The Rich Roll Podcast - Strength Coach Mike Mahler Wants To Optimize Your Hormones

Episode Date: September 10, 2018

When we ponder health, we tend to think about things like diet and exercise. Overlooked in this conversation is the primacy of hormone regulation. Chemical messengers that control almost all biological functions — from hunger to mood and everything in between — hormones play a massive role in overall well-being. When properly balanced, we function at our best. But should they fall out of whack, we become susceptible to everything we endeavor to avoid: weight gain, depression, poor energy, impaired sleep and a litany of chronic lifestyle diseases to name just a few. So let's stop overlooking this critical aspect of wellness. Today's maestro for all things hormonal is Mike Mahler — a human specimen of strength and power whose personal expertise in hormone optimization was catalyzed by an acute health crisis he struggled mightily to solve. Perhaps best known as one of the leading experts on effective kettlebell training for size, strength, fat loss and conditioning, Mike is a renown strength coach with a specialization in hormone optimization via nutrition, training, supplements, and lifestyle. He is the author of a variety of best-selling kettlebell training e-books and DVDs. He teaches popular kettlebell workshops globally and is a regular contributor to publications like Muscle & Fitness, Men's Fitness, and Testosterone Magazine (yes, this is actually a thing). And he has been featured in Muscle & Fitness, Men's Fitness UK, and CBS News. In addition, Mike is the host of the Live Life Aggresively podcast and the author of Live Life Aggressively! What Self-Help Gurus Should Be Telling You*. Refreshing for his raw honesty and no B.S. style, Mike developed a deep interest in hormone health after a serious bout with pneumonia and chronic stress left his immune system debilitated. Solutions to his malady eluded him until he pulled focus on correcting his hormonal imbalances — a journey that provoked a passion for preaching the importance of understanding the crucial role our internal regulators play in order to live truly well and perform at our peak potential. This is conversation about that journey. We nerd out on the specifics, which hormones do what and why, and how regulatory imbalances can lead to everything from obesity to exhaustion. We talk intermittent fasting; effective training techniques; how to avoid over-training; and the importance of restoration, stress reduction and sleep. We cover this interest and role in the growing kettlebell revolution; the importance of functional strength and mobility; and his every-day rituals. We discuss Mike's interest in combating human trafficking and his support of Project Child Save, a non-profit devoted to locating and recovering children kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. And we explore his vegan journey, why he doesn't wear it on his sleeve, the importance of leading by example. But more than anything, this is a conversation about what it means to live live aggressively — and why compassion is the ultimate strength. Chocked full of great information, Mike was awesome. I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange as much as I enjoyed having it. And make sure to break out that pen and paper — you're going to want to take notes. Peace + Plants, Rich

The mistake that a lot of men make in particular is that they overly fixate on what's my testosterone level. Yeah, testosterone is important, but so is DHEA, so is pregnenolone, the mother of all hormones. So is leptin, so is insulin. There's so many other things. So you got to look at hormones as an orchestra. When an orchestra works in unison, it's really special. So with the big picture with hormones, you have to look at what are the master control hormones? What are the hormones that have the most impact on everything else? Because testosterone, that's a downstream hormone. That's way down the line. It's not a master control hormone. So for both men and women, it's leptin, it's insulin, to some extent growth hormone, to some extent adrenaline, but definitely leptin and insulin being the most.

And out of leptin and insulin, it's leptin. That's definitely the master control hormone. That's Mike Mahler. And this is the Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How are you guys doing? How is life going? How is the job? Are the kids good? Did you remember to call that guy back?

Have you returned that email yet? Have you been meditating? Have you been doing that morning journaling, getting the workouts in, avoiding lousy foods? Is September greeting you with a smile? I hope so. I only wish well for all of you. My name is Rich Roll. This is my podcast. Welcome. Great to be with you here today. Thank you for your attention. Real quick, I wanted to say that I appreciate all the feedback I've received on DK's appearance in the intro to the Sanjay Rawal episode. Honestly, I think he was a little bit nervous, but I've known DK for a very long time.

And this is a guy with a very dry and honest and sometimes self-deprecating sense of humor. He's got a great wit. And one of the reasons I wanted to share the mic with him is that although he's an amazing guy and an incredible friend, he's also in many ways, the everyman, he's a very relatable person. And like so many of you out there, somebody who's come a long way in his health and wellness and fitness and diet and mindfulness journey, but still struggles with all of these things, which is very human. So I think it would be great for him, for the show, for all of you, if I have him pop in from time to time to share a little bit about where he's at with the idea being that

perhaps all of us together can help him adopt a few new habits, maybe set a few new goals for him and hold him accountable. In other words, kind of like a fun project of sorts. So let me know what you guys think about all of that. In other news, I just got back from New York City. And as much as I absolutely love that city, I do love it. It's the best city in the world. There is nothing like returning home to my family, my home, my tent, and my beloved trails. I'm feeling great. All is well in my world and even better today because I got the great Mike Mahler on the show. Mike is a strength coach and kettlebell expert. He teaches workshops all over the world with a focus on hormone optimization, hormone optimization via nutrition, via training, supplements, and lifestyle. He is a regular contributor to publications like Muscle and Fitness, Men's Fitness,

Testosterone Magazine, which I have to admit I was amazed to learn is actually a thing. Mike has also been featured in Muscle and Fitness, Men's Fitness UK, and CBS News. He's the host of the Live Life Aggressively podcast, and he's the author of Live Life Aggressively, What Self-Help Guru Should Be Telling You. As always, there's a few more things I want to note before we immerse ourselves in Mike's world. But first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time.

It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at

recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you.

I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Mike Mahler. So what I really like and appreciate about Mike is his honesty. He has a very refreshing, no BS, fluff-free style. He's also vegan, which is interesting, not only because of his stature as this respected coach

to all kinds of athletes, but also because he's a guy who doesn't wear it on his sleeve. In fact, you'd have to kind of dig deep to even know this fact about him. In any event, this is a great episode that, as I mentioned moments ago, focuses on the importance of hormone health, hormone regulation, hormone optimization, which is something that often gets overlooked in the broader conversation about health, about fitness, and athletic performance.

We track his personal story, including the health crisis that precipitated his interest in hormonal health. We dig into the various hormones that regulate our systems and how hormonal imbalances can lead to everything from obesity to exhaustion. We talk fasting, effective training techniques, overtraining, the importance of relaxation, restoration, stress reduction, and sleep. We cover the kettlebell revolution, the importance of mobility, everyday rituals, his vegan journey, leading by example, and what it means to live life aggressively.

So this is me and Mike Mahler. All right, here we go. Mike Mahler, good to see you, man. Thank you, pleasure. Long time coming. Del, delighted to meet you. Likewise. Can't wait to get into all of this stuff with you, man. You're a fascinating dude. There's so many areas that we could explore. But I think the first thing I want to launch into,

the thing that's kind of top of mind for me personally, and I think probably with the audience, is your interest and your research and specificity in the area of hormone optimization. Yeah, sure. Sure, I'd love to. Which is really cool. So first of all, how did you get, as a strength coach, as a fitness person, personality instructor, whatever you want to call it, how did you decide to dive deep into this area? Because it's kind of a, it's the bastard step

child of everything else fitness, but of course, essential to optimal health and athletic performance. Yeah, it's critical for athletic performance and just feeling good, even for people who don't work out, if they just want to feel good and vital. I got into it because I went through a serious health crisis. I was living in Los Angeles. I was around 29, so this is 2002. And I had a lot of stress going on at the time. I was in a really self-destructive marriage. My finances were really bad, just stress coming from all angles. So personal life stress, financial stress, I was just getting my business going. And this culminated in me getting a serious case of pneumonia, where I nearly died from it. And being the smart guy I am, I decided to fly to Uganda to visit my parents while I was fighting

this pneumonia. I didn't go to the doctor and get it diagnosed. So I went on about 20 hours of flying with maybe 10% of one lung functioning. So fortunately I was healthy. Did you know that? No, I didn't. Like I said, I was really stupid. Anytime you have a respiratory issue, you go to the doctor. You don't mess around with that because that can spiral. It started off as maybe bronchitis. I thought I would kick it, but it just kept lingering for a long time. But I just tried to fight through it. I was just being really dumb about the whole thing. And I was scheduled to visit my parents in Uganda. I didn't want to cancel out on the trip.

So I went, but when I got out there, I just, I, you have to get me to an emergency room immediately because it's probably 110 degrees out and I'm cold. I just had that feeling like your life force is withering away. So the doctor diagnosed me pretty fast with pneumonia, just looking at my symptoms. They did an x-ray of my lungs. You couldn't even see my lungs. There was so much just bacterial fluid just covering up everything. So long story short, he took a needle, shoved it in my back, pulled 40 liters of what looked like murky green tea out of my back. 40 liters? Yeah, 40 liters.

Went back the next day, another 40 liters. But the first day when he pulled that out, it was such a relief. And I was in so much pain and discomfort. He goes, this is going to hurt. I go, look, I don't care where you stick that needle. At this point, anything's better than how I feel right now. And it was immediate relief. So where I'm going with this story is that when people say stress kills, they're not

kidding. This is the culmination of stress when it's not checked out. So if it wasn't for all those things that were going on, I wouldn't have led to this point. And then if I at least had done a few early steps, go to the hospital, get checked out. So it's, if it wasn't for all those things that were going on, I wouldn't lead to this point. And then if I at least had done a few early steps, go to the hospital, get checked out, I wouldn't have led to this point. Right. So in other words, this understanding that it's not just, yes, you had a pneumonia, but what contributed to you incurring that? Obviously, like a, you know, a severely repressed immune system functionality. Exactly. And then what led to that?

Well, the anxiety and the stress and the impact that that has on your, basically, your lymphatic and hormonal systems. Oh, yeah, 100%. So, I mean, I lost 30 pounds of muscle during this whole phase. And this is when I was heavy into teaching kettlebell seminars. So, I want to look a certain way. How long ago was this? This is 2002. So, this is a long time ago.

So, I gave myself, after the trip, I got back to America. I gave myself about three months to get my fitness back before I started teaching again. Started promoting courses, but I go, I need at least 12 weeks to get back into things. But I didn't want to just get back to where I was. I wanted to make myself much more resilient than I was before this. And that eventually led to hormones. Now, as a fitness person, you're always thinking about testosterone anyway. So to some extent, all of us are interested in hormone optimization, whether we realize it or not. But the mistake that

a lot of men make in particular is that they overly fixate on what's my testosterone level. Yeah, testosterone is important, but so is DHEA, so is pregnenolone, the mother of all hormones, so is leptin, so is insulin. There'sone, the mother of all hormones, you know, so is leptin, so is insulin. There's so many other things. So you got to look at hormones as an orchestra. When an orchestra works in unison, it's really special. Like I was watching Hans Zimmer on YouTube, right? He does all the background music for a lot of movies. And there's a footage of him doing the song at the very end of Inception. And when you watch the orchestra, it's a totally different experience than when you just hear the music in the movie.

You don't realize how complex it is until you see it live, how many different performers there are, and how the timing is perfect. And if anyone is off, the whole thing is going to be a disaster. So it's going to be a bunch of noise. Yeah. Well, this is true of everything. I mean, it's not just true of your hormonal health or music. It's true with every function and facet of what it means to be healthy. And as human beings, we always want to narrow in on that one thing, like whether it's protein or testosterone or even macronutrient, like, oh, let's take all of this and boil it down to three things. We're always trying to reduce it down to one control group or one variable when in fact, it's this interplay of systems that's so complex and this drive to kind of reduce it down to one thing always leads us astray and yet we

continue to do it. Oh, we always do. And Dr. Mark Gordon will say it's, I don't know if you know Dr. Mark Gordon. I've heard of him. He's been on Joe Rogan's show many times. He's the foremost anti-aging expert. He does a lot of stuff with soldiers with PTSD. That's how he got into the whole thing. Because a lot of soldiers have PTSD, not because of what they have experienced overseas, but because they had some kind of head concussion. And when you have a head concussion, your testosterone growth hormone completely shuts down. You're not able to produce it naturally. So of course, you're immediately going to be depressed. And they go to the doctor and they're just given antidepressants and so forth. No one looks at

their lab work, but he does. And when he gets these people on testosterone replacements or whatever the protocol is to get their hormones back into play, he has a supplement he makes that increases growth hormone, but sometimes they need the real thing. It's just night and day. They go from being depressed, alcoholics, non-functional to being vital, excited about life, and very functional. But he'll say that when you put someone on testosterone, let's say it's TRT, whether it's a shot, cream, pellet, whatever it is, you have to also replace the hormones that are the precursors because they get depleted. So if you just replace testosterone, but you don't replace DHEA and pregnenolone, it actually has a negative impact.

Why do they get depleted? Because the body goes, oh, we have enough testosterone. We don't need to create the precursors for it. Probably part of it because testosterone comes from the precursors, so that's definitely part of it. I think the body is always looking for some kind of balance as well. So when something goes really high, it just wreaks havoc. But you have to remember, any kind of hormone replacement is not natural.

You're taking an exogenous hormone and you're putting it into the body. So it's going to be complex what the interplay is with anyone. The way you react will be different than the way I react in anyone else. You just don't know what the ramifications are going to be. So I'm not quite sure why there's an upstream depletion, but I think what you said is probably a good part of it. Right. So, yeah. Oh, I'm low on testosterone, so I'll just get a shot or I'll take it exogenously or I'll take growth hormone or whatever it is and I've solved the problem. As Americans, we always want to improve numbers on a piece of paper, right?

Whether it's our income or whether it's how much we're lifting in the gym or how many miles we've run. So hormones are no different. And guys get very competitive too. It's like sometimes they'll see their number. They're like, oh, man, my testosterone is 650. I feel great. And then they find out someone else has 800. They like well wait a minute how come you know how come that person has so much i go you just said you feel great you know so who cares what the other number

is this is what's wrong with mankind in general yeah this is the new this is the new uh like pissing contest or whatever you want to call it come on you were happy to tell you and tell someone else's number just like your income could be, it was like, oh, I make 300,000 a year, I feel great. And then you find out your neighbor makes 500,000, all of a sudden 300 is not enough now. And what does it matter if all of your other hormonal levels are thrown out of whack or, you know,

that interplay isn't functioning properly. So you really have to look at it, and this is what you've done, and what I wanna kind of learn more about is go to the source, go to the origin. And in kind of an Ayurvedic perspective of understanding that the body works as a system and interplay of all of these systems

working together as a whole. And that when there's an imbalance, you can't just supplement to cure that imbalance, but you have to get at the root cause of what is contributing to that imbalance. Yeah, exactly. You wanna address the big picture and then supplements come into play supplementally. So with the big picture with hormones, you have to look at what are the

master control hormones? What are the hormones that have the most impact on everything else? Because testosterone, that's a downstream hormone. That's way down the line. It's not a master control hormone. So for both men and women, it's leptin, it's insulin, to some extent growth hormone, to some extent adrenaline, but definitely leptin and insulin being the most. And out of leptin and insulin, it's leptin. That's definitely the master control hormone. So we're all familiar with insulin and insulin resistance and the like, but let's talk about leptin. That's sort of the bastard stepchild of the master hormones. What does leptin do? Why is it important?

Leptin is our fuel gauge. So just like with our car, we don't have to wonder when to fill up. We know when we're low and we know when we're filled up. So you don't go to the gas station and just put gas in and then wait for it to overflow and say, okay, I have enough now. And you don't wait until you run out of gas on the side of the road to realize, okay, I should have filled up. So what leptin does is it's in fat cells and it communicates with the brain. It lets us know when to stop eating. So when you

start eating a meal, leptin starts rising. And when leptin reaches a certain point, you get the shutoff signal, meaning that you've derived enough nutrition from the food you're eating. Anything that you consume more is going to result in nutrient spillover. You go beyond this, it's just going to go into stored body fat. So shut off right now. Now, people are hearing this going, man, that sounds like an incredible thing to have. I don't have it, but it sounds like a great thing to have. If I got more leptin, then I wouldn't eat as much. So I'll just supplement with leptin. Well, that's what people start thinking. They go, well, how do I? I go, the thing is, is that people that are overweight, they don't have a leptin deficiency. They have a humongous amount of leptin production.

What they don't have is leptin sensitivity, just like insulin resistance. They have leptin resistance. So the leptin signal is not getting to the brain. The receptors are dysfunctional for some reason. Exactly. And that can be from stress. That can be from poor diet. You're eating so much garbage.

So much of what we eat is not even real food. Our body doesn't even recognize it as food. So it just wears out leptin receptors. They just get tired and weaker and weaker and weaker to the point where they don't respond at all. And now you just have this feeling that your stomach's a bottomless pit. It doesn't matter how much I eat, I'm not content. I can just keep going. Do you think that that's part and parcel of why people that have chronic obesity struggle so much with weight loss and keeping it off? Yeah, 100%. And the other thing with leptin that's really troublesome is that when you have leptin resistance, it lowers your metabolic rate. Because even though you're in this state of consuming excess calories to your brain, you're deficient.

So it's like, well, look, we're not getting the you're deficient so it's like well look we're not getting the nutrition we need so let's just go ahead and slow down all metabolic functions right so any energy that was going to be allocated towards growth hormone production testosterone dha is shut off because those are not survival hormones those are basically thriving hormones when you feel great you're in a position of luxury. It's like, yeah, let's get your sex drive up so you can go procreate. But they're not survival hormones. So now your body's going to conserve whatever energy it can just for everyday existence, just getting by. So now you're hungry all the time, and then you're tired all the time.

And then on top of that, even though you're eating more, yeah, exactly. You would think that when you eat more, your metabolic rate goes up. But when you have leptin resistance, that's not the case. So you're consuming more than you've ever had, and you're not burning any of it, and it's not being allocated properly to useful functions. And you're as hungry as ever. Yeah. And your body is telling you, I'm undernourished. Exactly. Because your brain can't see you in the mirror, right? So if you're overweight and you're in the mirror, you're looking at yourself going, okay, I have excess energy reserves everywhere. That's really what stored body fat is. It's just excess energy

in case a famine comes, right? In some ways, we're created to survive famine. So we store energy easily as a result of that. So I would imagine it's also not as simple as that. I mean, if you have a dysfunctional digestive system, if your gut, if your microbiome is screwed up, then you're not able to absorb the nutrients that you're getting, which might compound that problem as well. Digestion's a huge problem.

That's one of the ways to improve leptin sensitivity is most of us eat too fast. And I'm definitely guilty of that myself. You're in a hurry, you just gobble down something, you're barely chewing it. You really want to chew 30 to 40 times with every bite. But if you do that, it's going to take a long time to eat. But that's not a bad thing. Because I tend to be a big dinner guy. That's my biggest meal. And I have this huge plate, right? And sometimes you just want to get through it quickly so you can get back to whatever you're doing. Sometimes you're just thinking about dessert you're going to have afterwards.

You're going, let me get through this so I can get to that coconut ice cream in the fridge. So you tend to eat faster than you should. But if you slow it down and are more mindful, like Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, he has this whole philosophy of being extremely mindful when you eat. He goes, eating an orange can be a form of meditation. You just peel it back and just take pleasure in what you're doing. And if you're with people, why not pause, have a good conversation rather than everyone's eating

and looking at their phone the whole time. And what is that process of extending the digestion sort of time curve, what is the impact on that, on microbiome health? Well, two good things happen here, and I'll come right back to that. Two things happen. One, you're going to extract a lot more nutrition from the food you're eating. You need to have the saliva mixed with the food. So you're going to get way more, you're going to be way more energized. Two, you're giving yourself time so that you're not going to get that bloated feeling, that just worn down sluggish feeling. Like a lot of people have to take a nap right after they eat because they're eating way

too fast. You're not giving yourself enough time. Also, you're giving time for the leptin signal to get to your brain because you're eating so fast. Leptin is telling you to, you ate so much so quickly that by the time leptin told your brain to shut off, to stop eating, you've already gone way past the surplus point. While if you slow it down, you have time for that signal, the satiety signal to get to your brain. So you're not going to over consume either. It's one of the other benefits. That's one argument that's used against drinking smoothies.

Yeah. Yeah, I've heard that recently. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a certain faction within the medical community, the nutrition community, and even the vegan plant-based community that smoothies are no bueno because you really need to take that time to digest the foods you're eating. But the counterpoint to that for me is that as an athlete, like I'm not gonna sit down in the morning and eat a massive salad. Like I'm just, either I'm gonna get the nutrients in a smoothie or I'm gonna just not do it.

Exactly, exactly. And it's a great way to get a ton of super dense, high nutrient, high phytochemical foods into your body in an expeditious way. I'm definitely pro-smoothie. And the blending is sort of a digestive process. Yeah, it is, exactly. I actually think all the negatives that are brought up

are actually positives when it comes to smoothies. They go, it's pre-digested. Okay, that's good. Especially for someone who already has digestive stress. Now it's less that your body has to work. Unless weight loss is the priority, I suppose. Yeah, I think someone brought that up. I might've been on Joe Rogan's show.

I think Joey Diaz brought that up where he said that he stopped drinking smoothies because I think with something about blending the fruits, your body absorbs it differently than if you ate it whole. Yeah, I don't know about that, but I think there's a big difference between a smoothie that's packed with kale, spinach, beets, hemp seeds, flax seeds, blueberries,

versus the one that's all coconut milk and peanut butter. And you're taking in 2000 calories, like that's different, it's a different animal. So when somebody says a smoothie, that can mean anything. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I do what you said, I pack it with greens, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cacao powder, protein powder, flax seeds, hemp seeds. So for me, it's a very convenient way to

get a ton of nutrition in early in the day because like you, I'm not a big appetite guy in the morning. I get up, I want to get my day going. And then I think also in terms of consuming it too fast, what I do is I dilute it a little bit more than most people do. So it's probably about 64 ounces. And then I just drink one glass at a time. Right. I don't just down it all and then like, okay, time to get to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I think you can just take the same strategy I just mentioned there, just slow it down too. Just take one glass at a time, dilute it a little bit more. That's what I do. I'll do one glass and then I'll thermos the rest. And I just take it with me and I'll sip it throughout the morning. And it just keeps my energy high and it keeps the appetite at bay and it makes me feel

good. Some workouts I like being on an empty stomach, sprinting, for example. I do 10, 100 yard dashes a couple of times a week. And I've always found that that I like doing on an empty stomach. But if I'm lifting heavy weights, intermittent fasting doesn't work on that day. I'm not going to go into the gym and try to deadlift 500 pounds for reps and haven't had a thing to eat that day. This has not happened. All right, so back to leptin. So what are the things that,

let's say you have leptin resistance or you struggle with your appetite, like you're hearing this and you're like, yeah, that's me. How do we right that ship and get that regulated properly? Okay, so we'll talk about the quality of food in a second, but just a meal frequency planning, taking longer stretches in between meals is going to help a lot of people.

And it doesn't have to be extreme, such as an intermittent fasting where you sleep eight hours and then you don't eat for eight hours. So it's 16 hours without eating. Some people do great on that. They feel like a million bucks. Others, they're just, it's just not going to work for them. What you can do and what will work for everyone essentially is, let's say, three to four meals a day with at least four to six hours in between each meal. So let's say for the average person,

three meals a day. I mean, that's what most of us are used to, breakfast, lunch, dinner. So six hours in between each meal. What that allows is these insulin receptors and leptin receptors to have a break because when you're eating constantly, they're constantly working as well. So you increase the sensitivity in between meals with longer stretches. That's interesting. I mean, that cuts across the philosophy of just grazing throughout the day as opposed to sitting down for proper meals. Some people do well on that too, but those are generally people that don't have any kind of leptin resistance or anything like that. Those are athletes such as yourself, people those are generally people that don't have any kind of leptin resistance or anything like that.

Those are athletes such as yourself, people that are training really hard. It's a different story. So I think sometimes it's a mistake when people look at what athletes do. They're going, okay, so-and-so in the UFC eats five times a day. I'm going to start doing that too. You have to take into account they train three times a day, and that's their whole lifestyle rolling around that. I mean, you can probably make the more frequent meal approach work, But for many people, what they're going to find is if you miss one of those meals, you get a blood sugar drop, you get really tired now. You're basically making

your body less, you're making it more, you're never going to store body fat or not going as much because you're always focused on the calories that are coming in. And if you don't get one of those hits, then you feel the negative consequences. That's what I always found with myself when I did really frequent eating. Right. So in other words, it's trying to create a little bit of metabolic resiliency by taking these breaks. Right. Right. Exactly. And then, you know, several hours, you basically go to stored body fat in between each meal as well, because those are pretty long stretches. So after a couple hours, the hormones decline and you go, okay, we need to pull from stored body fat to keep our blood sugar level stable.

So now that's when another hormone kicks in the gear, ghrelin, which is a powerful inducer of growth hormone as well. And that's a hunger hormone that lets you know, okay, it's time to start eating again. But it's also good to experience a little bit of hunger in between meals. I'm not talking about ravenous hunger where you're ready to pass out, but just a certain level of hunger is not a bad thing. That's the other thing that a lot of us get paranoid about, especially those of us that grew up when I did in 80s and 90s, where you would read the magazine saying, look, anytime you have hunger, you're cannibalizing muscle tissue. When I first started doing the warrior diet, are you familiar with that? No.

Ori Hoffmeckler, he's the author of that. He basically made intermittent fasting fashionable before it became fashionable. So this is back in maybe 1998 or so. And he wrote about this going the entire day without eating or just having light meals, very light meals, such as a salad or a few nuts, but essentially a water fast for the most part. And then over-cons consuming in the evening and this this website t nation put this article about and at that time especially this is when everyone is deep into five meals a day seven meals a day some even more than that eight meals a day some would recommend waking up in the middle of the night and

having a protein shake right so when you have to go to the bathroom have a protein shake right there and down that go back to sleep yeah a lot of us did that because we're like, oh, cool. I'm going to get more muscle growth by taking that little protein shake hit, right? People really got crazy with it. But when I started doing his strategy of essentially no eating during the day, I just worked into that. It was amazing how much more energy you had initially, at least for me, because now you don't have to allocate any time towards eating. So you're just focused on other things. And I would find that I'm actually, I wasn't hungry. I would get hungry when actually, if I started snacking, then I would get hungry.

So it was actually easier for me to go the whole day without eating than it would be if I actually started trying, if I had to have a few light meals, that would make me more hungry. Now, I'm not saying this is the best way to go, but I bring this example up that you realize that your body is a lot more adaptable and resilient than we realize. You're not going to just cannibalize muscle tissue just because you went a couple hours without eating. Just like the whole narrative of post-workout nutrition, right? You're like, oh, if you don't get something in that window of opportunity, that 45 minutes, you know, that workout's a waste. And when there's the only study on it shows that if you get a meal within four hours of the workout, you get full recovery. So even that is just

clever marketing. And generally, it's usually coming from a supplement company. Yeah, it's interesting how these ideas get planted into our heads and become canon before we really fully understand what's going on and how they shift. Yeah, it was always, you know, within 30 minutes, that's your zone in which your body's most receptive to, you know, receive that kind of nutrition. Right. And now we're, I think, at the very beginning stages of people starting to understand the benefits of fasting, intermittent fasting, water fasting, and you're seeing all these people online who are trying different modalities and variations of this

and sharing their experience. And this is really a new media, alternative media, like YouTube sort of thing, right? Like we're not hearing a lot about this on the nightly news. No, not at all. But if you're online and you're paying attention to trends in health, this is forefront at the moment.

I mean, I know Tim Schiff, do you know Tim Schiff? The name sounds familiar. Ninja warrior guy. Oh yeah, sure, sure. He just did 35 days water fast or something like that. And he vlogged every single day of the experience. And I had Valter Mongo in here talking about the fasting mimicking diet. And there's Sachin Panda,

who's a doctor down in San Diego, who's doing a lot of incredible work in this area. And people are getting hip to this. And it's cool to watch people experiment with it and share the results. And I think there's still a lot that we need to learn about it. But this idea that you can't go more than three

or four hours without eating is insane, right? All of us used to have that. We're over-fueled and under-nourished like never before. It's like, are we starving or are we obese? Well, we're both. Yeah, exactly. Most people, the last thing you have to worry about is starving. You have so much excess energy that you could live off of that for probably a month, right? A lot of people probably could do the, I'm not recommending someone listening just go not eat for 40 days. You would definitely wanna do that under some kind of supervision if you do it at all.

But the fact that you can do it and survive that, that'll tell you something about the way we look at food is a lot different than reality really is, is that you miss a couple of meals, it's not the biggest deal in the world. Yeah, and I think we need to look at it from a broader context than just muscle mass loss or fat loss.

Like when Walter Longo was talking about how it stimulates tissue regeneration, stem cell growth. It'll kill cancer cells, but not, you know, but create, you know, brand new cells, healthy cells. And I'm speaking out of school and I'm an idiot. I don't know what I'm talking about. But there are very smart people that are looking at this and discovering that there are some pretty cool things that go on when you do this. Yeah, growth hormone goes way up when you fast. Insulin sensitivity improves a great deal too. There was a doctor on Karl Lenore's show, Superhuman Radio, and he said just one 24-hour

fast can reset your insulin sensitivity. So essentially, I don't know how this is just pervasive across the board or categorical across the board, but you can either get someone out of insulin resistance in a 24-hour fast or at least improve it dramatically. And that's just one 24-hour fast. And that's huge given that pretty soon 50% of America is going to be diabetic or pre-diabetic, and this is all about insulin resistance. This is something that they've been treating patients at True North for a long time. I mean, there are these clinics you can go to, and they put you on these supervised fasts for people that are either chronically obese or have these chronic health conditions,

and they see some pretty amazing results. Oh, yeah. So again, more to be learned about that. But all right, so back to leptin. Are there certain foods that we should be eating that can contribute to sort of making sure that our leptin receptors are functioning properly? Yeah, I think the more nutrition you eat, the less calories you actually have to consume. And the more nutrient-dense your food, the less energy you have to waste trying to extract everything you need. So when you eat, we both do vegan diets. So if you focus on a whole food, plant-based diet, where you're eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, legumes, nuts, and seeds, these are all really healthy foods that

are giving you a lot of nutrition without taking in an excessive amount of calories. So focusing on real food as much as possible. I always like having some kind of balance of macronutrients. I know some people say you don't need to waste any energy on that. And I don't think you need to be overly pedantic about it,

but I think it's a good idea to have protein source, a good low glyglycemic carbohydrate source, and some healthy fats at every meal. And that could be as simple as one of my evening stir-fries. It could be garbanzo beans with an avocado added in or hemp seeds or pistachios after I do the stir-fry, mushrooms, tomatoes, a variety of vegetables, put some spices on there. And now you're getting a balance. You're getting everything. Right. And so when the leptin is functioning properly, the levels are appropriate and the receptivity is there, what happens downstream?

Well, now you have energy. Now that leptin is thriving, you have all this excess energy. Your metabolic rate is doing really well, and you have energy that can be allocated towards other things, such as improving testosterone, improving DHEA, improving downstream hormones, because now you're more in a thriving state. And those are thriving hormones, in particular DHEA, which is the ultimate stress management hormone. And without optimal DHEA, you're not going to have optimal testosterone, even if your testosterone levels look pretty good compared on the range that people look at. It can still be improved dramatically with DHEA because DHEA protects testosterone from cortisol. Cortisol is actually an anti-inflammatory hormone.

We always hear about cortisol as a stress hormone, and yeah, that's what it does. But when you have inflammation damage, either from maybe poor food choices or you worked out hard, cortisol comes in as an anti-inflammatory hormone to address that inflammation. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. But the problem is, is that when you're always in this inflammatory state, you're always increasing cortisol. And if you're always increasing cortisol, you're not in an anabolic state anymore. DHEA is depleted. And without DHEA to protect testosterone, cortisol is just going to nullify your testosterone. And that's when you get into this depleted state of your sex drive is poor, your mood is poor, you feel like your body's falling apart, you're weaker. Instead of getting stronger at each workout, you're

getting weaker. That's the hole that I could fall in from time to time with the kind of training that I do and the workload that I shoulder and just family life and everything. Like I just fire on all cylinders and I'm just like, I'll get it done. I'll get out, I'll crush this huge workout and I'll go right into the workday and family and all of that. And on some level, I think it, this is totally anecdotal,

but it almost, I feel like it almost feeds my adrenaline. Like there's like- You, I can do it. Yeah, you become addicted to it. But then I get into this chronically depleted state. Right. And I don't know if that qualifies as adrenal fatigue, how you would define that. But I know that my hormonal balance gets out of whack

because I try to, I push myself too hard. I try to do too much. And eating a clean, plant-based, whole food diet is great, but that's not the whole thing. Oh, no. No, it's not the whole thing. And the thing also is there's nothing wrong with what you're doing. You're a successful, just sex-driven person, and I am as well. So there's nothing wrong with pushing yourself hard and wanting to achieve impressive feats. The thing is that you have to balance the equation.

So if I work out hard four times a week, I need to do some restoration activities too. I get a massage once a week. I started doing that maybe a couple of years ago. And once I realized the benefits of that, I'm not talking about just a little fluff down. I'm just saying she gets in there and works out problems. Like active release. Yeah, exactly. So any problem you created that week from your workouts is getting addressed. So it doesn't just build up. It doesn't multiply with successive workouts. I'll have days where I just go to a spa and sit in a hot tub, steam room, you know, just relaxation strategies, do joint mobility, qigong type stuff every day, go take long walks with my dogs, clear my head.

You know, you got to do restoration activities as well. So you can push yourself as hard as you want and you'll be fine. You just have to balance the equation with other things. I'm not so good at that part. I'm not the best either, especially that pneumonia story, I'll tell you that. But because I had such a negative experience with that pneumonia, now it makes me, I realize the consequences of not balancing this equation. And also as you get older, I'm 44 now and I still like to lift heavy weights and I still have goals I'm pursuing. So I can do those. I make sure that my hormones are optimal or they're doing well. And then I make sure that the restoration is there so I get the optimal recovery. And how do you gauge that? Through blood work?

For hormones, there's two different things you can do. You can do saliva work and you can do blood work. Now, you'll hear pros and cons from different experts. Some will say they prefer saliva because it tells you what's going on on the tissue level. Others will say they prefer blood because it's more accurate. They say, oh, saliva is not accurate because we concentrate a lot of hormones in our saliva as it is. So you're going to get two schools of thought there. The blood work, everyone is used to doing that. That's standardized. The problem is that if you get your testosterone measured via blood, for example, it tells you what's floating around the bloodstream. It doesn't necessarily mean

anything useful is happening, though. Is it getting picked up by androgen receptors? And you may have a lot of testosterone floating around the bloodstream. That actually may be a negative thing. It may be so much floating around the bloodstream because it's not getting utilized at all. Because those of us who work out hard, we often have low levels of free testosterone. Yeah, so explain the difference between total testosterone and free testosterone. Okay, total is basically your life savings. This is the total amount of testosterone you're producing. Free is what you actually have access to. So you can imagine, let's say you have a million dollars in the bank, but you can only pull out 100,000.

So you have access to 10% of the million dollars. Free testosterone tends to be low with people that work out hard and in particular, professional athletes. Now, there's a couple of reasons why. One, people will say, well, they're under a lot of stress and so forth. Okay, that's part of the reason. The other reason is that androgen receptors are pulling it out of your bloodstream to be utilized by the muscles, liver, cells, et cetera, brain, so that the free level may be low because you're actually utilizing it, so it's not just floating around the bloodstream.

Right, so an indication that you have low free testosterone isn't necessarily determinative of anything. Yeah. So you don't want it to be at the very bottom of the scale. Let's say the scale is eight to 25. You want to be around 12, 13. Now, if you're lower than that, it may be because you had a hard workout the day before. Maybe you didn't sleep well the night before. There could be a lot of factors. So if you want to get a more accurate number, you could just take a week off from training, rest up a little bit, and then see if your free level is low under that circumstance, then you have some problems. You want to make sure that you put some things into

play to increase it. But if it's at a good range at that point, and then let's say it's lower during a week when you're working out really hard, then it basically just supports what I just said. It's lower because it's being picked up. It's being utilized. And then the other enemy people often bring up is sex hormone binding globulin. They say, oh, your free testosterone is low because sex hormone binding globulin is attaching to it and making it inactive. And that's completely incorrect too. I mean, sex hormone binding globulin is a transporter hormone. So it's what takes testosterone to places where it can be utilized.

So having good levels of that is not necessarily a bad thing at all. In fact, it's a sign of a good thing. And then you have to ask yourself, why would we have a hormone whose sole purpose is to make another hormone inactive? You know, we just produced six hormone-binding globulin for what purpose? Oh, so we can't use testosterone. Well, that doesn't really make sense. But now people understand it more as a transporter hormone where it's actually attaching to testosterone and taking it places, not making it inactive.

That's interesting. And so when you get blood work done, does it tell you like this is your free testosterone marker and this is your total testosterone? Yeah. And so what does it mean if your total testosterone is low or high? Okay, if your total testosterone is low or high? Okay, if your total testosterone is low, that means you're not producing as much as you should be producing.

Now, some will say the total doesn't matter, it's the free that matters. And that's not true either because the more total you're making, the more free you'll be able to actualize. You know, if my total is only 200, how much of that am I going to be able to free up to even utilize? You're only going to be able to free up a small percentage. So the higher your total, the more opportunity you have to benefit from utilizing more of the free testosterone. I see. And so what contributes to low testosterone? Stress is number one. 100% is stress. And most guys are pushing themselves so hard that you're in this stress state all the time. And every time cortisol is going up, your testosterone is going down. That's just the way it goes. So stress is the number one thing. And like I said, it's not even, I should say,

it's not even so much stress. It's just not balancing that equation. You can push yourself hard. There's no reason not to. So a lot of times when people hear me talking about this kind of stuff, they're saying, what do you recommend? That I just sit around and do nothing? I go, no, of course not. I work out hard. I push my business hard. I have goals. I have a lot of different nonprofits I like to support. I want to put myself out there and make things happen. I'm just going to give myself the tools. I'm going to take supplements like I've designed. I have a natural testosterone booster, which is amazing for athletes because anytime you're working out hard, your testosterone is going down. It's not going up from your workouts. So if worst case scenario, it's going to keep my

testosterone from going down, best case scenario, it's actually going to go up while I'm in this adrenaline state, while I'm working out hard, while I'm pushing myself. So that's where supplements come into play. Sleep is number one. If you want to improve your testosterone and growth hormone, you got to get sleep in. And I like to get at least eight hours of deep sleep a night. And my lifestyle is organized in a way where I can do that. I work at home. I don't travel much anymore. So even if I stay up late doing whatever I'm doing, whether it's playing cards on the strip or just working on my business at home,

I can get eight hours in, no problem. You can sleep in. That's the most important thing. Yeah. No kids or anything like that at home. Dogs wake me up. That's one of the things that becomes an increasing struggle for me.

And I don't know whether it's just age or whether it's something I'm not doing properly, but no matter what time I go to sleep at night, I'm pretty much gonna wake up at the same time in the morning. Yeah, a lot of people are like that. And that gets earlier and earlier as I get older. And so it becomes incumbent upon me to be more and more diligent

about making sure that I go to bed early, because if I go to bed early, then that's the best chance I have for getting eight hours. Right. And also having a diligent pre-sleep routine. Yes, that's very important. Which I give myself like a C. You know, I'm pretty good sometimes. And then, you know, it's like I'm out late. I just get home and I go right to bed. I go through phases. There's a really good program. It's a meditation program I like. It's

called Holosync. I don't know if you've ever used that. And you can download these programs into your phone and then you can play it while you're sleeping. They have one that you listen to before you go to sleep, right? It gets you relaxed. And then you put one on while you're sleeping. So it just stays on the whole time while you're sleeping. I've done certain things like that. Are there certain tones that are supposed to trigger brainwaves? Yeah, I forget what it's called. Binaural or something like that. I forget exactly the terminology, but that's what it's supposed to do. And you definitely feel like something's happening. It could be totally psychological. It could just be a total placebo effect, but you feel like something's happening in a positive way.

You just get more relaxed. Maybe it's just the fact of focusing on just that. You put this meditation in some headphones and you just sit there and listen to it. Maybe just that act alone is relaxing because you're not looking at your computer. You're not talking to anyone. You're just focused on the moment right there. But that kind of stuff makes a difference because I'm not a good sleeper either. I'm not someone who can just watch four hours of TV and then just go right to bed and just shut it off. Or I can be really active and then shut it off. I have to go through down phases where I get into a relaxed state. And then the challenge for me is falling asleep and then staying asleep because I wake up really easily. Any little thing wakes me up. And then

I take a long time to fall back asleep. So I'm getting better. I'm getting better at this. Taking magnesium before bedtime, I don't want to plug every single one of my products. No, but you have like a magnesium oil, right? I have a transdermal magnesium and zinc and MSM. And the MSM acts as a permeability agent to help get the magnesium and zinc more into the skin. But magnesium through the skin absorbs better than taking it orally, especially on the cellular level. And people will find that if they put on maybe an hour before they go to bed, you just start getting some muscle relaxant too, magnesium. And a lot of people who work out hard are magnesium deficient. And magnesium is crucial for testosterone, free testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin sensitivity.

And we get a lot of it through our food, cacao and hemp seeds. I'm a big hemp seeds guy. You get a ton of magnesium in there. But some supplemental on top of that. Some supplements, I think, just to give yourself some insurance, whether it's mine or another option, some zinc, magnesium, B vitamins, certain things I think are worth adding on top of the equation just to make sure. No, I do like magnesium powder in warm water or tea. Oh, the Epsom? Oh, yeah, just drinking, yeah.

Like the calm, it's called calm. Yeah, I think that's magnesium citrate. That's great. Is it? And so is there an added benefit by doing it transdermally? I think you get a better absorption rate, so it's gonna be more impactful. But ZMA is a supplement that many people use and it works well.

If you're taking an oral magnesium supplement and you find that it's helping you relax and it's working well for you, then keep doing it. Does it have something to do with melatonin regulation as well? Melatonin being one of the other master hormones, right? Yeah. Yeah. It definitely helps with melatonin production. Magnesium is important for that as well. Something about putting magnesium through the skin also improves DHEA more than taking it orally. There's some kind of enzyme

in the skin that's activated. So that's one of the other benefits that's interesting. Yeah. It's not quite clear. It's not quite understood a hundred percent, but there's definitely a difference with the DHEA production via transdermal magnesium versus oral magnesium. On the subject of DHEA, I mean, that's a big one that people point to if you're vegan. Right. Well, you know, if you're vegan, like good luck, you're gonna be screwed with DHA. With DHEA? Okay, I've never heard of that.

You haven't heard that before? On a vegan diet? I've never heard, I've heard people say, oh, you're not gonna get testosterone. People throw that around, whether they know what they're talking about or not, I don't know, but they're like- That's never their first thing that's present.

Oh, you're a vegan? What about your DHEA levels? What are you gonna do? It comes up. Well, once you've knocked off the other, you know, ideas like that, it's down in the pecking order, but I've heard it come up before. Well, like Joe Rogan made a point when he interviewed Louie Simmons. Now, I love Louie Simmons. I think he's the best strength coach out there, powerlifting genius. But he was talking to

him, and I don't know why it even came into the conversation because Louie's not a vegan or anything. But Joe said, oh, a lot of these vegan bodybuilders take testosterone, you know, because they're not going to, they don't have enough saturated fat in their diet to get the testosterone production through food. And that's incorrect. It's incorrect literally, but it's also incorrect for other reasons. One, there are sources of saturated fat if we feel we need it, coconut oil, cacao, so forth, right? But you don't need saturated fat to fuel this hormone chain. You know, any healthy fat will do it, whether it's olive oil. If you don't want to take oils, just get whole food fat sources as well. So whether it's hemp seeds or pistachios. Every food has some fat in it.

Yeah, exactly. And even if we do need saturated fat, it has some of that as well. And I don't think you need saturated fat to fuel this hormone chain. I just think you need good fats in general, whether it's flax seeds, hemp seeds, cashews, it doesn't matter. So you don't think being on a plant-based diet has any deleterious impact on your body's ability to produce, regulate, whatever the proper terminology is, DHEA, and then there's DHA also? DHA is a, that's an essential fatty acid metabolite. And that's an interesting discussion too, right now fish oil is all the rage, right? And I'm not a big fan of fish oil at all.

I think fish oil is at best it's not causing any problems. At worst it's causing problems and I'll get into that. Fish oil is full of EPA or DHA and EPA, right? So these are downstream essential fatty acids. That's all fine and good. But if you take too much of these, it does lower inflammation, but it does so by suppressing the immune system. So unless you have an autoimmune disorder, that's not something you want to do. You don't want to suppress your immune system. Rather than suppress the immune system to lower inflammation, let's lower the reason for inflammation to be high in the first place. Let's avoid inflammatory foods, let's avoid inflammatory habits, et cetera. And then if you want to lower the need for

inflammation, you take systemic enzymes. That lowers inflammation, C-reactive protein in particular, which is a blood marker of inflammation, way more effectively, in my opinion, than fish oil does without the negatives. So suppressing the immune system is not good. And then thinning the blood too much is not a good thing either. So I think high dose fish oil is problematic. You have to remember, fish oil used to be something people threw away. It was a garbage byproduct of that industry. And then all of a sudden it's like, hey, we can make money off this thing. Yeah. I mean, it's been hyped as this panacea. It's interesting. That's a similar story to how whey protein came about also. Oh, yeah. Exactly. How they're discarded. Exactly.

The product that they turned into this mega billion dollar industry. Yeah, exactly. There's a guy named Brian Peskin. He'd be great on your show. I'd love to get him on my show too. He has researched this topic of essential fatty acids exhaustively. And he doesn't have a vegan bias. And I'm bringing that up because he is very anti-fish oil and he's very pro plant essential fatty acid sources such as flax seeds, hemp seeds, et cetera, because he goes, you have alpha-linolenic acid. And what that is, is a parent's essential fatty acid, meaning that it can convert into DHEA and EPA, but not the other way around. And you will convert ALA into the downstream metabolites as needed. So it's basically regulated well, where as you needed that conversion, it'll happen.

Women actually convert a lot more, especially if they're pregnant, because the baby needs. EPA and DHEA are important. I don't want to diminish their importance, but you don't necessarily need to supplement with them to improve those levels. If you get parent essential oils, you're going to get the benefits of ALA plus the downstream conversion into EPA, DHEA as needed. That's interesting. If memory serves me, I think it was Chris Kresser on Joe Rogan where they were talking about this. I don't know if you saw that episode.

I don't think I saw it. I know who he is, of course. I think Chris was saying something about, and I'm sure I'm butchering this and getting it wrong. And I like Chris. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a good guy. And he really knows a lot about a lot of stuff. Right.

And I like him personally. But if I recall correctly, it had something to do with the inability of somebody on a vegan diet to properly or efficiently do this conversion process that created problems. Well, I mean, even if that's the case, there's still options, marine algae, there still are options that are vegan that are sources of DHA, EPA. Michael Greger did a video on fish oil and sort of debunking some of the, you know, panacea hyperbole around it. And he was saying that even, like they tested a whole variety of like the cleanest, the supposedly cleanest versions, and they still found some pretty high levels

of mercury toxicity in them. So even ones that were saying like were mercury free still tested. Right. So it's always advisable to use an algae-based one. Yeah, I think so too. Exactly. So if you're going to go that route, personally, I don't even think that's necessary unless for some reason you've done testing and you find that you're really deficient in DHA, EPA. I believe there are tests for that. There

are essential fatty acid tests. But you don't think that's really where we should be focusing? I don't think so. I'm always focused on what the big picture is, right? When it comes to weightlifting, I focus on compound exercises. When it comes to hormone optimization, I focus on what are the master control hormones that have the most impact. The downstream is important as well, and we should address that, but let's focus on the big picture, and then anything we need to do supplemental, we can get into. I wanna go back to the big picture master hormones, but we touched on testosterone

and I wanna just kind of see that through. Sure. So a lot of guys, you know, I'm 51 now, I'm gonna be 52 soon. A lot of guys in my age bracket are like, well, my testosterone is low. And that's just because that's what happens when you get older. Right.

Or I'm genetically predisposed to low testosterone. And this is just is what it is. And my doctor's recommending hormone replacement therapy. I know a lot of guys that are doing this right now. So again, this is something that's specifically focused on just this one downstream hormone. But what do you say to the person who says, look, I got low T, there's nothing I can do about it. It just is what it is. Well, one, if you're going to go that route, that's fine. That's your choice. But just make sure you're working with someone like Dr. Maura Gordon, someone very knowledgeable

or not Dr. Nick Delgado, people that know what they're doing so that they can make sure you're working with someone like Dr. Maura Gordon, someone very knowledgeable, or Dr. Nick Delgado, people that know what they're doing, so that they can make sure that you're getting the full benefits of hormone optimization, not just replacing testosterone. Make sure everything else is working in that orchestra. You're probably going to have to replace a few other hormones too, pregnenolone, DHEA in particular. But if you focus on regulating the master hormones, the downstream effect should take care of itself. I think so. I mean, certain people though, there's a couple of things. One, you know, at a certain age-

I mean, T is gonna go low when you get older, right? Yeah, at a certain age, there's gonna be an inevitable decline. So then you have to ask yourself, okay, I'm 60 now. Like, you know, a lot of people come to me, they're going, look, I'm 70. I've been diagnosed with low testosterone, but I don't wanna shut down my own production. I go, well, look, you're 70. Your own production is shut down already.

Yeah. The store has been closed for a while. Your production is very poor. Let's be really honest there. And how much time do you want to waste trying to figure out how to get it back naturally, even if that's even possible? And I've had older people use my natural testosterone booster with great results, but a lot of people that are at a certain age, it's just not going to come back to a level that's good for you. Because here's what I mean by that also is you may be 70 and your total testosterone is 500, and that's considered a pretty good number. But for you to feel your best, this person in particular, they may need to be at 800 or 900 to feel perfect,

where their sex drive is good, their mood is good, and they just feel like taking charge of the day. Now, can that person get back there naturally? Let's take a look at what's going on in their lifestyle before we answer that. Are they sleeping properly? If the answer is no, then okay, let's improve your sleep. Is their diet poor? All right, let's improve that. How much stress is going on in their life? Let's improve that. You can try to improve all those other things and then see what happens. Or you can have the attitude of, look, I don't want to change anything else. You know, just give me the testosterone. Yeah, that's most people. They don't want to be told that they have to modify their lifestyle habits.

I had a friend who had high cholesterol and the doctor's like, look, we can either change your diet or we can get you on Lipitor. It's like, okay, I'll just take the Lipitor. Of course. Yeah, there's a reason why that drug is so successful. But at some point, though, you're going to be doing everything right and it's still not going to be working in any avail. And that doesn't necessarily mean you need testosterone replacement. You may need to try something like Clomid, which is a fertility drug that Dr. Mark Gordon's been using with a lot of his patients.

And he has them do 50 milligrams every third day. And this is basically a, it's an anti-estrogen, but a very interesting anti-estrogen. It lowers estrogen in the brain, which signals your brain to produce more luteinizing hormone and FSH. So for some reason, the low levels of estrogen in the brain signals the testes to produce more testosterone. Now, they don't quite understand why this is the case. I have a theory. My theory is that for men, a lot of our estrogen comes from testosterone conversion in the estrogen, right, from the aromatase enzymes. So it's possible that low levels of estrogen detected in the brain, you may be trying to produce more testosterone so that you convert some of it back to estrogen but

that's just my theory that's a separate point but what clone made he'll he'll have before even going the trt route they'll try this because this drives up your own production of testosterone which is what you want to do right and also it fuels the entire because i asked him i go well what about dhe and pregnenolone does it improve those those as well? And he goes, yeah, that's what we've seen. So it's not just improving testosterone, it's improving the entire chain. So that's a more comprehensive solution. Now there's some that say there's some side effects. Some say that there's ocular potential eye damage that can occur, which he says is not the case, Dr. Gordon. That's only if you go way too high. So again, these are drugs. These are medicines. This is not something where you want to say, wow, that clement sounds interesting. Let me go buy some from offshore,

start playing around with it. Yeah. Listen, let's be very clear. Like, I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on the internet. I'm not- Yeah, me neither. It's like, I'm not recommending anything here. I think anybody who's listening to this needs to seek out the best professional advice they can get. Yeah. I'm more of a researcher and enthusiast. I'm just hoping to get people to start the conversation with themselves. So when they hear this, they go, you know what? That's not something I've ever looked into. I need to look into that. And I need to find someone that can guide me on that process. And I know plenty of people.

They're focused on, you know, building their strength or losing weight. And that's kind of where it ends. And, you know, like we said said at the outset, this is a complicated array of many systems that work together. And this system of hormone regulation doesn't get enough bandwidth, which is why I wanted to talk to you today. When we were talking with your crew, I go, you know, hormones have way more effect on how you think and feel than the other way around. So if you're depressed and you're thinking, okay, let me just think a certain way and I'll feel better. Or you can improve your hormonal profile and you'll automatically feel better. So that to me is just more efficient. On the subject of testosterone, is there a biological rationale or imperative as to why it would reduce as you get older? And what is the, if any, the long-term, is there a long-term negative implication

to taking it exogenously or therapeutically? Yeah, those are good questions. I mean, number one- People said like, you should do it. And it's like, well, you know, you're messing with this system. Yeah, and you are. What do you actually,

you're gonna repress your body's own ability to produce it endogenously. That's right. But what else is it doing if you're suddenly boosting your system with this incredibly powerful hormone? Well, apparently it has a lot of health benefits. It improves heart health and many other things. It improves brain health. Now there's more and more research that's coming out about the importance of testosterone with pushing off dementia, with any kind of decline in cognitive health. So I don't think there's

any negatives if you're doing it properly. So in other words, under doctor supervision. So if it's going too high and you're having these chemical reactions that your individual endocrinology is having a negative impact, you want to catch those things early. And that's what a good doctor will do. They'll go, okay, your liver enzymes are too high, so we need to reduce this. Or you're converting way too much to estrogen. That happens a lot. People take testosterone, their levels go way up, and now their estrogen goes way up too. So now they got to get you on something else to block that conversion. Of course. It gets complex, right? It's kind of like you go to the doctor and you go,

my cholesterol is too high. And then you get Lipitor. And then you go, you know, one of the negatives of Lipitor is you start losing memories and you start having a decline in sex drive or total shutdown of sex function. So now you got to go back and go, okay, my sex drive is not working. Okay, well, here's some Viagra. Now you're on two medications. Then you got to take something else for the negatives of that. So it can become – I'm not saying that TRT should be the first line of defense. I don't think it should be.

I don't use testosterone replacement therapy. I'm 44. My testosterone levels are great. But I don't think it should be ruled out as an option either. I think some people are in such a depleted state. Like, for example, these people Dr. Mark Gordon works with who have PTSD from head trauma. Think about how many of us have had head trauma that we just don't think about. I went snowboarding when I was 15 one time, and I had a really nasty fall. My head, boom, hit the ice. That could have had a negative impact on hormone production. A lot of us have been in car accidents where we had some kind of whiplash. It doesn't take much. You know, the brain is delicate. So if you have any kind of damage to your pituitary gland, you're not going to produce testosterone growth hormone naturally

and certainly not to the full benefit of your potential. Right, wow. All right, let's talk about insulin. Let's, you know, maybe we'll debunk a few myths. I mean, it's impossible to talk about insulin and insulin resistance without the subject of sugar coming up and diabetes. Right.

And your experience and your research and everything that you've learned, like what is contributing to insulin resistance and why is this a master hormone and how can we best ensure that we're regulating it properly? It's a complex subject because there's so many intelligent people that have different views on the topic. So I can understand why the average person gets confused.

You know, on one hand you have people like Dr. Nick Delgado who say that high levels of fat cause the insulin receptors to be weakened so that they can't process glucose properly. And now you have high glucose levels as a result of that. Yeah, I mean, Neil Bernard says something similar. Yeah, and Dr. Garth Davis, I think you've had him on the show,

or you know him of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He basically talks about it. He goes, it's not sugar is not the problem. It's your insulin can handle sugar. The problem is when you have way too much fat, and in his words, in particular, animal fat that dulls these receptors, now you can't handle the sugar.

Right. Now- And when these guys come out and say this, it provokes quite the response. Oh, yeah. Like, I love Garth. I love Neil. Like, I trust these people. And I know Garth, I love Neil, like I trust these people and I know like both of them

have done extensive research and I believe them, but that's anathema to the conventional wisdom that this is a sugar thing and a sugar thing only. Well, I think it's probably more complex than either one person's right or wrong all the time. You know, they may be right in certain circumstances while other people who talk about high sugar consumption being a problem, they may be right in certain circumstances, while other people who talk about high sugar consumption being a problem, they could be right regarding other people in

certain circumstances, meaning that some people could have pre-diabetes and insulin resistance because of high sugar consumption. That's just the way they're metabolizing it. Other people could have the same diet and not have any issues, right? So we're all very complex, different things. We're going to have different biochemical reactions no matter what the case is. I think the way to cut through all of this debate is to look at the common ground of let's focus on reducing garbage food because that has no benefit. Maybe it's not causing diabetes. Maybe it's not causing my. Maybe it's not causing my glucose, but it has other problems. Let's just cut it out anyway. Because the last thing we want

people thinking is that, oh, okay, sugar is not the problem. Well, I'll just cut back on fat and eat a lot of sugar. It's like, that's not good either. Yeah. I mean, to be clear, like I'm not saying, and I would never say that just eating sugar is not problematic. And when I say sugar, I'm talking about refined sugar. Yeah, we're not talking about fruits and stuff like that. Yeah, but can we at least say that this idea that you're going to get diabetes from eating fruit is... No, it's ridiculous. And I've seen people post stuff such as, oh, here's a candy bar, no difference between that and fruit. It goes so absurd. I had a guy at the dog park ask me, he goes, you know, I love eating a banana every day, but someone told me it's really bad for you. I go, come on. I go, banana? One banana is bad for

you? Let's get real here. So no, I think this carbohydrate phobia that society has right now, and I noticed that, at least when I lived in Los Angeles, I noticed that bread stores never made it, right? Like Great Harvest didn't have a location out here because everybody's on this low carb kick, or at least they think they are. It's kind of like the whole low fat craze. It never really happened. People go, oh, remember when everyone did low fat and everyone got fatter? And it didn't work. Yeah, but no one did it. Yeah, exactly. No one did it. What they did is added more low fat packaged foods to their existing high fat diets. Super highly processed snack foods. Nobody cut out all this fat and just drank orange juice and cornflakes. They did that on top of everything else. This whole low-fat craze has never happened. Now, I'm all about balance. It

doesn't have to be 30% this, 40% that, 30% that, but I think we all need all the macronutrients. Some are going to do better on more fat, less carbohydrates. Some, more carbohydrates, less fat. You don't know until you try. I find that for heavy weightlifting, I like to have a good amount of fat in my diet. And I don't keep track of this stuff. I just add it to meals and so forth. I just make sure I have good fatty sources. So I think that with insulin resistance, though, let's cut back on all the crappy food that we shouldn't be indulging in anyway. Let's start there because that's definitely not helping just as the way it causes leptin resistance. Leptin and insulin are intertwined. So if you have leptin resistance, you have insulin resistance. And if

you improve leptin sensitivity, you improve insulin sensitivity. So let's do all the same things that we just mentioned for leptin. Now, when it comes to carbohydrates, if you eat a lot of, if you're, let's say you're on a plant-based diet and you're eating legumes, nuts and seeds, fruits and vegetables, and you do it for 90 days, oil-free, and your blood sugar doesn't improve, which I would find hard to believe. I would think your blood sugar would improve a lot, but let's say it doesn't. Okay. At that point, let's start playing around because 90 days is long enough to see whether you should have an improvement. You probably don't even need that long,

but it's certainly long enough. But if you have a traumatic brain injury and you're stressed out and you're not sleeping, you can eat whatever you want. That's also true. See, that's the other thing that people don't think about is that it may not even be what you're eating. It could be everything else that's going on in your life. So that's where it gets complex.

All right, so cut out all the lousy processed food, of course. Longer stretches in between meals, just like that improves leptin, that improves insulin sensitivity. Intermittent fasting improves insulin sensitivity a great deal as well there. So you may find that your blood sugar improves a lot. Now you have to be careful, especially depending on what kind of diabetic you are. Some, if they go too long without a meal, they can have a blood sugar crash. Yeah, that causes a problem.

Yeah, that can be a problem as well. But let's just say you're somebody who's maybe teetering on the precipice of being pre-diabetic or perhaps you're even insulin resistant and you don't even know it. What are the downstream, setting diabetes aside, what are the downstream implications of just having suboptimal insulin receptivity. Yeah, when insulin doesn't work well, cortisol has to come in and pick up some of the slack to get glucose where it needs to go.

And then anytime you have an increase in cortisol, you're gonna have a negative impact on testosterone. So when insulin is not working properly, cortisol comes into play. And then when cortisol goes up, that has a negative impact on testosterone, DHEA, and so forth. Right.

So it's all intertwined in that respect. But all of the sort of top-line lifestyle protocols to regulate these master hormones seem to be the same, whether it's insulin or leptin or what are the other ones? Melatonin. Yeah, melatonin's important. Growth hormones is another one. Adrenaline. Adrenaline.

Adrenal fatigue's a big thing. We were talking about adrenal fatigue earlier where you're like i'm not sure if i have it well one easy way to know whether you have it is if you wake up tired let's say you slept for eight hours and you wake up and you're still tired and you don't you have to get that cup of coffee in to go and i'm a coffee drinker i enjoy coffee but my attitude is always if you need a cup of coffee then you have a problem you should skip it if you need a cup of coffee, then you have a problem. You should skip it. If you enjoy a cup of coffee, that's different. In other words, I wake up, I'm excited, I'm energetic, and then I love having a cup of coffee, kick back in my backyard and just get my day going.

It's a nice ritual. But that's not most people's experiences. Most people, they get up, they're tired. They don't get their motor going until they get a cup of coffee. It's kind of like imagine your car battery is dead every time you come home and you have to charge it in the morning to get going. Well, that's a big inconvenience, but that's what most people are doing. They wake up tired. They need some kind of stimulant, whether it's coffee or some other stimulant, Red Bull, et cetera, to get their day going. That's extremely problematic. And then what happens is your adrenals don't kick in because you want cortisol to be high in the

morning and low in the evening. So you're desperately trying to get the cortisol output so you can get through your day to no avail. And then it happens late at night, it finally kicks in and then you can't sleep, right? So you're stuck on this vicious cycle of I'm tired, I'm tired in the morning and then I'm tired all day. And then just when I think I can go, okay, fine, let me just wind down now. It'll be better tomorrow. Boom, it kicks in. Then you lie in bed and you're going, I'm just tossing and turning. So Charles Poliquin has a really good strategy for flipping this. He recommends licorice supplements. And what licorice does is it actually increases cortisol and conversion into a longer lasting cortisol so that if you take it in the morning, you get a cortisol boost.

And then you take it in the afternoon, you get another one. And then what happens is your cortisol naturally goes down in the evening as a result of that. So you're flipping it. And you only need to do it for about a week, right? A week to 10 days. Now, some will say, oh, that increases high blood pressure. It's like, okay, if you have high blood pressure, be careful. Again, even with supplements, you want to make sure you're getting checked out before you add anything to your regimen. So that's important.

And the other thing is they're going, well, I heard that increases estrogen. I was like, yeah, it increases estrogen in menopausal women. Like the alpha dude who's so terrified that he's going to get man boobs. You got to look at whether it's like, yeah, a study did show that it increases estrogen with menopausal women. Are you a menopausal woman? If not, then you don't have anything to worry about. Right. And it's a week to 10 days. You're not getting on it for a year.

I've used it many times when I go through periods where you just crash, right? Like you were talking about that. Sometimes you just crash from doing stuff. And then I'll wake up and I'm tired. I'm like going, man, I'm just exhausted., your arms feel really heavy. I hate that feeling. Your arms feel heavy. You just feel tired. You're like, man, I don't know how I'm going to get anything done today. And then whenever that happens now, though, I just have a bottle on hand at all times. Metagenics makes a really good one. It's vegan, no gelatin caps. And it's a

tablet. You just chew it. It tastes like licorice. I chew it just to digest it better. And one tablet in the morning, one in the afternoon for about 10 days, seven to 10 days, and then you're good. I like that. It flips it. You feel way better. I'm gonna try that.

Yeah, that makes a big difference. Charles Poliquin is also the guy who said you couldn't be a successful athlete on a vegan diet. But he also brought up my name in that question. Oh, he did? He prepped me. I heard you say it on London Real. Yeah, that's right.

I'm friends with Charles and he's been on my podcast many times. And I've always had a good relationship with Charles. I think he's a very smart strength coach. But he comes from that old guard of, you got to eat a lot of meat to be strong. And that's just what he's... See, the thing is, is that we look at professional athletes and we go, okay, they all eat a lot of meat. But is that the reason why they're professional athletes and performing at such a high level? These people are also very genetically gifted and they put in a lot of hard work and all that,

meaning that they could probably have crappy diets and still perform at a very high level. A lot of them do. Yeah, exactly. Exactly where I'm going. I would be shocked, I think. So we don't have enough professional athletes. We have a lot more now than previously that are on a vegan diet. But until we have a lot more, we can't say that it doesn't work or that this is a superior way to go because we don't have enough to go on.

Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, but it's changing. Oh, it's changing a lot. You're changing more and more and more. And I would say, like, it's a risk. Like if you're coming up, let's say you're, you know, 20 years old. Right. You're showing huge prowess and promise in your respective sport. You're being, you know,

you're being, you're the next big thing. And then somebody's like, well, you should go vegan. Like that's, that's right. That's scary. Like there's so, there's so much that you're wagering on that. Like how many people are willing to take that bet?

So it's only- Yeah, 100%. To date, it's only 100% to date. It's only been like the, the rare outlier who like grew up vegetarian or had the hippie parents or whatever who kind of just were brought into it and it felt natural to them. And so they don't feel like it's a risk, but that's why we need more examples. And I had, I just had Nimai Delgado in here the other day. Yeah. I just saw, I started following him on Instagram. That's a very impressive young guy. It's insane.

I mean, you cannot, I challenge you to find anybody with a more impressive physique. Oh, he looks great. I mean, I'm sure there's other, you know, but like- How old is he? Is he a pretty young guy? Do you guys remember how old he is?

Yeah, he looks like he's in his 20s. He's pretty young, yeah. Very impressive guy, though. I mean, yeah, and the sweetest guy. And he's never had meat, right? He's never had meat. He? He's never had meat. He grew up with Hare Krishna parents. Really? Okay, that's interesting.

Yeah, he's got a crazy, super interesting, there's a lot more than meat. He's had dairy then though, growing up in Hare Krishna. He did, and he went vegan a couple of years ago. So going totally vegan is new, but that's really when he stepped into bodybuilding in a big way. And the proof is in the pudding with that guy.

I mean, it's like that guy's physique is insane. Oh, it's amazing. And the fact that he's never eaten meat his entire life. Yeah, and that's important. It's impossible for you to look at that and go. Like all those arguments go out the window. And that's why I think he's really important

in this conversation. Oh, very. But he's one of the few and we're just gonna see more and more and more. And it's just gonna take a long time before we reach that tipping point where mainstream society just goes, okay, yeah, I guess you can do that.

No, definitely. And then going back to your point with a professional athlete, it can be very daunting to just overhaul your diet because let's say you're a UFC fighter, right? And someone comes along and says, hey man, I think you'd do great on a plant-based diet. And you go, okay, that sounds good. Let me give it a shot. And then you go to your next fight and you just get your clock clean, right? You just get your butt kicked. It's going to be hard not to think, well, what did I do differently in the last camp? Maybe you did a lot of things differently. Maybe your training was different. Maybe you had personal life problems going on. But the one thing that's going to stick out is, oh, I changed my diet. That's got to be what it is. Right. And maybe it was because it takes time for your body to adjust. That's the other point. I'm sure you hear this all the time. Like, well, I tried it,

but then, you know, I felt like lightheaded or I felt weak or I had bloating in my stomach. Yeah. And, you know, it takes the body a certain period of time to adjust for your microbiome to adjust to figure out like, oh, I actually need to eat more calories. That's a big thing. I think people think it's protein, but they're actually under fueled. Like, exactly. And, and this, you know, there's nothing wrong with a gradual, I know your, you know, your transition was gradual. Very gradual. Yeah. You know, there's very few people that flick this switch and go a hundred percent from one day to the next. And, you know, it's not surprising that, that the body, you know, needs an acclimation period. Yeah. Some people do. I know people that have flipped the switch and they do great. And then there's other people that have done a more

gradual approach. Myself, my mother is Indian. She's been vegetarian her whole life. So I grew up with her as a role model for vegetarians. She wasn't vegan, but it was there. And I ate meat growing up. And so, But when I was 15, I really got into animal rights. And then I knew I just had to cut this out. I just didn't want to go. What happened specifically? Well, a couple of things happened. I was 15 and I was really into a band called the Cro-Mags. And I know you know John Joseph. Cro-Mags are one of my favorite bands, period. It had a huge impact, not on just my diet, but I actually majored in religious studies because I really got into Hinduism through the Cro-Mags, even though I grew up with it via my mother, I really got into it.

So when I got into the Cro-Mags, the bassist, Harley Flanagan was the singer. John wasn't in the picture at that point. Right, right, right. There's a whole drama around that. And I'm friends with both guys, believe me. I know all about every facet of the drama since its inception. I know every narrative of it. Yeah. And John's one of my best friends. I love that. I like both guys. I don't, I'm not going to say negative, anything negative about either guy. I'm really good friends with Harley and I like John a lot. So here's the thing. I was reading this interview with Harley on the way to Kenya because my dad worked for the international monetary fund and we, we, he, he thought it was important for us

to travel internationally. So he wanted to take us out to Kenya to go to safaris and see animals and their natural habitat. Amazing trip. So on the way there, though, I'm reading this interview with Harley Flanagan, and he talks about how he was always very violent and aggressive and had all kinds of problems, and that giving up meat and eating a vegetarian diet and leading this Hare Krishna lifestyle really helped him. And then he said a line in there that really stuck with me.

He goes, look, we can't talk about peace and all that when you're eating a steak because that animal died in agonizing pain. You contributed to serious violence and you're trying to talk about peace. So that really stuck with my mind because I've always, even when I ate meat, I considered myself an animal lover, right? I had dogs and so forth. So I didn't really think about the hypocrisy of it until reading that. So that was the first seed planted. The second was when I was in Kenya and I saw all these animals in their natural habitat, and you can say, well, what about seeing a lion kill an animal? It makes you want to go vegan. It wasn't that so much. It just made me think about all the animals that don't live like that, that are in factory farms, that are being experimented on and so forth. So that was

another light bulb going off my head. And then I saw this movie, The Fly 2. And a lot of people, it's probably one of those forgettable movies from the 90s. I remember The Fly. I don't know if I saw The Fly 2. The Fly, the original, I didn't think it was all that great. The second one I thought was really good. And it touched on the topic of animal experimentation pretty profoundly. Whether that was their intent or not, I don't know. That's how you took it. You want to get someone interested in being anti-lab experiments on animals to show them that movie because there's a heartbreaking scene where this golden retriever is experimented on and mutilated. And you see this animal in agonizing pain and the guy who becomes the fly goes in and puts the dog down mercifully. But that made me start thinking also

about, okay, what actions am I doing that are contributing to laboratory experiments? So, anyway, I just wanted to change my lifestyle so that I'm not contributing to animal suffering. Now, I know it's impossible to not do it to some extent, just being alive, right? So, I'm not delusional to think that I'm no longer harming any animal in any way because I've been vegan since I was 20 years old, you know, 25 years now. But it's definitely lessening the negative impact dramatically. Yeah, it's an aspiration to create less harm and to kind of live in accordance with this principle of ahimsa that comes from, you know, the heart of Krishna. Yeah, that's the other thing too. Hinduism and Sufism in particular really resounded with me.

When I got into college, I really got into those things. But when I first became vegetarian, my mother recommended that I just keep eating fish and cut out all the other meats, but keep fish in. Your vegetarian mom, your Indian mom. She was eating some fish because of my dad's influence at the time. So that was kind of what she was doing, that whole pesco-vegetite thing. And I was like, okay, that's sensible, a gradual thing.

And then when I was 18, I cut that out, but I was still eating eggs and dairy. Not much. I was in college at the time, but I would have it. And then I got some literature on factory farming from PETA or some other organization. I forget which one now. This may have been when I was 20 at Lewis and Clark College. I was out there for a year. And that stuff is horrible.

That's heartbreaking stuff to watch. So I don't know how anyone watches that and then feels good about eating a pig or anything. It's tough. Either you avert your glance. And why do we avert our glance? Like, why do we, like, we'll like wait in line to go see a violent movie.

But if you flash like an image of somebody beating a goat or, you know, like, or a cow or a sheep, we just, I don't wanna see that because- Yeah,, like, or a cow or a sheep. We just, I don't want to see that because- Yeah, exactly. I don't want to think about that. We're all inherently compassionate. And if we really take a moment to look at that, we'll realize that we're not living in accordance with that compassionate disposition that I think we all have. And that creates internal tension and anxiety. So it's better to like, well, I don't want to look at that. And then I can just keep doing what I'm doing. And I don't have to wrestle with that discrepancy, that internal- Yeah. Changing anything in your life can be difficult, whether it's a job you

hate or a self-destructive relationship or whatever it is, any kind of change can be difficult. Even if it's something that you hate, you're used to it. So it can be difficult to transition from that. And sometimes we hear arguments now of like, oh, vegans are killing more animals than anyone else because look at all the deforestation that has to be involved to grow these crops. And they forget the point that the majority of crops are grown to feed the billions of animals

that are killed for slaughter. That's the thing. Not the 1%. It's conveniently overlooked. Yeah, not the 1% of the population that's vegan. Yeah, we took all of that land that's now being used to grow crops as feed for these animals, we would free it up for humans.

It's a huge thing that doesn't get addressed. The other argument that kind of comes up, and I've heard Joe say this a number of times, and I think he's sort of aiming it more at the sanctimonious vegan. Oh yeah, sure, and that's valid. Who sort of stands on a pedestal, but he'll say, look, if you're eating a vegan diet, but you're eating grains

or you're eating conventionally grown crops, like the threshers and the way in which all of those crops are harvested kills all these rodents and these insects. It's like, yeah, it does, right? It's not about a completely harm-free life. It's about reducing your footprint and your connection to that harm.

So again, it goes back to the aspiration. It's like, of course, we're not living karma-free. Oh, no. I don't, you know, it's not my place to judge anybody's lifestyle and stand in, you know, in reckoning of that. Like, this is just what works for me. And if you wanna hear about it,

I'm happy to talk to you about it. That's the best philosophy. And I think it's, you know, what's interesting about you and your journey with all of this is that it's not that you hide that you're vegan, but you don't put it out front, right? And so there's a lot of, like people come to you, they wanna learn about kettleball exercises,

they wanna learn about fitness. And then it's not until they're totally on board and invested in you and they've learned something. And then they find out like, oh my God, he's vegan. I know people have known me for years. They didn't realize. And it's, yeah, it's not, and that's a good point. I'll bring that. So I'm interested in why you, yeah.

Yeah, sure. So when I first got into the business, I was, I wanted to be a strength coach and train people. I didn't necessarily come in saying I'm a vegan strength coach. I'm just a strength coach. Right. And that allowed me to reach an audience that someone who identifies himself as a vegan strength coach is not going to, because once you say that, now people think, okay, I have to be a vegan to follow his information. His training system is only going to work for that. So that, so it's just- Or he's going to hit me up with all this propaganda and I'm going to have to deal with it. Yeah, exactly. Anything negative associated with vegan is going to be... Now, I did write articles about being on a vegan diet for magazines and on my website. So it's always been something that's out there. And people that know me know that I donate a lot of money to different charities and so forth to help people and animals,

not just animals, but kids that are being exploited in sex trafficking. One of my favorite organizations is Project Child Safe that helps kids get out of that world. So it's never been something that I don't have a tattoo on my chest and show it proudly, but it's something that I've never hidden either. This is not something that I use as a number one selling point. I kind of like the idea of someone gets into my information, like, wow, this guy's badass. Look what he can do. And then they find out like, whoa, he's vegan too? Then I think it's really impactful. Where if I led with vegan, a lot of people may not even look at the message. They're like, oh, I don't even want to see that.

Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. It's got to be, I mean, I'm sure you've been in situations where that realization occurs and they're right in front of you and you have to like, you know, like deal with that, you know, as it's like dawning upon that. But, you know, honestly, when I was in this, when I got into the strength world and I started making a name for myself, it was interesting because in some ways I would feel like imagine someone, imagine a black guy who has never been around racist people and all of a sudden you are, but those racist people like him for whatever reason. So even though they're racist, they're like,

oh, you know, we like John. Let's just keep him in the fold here. Sometimes I often felt like that because I would be around all these people that are eating meat and I'm the one vegan guy at the table and people are, these people always, these people had very negative views about the vegan diet. Like, oh, that can never work. You know, Mike's just different.

No, Mike's cool. And I don't, all these vegan idiots always talking about this. I can't stand those people, but Mike, you're cool. You know, you're fine. So I often felt like that odd man out type thing there. What does Poliquin tell you? Poliquin and I have never discussed, he doesn't tell me anything. In fact, he wrote a very nice article saying how much he respects me because he's not a fan of kettlebell training either. He thinks it's bad for the body and that kettlebell swings are going to mess up your back, which I of course disagree with, but that's what he thinks. And, but he wrote this article saying, Hey, I really respect Mike because he does a lot of charitable work and he's written some good articles on strength training. I'm not a fan of kettlebell training. I'm not a fan of kettlebell training.

I'm not a fan of the vegan diet, but you know, he makes it work. You know, it's always that kind of narrative. It was like, he makes it work. No, I find that as well. Like in the more kind of things that I do as an athlete, the more you become the outlier exception. When you're doing it from a place of like,

well, I'm trying to show that like anybody can do this or whatever, but then it just, it isolates you even further. I've had a lot of people that have gone vegan recently and a large part of it was just my example. And they also conveyed to me that they appreciate that I never pitched them on, hey, you shouldn't be eating that way. You got to eat this way. But they were watching. They're going, okay, what's he doing and why is he doing it? You know, it was terminating in their mind. So I think the most powerful message you have is your example. You want to talk like I have this motto, live life aggressively, right? Which is take charge of your life.

Now, a lot of people, that message resonates with a lot of people, but the only reason why it does is because I actually do take charge of my life. I live in a way that embodies that motto. If I didn't, that motto wouldn't mean anything. So if I'm healthy and strong and vital and passionate and then I'm also on a vegan diet, people look at all those things. They go, man, I want to be like him. It's like, oh, he's a vegan diet too? Huh, let me look into that a little bit more. So you're setting yourself up as a role model without saying you're a role model. You're just living your life and people find that impressive and they want to know more. They

get curious. Yeah. I think we're in this interesting time in our culture right now where we're having a conversation about gender in a way that we never have. And I think that brings up not just gender identity, but like, what does it mean to be a man? What does masculinity mean? And masculinity gets oddly conflated with dietary choice in a very strange way. And so- Well, you know, what's interesting on that is beer

is considered a very manly drink, right? Let's go get a beer. And beer is extremely estrogenic. The hops in beer is extremely, alcohol in general is estrogenic. That's the other thing I didn't bring up before. It's like every alcohol converts testosterone to estrogen. It doesn't matter what it is.

Yeah, you're big on like no beer, like in all your stuff, you're like no beer. I don't care. It's like, do not have a drink. No, I have a drink all the time. Forget about like resveratrol in the wine. Like, you know, alcohol is not your friend. Like you take a fairly hard stance on that.

I do take it pretty hard. I mean, I have a drink every once in a while. I'm not someone who never touches a drink. I don't have it at the house. You know, I don't have like a wine cellar at the house or liquor and so forth. If I go out to a concert or something like that or I play blackjack, I could all have like gin and tonic or something like that. I think someone who has high estrogen levels and low testosterone,

they should definitely cut out alcohol, at least until you get back into balance. So I just think it depends on where you're at. If you're fairly healthy and you're happy with your levels and so forth and you want to partake every once in a while, no big thing. We can partake in things that are not good for us as well, so we enjoy life a little bit. Not every meal you eat has to be healthy. I like vegan desserts too. Not everything I do is under this health umbrella, but most of it is so that when I stray on things, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't have a negative impact. If I'm having a couple of drinks every night, that's a problem. And a lot of people need a couple of drinks just to unwind.

So just the fact that they need it is a problem. And you're basically a functional alcoholic at that point. It's like, well, I just have three or four beers every night before bed. I was like, okay, cut it out for a week. Well, I don't need to cut it out today. I'm sure there's some negative downstream hormonal impacts of that. Insulin resistance is alcohol. It definitely contributes to that. And it definitely contributes to the conversion of testosterone to estrogen, adrenal issues. But again, we're talking about someone who's drinking a lot. If you have a drink or two,

if you have even one drink a day, that's not a big deal. If you have a couple in the weekend, not a big deal. Every time you go out on a bender though, let's say you get hammered, I mean, your testosterone growth hormone is shut down for many days. And that's not something that's hard to believe. Anyone who's ever had a hangover, you're not feeling in an optimal state at that point. Back on the subject of masculinity, I mean, you're somebody, you're a strength coach, you're just, you're jacked, you can deadlift 565 pounds, like you're throwing massive weight around, you were an early pioneer in this kettlebell revolution. You're a prime example of like this super strong, you know, alpha male type personality. And so what's interesting is how that fits into, like how that plays culturally in terms of you being a vegan and you being a

vegan for, you know, coming into it from a perspective of animal rights and compassion. So when you think about what it means to be a man, like what is, you know, where does compassion come into that equation and how do you think about that? Yeah, I think compassion is the most important form of strength. I look at compassion as a form of strength. And one of the other reasons why I have a lot of compassion for not just animals, but people in well, in particular kids, especially kids that have been through any kind of abusive situation. Like I said, one of my favorite organizations is Project Child Save. Yeah, how did you get involved with them and what do they do? Well, the founder of Project Child Save is Ty Ritter.

You'd love having him on your show. He's one of the most interesting guys I've ever met. And he has a team of former operators. So some of these guys are former Rangers, Navy SEALs, et cetera. And what they do is they will rescue kids at gunpoint from human traffickers, really bad people that are doing horrendous things to kids. So rather than try to go through quote unquote legal channels, they will go into countries- It's like dispatching a SEAL team. Guns blazing. Yeah. It's like an episode of 24.

Right. Yeah. It's like an episode of 24 when you hear the stories. So they will go in there, guns blazing if necessary. And a lot of times it has been necessary and get these kids out of these situations. So when you donate money to them, you're funding those missions. Is that legal? Can they do that outside of law enforcement? Here's the way law enforcement looks at it. They can't publicly support it, but privately they don't disavow it because they like what they're doing. Who doesn't want to see kids get rescued? I mean, it's kind of a vigilante thing though, right?

It is. Yeah. Yeah, it definitely is. It definitely is. And if they get captured in some of these countries, then they could be- But do those operations take place outside of the US or do they happen in the But do those operations take place outside of the US or did that happen in the- Yeah, they take place outside of the US. Okay, I got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes more sense.

Yeah, it's not a raid happening in Minnesota or something like that. I was like, how does that work? The FBI just turns the other eye to this? No, no, it's happened in the Middle East. It's happened in South America. Because that's where most of these, a lot of times it's American kids

that are being kidnapped and smuggled over there. Because blonde, blue-eyed girls are very high premium. Blonde blue-eyed boys are also very high premium, but any kid is a potential target for this. So sometimes you hear about American kids that have gone missing and the body's never found. And the reason or possible reason is because they ended up overseas somewhere in some kind of sex trafficking, slavery type situation. It's so hard to believe that this is actually going on. It happens a lot more than we would like. And there's a ton of money being made in this industry, which is why it's so pervasive. And these kind of pedophilia type people are everywhere. There's

people on this street. There's people in my neighborhood. They're everywhere. They infiltrate every facet of society, every ethnic group, every socioeconomic group, they're everywhere. They infiltrate every facet of society, every ethnic group, every socioeconomic group, every political group, it doesn't matter, they're around. And that's why parents have to be extremely vigilant with protecting their kids. And especially after having Ty on the show, I am always keeping an eye on kids as a way as in, who's this adult and why is this adult talking to this kid? Where are the parents in relation to this kid? Because these kidnappers know what they're doing and they'll snatch your kid in a heartbeat. And I see parents all the time that are on their phones,

just dicking around and their kids are playing 50 yards away and they think it's a safe neighborhood, no problem. But Ty will tell you that he has profiled pedophiles in person. And he said that they will say that they can go anywhere. You tell me what kid you want. I'll go get that kid within an hour. It's like, oh, you want a blonde, blue, white kid? Cool. I'll go to this neighborhood and snatch him real quick because no one's watching. That's terrifying. Yeah. So it is. It is really terrifying and it's extremely horrific. And when you hear the stories Ty has told about the kind of abuse they've seen when they go into these situations to rescue these kids, he told a couple of stories when he was on my show. And then he prefaced it by saying,

that's about a three on a scale of one to 10. And these were horrific stories. Kids brutally raped on video, you know, things like that. I mean, horrible stuff. But he didn't even, I don't even want to know what 10 is. You know, he told me three, I was like, that's enough for me to become a monthly supporter financially. I don't need to know number 10. Like, you know, I don't need to watch factory farm footage at this point to not want to contribute to that. I've seen it. So there's some things you just don't want to. So, so his organization had a real impact on me. And when you're giving money to his organization, it's not going to someone's Hawaii vacation or for him to get a new car. This guy barely pays his rent, Ty Ritter, because he

puts all of his own money into this whole thing. That's amazing. And you can tell, he's in his 70s now, so he doesn't go on the actual missions anymore. He's more mission control. He's the guy who plans out stuff, and then he has younger guys go in and rescue the kids. But you can hear in his voice that this is not something that he could turn away from. He used to be a security guy in Las Vegas, people like Steve Wynn and so forth, like that, right? And then he started learning about it. Sometimes kids would get kidnapped, and he would help get those kids back. And through that, he started learning about the larger picture of kids being kidnapped and put into sex slavery, human trafficking.

And he said that with my skillset, I couldn't turn away from it. But in some ways it's ruined his life because when you talk to him, he's, you can tell the emotional toll it's taken on him. You know, just dealing with his day to day. That's the tough thing. I mean, I had Mark Chang in here.

Yeah, I support his organization too. And it's the same thing. Like, I think he's doing better now, but when he came in here, he was in a rough state. And it's because he's so empathetic that he can't create a healthy boundary around his emotional state and what he sees. And it impacts him so deeply that he literally has devoted his life to this thing.

But it was, I don't know, I think he's, like I said, I think he's better now, but it was killing him. And it's something I've talked to Gene Bauer about also, like, you know, from Farm Sanctuary, like, how do you do that? He's like, you can't save all of these animals. It's just like, you can't save all the kids. You have to just, you know, do what you can do and find a way to make peace with that and be okay with that because you're in it for the long haul. Otherwise it will just, it will, it will devastate you and destroy you. That's what Ty says too. He goes, he used to keep track of what happened to the kids after he saved them, but some of their stories were really tragic and he didn't want that in their head. Meaning that some of them went on to commit suicide when they got

older and they just couldn't deal with what they've been through. Yeah, exactly. Some of them went on to commit suicide when they got older. They just couldn't deal with what they've been through. Yeah, exactly. Some of them have gone on to do really well, though. One lady in particular, she called him up when she was a grown woman and she has kids now. And she said that, you don't remember me, but you saved my life when I was a kid. You rescued me from these human traffickers. She's like, I'm always going to be indebted to you for that. And I was really glad that he got a call like that because I think it's really important for someone like him to get a call like that.

And just to know people support what he's doing. Because when he goes out and lectures about stuff, a lot of times people in the audience are like, oh, I don't want to hear this. You're like, oh, it's so funny. I don't want to hear this. They just freak out like that. It's like, that's not making the problem go away. This stuff exists.

So you want to have an attitude of coming back to masculinity is, to me, masculinity is being very compassionate, very taking charge of these things. So when I hear about that kind of suffering, I want to do something about it. Get them on the show, donate money, raise funds. My friend, Matt Brown, UFC fighter, he, and he's not an emotional guy at all. Anyone who knows him, he's a killer, you know, straight up killer. He's a great guy, but he's like a psychopathic killer when he's fighting. But he heard those episodes. He's like, look, I'm not an emotional guy, but those episodes had a real impact on me. And he's been supporting Project Child Save since, and he wants to do more. You know, so it's just one of those

things where a lot of people don't want to hear about this kind of thing. And I get it. You know, when I kick back to listen to a podcast, I don't necessarily want to hear about this topic either, you know, but at the same time. What are you doing? I thought we were going to hear about kettle balls. Human trafficking? Yeah. But at the same time, once you find out about this stuff, you have to do something about it. And for me, it's a little bit more personal because when I was five years old, I was sexually abused myself. We were living in Korea and my parents used to leave my brother and myself with a maid who acted as a babysitter. And we had some that were nice. But one lady was, I always equated her as, if you ever saw that Mummy Dearest movie with Faye Dunaway, she was like that kind of personality, right? Just this real hideous person.

And so I was abused by her multiple times. And when you're five years old, you don't know what's going on. You don't even know what to tell your parents about what's going on. First of all, you trust adults. You think that, okay, my parents left me with this person, so whatever she's doing, that's just acceptable behavior, even though it doesn't feel good. You know what's going on. It's not acceptable, but you don't really have the capacity to handle it at that point. So what happens is you suppress that deep. You bury that deep, and it's going to come out at

some other point. It's like a sleeper cell, right? It's always affecting you. It's in your subconscious mind, so it's always affecting your actions, but you're not aware of it. And that's what's dangerous. You didn't have a conscious memory of it. Not until much later. So once I was 28, and it was actually not long after that whole pneumonia incident, I was watching this movie, still one of my favorite movies now, Antoine Fisher. And Antoine Fisher went through a very similar thing. And in the movie, they show that scene where he's around five, six years old and he's in a foster home and he's being abused by this lady. And that had a

real impact. I mean, I kept on watching that scene over and over again. And there's a scene at the end of the movie where he confronts the people that abused him. And it's this really powerful, inspiring scene where he just says, you tried to break me. You couldn't break me. I'm still strong. And basically, I lived vicariously through that. And that's what I would have liked to have done to the person, to the lady who abused me. But I can't do that because I don't even know who she is, or she may not even be alive at this point. And it doesn't matter because I'm over it. But that movie left an indelible impression on me because one, it gave me total recall of what happened. And part of me starts thinking, maybe this didn't happen. Maybe it's

just a fantasy in my head. You know, maybe, who knows what's real or not? You're five years old. So I talked to my brother about it. I was like, look, I don't know if you remember this, but I just got these memories of, you know, this happening. And he got really choked up because he does, he did remember. He's like, yeah, I remember that. Is he older? Yeah, he's a couple of years older. And he has a lot of guilt because he fought her off. You know, she tried to do the same thing to him, but he was a couple of years older and he was a little bit more defiant than I was at this time. At this time in my life, I was very quiet and, you know, didn't have a large personality or anything like that. But my brother, Roger, fought her off. And I think at one point he bit her, you know, stuff like that. He really fought her off viciously.

So she left. She's like, okay, I'm going to leave him alone. So this is a good lesson for anyone who's being bullied. You know, you fight back, you're going to be left alone because bullies, they're cowards. They just want to deal with people that are not going to fight back. So with me, I didn't fight back because, like I said, I didn't know what you're supposed to do in a situation like that. You know, you're five years old. It's not like my parents ever said, hey, if anyone ever touches you inappropriately, you know, you tell us, you do this.

Nobody thought they'd have those conversations at that point. You just didn't think that was going to happen. So he has a lot of guilt in that he feels like he should have done something to protect me. And I've basically absolved him of that by saying, look, you're eight years old, man. You're a kid, too. What are you supposed to do? You don't even know what's happening. But that confirmed that it actually did happen. So, okay, now that I know this happened, it started making me think about, you know, why one of the reasons why I'm so compassionate to

animals is because I don't like seeing suffering of any kind, exploitation of any kind. So, if I see a dog suffering or if I see footage of animals suffering, that hits me on a deep level because I know what it's like to be in that position of being helpless, powerless. So, how did you ultimately work through this? Well, one is I talked to it to a lot of close friends. I just brought it up. And, you know, that wasn't, I didn't just call people up and be like, hey, guess what I remembered. It would just come up in conversations. And a lot of people have been through the same thing. And I'm talking about men here. I had many of my male friends have been through very similar things. Just about all of my female friends have been through some kind of sexual abuse. So it's really rough. And when you have

the courage to talk about it, everybody else does too, because nobody wants to bury this deep. You just don't want people to look at you a different way. So a lot of people don't want to bring it up because they don't want people to think that they're broken or that they're, you know, scarred in some way. But it reminds me of a story that I read about this World War II soldier where he died recently. There was a CNN story about him. And he survived the internment camps in World War II. But he didn't tell his family everything that happened to him then because he was a young guy and some things he just didn't want people to know about. But as he got older, he didn't want to die with this secret in him. And the secret is that he was raped repeatedly by Nazi soldiers. Not only rape, but it was a spectacle where people would rape him

while other people washed and leegiered and made fun of him and stuff like that. And he's a young guy. He's only, I think he was 17. He lied about being 18, Latino guy. And he carried this with him his entire life. And he never told his family because he didn't want, because they held him in such high esteem as this World War II hero and so forth. He didn't want to diminish that in any way. But at the same time, he couldn't keep this to himself anymore. So I believe he told either a family member or a therapist. He just got it out of his system. Of course, his whole family just was very supportive and didn't change how they looked in the middle, of course. They were very supportive and they were just glad that they could be there for him the way he was there for them so much in their lives. And then he just said that the idea of me dying without anyone knowing about this would have been more tragic than it actually happening.

And in Johan Hari's book, there's older women who say the same thing. They go, you know, I went through this and I grew up in a time where nobody talked about this kind of stuff. If you brought it up like, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't bring that up and keep that to yourself. But for them to actually able to unload that burden at some point in their life was really powerful for them. Right. So how did that, so you saw that and that impacted how you were going to deal with this or? I think my attitude is like when you, when you, when you be, when you go through serious abuse, you either have to embrace compassion fully or you're destroyed by anger. So my attitude was embrace compassion fully. You know, use this to be a stronger person, use this to be a better person

and be more caring, be more resilient, be more vulnerable, you know, just be a stronger person. Use this to be a better person. Be more caring. Be more resilient. Be more vulnerable. Just be a better person as a result of this. Don't be a worse person. Don't continue this cycle of abuse. Don't abuse people. Don't abuse animals. None of that stuff. Use this as a fuel to be more powerful than you could be if it didn't happen. You know, make it a positive. Yeah, people struggle with understanding that vulnerability is actually a strength. Yeah. We perceive it as a weakness and it takes courage to be vulnerable. Yeah. Because you are exposing your weaknesses, but the strength that comes from that

and the strength that can be given to other people who have had something similar happen to them is super powerful. And I think that that's also part and parcel of what it means to be a man and to kind of imbue this sense of masculinity. I mean, the most alpha guys I know are the most compassionate people you'll ever meet. And they're also really cool guys too. None of them are bullies or jerk offs or someone who picks a fight at a bar or talks to a woman inappropriately. These are also really cool guys too. None of them are bullies or jerk offs or someone who picks a fight at a bar or talks to a woman inappropriately. You know, these are all really cool guys

on multiple fronts. Because those behaviors derive from insecurity. Exactly, you're just overcompensating. That's all you're doing. It's like someone who picks a bar, tries to get into a fight at every bar. That's not too much testosterone. That's not enough.

It's too much estrogen, if anything. It's someone that's overcompensating going, okay, I got to show people, you know, how manly I am. Or someone who goes to a gym is like, okay, I'm going to lift more than anyone here. Who cares? Right. So it's just, those are just overcompensating type measures. They're not coming from a real place of strength. Yeah. Like I said, the most alpha guys I know were extremely compassionate people. They're always looking at protecting people around them.

Yeah. That's the ultimate man, right? To be the protector. Yeah, exactly. So you start off as this quiet, shy kid. Yeah. You didn't play sports in high school or anything like that? No, no, I didn't. I was just grew up in high school. You grew up in like DC area, right?

Yeah, I was really into the hardcore scene, not the straight edge hardcore scene, but just hardcore and heavy music. So where were you, because I grew up in DC. Did you? Okay, I went to Langley High School. I grew up in McLean, Virginia.

Right. So I used to go to the 930 Club all the time. 930, that was the spot. Bad Brains and Agnostic Front and Chromags and DRI. I got into that scene a lot. Yeah, so I was a very shy guy, not a popular kid in high school and not confident at all in terms of talking to people.

So I think this was kind of an outlet for me. It's like, you wanted to have those things, but you don't. So like, what's the next best thing? You go listen to intense music from people who embody it. I mean, the Chromags, you don't get any more confident than that. Like John and Harley on stage, these guys exude confidence and still do,

you know, to this day. So you're kind of living by, you're kind of feeding off that energy. I didn't get more, even in college, I became more social, a little bit more confident. Honestly, for me, it was a nugget of negative thing. Like my face got, this scar I have on my face is not vitiligo. It's called a cold burn where I was snowboarding when I was maybe around

28 in Utah with my parents and I got sunburned really bad and everything healed except this area. So this is like a residual scar. So this is the only place where it is. I've never heard of that happening to somebody. Yeah. Usually it's just congenital, right? Exactly. So vitiligo basically starts off as a small white patch and then it spreads, right? It's never something that's this big so immediate.

So basically one day I didn't have this, the next day I did. And initially- Can I just say, I have to interrupt you on this because for people that are listening and they're not watching on YouTube, you have like a discoloration on part of your face. But the awesome part of this is that on your goatee,

it splits one half of it, like perfectly down the middle between being white and being black. So you're almost like a James Bond villain. That's the look I'm going for. I got the devil's peak in the goatee. I mean, come on, I should be casted in those movies. It's kind of awesome, actually. No, got the devil's peak and the goatee yeah come on it should be casted in those movies actually no that's why i grew out the goatee because once i read your mustache do that too no no i don't have it i don't have it there yeah so it's a

this if i grew out a beard it would probably be white here and then like and there's it's crazy i'm older now literally like you dyed it to make it well i do full disclosure i do die now because i've gotten older it goes it'll come out gray but when i when it to make it a perfect dividing line. Full disclosure, I do dye now because I've gotten older. It'll come out gray. But when it first happened, it was black and white. I'm just keeping that look. All right. Keep it real.

Yeah. So that's when I embraced it instead of trying to get rid of it. Because when it first happened, I'm thinking, okay, this is just a temporary problem. My skin is going to heal. And then after a while, you realize it isn't. How old were you? I was 28. So I'm going to dermatologists left and right, and they're diagnosing it as vitiligo.

And I go, well, I've researched vitiligo. It doesn't make sense that that's what this is. You either are born with it or not. The way it manifested, right? Yeah, vitiligo you can develop later on in life, but it's not going to start with a big patch like this. It's going to be a milky white patch, usually on the forearms or hands, sometimes on the knuckles, and then it spreads gradually. It can start becoming 50% of your body at some point over time. But it never starts like what I have where, boom, just comes right there from a sunburn. So anyway, I would bring this up and they would just be incredulous and say, oh, it's just coincidental that this is something that was always latent. I was like, really? This

is something that was latent? This was just waiting to happen? If it wasn't that sunburn, it would have just magically appeared, you know, like this. So anyway, after going through a lot of doctors, I realized that, well, first of all, not only did I go to these doctors, I actually went through the treatment for vitiligo, which is basically burning your skin again. They have this thing called PUVA treatment where they expose it to ultraviolet light at a high degree, which is supposed to stimulate pigment. But I would say that doesn't sound like a good idea because I have this because I got burned. And they're like, oh, this will work. And then I got burned again.

So, I mean, it was almost worthy of a lawsuit, honestly, because I got burned so bad that the skin was peeling. I mean, it was really painful. Wow. And I go, look, I'm definitely not doing it again. And even after that, the doctor was like, yeah, you should try one more session. I was like, are you kidding me? This is worse than – now it's just worse than it was before. Fortunately, it didn't leave any permanent scars or additional scarring, but it was definitely

something I realized that was clearly not the solution. So long story short, after going to a variety of doctors to no avail, getting the answers I needed, some recommended getting on immunosuppressive drugs, you know, because sometimes vitiligo is a autoimmune disorder, or it is an autoimmune disorder where your immune system is attacking healthy tissue instead of just damaged tissue. But the idea of suppressing my immune system didn't sound like a good idea. So they're like, oh, you'll be more prone to getting colds and fevers. I was like, well, that doesn't sound like a good idea. So now I'm going to have this scar and I'm going to have a flu.

Forget it. So the final stop for me, and this is when I realized, okay, you're just going to have to live with this, is I went to this one lady who was basically some kind of tattoo specialist for medical conditions, where she said, what we can do is permanently remove the hair on that side and then just color it in permanently. I go, well, that's going to look funny. That means I'm going to have hair growth here. I'm not going to have it here. And she goes, yeah, it won't be perfect. I was like, well, forget it. I was like, this sounds stupid. And if you're like in the sun and you do get some coloration from being in the sun, it won't affect that area. You'll have a discoloration anyway. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like, how do you keep it? Anyway, it just sounded more complex

than it was worth. So then I used to put like Dermablend on, which is this makeup that people have for scars, right? And I would spend morning putting it on, like covering up this area. And that worked to some extent in terms of my confidence because I was really insecure about this. That's where I left out is that I was already pretty insecure before this in terms of relating to people. But after this, I was even more insecure where I used to talk like this, right? So you would be on this side of my face. Yeah, exactly. I used to do that. I used to try to hide it as much as possible or have my hand here like that. So I would put the makeup on and I was working in business developments at a company

called respond.com at the time over there in Fairfax. And it was more for me. It wasn't because I was getting negative flack from people. I'm not saying like I had a bunch of negative experiences where people were like, whoa, look at that. It was just more in my head. You know, you're being self-conscious going, oh, I'm getting looked at. People are staring at me and so forth. So I started doing this. But after a while, I was like, what am I doing this for? Who am I doing this for? For strangers that who cares what they think?

You know, this is not my fault. I don't want to be a slave to this where I'm not in break, where it's having a negative impact on my life. So after a while, I said, I'm not going to wear it anymore. Then I grew out the goatee. This is when I moved to Los Angeles. I was like, I'm just going to make this part of my look. That's just the way it's going to be because you can't do anything else. Everyone has scars. You know, mine are just, some of them are just on the outside. Yeah. It's like God gave it to you as a, as a, as this obstacle or like this talisman almost for you to say, for it to say like, look, man, you got to like own yourself and your path, right? Like, are you going to get comfortable with who you are and like own it? Or are you going to skirt it and try to find ways of hiding it and continue on this path that you're on? It just made me more confident. I mean, I did

more public, more seminars and public speaking, all of that stuff. I became way more confident with, as you know, initially you were kind of insecure, but after a while I would, in some ways I don't mind, I don't mind being paranoid or insecure or nervous because that means it's actually meaningful. You know, that means I'm actually going to, I like being a little bit nervous before I give a lecture because that means I'm going to be sharper. You know, if I go in there gonna, I like being a little bit nervous before I give a lecture because that means I'm gonna be sharper. You know, if I go in there and go, oh yeah, I got this and so forth, and then you blink out and you might panic.

But if I go in a little bit nervous, I'm gonna be more engaged and ready to focus. But fitness and strength training came in before this though, right? Oh yeah, it did. Like you started, you kind of got into it like at 17 or 18 or something like that. I did, I did.

And I got into it because partially I wanted to build an armor so that I was protected from the outside world. And what I mean by that is if I'm bigger, I'm not going to get messed with because I'd been abused as a kid and oppressed as a kid. I don't unconsciously. Yeah, exactly. It's like, I felt it was important to embody strength, project strength, exude strength as a way to avoid conflict. It's like, if I look tough and I'm big, then people aren't gonna mess with me. You know, for the most part is true. So that was part of the reason why I got into it.

Also, I just wasn't healthy at the time. I was drinking a lot and I was doing a lot of drugs. I was doing LSD and just doing a lot of marijuana and drinking that was very unhealthy, you know, excessively. And I just didn't feel good. Now I'm 17 years old and I feel terrible yeah so i gotta i gotta pull it together here you have like a moment of reckoning like an epiphany or was it just like a gradual like i think it was more gradual yeah yeah i just started again i remember my father bought me a weight training set just a bench and

some dumbbells and so forth and as i started working out more i started feeling good from doing that and then as you started as your physical appearance changed that that was very motivating. And then getting, I'm more into strength than I am trying to be big and muscular. I'm more of a strength guy. So as I got stronger, that was very inspiring to me because I was really weak when I first started. I couldn't bench press 100 pounds. I got pinned with that. But that to me was motivating. I was like, wow, I'm super weak. So let's get strong. And every time you had a positive step forward in terms of strength development, it was very motivating and it still is to this day. I love the feeling of lifting heavy weights

and blasting through plateaus. So you start doing this before college, but then you go to college and you major in religious studies, right? Which is super interesting. Yeah, college, the thing about college is that I didn't know, I wasn't a good student in high school until like the last two years. I did pretty well. And that's why I was even able to get into college because otherwise, forget it. But once I was in college, nothing was grabbing me in terms of what I wanted to focus on. Nobody's thinking about a major necessarily as a freshman. I mean, some people are pre-med and so forth, but that's supposed to be an exploratory year where you try a lot of things. And I did, and nothing gravitated towards me.

So I decided I wanted to move to another campus. Let's try something else. Let's go to Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. Let's go to the West Coast. Instead of being in Ohio, I was at the College of Wooster in Ohio. And it was – I'm not someone who necessarily believes in everything happens for a reason. I'm not a someone who necessarily believes in, you know, everything happens for a reason. A lot of times I hate that saying because it doesn't take into account that a lot of the negative things happen and there's nothing good that comes out of it. That's a separate line.

But sometimes I really believe in that statement because the one year I was in Lewis and Clark College, the mentor who got me into religious studies, this guy named Art Bueller, he was only there that year. He wasn't there before, he wasn't there after. So if I didn't go there that year, I never would have met him. And if I didn't meet him, I definitely wouldn't have majored in religious studies. So I met him, took a class on Hinduism, liked it, familiar with Hinduism. I read the Bhagavad Gita growing up and my mother, my mother used to buy me Hindu comics. Chromags are into this. Yeah, exactly. The Chromags like it, I'm down. My mother would buy buy me Hindu comics. Cro-Mags are into this. Yeah, exactly. The Cro-Mags like it, I'm down.

My mother would buy us these comic books that had Krishna and Arjuna and stuff like that. Those are the, yeah, we have a bunch of those. Do you really? Well, you can get them at the Hare Krishna Center. And they're like for kids, but they're like super violent. But they're like the original superhero. And they're like, the stories are super complex.

Yeah, they are. The Mahabharata is extremely rich. Nimai was talking about how he grew up reading those as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I grew up reading those for sure. And then I took the Hinduism class. It wasn't until I got to Sufism, which is Islamic mysticism. People like Rumi and Rabia, Hafiz.

Hafiz, it was their poetry that really impacted me, this notion of being one with God or one with your higher self and not being a slave to your ego. You can't get rid of your ego, but your ego doesn't pull the carriage, you control it. So basically, the ego are the horses, but you're the person controlling the carriage, you're guiding your ego. And that word, so Sufism really left an indelible impression on me. This notion of just living in the world, but not being attached to things so much that it has such a negative impact on your psyche. You know, striving for a higher purpose, a more cognizant way of living.

That kind of stuff really resonated with me. So that's what I don't really consider myself religious and I don't call myself a Hindu or a Buddhist or anything like that. But Sufism is definitely something that affects my everyday life. Well, you can see it infused in all of your writing and the work that you do, like this idea of merely the existence of the highest, of your higher self or the highest version of who you can be kind of plays into that, your tagline or ethos of like live life aggressively, not live life aggressively, like pound your chest like a gorilla, but be intentional with your actions, like have a plan,

like have a destination that you're working towards, understand the goals you're setting for yourself and how you're going to arrive there. So for me, when I see, when I, what I read into live life aggressively is really live life with conscious intention. Yeah, yeah, just purpose and just have strong reasons for why you do anything, to have meaningful actions. Yeah.

And what's interesting about just the gorillas, when we went to Uganda, we did a gorilla trek out there. So it was my parents, my brother and I. And when you run into a flock of gorillas or a group of gorillas, they basically say that if the silverback approaches you, don't look him dead in the eye. You got to lower your gaze and bow down. It's a challenge. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, Nick Delgado will say that gorillas know who look him dead in the eye. You got to lower your gaze and bow down. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, Nick Delgado will say that gorillas know who the alpha is in the group that they come across. So, the silver back is going to challenge that person. And this silver back in this group, and again, this is not a super high testosterone group. This is my family. But this gorilla stopped right in front of me. It was probably about as close as you are. Looked me dead in the eye.

Massive gorilla, huge back. This exuded power. You know, like way bigger than any massive bodybuilder, but just exuded serious power. Looked me dead in the eye. I didn't even have to think twice about it. I dropped to my knees and looked down immediately. And then this gorilla just kept going. Walked away.

Wow. But that was such an amazing experience to be that close. And there's no filter here, too. There's no cage protecting this gorilla from me going. Walked away, wow. But that was such an amazing experience to be that close. And there's no filter here too. There's no cage protecting this gorilla from me. We're right there. How did you end up so close though? Isn't that, that's gotta be incredibly dangerous. It's not something that they,

they don't try to get the gorillas to come close to you. But when you're going on a gorilla trek, your goal is to go out there and see gorillas. Now you're not necessarily, they're not necessarily trying to get you that close to the gorilla, but sometimes the gorillas are gonna come up to you. And if you start running, they're gonna chase you. So you that close to the gorilla, but sometimes the gorillas are going to come up to you. And if you start running, they're going to chase you.

So you can't just run off or run up a tree or anything like that. You just basically have to let them know, hey, I'm not challenging you in any way. They're peaceful animals. They're not going around ripping people's heads off. Unless they're challenged or you're hurting one of their young and all that. Gorillas in particular, they don't have – chimpanzees can have an evil streak and so forth. Gorillas are different than that. So anyway, and then the group is just going to follow the alpha. So if the alpha doesn't see we're a threat, then the group is just going to go with that. Right. But you could just, it was,

it was like a scene out of Planet of the Apes or something like that. You ran into Caesar. You're like, hey man, you're in charge. How does that play into like, what were we talking about? I forgot. I'm not even sure why I brought it up. I just remember you said gorilla. I thought it was a funny story. Here's what I want to talk about. Like you have this sort of online persona that's like a no bullshit, like don't pull any punches. Like I'm a straight shooter. I'm a straight talker. I'm going to call you on your bullshit, and like your book is in that tone, and you have like this thing that you're doing on Twitter now where you go-

My malarisms. You start all of them, like once you start doing blank, like there's no telling how messed up you're gonna be, and it's just like a litany of like all of these fucked up things that like we as humans can fall prey to that kind of lead us astray. Right. And so, but like in person, like in real life,

like you're a much sweeter guy than I expected. Like I was like intimidated by you a little bit. You know what I mean? But I appreciate like that no nonsense, you know, no filter, like, let me cut through all the BS that, you know, maybe you've heard and tell things to you straight based on my experience, which is kind of the subtitle of your book, which is things that, you know, I don't know exactly what it is, but it's like self-help, what they should be telling you. And I think it begs the

question of, you know, what's going on right now online, like a well-intentioned person could go on YouTube or on the internet or on the podcast sphere or wherever, trying to get good information about everything from health, diet, nutrition, fitness, strength training, self-improvement, psychology. And there will be like somebody there who's gonna tell you something along the lines of like, everything you ever thought you knew is wrong and go behind the velvet rope here for this amount of money

and I'm gonna tell you the truth. And I think the techniques that are being employed are getting more and more sophisticated. Like it used to be, you could kind of smell that from a million miles away. I think you still can to a certain extent, but it's getting trickier to separate who's real from who's full of shit.

So how do you navigate that, see yourself within that ecosystem? And, you know, what are your thoughts? I just try to be as authentic as possible in all formats. So first of all, when I'm on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, I post with my real name. You know, no anonymity, no fake handles or anything like that. So whatever I say, I have to own. It's coming from me.

That, I think, is important because a lot of times we see these negative YouTube comments. It's never with someone with their actual name. It's someone that just wants to ruin someone's day or feel like they're powerful. I can get on social media and just be mean-spirited. And I don't like that trend of trolling where people feel that the way to empower yourself is to diminish others or put other people down. I think that's a big mistake. I think we can have differences and be respectful about it. You're like, for example, I don't eat meat for all the reasons we went into, but I know people who eat meat who are

very healthy. So I wouldn't tell someone you can't be healthy and eat meat. My grandmother, great-grandmother lived to be 100 eating meat, not a lot, but she ate meat. So I think by, not only is that what I believe, but I think by the fact that I'm not so dogmatic about, you have to do things my way, if you want to be optimal, that makes people more open for a civil discussion as opposed to, Hey, if you don't do this, then you're an idiot, right? They'll be here. That kind of thing too. It's like, Oh, those are you guys, you guys who don't eat meat, you guys are stupid. So there's a lot of like, a lot of mean spirited dialogue, but I don't think it's useful in any way. Yeah, there's been a de-evolution in the civility

of discourse in general. That's being fomented by what's happening politically and economically right now. Yes. But you see it in the health space online, in this kind of ongoing, I wanna call it a discussion, but it's really, that would be putting it nicely.

Well, I think people feel like they need to be on teams. It's a mudslinging. Yeah, everyone's siloed. So if I'm vegan, then I'm anti anyone who's vegan. There's a tribalism that's happening and it's really not serving anybody. No, everyone's picking their team. So if I'm vegan, then I'm anti anyone who's meaty. There's a tribalism that's happening and it's really not serving anybody. No, it's not, it's not. So how do we transcend that?

I think it's important to interact with people that you disagree with and to not dislike them just because you disagree with them. So I think the more, and also I think what happens is- But what happens is if you step outside your silo and adopt a talking point that doesn't adhere to your tribe's list of pre-approved things that you can say. We just saw this last week when Mark Duplass,

a writer, director, actor in Hollywood, who's like a strident liberal said, Hey, I had this encounter with Ben Shapiro, who's more of a right wing, he's a right wing personality and pundit. And if you really have an interest in expanding your mind and hearing other people's opinions, like maybe have a look at this guy and he got crucified and he had to delete the tweet. And I think it came from a good place in

him of trying to build a bridge, but you can't say that if you're a member of this tribe, right? Right. So he had to take it down and he had, it was trending on Twitter and he just got reamed, you know? And so when I see that, like, should he have said that? Shouldn't he have said that? Well, we can debate that, but the bigger point is how can we have a civil, how can we extend our hand across the aisle and have a civil discourse

that will move us forward culturally? I think, yeah, I think too many people have this all or nothing attitude. It's a very binary approach, right? It's either this or that. And I've gotten flack from vegans for not being more like, oh, you should, you have a platform. You should be more out there just converting people and so forth. I go, look, this is not my thing. I'm not going to be that guy who just berates

someone for lunch, you know, for whatever they're eating. Plus, I don't think it's effective because they're not going to want to have lunch with me again, number one. We're not going to have, we're not going to become friends. And they're also going to have a negative impression of like, you know, those vegan guys are a-holes. I had lunch with Mike one time. The whole time he's just telling me about what I'm eating. And I've had many people, like I said before, that have either transitioned to vegan or are much more in that direction as a result of becoming friends with me because they see why I do it and so forth. That never would have happened if I just berated them from the get-go. So I think those kind of approaches are... I think also the fact that I feel online for

marketing purposes, people often feel like they have to take a very stringent approach on something, be very controversial as a way to separate themselves from their herd. So if you're a balanced, reasonable person, people are like, oh, that's boring. Just gets lost in the shelter. Yeah, well, it's not gonna promote, if it's not clickbait, then you're not, it's called clickbait for a reason because you're being baited to click, right?

Like if you're taking a balanced approach, like, well, let's see what this guy's nuance is all about. Yeah, exactly. So a lot of vegans will say you can't be healthy. Not only is eating meat unhealthy for animals, which is clearly true, but you can't be healthy at all doing that. Now, that's not true because we know a lot of people that are healthy who eat meat, right? Now, we can still, we don't like the fact that they eat meat because it's hurting animals, but let's not, the reasons for not eating meat are good enough that we don't have to add on top of that.

That's kind of where I go with that. And then it opens up, it makes you more open to these people wanting to talk to you. You know, like I've had people like Rob Wolf, Paleo diet guy on the podcast. He was a really cool guy. You know, he has different views on nutrition than I do. The whole Paleo thing is totally different than I am.

I've had civil, you know, emails with Rob and you know, I respect what he does and we may disagree on certain things, but yeah, I noticed like when I was doing research for this, like he wrote a really nice post about your, about all the work that you've been doing and hormones and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's very nice.

And then there's a lot of things he's doing that I do like. He's trying to get people to eat more fruits and vegetables. He's saying that the animals, that factory farming is definitely not good for you. You should get it from these sources. Now, animals are still being killed, right? So I don't like those options either, but it's definitely better than factory farming. And that's the other thing. It's like, oh, it doesn't matter if these animals are grass-fed and all that. They're still dying. It's like, yes, that's true. I understand that completely. But you have to understand that

factory farming is so bad and there's so much suffering involved with that, that anything that's in a better direction than that is a step in the right direction. Well, we have to place our targets on the biggest culprits of things that need to go away. And I think the great, not the great thing. I mean, the thing about factory farming is that that's something we can all unite and agree on. Exactly, that's where I'm going.

Whoever you are, nobody is in favor of what's happening here for a litany of reasons. And if we can unite on this one issue alone, we can create incredible change. Exactly. And that's where someone like Joe Rogan, who is, he's had some negative talk about vegans, but not always. He's had people like Matt Danzig on there. He's been complimentary of me before on his show. But he definitely agrees that factory farming is harmful. And he had the guys from Cowspiracy on there. And he definitely said, this is horrible and this shouldn't be happening, right? So even though he's a hunter and he's a meat eater and all that, that's a common ground we can all work on. And that is the biggest source of animal suffering.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I've been on Joe's show twice. He's about to have John Joseph on. Oh, really? Cool. We've had a little dialogue. Like, Joe really wants to... He sees the toxicity of this debate right now. And he really wants to inject it with a little civility. And I really respect the fact that despite some differences that he has with people like you and I, he's willing to have us on the show. Yeah. And he's going to have John on it and they're going to have a discussion about this. That would be really interesting. He doesn't have to do that.

No, he doesn't. You know what I mean? And I think that that's really cool that he could lend his giant platform to a voice that is coming from a different place from where he's coming from. John explains these things really well. We will unite on factory farming, if anything, right? And this is something that really needs- That's gotta go.

Redress at the highest level. That's gotta go. I mean, I think the future of meat production is not, I don't think the demand for meat is going to go away, at least not significantly, but I think the way it's manufactured is, and what I mean by that is I think in vitro meat production, that technology is already being utilized now. And I think that's going to become more ubiquitous, more pervasive. There's no question about it. And ultimately it will render factory farming. Exactly. And I'm all render factory farming. Exactly.

And I'm all for that. So, I mean, if you can, I don't know about what do you mean under those circumstances, you're not harming an animal. So that's an interesting one. But I would definitely be for other people consuming that a hundred percent. And I think people will,

people would do it right now if it were available and cheaper. See, that's the most important thing. If it's way more expensive. Yeah, convenience and price point. It has to be the healthy choice or the more environmentally sound or the more compassionate choice has to be as accessible,

as convenient as any other choice. And it has to be at the same or competitive price point as these other products. And until you get there, you're pushing a rock up a mountain. Exactly. So I think we're working towards that and it's exciting. So we're going to see what happens, but I think so too. You know, I'm in the same boat. Like I'm not the target audience for lab grown meat. I'm not the target audience for the impossible burger. Right. But I'm glad that these things exist.

What exactly is the Impossible Burger? Is that something that's injected with in vitro cells? What is that exactly? No, there's no animal cells in the Impossible Burger. It's a plant-based burger, but what they have done that distinguishes it from the other products out there like Beyond Meat is how they

have infused it with some form of heme iron that gives it that bloody taste. It gives it a much more meat-oriented texture and flavor than a typical plant-based burger. And that makes it kind of a game changer in that space. And there's a lot of people that love it. Like, it's not for me. It's like, it freaks me out to eat it. Yeah, yeah. But I'm not the audience for it. Like, it's just been so long.

Like, I don't need that or whatever. Is that what Fatburger is using now in their patties? Because I know they have a veggie burger now. I'm not sure. I know Impossible is rolling out. Well, they have Impossible sliders at White Castle now. Okay. And they're like every week,

there's more and more chains that are carrying it. I think, you know, fast forward a year to five years, it's gonna be pretty much available everywhere. And by that point, the lab grown meat thing will have come down in price. Like this is only gonna become more and more integrated into our food system. Yeah, 100%.

So I like the direction that we see. It can't happen soon enough. The sooner, the better, but at least it's happening. Yeah. All right, so we've gone over two hours and we haven't talked about fitness. We haven't even talked about fitness yet, right? Like we haven't even talked about kettlebells

except for me mentioning how we haven't talked about it yet. Yeah, sure. So this is your thing. Like you were early, like early adopter, early fan of kettlebell training. Now it's everywhere. Oh yeah, it's totally ubiquitous. But you trained with the original guy, right?

Pavel Sotselin, how do you say his name? Sotselin, that's who I know has been on Tim Ferriss' podcast. So convince me why I need to start using kettlebells. Okay. As an endurance athlete. Well, the thing about kettlebells is that no weight training- I was calling them kettlebells. A lot of people do that.

So that shows my ignorance. That's always someone who's never used a kettlebell. It's like cycling, biking. When are you going to go bike riding? Or what do they call it? Soccer, calling football soccer in the UK. So I have just demonstrated my ignorance on this subject. Well, what I like about kettlebell training is no weight training system improves muscular endurance more than kettlebell.

That's interesting. You have my attention now. Yeah. And the ballistic exercises, right? Kettlebell swing, kettlebell snatch, kettlebell clean and jerk or push press, these are full body motions where you use your entire body to project that weight where you want it to go to. Now, when you do it in high repetitions or for time, because there's a kettlebell sport

where people do two lifts for time, where it means 10 minutes without putting them down. Either it's cleaning two kettlebells and jerking them overhead, and you can rest here in between reps, but you can't put the bells down for 10 minutes. Or you're doing a one-arm snatch, which is an uninterrupted motion of taking the bell from the floor to overhead. And in 10 minutes, you can switch from side. You can switch once, so you can't switch side to side over and over again, but once. But you can't put the bell down. So if you can lift a 70-pound kettlebell for 10 minutes without putting it down, imagine the structural integrity, meaning your body's ability to delay breaking down, and the endurance that you'll get from that. Because your breathing has to be on

point. Your structural integrity has to be on point, meaning that your body's ability to sustain a performance against time so you don't break down. And then your cardiovascular VO2 max has to be amazing. So developing these things would definitely help you with what you do. But even taking that aside, because I don't do a lot of the – I mean, I do high rep double kettlebell swings and so forth. Not so much the 10-minute stuff. That just never took with me. But I definitely see the benefits.

the 10 minute stuff that just never took with me, but I definitely see the benefits, but even, even just set to 10, which short breaks at a 20, just working on volume, you're using your full body. So it's not an isolation move. So you're building up a lot of endurance with it. Then you're also learning how to use your body as one unit, which definitely carries over. Yeah. I think that's, that's the big thing, the functional strength aspect of using your entire body to do a movement with a heavy weight that is somewhat awkward and requires not just that isolated muscle, but really your entire body. And that's what distinguishes it primarily

from all of these other sort of traditional weightlifting, et cetera. And I do know, well, a couple of things. I know the difference in how I perform and how I feel as an endurance athlete when I'm functionally strong and particularly when my back and my core is strong. Right.

It's a huge difference, not because it necessarily is gonna make me run faster in the moment, but when I start to get fatigued, I'm able to maintain my form and my technique for much longer, which then translates into a performance gain. Exactly. I'm somebody who just wants to be outside and I want to go on my long runs and all that kind of stuff. So for me, it takes a lot of like mental discipline to go into the gym and do these things. And, and, um, and I have about kettlebells. You can go to a park. When I lived in Santa Monica, I used to go to the beach and train with them.

I'm gonna, I've actually ordered a couple for the house already. Oh, cool. My coach is really intent on getting me on this. And I've had fits and starts with it. My gym has them and my coach will write out a workout for me and they all have these crazy names and I don't know what any of them mean.

So I go to the gym and I pick, can I get the lightest kettlebell possible because I'm just skinny and I haven't skinny and I haven't been in the weight room in a very long time. And this is, I've committed this year to becoming functionally strong. Like I know I need it. And at 51, like, you know, my lower back gets tight

and I'm a little creaky in the morning and like things aren't, you know, it's like, I can't, I just can't get away with stuff I used to be able to get away with. Yeah, no 100%. And if I wanna continue to perform as an athlete, like this is no longer negotiable. Like it's absolutely crucial.

No, exactly. And I've delayed it for way too long. So I get the lightest kettlebell, whatever that is. And then I have to go on YouTube and go, I don't even know what the names of these crazy exercises are. And I have to watch a couple of videos of like the guy doing it to try to figure it out.

And then I try to mimic it and I do it in the most inelegant way. Like I know I'm doing it wrong. I'm like, it's something you need training for. I'm like, I'm supposed to be this athlete and I'm in here. Like, I don't know. It's like, for me, I really have to get out of my comfort zone and be vulnerable because like, I'm terrible at this. Right. But I know that I need to learn. And I'm like committed to doing it so much so that I, that I have ordered these for the house so that I can do them here. Yeah. They're fun moves. I mean, the kettlebell snatch, a double kettlebell swing is one of my favorites. And that really strengthens up the hamstrings,

lower back. In particular, when you're using one heavy bell, like you said, your midsection has to engage quite a bit with that. And so any one-handed lift, especially with high repetitions, you know, your lower back and your midsection strength is definitely going to go way up. Why did you pick this as your specific focus, especially before it was a thing? Yeah, I got into it. A good friend of mine who does jujitsu asked me, hey, have you heard of this kettlebell stuff yet? I go, no, let me take a look. And it looked intriguing to me. I'd seen kettlebells in the old time strongman magazines and so forth, but I didn't really know what you would do with it. It's almost like from the 20s, you'd see these old strongman guys holding these things. I just thought that maybe they predated dumbbells and you just did the same

thing that we do with dumbbells with this. I didn't really understand that there was a whole system of exercises specific to kettlebell training. I was already a fan of Pavel Sotsilin's work. I had his Power to the People book. So I already liked what he was doing. I liked his message. And then I wanted to get into the fitness industry and I wanted to get in with a unique selling point. Now, I wasn't thinking, oh, let me go try that that I've never used before. That's going to be the unique selling point. This was just in my head. When I started playing around with kettlebells just for fun, I wasn't thinking like, let me learn this as a way to go teach it. I was like, let me just play around with this. I enjoyed the movements. The kettlebell snatch in particular

came really fast to me. That's that movement where you take it from the floor to overhead. And I got really good at that fairly fast. So I enjoyed the aggressive nature of the moves. You know, you're putting up, you felt like you were just tearing something apart. You had this real primal feel to it. So that intrigued me to go take Pavel Sotselin's kettlebell certification. And this is 2002 in Minneapolis. And after taking his course, I was really- How many people showed up for that course? Probably about 20 people.

This is the second one he ever taught. He taught one before that. My friend Steve Maxwell was that. He's been on Joe Show many times too. And I took that course and then things weren't the same. I was like, wow, this is awesome. I didn't even have actual kettlebells. Then I had this handle, but you put dumbbells on. It was a plate loading kettlebell because I didn't want to make the investment yet. So I was just using that. After I took the course though, I immediately bought a SIP. So I was like, wow, this is totally different. And I love the way these things feel. I just like the whole thing.

They look cool. The movements are fun. And I also felt that this is a perfect home-based training system that the average person could really get behind. Because the average person is not really looking to get big and so forth. They want to have more, like you said, functional strength. They want to be able to play with their kids and not get tired. They want to feel strong and healthy.

They want to be able to play with their kids and not get tired. They want to feel strong and healthy. So I felt that what kettlebells delivered in the way that Pavel taught it would be perfect for that audience. Right. It's different than what he teaches and so forth. And then I learned from other kettlebell people. So it evolved over time. But that was definitely the most important step for the direction I ended up taking, getting into this whole health and fitness thing. It started with, if it wasn't for the four years I spent working, I didn't work for Dragondor, Pavel's publisher, but I worked with them heavily, meaning that I taught at a lot of their certifications. There were about five of us that were considered their elite team.

They called them the senior RKCs back then. And Steve Maxwell was one of them. Steve Cotter, who is the best kettlebell instructor by far. He's still out there. I don't teach kettlebells anymore. I just do my supplements now. But Steve Cotter is the best kettlebell instructor. He's still out there.

And Nate Morrison was there. Jeff Martone, who's very immersed with CrossFit. He's the kettlebell expert in the CrossFit world. So there were about five of us that were early adapters who all left this organization at one point. I left before some of the other guys did. This guy, Jeff, left before I did. And we all went on our own directions. able to go in our own directions is because we built up, we spent so much time getting exposed through Pavel's organization. And he was very generous with allocating time to all of us. It just got to a point where it was, I wanted to go my own way. I just wasn't happy being subjugated to their business philosophy of, as long as I'm involved here, these are the expectations that are on me. And I go, you know what? I want to be my own guy. I don't want to be known as his guy. I don't want to be like, oh yeah, Mike's one of Pavel's guys.

I want to be known as Mike Mahler, the strength coach in and of himself, not because I'm associated with someone else necessarily. So after four years, and it was an amicable play. I wasn't like, hey, screw you and all that. Some of the other guys had really negative falling outs, but that's the nature of any organization. You know, people just butt heads. It's almost impossible. So as an endurance athlete, what do you think, like if you were my, if I hired you as my strength coach, I mean, obviously you'd have to like evaluate where I'm weak and all this sort of stuff,

but just in general, like there's a lot of endurance athletes, runners, triathletes, cyclists, swimmers that listen to the show, watch the show. What are some key like strength exercises or perspectives that you could share? Like what are the things that like everybody should be doing who wants to like excel in the endurance world? I think the most important thing with the straight training regimen for endurance athletes

is to make your body more resilient. You know, you're not trying to become more muscular. You wanna make your body stronger. You wanna make your structural integrity more sound so that you perform better at what you do. There's a huge fear. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Oh, no, go ahead.

There's a huge fear of like, they don't want, be like, you're trying to get lean. Like it's all about like your power to weight, right? And like for runners, you can never get, like they're just trying to get as skinny as possible. And like, I don't know if you've ever seen a Tour de France cyclist with a shirt off, but like, you know, they look like 12 year old boys

and they're so terrified of any additional weight. I found like, if you wanna have a long career and you wanna remain injury free, like you need to be functionally strong or something's gonna give eventually, so. I would say that, you know, shoulders, lower back, ankles, and so forth. Feet strength is really important. That's why a lot of us do strength training barefoot. I like to do my sprinting barefoot, but vibrams, you know, I'm not running bare feet on a field. So, I mean, basically just making the

body more sound. Like Frank Shamrock always said that he did a lot of bodybuilding stuff, not necessarily to make his body look a certain way, but so that his strength was sound. He didn't have imbalances so that when he's fighting, when you're fighting, you're using certain muscle groups more than the others. So it's actually important to use the muscle groups that you're not using in your sport when you're training for balance. And that's what bodybuilding gave him because people are like, bodybuilding, that's not functional. You don't use those moves in the actual sport. And I think that's a mistake too with a lot of strength training now is you're actually trying to mimic the moves that somebody does with resistance. And that's not necessarily the best way to go either. I'm not going to hold a kettlebell and throw punches with it. That's going to change the technique. I'm not going to take a heavier basketball and try to shoot that because that changes the technique now. I'm not going to put a weight vest on and go sprinting because my technique with the vest on is going to be different than without. So it's actually going to be counterproductive. So you have to look at- You want to strengthen the supportive muscles.

Exactly. Everything that gets atrophied through the repetitive motion of whatever the specific sport is. Exactly. So whatever imbalances you have, your strength training regimen should address it so that you're not imbalanced anymore and you're less injury prone. The most important thing that a strength and conditioning program does is make you less injury prone. Like Steve Maxwell makes a great point of saying you should never get injured when you're lifting weights because the whole point of lifting weights is to make your body stronger so that you don't get injured in your sport. So the last thing you want to do is push it so hard with weight training that you get injured.

I mean, imagine someone who's a UFC fighter and they decide to find out what their deadlift max is. Now they blow out their back. And they're like, well, I had a million-dollar payday on Saturday. I guess that's gone. Right. But they're in the gym and everyone's watching, you know, and it's a big dick-measuring contest. I don't think a lot of those guys care. I mean, someone like John Jones is really into powerlifting, but he's an anomaly.

That guy's just good at whatever he does. He's just extremely gifted. You know, he's deadlifting 600 pounds and he just started maybe, this was after maybe six months after starting. You know, this is unheard of, but he's just a gifted athlete. But someone like him, I wouldn't have anyone who is... Well, first of all, there's really no reason to max out at all. Let's just start there. If you're a powerlifter, you do it for your sport.

But pretty much every powerlifter has serious injuries at some point if they do it long enough. That's just inevitable. So it's not about going to failure. No, I think you should stay away from failure. Like I lift weights. Like right now, I'm lifting really frequently. I'll deadlift five days a week. But I only do three sets of five with 70% of my one rep max. You know, so that's about 405 pounds for me. And I'm just working on technique.

I'm working on technique and I want my back to feel great afterwards. I don't want any tightness. And as a result of not lifting so heavy, I can do it more often. And if I do it more often, I get better neurologically. I get better. Neurologically, I get better and just from the simple act of doing it. And that's probably Pavel's most, Pavel Sotlin's most important contribution is this high frequency of training with keeping several reps in the bank, staying very far from failure. Because the other problem with going to failure is that- Well, you need a couple of days of rest. That and your technique is never good on that last rep, right? You go to failure is that you need a couple of days of rest. That and your technique is never

good on that last rep, right? You go to failure and number 10 is the only, is the last rep you can do. It's not going to look like number one through seven. Even that, even a few reps before that rep, your technique probably started degrading. And what about like heavyweight, low rep versus low weight, high rep? Yeah, that just depends on the context as well. So, I mean, if you're weak in those areas and improving it would be useful to you. So, for example, like a UFC fighter, the stronger you are, the better you are, you know, to a point. So, if your technique is great and you get stronger, you're going to be a better fighter. So, getting, and then a lot of these guys have to, our men and women have to stay within certain weight classes. So, lifting heavy weights and low reps, that allows you to get a lot stronger

without getting bigger. That's pretty much the way I train. So I'm not trying to get bigger. Even the size I have is more of a side effect of the training. It was not necessarily intent. You know, early on it was, as I said, I wanted to kind of build a shield to protect myself. But at this point, I'm not trying to get bigger.

I just like lifting. I just, I like getting, I like the act of demonstrating strength. Yeah, so for me, like where I'm not trying to get bigger. I just like lifting. I just, I like getting, I like the act of demonstrating strength. Yeah, so for me, like where I'm in a very low resistance, high rep, you know, sport. Right. Basically going long distances.

Would I be better served by doing heavyweight low rep? I think so. You do? Yeah, absolutely. Because it's also, you're also going to be, one, you're going to be way less sore from that. And two, it's going to, it's a totally different stimulus than what you're used to. You're someone doing, and you can, not to say that you can't do some high repetition, maybe at the end of a workout, you do a finisher,

kettlebell swings or snatches, or you just throw it in the mix. But that wouldn't be my, the focus of the regimen. It would be more heavyweights, low repetitions to make your body more resilient and to a point. And again, it wouldn't be the focus of the regimen. It would be more heavy weights, low repetitions to make your body more resilient and to a point. And again, it wouldn't be anywhere close to failure. So these wouldn't be maximum efforts. They would be challenging, but not to the point where an injury is even likely or even close to being likely.

Yeah, I got it, man. I'm sold, dude. All right, we gotta wrap this up, but I wanna leave people with, I wanna go back to the hormone thing. Yeah, sure. I to leave people with, I want to go back to the hormone thing. Yeah, sure. You know, I want to leave people with some things that they can take away and implement it in their own life, like to get a better sense of whether they're hormonally abnormal and some practices to help optimize hormone functionality. optimize hormone functionality.

Well, I mean, one thing people can do, the one test you can do that doesn't cost anything is, like Charles Poliquin has this whole biosignature approach, right? Where he goes, where you hold body fat is an indicator of your hormone imbalance. So if you have a lot of pectoral fat, that's way too much conversion of testosterone to estrogen. If you have a lot of stomach fat, that's basically adrenal issues, your cortisol is too high. And this is whether you're a male or a female.

Yeah, exactly. This is across both sexes. So you can do the mirror test and just look at where you store body fat. And that gives you a pretty accurate idea. It's not 100% accurate, but it gives you a pretty good indicator of what's going on with you. If you have a lot of tricep fat, it means low androgens, means your testosterone to estrogen ratio is poor. And more often than not, blood work will confirm the assessment from this. I'm not saying that it's in place of it, but that's something you can do right now and get an idea. And a lot of this is, I mean, we look at ourselves in the mirror every day. So nothing's going to be a big

surprise like, oh, wow, I didn't think about that until he brought it up. So now you just know why it's happening. Maybe you're storing a lot of stomach fat because you're under a lot of stress. If you want to get rid of that stomach fat, training and nutrition are important, but you have to mitigate the stress as well. Otherwise, you're just going to hold on to it. So that's one thing people can do. Blood testing, I recommend directlabs.com. If you want to bypass a doctor, you can go to directlabs.com. They have different panels for men and women. If you don't know how to interpret the results, it's not going to be that useful. So then you can contact someone like Dr. Thomas Inglot on or Dr. Mark Gordon, Dr. Nick Delgado. All three of those people are really good.

Right. One of the things that you recommended in one of the articles that you wrote is that you shouldn't, that your workout shouldn't exceed one hour. Yeah. That doesn't work for me, dude. Well, that'd be provide some context.

I get what you're saying though, yeah. No, I can provide some context though. An intense workout shouldn't last more than an hour. I got you. Some people, they go to the gym and they're just dicking around. They're taking selfies and so forth. They don't need to finish that up in 40. I mean, they should, but that workout is, it's not, they're not training so intensely

that it's going to be negative. Now, here's the thing. If you work out really hard, you're not going to want to go more than 45 minutes. Yeah. That's what Nima said. When I finish one of my workouts, I'm done. My workouts are 45 minutes. I was like, dude, I thought you were in the gym like eight hours a day. Sometimes it's even less

than that because I train frequently, right? I train five, six days a week. So when I go sprinting, it's 10 hundred yard dashes. That doesn't take long. I just drive to the close by field, bang out the runs, come home. That's less than 20 minutes easily. And then my weight training workouts, some I do at the home gym, some I go at a gym too, but it's always a couple of compound drills, three or four movements, four movements at the most. Sometimes it'll be squats, weighted ring pull-ups, and some kind of overhead press, and then that's it. Maybe glute ham raises or some kind of torso work. Dragon flags is one of my favorite, that Bruce Lee exercise, that's one of my favorite ab

exercises. But you get so much abdominal strength from heavy deadlifts and heavy squats, and also ring pull-ups, weighted especially, and overhead that your midsection is getting hit, even if you don't hit it directly. So I don't think any of this stuff has to be, consume a lot of your time. These workouts don't take me more than 15 to 20 minutes. I go in my garage, I hit three or four moves, I'm out of there. One of the things that you also talk about on the nutrition side of this, I mean, like we could talk about superfoods,

we can talk about ginger and turmeric and all that, we could talk about that forever, but really basic stuff like spices, like cinnamon and things like that, that everybody has at their home, or like starting your day with water with like lime and sea salt and things like that. So has at their home. Or like, you know, starting your day with water with like lime and sea salt and things like that. So can you talk us through,

maybe we can kind of wrap it up with just a few of these kind of practices. Yeah, a couple of things you can add today. So every morning I start with, I take a lime and I squeeze it into about 12 ounces of water and put a little bit of sea salt in there. And what this does is basically it nourishes your adrenals. So it's a great tonic first thing in the morning. And it's very alkaline as well. And it this does is basically it nourishes your adrenals. So it's a great tonic first thing

in the morning. And it's very alkaline as well. And it's very cleansing. I mean, you're going to have to go to the bathroom within a few minutes of downing this. It just cleans you right out. You're feeling good. So I do that every morning. That's a good morning ritual. And that's something everyone can add that right now. You're like, well, I don't know if I have adrenal issues. You probably do. If you live in society, you probably do. Just get this in. It has a lot of health benefits anyway. So that's one thing people can do. The spices, I like to add ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon to all my protein shakes.

I only have one a day, but I add it to that. And then with cooked meals, basil, garlic, not only does it make the food taste better, but you're just amping up the health properties of it even more so. And it's easy. You just add it right in there. Yeah, that's good. And what's your, what's like a day in the life of food like? Let's say, so it's some days I do intermittent fasting.

Well, I'll wake up, I'll have the lime and sea salt. And then I might have a cup of coffee with almond milk, a little bit of stevia. And then I won't eat until later on in the day. A lot of days when I, and when I'm going to be lifting heavy weights, because I like to lift weights about four to six hours after waking up, your body is decompressed. You're less likely to get injured.

And I just feel stronger. I'm not thinking about lifting heavy weights first thing in the morning. Body's tight. You know, I need to loosen up, do mobility exercises. So I do some joint mobility exercises that I learned from Steve Maxwell and Pavel Sotselin. And I have a YouTube clip. It's me and my dogs doing it in the backyard. It takes more, it doesn't take more than 10 minutes.

And that's something I like to do every day. If I slack on that, I feel it. I get tight real fast, especially if you're lifting heavy weights and just getting older. So that's part of the routine. And then I'll have this super shake where it's eight ounces of almond milk,

eight ounces of water, three tablespoons of hemp seeds, one tablespoon of flax seeds, one scoop of organic food bar protein powders. This is one of the ones I like. It has five different vegan proteins in it. A teaspoon of ginger, maybe a fourth of a teaspoon of nutmeg, cinnamon. What else do I add in there? I take a tablespoon of cacao, and then I add in a bunch of frozen fruits, So, acai, mango, blueberries, just whatever fruits people like they can add in

there. It doesn't have to be those. I blend that up, and this is a big shake. And then, like I was saying earlier, I just drink one glass at a time. That gets me through the entire day. I don't have a big meal until much later in the evening. And that'll be a stir fry, usually, of just a lot of vegetables and some legumes. some legumes. So maybe Monday it'll be black beans, Tuesday, garbanzo beans, adzuki beans. It's a different legume each day. Just mixing it up. Yeah, exactly.

And what is, when people come up to you and say, well, what about protein or are you vegan? And what, you know, how do you answer that? Well, you know, what's interesting about protein is that I used to get chiropractic adjustments from Franco Colombo when I lived out here in Los Angeles. And he still has a chiropractic office. Does he really?

Yeah, he does. He just does it for fun. I didn't know that. You should go to him just for the hell of it. But anyway, I talked to him a lot about training and nutrition, and he told me that even when he and Arnold were in their heyday, they only ate one gram of protein per kilo, which is considered extremely low by today's standards. And then they would add in maybe 30- Yeah, I think the daily recommendation is 0.7 for just an average human.

Yeah, and I don't think you need that much. I don't either. So one gram a kilo and then 30 to 40 grams when you're trying to put on size. So if they're just maintaining, they don't even do that. Just an extra 30 to 40 grams of protein. Now, these guys are big meat eaters. They're not doing it because a vegan diet is inherently lower in protein.

So maybe you're trying to skew the facts to say you don't need protein. That's not what they're doing. But what they, and then people will say, well, they were taking steroids. I was like, well, steroids improve protein utilization. So that would be more reason to take even more protein, right? So the fact that they're on anabolics and that's all they felt what they needed for protein says a lot. And these guys also did a pretty high carbohydrate diet, about 60% of calories coming from carbohydrates. And then fat was I think 15 to 20%, right? So it's quite a bit different. And these guys look great. That was the

golden age of bodybuilding. People like Franco Colombo and Schwarzenegger and Frank Zane, you know, these guys looked incredible. 1978 or whenever it was. Yes, exactly. So one, I don't think you need one gram per pound. Definitely don't need that. And some recommend even more than that. And I just think that's absurd.

I think one gram per kilo, which is what I get. So I weigh 200 pounds. I get around 90 to 100 grams of protein. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Right. You know, it just depends. And I've gone through periods where I've taken a lot more protein and never found it to have any additional benefit. I wasn't getting stronger, faster, or getting bigger.

My friend, Christian Thibodeau, who's a very well-respected strength coach, he said the same thing. And he's a big guy and he's jacked. And he weighs around maybe 230 pounds solid. And he said that he never found eating more than 150 grams of protein, if even that was that beneficial. Right. And most of these big guys are eating multiples of that.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then, but they're also taking, anyone that's a professional bodybuilder, they're using anabolics as well. Now, you can get away with a lot when you're doing anabolics. And you can say that that's more the reason why they're at a certain size. Look, I remember Testosterone Magazine wrote this article about how to survive with a high-protein lifestyle. What they meant is- Wait, tell me the name of that magazine.

This is called tnation.com. Are you serious? There's a magazine called Testosterone Nation? It's just called t-nation. It's just a website. It's not a physical magazine. They had a physical magazine for a little bit. These are guys who used to be with Muscle Media 2000 and then they ventured off. I mean, they've been doing this for a long time, 1990s. But anyway, they talked about how a lot of bodybuilders have serious flatulence because they eat so much protein and how some of the big bodybuilders at Gold's Gym would carry around Lysol containers with them because they're just farting on command everywhere they go. Okay. Now, if that's something you're doing, you're taking in way too much of something.

So let's get to the point of, and also here's the other thing. Longer stretches in between meals, better digestion. Better digestion means less need for protein intake because if you're digesting more of the protein you're eating- Less food intake in general. Yeah, exactly. I don't even eat as much as a lot of people think I would. Most people think I probably eat 5,000, 6,000 calories. I probably eat less than 2,500 calories a day. But what I'm eating is very high in nutrition.

Forget about calories. It's very nutritious. And the more nutrition you take in, the less you have to worry about calories. At least that's my take. So I think a lot of things we have been taught, we just believe because someone said it, but there really isn't anything to substantiate it. So you do do some plant-based protein in your smoothie. What else do you supplement with?

And I know you have your own line of supplements. Yeah, I mean, I take one of my favorite supplements is one I sell. It's called Restorzyme. It's a systemic enzyme which lowers inflammation by, it induces healing, so it lowers the need for inflammation. And if I could recommend one thing to you, it would be that, because that'll help tremendously with aches and pains. Yeah, I'll try it out.

Nothing helps. You were nice enough to send me a box of your stuff. Oh, yeah, and if you need more, just let me know. That's my favorite. If I could only take one supplement, it would be systemic enzymes. And people are surprised when they hear that because they go, man, your testosterone booster is so awesome. It's a natural testosterone booster. Your brain communicates with your testes more to signal more testosterone production. And it works extremely

well, way better than anything on the market. It doesn't come close. Just look at the testimonials from people that have used it. Nothing comes close. That's my second favorite product because as you get older, you're, I mean, it's not even so much as you're getting older, it's just more wear and tear, right? It's more mileage. Those of us that are working hard physically and on our businesses and in our life, you know, we're being inundated with different stresses. What about B12, D?

I take a B100, which has B12, but that way I get all the B vitamins covered. I don't take an actual B12. Vitamin D3 I do take. I actually did score a low on that when I did a blood test a while back, which is not too surprising because it's so hot in Las Vegas. We're not out in the sun all day long.

And if I am out in the sun, I'm not walking around half naked or anything. The irony of being the sunniest place in the world is that you avoid it. It's like I have to take vitamin D3 and it's sunny every day. That's sunny like there's something wrong, dude. It's kind of ridiculous. But I do take that. And there's to take vitamin D3 and it's sunny every day. It's kind of ridiculous.

But I do take that. And there's vegan options for D3. And I'm playing around with DHEA cream right now because that is really intriguing to me. And DHEA cream not only increases DHEA levels if you get the right one, right? There's a company that is a former compound pharmacy guy. So he created a DHEA cream, which delivers through the skin really well. A lot of the ones in the market, they don't deliver well at all. So you don't end up increasing DHEA or anything useful. I'm just playing around with that because sometimes for me, when I go through a period of distress, my DHEA can be depleted. So I'm just playing around with that to see how I feel,

how different I feel when I'm using that. So I tend to play around with quite a few things, but the staples are that Restorzyme, my testosterone booster, I use eight weeks on, four off, because you never want to get too adapted to any herbs. I'm a strong believer in cycling herbs. I have an adrenal energy product called Red, which has rhodiola, and it has ashwagandha, shilajit, and maca. That's really good for rejuvenating your adrenals, and those of us that are working out hard, just giving you more adaptogen properties. The magnesium oil I love putting on before going to sleep because I do sleep a lot, but I'm a light sleeper. So anything that helps me relax, because I'm always thinking, you know, when you're, I think I'm just naturally a thinker.

But when you're an entrepreneur, you tend to always be thinking of stuff. Have you experimented with CBD oil? I have, yeah. I like CBD oil. I, you know, I use marijuana recreationally just for fun. You know, not something like every day have, yeah. I like CBD oil. I use marijuana recreationally just for fun, not something like every day to go to sleep or anything like that. But that's my recreational, instead of alcohol,

that would be something I use if I wanna go to a concert or something like that. Not driving around on it, just so people know I'm down there spending the night. But CBD, I think is great for pain, inflammation. Some of my dogs take it. I have an older dog. He's a senior.

He's got some heart issues. So I give it to him just to keep him calm. You know, his heart's enlarged. So I have to keep his lifestyle as stress-free as possible so that he's good to go on that. So I do like CBD. I've never noticed anything profound taking it, right? Like, I've never taken it and been like, oh, wow. So I've got bone-on-bone arthritis in this elbow elbow and I've had stem cells injected in there, which helped

the most. There's a friend of mine in Vegas, Dr. Garcia, I had these mesenchymal stem cells injected in there. That helped a lot. But I've got this bone spur in there where it looked like it exploded. So it's everywhere. And I can't have them operated on or shaved down because I went to a couple of surgeons and they said it's too close to the nerve. So that impinges full range of motion. Like I can't extend this arm fully. But what the stem cells did is they got rid of the pain. Because I used to be in pain all the time

and I just dealt with it. I was like, oh, well, I'm just gonna have to deal with this. And it was a nuisance though, because you're always aware of it. But once I got the stem cells in there, the pain went away pretty fast. So that's been pretty powerful. Yeah, CBD oil is, I mean, for me, like I haven't,

I've tried it a couple of times. I think it helps me sleep a little bit, but it also gives me, it kind of makes me depressed. Really? Yeah. I've gotten that with certain things like, I remember I tried samey one time, which everyone said was great for mood.

I actually found it to be the opposite. It actually made me really depressed. Yeah. Everyone's different, man. Yeah, we're all so complex. You know what I mean? Which is kind of goes back to the whole thing with your hormonal health.

Like, you know, so if somebody's listening to this and they're like, man, I should think more about this. I should look into where I'm at with this whole hormone thing. Like, should they get a blood test? Like what's the first thing somebody should do to get on top of it and begin the process of trying to optimize this?

Well, what I would do is, one, go check out an article I wrote on leptins just to remind yourself of all the things we discussed. That's on my website, mikemuller.com. I have a hormone optimization lecture series too, which is eight hours. It's $50. It's really comprehensive.

So that's good stuff, information to have to refer back to. In terms of testing, like I said, a hormone optimization lecture series too, which is eight hours, it's $50. It's really comprehensive. So that's good stuff, information to have to refer back to. In terms of testing, like I said, you can go get the blood work done, but if you don't know how to interpret the results, it's not going to be that useful. And sure, you can research these things, but it's always good to have a set of professional eyes on anything you're doing. Is there a place where you can go and figure out if there's a doctor or a professional in your area who knows what they're talking about with this stuff? Not that I'm aware of. And honestly, it's hard for me to recommend someone I don't know personally, you know, and stuff like this. I'm sure there's plenty of good doctors out there that I don't know that are great.

But I've also had a lot of people give me negative experiences they've had with anti-aging doctors, where they walk in there and they just want to get them on stuff. It's like, oh, your testosterone is low. Let's get you on this. Your growth hormone is low. Let's get you on that. And it's like, well, let's get... My advice is to work with someone that wants to address underlying causes foremost. Yeah, like a functional medicine, integrative medicine doctor. I think Delgado is great, Nick Delgado, and he does distance consulting. I think Dr. Thomas Inklund, he's based in Phoenix, Arizona, but he also does distance. And what I like about him is the first phone call with him is free, where he'll assess your situation

and he'll let you know if he can help before he charges you anything. And he'll have you do even more comprehensive testing, such as mineral imbalances and so forth, because you could have low testosterone because your copper and zinc are low, you know? And you just address the zinc imbalance, all of a sudden your testosterone is great.

It's complicated. It is, yeah, it really is. That's why it's hard to say, you know, just do this one thing and you're gonna be great because you need to know, the more you know about your exact situation, the better it is to know what to do about it. Otherwise, it's just a guessing game. So you get the testosterone test done and it's low.

Okay, we don't know why it's low though. There could be so many reasons why it's low. It could be lifestyle, it could be stress. Maybe you hate your job. And it may take you quite a while to figure that out. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's why it's good to have someone who knows what they're doing, what he or she is doing, look at it because they've seen this kind of stuff a million times. Thomas Inglis is not going to look at your lab work or mine and be surprised by anything. He's

going to be like, yeah, I've seen this before. I know what to do. That's what you want. You want someone looking at it going, you know what? I know exactly what to do. Instill that confidence. All right, man. Thank you. Great talking to you, man. That was awesome. Thank you very much. Pleasure. Super informational. And you gave me a lot to think about. And I'm excited for my kettlebell journey. You notice I didn't say kettleball. I said kettlebell. You got it. Cool, man. Thank you so much. Thank you. Really appreciate it. That was really cool. If you're digging on Mike, you can find him at MikeMahler.com. That's it.

H. Yeah. You're at Mike Mahler on Twitter. You got to like unlock your Instagram account, right? I'll do that right after this. MikeMahler73 on Instagram. And Facebook is Aggressive Strength, right? Yeah, I believe so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you just go to my website, all the buttons- Yeah, exactly. Everything's on there. And the Live Life Aggressively podcast and the book by the same name. Yeah, yeah.

My friend Sincere Hogan and I do the show. We've been doing it for five years and it's a lot of fun. So I encourage people to check that out. Check it out, man. Thank you so much. All right, dude. Peace.

Thank you. Good dude, that Mike Mahler and great information. I really hope that you guys learned more than a few things. And more importantly, that you implement whatever you learned today into your daily routine or your daily rituals. Do me a favor, let Mike know how this one landed for you. You can find him again at mikemahler.com. On Twitter, he's at Mike Mahler.

On Instagram, he is at MikeMahler.com. On Twitter, he's at Mike Mahler. On Instagram, he is at MikeMahler73. And spread the word. If you enjoyed this episode or the show in general, share it with your friends and on social media. Hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts or on YouTube. This whole show is available on YouTube as well. And I appreciate that. If you're lost in your nutritional journey, you need additional guidance.

You're just not sure what to eat. You're interested in this whole plant-based thing, but you don't know where to begin. I can't stress enough how helpful our meal planner can be, the Plant Power Meal Planner. To learn all about it, go to meals.richroll.com. And when you do that, you will find access to thousands, literally thousands of plant-based recipes. When you sign up, you fill out all this information about yourself, your allergies, your preferences, how many people in your family you're preparing food for, all kinds of good stuff. All of that gets factored into the algorithm. So you only get presented with the recipes that work for you.

The system then generates automatic grocery lists. So you know exactly what to buy when you go shopping. And if you're in a metropolitan area, chances are we are able to actually just deliver the groceries directly to you. So you don't even need that grocery list. It's amazing. We also have insane customer support available to you seven So you don't even need that grocery list. It's amazing. We also have insane customer support available to you seven days a week. All of this is available for just $1.90 a week when you sign

up for a year. So to learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on meal planner on the top menu at richroll.com. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today, Jason Camiolo, as always for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for generating all those beautiful graphics and for shooting and editing the video version of this podcast, which you can find at youtube.com forward slash richroll. I want to thank my man DK for dropping in on the intro the other day and also for handling all of these relationships with our beautiful sponsors. Support the show by supporting the sponsors. And theme music, as always, by Analema. Thanks for the love, you guys. I will see you back here next week with a very exciting episode with the one, the only Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, and his brand new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

It was an honor and a treat to spend an hour with him and really excited to share that one with you next Sunday evening. Until then, be well, treat yourself well, be grateful, love others, love yourself, and get those hormones in order. Peace. Namaste. Thank you.