responsible about them, but like give into them slightly, you can't tell somebody who has massive sugar cravings to give into their sugar cravings, because that's just going to be the first step to getting them down a path of eating bad stuff. So does my system work for women? Yes, it works for some women, but it doesn't work for as many women as it works for men. It's much more common for men, particularly men who play like a varsity sport in high school. The closer you are to that, the more likely it is that your results will align with all the other people who've had

Starting point is 01:09:03 tremendous success with my system. What about stress? Like I feel like there's times where people are super stressed out and their whole diet training, everything falls apart. And I know other people who are like, yo, I'm super stressed out. I'm gonna go to the gym, come back to like a new person, right? The stress relief. And so how do you think about stress? Stress is really interesting. And I actually have a hypothesis for why people are fat, like another hypothesis for why people are fat. And it is, what does stress do to your hunger levels? And my hypothesis is skinny people become less hungry when they're stressed out and fat people become more hungry when they're stressed out. Well, if you just ask people, you know, cause part of, part of me

Starting point is 01:09:44 working with people in training intuitively is like, do you eat more or do you eat less when you're stressed? And typically the people who are underweight eat less when they're stressed. And typically the people who are overweight eat more than when they're stressed. And so I think, um, uh, your stress hormones will scramble up your hunger signals. For me personally, they make me less hungry. So I have to overeat when I'm stressed. If I don't want to lose muscle mass, probably more people have to be more careful about the types of food they eat when they're stressed. But the gym, the gym is the best antidepressant that you can find, right? I got off of the plane. I didn't sleep that well on Saturday night cause I had to get up early to

Starting point is 01:10:21 fly on Sunday. Um, so I probably slept like five hours or something like that on, um, on Saturday night. First thing I did when I got off the plane in Miami is I went straight to the gym. I actually I went straight to Dunkin Donuts to get coffee, but then I went straight to the gym after I got coffee and I worked out for a couple hours and I felt great. They say that, that actually, uh, especially like a red eyes or time zone changes or whatever. If you, as soon as you land, you go and you work out, whether it's at the hotel, body weight, whatever, it's supposed to like basically make the jet lag much less. Yes. And I've found that like, especially, you know, when I was working in crypto going to Asia, um, I found that my jet lag routine is like pretty

Starting point is 01:10:59 good as far as, you know, it would probably take me about 36 hours, uh, from flying from San Francisco to Hong Kong or Beijing to get acclimated to the time zone there, 80, 90%, where, you know, a lot of my colleagues, my age, it would take three, four or five days for them to get back on, back on that schedule. And you think, especially if you're a traveling executive where you're taking a lot of, uh, you know, cross time zone flights, like you need to get your body back on schedule as soon as possible. Like that's crucial. And, uh, and figuring out how to fly and how to train very much help that. Yeah. So when you think about stress, it feels like a lower stress life is better in general, both for longevity, for regulating what you eat, for

Starting point is 01:11:40 being able to train with a routine, or do you think some degree of stress is actually healthy and good and has some benefit? Well, it's a balance, right? So if you look at like no stress, a good example could either be people who know they're going to inherit billions of dollars when they grow up. Um, though their lives typically don't go as well as one might think. Um, or you could look at the rat studies where they're like, Oh, what happens if we give rats like everything that they want and they just don't have to worry about food. They don't have to worry about anything. It's like, Oh, they started cannibalizing themselves and they stopped learning how to like take care of their kids. So the human body and the human mind cannot actually exist in a stressless

Starting point is 01:12:20 state permanently. What you want to avoid is chronic stress. Every day I wake up and I'm worried about paying my bills. Every day I wake up and I'm worried about what my boss is going to tell me. The right amount of stress is acute measured stress. So you go to the gym, that's stress. You're putting your body through a stressful routine, but it's acute. You're not training 16 hours a day, right? If you're in mergers and acquisitions and you're working 80 hour weeks. Like that's not the type of stress that's healthy. If you're going through an intense 30, 60 minutes every day where you, where you can build up to that stressful event and then come down from it, finger to the wind, that's probably the right amount of stress. So you can't have too

Starting point is 01:13:01 much. You can't have too little Goldilocks. You got to have the right amount. Yeah. Um, and then how do you think about stress in your life? Like it seems like you live, lead a pretty low stress life. And I know you've talked a lot about like monetizing your life and talk about that. Yeah. So, you know, the people tell me that I'm really efficient at figuring out what is the shortest, quickest path between two points. And, you know, if I want to live a lifestyle, you know, when I'm younger, I wanted to be very rich, right? Because everyone who's young wants to be really rich.

Starting point is 01:13:30 And, you know, as I got older, I found that it was a lot easier to build like modest wealth and extreme wealth. And so if, you know, if I'm 36 years old and I have modest but not extreme wealth, well, what would I do if I were extremely wealthy? I would work out all the time. I would eat delicious food. Um, and I would kind of like go and, and not answer to a boss. Those are kind of the three things that would change, uh, compared to my corporate life if I were really wealthy. And it's like, okay, well, uh, if I don't have a hundred million dollars, but I have,

Starting point is 01:13:58 I make enough money getting paid to do the things that I would do anyway, what's really that different, right? Like I wake up. Yeah. It's like, I, I, I didn't have to actually take the steps to build that massive wealth empire. I do what I want to do with my day and I get on with it. And so the more you can figure out how to get paid for doing the things that you already do, that you're already interested in, the easier it is to make money and the easier it is to enjoy your life while you're making money. Will you become a billionaire that way? Probably not, but you may, because if you're really interested in something, you're probably going to end up hyper fixated on it and learning more about it than the next guy. And so one thing that I tell

Starting point is 01:14:40 people because I also do, you know, life coaching, uh, business coaching, career coaching, because so much of fitness overlaps with mindset. And I did work in tech for 10 years, um, is figure out how to get paid for the thing that makes you weird because everybody's trying to find out, find a unique selling point. Everybody's trying to figure out what their point of differentiation is. And it's like, okay, rather than try to be somebody you're not to separate yourself from the pack, look yourself in the mirror and figure out why do all my friends think I'm a total fucking weirdo and figure out how to get paid on that because nobody's going to be able to replicate your weirdness that's innate to you like what are some examples of people like what are they weird

Starting point is 01:15:18 about that they end up monetizing um it like let's look at mark zuckerberg right mark zuckerberg at 21 22 years old turned down the opportunity to have facebook acquired for like a 200 million dollar payout or something like that how many 21 22 year olds would say yeah you know i'm gonna to live, I'm just going to sleep with some bros on sleep on a mattress or whatever. I'm kind of building this thing. I'm really interested in building a social network. Like very few, probably 99.99% of people, if given an offer to sell their startup at 21 years old for like a billion dollars or whatever the offer was, would take it. Right. So he's weird because, and you worked with him, but he's weird because like how many other people could turn down that much money

Starting point is 01:16:03 to build a project that they're that passionate about. Not that many. So he's getting paid to do the thing that makes him weird. Yeah. Right? Or in my situation, like not that many people are going, like not that many people actually want to have abs because it's just, it's a lot,

Starting point is 01:16:21 it's a lot easier to kind of just not be fat. It's very easy to not be fat. It's a little bit harder to have abs. So most people will be like, oh, like I'm in good shape. Like, why don't I just go eat these donuts? it's like well that's actually not the approach that got me here what's what's easier is to to apply a sustainable approach day after day and let the results take care of themselves and so because i was able to do that i was able to attain the fitness results that i've attained

Starting point is 01:16:46 and all of a sudden i know about this system that i can teach to other people it didn't require me to go to school it didn't require me to study for a test you know get stressed out worrying about a grade it just required me to learn about the things i was interested in which then ends up you, if you can monetize it, build a business around it, then, uh, it feels like a lot of people are doing this now, uh, and starting to understand like the internet's pretty damn powerful. Yeah. Right. And, uh, if you are successful in doing it, uh, you're happier as well. Right. I mean, I, I felt like this when I was working in corporate America, like my last few years, I was making a good salary. Like I couldn't tell a random person on the internet,

Starting point is 01:17:22 Hey, I'm making X. And they'd be like, damn, that's a lot. I felt, I never felt like I was my own person until I start work, started working for myself. Right. Um, because especially when you get into like higher income earning brackets, you're always around people who are more successful than you. And as a competitive person, you're always going to kind of do some comparisons and be like, man, like, I wish I was doing that. I wish I was doing that. And so, you know, I always felt like when I was an employee, if I have to do a performance report or a performance review for somebody on a quarterly or annual basis, I always felt like that was degrading. I always felt like, dude, you guys are paying me. If you don't want to pay me, you don't have to, but like, I don't

Starting point is 01:17:56 want to I don't want to continue to show you why you're paying me the money you're paying me if you want to stop stop if you want to keep doing it do it but don't make me go through this uh what I consider to be like a little bit like demeaning process and I understand why employers do it I just felt like as an employee it was a little bit demeaning to me see I don't think I felt that way like I mean I did the quarterly reviews and stuff right like I always felt like uh it was like a feedback session like maybe it depends I guess on like who the person how I think it is if you just do it it can be done 10 different ways yeah yeah I guess it's like some people do almost do it in a demeaning way where it's like report to me the information and then I will tell you you know good

Starting point is 01:18:34 job bad job right versus uh maybe I was fortunate in that um like I'm thinking of one specific guy he very much used it as like uh okay let's look at the things that like you feel aren't going well and almost always it was like the things I knew weren't going well he also was like yeah those aren't going well let's figure out like how to like improve it and it was almost like check-in points. But I guess maybe that's more of like a message to the people who conduct them. Like, right. Don't be an asshole. Well, in the more cynical way and the way that I came to look at them, uh, after working several years in corporate America is, Oh, these are just a negotiation tactic. Because if you look at how promotional processes work at large companies, it takes a

Starting point is 01:19:10 long time to get promoted from one level to the next level. And oftentimes there's a talent mismatch where if you have, there's a lot of people at a certain level who are way more talented than the people who are a level above them. In sports, that would take care of itself over three weeks. We scrimmage together. You guys are better than those guys. You guys are on the starting team. But in a corporate setting, there's a financial incentive to keep people underemployed or undertitled. Because if you can keep somebody performing at level 10, paid at a level six, then you make more money as a company. And so what is an easy way to keep people getting paid as a level six when they're performing as a level 10 is you identify

Starting point is 01:19:45 various weaknesses that they have, um, at their present level say, well, you're not doing that perfectly. You're not doing that perfectly. You're not doing that perfectly. It doesn't matter that the people three levels above wouldn't be doing that perfectly either. We want you fixated on the things that make you imperfect. So don't ask us for a promotion this year. Cause it's going to take 18 months to 24 months. Yeah. Uh, I I've been on the other side of some of those conversations. You're like, I'm pretty sure that's not how this works, but okay. that that is, uh, that's fine. Um, talk a little bit about, uh, the content that you put out, uh, where can people go find it? What, what are some of the things if they want to learn more

Starting point is 01:20:21 about the fitness or diet stuff? Just follow me on Twitter. Um, you know, Alex Feinberg one on Twitter. Uh, a lot of my stuff is hosted on gum road, good third party site. And so, you know, you'll see a couple of links in my profile. If you want to check out my recipes, check out my, uh, my training guide, um, uh, fat loss system. Uh, and then every once in a while I'll run a masterclass sale. Keep an eye out for that. Or you can go on Gumroad and just pick it up now if you wanted to. And my DMs are open. So if you have questions, whether you want to find me on Instagram, which is same Alex Feinberg one, Twitter, I read all my DMs. I ignore the ones that are just trying to solicit me for money. But if you're not doing that, I will read it and I

Starting point is 01:20:59 will most likely reply. You don't send one Bitcoin to get two back? Yeah, I haven't. I haven't tried that me either but just just to the people who have the same profile picture as you i i i do feel uh very bad there's been a couple times where i've been like another place i'm thinking of one time uh i was in london and a uh a guy came up to me at an event he goes pomp he goes man we get to meet in person like he was like so excited and i was like oh no i don't remember his person is and uh he's like no he's like remember i'm the guy who sent the money and i was like uh and i was like what do you mean and he had sent like just enough money where i was like oh like like i felt like his pain but not enough where i was like your life's ruined like five or ten

Starting point is 01:21:47 yeah like like i want to say it was like 7500 bucks literally right like it was enough where i was like fuck right but at the same time i was like dude come on right like and so he whips out his phone because i was like what do you mean and he's like no look and he pulls it out and it was like expert level scam like sequence like twitter they commented they said you know message me on whatsapp then he had messaged on whatsapp then they had like moved him here and then he'd sent money and like this whole thing and i just had to break it to him like we were in the middle of an event there's people everywhere and i was like hey man come over here and i like i was like that's not me and he was like heartbroken but at the same time he was like kind of shook he said

Starting point is 01:22:31 what do you mean it's not you and i was like that's like a scam and so you know one just like the social platforms need to clean it up obviously but two uh uh i had never really talked to someone and like what i realized was like they like socially engineered it yeah they were able to uh there was nothing that they were doing that like would have made it obvious outside of the fact that uh if you knew my life and me and like all this like it's very obvious like they had no clue what they were talking about but they used the social like engineering components of it to literally get this guy to send money yeah being like holy shit what's up with them moving the conversations to whatsapp like if you if you're gonna scam people why can't you scam them on the

Starting point is 01:23:11 native platform i i think it's because on those platforms what happens is uh the accounts can get reported and taken away and then all the conversation like history is gone everything you don't have the connection with the people anymore okay get them to whatsapp like i don't think I've ever reported a WhatsApp number. Okay. Right. To like get taken down. So what they try to do is, uh, I think they like pop up, they have an account like shotgun blast to as many people as possible. Whoever fails the intelligence test and like responds, pull them to WhatsApp quickly. If I lose my Twitter, Instagram, you know, name your social platform account, uh, then they have them on WhatsApp and now they have the ability to communicate. Yeah. I started getting some of

Starting point is 01:23:50 these texts cause I assume there's a data breach that released my phone number. And so I get these, I get a text message from someone like a few weeks ago. Hey, are you the golf coach? I'm like, no, I'm a coach, but I'm not a golf coach. Like, oh, my assistant must've set me up. What are you a coach? I like reply. And then like three replies later, I'm like, this is weird. Like, can we be friends? Like why? Well, you just want to be friends with some random person who you, who you miss messaged and like, yeah, you know, I, you seem like we could be friends. Let's take this conversation to Telegram or to WhatsApp. I'm like, you already have my phone number like what's going on here so that makes sense if they bring it to a third party

Starting point is 01:24:27 platform they can't have their initial uh conversation flagged i have a friend who um his number's definitely out there uh because he gets all kinds of crazy ones now he gets them in like chinese and like uh he gets sometimes random photos like he showed me one it's just like literally uh it was just a photo of a woman with a dog no like nothing else just like a photo and i was like why are you sending that he goes i don't know if they're trying to get me to respond I don't know what's going on here but like I'm not responding I was like that's probably a pretty good idea but he gets one like every day yeah and I was just like I guess that's like some new scam but I don't understand there's no links there's no like request to do anything I guess it's just

Starting point is 01:25:05 like a social engineering like can you just enter into a conversation well I mean one of the things that we haven't even talked through as a society is you're gonna have a lot of old people who were scammed out of a lot of money right if you think it's bad now like I look at some of these schemes I'm like, Ooh, that almost got me. I almost clicked on that link. Cause it's always, it gets you in a fearful state. It's never, you're like calm. Like, okay, that's a scam. It's more like fraud alert. Click that. And you're like, Oh no, don't do that. They're just trying to pull my trigger, pull my buttons or push my buttons. But I think like, man, if my mom, every time I see something like that, I send it to my parents. Cause I'm like, watch out for this. Because if

Starting point is 01:25:42 I were like 20 years older, I probably would have clicked on that link. Uh, you ever got the physical mail uh spam there's mail that's come to the office uh and it's like you know they've got a name of a business they got the address like all the stuff and it's basically like you know some crazy claim whether it's fraud alert or whatever uh but it's physical mail it's like call this number and so like before i call the number you know i always go and i'll like google a number and it'll just be like this number is associated with scams phishing attempts like you're like, all right, fuck you guys. But like, yeah, a hundred percent people are calling that number. Well, a lot of times it's like, guess what happens when you register a business,

Starting point is 01:26:22 when you register a business, that number is found somewhere in some database. And so all these, uh, all these companies are like, Oh, if we can send physical mail that mimics the look of government mail, people think they need to pay us money and we don't need to get that many of them to pay us money. So if we just say, Oh, you know, you make it seem really official. And then, you know, maybe one person out of 30 sends a $50, $75 check. It's like, that's actually a pretty effective male marketing campaign. That is exactly what happens. Right. And whether it's fraud or it's just like, uh, you owe us. Yeah. I don't know how that's legal, but they definitely send that mail. Right. And the more sophisticated ones, you're probably seeing these now. I just, I just

Starting point is 01:27:02 started getting them like a year ago is, um, people writing letters that look like handwritten letters but they're not right and they're like house offers or something like that it's like this is nope that's a printer it looks a lot like you hand wrote that but it's not but that's gonna that's gonna increase your open rate i understand exactly why you're doing that and that's why everybody needs to learn marketing because if you learn how marketing works you learn how like all of these not to get marketed to you learn how politics works you learn how like all these scams work you learn how the education system works it's just like learn marketing and it tells you a lot of things. The last question that I have for you, future presidents of the

Starting point is 01:27:43 United States, do you have any wild predictions as to who could become the president? I think I mentioned to you that I think that in probably 5, 10, 20 years, the best viable candidates are going to be comedians. And the reason being is, you know, by 2030, anybody who has a public enough image to become elected president will have hundreds, thousands of hours of content out there on the internet, um, in which he or she almost certainly said one, two, three, four, 10 cancelable things, right? Well, how do you overcome being canceled? It's like, well, if you're funnier than the people trying to cancel you, they can't cancel you. Like it's just not going to work. And so do you see Matt Walsh? Yes. That video, I'm shocked that video

Starting point is 01:28:31 didn't get more play on the internet probably got throttled huh probably got throttled you said it not me uh but yeah for those that don't know uh he basically he had a whole uh um he basically raised the issue around a bunch of uh the child gender stuff or whatever uh put put aside what the issue was but the mob came for him yeah and he made a video and i remember i was scrolling and when i saw a video i was like oh they got him like here comes the apology and uh i saw a comment and it was like this is how it's done and i was like oh god and i click on it and of course he's just standing there he's i will not apologize i will not i was like oh okay this is not an apology video this is uh like the middle finger to the online mob video and i was like wow they

Starting point is 01:29:18 just actually in some weird way he just became stronger on the internet uh by not bending the or, or, or kind of, you know, uh, falling to their, their calls. And I noticed this around the 2008 financial crisis when a bunch of banking executives who clearly did stuff wrong, um, when they would go in and testify to Congress, it's like, Oh, they, none of them are admitting any of the obvious things that they did wrong. I mean, maybe the most obvious, the like extremely, extremely obvious things they'll admit, but the, the simply very obvious things they will never apologize. And I started paying attention to how like leaders function. I started realizing like, oh, I'm watching all these presidents, watching all these politicians, watching all these business

Starting point is 01:30:01 executives, watching them make mistakes, and then also watching them never apologize for any of the mistakes that they make. And these are all very competitive industries. So if apologizing were effective, you would think that some of the leaders would do it, but none of them do. Oh, that's probably because apologizing puts you in a worse position. And it's probably just uh, more profitable, or you can be more successful if you just never apologize for something, even if you're wrong, except in extreme, extreme, extreme outlier events. And I think that's, you know, I'm not, I'm not saying, um, Matt Walsh is wrong. I'm just saying the approach he would take would be probably the correct approach, whether you're right or you're wrong.

Starting point is 01:30:41 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Uh, my two predictions for president, the rock and Kim Kardashian, both of them are going to be president. What about Portnoy? No. you don't think he's got it no it's not whether he has it or not he wouldn't do it he wouldn't do it i i think he likes his life too much okay right like uh the the problem is uh you have to take one of two approaches you either have to really really really understand the like hollywood like that whole game which the rock there's nobody better in the world he's the most recognizable

Starting point is 01:31:12 person you know globally all the stuff uh or two is you have to have like decades of experience of understanding how to leverage uh the attention into like true business you know type things uh i think dave's probably i don't know top five on the internet like you know i don't know if you saw yesterday he literally tweeted and he was like yo elon are you gonna fix these fucking bots on your shitty platform right i was like that's like a hall of fame internet move like you like only hall of famers no right time right place tag them like bam we're off to the races right uh so like that's like the internet game but i think we on the internet forget like the rock is he goes to other countries and is like mobbed right most people we know on the internet if they go to

Starting point is 01:31:59 you know china people are like on the like they don't even realize that's a person they should like care about right if they're white they'll mob them because they find white people interesting but like but if you look at like a kim kardashian the other thing with her and people get all worked up about this but uh sex tape reality tv star entrepreneur criminal justice reform the next jump here is like you try to run for a congress seat a governorship like there's something in the political realm and you're a stone's throw yeah if you want to be public facing but if they want to have influence they can also influence behind the scenes but they probably want to be public it was their business. Right. And Chris Jenner is like, yo, my daughter became president. You

Starting point is 01:32:44 know, we could do. Yeah. There seems to be other families that are profiting a lot from the administration seat. Yep. On both sides of the aisle. Yeah. We'll leave it there. All right. Alex Feinberg one on Twitter and Instagram. I appreciate you coming. We'll definitely do it again in the future. This is awesome, man. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive

Starting point is 01:33:21 three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends, and I'll see you all for the next episode.

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