The Sevan Podcast - #169 - Stefi Cohen

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Bam. We're live. Oh, my God. No no echo makes me so happy makes me so happy hair games looking tight what's up thank you i know i'm i'm living the full fighter lifestyle oh is that is that uh

i gotta get punched in the face my hair can't get in the way but i don't want to shave my bald these are boxer braids. They're awesome. Is that what they're called? Yeah. Is it fun being you? It really is. I have a blast.

When did it become? Guest is on time. Guest is on time. Yes, Bruce. Guest is on time. It's funny. I'm 169 shows in. I'm racing to 500. I'm going to do 500 and then, and then reevaluate. And, uh, like two or three times I've had a no show of a guest,

which has forced me to do a show by myself. But, but now the kind of OCD I have, you only need a guest to show up not once. And theia is real you know the anxieties wait so 500 is the goal and then after that reassess like if it's basically if it's not if i'm not having fun fun fun like just like and it's not making me money money money then i'm not doing it anymore i'm done like um i want to spend time with my kids yeah and um it's really way out of my my comfort zone what do you do besides this to play with my kids put on stephy cohen videos and be like yo check it look at this chick boxing dude look at her deadlift dude look at that a sumo deadlift what is that oh can we go in the garage and try it sure all right hurry up we got to go to tennis lessons sounds like you have a fun life i do um was your life always fun

nah um you know i've i come from venezuela was born and raised in venezuela um from a modest family i moved to the states pretty much forced by my mom. That wasn't fun. She packed my bag for me, a massive, like one of those big hockey bags she packed for me. And she sent me on an airplane at the age of 17 to San Diego initially. And, you know, I had big dreams. I wanted to do big things with my life, but they were pretty unconventional. You know, the standards of living that I wanted to have were like, I want to be able to have freedom of time and place. I want to be my own boss and I want to make lots of money. And I want to be involved in sports somehow. I don't want to have a desk job. I don't want to be behind a desk job and be, you know, forced to abide by arbitrary rules of corporate America.

I didn't want to do that. And it sounded like I was pretty crazy. You know, my mom, my mom thought that I was out of my mind and that there was no way that I was going to be able to live that type of lifestyle that I wanted to live under those kind of standards or parameters that I was setting. And so I kind of had to create myself and, and, and really be creative and, and make it happen for myself. So, you know, the last, and I still grind, like, even though we're doing pretty well, I still, you know, I'm in a rat race all day long. Every, every single wake hour that I have is accounted for. Um, and I work really hard for what I have. That's all you know how to do yeah grind yeah uh you say you say it was a modest um upbringing in Venezuela but in Venezuelan terms you were balling right I mean no no really

modest oh yeah modest um you're you're a Jew I am your family your family escaped nazi germany is that how you end up in venezuela yeah my grandparents did so they actually they were born in romania and they walked all the way from romania to israel it took them like two months like boat train car walk horse donkey whatever it was yeah that's how they made it to israel and then in israel they got it my my grandmother was a teacher and she got a phone call from somebody here in somebody there in venezuela saying that they needed a hebrew teacher and a director like a principal and so she moved to venezuela and helped fund the first jewish school in venezuela do you know what year that was no idea no idea listen people five years before hitler started fucking slaughtering jews there were fucking more nobel prize-winning scientist jews

coming out of germany than any any type of science explosion anywhere anytime in the history of the world those people were fucking on top of their game, killing it, contributing to society in a way, you know, E equals MC squared shit, photosynthesis, Otto Warburg,

metabolic disease. I mean, like Otto Warburg's dad was a physicist. I mean, and in five years, bam, they're rounding these fuckers up and killing them. What's crazy is just the resilience that, that people had as a whole, as a society, and how they were able to bounce back from that, you know, and make lives of themselves.

Even, you know, look at my grandparents. I mean, fuck, they just moved to Venezuela, backed up a plastic bag probably, you know, and just started their life over there. And same way for a lot of people, they're the same age. And people that actually went to the Holocaust, like they had, so we are kind of like the last generation that got to interact with people who went to the Holocaust. You know, it's our grandparents that are mostly all either dead or dying. And we used to have like, every month, we used to have a Holocaust survivor or somebody who lived in that time period, period, when senior year of high school, come over to school and give us a talk about their experience. And the most memorable one for me was this

woman, she was a grandma of one of my closest friends in high school and she was had to have been like 12 or 13 when she was in the in the concentration camp and they played a game with her and a bunch of the other kids that lived in her villa or in her house and they pretty much put them in the snow barefoot and told them to they basically said whoever sits down because you're tired or whatever because you're uncomfortable if you sit down on the ground you get shot and everybody else sat down got shot and she she stood and to punish her they cut every single one of her toes and then she moved to Venezuela and you know is this made a killing, built her empire

and was super successful but it's interesting it's one of those stories I can't empathize with and I'm the great empathizer I can't it's so difficult to conceptualize that type of suffering.

It's nothing that none of us are ever going to experience. Not even similar, you know? It's crazy. Those of you who don't know Steffi Cohen, it's crazy how much Steffi Cohen videos I watched in the last few days. I was tripping that you were friends with Noahah that was crazy it's such a small world we went anyway sorry we went to school together no i know yeah it's nuts i can't wait to hear about well the first time you guys met and what that was about uh um stephy cohen is is not just um some jewish chick from venezuela she is a major contributor to the betterment of human beings on the planet. She lets people realize that they can do anything that they dream of, that they're really stronger than that they really are. She is the, you know, history will tell, but she's a modern day, you know, what's the guy's name?

The guy who broke the four minute mile. She's a modern day Roger Bannister. She's the, you know, there's the guy, the the four minute mile she's a modern day roger bannister um she's the uh you know there's the guy the fosbury flop guy i mean she did she's done some really cool fun things um with her life and then and then and now is i don't know how old are you i'm 29 she's 29 i don't want to say she's getting old but now she's getting older she's reflecting on it and she's letting her more vulnerable side come out she's talking about injuries she's talking about exploring just what it means to be in the public eye what it means to be a woman what it means to be a human

she's just now now we're and then she's also like okay i'll try another sport too parlayed all of this uh hard work into some other stuff um did your Are your parents here now? My parents are separated or divorced. My mom lives in Chicago. My dad is in Venezuela. Okay. Do you ever go back to Venezuela? Last time I was there was in 2018.

Oh, shit. Yeah. But apparently things have changed so much since 2018. When I was there, it started resembling a lot like Cuba. When I was there, it was it started resembling a lot like Cuba. Everybody kind of like wearing really old suits from the 80s. All the cars are broken down and super, super old. The currency is worth still worth nothing, but currency is worth nothing.

It's like monopoly money. And it was like a zombie town. I think 30 percent of the total population of the country left. I think 30% of the total population of the country left. It's a trip. Two years ago, I think I was reading a story about how the average person in Venezuela had lost like 20 pounds because of just the crazy shortage of food. I have a, so I used to compete in Olympic weightlifting and I did a few training camps over there. And I met this one guy. And he called me. It had to have been like end of 2017. He called me.

He says, listen, I used to compete at 77 kilos. I'm weighing 56 kilos. And it's almost 20 kilos lost. He's like, it's not because I want to. It's because my parents are really old. And pretty much all much every, every money, all the money that I have, I have to spend on food for them because they can't work. And I don't know what else to do. Like I need to get out of here. If there's anything that you can do, I'd really appreciate your help.

And I barely knew this guy, right? Like maybe I trained with him for a few weeks at most. And I asked him, okay, where would you want to go that you think you would have a better opportunity? And he said, Peru, cause he knew, he knew a coach there and he knew the team and he wanted to move there so I sent him enough money for a ticket for an airplane ticket to go from Caracas to to Peru and a little bit more it was like 700 bucks and a couple months he said thank you he was super appreciative and

then a couple months later he gives me a call again You were super appreciative. And then a couple months later, he gives me a call again. He's like, hey, I just got to Peru. And I'm like, what do you mean? You just got to Peru. It's been two months. And he's like, yeah, I decided to split that money between me and two other friends and just hitchhike rides and take trains and buses instead of flying. So he took two people with him. Paid that shit forward.

Yeah. Do you know Chris Cooper? I do not he owns two brain business in canada you don't know who that is no i don't i'm right you know do you know who miranda um do you know street parking miranda alvarez yeah do you know her know her no i know all of her yeah totally totally just my brain's just going off into just a totally other direction No, I know all of her. I love her. absolutely love chris cooper owns the the largest and what made me think of him is he owns the largest gym consulting company in the world and it's out of canada and he has to you know and canadians have to keep their head low they have tall poppy syndrome there do you know what you know what that are you familiar with that yeah and um so uh and he's such a gentleman of the

highest order and he gives away all of his shit basically for free. That's why this podcast is going. Basically, I had him on my podcast in a CrossFit gym that was failing, listened to the podcast, followed a few of his simple steps, became extremely successful. And then three years later called me and said, hey, I want to pay it forward to you. Will you start doing your podcast again? I'm like, no, I don't want to. They go, why? I go, I don't want to make – I don't have a producer and I'm not going to do any of the calls and i just want to point at stephy cohen and be like

can you call her and try to get her on i'm not i don't want to bug stephy because i don't have time for that shit and he goes fine i'll give you one of my employees to do that oh shit and then my wife made me do it she made you do she's like don't be a dumbass this is the universe conspiring to help you it's true do your 500 shows and quit being a bitch man but that's what i that's what i always say like in terms of how people should act towards one another it's like if it really if you do good by by everybody it comes back to you at some point yeah it really does i'll just um when the show's over i want i'll send out i i have your email on that email thread and i'll send out an email connecting you and miranda chris i mean just to say hi you know

what i mean just like you guys are such good people and you guys are doing such great work work in the world i i'd love to i've always wanted to connect with her yeah and chris is just so good at picking his brain because he's seen so many he's seen thousands of businesses succeed and fail and succeed and fail. So he knows just stupid shit like, hey, don't buy that toilet paper because 85 of my clients have said that it gives their people rashes on their butthole. I mean, you know what I mean? I mean, I'm being a little risque, but – so you asked that guy – is Hayden a Jew? No.

Are your parents okay with that? They weren't, or my mom. My dad was okay. My mom wasn't at the beginning. But then she had no other option than to accept. Are you guys married? No. I think my parents wanted me to marry an Armenian,

and my wife's parents wanted her to marry a Jew. And then like you'd reach a certain age or like, okay, would you just get married? Exactly. Just get married, just get married. And then, and then, and we really didn't think we were going to get married, but then it, I think she was probably, we had already had our first kid. So like at 39, she's like, I want a kid.

And I was 43 we never thought we'd have kids well are you do are you gonna do kids i think we didn't want kids i don't want kids i don't it's i'm freezing my eggs in a couple years uh just in case but no yeah um we didn't want kids either and then what happened was she got around we started hanging out with women who were like breastfeeding and we were hanging around some other people like who we thought were like jackasses and they were doing a good job raising their kids and my wife's like dude we could do this we're like we're like just like slightly less jackasses than them and that breastfeeding shit looks fun she's like let's just have one i was like all right so how many do you have now i have three what happened what

happened was is we had the first one and then we just stopped practicing safe sex. Safe sex. I thought they just multiplied. You have to bone, and you have to do it irresponsibly. Too much work. Yeah, I bet you you're going to end up having one. yeah i i bet you you're gonna end up having one it'll be just something like you end up being like i like i i suspect you'll be like my wife i'll take one of those but but we never thought we wanted one so yeah that's really gonna give

my mom hope good and you're so young still now it's okay to why is your business called hybrid what does that mean hybrid it runs on solar your your your business runs on solar and and uh conventional electricity no not really we we started hybrid when when we were both competing in olympic weightlifting and in powerlifting and that started kind of catching the interest of a lot of people just the training style was a little bit on the unconventional side. At that point in time, Olympic weightlifting was the style of training and programming that people used to do was solely focused on snatching clean and jerk. And it kind of thought about the squat and the deadlift as accessory movements to the snatching clean and jerk. deadlift as accessory movements to the snatch and clean and jerk whereas we were doing the squat and the deadlift as primary primary exercises to complement the snatch and the clean and jerk so

essentially we flipped the model and started focusing on having a strength backbone to our program and started making a lot of progress and people were really curious because our physiques changed a lot since we were focusing on strength and building some lean mass as well. And then our lifts were going up in parallel because our technique was dialed in. So that's how he came up with the slogan. Hybrid lifting was lift like a – look like a bodybuilder, lift like a powerlifter, move like a weightlifter. Oh. That's where it comes from.

That's cool. Why did you explore that? Oh, that's where it comes from. That's cool. Why did you explore that? Honestly, just because there was there seemed to be an organic interest in that style of training. So when so Hayden used to own, I don't know if you're if you know the company working against gravity. I've heard of them. They're the nutrition people.

Yeah. So that used to be Hayden's company. He sold his shares to his ex-girlfriend but he was he had experience in online uh building online businesses so because people were asking us we actually at that point i think i had like 3 000 followers he had like 12 000 followers and we posted a photo with a poll asking if people would be interested to email whatever email it was and we got about 400 requests from that so it seemed like it was what people needed what people wanted and it was something that we we felt comfortable in delivering um guys the reason i that she gave those numbers like 11,000 and 3,000 for let's say 15,000

Instagram subscribers and then you have 400 people sign up is there something in the business in the business that they call conversion and like a really strong conversion rate or a normal conversion rate would be a quarter of one percent so if you add uh you would need it's bad the conversion rate on instagram is really really bad basically in all social media is really really bad so basically to have 400 people move the needle or jump in and want to participate it's a massive uh yeah it's a massive conversion rate and then um how did you two meet we met at a weightlifting competition and he was he a was he a um competitor also so okay the real story is he was in miami for a weightlifting competition at that point in time

i had a side hustle that was i was was making singlets in Venezuela from this guy named Wilmer. So I would purchase the singlets for like a dollar and 17 cents. And then I would sell them here for 85 bucks. So that would be my side hustle in grad school. And he saw that I was selling singlets. They were actually pretty cool. So he messaged me asking for one sliding in the DMs and then inviting me for coffee. Did he really? No. No. He admitted afterwards that he didn't really want to sing, that he wanted to go on a date.

Wow, that's awesome. It was interesting what you were saying that you wanted as a kid. You wanted autonomy in the workplace. You wanted money. You were naming off all these things. And I was thinking, as a guy, it's like you just want girls to like you. Life is so simple like it's like or boys to like you just want someone to want to fuck you like that's like like it starts off you just want someone to babysit you then you want someone to bathe you and wipe your butt and then eventually you want them as you get older you get pat like six seven

eight nine ten years old you want to start more and more with them until you're a man. Then you want everything. And when was this? When did you guys meet? We met in 2015. So it's six years. And how long has Hybrid been around? Since 2016. Okay.

And is he basically a co-founder with you? It's basically like – Yeah. Yep. And do you sit down and have like a long-term vision for this or is it more – No, that's what's really interesting. When we first started, I was the one that didn't really believe that it could become anything big. For me, at that point in time, it was just another side hustle. I've had many in my life.

It was one of the ones that I was going to do for a little bit and then probably figure out how to get a real job, quote-unquote. Hayden did think that there was a lot of potential in the idea, and of course I backed him up. I helped as much as I could. But honestly, no. I mean, it got to a point because we were growing so fast and exponentially from month to month that after just maybe three or four months, I could already see that it was going to become something big. But I never thought it was going to become as big as it is now.

Employing, you know, over 60 people, being able to, or having funded three other successful businesses on top of that and just being the size that we are 60 people yeah and where you're based out of miami yeah we're based out of miami you know we went from from being coaches so just writing writing workouts and putting them on software we went from that to actually building software that we can sell so now we don't consider ourselves coaches anymore we consider ourselves that we are in the uh software as a service business in the sas business is it important to change your identity or the way you think about yourself like why is that important yeah it absolutely is because the identity that you ascribe yourself to essentially is going to determine how you're what you're going to focus on, where you're going to direct your efforts and in what direction you're going to be a coach then say all my free time I would have spent reading more about

strength and conditioning reading more about how to get one percent stronger or I don't know what nutrition whatever that was whereas we spent more time learning more about machine learning learning about software engineering bringing in the right people and obviously creating a structural organization that made sense for the goals that we have. I'm 49. You're 29? Yeah. Yeah, you may have just explained something to me that I've been digging around wondering what's the importance of it for 40 years. Did you ever want to be anything when you were a kid? I wanted to be rich and I wanted to be a professional athlete.

Yeah. And did it matter what kind of athlete? No. No. And are you a professional athlete? Yeah. I mean, the definition of a professional athlete is when you get paid to compete. Right. Because then you've kind of taken it to the upper echelons of that. Not only then were you a professional athlete, but then you redefined what was capable in the sport by setting world records.

Hey, so you have – I want to accuse you of sneaky numbers here. Are you ready? You get – I don't know what they are, but you get a world record like in deadlift. That's crazy. We'll circle back. I don't mean to like over – No. Go over it like it's not a big deal. And then you get a world record in like bench press, right?

And then you get a world record in back squat so you get like these three world records and then you get a fourth world record because it's the combined the combined score of all three of them correct yeah i don't know about that i'm just gonna give you three i can't give you four for that no i can't i can't but i was like i was listening i'm like wow that's great i really i really like how you get the fourth world record doing that yeah no i mean it does matter because you know there's been times where i don't know fuck people can chip that by one pound and it's just the accumulation of it that also matters the total amount of volume you move yeah and i guess it's equivalent to like in

basketball they have something called like the triple-double. That's like how many points you scored, how many blocks, and how many assists. And that's just as important as like how many points you scored, right? How many times did I pass the ball to you that you scored? How many times block shots did I block? So it's kind of like that. It's like the triple-double. It's like being good everywhere at the same time not especially do you know this um other venezuelan dude that's uh he's like the shortest greatest

tennis player in the world he's a dude no what's his name should i know man someone needs to google it and write it in the comments he he's he's like the 10th he's like the 10th best um male tennis player in the world um but he's only like 5'9 or 5'10. He was just in the U.S. Open. I think he was in the U.S. Open. He's awesome. But anyway, I told my tennis instructor, I was like, hey, I'm pulling my kid out of tennis, my kid's tennis instructor. And he goes, why?

And I said, because the average height of the top 500 male tennis players in the world is 6'1. And I go, my kids will be lucky if he breaks 5'5. And like oh how about this guy in venezuela he's 5 10 i'm like dude that's still five inches taller than my kid will ever be i was joking my kids still have you heard of the femur lengthening surgery that people are doing now oh tell me please tell me bro it's insane so there's this doctor i forgot where he's from. I don't even know. I think it's from here. But anyway, so they do this thing where they go in and they separate your femur. And then.

What do you mean they separate? They like saw it? Yeah. Okay. They saw your femur. And then they put this apparatus that has like two sticks sticking out. And then three times a day, you're supposed to like push it open like a little bit more it's like i don't know by how much a millimeter or whatever at a time and you do that until you you reach your desired height and people are gaining like i don't know

anywhere from like three to three to six and i can't be inches. Centimeters. Centimeters. No, way more than that. Way more than that. So inches. Yeah. Three to six inches. Oh, someone said Schwartzman, Diego Schwartzman.

Diego Schwartzman. Yeah. You should reach out to him. That's another one. Look at me. I'm like a matchmaker. Sorry, Hayden. Hey, don't worry.

Hayden. He's probably he's, he's, he's gay. He's gay.. Look at me. I'm like a matchmaker. Sorry, Hayden. Hayden, don't worry, Hayden. He's probably, he's gay. He's gay. I don't know. I wrote him down. Do you have an opinion on that? On the leg? My immediate judgment, harsh judgment is I disapprove.

I think that's way too extreme. And people, I saw the results. People don't walk the same after that. Really don't. And think about it. You're just increasing the length of the femur. What happens with proportions? How is that going to affect everything up and down the chain?

Now you have a femur that is five inches longer. Your tibia is still the same size. I know. So I had that same surgery on my nose. Right. Thinking that it would make me smell better. And look how it fucked me up. Took off my, all my weightlifting got fucked up.

My center of mass. My midline got screwed up. So you come to the United States. You came by yourself. Yeah. At 17. Yeah. You can't call me sexist.

You can't send a set. Can you send a 17 year old girl, pretty girl to the United States by herself? Yeah. Apparently who looks after you? Um, the school, I was sleeping in the dorms.

So at least i had some structure and were you a good student no school came school was really difficult for me my entire life especially going i was bilingual i i managed english fairly well but it was still really difficult for me to learn and retain information in English and then get used to the testing, the testing methods here with a scan Tron and multiple choice. Like we didn't have that back home. It was mostly short answer. Oh, that that's interesting. Do you still have trouble retaining information in English?

In English? Yeah. Like for example, I can memorize an entire song in Spanish in maybe four or five times that I hear it. And a song in English, it'll take me a few days. Wow, that's fascinating. My first language is Armenian. I'm amazing at remembering numbers and like math and longs and just but I English shit like I can't remember a movie I watched like a week later. It's like people be like quoting lines from it. I'm like, what's that from? They're like, dude, it was the movie I watched. Like, a week later, it's like people be, like, quoting lines from it. I'm like, what's that from?

They're like, dude, it was the movie we saw. Yeah. Wow. I'm learning all sorts of stuff. So, no, I wasn't really a good student. I was an average student, and if I really, really, really, really applied myself, I wasn't a good student. How old were you when you learned English? I went to a bilingual school all the way from kindergarten all the way to high school wow can i shorten so much can i get

shorter so my snatch distance to the floor is above is short now people are getting all excited about making you somebody taller in the comments can you see the comments no where no i can't oh it's it's it's if you went to the if you go to the seven on podcast youtube station you could see them pop up if you want stephy would you say that atg knees over toes or 90 i don't even know what that means oh oh yeah yeah stephy would you say ass to grass knees over toes or 90 oh does that mean like when you're in the bottom you're catching it in the bottom of the hole should your knees be over your toes yeah obviously there's no other way if you if your ass is all the way down to the floor there's no other way for you to be in that position

if your toes aren't over your your knees aren't over your toes there you go see duh gershwin duh she kind of she almost rolled her eyes at you dude but not quite um in in the video that you made with um heber and mars oh what's that was not that wasn't my porn guys that. That was an ad from your YouTube that I just opened. You said you started with CrossFit, which knocked me out of my seat, kind of. I was just shocked. But I shouldn't be why were you shocked because i just expect that community the power lifting all that community the uh just the the the big old strong dudes who are just lifting heavy shit just to hate shit on crossfit and hate

crossfit it's just a defensive i'm just stuck in a permanent defensive state for that you know what you know what i think I think they came around. I didn't really like that aspect of the powerlifting community when I first got into it. But it changed. It changed. I started realizing that the only reason why there were people doing powerlifting was because of CrossFit. You know, CrossFit was kind of the bridge. The people that – and you know what?

I didn't even know about power lifting before crossfit so right it's kind of what gives people an introduction to lifting right of course and there is no reason for it um greg glassman said this thing one time to me he said if you're going to help your um cardiovascular capacity if you want to help your cardiovascular health sorry your cardiovascular health you have to make some risk with orthopedic calamity. Meaning like I get off the couch and there's a chance I'm going to be injured. Right? And then there's people like you and Matt Fraser and Tia Toomey and this – I don't know if he does the same thing you do, but that the half door guy that fought on your card, they take this shit to extreme.

I guess it's, it's, there's, there's me driving my kids to school and then there's the formula one guys, right? Yeah. Um, and that formula one in that formula one race car, do you know who Alexander Volkanovsky is? Sorry, I'm all over the place. Do you know who that is? No. He he's, he's two or three fights away from being the greatest living fighter alive today he's the light head light um lightweight champion in the ufc he's 23 23 and one australian guy and he got covid and he got and he got pretty

sick from it and i was explaining to him i said hey and he was telling me about how many how much carbs he eats right to because he works out to um what do you say he works out to fuel his needs right and i said hey um you know formula one race car goes 200 miles an hour but if it hits a pothole it's fucked right and and if you eat a shitload of carbs you're gonna have a lot of hormonal reaction would you agree with that um no no okay uh well this is what i told him so you can unfuck me in a second i told me if you eat a lot of eat a lot of if you eat a lot of carbs especially refined carbs you can get a lot of insulin in your system and that insulin insulin in your in your in your bloodstream affects your

um don't worry you can say anything nasty to me i'm unoffendable no go on that if you get a lot of insulin in your in your bloodstream anything you anytime you increase the traffic in your bloodstream you affect the ability of nk cells and t cells to do their job and so you may appear to be fucking just healthy as shit and you may be like pushing the outer limits but when you push the outer limits when you when you do more than just get off the couch and swing the other way like a like a stephy cohen alexander volkanovsky and matt fr Fraser, that there becomes a point where it's dangerous. I'd be willing to use a different word. Your thoughts, ma'am.

I know that was a lot. I mean, my thoughts on the whole insulin chain and it affecting somebody's long-term health or short-term long-term health. Immune system specifically. Immune system. Okay, so I'm not very well-versed in the literature as far as processed carbohydrates leading to a decrease in immunity, essentially. But I would have to read up on that. But I don't know. Usually, like, I lean into the direction of everything being

multivariant if he was experiencing a decrease in health or a decline in health uh likely it's a multitude of factors it's you i don't feel like it's fair to blame it on only one thing yeah maybe the processed carbohydrates were contributing already to something pre-existing that he had that led to a decrease in immune factors for him. But it's unfair to blame it just on one thing, you know. And he would have had to be consuming a crazy amount of them as well. It's the excess of that too. Right. Let me word it a different way. How heavy did you start deadlifting before it became dangerous? What was the first amount of weight you ever deadlifted? Did you deadlift like 95 pounds one time?

No, I always deadlifted more than that. I think the first time that I maxed out was like 225. Oh yeah, shit. What did I see? saw uh some number that the first time you ever sumoed you sumoed 315 is that true that's fucking nuts that's uh that's five pounds um under my max and and i could be lying i sometimes i wonder when i tell people that i deadlifted 321s you know like i wonder if i'm lying do you ever wonder if you're lying when you're like, yeah, I deadlifted 545. Do you ever feel like sometimes I accidentally lie by like five pounds. Sometimes what you under, you under say it by five pounds. No, I it's plus or minus five pounds. Some, sometimes for some reason, I don't, I know I'm lying, but sometimes I like say 540 just because I don't feel like saying 545. And sometimes I say 550. I don't know why.

like saying 545 and sometimes i say 550 i don't know why interesting yeah i mean it yeah it's weird okay so so so the the first time you deadlifted when did you start deadlifting and you're like okay this is this is like like fuck these these vertebrae better be all lined up in the right fucking way so like when did i start realizing that i was getting fucked yeah well i don't know did you get fucked i mean. It sounds like you had some back issues. Yeah. I did. I did. I think it was like two years in.

So right after the beginner games stopped and I was starting to have to work really hard for improvements in my max, I think that's when it started kind of falling apart a little bit. And I started having to adjust my strategy to stay in one piece. You know, my mindset quickly went from how, how fast can I get strong to how long can I stay injury free. And that was, that was really interesting for me to experience because anybody can tell you any athlete, especially any young athlete, you feel invincible, you hear about all these stories of people getting hurt doing XYZ training because they were overtraining, because they were deadlifting too much, because they were lifting too much, whatever it was. But you never think it's going to happen to you until it does. And then you really have to reevaluate things. Programming, you know, organizing your training, periodizing your training becomes a really complex algorithm because now there's all these other variables that you didn't account for, like your right hip bugging you, like your left knee being all wonky, like your right freaking ankle falling apart.

And you have to figure it out again and again and again and again. Every training cycle, something different hurts. How heavy were you deadlifting when that happened happened when the beginner gains started going away um i think i had reached a mid 400s i was like around the mid 200s yeah some people some people laugh don't that's not making fun of it people have different resiliencies i'm not saying you're you're an inferior human being but maybe i am do you know how strong i felt when i deadlifted 250 sure you felt strong as hell holy shit god damn i remember the first time I deadlifted 135. Yeah, I know. Oh, do you remember the first time you benched 135? Yeah, that I do. That's a plate.

Do you like to put the plates on yourself? Um, no. No. No, why would I? I would rather someone does it for me. I noticed that about you guys. people put the plates on for you. I like to do it cause it's just, um, it's part of like, maybe it's just a built in rest or it's like the meditative process. It's like the, the, the tea party, you know, the,

it's just a part of the meditation. No, definitely. It's a you thing. Yeah. I think, I don't think it's a meeting. I think that you get so strong after a while you're just like yo bitch put the weights on yeah honestly yeah it's kind of like a respect thing all the kids that train in my gym wanted to put the plates on my bar yeah um how about spotters how important is it to trust your spotters yo i don't trust any spotters what'd you say say? I don't trust spotters. No. Okay. Tell me about that. No, I just, I, because I come from a weightlifting background, I learned how to bail on my lifts

safely. So I either set the safety pins at a height that I know that I can just dump the bar into without, without breaking it. Or I lift on bumpers and I can just drop it behind me. Especially in a squat. Cause, cause you know what happens if you have two spotters, one on each side, they're never going to pick up the weight equally. Yeah.

So there's been many occasions where someone, you know, I fail a lift and one person pulls it up really high and the other person doesn't. And then your back is all like funny with 500 pounds on your back. And that doesn't feel good. But have you ever, have you ever been injured by your spotters or a failed lift or something that went awry? I've been injured by a failed lift. Yeah, that was the beginning of my back pain journey. Essentially, I was preparing for the 2017 US Open, which is the biggest competition in powerlifting. 2017 US Open, which is the biggest competition in powerlifting. It's like a yearly one that everybody goes to kind of thing. And my back was bugging me. And I just, I don't know, it's so

funny, because I was in physical therapy school at the time. And if anybody else in my position would have come to me for advice, I would have given them a completely different advice than what I was doing. So I just was, I just was hoping that it would magically go away, that I would magically come into training and it wouldn't hurt. I just kept increasing the amount of ibuprofen that I was taking all the way to like a gram before training, which is extremely excessive. And yeah, it was just one of those days. Hold on, hold on. Wait, wait, wait. A gram. So. A thousand milligrams of ibuprofen ah yes okay

thank you for doing the math for me thank you thank you way too much and i just came in and i had a heavy triple in the squat program for that day and even though i knew i shouldn't even attempt that because my my back was bugging me so much i did and i ended up pinned by the by the squat at the bottom of the squat and then filled it into the safeties and then was legit just immobilized for half an hour. Couldn't even take my belt off. I was just laying on the ground. That was the beginning of like a really bad back pain episode.

Did you cry? No. Do you cry? Yeah. Did you ever hurt your back so much that you had to um like to pee you had to crawl into the shower um no but i've hurt my back so bad that i needed help putting my pants on and off and tying my shoes yeah i got you beat um yeah man fuck i was in a hotel room and i just and i i don't know what happened i hurt my. But you know what's crazy? So then this friend of mine who's a doctor – I was in there for two days in this hotel room and I would have to crawl into the bathtub to pee. I was so fucked up.

flexerol and vicodin at the CVS and it was a mile and a half away and I just fucking bit a rag and forced myself to get dressed and I put in and for me whenever I'm hurt I want to start sweating I want to be as hot as I can so I put on just shirts and sweatshirts and long johns and pants and I walked a mile and a half to the CVS and I swear to god just placebo or just knowing even before I put the flexerol and vicod into my mouth, like 90% of the pain was gone. Oh, for sure. That's motion. The best thing that you can do when your back hurts is, is keep moving. And it's so counter to what everyone thinks. And it's so counter to kind of an old school approach to back injuries, especially by MDs, by physicians, they'll tell you to lay in, lay in bed and bedrest. especially by MDs, by physicians.

They'll tell you to lay in bed and bed rest, and that's the complete opposite of what you want to do. When I first took my L1 in 2006 or 2007, I can't remember, CrossFit, and Greg would do all the lectures, I remember he said something like, the mama lion gets in a fucking battle and has fucking like her paw torn off but wins the battle she doesn't take tomorrow off she's made to heal on the fucking move we're all made to heal on the move um yeah the the back the back things um this kind of a hard one to ask you but i if i sleep for more than six or seven hours,

when I wake up, my back hurts. If I like go to bed at one and I have a podcast at seven and I get up, my back doesn't hurt. So something's happening around the six or seven hour mark. It's pretty consistent. And when I do my first piss in the morning, like I have to lean against the wall, like an old dude, you know what I mean? Like you probably, since you're not a dude, you might not know, but there's like the drunken lean, you put your hand on the wall in front of you and you kind of lean over and your dick just kind of points into the toilet. Right. Well, this, I wouldn't talk, I wouldn't talk like this to you like this, but I know you're

a doctor and you're okay with this. So, so, so, um, but within an hour it goes away. I have my first cup of coffee. I open the blinds. I walk around my yard and pick up dog poop. You know, I have my, like my routine, you you know with the bags and and i'm perfectly fine do you have that do you wake up in the morning i don't know what the female equivalent is to leaning against the wall to pee um for me it would be leaning into the sink to brush my teeth oh and you struggle and you struggle with that in the morning not anymore but i used to like when i had really bad

back pain i used to how long you're all good how long how long was that been going on for you uh five years i basically as soon as so i injured myself once really bad when i had kids and since then i just basically stopped everything. I stopped everything. I do squats with a 40-pound medicine ball. I ride the assault bike. I do a shitload of push-ups and pull-ups. But I stopped like once – I can't remember the last time I power cleaned.

I don't ever deadlift over 135 anymore. I'm just terrified of hurting myself again. Okay. You're saying some really interesting things. Before I go back to that, does leaning forward make your symptoms better? Kind of, but I don't have muscle engagement. Yeah. So, yeah.

Do you know child's pose? Yeah. Feels so good. Okay. Do you know child's pose? Yeah. Feels so good. Okay.

And basically two days ago after watching all your videos, and I had heard this like 10 years ago when my back first started bothering me, some yoga guys like, hey, you got to start doing back extensions. Basically Superman's on the ground. And I heard you say in an interview, I don't know if it was with that four-hour work week guy I think. Yeah. Tim Ferriss. Yeah. Who? Tim Ferriss. Yes. And you said something about there being a correlation between people who can hold a back extension and having good backs. I was like, fuck. Thank you, Steffi. People have been telling me this for 10 years,

but when I heard you say it, it stuck. So yesterday I started doing those. It's not a matter of back strength. Low back endurance is more important than low back strength because the muscles of your back are postural muscles that are supposed to be on all the time. So that's how you should be training them. But, yeah, I mean, you said some interesting things. I mean, there's two kind of approaches when it comes to evaluating and treating low back pain. There's a structural or mechanical approach, and then there's a biopsychosocial approach. Usually therapists lean in one direction more than the other. The beauty of being me is that I don't treat people. So it's not, I'm not, I'm not, I don't have any vested interest in either camp or either form of treatment. I'm completely unbiased. And I'm just basing my opinion on facts, you know, on what I've read on the most recent literature. So essentially,

the mechanical, the structural approach talks about there being some sort of physical damage to a structure. That type of injury accounts for a very small percentage of the total amount of low back pain cases. So it's not necessarily the case unless it's kind of like an acute injury, something that had a traumatic acute thing, something that happened when you were lifting or you fell in a car accident or something like that. Most cases are what's considered persistent pain or chronic pain. are what's considered persistent pain or chronic pain. And in those cases, you lean more into the biopsychosocial model, which basically looks at the relationship of that you have of pain with your emotions and how you're interpreting that pain, how your brain is consciously and subconsciously interpreting that pain. So for you, for example, you said, you know, I'm staying away from weights

because I'm scared of hurting my back again. That is like a hundred percent something that I would, that I would, I would lean the conversation into, into the biopsychosocial side to try to figure out why that is, you know, what about weights? What about those movements is triggering kind of like that, that perceptual response and why is that perpetuating your pain cycle essentially? A trippy thing about it is like so I wake up in the morning and if I bend over just a tiny bit at the waist, it feels like I'm just going to fall over, right, on my face. I have no muscle engagement. I can't stop it. Nothing.

An hour later, that's gone. I can bend over and touch my toes. Yeah. So weird. Yeah. muscle engagement i can't stop it nothing an hour later that's gone i can bend over and touch my toes yeah so so weird yeah so maybe you're saying that something could have had like you're saying that like uncle buck could have got to me at seven years old and that's why i'm attached to my back hurting um i mean maybe maybe or it maybe it had nothing to do with with your back maybe it had something to do with with something else related to pain. So, for example, the way I like to explain this is pain as a smoke alarm. So this was a concept that I learned from Dr. Greg Lehman. Basically what he says is that when you compare – comparing pain to a smoke alarm means that when there's smoke in your kitchen, for example, and something's burning, your alarm

goes off, but maybe it's you're just making bacon, right? But the alarm is there to tell you there's a fire. But in this case, the alarm is just being overly sensitive. And it's telling you that there's a fire when in reality, it's just smoke, or maybe goes off for no reason. Maybe there's not even smoke, maybe you're just boiling vegetables, you know, and that the evaporation of the air for some reason triggered the alarm on. So that same thing happens to our brains. Sometimes there's no perceived threat or danger, yet our brain is interpreting a situation as threatening or dangerous, when in reality, there's nothing there for you to be afraid of. Dr. Laurie Mermozley also talks about that on one of his TED talks in one of his lectures, or one of his lectures, I can't remember. But he's a neuroscientist.

And he's telling a story about one time that he went out hiking, and a snake bit him, a poisonous snake bit him. And he'd been on that road on that mountain many times before, and he just thought that it was a branch that brushed his leg. And a few minutes later, he was passed out on the ground, and his wife found him, took him to the yard, and it appeared that he had been bitten by a venomous snake. A couple years later, he went to the same trail, and he effectively got just brushed by a branch. And his reaction was like, he started screaming. He was panicking. He was like holding his leg. He thought that he had been bitten by a snake and it felt as if he got bitten by a snake. And it's just that built in kind of preservation, self-defense mechanism of your brain that tricked him into thinking that he was

experiencing pain when in reality it was just a branch that brushed his leg. So there's a really interesting kind of memory thing with pain. We know that there's neuroplasticity changes that happen in your brain after you experience pain. Like you start actually forming these connections in your brain that prepare you in case that you encounter a situation these connections in your brain that that prepare you in case that you encounter a situation like that in the future and in some cases it turns up the sensitivity of your brain to uh external stimuli so that's so susceptible to something shit like that most of us are it's it's it's a yellow it's a yellow hardback book. The author is Steffi Cohen.

The name of it is Back in Motion. Back in Motion. Why isn't there an audio book of that? I looked and I couldn't get it. I know, yeah. We just haven't done that. I've been writing another book. Hayden?

Hayden? Hayden can do it? Hayden? Narrate it? Dude, we started the podcast, but he doesn't do it narrate it dude we started the podcast but he doesn't have to narrate it he's the what is he Hayden's the he's the business guy he's the startup guy

Hayden get that audio book done I'm gonna tell him tell me about meeting Noah in your journey into into crossfit like what school were you at where was he always smiley and nice um all that shit he was did you guys date did you guys date oh no okay i didn't close um i wasn't interested of course he was um yeah so we met at the university of miami we're both in the same program I wasn't interested. Of course he was. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Yeah.

So we met at the University of Miami. We're both in the same program. It was the exercise physiology undergraduate program. And he was in one of my ex-face classes, I think. And I knew that he went from actually playing water polo with a buddy of mine with 4-2. He was on the water polo club team or whatever it was and then I remember he went from being he was ripped but skinny and small and then all of a sudden he started getting bigger and like super jacked and and crossfit started popping and he started being you know one of the cool guys

that everybody wanted to hang out with and I was in the I was playing soccer with a with a female club at the time but it was like recreational soccer and was really itching to try something competitive again I wasn't ready to let go of that part of my identity really I thought I was but I wasn't so I asked him about CrossFit in one of our classes and he said that he trained at Peak 360 that I should just stop by I was only three miles away from campus. I had a bike. So I biked there and was happily greeted by Noah. He was being his bubbly, welcoming, friendly self. And yeah, that's kind of how I got my introduction to, into weightlifting, to CrossFit and you know. Was, um, was Guido your instructor there? Yeah. What's his last name?inidad yeah that's right yeah he's cool too right such a such a nice dude really him and his wife virginia both amazing amazing people

um do you live close to there now yeah i do i live right by campus still and and do you ever see these people do you ever see noah or guido? Yeah. I actually train with Noah from time to time. Stop by peak, say hi, lift some weights. That's awesome. It's such a small world. Another trippy thing was when I was looking at your Instagram. I don't know why it's trippy to me, but it just seems like such a small world. It's the Sarah Bachman lady.

Yeah, yeah. Does she live in Miami? Yeah. She lives in Tampa. so and are you guys friends yeah yeah that's such a trip um last night i had john brazink on are you familiar with that name no so i made a movie about him it's called pulling john it's a documentary he's the he's the he's the greatest living arm wrestler of all time Cooling John. It's a documentary. He's the, he's the, he's the greatest living arm wrestler of all time without trying to like offend Matt or Rich or Michael Jordan. He's his dominance in the, in the sport of arm wrestling is like, there is, he has no peer in any other sport that I've ever heard of. I mean, he is something extremely special. And I asked him yesterday, I said,

Hey, I'm going to have Steph Cohen on. And you know, she has a world record deadlift of over 500 pounds. And then the men's dead a world record deadlift of over 500 pounds and then the men's deadlift world record is like a thousand pounds double that and I go is it like that in arm wrestling I go are there are is it is it the discrepancy that big and he I brought up Sarah's name and he said she was just strong as shit he said he was saying that she in in the sport of arm wrestling that she would give most dudes a fit for sure well but at the same time with with power lifting i mean you you can compare you should compare a female and male of the same weight class ah okay good point yeah so very good and that's and that is what he did in all fairness see that's why you're a doctor and i'm

just some dude who's trying to get the 500 podcast. What is the world record for a 115-pound dude, 120-pound dude in deadlift? Do we know? I don't know, but we can look it up. Someone will tell us. Yeah. Martin Adam says, hi, Steffi. Hi. Y-S-T-E-F-I.

That's a question? No, that's my question oh because you're like that's a fucking idiot why why is that a common spelling for stephy is that is there some sort of venezuela what's your real name is that your real name my real name is stephanie but i have it's a french heritage my dad is French okay that's why it's spelled with an F okay I've never seen it so it's common in like in France yeah it's spelled with an F a couple years ago you reached out to Matt Fraser or Matt Fraser reached out to you

Matt Fraser reached out to me when he was still competing because he wanted to perfect his deadlift. Can you tell me some details about that? Like he just slid into your DMS or you guys had a mutual friend or. And look, hold on. I found the, uh, the number for deadlift. The biggest one I found is, or the heaviest one is four 51 at that weight class.

Kilos. Bounce. or the heaviest one is 451 at that weight class kilos pounds and mine's 545 holy shit yeah but but i mean it's also because like how many guys weigh what i wear weight and in the weight class above in the 123 class it's 530 598 is the heaviest one i found wow that's amazing yeah they're not too far are are are men stronger than women i think generally speaking yeah could the strongest person alive be a woman bound for bound or absolute either bound for a bounty yeah an absolute probably not just because they don't make women don't just don't get as big yeah man that's cool that's really really that's really cool did you really sleep for 16 hours once or was that you were you just joking no no i have i listen if i if i think my superpower

actually is not strength this is my ability to sleep it's unbelievable look i went on a indian indian motorcycle trip so it was a three-day long trip we watched the video yeah we spent like eight to ten hours on the bike your first vlog yeah yeah so pathetic it's so bad never doing that again anyway so second day um hayden's bike broke whatever we had to leave it in the middle of the road and i had to ride bitch So I had to ride on the back of somebody's bike, of course. And man, it was so boring to just be on the back. I fell asleep going 110 miles per hour for an hour and a half. Just like this on the back.

My hands, my arms were like flailing in the wind. Was there a belt around you and the dude in Hayden no i wasn't on hayden's i would never ride on the back of hayden's bike i don't trust him like that he doesn't have whose bike were you on it was uh sean mcd the guy the indian guy like he's kind of like a pro pro rider he's the guy yeah um were you strapped to him? No, I was just leaning forward. Did he know you were asleep? He said he noticed like after 10 minutes because I was like flinching, like sleep flinching. Oh, yeah, yeah. Twitching.

Yeah, that. Oh, my God. If you sleep for 16 hours, do you get up to go pee? Likely, yeah, likely I get up to go pee and brush my teeth again because that's technically two sleeps yeah so probably at the half hour mark i'm brushing my teeth being and going back to sleep do you prefer to brush your teeth or floss your teeth in the middle of the of a sleep no just in general like you have a favorite? Oh, no. I have to do both. I have to do, actually, waterpik floss. Brush waterpik floss. Wow.

I don't waterpik, but, man, flossing, like, I like to go on Amazon and just order, like, you know, 10 things of floss, which are expensive. Dude, order a waterpik. It's about to change your life. Yeah? Oh, my God. It's so good. And it makes your gums so healthy because it actually like massages the gum because think about it with a flush you go in and down and like sometimes you're like poke

your poke your gum yeah plus you like massage your your gum and some of the stuff like actually comes out um what brand any there's there's the the one i like is one that's on amazon prime it's like 80 bucks is the best one it's a wireless um isn't it a pain like filling up that water container and like moving all and having it sit on yours you know what's a pain to lose your teeth think about it you only have one set look at you like a real doctor and shit you're like a real coach oh man i've seen horror horror stories of of of stuff like in my family my mom getting teeth pulled out uh what's it called when you have that thing root canal yeah yeah it's a hard pass for me oh you got real ethnic there for a minute yeah it happens um i i like to have like just dental

floss everywhere in every car in like all the glove boxes the junk drawer yeah just like that yeah what do you do with them after you use them in the car i don't want to talk about that yeah how did you know that i put it on the floor and, and then my wife will get in the car and they'll just be like little strings all over on the floor on the mat. That's disgusting. Just sloppy. Just so sloppy.

It's a guy thing. I think just guys do shit like that. Like picking their nose, picking their nose and just, just tossing it anywhere. Yeah. I wipe it on my leg. No problem. That's not okay. I just wipe it on my leg. Oh, that's not okay. I wipe it on my leg. No problem. No, that's not okay. I just wipe it on my leg.

Oh, that's not okay. I wipe it on my sock. Hey, at least I outgrew eating it. So did you feel comfortable giving it? So tell me about that again. So Matt calls you or Matt slides into your DMs. Yeah. And he says, hey, Steffi, I'm Matt Fraser.

You see the blue checkmark. You're like, okay. Oh, yeah, this is the CrossFit guy. You get back to him you get personally get back to him or does he have to do what I do and have to like talk to like some third party no I got back to him and um and then he says um and then he says hey I need help with my deadlift or I'd like to talk to you about deadlifting yeah he said I'm a big fan uh I'll be in Miami I would for guadalupalooza i would love to stop by your gym and get a deadlift session in with you and then he comes and are you is any part of you scared that like you might hurt another like like what works for you won't work for someone else and it's like jesus it's

like it's like me bringing my car over your house and asking you to paint it and it's like a six hundred thousand dollar car you're like fuck i and it's like a $600,000 car. You're like, fuck, I don't know. Like, I'm a good painter, but Jesus. No. No, not really. I'm confident in what I know and what I do. Yeah, that's dope.

That's exactly what I was asking. God, I'm trying to think. Like, I guess that's how I feel about parenting. I'm kind of like a borderline know-it-all about parenting. I feel so confident in how I'm raising my boys. I might need to ask you some questions about that then when i raise how to raise hayden yeah he needs a lot of help he's stuck in canada currently did you know that no tell me about that and then we'll get back to matt i love it canada and uk and australia can go fuck themselves as far as i'm concerned we flew flew back from Dubai and he got a 10-day ban because Canadians weren't allowed in the UK.

And that was where his layover was in. And so he had to go back to Canada, spent whatever, spent a week there with his family. His parents said he hadn't seen him in a while. And then he lost his passport. In his passport was his visa. And now he's 10 months stuck in canada yeah fuck how did he lose his passport and what are you gonna do are you gonna put on a singlet and go over there and get him girl listen that's why i was asking you about parenting

what what are the repercussions of someone losing their passport and their visa and then being stuck away from home for 10 months? Is that really true? I mean, I know the story's true. Is that really true? You're not going to see him for 10 months? I mean, we can meet in another

country. There's no way to cross the border? He can't drive or some shit? No. Fuck, it's weird. Why can't he just go to the embassy and get all new shit? Dude, exactly. And especially because it's a visa that already exists.

It's not like they have to do all the background check and all of that. That's already been done. I don't understand why the process is like that either. Oh, shit. I figured it out. Why? He wants you to come there and marry him so you can bring him back. It's all a ploy.

It's all a ploy. He wants to put a ring. What's the song? He wants to put a ring on it. We're engaged. Can you do that then? Can you just go over there and bro i'm not i'm not getting married for those reasons that's against my morals do you have morals yeah are you religious um i consider myself more like a stoic what's that mean um i live by the principle of doing good by others and just doing what's right giving back having virtue being being just that not getting cottoned in things of the past trying to help everybody around me

how did you find that what stoicism what was your introduction uh ryan holiday ah yeah ryan holiday was i think i read his book The Obstacle is Away first and that was kind of my introduction I never you know I was raised in Judaism but I was never really religious I enjoyed certain aspects of Judaism like just the fact that it there's holidays that bring people that bring families together there's a lot of you know good quote-unquote rules you know treat your parents right uh treat everybody with respect like there's there's certain things that i really like about the religion but i don't necessarily ascribe to believing in a god and and really and believing the entire story of how everything came to be i i i went to that guy's Instagram account,

Ryan Holiday, and I watched a few videos of his. And I couldn't help but not like him. He has a very punchable face. But what about him did you not like? What about him did you not like? I don't think he has embodied what he's teaching. I think he's a classic. He's teaching what he needs to know the most himself.

He doesn't consider himself a stoic. I asked him that question on my podcast. Oh, you had him on your podcast? Yeah. Okay, interesting. Okay. And I don't know him that well, but I saw some stuff that he had written, and had him on your podcast? Yeah. Okay, interesting. Okay. And I don't know him that well, but I saw some stuff that he had written, and I thought, oh, this is really cool. I'll check out this guy's thing.

And I was like, this guy has – he has – I don't feel like he's created space and stillness in his life. I feel like he has a – he's still – yeah, that he's a bit of a wreck, train wreck. For sure. And I think he's more that he's a bit of a wreck, train wreck. For sure. And I think he's more, he's a writer, he's an author, and he's a businessman, right? Like he's, he is, and there's still, there's still value in what he does in the sense that he's pretty much filtering and consolidating hundreds of thousands of years worth of information going stemming back from marcos aurelius and and other philosophers and putting it in a way that's easy to understand like if anybody listening or yourself even have you ever read like original text from that point in time it's no it's like really really difficult to decipher Like I have a book that I try to write, I can't remember, Epictetus,

and it has a bunch of just original text and I just can't read that. So reading it from him and him being able to analogize some of those stories to stories that I can grasp that have happened in the last 50 to 100 years, that there's value in that. But yeah, he doesn't claim to even be a stoic i was curious about it about that as well he just

really enjoys learning and reading about it and that's kind of how he got started into writing about it do you know anything about daoism darwinism daoism with a t there's this book it's called how the fuck can that slip my mind the author's name is Stephen Mitchell and it's the Tao Tao Te Ching T-A-O-T-E-C-H-I-N-G I think that's what it is three words Tao Te Ching

and Stephen Mitchell did the translation and the pocket edition is like I think it's everything that it's amazing it's the most amazing book ever written yeah you'll be stoked

well you'll carry it with you everywhere it's little like this yeah you'll like it you'll love it so Matt comes to you and do you guys hit it off so so so matt comes to you and you guys do you guys hit it off do you guys get along are you guys friends still oh well i mean you guys are in business together yeah yeah yeah uh yeah i mean yeah we hit it off just fine he's i was really surprised in how humble and friendly he was so i love there's a lot of people that when they achieve

a certain level of success they become arrogant they lose that humility but just the fact that he reached out and and realized that there was something that i could teach him was enough for me to to already like him and when you saw him dead lifting were you like okay matt you should do this you should do this and there were some pointers right away you were like i'd like to see you try this and try that yeah for sure of course there's always something to work on. And did he know your history? Did he know that you had, you knew about CrossFit and had experienced it? Yes.

Crazy. And then, so, and now flash forward two years and he, he, his training program, HWPO, is available through your company. You host, am I saying that right? Yeah. Yeah. You have an app, you have a platform that he utilizes and his people come to it. And when they come to his, they his people come to it. And when they come to his, they could also go to yours.

Or when they go to yours, they can also go to his. Exactly. For a different price point. It's a library. You have an app that's a library for training. Exactly. And there's 19 different training programs on there? Yes.

And 19 different people? So the app, I don't believe it hosts all 19 programs yet it hosts four of them the power lifting uh performance the build and the hwbo so those are the four programs that are on the app right now crazy are you were you just like were you just like beside yourself when when when this thing launched with you and matt were you like holy shit this is like peanut butter and jelly yeah pretty much i knew it was gonna be it was gonna be a really good partnership from the beginning i mean it's crazy it's kind of like what needed to happen for all the communities for sure for sure and we've been doing this for so long really that obviously anybody can do it on their own matt could have done it on his own easily and been successful as well but we've worked at kinks, you know, for, for the last almost six years,

we've been in this space and yeah, we help each other out. And it's a pretty symbiotic relationship. It speaks volumes of your program. I mean, I don't mean this like, like Matt's above you in any way. I mean it in the fact that just that I know Matt and I know the CrossFit community more than I know you, like I heart, like, like way. I mean it in the fact that just that I know Matt and I know the CrossFit community more than I know you. Like, I mean, I definitely had seen you around, but it was so, it was so limited. It was just by happenstance over the last, you know, whatever, 10, 15 years. But obviously I've been steeped in Matt shit, right? Because it's CrossFit, right? And that's

where I was. That's where I worked. And i figured there might he he doesn't fuck around no he's all business yeah and if he if he i was just shocked that he would go with someone else me too shocked we spend almost two years in negotiations awesome so he awesome crazy i'm so stoked for all of you and it seems like it's crazy successful and he's crazy and he's embraced it to like no end yeah yeah he's he's absolutely crushing and yeah the partnership's great what's what's next on that are you gonna do are you gonna be is there gonna be someone teaching jiu-jitsu on your platform next or boxing? Do you think that I've snuck into your emails when I say that? I feel like you did, yeah.

No, it's part of the natural progression of the app that we kind of had envisioned of it becoming a marketplace for other coaches to be able to use our service. That's our all-inclusive service. So it's not only using the app, it's also using the the support team so our marketing team obviously our software engineers our media team um but it'd be a platform that's reserved reserved for a certain standard of trainer or of coach do you do you know these um do you know these uh jiu-jitsu are you familiar with the jiu-jitsu community at all? No, not really. There's this group of guys. You might want to just take a peek at it.

It's called Daisy Fresh. Daisy Fresh. Yeah, and they're out of Mount Vernon, Illinois. It's basically this guy – yeah, Steffi, I think you would love this. This kind of resonates with your story of sending that guy money in Peru or in Venezuela to get to Peru. This guy basically just rented out an abandoned dry-cleaning place, and he started letting young boys stay there and sleep there overnight. And this guy was a black belt in jiu-jitsu, and he started just training them in there. And they basically had barely running water running water no heat no cold and now eight years later like the best jiu-jitsu guys in the world are coming

out of this fucking abandoned dry cleaning place it's nuts the story is nuts it's called daisy fresh there's a youtube series it's called daisy fresh season one it's so cool it's a good be a fun thing to watch like like like at 10 o'clock at night with your arm around hayden like when he comes back in 10 months dude man 10 months i feel like this is going to be really inappropriate that i say this but i feel like 10 months is too long to be away from your mate and like other suitors could slip in um i mean you know what i'm not concerned about that at all no not not i mean you shouldn't be concerned i'm talking he should fucking be concerned no i mean i'm so focused on what i'm doing right now boxing that it's honestly i hate this i hate

to say it i feel bad saying it but it's almost like a blessing in disguise because I I haven't been able to give him that much attention anyway because of how busy I am I train so today I woke up at 5 a.m. I had training at 6 30 um I had to go to the office film a bunch of stuff come back here do the podcast and I'll have another training session at 5.30. Boxing? Boxing, yeah. Do you have another fight lined up? Yeah, December 26th. Do you know who it's with? No. Then how do you know that you have one lined up?

Because I know that I'm going to fight on that card. Usually, you find your opponent like four or five weeks out. And where is the card? In Switzerland. I don't know what city. In Switzerland? Mm-hmm. Can't you just fight in miami or vegas or some shit yeah you could but um it's it's another it's a business opportunity i'm i'm teaching seminars with my coach so we're teaching four seminars he's teaching the kind of tactic boxing specific and I'm teaching nutrition and strength conditioning as it pertains to boxing.

And the seminars are after the boxing match so that there's not a distraction. No, they're before. We're teaching every weekend leading into the fight. Oh, shit. Yeah, I have multitask. I've done sports at the highest level and school at the highest level and, uh, running a business for the last ever. So I'm used to it. Holy shit.

Hey, um, do you think that, um, did you follow any, do you follow the CrossFit scene very much? Uh, not very much,

but I do follow it. Do you know about Ricky Garrard? He got suspended for drug use and he's coming back after four years. Yeah. Do you have any, do you care that he used drugs? He got suspended for drug use and he's coming back after four years. Yeah. Do you care that he used drugs? Matt gets pretty hostile towards him. Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, I think that if you're competing in a drug-tested event, then you shouldn't be doing the things that are illegal for you to do at the same time sports are so corrupt that i feel like more people are doing it than we're aware of so it just sucks to be that one guy that's taking all the heat like i i feel bad for him in that sense because i know he's not the only one and people are treating him as if he's it's the only you know the only person no No one else dares. Everybody else has such high morals and such high ethics. And they would never do it when the reality of sports is that it's not like that.

It's a lot more common than people think. So I don't know. I have mixed feelings about what happened to that guy specifically. The way I kind of heard the story that he told chase and i believe it because this could have easily have happened to me he's 22 years old some friends like hey you should take this shit it'll make you really really fucking strong he takes it and then he goes to the regional event and they test him and he doesn't pop so he's like fuck it good to go load up and he just started taking shit loads and then he popped and i remember giving a friend of mine saying in high school hey i'm going to mexico

and i'm going to get steroids there and i'm going to bring him back and i'm like oh cool and i gave him 100 bucks and he came back and i lost 100 bucks he never gave me the steroids and then and then even even when i was watching the interview with chase and i've said this a bunch of times on my podcast i'm sorry to beat a a dead drum, but he said the stuff he took. It's called RAD 140. So while I'm watching the interview with Chase Ingram from CrossFit, I'm looking up the shit, and I find it, and I can just buy it online. And I put it in my shopping cart, and I'm about to buy it. But then I noticed as I hit the purchase button, this warning comes up that says it will enlarge my prostate.

And I'm like like fuck that i'm 49 like all my shit's running good like like but but but but i'm 49 like you know what i mean like i drink four cups of coffee in a day and it could break my shit so um i don't know i i the only person i think that should be upset is pat velnerner. That's the guy that got pushed off the podium. Yeah. That kind of sucks because he didn't get the picture and all that shit. I know. Yeah, that is pretty annoying.

All right, but you don't know him. You don't know Ricky. No, I don't. But you know what pisses Matt off. Like when I talk to Matt about it, he comes unhinged. I've heard Matt talk about it. Yeah, yeah, he gets – he gets um on your motorcycle trip how many times did you drop your motorcycle sorry loaded question I know stuff I counted that I think it was like 15 dude it was bad it was bad it was so bad it was so bad but you know know what? I blame them.

They didn't ask me what my inseam was and they didn't ask me what my weight was. And they gave me this monster of a motorcycle because I can lift a lot of weight. But it's not about the weight that you can lift. It's your proportions, right? Imagine I only have this much amount of weight on top of a thousand pound bike. Like it's not, it doesn't matter how strong you are. It's going to tilt in one way or the other. I can't reach the floor in my defense had you ever dropped a bike before

that no my bike almost every day and i've never had that happen to me um and in the first time you dropped it where were you and were you just like completely like holy shit i turned the bike on everybody turns their bikes on we're driving we're we're moving the bikes from far away in the parking lot to right in front of the hotel door so we can load the bikes up and everyone's like turning their bikes leaving turning the bikes leaving and i'm left with with matt it's just me and matt and i turn my bike on and as soon as i let go a little bit of the clutch boom tilt started to left I'm like fuck Matt had to get off his bike help me tilt the bike back up head over to the to the in front

of the door and I dropped it again and that's when I realized all right this is gonna be definitely it's gonna be a problem so the first time I dropped the bike actually I don't even know if I dropped it this time but when a bike starts to fall over you go to war with it right and it feels like your whole body it feels like someone did you try to go to war with it and like feel your back feel your back go out or anything I won a few of those battles I did win a few of those battles but most of them I lost yeah it was bad so this 700 or 800 pound bike would start to go over and you'd fucking buckle down and start trying to go to war with it try as hard as i could um the i'm panicking because we're running out of time and i have two pages of notes

um the the fish the fucking 800 pound fish. This is fucking ridiculous. This video. Who tell me whose idea is it? Like, like the leverage you have on that base for people who don't know, there's a video of her and her, and her two friends,

they go on this fishing boat and they catch these fish that they don't even look real. The Fisher. What were those fish? Gliath groupers yeah they look like prehistoric dinosaurs from the deep sea it's like catching a manatee it's fucking ridiculous they're insane anyway so she's got this fishing pole and her leverage on it is so bad like how does anyone like they have you like this dude the guy josh the guy that took us fishing yeah he can pull one of those on his own how because okay so imagine this is the fishing pole what you do is that you have to anchor the fishing pole in between

your legs and then see this is you standing right yeah as the fish starts pulling the the pole down and like it starts bending like this you also have to squat and eventually you end up in like a sissy squat position with your knees fully bent and like legit uh parallel to the ground that's how that's the end position is like your knees are fully bent you're like parallel to the ground and the in the fish net or rod is completely like this. And that's when it catapults you out of the boat. Hey, that's that image of you holding the pet up like that and saying this is you. I'm going to I'm going to make that a little clip and repeat.

And that's going to be my promotion for the podcast. Was that fun? Did you like that trip? No, I hated it. Yeah. I don't like fishing. I don't like fishing as it is. I'm not okay with taking animals out of the water or using fish for bait. And I didn't realize how against it I was until I was on that boat. And then I could just, I was so uncomfortable the whole time. Have you been hunting? No. And I don't think you can do it either.

Yeah. I need to do it because I don't think I can do it either. You mean like you're going to shoot the animal and you're going to start crying. Yeah. I'm nothing against people who do it, but like I just personally can't live with, with it. Dude, there was, um, what are those big, not not fire ants like the bigger ones i don't know the red army ants or something i don't know they're red big massive whatever we call them bachaco in spanish there was one of those inside my house and i was about to step on

it and then i was like no i can't do it like what did that why would i kill it it's just my house is not doing anything to me or anyone else. So I grabbed that. I grabbed that piece of paper and I put them back outside. Yeah. Um, before I had kids, I had this rule that everything that was in my house had to be caught and released.

But now if I'm black widows, my, my wife is like, Hey, you can't do that. You got to kill them. So I kill them. You have black widows in your house.

Okay. But those are like, they can kill you. I guess. I mean mean that's the word on the word on the street i mean i've never been bit i don't know what's true or not true anymore i don't know i feel leon said velvet ant is it a velvet ant i don't know i don't know the only thing that i've that i've killed is a because it almost killed my dog. Oh, what? Bufo toad. We have these, these, this massive frogs in here in Florida that they expel on their,

from their skin. This like people actually lick them. Cause it has like a, it's a similar thing than a psilocybin. It's like a hallucinogenic thing or that LSD. It's like LSD. It's like LSD. And if your dog eats itd it's like lsd it's like lsd and if your dog eats it bites it or gets sprayed by it they can die so how big is it it's like this big how

did you kill it with like a broom handle yeah damn damn i i was in i spent a lot of time in africa in like these really fucking like isolated, isolated places where there's nothing except just tee like 5,000 and you can hear them coming. And then you look out over the desert and you see this black circle. That's probably like 20 feet by 20 feet. And it's just moving along the desert floor. And then you can go over and kind of like, look at them and they're like, and they're just coming. They, they do like a, just a walk around the town. I know. Right. And then you do a walk around the territory just looking for shit on the ground so they would just find stuff but it would be crazy because like they'd find a sleeping dog and then the dog you know you'd watch them like go over the dog and then start trying to get the dog and the dog would get up and run but it was crazy

it was crazy it was just like an army going out just looking for shit to fuck up but every day at the same time of day i would see them come out yeah fuck that yeah people there like uh i would i would see like a uh like a teepee and um i and no one would be in it and i'd be like hey what happened how come no one's in that teepee and they're like oh cobras moved in or or termites moved in you you know, just nutty shit. Africa's a trip. Thank you for your time. Appreciate you. Thank you for having me. Lovely conversation. It was. Yeah. Good. I get nervous before all of these. Really? Yeah. What, what are you nervous about? Um, Yeah. What are you nervous about?

I don't know. I was going to make up some shit, but I couldn't feel a real answer coming. Maybe long silence is like the one I just had. Well, you're pretty good at it, so you should feel more confident. Yeah. But you know what? Aren't you nervous right before you go lift yeah yeah but that's necessary i've actually tried not to be nervous and it ends up being really bad for you i think in sports you're using those nerves okay then one more question for you is is that fighter do you have fight or flight before you before you lift in front of a group and then you have to make sure that you don't choose the flight mode? Um, I mean, yeah,

if by fight or flight, you mean just like the, the feeling of kind of like that anxiety, like elevated heart rates, palm sweating kind of, kind of thing. Then yeah, of course I do feel it. Um, no, I mean, literally you want to run out to the parking lot like like minutes before this podcast starts like i don't like so today we had to change the time of the podcast and i wanted to write to you so fucking bad and be like we can do it on another day you know what i mean like yeah like i just want to run away i'm not always wanting to run away i feel like everything i do in my life i I have to face like, That's interesting. Yeah. But the obstacle is the way. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yes. Yes.

And so have you ever had that where like, it's your turn to go up there and deadlift and you're like, Oh man, I'm just going to just run out to the parking lot, jump in my car and drive away. With lifting and never happened, but with fighting, it does. Like anytime I have a sparring session, pretty much. I feel like that. It's so weird. Even during, I had this conversation with one of my friends who's a world champion boxer.

And, yeah, she has the same feeling. Like, sometimes, even during sparring rounds or during a fight, you go back to your corner and you don't even feel like you can go back in. Like, you're in such a high state of arousal that you feel like you just want to get out of the ring and quit forever you question yourself even like why you're even there but yeah and fighting more and more and powerlifting is it is it um what did you think of the tyson fury um deontay wilder fight sick fight sick fight i loved it i loved everything about it i i thought personally personally I had never seen a fury fight because I just started boxing really I wasn't a boxing fan before and I thought it was going to be a little bit more technical but just man you know what it is to be knocked down multiple

times and just get back up and try to try to survive or change your strategy I don't even know if you're even thinking at that point you're're just trying to not get put on your ass again and just trying to throw as many punches as you can without getting punched many times. It's just crazy. They both showed so much hardness. Really impressive, especially after experiencing that feeling in a ring. I have so much respect for athletes like that.

Crazy. Did you like Deontay going into the fight? I didn't know much about him. watched a couple of his uh older fights i i do i think he's a he's a great fighter but man fury is just so impressive so i'm pretty sure how he turned his life around and his whole story is crazy yeah i i was not a fan and then by the third round i was like holy shit i not a fan. And then by the third round, I was like, holy shit, I'm a fan. Yeah. Someone just wrote, Hector just wrote, Steffi just Ryan Holiday'd Sevan. The obstacle is the way. Is that one of his lines? Teach me.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much um they said um i guess someone from your camp invited me to be on your podcast and my producer's like how should i answer like you can't you can't answer now what if like she hates me or i hate her then it'd be an even more interesting conversation good point