The Sevan Podcast - #178 - Mark Bell

Episode Date: October 22, 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. Would you rather I start the show late or just sit here and look at you and not say anything? Those are kind of the options, right? Just sit here and wait for Mr. Bell to tell you a story.

Good morning, Dean. How can the YouTube video say 11 waiting when I know we're live? I'll tell you a story that I'm about to tell again anyway to Mark Bell. I have a friend who went on Mark Bell's podcast and I guess Mark does all of his podcasts live and my friend was telling me, hey, that's the only way to do it. You got to go live. You got to go live. Felipe Rosario. Felipe. Good morning. Yes, Sevan. That is me. That is the name I go by. And so my friend told me that he went on Mark Bell's podcast and that Mark Bell does it live. So I was like, well, shit. And so this friend of mine, actually, he was the first person I ever

went live with on my podcast. He kind of pushed me to that. Thanks for the last episode. Shed light on some stuff for me the last episode with uh lica belly is that what you're talking about that was cool i have to tell you that was that i i was uh i had no idea how that was gonna go i never know how any of them are gonna go um who's the easiest person to do a podcast with uh i mean obviously james and kate that's why i get so out of control i'm too comfortable um i lose all discipline but uh who else what guests um oh with gee yeah that one was i wasn't ready i didn't know how that one was going to go either. You never know. What did you like about that one? What did you like?

He's on his own podcast right now? Seriously? That's completely un-fucking-acceptable. There's no fucking way he's doing his own podcast right now, and I'm sitting around here waiting for Mark Bell with my thumb up my ass. There is no way. Mark, hi. What's up, man? I'm reading the comments. They're like, dude, he's doing his own podcast right now he's not coming on your shit yeah i'm too busy doing my own stuff how do you how do you

decide i that you know the once every six years that someone invites me on a podcast i'm like fuck that i'm not spending an hour and a half on your podcast. You come on to mine. How do you decide to go on other people's podcasts? I was enticed by the hand job. Ah, yeah. This guy's probably offering the hand job right up front. He's probably pretty good at it. Probably knows what he's talking about.

Dude, you signed an NDA. You're not allowed to disclose those type of things. I just, you know, I like sharing information. So if someone's excited and fired up, then I'm excited and fired up too. I like sharing information because there's just so many different,

there's so many different people to listen to out there today. People are following so many different people. I'm not sure if they know all the different names out there. So like if I hop on someone else's show, even if the show is kind of small, um, then maybe I reach a new audience. Maybe some people hear about me and some of my ideas and concepts and some people I follow. And then they gain some knowledge towards that and maybe it can help change someone's life in some weird way. Yeah. Um, that is, that is the theme as I dig around on Google, the internet, that is your theme, helping people. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's,

it's a motif I see everywhere. How did you choose that shirt today? Did you, or was it just random? You just kind of stumbled into your closet. Yeah. I, I, I stumbled out of my closet. I get dressed and it's pretty dark, so I don't even know what I'm throwing on exactly. More recently, I've been throwing on some bigger t-shirts. It's kind of a weird thing. I don't know why this happens, but as you get in better and better shape, for some reason, your clothes get baggier and baggier. I'm not, I don't know how that works, but that's,

what's been going on. We lose them. They delete them. Maybe the answer was too profound. Way too. Thanks for holding. Thanks for holding this. I was trying to close a window on another computer and I closed my own window. That's a first. Oh, sorry. Everyone knows the answer to your question except me. So it's dark. You stumble into your closet.

bigger clothes, which is kind of funny because, uh, I have a tendency to do that as I get leaner. I don't know what, I don't know what the affinity is for that, but, um, anyway, yeah, I'm getting dressed at like four in the morning, my wife's sleeping still. So I'm just trying not to make, uh, make too much noise and just grab whatever clothes I can. And sometimes I end up with, uh, some pretty interesting, um, mismatched clothing. Yeah. I pictured you would be wearing something like one of those shirts from the eighties, like that goes on top of the MC hammer pants, like something more like with like a spaghetti strap. Oh yeah.

Yeah. The, oh, I see the, um, yeah, like the bum equipment, uh, gorilla wear from back in the day, the, uh, boat neck style, uh, sweatshirts. Why would you go? I do the opposite. As I get leaner, I would like I have fat clothes and not fat clothes. And it's like there's like a one pound difference. It's because you probably never actually been in great shape before.

Yes, that is that is that is 100 percent true. You get in really good shape. It gets to be weird. You're like, I need to kind of hide this. I need to reserve this from other people. Oh, like you don't want the attention. It's too much. Yeah, like if a dude takes off his shirt and he's got like a tank top on and he's 6'1 and 180 pounds, people are like, oh, that guy looks great.

But if you pop off your T-shirt and you have a tank top on and you're 280 pounds, people are like, that guy looks great but if you pop off your t-shirt and you have a tank top on and you're 280 pounds people are like that guy's a fucking asshole so it's one of those deals people think you maybe took it too far or something I don't know yeah I can't believe you just said that to me

it's because you've never been holy shit there's a lot more of that to come on this show probably i don't know oh my god mark wow i mean that that is that is the truth i've never been in i've only i've never i've never i've never been in such good shape or if i was i have like some sort of body dysmorphia or something i've never been in such good shape where i was like excited to take my shirt off or or i mean think about it this way right like um there's different degrees of like wealth you know and like are you gonna

pick up your buddy like that you used to hang out with in high school you're gonna pick them up in your brand new like rolls royce you'll probably choose to pick them up in your like beat up Jeep or something like that. Right. So it's, it's one of those deals where, yeah, it's cool to like show it. It's great to have it, but, uh, only certain times, certain situations, cause other people sometimes can't handle it. So there's some video of a flex wheeler walking on the beach in Venice back when he was a competitive bodybuilder. And just there, I've seen other people post similar things where just the looks he's getting are, you know, I don't, people aren't like elbowing each other saying like, wow, what a magnificent physique that is. Wow. That's really

cool. Everyone's just saying, oh, that guy's on steroids or that guy only cares about himself or, but you know, it's, it's our own self image that really matters the most, our own, not self image, but our own self thoughts that matter most because, uh, a lot of times people aren't really even thinking much of anything that you're doing. They're barely even paying attention. And even if they did have, uh, hateful words or whatever, um, they don't know you. So so like what's the difference like what what why does it even really matter why why get in your own head too much about what other people think but that's my way to do it it's just a it's just to kind of uh cover it up with some baggy clothes i

guess so maybe maybe you're like hey i don't want to make this i'm in such good shape right now and i'm going on with this dude sevan and i know he's never been in fantastic shape, so I don't want to make him feel bad, so I'm going to roll up in the beat-up Jeep. That's right. But you don't have a beat-up Jeep. You've just tried to throw some mud on your Rolls Royce, and I see right through it. This house that you're flexinging in front of is this your house uh i oh it's a blue house with like a deck on top or gray i'm not sure what you're looking at can you show me i um i probably could if i knew how

if i had an engineer like you if i was big time like you it's you with the with the slingshot blue slingshot over your shoulder and you got this bam double oh no that's not my home that's uh that's in new jersey oh yeah that's a uh yeah that's a rental that we took out for the weekend we me and my family we go to new jersey um every year i'm originally from new York. And so we go to the Jersey shore and, uh, yeah, that was a place I rented out for about a week or so. And, uh, we had a great time, kind of a big old, uh, bell family reunion. There's like 40 of us that go to it.

So it was pretty fun. How good does that feel to be able to do that for your family? I'm assuming you pay for the whole thing. Uh, it, it feels amazing. Uh, I don't pay for everybody. 40 people's a lot. I can't, I suppose that I maybe could figure it out, but, uh, we, um, we do, uh, have a couple other people that join us. My dad usually joins us. My brother usually joins us and stuff like

that inside of the house that we rent. But yeah, like I said, there's 40 of us. So there we're kind of, uh, all over the place uh out there in new jersey when we go i do something like that in lake tahoe not even with 40 people but when i started having a little bit of extra extra money on top of extra money i started renting a home in tahoe once a year for like five days and invite my family and it was like it's like the greatest thing ever it's awesome it's amazing to be able to share stuff with people i have a home um i have a beach house in bodega bay and i have a home in tahoe lake tahoe as well and um you know to be able to share that with friends and family there we don't we don't rent them out we don't let uh we're not trying to make any money off of

them or anything but we just uh let friends and family stay there for free. Uh, and even some employees and stuff like that, whenever, whenever they want really, just as long as we're not there and, uh, you know, it works out great. And I was able to buy a home for my dad. I was able to buy a car for my dad. I was able to buy a car for my brother. Um, and yeah, just, uh, the invention of the slingshot and some of the products that I've created over the years have not only created a great life for me, but a lot of the people that I love and care about as well. Dude, that is so awesome. You bought a home for your dad. You know why that's so good too,

is because you get it back. Right. Everything you buy your parents. Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, as long as you don't get hit by a train or something. But they go before you and then you get that shit back. God, that, what, it's so cool. I mean, that really is the dream for every kid, right? What's great about life is if your parents don't become a burden on you. What's even greater about life is if is if your pair, if your parents don't become a burden on you, what's even greater about life is, is if you can like help them.

Yeah, it feels unbelievable. I mean, they, you know, um, to watch my own children, I have a 14 year old daughter and a 17 year old son and to watch them grow into, you know, uh, not maybe not fully capable yet, but,, but to watch them grow up into capable human beings that are kind of cooking their own food in the kitchen. And my son's, you know, driving himself back and forth to school and picking up his cousins here and there to go walk around and just have some fun and things like that. It's really neat to watch your kid be able to do really much of anything that you taught them, whether it's they tying their shoes for the first time or they're brushing their teeth or they finally use the bathroom the right way and don't

just shit their pants or something like that. It really is amazing. So I can't imagine what it's like for my dad, um, you know, to have a kid that, uh, you know, is, is later trying to turn things back around on him and showing him, uh, my appreciation and my thanks for him. I walk with him every morning, uh, as well, just, um, just as part of our, like morning, our morning ritual together. And, uh, yeah, I mean, he's an amazing person. And I always start out whenever somebody asked me about some of the successes I've had with business, I always have to start out and say, Hey man, I don't know what it's like

to live any other way. But I grew up with two amazing parents and, uh, that's the ultimate secret weapon. Not everybody gets that. And I understand that. And so for some people, uh, I believe they're, uh, they're starting off a little bit further back. Uh, if they didn't have, uh, parents that were supportive, my parents went to everything all the time and they still do. Um, when my, my mother passed about a year, about a year ago. year ago um but even before that even when she was sick and even on her worst days and stuff like that uh they they would both show up to everything we have a seminar this weekend and uh i'm sure my dad will be there he was here for our last seminar that we did with uh ct fletcher so my dad is is always around at these things um even if it's not like his

greatest interest you know he's like my son's going to do that this thing and i'm i'm going i'm going to be there did you walk with him this morning at 6 a.m this morning his knee was banged up a little bit so uh we didn't actually walk this morning but i still got my walk walk in i still got my steps in but uh yeah we walked yesterday mark was in a movie bigger faster stronger did i say i'm in the right order something like that sounds good enough and that's how he popped on my radar i think that movie was from 2008 right and that was a co-production between you and your brother. My brother, Chris, directed it and wrote it. OK. And the movie was.

I am I was I am, I guess, kind of a documentary filmmaker. I've made a bunch of them. But this movie really was one of the first ones ever to take it to the next level it had some of this uh michael moore shit that was like really practical and down to earth it wasn't as um it was really great man your brother's something else and is interviewing and that's so that's how the bells first popped on my radar and then over the years with my and that was right about i was about one or two years into working for crossfit at the time when crossfit was just you know kind of like spreading around the world there were about 300 gyms i think in 2008 and so of course my um my interaction with mark just through seeing him on videos and on the social media just over the years has just

increased i've sort of kept one eye on him and seen what he's doing, but not very close because it was in a world, it was a world that I thought didn't really have any interest in CrossFit and that maybe shit on CrossFit is too hard. But, but just, anything I heard was always like poo pooing CrossFit, which was okay. There was no, it was kind of like what Mark was saying in the beginning. You kind of, no one's really looking at anyone as much as you really think they are. And I, and I know that. Yeah. If I can interrupt for a second, please.

Anyone that bashes CrossFit, anyone that thinks that CrossFit is like foo-foo or it's some bullshit that people do that can't lift heavy weights or it's something that people do that can't bodybuild it's like uh i think some people think it's a place for people that didn't have a place previously in fitness they got the totally wrong idea and wrong concept crossfit is extremely is is just extremely difficult. Uh, even for an advanced lifter, uh, just to give an example, there could be somebody that works for a long period of time in their career, their lifting career towards a 600 pound deadlift. And maybe that same person can squat around 500 pounds. And maybe that same person can bench three 50, 400 pounds, something like that.

That's a very strong, very capable individual. But now you ask that same individual to do a rope climb and most likely they're already out. Like most likely they're going to have a really hard time because that individual that can lift those weights like that normally is somebody that's fairly heavy. Let's say that individual is gifted enough to do a rope climb. Okay. Well, let's see how long it takes them to run a mile. Most of the time, you know, their, their time, their, their running time is going to be compromised. Let's see them do a pull-ups, you know, and people make fun of the kipping pull-up, but they don't understand the whole reason why the kipping pull-up

exists the way it does is because the rules in CrossFit are to get your chest to the bar. Your chest has to make contact with the bar. So show me some other way of doing a pull-up, if you will, where you don't move your body around like that to get your chest to touch the bar in a pull-up position. What ends up happening is over time, if you were to train me in CrossFit, I'm about 240 pounds or so. If you were to train me in CrossFit, I would end up over a period of time having to look like a CrossFitter. I'd have to lose weight. I'm not saying that you can't do it at these bigger sizes. There certainly are some genetic mutants that can do things certain ways. But I think powerlifters would look down at CrossFit and say, these guys aren't that

strong again you got to keep in mind these men and women first of all they are very strong so i even contend that notion uh but also these are people sometimes coming off of a 5k trail run to deadlift 500 pounds or in the case of. Brooke Wells. Doing a 5k trail run. And then still deadlifting like 425. Or something like that. In a deadlift ladder. It's like are you fucking kidding.

The CrossFitters need a lot more respect. Than they get. They unfortunately only get it. Well not only get it. But mainly only get it from themselves. And from their own community and i hope that powerlifters bodybuilders and strongman athletes um and other people in fitness give them their due credit there are they are fucking savages i think most of it to be honest

is just the insecurity of the crossfitters though i never heard you know um yeah i didn't mean it to say it like any of it was true either i think there are obviously some people in the in both communities who poo-poo them there's probably more crossfitters that poo-poo powerlifting than there are power lifters that poo-poo crossfit um because let's face it when you start doing crossfit you sort of tap you start really exploring a lot you sort of tap, you start really exploring a lot of things you never thought you could do. You get, you know, a 50 year old woman climbing a rope and you can't help it all of a sudden think you're the shit. So, I mean, we do have a little bit, we have our own ego problem. I mean, every time I don't go to Starbucks anymore

since the so-called pandemic started um but uh every time i would go into a starbucks i'd look around and uh i'd be like i'm the fucking fittest person in here i had that little voice would say in my head i'll fuck whoop anyone's ass in here five five one 50 um uh so so then then so then finally um how he he and i always confused you with jesse burdick um which is funny because you guys are, as I dig around about you, you guys are friends. Absolutely. Yeah.

My BFF. Yeah. That's crazy. And so I always kind of, so, uh, a while back, um, uh, another mutual friend of ours, Dave Castro told me, Hey, I was doing something with my kid and he goes, Hey, I'll put you in contact with Jesse Burdick and he can help you show you some stuff to help your kid swing a bat better and so i thought i was getting put in contact with you and it took me a while to figure out okay that's katie hogan's husband and i had to like re i had to un have you ever thought two people were the same person

i actually was at the airport one time and somebody congratulated me on getting married to katie hogan oh that awesome. That makes me so happy. It's not very legal for me to have two wives, but okay. So I had to pull you guys apart. I had to pull you guys apart and make you guys eat your own person. It was like Play-Doh getting mixed up as a kid when you didn't want it to. And then it became very clear you're not. And, uh, and then, so then, and then, and, you know, it became very clear.

You're not, you're not. And then I guess Dave went on your podcast and he said, you do your podcast live. And then he started just telling me what a bitch I was. Cause I don't do mine live. So then I was like, I can't be a bitch in Dave Castro's eyes. So I started doing mine live. And then he's like, have you had Mark Bell on yet? And I go, nah, he's too big time. I'm working, I'm working my way up. He goes, dude, he's the nicest guy ever. Now I've that those words don't

come out of Dave's mouth. Do you know what I mean? And I don't even think I've ever heard him use the word nice except to describe you. So I was like, all right, either Dave set me up and this guy's a total prick and Dave wants to see me get fucked or I'm going to, I'm going to make the attempt. So, so here we are. And I see that house that you say you got in New Jersey. And what's funny about that is you say you have a vacation home in discovery Bay. And that's exactly where I thought that was. I thought that was like somewhere in Northern California, like discovery Bay or like somewhere outside of Guerneville or something, you know, like the drive to Guerneville. I see homes like that with all the seagulls all over them yeah we have a place out in uh it's bodega bay

is the area bodega bay yeah but i mean they're all they all look the same but bodega bay is uh it's kind of a hard place to describe because there's a beach there and um it's it's really interesting like somehow like not not that many people seem to know about it or maybe it's too chill. Like it's not, it's not like Santa Cruz. It's not like Santa Monica. Um, it's not like a real beach that, but me and my family, we love it. And people oftentimes, when we do go there, they're like, what do you do when you go there? And we're like, exactly. We do a whole lot of nothing. We go for walks. We go on hikes.

We hang around the house. My wife's always messing with a puzzle. Kids are usually playing like board games or sometimes video games. And, uh, we're just barbecuing and kind of hanging out. So were you, I want to go back to how, how, how the slingshot came about and how it changed your life before the slingshot. Were you just hustling? Um, before the slingshot were you just hustling um before the slingshot i was mainly just power lifting just but how did you make money i didn't you didn't i didn't really

make i didn't really make much money i uh you know i did have my gym and the gym was making a little bit of money um don't lie gyms don't make money and i know but the gym the gym was making a little bit of money. Don't lie. Gyms don't make money. And I know. But the gym wasn't always free. So in the beginning, the gym made a little bit of money. And I did a little bit of personal training. And I also started a magazine called Power Magazine. And that was starting to make a little bit of money. But I didn't really do much.

I wasn't able to really put up much points on the scoreboard in terms of, you know, bringing in income. But my wife and I together figured it out enough to where we could, you know, maintain a mortgage and things like that. we were losing our home and uh my i mean my financial stability was so bad that uh you know i had bad credit i couldn't get a credit card um i couldn't even sign for our house so my wife and my brother-in-law did personality. And so, uh, while bills were piling up and while different things were going on, I was always like, I don't know, it's going to just work out one day. You know, and my wife was like, shit just doesn't work out. I was like, ah, it will like, I'll just keep leaning into this powerlifting thing. And eventually it becomes something from the time I was a kid, from the time I got into lifting when I was 12 years old and I started getting that burn to want to do it every day. I always knew

it was going to turn into something. I just, I just never really knew what that is. So I explored pro wrestling because me and my brothers loved pro wrestling. I explored playing football because I thought maybe I could use my body in some way to make some money playing football or something like that. Turns out I wasn't good enough at that or professional wrestling. And then so I shifted gears and went back to what I started with, which was powerlifting. And I just felt like powerlifting was like a calling. It just was always there.

Whenever I would explain how to do a bench squat or deadlift, just words would come flying out of my mouth. I was normally pretty shy. And now here I am, you know, explaining, you know, how to bench squat or deadlift to the CrossFit community because I started doing powerlifting certification courses, um, through CrossFit. And, you know, I, I just started to gain more and more confidence in myself. The more weight I was able to lift, uh, eventually getting to, you know, squat over a thousand 80 and bench press 854 pounds deadlift 766. And just after you start to do things like that for yourself,

you start to recognize what you can really make of yourself in other areas. It's like a light bulb, hopefully, will eventually go off and you'll go, wow, I wonder if I took the same principles that allowed me to get better in the bench squat and deadlift and become a high-level power lifter and a high-level powerlifting coach. I wonder if I could take that outside of the gym and figure out ways to be a success otherwise. A successful dad, a successful husband, a success in the eyes of, I guess, the general population, which is kind of always comes down to making money. How long has the slingshot been around? The slingshot has now been around, yeah, for about, yeah, I'll be going on like,

it's been around for 11 years. Oh, darn. I was trying to show off. Okay. 11 years. And so your kids are 14 and 17. So you had two kids. What was the most amount of months you were behind on your mortgage? We actually just stopped paying it because that was advice from my dad. My dad's a financial advisor and he said the whole country's upside down. So he's like, you don't have to pay it. And he turned out he was pretty much right. So I think we went about six months without paying it. And I don't think we ever even had to pay it because again, uh, that was a time that was, uh, like 2008 or whatever, when things were just really

weird. My dad's like, they can't retract money that you don't have, you know? And he's like, not only do you not have it, but no one else has it either so it was a weird time um i don't remember exactly everything that happened uh but i do remember that yeah we didn't pay for months on end uh towards the towards us uh moving out of the house oh you ended up moving out of the house yeah we ended up moving out of the house and then we just um you know so sometimes you know you have to shrink down sometimes in life you know you you might you might try to you know uh we we were financially stable when we bought when we bought the home even though i didn't have much income my wife was doing pretty well um so we weren't doing that bad when we got the home, but once we, once we got down the road further and she lost her job, um, and I wasn't bringing in hardly anything, then, uh, we had to make a move.

And so when we made the move, we just switched back to renting and then we rented for a while. And that was, that went simultaneously with a bunch of things. Simultaneously, we cut back on our spending because we went from having a pretty high mortgage to fairly modest rent. And then also with my gym, I was paying like around a thousand bucks a month for this really shitty space to have a gym. And then I changed my location to be inside somebody else's gym. And because I had a lot of equipment and I've just brought a lot of energy to the gym, they let me be in there for free for about two years. Wow. And so that freeing up of a little bit of money, um, actually gave me some time to free up my bandwidth, my mind, my brain, to be able to think

more about how I could, you know, what's something that people could utilize that I could maybe invent or create. The slingshot is like, you know, part of a long list of things that I've had stewing in my head for a long time. I've, I've kind of always been inventive, I guess. I've always had ideas and concepts. Some of them have been too big. You know, some of them have been like, Hey, let's, what if this squat rack did this thing? And, but it's like, how the hell do you make something like that when you don't have any money? So making a stretchy rubber band thing that goes around your arms, uh, is a little simpler, uh, move to make. And so, um, I tore my pec several times, uh, during my powerlifting career, just trying to

push the envelope and trying to bench press big weights. And it was the second time that I tore my pec going into a competition where I discovered that I could lift, I could still lift with torn pec, uh, with is slightly torn pec. It wasn't like complete rupture or anything, but I could still lift with that torn pec. If I wore a bench shirt, a bench shirt is a supportive device that power lifters sometimes use in equipped power lifting, which allows them to handle more weight. It also will help stabilize the joints and take a lot of pressure off the muscles. And so I was like, you know, this bench shirt thing, like there's something to it. This is pretty amazing. And I was just sitting in the gym one day. I'm like, no one really in a commercial gym would ever wear a bench shirt and bench shirts are so stiff and

weird. Like when you, if you had 225 pounds on and you went to bend your elbows to bench press, 225 pounds would just hover. It just wouldn't even move. You would only bring it halfway down or so. And it'd be impossible to get it to touch your chest in a bench shirt. They don't really work that way.

You need more and more weight to kind of shove you down so that you could touch the barbell to your chest. And so I was like, well, you need something more pliable than this. This isn't, this would never work as a commercial product. So I just started thinking, how could I take some of those guys that I've met in the gym that are in their forties and fifties who have said, oh man, I remember when I used to lift big. I remember when I used to bench 405. I remember when I used to bench, you know, three plates. How do I get them to still say that they can still do those things?

And so that's when I started thinking of a device that would allow you to go full range of motion, that would give you support, that didn't look too weird, that also you can get on and off yourself. Yeah, if you do look weird, you can just take it off real quick. All right, I'll wait till that chick walks by. The bench shirt is really, really, really, really weird. I've only seen it once.

I was up in Canada. You might know the guy. The guy's name is Jay. Oh yeah. Yeah. I know you're talking about. He's a, was an all time world record holder.

Oh, he was. Net net. No. There you go. I was up there filming with Devin Lorette, and he was friends with Devin Lorette. Devin's the guy that fought Half Thor, the arm wrestler. And I met Jay Nera, nicest guy ever, and that was the first time I saw one of those shirts, and it was bizarre.

It is such a – like, I don't know if people really understand what Mark was saying. Like, the shirt is so tight that you can't really bring your like he was saying even if you put 220 pounds on the bench it it your arms still are kind of straight i didn't know it was that much but man it's so weird it's such a trip i got a question for you too but keep going with this story sorry to interrupt oh that's okay yeah the bench shirt is definitely a weird thing and plus you need multiple people to help you get it on and then once you're kind of like a zombie your arms are out in front of you and you really literally can't move it's hard to even like drink from a water bottle you know when you have a bench shirt on so it's it's just a weird thing that was adopted by powerlifting and so i knew

that that would never be something the mainstream would be too excited about. Plus it hurt. It was very uncomfortable to wear. It would leave these little raspberries all over your chest and arms and you just looked like you got pinched a million times. And so I wanted to think of a device that would be more comfortable. And like I said earlier, I was always thinking of different products and different things to use. I was always thinking about different knee wraps and knee sleeves and all these different things. And I was just like, why don't I just make something for a bench press? And so I took, I had my dad kind of hold two wrist wraps together in the middle.

And I wrapped them around my arms and I brought my arms back. And as I did that, the Velcro snapped and it hit my dad in the face. And my dad's like, oh, that ain't going to work. And we were both kind of laughing, but I was like, no, no, no, that's exactly, that's the right feel. Cause when you go to spot somebody on a dumbbell inclined bench press, you spot them from like their elbows. And I was like, that's where the support needs to come from. So I just took two knee wraps. and I was like that's where the support needs to come from so I just took two knee wraps I brought them to my wife's friend who uh sews together um she makes uh swimsuits for my wife's swim team and I had her sew two knee wraps together and make kind of a circular flap

on the sides so you can put your arms in it. And she came back a week later with kind of the first ever prototype of a slingshot. And I met her outside of a Starbucks in Woodland, California. And I went from, I just said, hey, can you stay here just for a second? There's a Fitness 19 right over there. Walked into Fitness 19, just bypassed the guy at the front desk as if I was already a member, which I wasn't. And I walked over to the bench and did 135 pounds. Did you get all puffy chested when you walked by him? Oh yeah,

of course. You better not say nothing. I'm looking for Joe is Joe. Joe's here, right? He's in the back. Okay, cool.

And so I, I, you know, walk in and I do 135 pounds for a few reps with the slingshot on. And I was like, Oh my God, this is the right feel. Let me put on a little bit more weight. Put on 225 and was chucking it around. And it felt like it was really alleviating a lot of tension from my pecs and also a lot

of tension from my shoulders and my elbows. And when I got up off the bench for that session, I just from head to toe was kind of covered in goosebumps because I was like, holy shit, this is what I've been thinking about for so long. Like that, the thing was in my mind for about three years previously. And I went to a few different companies and told them my idea. And they're like, I don't think there's a place for that. Like, I don't think, I don't think it's a place for that. I don't think it's a good idea. I went to a friend of mine who was an investor who just was really banked up. He had a lot of money.

And I told him about the idea. And he's like, Mark, I think that's a terrible idea. And so I kept going to some different people. And everyone kind of shot it down. And they were like, there's already bench shirts. I don't understand. Why would somebody want to wear something that doesn't allow them to lift as much as a bench shirt. That's make, makes no sense. And I was like, well, it's not for power lifting. It's, it's more for people that still want to bench press. It's also going to allow people to handle more weight, to be able

to do more reps, more sets, be able to handle more volume in a safer fashion. Cause the bottom of the bench press can sometimes be a little dangerous, be a a safer fashion because the bottom of the bench press can sometimes be a little dangerous be a little iffy on the shoulder and again yeah everyone just kind of shot it down i shot it down myself after a while i was like well this you know that i don't know they're probably right which is probably just probably just an idea that's uh that's just that an idea you know maybe i shouldn't make it and then um i got a call on a i got a call after i got done with a workout one morning um and it was my dad and my dad said hey your oldest brother uh he's dead he just he just died uh you know we're trying to find out more

information what he died from and this and that'm here, my mom crying and screaming in the background and stuff. And, uh, it was probably maybe like three days later. Do you deny that when you hear that? What's the brain do when someone tells, says something like that? I mean, you know, you're, you're like your, uh, You know, your heart like drops down in your stomach, you know, and you feel kind of sick and you're not like sure how to process the information. My brother was a drug addict, you know, on and off most of his life. Have you ever been arrested? Yeah, yeah. He's been arrested a bunch. No, you.

Have you ever been arrested? No, no. Because I've been arrested a few times and there's that feeling or like you accidentally did something really bad to someone you didn't mean to do like something you did yeah when someone tells you that somebody when someone tells you that someone's someone's dead it, it's a really interesting thing because... It's almost like you're on acid. You lose touch with reality. You can't keep your shit together.

Yeah, you lose touch with reality. You lose touch with time. And you're just kind of confused, regardless of who it is and how it happened. Yeah. and how it happened. Yeah. You know, but I was trying to process some of that and trying to figure out, you know, what, like, what the fuck was, you know, but anyway, I had a dream a couple days later and my brother was in the dream or I don't know if it was a dream and I don't know if I was awake. Um, I don't really know what to believe, but I had a whisper in my ear and it just said, think. And then from that moment

on, I was like, you know what? Fuck everybody else. I'm going to do things. I'm going to do things that I think are the right way. I'm going to kind of live the way I want to live by shit that I want to buy. I'm going to do things that I want to do. I have a lot of great things locked up inside my body and I'm too reserved and too shy and I'm fucking sick and tired of holding these things back. I need to put them out into the universe because my brother was, my brother was that way. You know, if my brother, if you pissed him off, he would just flat out tell you why, why he was pissed at you. You know, he, he wore his emotions on his sleeves. I mean, he got into like a lot of fights

and things like that. He had some characteristics that were, um, you know, deplorable at times. And the other characteristics where you're like, I would love to be that guy. I would love to be that guy that just punches somebody in the face just because he was like, you know what? Fuck that guy. That guy did me wrong. I'm going to go and punch him in the face. Like sometimes you just want to be that person, you know, but there's a rational side to you that goes, ah, that's probably not a great idea to go and punch anybody in the face, you know, but there's that, uh, two sides to most people. And my brother was, uh, that kind of one side all the time. And so I was like, you know, I'm going to take that characteristic on and, and utilize that to my advantage, but not have it burn me up as well.

So how long after you had those two knee sleeves sewed together, did your brother pass? What was the timeframe there? I was just a couple of weeks probably. Cause like I said, the idea was dormant. It was just sitting there and it just needed me. It needed, it needed a good kick in the pants, you know, and that, uh, that was a good kick in the pants. I was like, life's too short. You know, I'm not going to sit here and I'm not going to die with a bunch of ideas in my head. And I mean, what's, what good is it for me to keep it to myself? I need to get them out there in the universe. And so once I made the slingshot, the next thing was, I was like,

I'm going to order thousands of these things, which I don't know why I thought that I needed thousands of them since nothing really like it ever existed before. But I just knew that if I if I invested in it, that I would figure out I would make my decision correct, basically, no matter what. So I bought like 4000 of them. Holy shit. I'm going to how many how much room does that take? Is that like that's like a huge box truck000 of them. Holy shit. I'm going to, how many, how much room does that take? Is that like, that's like a huge box truck full of them,

right? It's a, uh, garage worth, uh, that's for sure. And that's, uh,

you know, the home that we were renting, we were renting from, that's where we were, uh, selling these slingshots from this little pink house that was in Davis, California. Mark, hold on, hold on one second.

When did you meet your wife? I met her in like 1999. And then when did you get married? We got married in, I met her in 98. We got married in 2000. Okay, so two years later and so you does she so you have two kids you've lost your home and is she like um hey dude maybe we should just order like a hundred prototypes at first or like i mean i'm sure sure because a woman's like not even a woman a mate is crazy

important in times like this like people the muse thing is not bullshit people need like the strongest man in the world needs a woman a good woman holding his hand if she fucking doesn't believe in them they the whole fucking thing can get all fucking weird real quick. Am I right? Or. Yeah, no, you're a hundred percent correct.

I was, uh, you know, right in the middle of my powerlifting career. Um, so I was very much focused on that. And there was never a moment where she was like, Hey, you know,

um, you spend too much time doing that. You should think about doing something else. There were conversations of like, Hey, like you ever think you're going to get like a job, you know, like something that's, uh, different than being like unconventional and just making some getting paid here and there. Cause like I said, I did some stuff with, uh, I did some seminars. I did some personal training. I, nothing was ever from lack of motivation and nothing was ever. So I had discipline, motivation, but she wanted you to get a job at Starbucks with health insurance for the family.

A little bit, but not really. She knew that she knew that that wasn't really me. And she saw the discipline. So I think that somewhere somewhere inside her, she knew that that was going to like turn into something as well. When it came to the slingshot. Yeah. She was like, you know, just like, I don't know. And I was like, well, let me just, let me just handle it. Cause I think, I really think that this thing's gonna, gonna work.

Cause she didn't understand, like, she does understand power lifting actually pretty well nowadays um but at that time she didn't understand it that much and she didn't know what kind of calling there would be for people to care about their bench press you know because that's pretty much what the idea is and and the website initially was called how much you bench and so everything was kind of based on this uh this one movement you know most of the times if you're going to have an invention that is really powerful a lot of times it's multi-faceted it's something you can do like a lot of different things with or it's um or it's something that's uh that's a consumable like something that you have to use all the time like toothpaste or something like that or food that's a consumable like something that you have to use all the time

like toothpaste or something like that or food yeah like a camera you can shoot porn with it or you could shoot insects in your backyard with it vast huge yeah this thing but but but you did nail it because every tom dick and harry even even us crossfitters who are told to hate the bench press it's a it's a lie everyone loves the bench who are told to hate the bench press, it's a, it's a lie. Everyone loves the bench press. Everyone goes back to the bench press. So in that regard, it's kind of like the, it's kind of like food. It's food of the fitness world. It's like, everyone does it. Right. Even the closet benchers. That's right. My wife, uh, was always, um, was always supportive, but like I said, there was conversation of you know i think like you basically have to get a job because you know i don't know what the hell we're gonna do but

um there was that conversation or there wasn't there there was there was yeah it was just like i don't um my mom was a divorce attorney and i think she told me one time that 50 of all divorces are financially caused by finances i think yeah i think that i think that told me one time that 50 of all divorces are financially caused by finances i think yeah i think that i think that that's true but like i said she's always been she's always been supportive all the way to the point where she just kind of started taking that on you know she started taking on being the person that orders the slingshots and now she's basically the ceo of the company and runs everything here oh you're lucky that's so about, so these 4,000 come and like, do you know how you're going to sell them? Are you just like slinging them like, like, like, like too short with slinging cassettes out of his trunk?

Basically, yeah, we were, we were selling them anywhere and everywhere that we could. we could. Um, I had a friend, uh, who was a longtime employee named little smoky, uh, who was, uh, literally selling them out of the trunk of his car at like a 24 hour fitness. And, uh, he would come back like every week and be like, yeah, man, I sold six of them. I sold four of them. I sold 10 of them. And I was like, Holy shit. Like it's actually really going good. We actually, we had a website, uh, of course, uh, where we were selling a handful of them every day. And we were just selling them whatever way we could. But my whole thing was I already had some inroads with the internet because I wrote on a website called EliteFTS.com with Dave Tate. And I wrote under the name Jackass for a while and just trolled everybody

on there for a long time. And then after that time was up, we kind of revealed my name and who I was. And so I had a little bit of a little bit of internet clout at the time. I'm one of the first people on YouTube. I still think that this day there's not anybody in fitness that has more YouTube videos than I do so we already had some good momentum there and with like things like Facebook and those things coming around it ended up being perfect timing so how to sell it was never really a question I was like I'm just going to tell people how awesome this thing is and show people what it does. And we shot videos. And at that time, there was no other competition. So it was pretty simple.

The success came fast. We went from selling like five of them a day to selling, you know, 20 of them a day to then implementing wrist wraps and knee sleeves and elbow sleeves and all kinds of other different products from there. I remember our neighbor actually looking into our operation that we had at our house, and he was like, you guys need help? He's like, what do you guys have? And the boxes that these things come in, the slingshots come in, it has like a mesh thing on the outside. So it just totally looks like drugs. It looks like we're slanging some drugs. And, uh, I was like, I don't, I don't think we really need any help. We only sell like five of these things a day or whatever, but as we kept moving forward

and selling more and more, it turns out we did need help. And, uh, that guy is now our logistics guy and he, he does all our shipping receiving and he has for the last decade or so. And that was your dad. Is your dad, your accountant? Yep. Wow. And he got rid of all his other clients or he still keeps them.

Oh no, no. My dad, he works with, uh, my, my dad loves to work. So he works with,

uh, he works with a lot of people, works with hundreds of people. I met Mark at a show in the UK a few years ago, lovely, humble guy, and really, and a real family man had a great conversation about work-life balance. Sevan, you would get along well with him. You'll get along well with him, dude. He told me I've never been, we started the show in the gutter. We can, it can only get better. It can only get better. Um, I, so I used to do this thing where I would, um, I would go around to people's houses who were growing weed and I would ask, like I would meet them on the internet or something.

Um, this is like, I think pre Facebook and I would, um, I don't know where like marijuana chat rooms and I would chat them up until like they trusted me. And then i would go to their house and i'd film their grow room like their lights they would show me their setup how they ran their electricity their airflow all that shit right and then i would film it and i'd go like to like five to ten houses and then i would make it into a dvd and then i would and then i would sort of narrate the dvd this would be all in the bedroom at my mom's house as a 30 year old man you know and then i would um and then i would sort of narrate the DVD. This would be all in the bedroom at my mom's house as a 30-year-old man, you know. And then I would put them on eBay and I would call them Seymour Buds Volume 1. And it was crazy because like I would set – like someone would order one, right, the DVD.

And I would fucking print it out on my DVD player for like $20. Some days I'd sell like three and I'd make like $60. And it was fucking nuts, dude. Having 60 bucks mailed to me for like me just going around filming people's marijuana setups, which is like something I love. So when you start selling these, then you start having money.

Are you tripping? Are you just tripping? Like you're like, holy shit, there's like $5,000 over there. Oh my God, I just paid for all of these. Like were you tripping when you sold enough to pay for the first four thousand uh it felt pretty amazing you know um to have financial freedom is is a real blessing you know um and i don't think i don't think you need to be like loaded to have financial freedom i'm just talking about financial freedom to go in,

to go into a grocery store and to grab a nice steak and to grab a nice wine and a couple other things and just really not care much about the price or to have your mechanics say, Hey, you know, not only your brakes messed up, but Hey, your transmission's messed up. And you're just like, Hey, just fix whatever you need to fix. And you're not sweating it. Like, man, that when you're tied to, you know, a $1,400 mechanic charge and you're tied to, uh, worrying about how much, uh, each meal costs and stuff. It's just, it's just hard. You know, it just makes, it makes everything a little bit more difficult. Um, but I did live my life there for many years and I think people don't, they don't realize that, you know, they think, oh, well, it's

easier for you because you're this or that. And yeah, it is. Fuck, it gets, it's an amazing thing. It's great to be able to afford things. When you, when you really like make yourself into something, the interesting thing is that a lot of things will be paid for for you. I get free meat from Piedmontese, a company that has some amazing steak and beef and stuff like that. I get free food from a company called The Vertical Meals from Stan Efferding.

from Stan Efferding. So it's like, you know, you, as you kind of build yourself up and you build a reputation, you're getting these things for free, but as you know, uh, nothing's really, nothing's really free. Everything's earned. And so everything is earned. Everything is earned. Everything's earned. I, I did feel good about having the money, but I i was like it just didn't matter to me much because i'm like you know what i'm already a bad motherfucker you know like i i took myself from being a little bitch with like 95 pounds on my back when i was a kid to try to squat remembering how bad it hurt my neck and my upper traps and my back just to hold the weight of, you know, to have the barbell on my back to being able to squat over a thousand pounds. So I already felt like empowered. I already felt rich. I already felt like I had wealth

and I was never short of hugs or kisses or love in my own household growing up from my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. Even my uncles now, when they see me, they still grab, they grab my cheeks, like aggressively fucking grab my cheeks and they look at my face. They'll give me a kiss, God damn it. And they'll grab me and they'll fucking kiss me. My grandfather used to say, get over here and give me a kiss before I beat you. Because we're that kind of family, you know, we're real close that way. And I'm never short on showing affection to my wife and my kids and stuff too.

So I've always been very fortunate to feel really good. There have been times where when I wasn't making money fortunate to feel, uh, to feel really good. There have been times where when I wasn't making money, things were more stressful where I was thinking, yeah, like, man, I do need to fucking figure some of this stuff out. But at the same time, I felt so good about myself that I was like, you know what? Shit's going to just work out. Like I'm not a, I'm not a bad person. I'm not a shitty just cause I didn't go to college just cause I didn't get good grades in school just cause I sucked at school basically. And, uh, maybe I don't have some of the same attributes that some other people that I know, that doesn't make me a fucking bad person. If I'm just a good person and I keep

putting one foot in front of the other every single day, things are going to work out in my favor and I'll be able to gain a financial freedom. I'll be able to have fitness freedom. I'll be able to have a lot of freedom to do a lot of the things that I want to do. You, this is the second time you brought up family and love. I was raised in a very similar situation. I'm Armenian and I had, you know, five uncles and aunts. And it was like, it was almost too much like i was always getting my cheeks pinched my ears pulled i was always riding on someone's shoulder someone always had like a hand up the back of my shirt rubbing my back kissing me my dad was always pulling my

ears biting me my mom like every night like kissed me to death till i went to bed. I mean, it was a fucking, and I, and what's crazy is, is now that I have, I have three kids and, um, it's so awesome because I just do all of that to them. And like, I totally get why my parents couldn't, and my uncles couldn't keep their hands off me. It's just like, it's just, they're just, they're just kids just have healing properties. You just touch them and you feel better. And you also said something else about having two loving parents, and that gave you an advantage. I cannot emphasize enough how much I agree with that. I'm a huge believer in the writings of Thomas Sowell. He's an economist, 90-year-old guy from the Hoover Institute.

I know who he is, yeah. Okay. from the Hoover Institute. I know who he is, yeah. Okay. And if you start reading some of his books, not you, the listeners, you will see that the leading correlate for fucking everything is married parents.

And that when you start, people start talking about skin color being a correlate or age or any of these other things, you'll realize what horseshit it is. Having two parents is like, don't get me wrong, like my parents were divorced. Um, don't like

people turn out. Okay. Who like both their parents die and they're in an orphanage. Like there's, there's no doubt that hardship makes, can make incredible people, people that are way better than Mark and myself who had loving parents. Um, a hardship is fantastic if you survive it. A hardship is fantastic if you survive it. But man, having two parents, congratulations. And it's really impressive to me that you and your wife are still together through all of that. You really have to have – if you don't believe in your mate, don't get married. Yeah, marriage is a really – Don't get married if you don't believe in them marriage is a really

interesting thing but i just think that in terms like parenting um whether people want to actually get married or not or to do it through the eyes of like the court or the church or the government i do think that maybe some people should reevaluate what they think that means to them and maybe just discover their own way of being married. I know that sounds like. No, no, I'm with you. Sounds a little bit like a farce, like, oh, well, you're not really married, you know, but. Are you are you not really married?

Like by like legally? No, I am. But, you know, looking back at it, I'm just kind of like, you know, I'm only legally married because we already had our first kid. And at some point I thought, well, shit, if one of us dies, it'll be so much easier if we legally get married. And that's the only reason why we did it. But actually I'm glad we did in hindsight. There was a little bit more profound for me than I thought.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's certainly, I, I think that the idea sometimes behind things like this idea that, you know, if we don't, if we, if we allow it to not be illegal to go to school, that we're going to end up with a bunch of young kids that are losers. You know, I think that's the alternative that people think is going to happen. to religion anymore, especially here in the United States. And we start to recognize that more and more people are kind of falling off in terms of how excited they are to actually officially get married. I think that people think everything's going to go to hell.

But I just I just I disagree with that. But I do understand. I think they just think that everyone's going to go around fucking each other. And but like those things happen anyway, those, those kinds of things happen anyway. I just think we have some traditions maybe in this, uh, we have some traditions that people should probably just rethink. Cause I just think that sometimes people aren't really super thoughtful about something that's super powerful, like marriage. And it's like, man, that's a real, could be a real trap you can get married have kids

and then feel like you're kind of stuck people stay together sometimes because of the kids and it gets to be they can get to be complicated have you only been married once yes yeah that's awesome you're in um i don't know if this is appropriate to say but your wife looks like she's getting prettier like over time that is appropriate to say like she was pretty always but then like in the and you post a lot of pictures not a lot but there's a regular drumbeat of her so like if you want to like as judge mark's wife you can you can go on his instagram i scrolled through all it took i mean i'd scrolled fast but i scrolled through all 9 000 some odd posts all the way back to December 4th, 2013.

It took like three hours. And I did it while sitting on the floor in my garage. It was weird. Like I just started and I had my notebook next to me and I was like pretending to stretch. And three hours later, I had gone through all your posts. That's awesome. Well, you know, she has to get prettier, right? I mean, my stock is going up. I'm getting in better shape. I'm a. Well, you know, she has to get prettier, right? I mean, my stock is going up,

you know, I'm, I'm getting in better shape. I'm a wealthy man, right? Like she's got a, she's got a, she's a, sounds like she's a wealthy woman. She's doing great. And I'm amazed by her, uh, every day. And you said, you know, if you're not excited about your spouse, then, uh, don't pull the trigger. And I couldn't agree more. I'm excited by her every day. Every day I see her, I'm like, get over here, give me a kiss, you know? And, uh, we just, we try to make time to not even try. We make time for each other just to stop each other in our tracks and just say, Hey, I love you. You know, I care about you. I'm, I'm proud of you. I'm proud of us. This is fucking awesome. Like just why not just recognize

and we don't have to be doing anything. You know, um, I noticed that a lot of couples are preoccupied with doing shit. They're preoccupied with going out. They're preoccupied with going on vacation. They're preoccupied with a lot of things that like, oh, they're going to, you know, we're going to get a dog or we're going to move or we're going to get a new car. Like there's so many things that people throw, I think, in the way. And I have a lot of these things in my life as well. But my point is, is that my favorite part of the day and my most exciting moments of the year are just driving home from the gym and going to my home with my wife and kids. I don't need to be going anywhere. I don't need to have something to,

I don't need to have this next thing kind of hovering over me. And I see a lot of people doing stuff like that. And it, it just kind of, I'm like, man, they're always kind of on the move and they're not, they don't have a home life. I'm not saying you can't travel and shit like that, but I'm just saying like, you need to have some togetherness and some stillness of just dealing with life in the moment and not having all these external things going on all the time. Alcohol is another great example of that. People drink way, way too much. Um, and just care about each other, love each other just for the company and not for the fact that you're going to Hawaii or Disneyland or whatever it might be. Like, why can't you just enjoy each other and enjoy some good food and just hang out?

Are you a homebody? I mean, not really. I mean, I get around a lot we're we're home a ton you know um you know i'm a homebody yeah four or five days a week we're we're eating dinner together you know i don't i don't want to go anywhere yeah do you have a yard a nice yard i do yeah i got some i got some acreage and stuff like that but you know for me i i like to go other places but like i said i like being at home and being like in my rhythm and having my kind of normal schedule david mcfadden i fucking love mark bell that's you that's you. That's you. Thank you, David McFadden.

There was this thing. Let me see if I can find it here. While I look for it, I'm going to tell you a story and see if it resonates. I had a guy on yesterday named Lika Veli. He's a rapper, and he has a song, Mark, and it's called... Oh, go ahead. Check your phone. I'll look for this. Lika Veli? Yeah, do you know who leaka valley is can you read what do you what do you look at who texts you who texts you people are blowing me up telling you how handsome you are

you're like dude i can't believe you did this podcast this is sick oh no we're not live are we we are live. Okay, here it is. Here it is. I want to tell you about this rapper I had on yesterday, Lika Veli. But first, I want to tell you this while I found it. In one of your posts, it says, attract success. And in that post, and you have a lot of posts, you probably don't remember it. But it finally made me understand what that means to attract success

and it's um uh when at least the way i understood it from from what you were writing it was basically you were saying something like if you if you are a if you if you are a disciplined person you will also um attract disciplined people so like there was this girl in college that i fucking really really liked and like some meth came around our group and so we all started doing meth and then like after a month like like there was like 30 or 40 of us after like a month like half of us stopped right it was like okay that was fucking the trip right and then and then the other half kept going and then after like two months that half stopped and then the other you know now it's down to like seven people and they kept going then after like three months, that half stopped. And then the other, you know, now it's down to like seven people and they kept going.

Then after like three months, they stopped. And then, you know, every month, like you could tell like, oh, shit. I mean, I don't know if you've ever done that shit, but that shit's like hard on you. No, it's so hard on you. It's so hard on you. But it's fun. It's really fun, but it's really hard. It feels amazing.

There's got to be some reason why people do it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Eventually people like will start sucking dick for it who like never thought that they would suck dick i mean it's it's it can throw your whole shit out of whack right your your priorities and what you're willing to do to get what you need but this girl i really fucking liked her but she was part of the crew that was going down and she was fucking great she was smart she was a fucking uh division one athlete she'd fucking had all her

shit together but as she started going further and further down that path, I just realized like I was I found that I found it unattractive. I didn't see it as a successful formula for life. And as in my in my life, like I as i'm 40 how old are you mark 44 do you dye your hair no holy shit what do you have any gray hair yeah yeah there's a little bit coming through here but yeah this is this is from my papa my dad damn you're rocking you're like tom seck, but all buff and shit. So, um, so, uh, I like now today, like I realized I have such crazy discipline and because of that, I attract great people. Like I really, I really avoid added sugar. I really avoid refined carbohydrates and make sure I exercise like every single day. There's some sweating going on. You know what I mean? I, I stay, I stay positive. I pick up as soon as I get to the skate park, I pick up all up all the trash you know so that my kids don't have to skate in a trash year like i just do like just things that i'm privileged to do because i have hands and eyes and a heart you

know and um and i and i before i read that post of yours that's that um you want to attract success i thought it was like some like mystical new age shit, but it's not. It's like, it's like really fucking practical. No one wants to hang out. Like you could be the coolest dude in the world, but if you always smell like cigarettes, like there's like,

no one wants to hang out. Like I've had great friends. Like I've, like I have a propensity to be addicted to nicotine. Have you ever fucked with nicotine? No. Oh, it's another,

it's brutal. And so like now I don't want to like i like i don't want to interact with people who are addicted to nicotine because i don't want to get addicted to it again because it's a motherfucker so i just want to say thank you for that yeah you know i um, people are trying to chase down success and I think it can be a mistake. Um, I also think that people don't have good definitions for themselves on what they think is successful. They may not have selected, um, like a role model. Like, I think, I think there's nothing wrong with saying like, I don't really dig this guy. I like this guy's content. I like, I like a lot of what he does. I'm going to try to mimic a little bit of what I see from him. I don't know his personal life. I don't know if he does meth on the side. I don't know what the guy does, but I like that he talks about, I like that he's family forward.

I like that he eats pretty well. Looks like he has fun too. I see him drinking with his wife here and there. Like I'm going to put some of those ideas forward, but I think sometimes people don't have like a defined goal or a definition that they, that they know what success is for them. I think sometimes people just think they want to be like rich or famous,

but they don't have a definition of that either. Like when, when is going to be enough? When is that going to roll over into it being the achievement that you were looking for? Do you have to have 500,000 followers on Instagram? Do you need to be in a movie? Do you have to be on TV consistently?

Like, can you be in one TV show or like, you know what I'm saying? You have to really try to define. Like, can you be in one TV show? Or like, you know what I'm saying? You have to really try to define what these things are that you're even attempting to chase. But I'd also say don't even chase anything. Don't chase success. Don't even chase down goals. I would even break people down and say don't really necessarily have goals.

down and say don't really necessarily have goals i would say that take the james clear method and just have a system in place that is going to get you to a goal if you just simply follow it and in that way it's more like it's mathematical you know did you do your cardio today well i guess if you didn't do your cardio today or if you didn't do if you didn't eat the way you were you um the way that you thought is in your current best interest then it turns out you're not as interested as you originally thought you were um i don't think there's anything wrong with having like a goal but i think the problem that people run into is it's not really a defined goal so they're like i just want to get in better shape well what is that you know what are we talking about here what are you trying to do

also what's wrong with having some low-hanging fruit what's wrong with um think about the way little what's that mean date ugly girls yeah yeah date yeah date well if you can't find a date start out with ugly girls you know start out uh start out with whatever you think uh is going to be uh the thing that gets the ball rolling for you because momentum is a motherfucker you know what once i think that people understand that motive and motivation literally come from movement. It's hard to sit down on the couch and be depressed about a certain situation and see a video that has inspiring stuff in it and that is motivational. But your brain at that moment is not healthy enough to receive the message properly for you to get up off the couch and be inspired to run. That might happen. That can happen. It does happen, but it usually only happens in people that are healthy in the first place.

You know, in order to adopt healthy habits, you have to have a healthy mind. It makes it more difficult to adopt much of anything when there's kind of like chaos going on. But I see people are, they are almost like the pursuit of a woman that's out of your league. Guys that are able to figure that out, they don't pull. They don't pull towards. What do they do? They do the opposite. Push away, you know,

give the girl the Heisman, give her the stiff arm. And a lot of times, a lot of times they're going to be intrigued to find out more about you when you do that kind of stuff. And I think success is the same way. If you push success away and you are just pretending as if you don't even know that it's there, if you continue to take the right steps day in and day out, you'll one day bring your head up and you'll look and there'll be a whole group of people telling you that what you did was great. And then you go, huh, what are you talking about?

And they'll say, Hey, look how far you traveled. Look how fucking, look how you walked a thousand miles. Look at how far you came. You lost a hundred pounds. You know, you squatted a thousand pounds. You were able to do this and that. And you're like, you kind of look around and you're like, are they talking, are they talking about me? I'm not even really sure what they're talking about. All I was doing is doing the right steps every day. So that's the way I look at it is that you, you attract success

by being an attractive person. And it doesn't necessarily have to do with your looks lining up with the way that everyone thinks is, is super attractive. It's having attractive habits. And, uh, what you said was really well said, really well put. I think everyone, you know, knows that beautiful girl that would just drink a little too much. And then you said was really well said, really well put. I think everyone knows that beautiful girl that would just drink a little too much. And then you see her like throwing up or seeing her just like not looking so good at the end of the night. And you're like, that is not that's not as good as I thought it would be to kind of hang out with that person. So, you know, if you want success, you attract it by becoming an attractive person and by adopting the many, many great habits that you would need to do that.

Have you had Miranda on your podcast, Miranda Alcarez? I have. Yeah. It's kind of a long time ago, but I should probably revisit that again. What a crazy success. Do you follow what her and Julian are doing with street parking at all? Oh, I know they're crushing it. Yeah. They're doing a great job with their online coaching and training and stuff. Right. Yeah. And they just had this, their communities crazy, man. They got 32,000 people that are just like in love with each other. The whole community has such great synergy. I watch from afar and, uh, and I, and I'm just like so um i'm inspired i'm uh motivated i i just i like i like just what she's doing for humanity but they just had a gathering in um las vegas with their community and uh she sent me a me uh some videos from there and i was just watching them i'm not i'm not, I'm not, I, uh,

we both have kids. So we share kids, kids ideas in the DMS and texts, but I guess you could say we're friends. Such a, it's such a, it's such a weird, it's such a weird world. Like I, I admire her and I taught, and I probably DM with her like almost daily, but I, it's still weird. Like, but I don't ever see her. So is she my friend, you know? But anyway, so my, my, my point was, is't ever see her. So is she my friend, you know? But anyway, so my point was, is that I had her on the show a long time ago. And while I was going through her Instagram, I saw this post and it said successful people have these three things. And it was like habits, good habits, passion.

And there was another component. I can't remember what it was. Maybe it was discipline. And that she was, it was basically like saying, Hey, you don't need goals. And it kind of set me free because my whole life I've never had goals, but I'm like a crazy habit person. And one of my habits is always to keep refining my habits and I'm crazy disciplined. And I love fucking structure and, um, kind of crazy structure, chaotic structure, but I like structure. Right. And I like staying in my loop and, uh, and you kind of were just nailing that. And like all my

things that happened in my life happened because I had good habits and I kept one of my habits is to keep refining my good habits. Right. And then shit just started happening. You every summer, if you plant something in your backyard, even if the gopers are eating 30% of my trees, 10, 10 years from now, it's like, Oh, should I have more avocados than I know what to do with? It's such a great feeling. There's one thing I find really interesting is like, I, I ended up sharing out a lot of information that's just like this. And this is the stuff that doesn't get viewed much. This is the stuff that doesn't get as many likes and stuff. But what's encouraging about it is that it's a long game.

It's the long game. And what I'm encouraged by, though, is that when I run into people. And they say, hey, you know, I really love the content and I love this. I love that. They'll refer to one of those posts and they'll say that post hit me at the right time or it hit me when I needed it most. And thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it. And it makes it all worth it, you know, because I, I just posted an amazing post from Ben Patrick, who's doing a seminar at my gym this Sunday. He's the knees over toes guy. Oh, I tried to get him on the podcast.

He wanted to schedule out till 2028. I was like, ah, it might be dead. He's a busy son of a bitch. But, you know, I,

I think, uh, people, they, they're, they just, they're looking for the quick stuff. But if you hang in there and you,

and you watch some of the long content, I was listening to shit this morning that I did not want to listen to. We have a guest on the show later today. That's going to deep dive into fucking every little nuance thing that you can possibly think of when it comes to like supplements and stuff. I love all that stuff, but I only like it on the outer part. I don't like listening to it real deep, but as I listened to it real deep, there was so much that I started to get from it. And I think that I wish that as I listened to it real deep, there was so much that I started to get from it. And I think that I wish that more people would be, I know you only have so much time on your hands and stuff like that, but I wish that people would consume the longer content, even when it is on Instagram, even when it is on TikTok.

It's only like three minutes long, but go and watch what Ben Patrick talks about, because he talked about having like 20,000 followers on Instagram to having, he's got like probably over a million now his shit's going crazy, but he talked about how he got there. And he's like, I had no entertainment for the last five years. He's like, no pornography, no movies,

no this, no that. But he went into the reasons on why for him, he felt that it was in his best interest to double down and to really focus in on his craft and to focus in on his work and to focus in on his job. Then he went on to talk about this story about when he was a little kid, how he raised money to get a Michael Jordan rookie card. It was like 700 bucks or 500 bucks or something. rookie card. It was like 700 bucks or 500 bucks or something. He told parents, he told friends and family that, Hey, you know, Christmas birthday only give me money, you know, and he worked and he traded cards and did all these things. And he ended up with a Michael Jordan rookie card. So it doesn't mean that for everybody, that that's what's going to, that, that it's always going to

take that much attention that you have to be that much of a savage to get to where you're going. But for a lot of people, it's going to mean that there's going to be, there's going to be some FOMO. There's going to be some like, there's going to be some sort of sacrifices that you're going to have to make as you want to go towards your goal. Anytime that you veer off of the particular system that you're following to get you in the direction that you want to go, just understand that it's because you're not quite as interested as you thought and or you don't mind it taking a little bit longer time. And for me, I never cared that if it took a longer time because people would always say, oh, you you know, a family and can't have this and can't have that when you're trying to be an entrepreneur because you won't have time for it. I'm like, well, let's see.

Let's fucking test it out. You know, people say, you know, along the way, you know, because I used to be 330 pounds. Now I'm 230 pounds. I'm under 10% body fat. People say, well, you can't really enjoy a drink. You can't really eat what you want here and there. You're going to have to stay really, really disciplined. Stay under 10% body fat. Like that's a, that's a tough thing to lose a hundred pounds. That's a tough

thing. You're going to have to be super focused. But what if you're just like, Hey, you know what? I don't give a fuck how long it takes me because greatness cannot be timed. Greatness is something that you do regardless of how long it takes you. So for me, I'm like, I don't care if it takes 10 years, but I'm still going to get there. I'm still getting in better shape. I'm still getting a little stronger. I'm still improving. I went from not being able to run at all to now I can probably run two or three miles pretty easily, which is no, it's not a, it's not amazing to be able to run something is, uh, I think fairly substantial. So that's the way I look at a lot of things. You lost a hundred pounds.

Crazy. Some Hector wrote, um, you record your goals to record 500 podcasts. You know, when I make that goal, um, sorry, Mark, there's a little bit of backstory there. But basically, I've told people I'm going to do 500. My goal is just to race to 500 podcasts and then and then like either tap out or keep going. But but how this thing started is is I really want to spend a lot of time with my kids. And I ended up started doing this podcast and I still spend a lot of time with my kids. It's the only thing I do besides this podcast.

But anyway. I don't know, Hector, if I would say that it was a goal. It's more like an out for me. It's more like I can't. How can I? There's probably a good metaphor simile for it. But I just want I want to see. I didn't set 500 goals is like the goal. Like I need to get to 500.

I want to find an out. I need to see the end of this, even if it's not not the real end i'm okay lying to myself and tricking myself i need to know that like it's sort of like it's sort of like um it's sort of like motivation like if i bought this new microphone and it was 500 i would be like oh fuck i better do 30 podcasts with this even if i don't want to or if i so like um or SARMs, it would be motivation to do two workouts a day. I wouldn't do that and then not do that. It would have a double whammy. It might actually help me and make me stronger and recover,

but it would also be a psychological motivation like, hey, I don't want to waste this. So that, I don't know if I would say that my 500 is a goal, but maybe I'm lying to you. Maybe I do have goals. I don't know. Yeah, I think we all have,

we all have some goals. And I, you know, hopefully I didn't paint the wrong picture there, but habits are crazy important, man. Habits. Yeah, it's the habits and the systems that you have surrounding those. I mean, a simple thing, a simple thing.

Like, let's say that you enjoy music. Well, if you enjoy music and you're a guitarist, then you probably have maybe some aspirations of playing the guitar and maybe to someday do it live. So, yes, you do have a goal. maybe to someday do it live so yes you do have a goal but what's going to get you to the goal the fastest is not necessarily thinking about that goal every day what will get you there the fastest is just having easy access to your guitar where your guitar is in a good spot where you can jam on it every day and you can practice and you can mess around with it every day rather than you know keeping it in the closet or having some other, uh, you know, any time there's going to be interference or interruption of anything that that's why I love

walking. Cause it's like, it doesn't really require much. I just need a certain amount of appropriate clothes depending on like the weather and I need some shoes and I can get going on it. And so just trying to, trying to put systems in, I think, is the key to being successful. You can have a goal. But I think again, I think it's really helpful to define the goal. And I also think it's important to have if you are going to have goals to have like little markers that are super easy to get to that low hanging fruit that we talked about earlier for example when i do my run a lot of times i'm doing like a walk run so i'll walk and i'll just be like all right well i'm gonna run from here to that stop sign or for today anytime there's a hill i'm gonna run anytime there's a uh anytime i'm going around something i'll run that part of it

or something like that. Yes. I call these head games. I do all that shit. And when you do it, it's in shit everywhere, carrots and prizes and natural signals. It's almost like I'm running around playing Pokemon go. If I see a Tesla drive by me, I'm going to run a block.

Like just play the fucking game. Yep. And I'll even, I'll even run some songs you know i've run yesterday i ran for four different songs and and i've kind of just accidentally picked songs that were fucking long and i was like oh shit this is kicking my ass but just going to that song you know it just it's in a sense of accomplishment and you got to think about it this way it's something that you told yourself that you're going to do. And then you followed through with it. And it's like, holy

fuck, man, I really can. I really can hold my word, especially to myself. Like that's awesome. This other thing in my life might be shitty at the moment, or I don't have control of this or that, but I got control of this today. You know, that I'm going to have two servings of vegetables for the day. that i'm gonna have two servings of vegetables for the day i'm gonna have two servings of fruit for the day and i'm gonna make sure i get my protein in for the day it's like bing bing bing bing just racking up the points keep success on the scoreboard i just realized that you're um you probably don't give a fuck you're not an instagram whore like me but um i just realized I didn't change your name. It's Mark Smelly Bell.

I'm going to change it right now. Mark Smelly Bell. Do you guys use StreamYard? No, I don't think so. What do you guys use for your podcast to go live? I think we're live on a bunch of different stuff, but what do we use to go live um i think we're uh live on a bunch of different stuff but what do we use to go live andrew andrew will pop in here for a second i think i don't have my camera on but no we were using uh restream.io and that was allowing us to stream basically almost

anywhere like the but the main two things were uh youtube and facebook but it allowed you to do like periscope and some of these other like kind of like dead streaming uh platforms and so these days all we do is just uh stream straight to youtube now okay we were using riverside and we just switched i i thought i thought it was i mean you know technology it's so fucking amazing until you find better technology like riverside was like oh my god i can beam to afghanistan and now it's like i'm on stream yard and like i can change mark's instagram on the fly i mean i would really look at streamer like so right now we're on facebook youtube twitter twitch and like eventually i'm gonna i have to i have to like have an iq of

over 90 to go to rumble, and I'm hovering around 89. So I'm just going to pinch my butt cheeks together and get us on Rumble soon in the next month. But man, StreamYard is dope. I highly recommend checking it out. And maybe your shit's better. I don't know. I don't know your shit. But this is –

Check it out. It's crazy. So just so easily, I can just push a button and then just share a screen. So easy, and it would just like shove uh um uh here i'll do it share screen click on this chrome tab double click uh mark bell on duck duck oh no no here i'll do nikki minaj like this is like one of my favorite songs and uh bam you know fake white white child niggas are straight. These girls are my son. Bam, done. And then unshare the screen.

I mean, it's just cool. I don't know. It's awesome. Do you like Nicki Minaj, Mark? I can't believe we just had her on. That was amazing. Nicki Minaj, thank you for your time. Do you like her as an artist?

Absolutely. You do. You didn't seem as excited as I would be artist absolutely you do and you have a uh you didn't you didn't seem as excited as i would be how about uh lil wayne you like lil wayne i fucking love little wayne i i love uh you know any of these artists that are kind of at the top of their game i love it man i think it's i think it's, I went to, um, I went to a pretty big concert out here and, uh, it was in Napa and it was called bottle rock. And, uh, just so people know nothing big happens in Napa. So there's the oxymoron that, uh, Mark Bell just said.

That's right. There was, uh, we had like guns and roses was there and. Holy cow. Yeah. Yeah. There was, there was a, uh, a bunch of Miley Cyrus was there. Holy cow. Yeah. Yeah, there was a bunch. Miley Cyrus was there. Where the fuck do they play in Napa? Just some rich dude had them? Like one of these actors had them at their vineyard? It was just at a big fairground type thing.

Wow. It went Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Yeah, it was cool, man. And, um, yeah, it was cool, man. My son, my son was into it. My son plays a guitar. So, uh, he was kind of into, uh, checking out some of the bands and stuff like that. But yeah, we had a great time and watching, you know, getting an opportunity to watch like Miley Cyrus, uh, you know,

whether I like love all her songs or not or whatever, it was just incredible to see her on stage and to see her perform. She's a fucking savage. I mean, she's amazing at what she does. So yeah. I'm sorry to hear that. I was hoping that Slash put it in her ass, but that's just my, I mean, that's just my tainted view of what I know about them from the internets. Right. Right. Yeah. No, I mean, Guns N' Roses was awesome. There was a lot of great performances that weekend, but

I dig it. I think that one of your characteristics that makes you so wonderful as a human being is that you are pretty free. And what do I mean by pretty free? I mean that you're not, you don't feel like you have to hide a lot and, and, and yet you're, you're, and you're also not at a frenetic pace. You're, you're like you said, you're laid back. So there's this, um, there's not really an ulterior motive. You, you, you're laid back. So there's this, there's not really an ulterior motive. You, you, you're the earth circling the sun every 365 days. You rotate yourself. You're pretty consistent. And, and what

made me, there's honesty, integrity, and freedom. They're kind of all intertwined and you have cultivated all of them. I don't know if you had them your whole life, but this is the example that I was thinking of. I had this rapper on yesterday named Lika Veli. And I had him on because he has this song and it's called Let the White Kids Say Nigga. And he's a black dude. And we started the show by saying, I was like, can you imagine, this is me saying this to a black dude, can you imagine being born onto a planet and when you get there there's a word waiting for you that if anyone else says you're supposed to be offended by and fucking have to fight someone for what a fucked up situation to be in who the fuck would do that to you why would you want to be born on a planet where there's already something

that you have to be offended by fuck that and i'm so fucking proud of you that you're saying no i'm not doing that 25 years old i'm not playing that finger fuck i'm done with that fucking game let the white kid say nigga like i'm done with it i get it and he was respectful he's like yeah let the i understand the older generations being offended by it but like i'm not i don't it i'm being offended is the opposite of enlightenment and it's it's some self-oppression and he and it was just it was one of the longest podcasts i've ever done it was so awesome so how does this relate to mark bell because the it's all around the steroid talk you made this movie with your brother that basically from and i am dying to know what your perspective on this is where it all gets down to what if i'm even close to being right you made

this movie about yourself that set you free like now there's nothing else it's like when my girlfriend caught me cheating on her everyone else would be dreaded by that i was like oh thank god so fucking tired of hiding you know what i mean i'm assuming it's what it's like finally telling your parents you're gay was how was that when you did that um uh you're just it's like jesus christ it was so stupid like so what yeah um and and then and sorry so once you admit that that that, okay, yeah, I take steroids and. Damn it! I see you! Do you see me?

I see you, yep. Yep, yep. We had someone here. Did you hear any of that fucking dramatic monologue I gave? How about that? I did not. You didn't hear any of that? Oh, damn it.

I definitely heard the question. Did the movie set you free? You know, set you free um you know uh not i you know not really i you know um let's see here uh so performance enhancing drugs are like they were but it said in the movie, um, one of the guys in the movie says steroids are as American as apple pie. He tells that to my brother. I've always thought the same thing. I've always thought they're like kind of part of our culture. Um, and they're part of other cultures too.

They've been used like by the Russians, I think as early as as like the 30s or 40s or something ridiculous like that like way way before whatever the case is maybe i'm a little too early but whatever the case is uh you know performance enhancing drugs have been involved in like the olympics and been around for a really long time from the time i was a kid um i didn't idolize and look up to um a lot of athletes that weren't on performance enhancing drugs. You know, I looked up to like Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior, Randy Macho Man Savage, like these top level WWF wrestlers. Now, it wasn't really truly known whether they did or didn't. People didn't talk about it that much. But the gyms that i went to as a kid in poughkeepsie new york um guys would talk about yeah i'm on i'm on a diana ball cycle because i'm getting ready

to power you know to do this competition in three weeks and it was just kind of it was just talked about a little bit here and there people weren't like you know real out in the open with it but it also wasn't like this dirty secret um people talked about it like my some of the trainers and coaches and stuff that i knew they'd say oh you're you're just you're you're way too young like there's no point like there's no point like you're gonna you're like mark you're gonna make progress pretty much every time you step foot in the gym. So there's the reason why you take them sometimes is because your progress may, may halt, or you want to try to take it to another level. Well, you're already getting on another level just by being consistent since training is new for you since you're a teenager and your hormones are going

crazy and stuff. And so it was just sort of like, it was just part of the culture. And then also in powerlifting, powerlifting when I started out in powerlifting, I was in a drug tested federation, but there are drug tested federations and there's non-drug tested federations. And in the non-drug tested federations, no one's really complaining. In the tested federations, every once in a while, someone will be like, oh, I think so-and-so is a little suspicious. I don't know how they're passing the test, but in general, you know, no one cares. It's like these two divided leagues and, uh, no one really makes a huge deal of it.

Once you get outside of that and you start getting into the general public and the general population, that's when they have a misunderstanding of like what's going on and what's happening. And I kind of think that people just throw around the word steroid and they think that it may be, you know, automatically does something for you, um, or automatically does something to you. Um, it, it does help. It helps you build muscle mass. Um, people will sometimes refer to the study where I think for several weeks, there was a group that took steroids and a group, uh, and a group that didn't and both groups trained and, or I'm sorry, the group that was natural worked out and the group that was taking performance

enhancing drugs didn't work out. And the, uh, the, uh, group that took steroids improved their bench press without working out maybe a little bit more, even so than the natural people that were working out. Um, but you know, those things are, you get to play that card one time, you know, steroids will give an increase in muscle mass one time. They don't give you increase in muscle mass in perpetuity. So whatever your genetic potential is, you might reach your genetic potential to a certain degree. No one really knows what that is. Then if you take steroids, it might give you a bump, 5%, 7%, 10%. I don't know what the percentage is,

but you get it one time. You don't get to do it forever. And then from there, you would have to continue to take more and more drugs or get into different kinds of drugs. If you're trying to be like a pro bodybuilder or something of that nature, but still the underpinning thing. And the thing that would still need to be worked on a lot is your habits. And there's not a steroid for that. You can't take, I mean, there's things now that you can take that can help with dopamine and serotonin. I think if you figured it out the right way, maybe you can come up with something, but there's not something that's going to replace the cardio work that you do. There's not something that's going to replace the hour of training that you're going to do. They kind of help with recovery, but they also

allow you to do more. And whenever you can do more, you end up with a little bit more damage. So just because you take steroids doesn't mean you don't feel your workouts. Doesn't mean that you're not sore. So there's tons of misconceptions about it. But for me, you know, saying that I took them in the movie, um, it did feel really good just to kind of flat out say that I did them.

Um, but it didn't necessarily feel like I was holding on to any sort of secret, especially because like just how big and strong I was. I was like, if anyone knows anything about anything, um, you know, I bench pressed 705 pounds in the movie and I squatted like 900 pounds in the movie or something like that. So it's like, you know, and I just looked fucking jacked. I'm just thinking like anyone that has been working out for even a couple months and has read a couple magazines and stuff, they probably know that people utilize these drugs. So it wasn't like some sort of big coming out party or some big.

So then where does it come from? Where does this sort of this honesty and integrity? Are you uncomfortable lying? are you uncomfortable lying um i i well i i think everyone lies i mean there's like there's there's some sort of stat that uh an adult can't go more than like 10 minutes without a lie so maybe even what i just said is a lie i don't know people lie all the time um i i i'm a liar i lie all the time about stuff it just you just sometimes. I don't know why exactly, but I'm not going to say that I'm afraid to lie or that I can't lie or some sort of super immensely honest person. else. I just, I try to do my best. I do think it's important to give people information and it's important to give people like context to the information. I wrote an article for my own magazine years ago about how I got in shape, but I also listed out all the different things I was using at the time. Cause I'm like, I can't leave these things out. This doesn't make any sense.

Testosterone. While I did say that testosterone is not going to necessarily just like do all the work for you it is a motivating factor like if you have low testosterone then you would know what i'm talking about because you don't even want to get up off the couch you might even be kind of depressed but if your testosterone is optimized not necessarily through the roof but if it's optimized that is encouraging to go do stuff. And testosterone will make work even more encouraging. So when you get in the middle of work, you'll be even more invigorated and even more fired up to do the work. So I felt it was really important to list out. It's like, Hey, I'm on some thyroid medication. I'm using testosterone and just like whatever else I was doing at the time.

I was like, I need to say this this way because I don't want somebody else to read it and say like, all right, I'm going to do what Mark did and I'm going to lose 50 pounds this way. I was like, well, they need to know the whole story. They need to know that it's not just it wasn't just the diet. The diet is a big factor. And I would conjecture and say that I would end up with really great results without the pharmaceuticals. But I'm like, I don't know any other way. This is the way that I did it. This is the way I chose to do it. So I'm going to share it that way. When you started, when, when, what really got me like, um, doing backflips over you is when I,

when you start, when I saw september because i'm like a huge huge huge walker um me and my wife now like my whole life i've just been a huge walker i've always been into like walking okay i'm gonna walk across town it's 20 miles or i'm gonna get up like four in the morning and walk to this job interview and that's at 9 a.m that's 12 miles away like i just always thought that that was cool. And I was always, I went through the whole hippie phase. I was barefoot for two years and I just always just walking's dope. When you walk the, I don't know if I've ever walked 50 miles straight. When, when, when did you injure yourself doing that by any chance or how, how long did it take to recover from that?

Yeah, it was it was pretty crazy. You know, like I saw videos of people talking about it. And my son is actually the one that brought it up to me. He just said, how many steps are you doing a day? And I was like, I don't know, I do like 10 or 20,000 here and there. It really wasn't that crazy at the time. And he's like, you know, one day you should just do like a hundred thousand steps. Your son told you this? Yeah.

And I was like, oh my God. Yeah. So then I looked it up online and it turns out there were some people that did it and they were complaining about their feet and stuff during the walk. They like vlogged it. And I'm like, man, I think these guys are pussies. It can't be that bad, you know? But I'm like, it does take a long, I mean, it takes, you know, almost all day.

It does take many, many hours to go that far. So I really wanted to join you under the shovels, man. I like. It would have been dope. Yeah, I really wanted to do that. Okay, sorry. Go on. And so like, you know, during it, it wasn't that bad.

But there were times where it felt like my legs were going to cramp up and stuff like that a couple of times. And I was drinking water and doing stuff. I tried to sit down here and there, but like nothing would alleviate the tension. And so what I started doing is I started walking backwards here and there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I saw that in the video. Yeah.

As you get fatigued and tired, you know, you're just like, man, if I have a misstep, I don't know what's going to happen. Anyway, you started getting stiff. That is that it's like stiff and like seizing up like the tendons, like all the wires inside you, whatever those wires are called, the tendons and ligaments. They start to get started to get really stiff. You start to feel a lot in your shoulders and even like your upper back and stuff like that. And, uh, it got to a point where it kind of became a battle of like attrition. You know, you had to,

I had to avoid the sun for a while and stuff cause it was getting warm. I was like, I can't really walk that way anymore because that way there's no shade and I'm going to get crushed. And, uh, so I had to think about it more. And I started getting like a rash on the back of my legs. I don't know what the hell that was. So there was some weird shit going on. But all in all, like the entire walk wasn't that crazy.

But the aftermath was my ankles swelled up quite a bit. And it took me like six or seven days to be like maybe even more maybe more like eight days or so to be kind of back to normal i gained a ton of weight from it which is kind of interesting yeah that's weird is that inflammation or like what like yeah i think it was a lot of inflammation um it was hard for me to get like the this this the swelling out of like my legs. So I had to like put my – I had to lay down on my back and kind of put my feet up, get my feet up above like my heart basically. And I had to do that for a couple of days.

So it was definitely harder than I anticipated. I've had my hands swell on walks. It's weird. Like you can't even close them. It's so weird. Yeah. They get real puffy from kind of, if you're swinging your arms pretty good.

Yeah. Real puffy. Oh God. I hope I wasn't doing that. I hope I didn't look like one. I try to look cool when I'm, when I'm walking. Um,

do you follow the CrossFit scene at all? Do you know, do you know who Ricky Gerard is? The guy who popped for, um, SARMs? Yeah, I'm a little bit aware of it. Yeah, and I saw that guy was like just crushing everybody one year, and yeah, he got popped.

Yeah. Yeah. So he was doing an interview the other day. I've always wanted to do – when I was in high school, this guy was going to Mexico to get steroids, and I gave him some money to go to bring some back for me and then i don't know what happened but i never got the steroids and um the thought of like taking them has always like excited me right like fuck that would be so fucking awesome to go outside like to be able to change the tire on my car without a car jack like just hold it up with one hand and take off the lug nuts with the other. And, uh, but I'm 49 now. So he he's doing this interview with Chase Ingram and Chase is like asking what he took. And he said, he took this stuff. It's called rad one 40 and this other stuff. I can't remember what it's called, but as

he's saying it, I'm like, Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to get that shit. So I look on the internet and I find a website that sells it. And it's just, it's a, it's a, it's like, you can buy it like in 70 pills or 140 pills. And I put both of them in the cart. I'm like, oh shit, I can't believe I'm going to get this. And I'm like, and you know, and I've had some bad experiences even with creatine. Like I take creatine and my back goes out.

So I don't know what the fuck I'm thinking, taking this shit. So I go to order it. And right as I'm about to like get to the order page, there's like this warning pops up about it could cause enlarged prostate. And I already had a dude like stick his finger up my ass a couple of years ago and then tell me I need to go to a specialist. And so I had to have another dude stick his finger at my ass and to tell me I was fine. And I talked to that dude. I was like,

Hey, you should have the, anytime you stick a finger up someone's ass, the first dude should be a specialist. There's no need to like, yeah, to do it twice. No, it's not. It was so uncomfortable. I feel like I get excited about this.

Have you ever had anything in your ass? I have. Yeah. And great. Immediately. I felt like I, like I, like I had to take a shit.

It was, Oh, but I'm sure that guy's not having fun either. Is that the sensation you had that you felt like good to take a shit? Like he breaks the sphincter and all of a sudden you feel like you have to poo? Oh man. Pretty much. Yeah.

I had some sort of like crazy stomach thing a couple of years ago. And I don't even really know why the guy checked my butt. I'm still trying to figure it out, but I don't know. I need to get like an, I had to get like an enema. It was pretty wild. And does it feel good at all? The enema felt great. Cause I felt good after I was done.

Cause I was, was super sick for, uh, like three weeks. Like it cleaned you out. It cleaned me out. Yeah. I think maybe there'd be some refreshing or nourishing feeling if he would have been squirting something into my ass but anyway when i saw that i just didn't pull the trigger on it i'm like i i i in the prostate it's like connected to the cock and balls and just the whole like right so you didn't get it no i didn't get it. No, I didn't get it.

I, I, I, I didn't, I didn't get it. Do you, do you have it? Do you have any, um, like, is your first reaction is like, yeah, that's not the shit to buy or is like, ah, you should have tried it. Like, do you have a, do you fall on either side of the fence when I tell you that story? Um, I think that, uh, you know, I think that steroids are, steroids are and these aren't steroids just to be like right like that's kind of like mischaracterizing the word right like sarms aren't steroids right i don't know what sarms i don't know what category they fall into but in terms of like testosterone and things like that like i think they i think they really do have a place i think they can be

really useful for a lot of people i think they can help to improve people's lives. The only thing that I would say is like, I don't know where you go from there. And especially with like SARMs, because SARMs would really, it would really mess with your testosterone levels quite a bit. And, uh, so I don't know what the exit strategy is. You know, you mentioned the 500 podcasts. It's like, maybe that's partially like a little bit of an exit strategy. Any good business, you have an exit strategy for like even my own podcast. I don't have like an exit strategy. There's like, it just goes on. Like how long are we going to do it for us? Do it forever? I guess, you know, I don't know. Um, and so anything that doesn't have any sort of like exit plan is not great. And I would say like TRT and SARMs and just any investigation into taking anything that's going to alter your hormones, whether it's growth hormone or testosterone, Trenbolone or any of these things. these things. Um, I think it needs to be thought about very, very carefully because how long are you going to do it for? What, what are some of the desired results that you're looking for? Um,

there's so much that can be done through, through your nutrition. I know I sound two-faced almost, you know, being a guy that is in a movie talking about steroids now saying, Hey, like you don't really need them. Um, but I, for, you know, I, I think I have like decent genetics, but, um, I was a pretty, pretty good athlete before I ever took anything. I was pretty strong. Um, I weighed probably about 15 pounds less than I do right now. I didn't look, I didn't have this much muscle mass. I was just a kid. And so I don't really know what I would have achieved completely natural. I trained naturally until I was about 25 and had a pretty good physique. And so I would really discourage people from taking stuff because I think it's

like, I don't know. I don't know what the next move is after you take something. And I think if you're going to take any pharmaceutical that does anything for you, helps you sleep, helps you with your concentration, it's a performance enhancing drug or any of these things, I think you should be really considerate of how long, like, is this, is this a thing I'm going to utilize to bridge something? Like, am I going to take a, uh, something that helps my lipid profile, a cholesterol

medication? Am I going to take that as I'm working towards being on a better diet and making better lifestyle choices? Cause to me, that sounds great. Like, Hey, fucking go for it. You're taking the fun out of this entire conversation.

No, I just want to take it and get strongest fucking buff and yoked. And now you're talking about lipid profiles and exit strategies. Yep. You're acting like a fucking adult mark. Yep. You gotta, you gotta think about things.

I think, uh, I am pretty boring that way. You gotta think about things in some sort of reasonable and some sort of reasonable fashion. And I think that's been something that's helped me kind of hold it together over the years. Cause even though I hit some big numbers and lifting and stuff, and people might think that I was a maniac and even attempting some of those things. Um, I never really was a maniac. I never really was crazy. And I never really even felt like I was good or great at anything. I just, it's just an accumulation of a life's work.

I remember having a guy come in the gym one time and he and I were talking about some business stuff. It was like a business meeting in between the, in between my sets of bench pressing, I'm benching 500 pounds. I'm going back and forth and having a conversation with him. And he's like, they can't fucking believe this. You're just having a normal conversation. And then you're laying down on the bench and you're doing 500 pounds for two reps, like every couple of minutes. And, uh, I was just like, well, it wouldn't be any different if you,

you know, uh, we're going into like a boxing gym and somebody was talking to you in between jumping rope. I mean, this is, this is what I do. This is a, uh, accumulation of, uh, something I worked at for a really, really long time. So I, I try my best to have a, uh, a reasonable approach to just about everything that I do. When I, there was a guy, um, who used to work for me and he was doing a piece on a tattoo artist who was also a CrossFitter at CrossFit. And I said, Hey, when you go out, when you go talk to the tattoo artist, ask him if he, if, if, if he wishes he would have never got a tattoo. The guy was covered with tattoos because I'm not going to ask him that. I'm like, dude, ask him that.

And he asks him that. And he says, yeah, that's so weird. You asked me that. I do wish that I'm covered in tattoos, but i wish i would have never got a tattoo and there's this chick i knew these fucking biggest fucking fake titties ever she was like she she looked like she just fell off of out of lowrider magazine off the hood of one of those cars you know what i mean just crazy body the biggest fucking like and she's like yeah i wish i would have never got these and then recently i started following this uh this this chick who's like an ex-bodybuilder and she just

had her fake tits pulled out and she's like hey i her response was is i can breathe again like what the fuck yeah and i is is there any part of you that's like that that's like oh shit like like you've you've gone down a path of something you need to maintain now your whole life that you wish you would have never gone down the path is that is that am i hearing any of that from you no i definitely don't i don't regret it um regrets a little too strong i don't i don't mean to say regret it i i purposely didn't choose that word. Right. But just like,

like once you get fake tits, like you got to deal with them your whole life. Like in 10 years you have to have them replaced. It just seems like, what the fuck? It seems like a lot of work. Um, even going to the dentist is a pain. Yeah.

You know, I, I started taking stuff at 25 and I never really looked back. And I think that, uh, it would be nice to be able to make a choice on whether I want to utilize TRT at this stage in my life, but I don't really have that.

It doesn't, well, it doesn't appear like it's a choice. Let's just put it that way. Like if I came off of everything, I'm on a TRT dosage now, But if I came off of stuff right now, I because I'm 44, I'd imagine I would just be lined up to take TRT anyway. of what my natural abilities are at this point to produce testosterone. I know there's ways that I could kind of kickstart it again. And,

and there's things of that nature, but there's also a part of me, even though I did leave power lifting behind and I did leave behind, you know, being like super huge and, and very strong. A part of me is not willing to, like, surrender everything at the moment. And so if I was to make the decision to, like, just go off stuff and say, fuck it,

I would, it wouldn't be for a couple of years, probably, that I'd make that particular decision. But to think back. What do you mean like you would if you decided it it would be two years of just slowly getting off is that what you're saying or you mean like you wouldn't you would you're not even at the age yet where you would consider getting off from a mental perspective i'm not really ready for it you know because like what what happens is this is really fucked up but what happens is you actually some of it can be mitigated a bit, but you actually become worse than you ever were before. So people are like, oh, you just go back to normal. That's like it doesn't work that way, man. The body keeps score and the body keeps track of what you were doing and how you've been doing it. And in order for it to reach homeostasis, if I was to come off everything, it's going to counter-correct in a direction that would put me at a very low amount of testosterone for a while. Once I was at a very low testosterone for a while, the body would catch

on. The body would say, hey, now we need to produce this stuff. I don't know what's going on up there, but this shit ain't working anymore the same way that it was. So and so that process would take a while. I would lose a lot of muscle mass and it would just be a like a literal and figurative kick in the nuts. Let me show you what you'd look like, dude. That's awesome. That's what you fucking turn into you turn into this yeah so it's not like i would bounce back to like automatically looking like i was when i was 25 you know no no that's some of the stuff that i do think about and i'm like oh shit like it's i'm now in a kind of compromised

position to just be on them the rest of my life. Like I said, I don't have to be on them, you know, I don't necessarily have to do it this way, but from a mental perspective, um, I feel good doing it this way right now. And I get my blood work done and everything seems to be healthy and everything seems to be kind of like heading in the right direction but to go back to your main thing about you know uh in some way or tattoos titties are always my main thing yeah titties and tattoos if you go back to your main question about you know whether i kind of rethink uh whether i should have taken them or not. I liked the decision that I made, you know, it, it, it, it made my life part of what it is, you know,

and I think that anyone that went through any drug use or abuse would probably say a similar thing like, Hey, you know, part of my story sucks or I'm not necessarily proud of some of these parts of my story, but they are my Hey, you know, part of my story sucks, or I'm not necessarily proud of some of these parts of my story, but they are my story, you know, without steroids, there's no slingshot and without the slingshot, there's no slingshot world headquarters that we have here. So a lot of things were kind of built off the back of those things. And, and I think if we're just being honest, there's a lot of people out there that are like that. Arnold's like that. Um, a lot of the people we've looked up to over the years that are athletes are like that. I would put Joe Rogan in that category who uses, uh, psychedelics

and marijuana. Like, you know, uh, everyone's on a little bit of something. And, uh, and I think it, Everyone's on a little bit of something, and I think it is part of our culture, and it is a huge part of what kind of makes up the way that you think and the things that you do. You could say to someone, I'm proud of you. And like when I used to work with Dave and he would say, I'm proud of you, I know it's him just alphaing me I know like he's not really proud of me it's just him like it's like it's like he's picking me up and putting me on his shoulders like I'm a little bitch and it's funny I like it it's the Navy Seal

way right they say I'm proud of you but really they're fucking kicking you but but and I don't mean it and the reason why I'm clarifying I don't mean it in that context are you proud of Joe But – and I don't mean it – and the reason why I'm clarifying, I don't mean it in that context. Are you proud of Joe Rogan for what he's done for humanity?

Joe Rogan is dope, man. I listen to him quite a bit. He is dope. What he's done for humanity is fucking nuts by just being – by just not being a fucking liar by just trying to be honest well he's a guy that's transparent he's a great example of uh i mean maybe in some respects he was like hunting down success in some ways because sure he's got the kind of acting background the entertainment background the comedic background fear factor and he's got a lot of a lot of accomplishments and he's he's he's very good at at what he does like it's not his uh his podcast being the podcast that it is is based on so many

years of like preparation for the podcast without even knowing that he was going to podcast and so he was kind of like almost sacrificing for the unknown in some, in some way, but yeah, I, uh, I am proud of, uh, what Joe Rogan has done and it's cool to be in this podcast community. I mean, he, he kind of launched, he launched so much of this. It's, it's really, it's really kind of bizarre if you really think about it because now anyone can have like a show everyone does kind of have a show yeah i got i got a show you got a show dude you have a real show it's crazy how many shows you've done how many shows do you go on where you know uh the the other person you're talking to has a show you know it's probably more and more uh it's more and more common all the time. What I think is amazing about it is that you get to select what you want to listen to. You get to

select the different people that you want to listen to. And you can, um, I mean, look at how many different routes you can go in terms of listening to, you can listen to podcasts on relationships. You can listen to murder mystery relationships. You can listen to murder mystery podcasts. You can listen to podcasts that talk about history or comedy, or, I mean, it can be, you know, sad and somber, or it could be self-help. I mean, it's like, man, the list of things that are out there is crazy. And so Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan is interesting because he's, crazy. And so Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan is interesting because he's, he's a guy that's on a miss on a mission to gather more information because he gets tripped up himself and gets confused himself along the way about what's wrong, what's right. And how close to the truth that we can actually

get. And I think that's why I've been fortunate enough to be on a show a couple of times with my brother is because my brother, I think is a little bit like Joe Rogan and the way that my brother told the bigger, stronger, faster story and his other movie, a leaf of faith. If you, you know, if you watch those movies, they're a little bit Joe Rogan-esque. They're, they're very, um, cause Joe Rogan is just a curious person and he wants to learn. And the reason why he wants to learn is that he knows he has a lot of ideas in his head that aren't necessarily correct, or they're not necessarily the best or most optimal.

And so he's like, shit, man, I want to challenge these ideas. And he's one of the smarter people that I've ever encountered because he's one of the very few who's not afraid to say, hey, you know what? I changed my answer. I changed what I thought, you know, three months ago or six months ago. He does an amazing job with that. And I'm grateful and thankful that he kind of kicked all this off for the rest of us. Cause now you see so many other people. I mean, think about the amount of money that he's generated, but not just for himself, but for many other folks, but think about the amount of knowledge.

I mean, he deserves twice as much money. He did give him another fucking a hundred million for the fact that now he's standing up for the, for the common man. What he's done in the last six months is nuts. I don't know. Say that again. I was like, maybe like deserves like some sort of like crazy prize, like a Nobel Prize or something. Because think about can you ever think about in our history another person that has launched this much knowledge? I mean, think about all the podcasts that have spawned off the back of Joe Rogan's show and the people that he's even just highlighted. And then he's like Larry King that hasn't sold out.

He's like Larry King that hasn't been bought, at least from what I can tell. It's really amazing. I mean, remember, you know, back in the day when there was for the 49ers, the head coach, Bill Walsh, and then there was the Bill Walsh tree that came down. And there's all the different coaches that he worked with and all the different players that he worked with. And they became successful GMs and successful coaches. And I mean, Joe Rogan is like that, but it's like on some other weird, it's on some other level because he didn't have to do as much directly with people. A lot of it's been, you know, via the podcast and virtual type stuff. When did you come to California?

Probably in like 1997 or so. Somewhere around there. Yeah. I met my wife about a year later. And why did you come here? My brother, Chris, he went to a USC film school and I came out to visit him from New York.

And I was like, man, I was like to visit him from New York. And, uh, I was like, man, I was like, does it ever rain here? He's like, never. He's like,

never fucking rains. We're in Los Angeles. And, uh, I was like, shit, really? I was like,

it rained the last 20 days in a row in New York. I was like, I got to figure out a way to move out here. And so I did live in an apartment with my brother. He and I trained at gold's gym, Venice every day or for a cut for day for a period of time there. What year was that? Yeah, that was, now that I'm thinking back, it was probably 96, 97, somewhere in there.

Did you ever, did you recall seeing Greg there, meeting Greg at that time? Yeah, no, I know that Greg Glassman was there. He was a trainer somewhere. I don't know what year, but he was a trainer getting kicked out of Golds to Golds to Golds down there. Yeah, he was telling me that he was part of some of that. There were so many people coming in. Please don't try to get him on your podcast before I get him on my podcast. Please don't do that.

Are you talking to him? I'm trying to get him on my podcast. Are you talking about him again? Oh, great. Yeah, perfect. Perfect. Yeah. you talking to him i'm trying to get him on my podcast he says oh great yeah perfect perfect yeah no greg you should definitely get him on your podcast by the way yeah absolutely no he's scheduled to be on as soon as he can be on um oh i knew it i knew it

greg mine first so we'll we'll see uh we'll see what happens but um you know there's another guy who like blazed a trail that's just amazing i know that uh he uh recently made some you know really shitty comments and i know that he's been under fire and stuff but uh i mean the invention the creation of crossfit and i know some, well, he didn't really make anything because that's just called a superset or whatever. But he did poke some holes in fitness, and we ended up with men and women that are just – we've never seen men and women look the way they look now, especially the men and women that do CrossFit. These people, they look phenomenal. They can do phenomenal things. I do realize that in an effort for people to try to keep up with what goes on at the

CrossFit games, how that can be harmful and detrimental. But I don't even believe that that was any part of Greg Glassman's original. I don't think it was part of his original goal. His main thing was just like, Hey, you know, show me a guy that squats 600 pounds and I'll show you a guy that can't run a six minute mile and show me a guy that can run a six minute mile. And I'll show you a guy that can't squat 600 pounds. And he was like, Hey, let's see if we can make that athlete. And he has, he's made people that are at least close to some of those stats or, or can handle, you know, at least a, a 400 pound squat. And then they can go run a mile in six minutes and stuff like that. I've seen some of their athletes do stuff like that before.

So I, I admire, I admire these people that are able to create momentum for so many other people. And you look at what CrossFit has done to the, to the fitness community and what it's done to, um, get people flipping tires, climbing ropes, uh, lifting barbells. I mean, it's just, it got so many more people in the power to think it's, it's really odd, but Greg Glassman single-handedly rewrote the record books in powerlifting

because powerlifting and CrossFit and a lot of these men and these women, when they started to do some of the powerlifting movements, they actually kind of recognize like, man, I ain't no CrossFitter. I actually am better off lifting these heavy weights. This is kind of more who I am. I like the longer rest periods. And a lot of those people transitioned into powerlifting. It helped powerlifting more popular. Every sport grew. Yeah. Frisbee,

frisbee, fucking golf. Every, every person who does CrossFit gets fit. And then they're like, shit, how am I going to use this fitness? Every single sport grew because of CrossFit.

By the way, I don't think he said anything shitty. I think that he said something great. I mean, I'm not saying that to like make a debate between me and you by any means. But I think he said something very, I don't know who it was, fucking Galileo or one of those. He said something really inflammatory and then it just started to come to the form of other people. Yeah, people read into what he said completely fucking wrong. Just because someone says the earth is round and you think it's flat doesn't mean that they should be hung.

And but I mean, I don't think he cares. I think he's happy. I think he's rich as fuck now. And I think the pressure of the world is off his back. And I think he's I mean, it goes back to what I was saying. Or it'd be him. Yeah, I think when he comes back, he's going to be very heavily embraced. I think people think the grass is greener on the other side.

It is not. I think that the same way it's liberate. I think that like Joe Rogan saying that he does whatever he does, testosterone replacement or that he does acid or that Mark Bell talks about it openly or that Lika Veli has songs that say, let the white kids say nigga or that Greg Glassman got canceled. There is a freedom, especially if you're financially independent to being canceled. It cannot emphasize that enough. But the only thing that sucks is once you become financially independent is if you have any integrity, you have an obligation then to defend everyone who's not. And that's a, they don't tell

you that part, but if you have integrity, that's, I think what you do. The one thing that you were kind of talking about earlier about like being offended and you were kind of mentioning like, Hey, do you think, you know, your brother's movie helped kind of free you up or, you know, help you kind of feel more free. Really what's helped me more so over the years than anything is just my own investigation, my own look into myself. And I say this often,

the greatest podcast you'll ever do is going to be the one that you do with yourself, you know, and it's not an easy thing to admit your faults. It's not an easy thing to really kind of pick at the things that you're not good at and to really investigate and really look at those things and really try to figure out ways of making those better. For me, it's been really helpful over the years to just really work on just not being reactionary, you know, just give, there's, there's not too many things in this world. I mean, there are emergency situations, but there's not too many things in this world that you don't just give a little bit of time to, and the problem will subside or sometimes problems will subside

by themselves just from time alone. But usually time, you know, they say, sometimes people say sleep on it, but I think people are too anxious sometimes to sleep on it, but sleeping on it is great advice, or just take a little bit of a pause. You see a comment that's rude to you on the internet or something like that, just give it a little bit of a beat. Give it a second. Maybe if you're really that mad, say, I wonder if I'll come back to this tomorrow.

What are the odds that you're going to go back, look at your same post from yesterday, scroll through a couple of the comments, find that same comment that you found to be super offensive and go in there and just start trying to beat the person up that said it. So I like what you're saying about being offended. And even that very word, uh, while I'm not on the other side of that, um, I, I caution people against falling into the trap of somebody hating them or saying something hateful or hurtful. You know, just really think about that.

When someone says something hateful or hurtful, what the fuck is that about? You know, like, where is that coming from? Hurt people hurt people. And when someone like that's trying to dish something out to you all they want to do is get a response all they're looking for is to get a rise out of you and for me what i usually try to do is when someone says something ridiculous is a ignore it which i think is the best and best route to go most of the time. B, the other thing is, I think, um, you can just answer it with humor because when something, when someone's trying to inflict a wound on you or someone's trying to hurt you or be mean to you, when you have kind of a comedic

response, that's not disrespectful. Um, I think it's like, it shows them how ridiculous it is or at least it shows everybody in the group how ridiculous it is there's a comment that I sometimes leave for people I don't really even use it much anymore but I sometimes will just say I'm just happy to be here and that means like go fuck your mother you know like that's what that means. Go fuck yourself. But I just like to say that because it's just like a I'm pretty much completely ignoring this, but I'm giving it some sort of information. But when people see that you respond that way, then your fans will start to respond that way to people. I've even taken quotes and taken things from that are completely random. quotes and, and taking things from that are completely random. I'll look up, uh, you know, I'll look up something about the, uh, the first trip to, uh, the moon or something like that. And I'll find some, I'll, I'll, I'll find out the type of metal that was used on the rocket for the

first, uh, for the first flight to the moon. And I'll, I'll hit copy and paste and I'll paste it to the guy that says, Hey, you still look fat or you're an idiot or you, you don't know how to read or whatever it is. I'll copy and paste that and put that in the comment section. Makes me laugh. Love that. Oh, alloyed metal was used for the first flight to the moon or whatever. And the person's, the person's looking at it and you know, they're infuriated. Like what the fuck, man? No, I'm trying to like fight with you and you're, you're fucking around, you know?

So, you know, for trying to figure out a way to have fun with it, just the last thing on being offended is, uh, normally being offended from something or from someone is based off of value assignment. You, for some reason have valued why, what I'm going to not even say anything in terms of race, because I don't, I've never been subject to that. So I don't know what it's like to be on the receiving end of that. Fuck you, cracker. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I have, but like, see, I don't, I just, that doesn't, that doesn't mean anything to me. Right. Yeah, no, I'm saying I don't get a, but again, it's a value assignment. So that's a great

example though, to the word cracker. Like it has no, it has no value to me. I'm not valuing that. I don't value you saying that to me. And society's not demanding you value it either. Right. And I think that that is a great way to go about it. Someone calls you fat. Someone calls you stupid. Who, who is this person? You know, if this is a person in your life that you love and you care about, and they teased you about something that bothers you, you have to talk to them about it because that is a person that has a high value assignment in your life. And you need to say, Hey, you know what? I, I might be a little sensitive. I'm not sure what happened, but like when you teased me about this the other day, I didn't take it that way. And it actually,

it cut me pretty good and i i would rather you know maybe we could figure out a different way to mess around with each other or something somebody that hears that that loves you and cares about you they're gonna go oh my god i'm so holy fuck i'm so sorry somebody that continues to do that then you need to figure out a way to uh probably boot them out of your life but that's the way i view a lot of those things i don't think i think how about when people say stuff that upsets you like about so i was walking the i was walking by swimming pool the other day and there was this woman and she was she was she was probably i don't know 100 pounds overweight and she was in a in like a um she had a swim cap on and she had

like a like a almost like like i think she had a bikini on even, but it was like the kind of bikini a hardcore swimmer would wear. And she was stretching, and I was thoroughly enjoying watching her stretch. I thought it was – I just love human bodies. Even though I talk so much shit about people being overweight and fat, it's mostly just around the fact that I'm just so fucking pissed that there's a mischaracterization of what's going on with the pandemic right now. But I just love human bodies. Like, I love sumo wrestlers. The only thing that is really hard to see is young kids who are obese and anorexic people for me. But I still don't think it's – I still really enjoy just looking at humans.

And so she's, like, stretching, and I'm humans and um and so she's like stretching and she's and i'm watching her and she can't see me like i'm on this trail that's behind the pool and i'm watching her stretch and get ready and she's going through all the movements and she's got this huge ass and like i'm watching her arms and this whole being she's getting ready to go in the water and the person i'm with is like that that's disgusting. And that hurt me. I was just like, it's not even about me, but the fact that I was enjoying it. It's worse than let's say I took you to the museum and we're looking at a Picasso and you said he's a dumb fuck. My kid could have painted that.

I'd be like, yo, chill it's um it's it's uh it's a shame it's a shame to me that uh i don't know it's just i just feel like it's a missed opportunity and like i usually don't correct those people unless they're really close to me like if they're like family members i'd be like yo you're looking at that all wrong you're looking at that all wrong there's nothing like i think it's an education opportunity you know i think it's i think it's a an opportunity to you know communicate with people sometimes sometimes you know you do get a friend that's like i don't know like maybe they're trying to be crass because they're hanging with you and like they think that you would enjoy because they saw you looking at the person and they felt you would enjoy that. Right.

As we go back. Oh, yeah. Fucking you're right, bro. Like totally disgusting. But I think that I look at a lot of stuff is like opportunities for education. So I pay close attention to people around me saying certain things. And I even have people that really won't talk much around me because they know this about me. So, uh, you know, family gatherings or something, if someone's like, man, I'm just so tired of having these love

handles, they know I'm going to go in on, well, you know, have you, you know, thought about taking up some walks during, you know, they know that I'm going to like throw solutions at them. And sometimes they're literally just, just complaining. But I think a lot of these things are opportunities to communicate, share information, and maybe in that case, not educate, but have a conversation and say, that's interesting. You know, why do you think that's disgusting? Do you think it's very unattractive for someone to have like a little extra weight on their body or, you know, like what's your, what's your threshold? You know, someone being

40 pounds overweight, like, you know, or, or do you like to see people be more, more muscular or something like that? You know, and then, then you can get into like a, a conversation because you can say, well, I don't really think it's disgusting. I actually just think that, uh, you know, that person has, uh, probably, uh, just maybe have, hasn't got out in front of exercise yet, but look at them, how cool this is. They're here exercising right now. And maybe they're on a journey to where they want to try to work on that you know being overweight is a funny thing i don't think that being like being obese and having your body having your body compromised to where it doesn't have access to do the stuff that it's supposed to do i I think that's dangerous. And I think that that is something that you should try to work on. And I understand how difficult it can be. I get it. But just have

just having some extra weight on you. I think it's, it's very, I don't want to like lower the bar and just say, Hey, you know, we can all have extra weight on us because there's super delicious foods out there. But at the same time, I don't really think it costs you nearly as much as the media and just people in fitness want to make it out to be. Somebody with an extra 20 pounds on them, even an extra 30 or 40 pounds, I mean, it's debatable. Some people even say that fat is in some way is protective. And I know people like lose their minds over this, but if, if you, if you can just not get so heavy that it kind of, um, changes the way that you stand,

changes the way that you walk, uh, yeah. Interrupts your sleep, prevents you doing a lot of things. It prevents you from walking, prevents you from staying motivated. I mean, those are the things that once those things start to happen, you do need to investigate. And I do think that you can say that it's a gluttonous way to start living because you're not paying attention to something that's so obvious. You now have sleep apnea.

You're falling asleep in the middle of the day you're clearly a hundred pounds so that part of it it's not that your body is disgusting or that you're a disgusting person you have developed habits that are gross that are disgusting it wouldn't be any different than seeing someone who's already completely hammered having a couple extra shots at the bar and you're like motherfucker that's disgusting can you slow down you know so i think it's all the times in college i was drunk and then took a bong ripping that caused me to vomit it's like dude you shouldn't have taken a bong rip you should have gone home you dumb fuck yeah it's gluttonous yeah it's it's gross. Gluttonous. Yep. Did you ever smoke weed? No. Did you ever go through a weed phase?

No. God, you're so pure. No meth. No weed. No. Are you square? So, you know, my oldest brother, you know, dying from drugs and my brother Chris having an addiction to some stuff and my uncle dying from drugs.

So I never really got into much. I never really got into alcohol or weed or cigarettes or like Coke or meth or any recreational. Like a healthy fear. Yeah, yeah, any recreational stuff. I just always thought they really really weren't for me and i was always like if i'm going to take drugs i want them to like do something for me yeah so i that's kind of where i thought about performance enhancement i'm like this because i was always into lifting and uh even i feel better tomorrow if i take this

but if i take this i feel like feel like shit tomorrow. Yeah, 100%. That's kind of the way that it went. I have experimented with mushrooms and LSD, and I do like both of those quite a bit. Not a lot. I haven't done a lot of either one of them, but I do like them. I do enjoy them. I do think that I do enjoy alcohol here and there, but, uh, I think alcohol is alcohol is an escape. In my opinion, it feels like an escape,

which feels nice. Sometimes it's almost like it takes you to a different place and can help assist, make you a slightly different person. For for me it helps make me more social um but when it comes to when it comes to mushrooms and when it comes to lsd at least with some of my experiences so far it's really like introspective like you it's like uh you start working on yourself and i think that that has a ton of merit that's it's almost like going to therapy but it's you teaching yourself it's you walking yourself through your own therapy it's fucking wild and you don't get to really select the time that you have you know you sometimes are wonderful and sometimes they're wonderful and sometimes you're like, fuck man, that whole experience was pretty, was pretty fucked up. Whereas normally with alcohol,

I think alcohol is so popular because it's pretty predictable. You have a couple of drinks, you're around a couple of friends, and usually you just get to like more fired up. You're pretty excited. You know, you're a little more talkative. Your inhibitions are down just a bit. And if you, and if you get the right amount of alcohol, it's just perfect. You know, you can obviously like overdo it. And sometimes you don't get the same buzz.

But for the most part, it's really consistent. And you can really manage the time that you have by getting around people that you enjoy. And you almost always have a good time. I guess there are some cases where like you might get frustrated or something like that because you're you're you're drunk at the wrong time or getting a buzz the wrong time or whatever but for the most part it's pretty damn consistent and with psychedelics it seems like man you're going on this ride and you're like, you start going on this roller coaster and you're like, oh, that's pretty cool. And then you're like, what the fuck? This ride

sucks. This ride's never going to be over. Yeah. You're like, what the hell? And it can make you kind of paranoid and a little sketched out and stuff. but I do like them. I've even messed around with a little bit of a micro dosing. I've even taken some mushrooms like on a run before and then been encouraged to like run more. I'm like, fuck, I can, this feels good. I can run for longer and things like that. And so I'm just kind of a baby when it comes to that stuff. I have not done it a ton but uh just kind of getting smart stay a baby those those drugs in in my opinion my experience my know-it-allness is um every time you

do those things there's no going back so people should be aware of that like you're just having fun on an acid trip and then all of a sudden out of the corner of your eye you see a tribe of native americans and your whole life has been shifted. And now you're focused. You go from being interested in fitness to pursuing a Ph.D. in Native American cultures because you saw a fucking tribe of Native Americans. You're not asked to fuck. Just change everything. There was something that Mark said that I want you guys all to really notice.

I notice it whenever anyone says it because it's so fucking rare. I think Hinshaw mentioned it. He said something about not reacting. There's this word meditation and he said, and creating, I don't know if he used the word stillness or space, but there is this word we use in society called meditation and so many people don't know what it is and um mark just described it and you and i the example i use over and over and over is from the movie terminator when um someone says something to the terminator and it something a reaction pops up in his head should he say this should he say this should he say this? Should he say this? Should he say this? And Arnold chooses, fuck you, asshole. And the difference between the Terminator and human beings is as human beings, one thing, one reaction will pop up.

And the second one won't pop up until you let that first one go. And that's called not reacting. That's called meditating. That's called mindfulness. That's called creating stillness. That's called creating space. And so someone flips you off as they drive by you. Your reaction is to flip them off. If you let that go, if you have cultivated enough self-awareness, you won't flip them off. That will pass and another option will come up and it will be to look to your left to see if a car is coming. coming and if you let that go then the next one might come up and you might be rolled down your window and yell i love you and you can choose and just be and if you go back and you're like

nah i'm gonna flip this motherfucker off at least you had three choices now and so you you you there's this misconception that we have free will we don't have free will i'm sorry i know that's gonna kill people but we do have the free will to choose our reactions wherever the fuck they come from i don't the fuck they come from. I don't know where they come from. Can I take a break? That was going to be my final question. What do you do on your podcast when you have to pee?

Let me pee. I'll come back and answer it. Okay. I'm going to pee too. I'm going to be all right. Stand by. Stand by. Peebreak. Thank you. And the pee break is over i was just i was just wondering that i was just going to ask him what does he do what does mark bell do on his podcast when he has to pee does he he's got that he's got

a co-host i gotta ask him about that guy. Per break indicative of age. You mean like how often we have to pee is based on how old we are? Like the older you are, the more often you have to pee? Mark, how are you? So that co-host of yours, the handsome dude who's like, if I'm looking at your show, he's to the left, the black guy. Is he a crutch he uh yeah he a crutch for me yes for me to lean on like i like i started this podcast this like i the one i had brian this guy brian friend on a bunch of shows and like he became like a gnarly crutch and then like and then like i don't know what happened i

guess he just didn't want to like go full steam ahead like me he like wanted to have a life besides podcasting so i kind of lost him now he only shows up like every like five or ten shows and it's forced me like to like but i but i'm always looking for another crutch you know i i like to uh i like to give opportunities you know to people that i think that are that are really worth something and so right yeah with in sema um in sema that's his name yep uh and i am a um yeah i i wanted to bring. Uh, a lot of the reason is just cause like, he's better than me in some stuff, you know, he's, he's, he's taller than me. He's better looking than me.

He's more Jack than I am. And I actually liked that. You know, I like, um, you know, I, I don't have the biggest squat bench or deadlift in the history of super training gym. And that's the way that it should be. If I'm going to be the coach and the leader and the mentor, I should be able to kind of mentor people to a higher place. And so I like to be around like-minded people, but I do like learning from people that are in a better spot than me, or at least in my view, are in a better spot than me. And I think he gets the same from me because I'm older,

I'm more established in my career and stuff. And so I think it makes for a really good synergy. But yeah, he is someone that when we first started this podcast, he was a little more reserved, a little bit quieter. But yeah, now that we kind of have the dynamic that we do, he is somebody that I lean on here and there. Do you ever do ones without him? We sometimes do something that we call Sunday school, but we haven't really done or Saturday school. Maybe we haven't done one of those in a while. So normally, no, it's just, it's the three of us. It's usually Andrew, uh, and in SEMA and myself. How did you find Andrew?

Um, Andrew, uh, actually came to an event that we had. We had a, uh, like a, uh, an event where we had a bunch of girls at the gym and I podcasted with, with a bunch of these girls. They were, um, all with bodybuilding.com at the time. And I've done stuff with bodybuilding.com before, and we had tremendous success doing like live, uh,

things from the gym with them. And, uh, we've had great responses with a lot of the stuff that we've done. So, uh, they were like, Hey,

I think it'd be really cool if we brought down a bunch of these girls, they power lift, you can kind of coach them. Maybe you can do like a seminar. And so anyway, we had this event and Andrew had a camera and he's like, I'm not a perv. I'm actually a cameraman. Is it okay if I take some pictures? Why can't he be both? Yeah. And I was like, well, it's okay if you're a perv. Fuck, why do you think I'm here? You know? But yeah, Andrew gave me a business card and I was like, man, that's really weird timing. Cause I'm really looking for, for a photographer. And so that's kind of how we met. And then he and I have, you know, stayed in contact for, we stayed in contact for a little bit after that.

He started coming in, doing some photos, hired him on. And then he kind of became the Swiss army knife around here where he could, he can kind of morph into doing anything. And so he was editing videos. He was doing a video series that we did for a long time called Hustle Mania. doing a video series that we did for a long time called hustle mania or just kind of follow me around for my day and kind of see what i do work wise workout wise and podcast wise and then uh i had a podcast that went on for a while where i did probably a little over 500 episodes or so um and uh me and the guy that were running that podcast, uh, split apart. And as soon as that opportunity kind of came up, Andrew's like, Hey man, I want to run the podcast.

I was like, do you know anything about it? And he's like, yeah. And I think he just started learning on the fly that day, but, uh, yeah, he's been, he's been a great addition as well. Yeah. That's awesome. I need that. That's it. great addition as well. Yeah, that's awesome. I need... But you pay him. I don't want to. He makes money. I need a dude like Andrew who will work for free for me. I need a guy like right now.

He chimes in and is like, why are you asking about Andrew? I'm your guy. You know what I mean? I need an Andrew. Andrew is a great addition to the show. He, I know he wants, I chime in more, but you know, and see and seem and I are, you know,

we're alphas over here and we're, we're just not, we're just not letting Andrew say anything. We'll just beat his ass if he says something. So like, if you see his picture, like if you see his picture pop up and like, he's about to like you see his little square pop up you just give him the stink eye yeah we just kind of wave our fists out i'm like you motherfucker andrew get back to pushing buttons over there would you get back to work um what was jesse burdick ever your co-host no but he's been on the show a bunch of times yeah okay yeah because i saw him

in a bunch yeah we did seminars together too okay and and how long are you usually your podcasts uh they'll go sometimes they'll be an hour and sometimes they'll be up to three hours kind of depends on the guest depends on how far we go I think the sweet spot is usually around 90 minutes to two hours, somewhere in there. But for us, that's been kind of the sweet spot. Yeah, I like 90 minutes. The podcasts that I've been on that have gone three hours, I've done two, and I've regretted both of them. Yeah, I mean, it just depends on the conversation. It depends on how many people are on the microphone. Right. You've got more people on the microphone, and it might work out a little differently.

Right. We have a great dynamic going. We have a really good— Who, you and Seema and Andrew, or me and you? You and I, yeah. We have a great dynamic. That's what I thought. And Andrew. No, you're actually very good at this. That's what I thought. And Andrew, no,

you're actually very good at this. You're very conversational. I'm enjoying it, but yeah, on our show, we have a great dynamic going in. I really like to get guests here. Like someone like yourself,

I'd love to have you here. You know, it'd be so much, it'd just be so much better, you know, doing it this way is great. And this is a great way for listeners to get the information, but to actually meet you and see that you're 5'2 and 125 pounds, that'll be great. Why? Why? Everyone tells me that. Why? Why do we have to be in the same room? Isn't this nice?

Do you think that we would have gone deeper or more intimate if we would have been in the same room? more intimate if we were been in the same room, what would be? Yeah, no, I think so. I think, I think at least for my show, because what we would do beforehand is we'd work out and we'd have a good time and we'd fuck around and we would just get to know you a lot better. You know, it's, it's different than just trying to look stuff up on you. You know what I mean? Yeah. But aren't you afraid if you have your, if you talk to your guests before, um, that

like, that you're going to have to fake some of this stuff that you have want to ask them again. Like, like if we were in the, like when we were in the, if we were in the changing room and you saw I had a 12 inch dick and you were like, holy shit. And I'd be like, Armenian dude. Then you'd have to like fake it like later on in the show and be like, Hey dude, how big is your penis? And like, I, everyone be like, dude, you already know.

Yeah. I already saw it. The cat is out of the bag basically at that point right yeah i mean don't you feel like it's um more or do you have that issue like like it loses a little bit of its sincerity um if you've hung out with the person before you asked if i was afraid of it and uh the only thing i'm afraid of is freddy krueger so this time of year is actually really hard for me because i know that motherfucker is going to be on tv and i'm gonna have a hard time sleeping but no i don't sweat it man i i it's it's fun to meet the guests beforehand and talk to them uh sometimes we just roll right in the podcast but most of the time working out with somebody, even just showing somebody around my gym, um, even just, even just somebody like this kind of thing happens all the time. Somebody will just come in the gym.

They'll say they're a huge fan and, uh, they're, they're not even coming into workout. They just wanted to stop by. They wanted to maybe buy something from our store or something. Well, I might get talking to them and I might show them around. When I show them around, it's really, uh, you could see a lot about someone's personality just in the couple minutes of me showing them around. If I show them a couple of pieces of equipment in the gym, I'll know that they're real gym enthusiasts. If they actually try some of the stuff, I'll say, Hey, look at this. We have this sled over here. It's called the tank. It has this

crazy resistance on it. It's got these tires. You push it and it looks like it's going to be easy, but it fucking crushes your soul. The people that, that most of the time, people I want to hang out with more are like, fuck yeah, dude, that's sick. Can I try it? You know, and then they'll try to run or something. They'll kill themselves. So, you know, I like the interaction of trying to do a workout with somebody. And you could see, like, if I said, hey, man, we're going to do we're going to do box squats today. If the first thing out of your mouth is like, man, I don't know my knee. I'm like, oh, come on with this guy.

You know, he's got a fucking fitness podcast. Really? I'm never, Oh, come on with this guy. You know, he's got a fucking fitness podcast. Really? I'm never coming to your gym. You just scared me away. No, you don't have to do like the weights that anyone's doing, but like, you know,

I worked out with, uh, Hannah Eden recently. I worked out with Marcus Philly recently. And like, I can't do any of the shit that those people can do. Those people are. Marcus Philly should never take a picture standing can't do any of the shit that those people can do. Those people are- Marcus Philly should never take a picture

standing next to you, by the way. I know. You ruined him. He was a God in my eyes. And I saw them standing next to you and you made them look like a fucking pipsqueak. Dude, I can't believe you unfollowed everything that he does.

Because that takes commitment. You went into his YouTube, you unfollowed him there. You went into his YouTube. You unfollowed him there. You went into his Instagram. You can't unfollow everything Marcus Philly does. He does too much. That's wild. Hey, did you love him?

We did, yeah. Yeah, he's awesome. I think he's coming back up this week because we got that seminar. So, yeah, it'd be great to have him around a little bit more i know he's uh he's not too far away christian leon uh he says he's coming to your seminar mark see you sunday for the knees over toes seminar shit sounds great do you know that guy christian leon i do now imagine getting raped while your attacker puts the covid vaccine in your arm worst day ever that's a weird comment um i'm gonna imagine that i get neither of those

hmm uh are you still coaching kids stuff like kids football stuff like that no but i really did enjoy that uh i was a football coach for a little while and uh and a strength coach for a football team here in uh woodland california that that was that was a blast i'd love to maybe get back into something like that maybe maybe when i'm a little older i got too much shit going on right now i asked you if that was your house I'm wrapping up the show but I want to get in any I'm reviewing my notes here uh we talked about

oh raw meat how about all this raw meat shit going on the Brian the liver king the carnivore MD people just chugging testicles and just what's are youicles and just what are you doing?

Any of this? Are you have you had any balls in your mouth recently? Are you jumping on the bandwagon? I have had balls in my mouth recently, but it wasn't too, no, I was kidding. Um, nothing you chewed just.

Yeah. Mm. Uh, I do like, uh, you know, some of the organ meats and stuff like that. I think that they have benefit.

Um, I don't like the flavor of them, so I'm not going to go out of my way to eat them, but I consume them. And I made a product called the Steak Shake. And the Steak Shake has— Oh, that's you, the Steak Shake? That's me, bro. I have that in my notes, too.

Okay, go on, go on. We'll come back to the Steak Shake. I created a product called the Steak Shake, and it has beef protein isolate. It has egg white, and it has whey protein in addition to liver, heart, kidney, spleen, and pancreas. So it has a organ blend in it. And, uh, that's how I get my, that's how I get my organ like vitamins and minerals. I get it from that. I usually have about four scoops of that a day, two, two scoops in the morning, two scoops later on in the evening, uh, usually after dinner or something like that.

I made a chocolate one, made a vanilla one. They both taste great. They both don't have artificial sweeteners in them. I'm working on restocking the chocolate as we speak because it's been very successful. But just in terms of the raw meat stuff, like, no, I don't mess around with, you know, we had Jay Cutler on the podcast, Jay Cutler's four time, Mr. Olympia and somebody I really look up, really look up to one of the more extraordinary people that I've ever met out of all the guests that I've ever had on the show. And, uh, he has a quote that just stuck with me forever. And he said, don't be fancy, be consistent. And, uh, that's something I will never forget. And I think that's really, really important when you're considering making changes of any kind, whether it's to your training or to your nutrition or other changes, lifestyle changes that you might want to make. You know, you don't need to run.

You don't need to sprint 40 seconds of every minute for 10 minutes to get in shape. Although that might be a crazy workout that would indicate that you're in shape, but it's all about consistency. You know, that kind of workout to try to do something like that day in and day out, most likely is not going to happen. If you're eating stuff that you really don't enjoy, then I'm going to say you're going to have a hard time with long-term success. And something I've been kind of realizing more recently, it's kind of interesting with nutrition. Nutrition, you can get results in days. Like I'm talking about three days, five days. If you're listening to this right now and you got an extra 30, 40 pounds on you, you can start a nutritional intervention right now where you pretty much just eat meat, vegetables, maybe some fruit. In three days,

if you have never eaten like that before, you will probably feel fucking amazing. Results will vary for every person a little bit, but for the most part, most people will lose a little bit of weight from following a protocol like that. Now, the key is that are these things things that you enjoy? If they're not things that you, if you don't really enjoy meat, then you're going to have to try to find, you know, other alternatives. But I think you want to try to figure out how can you in anything you're trying to do in anything that you're trying to be successful at, how can you be consistent? And when it comes to nutrition, the main thing that you're trying to think about is how can you make it through every single day without overeating? And the way that you do that is you prioritize protein. Maybe you eat some fiber because fiber can be filling too. So maybe

you have some vegetables, maybe you have some fruit. There's other things that are satiating that don't have calories in them too like coffee bone broth so there's some fringe things like that that you can have another thing that helps satiate you though is to have proper micronutrients as well as macronutrients and so the micronutrients that's where some of this liver stuff comes from. And some of the people talking about nose to tail and organ meats and eating testicles and stuff, having those things intact can help make the hormones of the body intact, which will allow you to make better decisions each and every day. And none of this stays intact without one of the most important things. And that is

to make sure that you're getting enough sleep. But once those things are met, you don't necessarily need a strict diet protocol. You prioritize for protein, eat some vegetables, eat some fruit, make sure you get your micronutrients in, which micronutrients are probably handled from eating meat, vegetables, fruit, eggs would be in there too. And then nailing down your sleep. If you can do those things, you most likely, whenever you eat meat, it will fill you up enough to carry you through a long enough period of time where you're not eating. And then you'll eat again. So you'll eat like two, three times in a day and you should be good to go. You'll probably inadvertently intermittent fast just because you have the right stockpile of foods in your body.

Do you ever fast for 24 hours or 36 hours? Yeah, I've done five days and I've done a lot of different things like that. I think they have some benefit. I think it's a good idea to become buddies with hunger you know it's a good idea to recognize that you have this signal and that you don't have to act on it just like we talked about earlier just because somebody said something to me uh doesn't mean i have to select madness i don't have to select being disturbed i don't have to select being pissed off I don't have to select being pissed off. I don't

have to select, Hey, fuck you, motherfucker. I can't believe you said that shit to me. I can select whatever I want, uh, for it. And so, um, I do think it's a good idea to treat hunger the same way. Like I don't need to respond to that. What you'll notice is that the less react, the less kneeerk reaction you have to your hunger, the more often you can push it off. People say breathe through it. You just go, all right, well, yeah, I have that urge. I smell what the other person just cooked up. That does sound really good, but I need to hold true with what I'm doing. And when you recognize that a steak is just around the corner, it's really not, you're not really missing

out on anything. It feels like you are, and it can be difficult, but I think fasting is, is intermittent fasting, especially I think has a lot of merit. I would just warn people of one thing, has a lot of merit. I would just, uh, warn people of one thing, and that is you can overdo your fasting and then you can make yourself insanely hungry and you can overeat. So if you, the whole key to any sort of fast, whether it's a day fast, a five day fast, uh, or 16, eight or any of these types of fasts is just to, when you come out of the fast, is to pretend that it never happened. That way, the calories that were partitioned off, you're not eating then and then some. Some people will...

The two five-day fasts I've done in the past couple years, complete fucking disasters. One of them threw my eating off for like six months like i just for the next like yeah yeah for like six months after that i was like fuck you like but but um but um i do stop eating every saturday night i sleep i don't eat anything sunday at all except for black coffee and then i don't eat again until monday morning and the and basically all i tell myself and i've done that for like 60 70 weeks

now i don't know how long but and now it's just become normal um but basically i just have to sleep twice so i tell people i do a 36 hour fast once a week i don't really know the number of hours i don't know if it's 30 or i don't know if it's 44 but basically as long as i sleep twice i feel like i'm hack i'm cheating right sleep, I don't eat for a day. I go back to sleep. And, um, and on Tuesday, uh, on Monday mornings, when I wake up, I basically have, it's, I feel fucking incredible and I'm not even hungry. I mean, I ended up eating. I almost always eat some eggs left over from my kids, but the fasting I feel like basically like I shrink a size and then I gain it gain it back all throughout the week and then I just fast again just one day and I used to feel like I was missing

out and shit but now like I don't give a fuck it's me it's just you doing your own thing and you feel good about it yeah it's great it's's great. But the two five day fast I've done did, but both times fuck me up. I don't feel like, like it was, uh, and one time I just did water and I did not, I, I, I, something was wrong. Like I said, yeah, you can, you can, you can, you can definitely overdo fasting. And if it's, uh, if it's deregulating your hunger, like if it's, um, if, if you ended up binging and stuff and it ain't working, you know, that those are the things you need to investigate your, your low carb diet.

Isn't working. If you're ending up in the pantry, eating a bunch of cookies, like you're going to have to probably find something slightly different. Now, if you have some cookies once a month or something, that's probably not a big deal. But if you find yourself, you know, waking up in the middle of night and having these crazy cravings and, and things of that nature, then the current diet plan that you're working on, it's great that you're messing with it and it's great that you're working on it, but it's just not really working. And so you need to, you need to figure out figure out what's going to work, what's going to allow me to get the rest that I need and allow me to not think about these

other foods all the time. In the 15 years that I was hanging out with Greg Glassman, he was always just talking about the evils of added sugar. And so basically from the day I met him till, I don't know, a year ago, I was always taking steps to reduce sugar. So like 15 years ago, I quit drinking soda. And then like, you know, every time you had a birthday party, I didn't have cake. But then you know what finally pushed me over the edge that I ended up on the Paul's Saladino's Instagram. And I started seeing all this, following all of his carnivore diet shit. And I was thinking, okay, that's what I'm going to fucking do. I'm going to let myself basically eat as much meat and hard cheese as I want for two weeks, throw myself into ketosis, and then slow and see what happens.

And I guess – I mean I'm no fucking rocket scientist, but I guess what happened is I went into ketosis. And at night instead of craving – always like at 10 o'clock i was started craving carbs and all of a sudden i started craving fat at 10 at night it was so fucking weird i was just like holy fuck how can i be i just wanted to start eating avocados and uh cream and butter and so i'm like okay and i just never went back and i basically have just cut out added sugar and refined carbohydrates almost almost like 100% from my diet. I let myself eat as much vegetables and meat and hard cheese as I want. Let's go buck wild. But somehow when I went into ketosis, it fucking tripped the wire of, um, not chasing. It was like being free. I feel like so free that I don't

chase because I never realized that I chased carbs all day. I didn't even know I was doing that. I think a little fitness secret that maybe not everyone knows is, is the fact that most people have some sort of treat of some sort. Like most people that have these great disciplines, there are, there are bodybuilders that like go all in and stuff, but like most of the time people are like, oh yeah, I don't eat any carbs. And then you find out they have a little bit of dark chocolate at night, you know, hours after dinner. You find out that they throw a little bit of fruit in their protein shake or that they have cottage cheese and fruit or yogurt and fruit, or they like to have honey here and there.

Like you usually find, usually find something or, or they eat even something like a potato, you know, a potato here and there. Like you usually find, usually find something or, or they eat, um, even something like a potato, you know, I have potato here and there. And so I think for each person, it's good to try to select what's, you know, what's, uh, what's something maybe just a, just a tiny bit off course that won't send you spinning out of control that you can eat, that you can manage. don't send you spinning out of control that you can eat, that you can manage. Um, I think it's important to try to find those things for myself. Um, I have a jello that I can rely on. It's like 10 calories. And what I'll do is I'll get this little tiny thing of jello, which has like artificial sweeteners and colors and all kinds of shit like that in it, but I'm not worried about it. I'll sit down, I'll eat that. And if I want to eat another one, I get up and eat another one. If I want to eat another one, you know,

I'll do that. And I might go through four or five of them, but it doesn't cost me, you know, it's like, it's 50 calories, you know, it doesn't, uh, I'm not consuming a lot of extra. Um, I might do the same thing with something like hard boiled eggs. I kind of tell people like, if you look in your fridge and all you have in there is like hard boiled eggs and leftover meat. And you say to yourself, oh, I'm not really hungry for that. That actually means you're not really hungry. You know, you have a fake hunger going on.

You're hungry for something different, which is fine. That's a nice recognition though. Like, of course you're hungry for Fritos. We all are like, of course you're hungry for fritos we all are like of course you're hungry for nachos like those are fucking delicious you know i my my go-to treat and i'm so glad i found it and i gotta thank greg for that too is uh frozen berries um just like and then and then i put a little heavy cream on it and the heavy cream freezes on there like fucking magic shell. Remember that shit as a kid?

Yeah. And I'm just like – and I give myself that at night, and I can't even fucking believe that it's legit. I'm like, holy shit. Yeah, you're so good. What kind of berries? Just like a mix? Yeah, just whatever. the stuff that's too expensive to buy, but because I'm smart with my money,

like we talked about in the beginning of the show, I can put in my cart and not worry. When I lost my job with CrossFit, I didn't re-up my membership to SiriusXM. I didn't, and the reason why is because the money I saved from that makes it so I can buy organic avocados without thinking twice. Like what you said in the beginning, I didn't get to jump on that, but that's so true.

Cut everything out in your life to make your life easy so the shit that you want – I remember being in high school and putting in like $3 at a time into my gas tank. That shit sucks. How about you just stop smoking weed and stop drinking coffee at Starbucks so you don't have to worry about fucking putting gas in your gas tank? Life's so much better that way. When's the – three hours and six minutes. One more minute and it'll be a new world record. Oh, yeah.

When's the – what's the longest you've gone without working out? What's the longest you've gone without working out? Since like 1850 when you started. Yeah. Right after I was done signing the Constitution. Yes. Fuck, man. I haven't had really any long breaks off of lifting.

I want to say the most amount of days in a row might be like four or five. And when you say off, like literally like you didn't do 100 pushups or you didn't anything over a walk like you've taken four or five days off. Yeah, I think so um there so there were times when i was like a couple years ago when i when i was when i was a competitive power lifter and we would travel around and go to some other places um i if it was for the seminar stuff i would usually lift because i like to lift before the seminars kind of gets you hyped up and gets you ready to go. But you look good. All jacked. Yeah.

If I went to like trade shows and stuff years ago, a lot of times I wouldn't work out on those days. I would just go for like a walk in the morning. So like I could have, you know, been at like the Arnold for two, three days. And, you know, just had four or five days completely off of like lifting. There's always some exercise, uh, in there of some kind, at least some sort of walk or just something. If you're three 30, the two mile walk from your hotel to the convention center with fucking, um, uh, uh, uh, a pallet jack of steak shake is fucking a workout. Steak shake is fucking a workout. Oh, yeah. Yeah. When I was that big, there wasn't really a whole lot of walks going on.

It was, you know, it's been I've been walking quite a bit for the last like 10 years and probably for the last five years is when I really kind of kicked the walking into high gear because I became a person that just wanted to move more. I just like nowadays, I just feel like I i mean i'm standing right now doing this podcast i feel like i need to my my body is trained to like want to like even at the end of the day when i sit down and i watch tv and stuff i'm like i'm wasting my fucking time i'm wasting my fucking time you should get up you should go do something and i'm like no asshole you're chilling here with your wife you You're watching a movie, you know? So my, my, my friend, my friend, Travis Bajent told me, do you know who that is? Travis Bajent? I know him well. Yeah. The arm wrestler. Yes. Um, he, has he been on your podcast? He has not, but I'd love to have him on. I haven't seen him in years.

have him on i haven't seen him in years um he told me that when you when you go over 300 pounds that there has to be moving air in the room like there has to be a fan in the room oh absolutely you start sweating bullets yeah is that true like so when you were over 300 was there like a fan in every room in your house or like you had to sleep with a fan on you yeah you need not only do you need a fan but you need a fan like blowing directly on your face for some reason your face and your face is fat and uh yeah your back is just kind of always sweaty it's kind of gross i remember travis i was at the arnold classic one year and you know he's he's very you know uh he's very loud you know he's got a great personality and he's yelling at me and my brothers and stuff we don't know him and shit like that but we go over

and we kind of recognize he kind of has this like wrestling personality game recognized game yeah and he's like he's like you know he's got this arm wrestling table set up and we're like we're just gonna get like there's just no point so I just like locked up with him I just felt his strength right away and I was like this is just

this is just like totally he didn't kill me or anything but like we just with him i just felt his strength right away and i was like this is just this is just like totally he didn't kill me or anything but like we just he was totally just toying with me playing around but he just felt so strong just even the way that he grabbed my like thumb i was like oh my god it feels like you can break my hand um and then we were so he was we were just messing around that's kind of how we met and then um we walked by his booth again and we were with eric spoto and uh travis is yelling again i was like hey you want to try arm muscles this guy and uh eric was like super reluctant he's like i don't think so and so they they locked up and they they weren't gonna they weren't gonna go full steam anyway like those guys they're professionals.

They'll fucking hurt themselves if they go all in. And I don't think this guy, I don't think Travis knew about Eric Spoto at that time. Eric Spoto broke the all-time world record in the bench press and actually is quite a prolific arm wrestler himself, but nobody really knows that. And so they lock up and travis like looks at us and he's like you motherfuckers you brought over your friend you brought over your friend to beat me up yeah it was uh i think uh eric was able to beat him with one arm and then travis was able to

beat him with the other i forget who was like his left is his bread and butter right right right yeah yeah and so eric was able to beat him with his right but like you know travis is already you know super high level either way yeah what a great what a great story uh mark thank you thank you this has been great uh thank you so much where do you live at i'm in um santa cruz california oh shit you're not too far so you do need to come to the gym it's it's where it's where i dwell i know i'm i'm telling you like i seriously was planning on coming when i saw that shovel walk thing i go this motherfucker thinks no one's gonna show up at 4 30 i'm gonna like i started like like you know what i mean getting myself revved up i'm gonna fucking drive up there

and like be under the shovels at fourth. And then the day just came and went and I didn't. And I'm kind of glad I didn't. Cause I know that feeling of walking so much that like the wires that like run our marionette start tightening up. It's a weird one. That's a good way of putting it, you know, next just, uh, and I'll let you know, like, just, I mean, I walk over there every day, so I'll just hit you up. And if you have time to cruise down, we can hit up a walk.

And then when we're done with the walk, we could podcast. Oh yeah. That's so much better than box telling me we're going to do box. Do you ever come down this way? Uh, it's been a long time, but i can make excuses to come down that way for sure all right well if you ever do it would it's it's always it's always a it's always a pleasure to meet uh nice people and hang out with nice people what did you do for crossfit i ran their media department so basically i i i was um i was producing a show for espn that that travis was also co-producing

he was actually the executive producer he got all the money from the sponsors for it and i was making the show and i ran into this guy named travis titus who's a uh pretty high level security guard he got some crazy crazy crazy. And he was telling me he does this thing called CrossFit. This is like in 2005 or six. And he told me the workouts he did. And I'm like, you fucking liar. He was already buffed and beautiful. I'm like, there's no reason to fucking lie. And then we went home and my buddy's like, holy shit, that guy's not lying. He does workouts where you sprint and do a hundred pull-ups and weird shit. So I started doing CrossFit and there were no videos really on the website at the time.

And so I just wrote an email to Greg and Lauren, or actually my buddy did. And he said, Hey, we, we want to make videos for you. Um, and we gave him a budget of like $500,000. And Greg's like, well, uh, we don't have any money to pay you, but we'll let you go to a seminar for free. So I went to a seminar for free and had my mind blown. And I was 34 years old at the time. And I started making videos for CrossFit for a year for free. And it was just me and Tony Budding and Kerry Peterson who were on the media team then. And flash forward 15 years, and I was running that thing with a hundred people working for me, making documentaries, ESPN shows, YouTube. I was just crushing it you gotta live say that again

i'll say you got to meet my brother oh i'd love to meet your brother what and that's why i was so like when 2008 when he did that like i made a lot of movies and i was like wow this this someone this is a thoughtful motherfucker like he's it's that an, it's an incredible movie. I watched it again two nights ago. Awesome. Yeah. Incredible. All right. Well, thank you. Thanks. You want to go to, you want to go to four hours? My wife always asked me that. Yeah. Come on, baby. 50 more minutes, 50 more minutes. 50 more minutes. I'm willing to give you Travis's phone number and three other people's phone number as long as you promise not to have Greg Glassman on before me.

We'll see. If you have Greg on before me, I swear to fucking God I'll break all your bench press records. I'm not fucking around. Damn. I don't want that to happen, bro. At 150 pounds. Thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.

You the man.