 Hey everyone, welcome to Mind Pumped. Did you know that eating low protein can actually cause you to overeat? Yeah, you're going to learn about that and a lot more in this episode. In the second half of the show we answer four live-collar questions. Questions like, my traps aren't growing, what can I do? Or what is the best way to naturally raise my testosterone? You'll want to find out about that. Finally, if you want short clips of the show, go to our other YouTube channel, Mind Pump Clips and subscribe. And by the way, a lot of you already have and thank you. So everybody else out there, go subscribe right now. All right, here comes the show. All right, look, studies have shown that eating more protein tends to help people be more satisfied. But does this mean eating a low protein diet leads to overeating? A new study suggests yes, that's the case. In other words, if you don't eat a high protein diet, you are far more likely to overeat. Doesn't that seem a bit a little bit obvious? It seems obvious. But you know what? There's only three macros. I know. If you get rid of the most satiating one, chances are. However, your options are slim. What I like about this and what I like about scientific studies is that they'll take something that seems obvious and then they'll test it just to make sure because sometimes you get results that aren't what you would expect, right? There could be another variable or something else that's going on. I know. Water is wet. Water is wet. Yes, I know. But they did a study. They did another study and it was pretty well made. And it, in fact, does show what we would think would be the result, which is if you eat a low calorie diet, you're just more likely to overeat. So in other words, if weight loss is your goal or trying to avoid being overweight, and we've said this a million times, you want to eat a high protein diet. Low protein just makes this overeat. Now, there's a lot of theories as to why this may be the case. And it's probably, this is the leading theory, which I tend to agree with. There's no way of knowing for sure, but I think because of the way we evolved that our appetites were regulated by foods that tend to have more or less nutrients. And the most nutrient dense foods on earth, the most nutrient dense whole foods I should say on earth, are meat. Like if you ate a bunch of meat, the odds are you got all of the essential nutrients, proteins, fats, both essential, plus micronutrients and vitamins and minerals. And so I think when your body, with this, we evolved to where our bodies sense all this protein, and then our appetite gets tamped down because our body's like, okay, we don't need to spend so much energy seeking food at the moment, because you probably got everything you need. Versus I'm eating a bunch of berries that I found that are growing wild or maybe some roots that I found that are wild. And because my body didn't sense the protein, it also knows, well, those foods have some valuable stuff in them, but they're probably not getting our essentials. So let's keep the appetite high so that the person is driven to search for more food. I think there's some behavioral aspects to it too. So we recently talked about how we'll just go on a diet where I'm just going to focus on getting protein. That's my rule right now. I'll just make sure I hit my protein take. One of the things that I noticed when I do that, if I tell myself that there's no restrictions, like I can't not have something that I want. The only rule is I have to make sure I get protein first. It limits my options a lot of times. So in other words, like, let's say it's, you know, middle of the afternoon, I already had lunch, it's going to be probably two or three more hours till I get to a dinner. And I'm starting to get hungry. I'm driving from point A to point B. If I make that rule to myself that I have to get protein first, it's not as simple as just like pulling into a gas station and grabbing a bag of chips or nuts or something. So I feel like there's a behavioral aspect of that when you're targeting protein, because it's harder to find like protein rich meals in comparison to carbs or saturated fat, I find that that also plays into a role of helping you stay within your calorie. Do you think it has a lot to say? I do. I think that's part of it. But, you know, in the study, they don't, they're not, they're not, they're not accounting for that. Yeah. They're not working with people who are like making this rule. What they're finding is just people who eat more protein tend to not overeat and people eat less protein tend to overeat, right? And they control for lots of different factors like you could have someone who eats less protein, but also has maybe an eating disorder. So just eats low anyway, low calories and all that stuff. But they're controlling for all this stuff. And so the first thing that you said about like, I got to hit my, my protein targets, if you do that, and if you give yourself no limitations, like you're like, okay, um, you know, I can't if I want ice cream, like, so if I want ice cream, I'll eat it. But I know I supposed to get 30 grams of protein first with this meal. Yeah. So let me eat my 30 grams of protein first, then I'll eat my ice cream. You're probably going to eat less ice cream or not eat the ice cream at all. It just leads to, you know, behaviors that lead to less chances for obesity and poor health. I don't even think it's, oh, sorry, Justin. Oh yeah. Did the study like account for it being animal sources, the protein versus, um, you know, plants, or was it just like any protein in general? Any protein in general. However, plant proteins are harder to come by as high protein foods as a percentage of total calories. A lot of volume, yeah. Yeah. So like, you know, what's a good high protein? Did you see that viral, that viral tweet that someone did about broccoli comparing broccoli protein? Oh, yeah. Like you could assimilate all that in one sitting. Well, not even that. Like, you know, any pounds of broccoli you got, it's like a whole bunch. That's the part that annoys a shit. I mean, because people will be like, well, you know, legumes are high in protein. Yeah. For a plant food, but to get 30 grams, like 30 grams of protein, like you'd have to eat a ton of beans and that would come with a lot of other stuff. Right. You 30 grams of animal protein and especially if you get a lean source and it's like a small piece of like chicken breast or something like that. And if you want to make it fatty, you can. But that's the point. The point is, if you're seeking high protein plant foods, it's going to come along with a lot of stuff and a lot of volume and a lot of that stuff. Where with animal sources, it's relatively easy. And it's dense is what it is. It's just very, very dense. And then that, you know, that digestibility, like eat a 200, eat 200 grams. Like, so I'm 200 pounds, right? So if I aim for 200 grams of protein from plant sources and I don't use protein powders because you can get plant based protein powders, which makes it a lot easier. But let's say I don't, I'm like, I want to eat 200 grams of plant protein. Oh my God, you know, which volume and all the fiber and other compounds in the vegetables that are going to make me just blow. And it's going to be just a challenge. 200 grams of animal protein is hard to get, let alone plant protein. So that's really about it. But I mean, if you could do it, I guess you can. And I'm sure some people do better that way. But again, it's another study that shows that there's a strong connection between low protein and high and overeating, which supports what we already know, which is protein assasinating. It just makes you not want to eat more. Yo, here's the giveaway for today. Ready? RGB bundle, maps, metabolic, mass performance, maps, aesthetic, all three for free. Here's how you win. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we dropped this episode, subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications. If we'd like your comment, we're going to notify you in the comment section. We're not going to notify you any of the way. So we're going to notify you in the comment section that you won the RGB bundle. One more thing before we get going with this incredible podcast, uh, we got a sale going on right now, map symmetry 50% off, map strong 50% off. If you want that 50% off discount, which will end by the way when the month is over, if you want it, click on the link at the top of the description below and get yourself set up with the 50% off discount. All right, here comes the rest of the show. How'd your morning go today? You seem to extra chippery today, bro. You were all kind of like, uh, grinning and just in a good mood. I was like, what's going on? Is that a good weekend or what for what? Yeah, you know what happened today? What? It's the day I've been waiting for my whole marriage. Oh, wow. It was that good of a day. Oh, I felt I could see the globe. What does that mean? Yeah, I could see it. Oh, it's so great. I hope, you know, words she used today. I'm just, look, I'm speaking for, I think I'm speaking for a lot of husbands here. So I got a text this morning and Jessica's like, where's my hooded sweater and where's the baby's hoodie? And she said that. And I was just like, Oh, finally, I'm like, you can't find something. No, I said, I put them in the closet where they belong. Finally, you did the right thing. She's like, oh my God. And I'm like, boom, you know, big letters. And I said, I'm going to save this. I'm going to bring this. I put something away. We're a belongs. And you couldn't find it because it's always the other way. The irony of that, right? Two. She's like, looking to all the places. Yes, except for where it belongs. Exactly. Cause it's usually the other way around. I'm always trying to find something. She's like, well, it's where it belongs. That's another way. Oh yeah, that's right. You know, so finally happened. Document that. Was she good sport about it? Oh no, I wasn't. I mean, it's she's thought it was hilarious. She screens shot at it and she sent it to her family and all that stuff. No, yesterday it was not yesterday. Saturday she went to my cousin's wedding shower. So I got one of my cousins getting married. Wonderful family. Good, very good people. And she's like, you know, it's two hours away. So she's like, do you mind if I don't take the baby? I mean, she's already, she's pregnant. I'm like, of course. I'm like, leave the baby with me. I'll hang out with the kids. And you know, she's like, are you sure? Well, I'm like, yeah, I'm totally fine. I'm capable. Don't worry about it, whatever. So she left and I had a great time with the kids and we use no electronics all day. And, you know, I made sure to clean the house and put things away because I really wanted her to come back to feel like not stressed. Because I could tell she was worried that either A, she was going to come home and find a disaster or she was going to come home and be like, oh, so you guys just watched movies all day. That's nice. You know what I mean? So I'm like, no, I'm not going to do all that stuff, but it's pretty funny. It's funny too, because I sent a text to I'm going to group thread with like a bunch of cousins and friends and we're all dads, you know? And I'm like, man, you know, doing like the day to day mundane stuff with my kids. Like I wish I knew this is when I was a younger down my older kids. That's how you really build a relationship with your kids. You know, you think it's all like tedious crap. But by the end of the day, my younger, you know, my baby, he's almost two. He was just, he just was so close to me. He's hugging me. And, you know, I could tell I feel more connected. Why? Because I fed him. I changed his diapers. I gave him a bath. I was hung out with him all day. And then, of course, I send that to my buddies and one of them gets all insecure about it. Well, I do a lot of stuff. Oh, God, relax. I'm not pointing out that I wasn't insulting you. It was my own conclusion that I thought. I'm not pointing out that you don't do shit at home. Okay. You had to be careful when you say stuff like that because people get offended. You know, did you do which did you guys both do your interviews with Salemi yet or just? I know, I haven't yet. So did you guys get into father talk? That was like really cool. We did. We had a great conversation around that. And that was like one of his, you know, his fears because a lot of his buddies have told him that. He's about to become a dad. Yeah, yeah, right. He's about to become a dad and that, you know, oh, you know, I hear that you go through these phases where he'll be super connected to you and he won't be. And I said, Max is going to is over three years old now. And we've never gone through a phase of him not being absolutely connected to me. And I said, what I attribute that to it could be wrong. There's a problem. Sure, there's an exception to rule some dad that did all the same stuff as I did and he maybe went through that process. But for me, when I look at me and my two other best friends at the same time, we all went through this. I was just involved in all the little stuff. Yeah, you know, the things that you just don't really think about that. I think a lot of the way that's a testament to you because you're you were an older dad, because I feel like you figure that out when you're older. When you're younger, you just like, oh, I got to work, make money. Well, I knew I mean, that's why I wanted to wait till I got older. What's for that exact was because yeah, because I think where I'm at in my life today, where I compared like if you brought up 25, like not only was I way more selfish at 25 years old, but I was also very much so busy trying to figure out my path and much of my time would be dedicated towards that. And I would have probably leaned and I already do lean heavily on Katrina. She does do the bulk of the work, but I'm very much so involved in everything. I mean, and I make sure that she does too. Like she's really great about, you know, if it's been a few nights where maybe I haven't put him down or maybe I worked late. And so I got less time with them. She'll make sure to like, hey, you want to do Max tonight? You do the bath. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'll do that because I missed a day or whatever like that where I got home late. So and I just really think that being involved in those things of the putting down the diaper changing, the feedings, the like the more of that as a dad you're involved in, I think the more attached that he or she will be to you. And that at least that's my experience, bro. You know, that lesson I learned the hard way with my older kids. It's when I got divorced, I all of a sudden was now mom and dad, right? So it was so stressful. It was like a year period where I was so overwhelmed because now I got to do school lunches, I got to meet with the teachers, I had to get you ready in the morning, get your breakfast, make sure your clothes are clean, do all the stuff. And I didn't do any of that before and I was so overwhelmed. And then put it on Jessica because it's Jessica and I were first getting together and I'm like, I'm not about to like, oh, hey, welcome, you know. Take care of my kids. Yeah. So, I mean, she did hell, but I really took it on, right? And I was so overwhelmed, so stressed out. And then the craziest thing happened, like I started to know my kids, but I didn't know that I didn't know them before. You know what I mean? Yeah. All of a sudden I'm like, I'm talking to them. I'm like, I know them. I'm building a relationship and it was a paradigm shift. The paradigm shift was before I'm like, oh, this is all just a bunch of hard work. Now I realized, no, this is a blessing and opportunities. It's not the like, oh, we go on vacation and I play with you sometimes. It's the day-to-day stuff that we call bullshit. That's how you develop a relationship with your kids. Yeah, I'm always reminded about that. And I've been going through that a bit because I, you know, some of my efforts have been sort of split in terms of balance of like putting that into the football team and then coming home and then hanging out with them and being involved in their gymnastics and, you know, trying to keep tabs and updates of what's going on in their lives. And so I've, you know, I've, I've definitely tried to limit my time. So I do like two, maybe three times a week now where I go to practice. I don't go the full week because I'm like, I need to like go to their practices and be involved in their stuff. And, you know, I started bringing them more to the games. And so they're hanging out with me up in the box. And we're like, you know, it's been a great transition for me to, to bring in like, especially Ethan and stuff. Cause he's at that age where he's just like, I want to be with dad. I don't want to hang out. Uh, but with Everett, it's funny because at night is when he wants to just be chatty and he just like tells me everything like before bed and he was just getting into like who he has like crushes on and stuff. So I'm figuring out like who like, like what his taste is, you know, it's like interesting to see, uh, you know, what girls he's kind of into and whatnot. He showed me a picture of one and stuff. So now is he like, does he have tastes like you? Do you see? Yeah. Yeah. He's very, he's very much into bonds. I'm like, it's my boy. It's like, you got good taste, but my oldest, you know, God, he's going to listen to this and get annoyed. I'm not going to go too far. He has a girlfriend right now. Doesn't he? No, no, no. Oh, he doesn't have a girlfriend right now. Okay. But so I'm not going to get too much in it because you'll get mad, but, uh, we're talking around this topic or whatever. And I'm noticing he likes like kind of the stuff I like. Like he's into like kind of smart-ish, maybe a little weird, you know, kind of girls or whatever. It's so Jessica's like, Oh God, he's still your son. I'm like, I don't do it's just so funny, you know, like a type, huh? Yeah, just so I know. Apple doesn't fall far from the tree, huh? But he's, you know, he's going to be, he's going to be 18 next year, dude. He's going to be a man, I mean, a man, I guess, you know, yeah. I guess it's wild for me to watch because we've now been, you know, all the other for eight years almost, right? Especially if you count the time leading up to before the podcast started, right? Cause podcasts has been rolling seven coming up on seven years right now. Right, Doug? No, going on eight. Oh, we're going on eight. So it's been like eight, nine years since we all really connected. And, you know, seeing Doug's daughter too, like how much she's grown, like everybody, they were, I remember all of them. Yeah, they were all so little. Dom was little, it's like another all like high school, getting ready to graduate high school, like that's just crazy to, to think that, you know. Yeah, I know. I'm having a lot of conversations with my oldest about sex and drugs because he's going to go off to college. Now, are you, are you prompting that conversation or is he bringing it up a lot? You know, um, either. So it could be either or, right? So we'll have, and Jessica's really good about this. I still get weird about certain conversations when they talk about like sex or, especially when they ask her questions, cause Jessica's brutally honest. And I'm always like, oh, fuck, did he just ask? Like, have you ever dropped acid? You know, whatever. Like I'm like, no, don't, just don't, you don't even know anyway. But it was, there was conversations and we're having these conversations. And what I'm telling my son is I'm like, look, here's a deal. I said, you're going to be exposed to alcohol for sure, definitely marijuana, maybe other substances too. I said, um, you know, you're going to drink and you're going to smoke cannabis first with me, if that's what you're interested in, because I want you to, to know what, what the limits are because I'm not afraid of him having the occasional drink or, you know, whatever, what I'm afraid of is him going too far. Like I had, all of us had experiences of that because you test the limits when you're a kid and you go too far. And that could be freaking dangerous. So are you guys, are you still on the same page as we were last time when we kind of had that little discussion about our kids? If, if I had to choose either or they got into drinking or into smoking, which would I would prefer? And I think everybody thought I would lean towards the smoking. And I was like, no, I'd rather, if my kids are going to do something like that earlier than I'd like, right? This is assuming that they, boy, it's so hard, right? It's a hard, it's a tough one. It is a hard one. But if I, if I had to, what are the parameters that they, that they use it too much or that they just occasionally? No, no, no, that's, no, you see, that's just it. You got to, you got to roll the dice with the chances of that, right? It's just like, if I, if they got introduced to one or the other and I, and I had a, I had a choice of which one I would just, I would prefer alcohol. And most people thought, whoa, that's crazy. I think I'm with you on that. Most people didn't think that for me. But and, and actually part of the reason why is because of how I feel like how, how much we've normalized cannabis and that it's, we, a lot of the stuff that you see is, is pro, right? All the health benefits of it and it's not as bad. And oh, even though you're smoking it, it can even cancel out the cancers. Like it's net zero. And like, and so there's a lot of developmental mind, right? So, but there's, but there's a lot of push though in that direction of like, there's not as many social barriers. I guess you're right. And, and so then I think, and I kind of watched this happen with my little brother because I shared this before, I don't know if I shared on air, but with you guys, I know I have about, you know, I was right in the thick of the cannabis space, right? And, and the owning the clubs and being involved in that when my brother was your, your son's age. And I remember having this like conversation. It's like, and it was a weird conversation because I knew that I needed to, to, to, to like tell him, be careful. And like, you know, it's, uh, and, you know, but yet here I am in the middle of it. So I can't be like, you should say no to drugs. I can't be like that. Like, he's gonna be like, come on. Cause he's not gonna listen to you at all. Right, right. Of course I, so the thing that I just kept trying to explain to him was just like, you know, just be careful because I know how much it tamps down your anxiety. And I know how much it makes you feel good and relaxed. And I know all the positive things. I enjoy it too. Right. I'm not, I'm not denying any of that, but it also could creep into your life so easily that you go from using it every once in a while for anxiety to all of a sudden I'm doing it every day to then I have to be high all day long. I see what you're saying. And because you can function and do things at the same time. Now you become this super stoner and you don't even realize how unproductive you are. In fact, I have many friends that think they're more productive on cannabis than they think they are off of it. And that's just because they don't know. That's a lie. Right. It is a lie. And it's in, in, in, in the, of course, there's someone listening right now who's probably in their head trying to defend themselves right now saying like, oh, I am, you know, no, you should see what you look like hella sober. Okay. That would be my challenge. Right. So, you know, for that reason, I would be more concerned about it where alcohol, like it's very obvious when you get drunk, you know, the likelihood that you're not going to show up to work. Yeah, you're gonna show up to work after having an edible drink, you know what I'm saying? And get away with it a lot easier. See, the way that I always think of it is which one would I, which one am I more afraid of? Dangerous. Or like, like if being alcoholic or a stone or obviously alcoholic is worse. But I hear exactly what you're saying. What you're saying is with cannabis, the odds that someone's going to use it regularly are higher probably because there's not as many social pressure. Yeah, I think the consequences are more obvious with alcohol, right? Like it's just like very obvious if I drink too much, this happens as a result or like, you know, it's like you can kind of blend that line a little bit with marijuana where it's like, I don't think I'm abusing it, you know, like, and you can just repeat it. Bro, I had, so I was talking to him, and I've talked to him about this before, I said, you know, if you drink too much alcohol, it sucks and it could kill you and you'll get sick and all that stuff. I said, and I know they say that that marijuana is, you can't overdose. I said, that's true. That doesn't mean you won't have a traumatic event or feel like you're going to die. And I tried to explain to him, I said, overdosing on cannabis is one of the worst feelings you could ever experience. You have some come-to-Jesus moments for sure. Yeah, so it's like, yeah, you didn't die, but it don't mean you left, like, on stage. But your ego died. Oh, like, ah! Everything else? You could get PTSD from too much. I know, I know you can't. You should keep that clip, right, of the cop that calls him. I would totally use that clip. Like, listen, this is real, son. This cop threw himself into the bus. Yeah, imagine how scared he has to be in order for him to call the cop right now. Call 911 on himself. I'm a cop. So I have a pretty funny story. So have you guys ever got, well, OK, so whenever you find something really good, like say it's like a dog sitter, say it's like, you know, a babysitter or whatever, like a handyman or something, right? And like, your family or your friends kind of find out about it and you're like, wait a minute. You don't know if you want to share it? Yeah, because then they take him and then it's like, he's booked up and it's like, you just introduced them. So anyway, so Courtney and I are kind of talking about this because we have like a really good system now, like we got somebody that can watch our house and our dogs if like we have to leave on a trip or something. And like my parents found out about this and like they just like had a bad experience with one of theirs like, oh, can you send over, you know, her contact to us and all this? And we're just like, dude, how do we like shuffle this? Like because like I know for sure they're gonna want to take because they take a lot of random trips and we don't know and they plan things way out ahead of time. And we're just like, dude, no, I don't want to give them keys to this car. You know, like this is our person, you know? And so we're like kind of going through options and all this and like, what would kind of deter them a little because we are, I mean, the date that they got like it's like- They're cool, but they're Satanists. Yeah, that's basically what we're like. We're gonna start texting them like, yeah, you know, it may not be a good fit, like she smokes weed and like throwing them under the bus. Like her boyfriend comes over like most times we are okay with it, you know, but you might not be okay with it, you know, like trying to create all these scenarios where it's like, does it look like appealing and whatnot? And so we're just like, we're just, yeah, like Satanists like we're trying to come up with scenarios that will like scare them and deter them away. But I mean, finally we were just kind of honest with it. We were like, oh, I think, you know, like we tried that same weekend, but it's not available. How many, did you, I wonder if our clients ever did that when we were trained? Yeah, I guarantee it. I guarantee it. I guarantee it. When you got real busy. Did I tell you about, or did Cassie share with the app that she uses? So there's this, this is, there's a new app. It's really actually, she's done it now two or three times and she says, it's been an incredible experience every time she's done it. And you have a perfect area because you live in the Santa Cruz area, which is a popular travel place to go to the beach and stuff like that. Yeah. And you guys have a beautiful house. So these people, they come watch your house and dog for free. It's basically in trade for being able to stay at your location. No way. Yes. And they're dog lovers. So these, so it's- See, that makes perfect sense. It's an app that is collected. Made, people that love animals that are dog lovers. What a disrupting technology. Right. Who also want to travel and go places. And then they look up and go like, oh my God, it's Santa Cruz. And then, and there's like reviews on- How do they like verify them? There's reviews, just like reviews, there's reviews on their four-star, five-star, people leave comments, oh my God, they were amazing, they cleaned my house and they, my dog, they sent me updates of my dog playing with them every hour. Like- Well, for them, it's free- Of course. Vacation home. Imagine getting to stay at Justin's beautiful house for free and you want to go to Santa Cruz for vacation. And all I gotta do is feed your dog, walk your dog and play with them a little bit. That's such a disrupting technology. You know what that, okay- Cassie loves it. So I'm going to give away a business idea because my son came up with this idea and it's along those lines. Okay, so he says, he says to me that- It doesn't exist already. Well, I don't know if it does. I'm going to hear what you guys think. It's kind of funny. So we're sitting there washing dishes and he goes, hey, he goes, have you heard of smash rooms? I'm like, what's a smash room? He goes, you pay money and you go in these rooms and you put on safety goggles and whatever and then you just break shit. Yeah, those are different kinds of things. And he goes, what if- No, not like Jersey, Georgia. Those are a real thing, yeah, so keep going. Yeah, you go in and you get sledgehammers and you break shit. Right, right. And it's like cathartic and you love it. Yeah, yeah. What if you connect those people with like construction demo jobs? So they show up to places just to demo your kitchen but instead of paying them, you let them do it for free. They don't want to smash it. You get your shit smashed. I'm like, huh, I wonder. You know, that's not a bad idea. If there's a business there would be on the average job, how long is the demo process for most jobs? And I would actually- That's the fun part of it. Well, I'm sure most carpenters are like, yes. But you got to pay them still. Right, right. You got to still pay them to demo your shit. I mean, usually owners like that, that would be the only time they would actually do any of the work is like the demo part. Yeah, they have it on these like do-it-yourself like home shows or like, you know, put gloves on. They're like, ooh. Yeah, smash. Yeah, and it's like they don't know anything else. Yeah, but you know what though, it was funny about that. So obviously my dad worked in, he did stonework, right? So we would go in all the time and demo bathrooms and kitchens or whatever and at first it's fun. Okay, but that doesn't, it's real quick. You're just exhausted. You breaking like old cement and tile or stonework. Yeah. And it's like, as a kid, you think, oh, I'm going to slam the sledgehammer and it's going to break the whole floor. No, you slam the sledgehammer and then you break up a couple pieces. And you're like, oh shit, I'm going to be here for four hours. There's a difference between getting this old beat up car and saying, go ahead, have at it, destroy it versus someone saying, hey, I need you to beat this door until all the paint is off right here. Yeah, of course. And so then you have to like, after a while you're like, okay, I'm over this one thing, right? So yeah, interesting. Dude, I had a buddy, my dad used to obviously bring me to work and then he brought one of my cousins once and we were demoing this room and we had to break a wall. And you know, the wall, you know, obviously here in Italy walls are all concrete, but here obviously they're like sheetrock. And so my buddy's like, oh, watch this. He's like, I'm going to run through the wall. Well, he hit a stud. He hit a stud, bro. Yeah, he ran. Oh, bros, there is on the floor. No, it's the sound of breaking glass. And I'm guaranteed because all those like break rooms, smash rooms, whatever, like that's, that's what everybody gets excited about. I was at a job where it was like, I worked at a warehouse and like you'd have, every now and then you'd have defective windows. And so we would have to throw them in these like huge dumpsters. And so we made like a sport of it. And so you'd like take it and you'd like throw it and just make the best sound ever. Did like break it with rocks. Yeah, I went with my favorite. I went with my friend. So where he lived, he's got a huge property. And so basically he's, he could shoot his own guns on his property. So he would go out and you'd get like old whatever, old computers, what else would be fun. So we'd sit back and we'd shoot it with different firearms to see how far the bullet would penetrate, whatever. Have you ever tried to demo or whatever break in old TV? Oh, like the old two ones? Like the ones that weighed 5,000 pounds. And what did they make those things out of? Like bulletproof everything? Yeah. Bro, it was a, you know what went through? A 45. It's like the shape of the glass, right? It's like, it's just like spiders out. It doesn't even. Dude, like nothing went all the way through. We had to shoot that thing with a 45 to get the bullet to go all the way through. I couldn't believe how strong that was. TV is now, you breathe on them wrong and they break. Oh yeah. And then you have to move that. One of my friends had one of those and it was like, you know, it was a big piece of furniture, basically. That's what they are. Yeah. And it like had this huge tube that went like way back and we're trying to lift it. And it was the heaviest, most awkward. And it only gave you like, you know, the fingertip amount to like grab underneath it and we're like going downstairs. I remember that was the most biggest pain in the ass thing I've ever had to move. How far are we away? You think from our phones, which are already super computers. It is just shooting up with a 4K HD onto your wall. I think we're like this close, right? We have to be close to that. Where you have, everyone has your streaming apps on your phone already. So you can watch your Netflix also that it's just like, all you need is this super powered lens that would cast and shoot. Maybe like a sheet or something. Well, yeah, that's easy. Yeah. A sheet, a wall. You even have walls where you can, you paint with like a special paint. You just paint the wall and it reflects off there really nice. Probably. I'd say it's around the corner. Wouldn't you think that's the next evolution to the TVs? I mean, when the flat screen came around, you saw that coming, right? You saw like them starting to change the way the TVs were and they were thin and light like that new technology. So what's the next big leap in that space? To me, that's the. That would make sense versus the hologram. I don't know if that's ever going to take off, but I've wanted it to. Yeah. I don't know if watching a movie with hologram forms. Just like, hey, there'll be action figures. A scary movie with a real hologram frame. That'd be terrifying. That'd be cool. Yeah, man, I think so. Speaking of that, are you guys watching, are you guys watching Dahmer? Where you at? I only watched the first episode. Courtney's watching it, of course. Oh, wow. Doug, are you watching it? Murder driven. I'm not. Interesting. I will. You know, it's like the most. In the morning. I mean, here's like an obvious prediction, but I guarantee that will be the number one Halloween costume this year. For sure. Dahmer? Yes. For sure. It's like, I think it's like the number one meme right now. Dude, a lot of people don't realize. His thing is like being used as a, I've seen the one where he starts like dancing and getting all into it. Like I was like, what is this? A lot of people do not realize, because Jessica had no idea. She thought, oh Dahmer, he's the guy that killed people in Atom. I'm like, he did worse than that. Like I'm trying to explain to her. Like he was in a necrophilia. He would cut off body parts and use them and do things and just weird shit. You know our good friend, you know our good friend, Max. Max was actually the reason why I finally turned it on because I was like, ah, get around to it. He was raving about it, huh? He said one of the best shows he's ever seen in his life. He put up there with like top 10 ever greatest. I told Courtney that too, you know? Cause she's watching, and she's like kind of screens things for me. And he's like, you know, I'm like, am I missing out? She's like, you wouldn't like it. Like you wouldn't like it. Just a whole lot of, well, I mean, obviously, like every episode is basically about him kind of like struggling with the fact that like he's into dudes. Like, you know, trying to reconcile whatever. But either than that, like it's just all murder in game. It's, you know, okay. If someone were to pitch it to me, I would probably say, yeah, it's not really my thing or whatever, I'll get around to it. I wouldn't be that excited. And what I found, and this is, I think to like Max's point, the acting, the music, the cinematography, like it's just very well done. It's accurate. Yeah, it's very accurate. It pulls you in. Like even something like that, which is not my vibe to, I mean, you guys know me, I don't even like scary movies, right? So like this, you know, creepy, and it doesn't get scary. Are you losing sleep? What's going on? I did. So first time ever, this has never happened when I watched a show before where I was getting nightmares every time that we watched it. And I told Katrina, in your nightmare, were you getting lured into some new house? Bro, it was weird stuff. It was, they were way too weird. It was weird, creepy dreams. Like, so I told her, I'm like, we can't, I can't watch that. That can be the last thing I watch before I go to bed, but it has, it keeps pulling me in where I'm like, I'm fascinated by it. And they did a really good job. So you want to know what sucks about all this? Is, so I was having a conversation with Vicky and she's just, she was like, what makes like, like what's the deal with serial killers? Like, why do they, because obviously Dahmer was crazy, did terrible things, a lot of stuff. She's like, what makes serial killers do that? And so we have decent data on this. And part of it is severe trauma as a child, in combination with the right genetic mix, either from genetics or epigenetics due to environmental factors like maybe mom did drugs when she was pregnant or something like that, right? But we don't quite know, but here's what we do know. And this is a fact, and this is the thing that's, that's crazy. We know for a fact that when serial killers or mass shooters or anybody who's like super crazy, when we glorify them and create, and turn them into these celebrities, you get more of them. Yeah, more of those mimics. So that was my, that's my fear about it being like the number one show in the country right now. Already happening. Totally. Okay, I'm going to pull this up. You know, so Geo just now, let me see, did he send it to me? He didn't send it to me. Did he send it to you? It's in the group chat. Let me look it up, because I don't think it's pulling up. Why, did you ask him to send you something? I don't, oh, is that Stockton? Okay, there's a serial killer on Stockton right now that they're looking for. Oh, good, great. Right now. Was it already killed five people or something like that? Like just recently killed five people. I'm going to Sacramento this weekend. Yeah, right now. Yeah, Stockton's far from Sacramento. Is it? I think so. But I think it's within the radius of where serial killers stand. No, so here's, and this is a fact, we know this. People who are on the border, okay, who are crazy and on the border, when they see a glorified mass shooter, oh, kid shoots up a school, here's their picture, here's their name. This guy, Dahmer, there's a whole series about him. People can dress up like him for Halloween. Everybody's talking about him. He'll be the number one costume, guaranteed. You're going to create more of them. Do you know those countries that make it illegal to broadcast a serial killer or mass shooter's name? You know what's funny about that, Sal, that you bring that up, that I remember when I found this out years ago and I was fascinated by this. And it's, we do that with bank robbing. Yeah. Why wouldn't we do it? Right. We're worried about our money. We're worried about someone stealing our money, our accounts. What's the statistics on that? Because so many percent bank robbers get unreported. Yeah, they're like 50, 50. And they don't glorify them on purpose because they don't want people to go rob banks. They don't want people to know that it's possible. They do not want them to know that it's actually pretty, I mean, it's 50% chance you get away with it. Those are pretty good, those are pretty good chances to go in and rob banks. Theoristic theorist in me is like, why are they allowing this? I don't know, but it's, to me, it's literally, this is what happens. Okay, serial killers haven't been a thing for decades. 60s, 70s, 80s, early 90s, it was like serial killer time because they happened, they got glorified. By the way, they would save news articles with their name in them. Some of them would write letters to the police to try to get them to chase them. Zodiac killer. Well, part of the formula is narcissism, right? It is. Yeah. So all of a sudden now, Donner's- It's a lack of empathy. Yeah, Donner's like a celebrity. So you got some kid or some psycho who's on the borderline and he's like, I'm gonna go out with a bang, you know what I'm saying? So this is just, that's what makes me sad about this a little bit. Well, it's interesting to me, a lot of the serial killers like back in the day, like how they're now attributing some of those of, you know, the MKUltra experiments, like some of it tying back to that initially. Yeah, there's quite a few of them that they can like attribute. And they think that like Manson even was one of those that started out- Manson used psychedelics as part of how we brainwashed. He had middle-class kids. Right. Young teenage boys, right? Is that what he did? No, he got a group of people. Some of them were girls. And- I thought he was middle-class boys that were like teenagers. No, I thought that's what it was. And I thought he got them all high on psychedelics and convinced them to go do his dirty work. No? Well, yeah, but there was, I think there was a girl or two. Oh, I don't know too. And he- I thought he was like very specific. Like I thought it was like teenage boys that come from like middle-class. No, it was like well-to-do normal kids and through, he would like brainwash them and use psychedelics and stuff like that and got them to do some of the most heinous shit ever. It's really crazy. Yeah, so publicizing these things and stuff. Anyway, the question Vicki asked me, she goes, how come they're always men? Why are serial killers always men? And that's a good question. You know, the theory around that is that- Supposedly, maybe we just never find the women. They're smarter? Maybe. No, no. First off, female serial killers exist, but they're rare. They exist. That's my whole monster movie, right? That was about that. It's because nature rolls the dice with men more often. We're expendable. So when you look at a chart, if you looked at a chart of insanity on one side, violence and insanity over here, and then like extreme productivity and innovation on the other. So two extremes. A higher percentage of men make up the ends and a lower percentage of make up the middle where you see more women in the middle. And that's because the theory is, evolutionarily speaking, men can, nature could roll the dice with men because you need women. You don't need a ton of men. One man can get so many women pregnant. One woman can only get pregnant once a year or once every nine months or so. So it's like, they roll the dice. So we're more likely to have that combination of genes that makes this crazy. I mean, that's a pretty deep way to look at it. A simpler way to look at it is that the likelihood that you would have a woman, the woman would have to be like in the top 1% strength-wise to make sure she could handle all of her people she's trying to kill where the average man, strength-wise, could hold down. Oh, no. No, there's serial killers that kill people with poison. I know, but of course there's other ways to do it, but I mean, at least from the way they're depicted, there's almost always one with a struggle physically in order to... Oh, no, believe me, if there's a small guy, there's been guys that are not that big. I bet, I mean, really it's, well, that's the main theory. The main theory is that that, because if you look at like insanity, like insanity is much higher in men. But so is high productivity, single-minded innovation type stuff, which by the way, that is also correlated with a little bit of craziness. You ever meet like a super creative, super innovative person? They're always a little weird. So it's just the role of the dice. And so you're more likely to get, you know, both ends of the spectrum. That's the theory at least, and it sounds kind of... Yeah, watching the show, it looks like he's like the perfect storm of all the things you need. Like he has, like he genetically, it seems like he's a little predisposed to some of that stuff for like he, it runs in the family a little bit. He has major trauma that has happened. Like he also went through puberty at the time that a lot of this stuff was going on. So he's connected some of that. So he seems like he was like the perfect storm for somebody who would turn into this. So the last one was Ted Bundy, right? They did a series on that. So it seems like it's just like a cycle. And then they're gonna go to the next serial killer to, since it goes so well, right? Wasn't the killer in, what's that? Silence of the Lambs? He was based off Dahmer, right? I believe so. Oh, he was? Or parts of them, right? Because remember he ate his victims. Well, the cannibalism part? Yeah. I mean, I've seen Silence of the Lambs and I've seen Dahmer, right? They don't seem anything alike. Oh, I thought maybe he inspired that a little bit. Maybe there's the cannibalism part of it or something like that, but even that, I mean, the way they're depicting it in the show is different. I don't mean I don't want to... Which by the way, like still one of the more disturbing movies I've ever seen when I was a kid. Remember the first time you watched Silence of the Lambs? Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's just a Dahmer thing that will disturb you on this. Well, because it's real. Whole, yeah, on a whole another level. Like it's, and they did a good job, man. I mean, they did that. It's not a show I thought I would watch and it's, I mean, look, it's like number one right now. I think, look it up, Doug, what it's doing. I think it's breaking records right now. It is. Yeah, it's doing all kinds. I saw an article on it. You did you? Yeah. All right, so let's switch gears a little bit. I was listening to a conversation about, so I've kind of been keeping track, like you, Adam, keeping track of like, what some of the experts are saying, people I trust at least about the economy and markets and what's happening. And I mean, I don't think anybody argue this now, but all signs are pointing to big recession, kind of looming. And I heard a great conversation. It was Chamath on all-in podcast, which I love his input. Dude's super smart. And he said, yeah, one of the first things that companies do when, because right now Apple is, I think either freezing, hiring, or laying people off. I think Google said something like, if you can't come to the office, then you can't work for us, which automatically got rid of a bunch of people. Or no, it was Meta. Tessa did that first, right? Yeah, so, and that's kind of like a easy way of laying people off is giving them an ultimatum type of deal. You know, this is the first time in history since Facebook has been around, they will not grow employees. I mean, these are the big monster companies, Google, Apple, Meta, like these are like, and they're like, if they aren't doing, if they're starting not hiring. So anyway, he said one of the first things companies do is they cut advertising and marketing. And I was thinking about that. And this is why I told you this morning, Adam, so I love your input on this. It made me think like, because companies still need to market. No matter what, if you're a company, you have to market, okay? But they're gonna cut marketing. So my thought was what they're probably gonna do is try to be much more strategic with marketing. And I feel like this could be a potential opportunity for content producers, because if you're like a social media, you know, quote unquote influencer or you have a podcast or whatever, you may not have the reach by yourself, like you will with broad, you know, broad-based advertising, but your conversion's always so much higher because of your influence over your audience. So I feel like- So they'll lean heavy on the conversion side of it over like the brand place. Yeah, so instead they may be like, we're gonna cut marketing, but we're gonna be much more strategic about it. He was very optimistic in the podcasting space. And for us, and I was a little more, pessimistic about it. So I don't disagree with you, although I don't think it's gonna be a good thing for us. And the reason why is because one of the harder things about advertising on things like radio, television and podcasting is to be able to measure the ROI. You have to kind of estimate. And there's a lot of things out there that say like Edison did a report years ago about the behaviors around podcast consumers that nearly half of them don't even use the URL that we drive through. So you can't even track. Right, so you can't even track for sure. So I use that a lot of times when negotiating contracts with partners, I just tell them straight up, like, hey, listen, everybody who wants to do advertising, they're looking for two, two and a half times ROI. And it's like, okay, well, if you're looking for two and a half times ROI, and I'm telling you that 50% of the people don't even use the URL, like you're really getting like four or five X. That's unrealistic. So I've had that conversation of times with partners that they go, okay, I get it, I understand. So basically it's like, as long as we break even, then I'm okay. I think that because there is that gray area in radio, television and podcasting, it's going to make those areas, because I still have to deal with this. Even people that I've had that conversation with, they're still like, oh, we're barely breaking even, you know, like you think we could do this or you think we that, or maybe we'll slow down advertising. So I'm always having to have that conversation. I think they're gonna see more and more of that. And the reason why is because you can go to Google, you can go to Facebook, you can do ads where it's very cut and dry. If you have a good campaign set up on Facebook or say Google ads, you can literally get it in, especially big companies that are sophisticated like this that have good CRMs can go, okay, I'm gonna put $10,000 into our advertising on Google or Facebook, and it will return me $12,500. It's a direct- Because the analytics are so specific. Yeah, very, very specific. There's no, there is no gray or there's no, like I have my, my person may or may not use. Now, do you think as companies become more educated because there's still value in advertising with a content producer over something like Google or Facebook? So I, so that part of, I totally agree with you. So as they become more educated, as the market and the economy goes down and they're looking at their mark, they're looking like, hey, we still need to market. We just don't want to spend as much. I just don't think we're there yet. So I agree with you. Do you think it's gonna accelerate that because of the pain that they're gonna feel? Cause, cause they're gonna feel pain cause they're gonna be like, we need to market. And yes, we're getting this return from Google, but it's only giving us so much. That's a possibility, right? That this may be this next year to two years when we go through this time, it may be a rude awakening for a lot of companies or they might find out the hard way, right? They might, let's say one of our partners that's been with us for a long time and has been okay with the ROI up until now. But now they have to cut costs or they're like, you know, sorry, love you, mind pump guys, but we just can't afford to keep doing this. They cut us and then six months to a year later, they've been on this decline and they cannot figure out why their money's not there. And you're right. So they might, and they might find out the hard way, like, oh wow, maybe we were getting more revenue from them than we thought because we can't technically track it to that level. Cause the future is democratized media, not old media. And I agree with that also, right? So I agree that the future is content creators. Like if you have a company in the future, you're going to have to be connected to creating content. Well, otherwise you're not going to convert. Well, I just think the opposite will happen. It won't be that. It'll be, if you start a new company, you will immediately look to attach yourself to- Or do it yourself, which is unlikely. Yeah, yeah, cause we see companies try and do that. Cause I mean, look at, look at, here's your evidence. You have people like Kim Kardashian entering into a market like makeup and crushing the old companies that've been around forever. Just murdering them. Yeah, Mr. B starts a chocolate bar, starts a burger joint also. He's the number one chocolate bar, number one burger joint in like over four nights. So I feel like, I feel like what's going to have, what may happen is it, and this is what happens. What's his name said this on that show? And I love it when he says, he says, wealth is created in downturn economies and then it's realized in the upturn. In other words, when shit goes down, that's when the, like the, these innovative new ways of doing business are created just cause the pressure. And then when the upturn comes, that's when they collect. Yeah, that makes sense. That's when they collect. This may push, in my opinion, this is how I'm speculating here, it may push what's falling. You know what I mean? It may make it happen faster where these companies are like, we're not going to market the old way cause we don't got the money. We need to be like specific. I mean, we're on the same page with that. I agree with that. You just don't know if it's the right time. But I'm not as optimistic that I think that, like it's not going to be that quick of a turn. It's like, unfortunately. We may have to feel a bunch of pain. Yes, humans tend to have to feel a lot of pain before they wake up and go like, oh, shit, this is the way. Or, and then also, you're also assuming that they have the back end to really be sophisticated enough to know, like, oh, this is what's going on. I mean, I think there's going to be a lot of people that feel pain and don't realize it and are like trying to guess. Well, so, which brings us to another part of this, which is, and this was another thing that they said that startups, this is a good opportunity for startups because when everything was booming and you were a startup and you wanted a higher talent, they came and demanded high salaries, all these perks, because Google's hiring, Meta's hiring, Apple's hiring, all these other companies. But now, nobody's hiring, so now you may be able to scoop up talent. And so we may see small companies pop up and small companies love podcasts. So that was the point I was going to bring up. Craft designers would be humbled. Yeah, right? Totally. They're big ass heads. That was the point I was going to make up when you sent over that graph that like showed how bad the money. The investments? Yeah, the investments, as I say, I have opinions on that. I think there's some positives to that, is that you're going to be able to get better talent right now. You're not going to see these crazy inflated numbers. And if you're, let's say, one of the startups that we invested in the last two, three years, because at first it's kind of like, oh great, what are the likelihood these guys are going to make it through this? Well, the truth is, if they do weather this storm and they do make it through the next year to two years of this downturn that we're going to have, then they're going to be a very resilient company. And then when they catch the wave on the way back up, they're going to be ahead of a lot of people. So there are some, I think, some positive sides to these startups or the angel investing we've done. I think that if you make it through now, it shows that you have a pretty robust, or run a tight ship as far as your business. And so it could be positive. Speaking of partners and stuff, so I was thinking about public goods. This company we work with, for people who don't know, who they deliver home goods and products to your door, very environmentally conscious. So the packaging is good, low waste, and they don't put any chemicals known to be, hormone disruptors or whatever in the product. So it's really conscious company, but I thought about them because one of the things that annoys the crap out of me is I hate being lectured to by celebrities on shit that you know that they're massive hypocrites on. Like Leonardo DiCaprio, oh, the environment and the climate, whatever, he's got yachts and the guy's spewing more pollution than the next 5,000 people combined. And there he is, you know. It's always the sky is falling information without like any actionables behind it. It's just annoying to me. And then I'm thinking like, you know, the truth is if we really want to make an impact, the best thing you could do is not grand gestures. It's just like fitness, right? What's the best thing you could do for your health? It's not the grand gesture, it doesn't last. What you do are the small things that you can inject into your life. So what you can do is, look, you already used soap, you already used shampoo, you already used all these household products, you have dog food, you have all these, all you switch to a company, you're not gonna spend more money, if anything, you'll save money, but you're gonna get products that are more environmentally friendly. And if everybody did something like that, which isn't a big ask, right, it's not a big change. I'm not telling you to get rid of your car, ride a horse or some crazy whatever, or not drive anymore. All I'm saying is you already use these products, you switch to a company like Public Goods where you're probably gonna save money anyway, that's the best way in my opinion. And these celebrities making these big, like, oh, yeah. You buy the bottles and you just buy the refillable packages that like- Biodegradable. Biodegradable, it's less waste, you know, like it's an actionable thing you can do. I mean, between that, and I'm always like, plant trees, and like everybody thinks that's ridiculous, but you look at the numbers, statistics or what that does in terms of like lowering the emissions and carbon in the atmosphere, it's pretty substantial. Yeah, and they plant trees for every, I forgot how many dollars. Exactly, they actually, yeah. So they're all backed behind that. Well, they're a perfect example of what you were just explaining about what's happening with, you know, companies and content. I mean, a company like Windex is gonna eventually die. Yeah. I mean, that brand is so strong because we know it just because it's been popular in commercials since we are kids and stuff like that. But when you can go and shop at a company like this where you know what they're doing and you can get behind it and you can get it in the hands of people like us that have a network that you're influencing. And obviously we're not the only company that Public Goods works with. There's a bunch of other small companies that they work with. And so now you could literally take a company that would have no chance at competing with, you know, all these house products that we all have seen in our house forever. But this is to the point of what the guys on all in were saying, like, we're only like a decade away from like a lot of those big monopolies completely dying and the consumer is getting wiser about how they make their purchase. The people that are loyal to those brands, that generation that listens to radio and watches broadcast television, like the younger generation doesn't do that. They just don't. My kids don't understand old brands. They know brands that they hear from their YouTube, you know, content creators or Instagram or podcasts. So it's 100% right. And the thing is conveying a message that requires people to change their habits. You're more effective when you have an audience that really values what you have to say versus, you know, broadcast TV. Like, that's like, you know, nuking something and hoping that you hit the right people or whatever. It's like, this is like precision, you know? And I just compared nukes to advertising. Sometimes my analogies don't hit. Whoa. Yeah. Speaking of partners again, you know, so I was at home last night watching TV and I had real rough night of sleep the night before. So I'm looking for my Felix Gray blue blockers. Couldn't find them. So I found this old pair. This is before we ever worked with Felix Gray of these other blue light blocking glasses, but they're the orange ones. And I put them on and I'm watching TV and I'm like, this, you know, that's got it. Watching TV with orange lenses is not a good combo. That's gotta be the biggest barrier between people wearing blue, you know, not wearing blue light blocking glasses. They, on their electronics, they don't want everything to be orange. Yeah. That's gotta be the biggest hurdle. So, you know, the Felix Gray ones are clear. For people who don't know, they still block blue light, but you can see everything looks the same. Did we bring up on their last time we had their commercial? Did we talk about, you know, that they moved into contact lenses? Did we talk about that? Blue light block. We didn't contact? Oh, yeah. We didn't talk about it. No, we didn't. We didn't talk about it, huh? No. Yeah, do you guys know that? They have blue light blocking contact. Are they blue light blocking? Or are they just contacts? Look, look them up. Look, Felix Gray gets into contact lenses. I would assume that. I would assume, yeah, that would be their angle would be having blue light. Yeah, why would you do, why would you do contact lenses that are not blue light blocking, right? Wouldn't that be kind of counterproductive for the company? That's wild. That'd be kind of cool. Yeah, super cool. Yeah. Especially if you work on a computer all day. They're quietly making moves, dude. They really are. I mean, they, they, since the very, I mean, since the very beginning, I've always been interested in the company and who they've partnered up with. They went the slow route. I know they're on the higher end and stuff like that. So it's, it's a little bit slower to adopt because, you know, right now the message around blue light blocking, everybody is jumping on the bandwagon. But then what everybody does goes right to Amazon and looks up like the cheapest pair of blue light lock. And they, they, they're not that company. Again, you know, to the point when I made on the forum the other day, it's like, you know, when we started this business, they're not all the same, by the way. They're all created the same. No, they're not. Absolutely not. Just like everything isn't. It's just like the Viori athleisure wear that we wear is not created the same. It's just, I mean, one of the things that we all agree on, which I love that we were on the same page is that if we are going to do, this is before sponsors and partnership. If we're going to do that, we're going to go up to the best, not the cheapest, the fastest, the most convenient. It's what we think is the best in a space or an area that we're interested in. And Felix, great to me was 100% that when we were first looking at the blue light lock. So I'm not sure if they're actually blue light blocking lenses, but they're designed to reduce eye strain. So if you're working on the computer a lot. It's got to block some blue light them. What's it saying? It says superior structure meets long lasting moisture. Is that what it says? Yeah. So they're more comfortable fit. With the breathability and so on with the lens. They have this optical center point, which eases eye strain. Okay, so it's not like. Water rich lens material. So basically a better hydration for the eye. So it's really designed for people who are in front of the screen a lot to have less eye strain. I wonder if he just saw an opportunity there in the space that somebody wasn't providing a better contact lens. Of course. That's really interesting. Who's contacts in here? Does somebody use contacts in here? I use contacts at night. I use a lens that actually reforms my eye at night. And then in the morning I take them out and my vision is good. What? Yeah. It's called ortho keratology. I've been doing it for like 15 years. Wow. That's really cool. He really has brown eyes too. Those are fake blue eyes. Yeah, you know. You remember when that was a thing? When it was thing like girls would put different colors. Purple. Katrina did, I think purple. Did she really? Yeah, I think she did purple or something with that. Or no, I think she told me like blue is what she did. Yeah, you remember when that was popular for girls? Yeah, there was a point when like, right when the colored eyelids. It's real deceptive, yeah. Like, yeah, you think like they're like bright green eyes. You're like, whoa, it's like striking. Yeah. Like super exotic. I mean, it's all part of the, everything. I mean, I get it, right? They're already wearing like bright lipstick. Yeah. Dude, do you have paint to your face? Dang, you got me again, you know? Wow. I wonder in the future if we're gonna have like CGI faces, you know what I mean? Or something, it's gonna broadcast. Oh, did you see that article? Somebody sent that over to me. Oh, I gotta find that. Dude, Doug could look it up for us. Remember what I said about the future of acting was gonna happen, you know what I mean? Oh, Bruce Willis. Bruce Willis. Did you guys see that? He sold his likeness for future CGI. We knew that was gonna happen. Yes. That's, I mean, how wild is that gonna be, dude? How much did he make? I don't know. Isn't that cool? That's the start. I mean, I'm sure there's gonna be Tom Cruise and every other A-list actor. Dude, what? I mean, he's writing contracts for it right now. I feel like I would take the less money, have my likeness and use my CGI and I don't have to do no acting. Like, that's awesome. I mean, you're seeing it almost everywhere now, like they're bringing back old characters and movies and TV shows. It's gonna be weird. Okay, think about it. Try and figure this part out, okay? Think about the market. How much does it disrupt that? Because now you could literally do 10 movies in a year. So now someone like Bruce Willis would be willing to maybe give out his CGI likeness to 10 different potential movies because he can do 10 in a year where realistically what an actor could maybe do one or two a year. Now, how far away are we from actors not being people anyway? And it's all create, like movie studios are gonna create an actor. That's what I'm saying. No, not have to buy. Oh, well, there's, no, see, I don't think that's gonna happen because we- You don't think that'll ever happen? No, we still as humans, I mean, you've talked about this before, like how, like why we're into like the king and queen and royalty in the United States, it's celebrities. Yeah, but think about it this way. Imagine if, okay, CGI is so good that it looks real. So what you're watching on TV, you can't tell it's not an actor. You think that's a real person. Yeah, that's fair. And a movie studio creates a CGI character for a movie and it's so realistic and so good that you love that character or that actor, that CGI. And now that same person can be put in different movies by the movie studio. Yeah, I don't think I don't see that. Have you seen those like AI generated scripts? Yeah. You know, like paintings. Yeah, they were all terrible and stuff. Oh my God, they're so awful, but they're like hilarious at the same time because it's like, dude, the punky, but like imagine once they start figuring it out, like what that is. I think the more likely scenario is that it's gonna be extremely competitive market. And I mean, now you're gonna see YouTube stars sell their likeness. You'll see Instagram famous people sell it. Like movies will start going after characters that are famous online, whether it be through social media or any of these media platforms and potentially movie actors. And then they will be able to sell their likeness. That to me will be, because what? That'll happen first, yeah. What I said is gonna be a while out, which I think could potentially happen. But I just thought of something. Are they going to, in that case, are they going to create regulations that make it illegal or copyright infringement to use the likeness of someone else with like deep fakes? Cause you know, deep fakes are all over the internet. Sure, you should be able to sue somebody over your likeness, right? Yeah, like they do this all, okay, they do this to actresses all the time. Well, they'll take their face and put it on a naked body with nude photos or whatever, right? And it's really annoying to people or whatever. Like, does this mean, are we gonna create a new, because of this, potentially create a new regulatory system where you're not allowed to make a deep fake because that person's likeness is owned by them, which I like. I like that too. I mean, someone's gonna make a deep fake about you. I should be able to sue this shit out of them if we find out who did it, right? Especially if they're doing it to defame you or anything like that. So I absolutely think that. Now, at what point do you see them doing this with political leaders? We're like, you're the president and then they just use a CGI of you to give the best speech of all time. Who says they're gonna do that now? Or two. Think about it, you guys. All of a sudden it was like, wow, Biden, he sounds sharp all of a sudden. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I was gonna put him, excuse me. Wow, he's done a lot of stumbling on any words. This is a lot of stuff that made sense. Bro, you hear him, do you hear them trying to defend him when he was asking for the senator that passed away like a year ago or whatever? It was a senator, right? Jackie, are you here? Where's Jackie? I didn't think she was gonna be here. How do you need to defend him on anything anymore? He's out there. That's dementia. He's in there, man. It makes me sad. It's a problem. It is sad. It's elder abuse, dude. At this point, the dude is our president. I want all the positive things to happen. I mean, he's running our country with no choice at this point. Can we not get an assessment? Some kind of mental faculties checked. You know why? Is he fit for the job? First of all, the Democrats don't want that. Of course not. Then that makes them look bad. And the Republicans don't want that either because who takes his place? Kamala. Right. She's a winner. Yeah, they don't want her either. So they're like, uh-uh. And then if Kamala doesn't take it, who's after that? Was it Pelosi? So everybody's like, leave him in the car. It only gets worse from here. Leave him in the chair. Leave the guy. Ride this out. I think you're right. I think it's bipartisan of this. But I think both Republicans are like, let's keep them in there. You know what the strategy is? To keep yourself propped up. If you were the president, one of the strategies to keep yourself from getting attacked or whatever is to make sure that the VP is so crazy and scary that nobody wants to kill you. Yeah, dude. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I suppose. Make sure your running mate is way worse than you. They'll never kill me. Because you know, so it's supposed to take over. We're good. That's great. Hey, check this out. 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And then use the code mind pump for 15% off. All right, here comes the rest of the show. Our first caller is Cesar from Florida. Cesar, what's happening, man? How can we help you? Hey guys, how's it going? Good, good, man. I just wanted to quickly say, I'm a brand new listener. I've only been listening for like about almost two months now. Oh, wow. And yeah, I just want to thank you guys because for like the past two months, I've just been listening. You guys are the only products that I'm listening to now. And you guys have fundamentally changed the way I think and the way I view fitness and health. So I just want to thank you guys for that. Awesome. Hell yeah. So a little bit of background. I'm 21 years old right now. I'm 5'11", sitting at about 2, 13, 2, 14 pounds. And my fitness journey just started maybe about a year and a half ago. I fell into the category of like skinny fat, not like too big, but not like scrying, you know? Prior to that, I never really worked out as much. It was usually like high school, PE, physical education, stuff like that. But I was normally more insecure about how I looked and how I felt. So thank God, my best friend, shout out our money. I'll send him this podcast so he can start listening to you guys too. He actually was the one who got me into the gym. And I think around that time in my life, I was lacking a consistency of anything. So the gym became more of a help through mental health for me. And that bled into having a better understanding about physical fitness and health. So I started growing a little bit more muscle, losing a little bit fat. But the number on the scale wasn't going down. But then I realized that if I just felt good and my friends around me were telling me, hey, look, you're sure to feeling you are feeling out. You're looking a little bit better. I was feeling good as well. So the number on the scale didn't really matter at that point, you know? So I just working out, we fell into the category of powerlifting. So bench press, heavy squats, overhead presses, and stuff like that. And I built a lot of strength. I hit was hitting PRs. And I felt really good. Over some time, me and my boy came to a conclusion where we kind of want to start a cut. And me being a newbie, I was like, what's that? So we were looking up some information. And young guys in our 20s, all we have to look up to is influencers online, which kind of sucks because they're usually either trying to sell you a product or they're trying to get a pro card themselves. And they're trying to, you know, it's a different mentality other than like, honestly, we're just trying to look and feel good, you know? So we found this super strict cut, which was like, keep in mind, my calories weren't like, I wasn't tracking anything. I didn't know what that was at all. So this introduced me to counting calories, hitting macros and stuff like that. So we did this in cut, which was about 1,300 to 1,500 calories a day. And I was feeling very depleted. I was always super tired. The volume in the gym was like going down. I wasn't hitting PRs anymore. Actually, the weight going down. But like, fat was shredding off my body, like, insanely. I was around 225 to 30 pounds. And I went all the way down to like 190. And I found out that I had abs. Muscle definition was coming out more. And my even friends around me were like telling me, bro, like, you look good, this and this and that. But I was feeling like, shit. It was really bad. But that's when I realized that body dysmorphia was a real thing. And I would look in the mirror and I would just feel scrawny. So we did that cut for like about two months. That was the lowest I got, so around 190. But then I started introducing more calories. I was feeling a little bit better. But I was still losing weight, which is kind of weird, because I wasn't trying to lose weight anymore. I wanted to gain muscle, like build muscle mass. So after that, I did a bulk. I started looking up information. I did a bulk for like about three, three, four months. And I didn't know how. Basically, what it said was intake more calories and work out harder. So I did that for like about three, four months. I went all the way back up in weight to like around 212, 212, 213. And then I continued doing that. I reached back up to like around 215. And I gained a lot of muscle mass. I was hitting new PRs than the ones I did before. I was feeling a lot better. And I got to a size where I felt comfortable with doing another cut. So with my knowledge of cutting before, which kind of created a bad habit with food, it was the only cut I ever did before. So I tried to do that cut again. And my body was not responding to it at all. I started it last month. I did it for like about, I'm trying to do it for like about two weeks. And I was feeling, I was feeling bad. It was, again, I was feeling very tired. I wouldn't want to get up to go to work in the morning. I would come home from work and I would just like fall asleep for like two, three hours, wake up and feel like crap at the gym. And, but yeah, so like my question to you guys is like, what's the best way to work out? Should I change my workout? Should I change my diet? What would be the best way to do that if I just want to get lean and feel good? Yeah, good question. First off, Cesar, you're 21 years old, right? Yes, sir, yeah. Yeah, so I want to commend you tremendous awareness, self-awareness at your age and how new you are to working out. The things that you're talking about and the way you're talking about how you feel, you mentioned body dysmorphia. That level of awareness through fitness takes people typically a lot longer and especially men. It takes young men a lot longer to get to the point that you're at now. So you are kicking ass. You're really at a good place with your self-awareness and I think you're gonna get where you want to pretty quickly here. There's just a few things that are missing and one of them is just the right information, okay? You just need the right information. You're one of those few people where if I give them the right information, I think that's usually enough to get that person to where they want to go. So here's where you went wrong before. Where you went wrong before is you cut calories too aggressively. Now, any cut is gonna reduce some energy and any cut, you're gonna notice a performance drop in the gym, okay? So it's just normal, right? If you have more calories, you got more energy. If you have less calories, you have less energy. But your cut sounds way too aggressive. 13 to 15 are calories. I don't know where you were at before that. I'm based off what you're saying. It sounds to me like you went down 1,000 or more calories based off where you were before. So basically what you wanna do, Caesar, is if you wanna bulk or you wanna cut, you gotta figure out where you're at first before you do that, okay? So let's say you're eating on average 2,700 calories a day and you're like, hey, I wanna start to drop some body fat. I wouldn't go from 2,700 to 1,500 calories. I'd go from 2,700 to 2,000 calories because it's less aggressive. You're gonna get less of those negative side effects. You're more likely to feel motivated, more likely to feel good and you hit the nail on the head like, okay, great, you're losing weight but you feel like garbage and you're dreading it and you just don't wanna do it anymore. And then one of the things you touched on is that it became less effective the second time around. And this can happen when your cuts are too aggressive and you do them for too long. The body actually starts to become better at storing body fat and it starts to become better at holding on to it in a calorie deficit. In fact, in extreme cases, you'll see high-level competitors, bodybuilders, physique competitors, bikini competitors and they'll talk about burnout and they'll be like, oh my God, my body doesn't respond anymore. I have to do more and more just to get down to the same body fat. So you just went too aggressive. You gotta first track where you're at and then from there, go slower because you wanna feel good while you do this. Otherwise, for most people, it's not worth it. Like, okay, great, people are saying you look good, you got abs, but you feel like garbage. Like, you already came to that conclusion, right? It's just not worth it. Same thing with the bulk. You might have gone too aggressive with the bulk and you kinda said basically eat a lot more and work harder. I mean, yeah, but it's way more complex than that. Really, a bulk is increase your calories, maybe 500 above where you were and then your workouts, no matter what your strength training should always be aimed at building muscle, whether you're trying to cut or trying to build. Now, why is that the case? Because if you're training in a way to build muscle, you're gonna minimize muscle loss when you cut and then when you're training to build muscle, you're gonna maximize muscle gain when you're trying to gain. So those are the things that I would have you focus on and I think if you, based off the awareness, the way that you're expressing yourself, I think knowing that, I think you're gonna get there pretty quick. To be even more specific to what Sal sings, 100% agree with all the advice he just gave, I would get off the diet completely and eat when you're hungry, make good choices, track for one week. So download your favorite tracking app, whether that's Fat Secret or MyFitnessPal or whatever else is out there. And the goal for that week is to eat when you're hungry, but make good choices and then just track what do you consume on average. So then you get the total for the entire week divided by seven days. And then we find out that, oh, it looks like right around 2,700 calories is where you feel satisfied. You're not really putting on a bunch of weight. You're not going down the opposite direction. You feel good energy-wise. There's homeostasis, okay? There's your caloric maintenance. From there, depending on what you wanna do, like Sal said, if your goal is to bulk, add 500 calories to the diet. If your goal is to cut, reduce 500 calories from the diet. And you can do that in two different ways. You can do that either one, through creating more activity, or by reducing calories, or a little mix of both. Maybe I reduced 250 calories, but then now I go for a hour walk every single day that I didn't do before. That would also create that deficit. And then the last piece that he didn't really touch a lot on that I would add in there because I don't know if your programming looks the same as what it has for the last year or so. So if you're kind of still following that bench squat, which by the way is an incredible place to start. And I think a solid was solid for you to do what you did, which is getting strong and lifting on the big five, right? But if it looks just like that, and it has looked just like that for a long time, you might also benefit from changing up your programming and give your body a new stimulus. And so that can look at by manipulating rep ranges, rest periods, exercises. I think based off of what I'm hearing from you, I'd love to give you maps aesthetic or performance. Either one of those I think would be a good new novel stimulus from what you sound like you've been training. The combination of a new training program, following a diet protocol like that, I think you're gonna feel great. Yeah, I 100% agree. Cesar, I think performance would probably be better to start with for now. Maps performance. So if you're not familiar with that, it's a movement focused, kind of athleticism focused strength training workout. So the goal is still to build muscle, but it's gonna train your body in different planes of motion, which is probably different than what you've been doing. So it's gonna help develop a more balanced body. And then from there, you can go back to what you were doing before or one of our other programs. Or aesthetic. Or aesthetic, yeah. Yeah, go performance and aesthetic. I mean, literally that's how we wrote our programs in that order is to follow a kind of five by five ESC type of routine, which it sounds like you're kind of following and then move into performance and then move into aesthetic. So Doug will send you over performance to go that route. Yeah, but I definitely want you to continue to listen to your body. And you're gonna get a lot of information out there. I'm glad we're the only people you're listening to because there's a lot of, I mean, God, there's more bullshit out there than there is good information. But even- I actually fell into listening to you guys on YouTube, actually trying to find the information that I'm asking you right now. So I'll do it. Well, good deal. Well, I'll tell you what, even our information Caesar can sometimes be wrong for you. And what I mean by that is, listen to your body. If something doesn't feel right, if your energy's down, if you start to feel pain, that's not normal workout pain, but like a joint pain, you notice your libido crashes. If it feels like it's too much volume, something we recommend it or whatever, listen to your body because as an individual, there's gonna be a variance between how you respond versus other people. And that right there is gonna guide you so well on this journey of fitness that you've just embarked on. You're ahead of the game already, bro. You sound real, for your age already, with the questions that you're asking, like Sal said, I think you're doing great, dude. You're gonna have a great journey. Keep us posted along the way. You have questions. Hit us up either on social or in the forum or reach back out to us, man. Keep digging into our podcast and everything else. We got you. Yeah, I listen to you guys every single day now. So you guys have some content out there that is probably really hard to get through it all. So you guys are gonna be ones I listen to a lot now. Awesome. Thank you guys. Thanks for calling in, man. Appreciate it, guys. Take care. You got it. How rare is it to hear a 21 year old who just started working out to talk that way? Yeah. You know, a 21 year old guy. Yeah, you don't hear that a lot, especially his own self-awareness, like going through that and really analyzing, you know, how he was feeling through that whole process. Like we just want to get big or we want to get shredded. That's really like the main focus to that age. Me at 21, I would have been like, I feel like shit, but I'm still doing this. You know, I would have just not listened to anybody. Just pushed through. Just until my body just yelled at me. It's wild. I mean, you're right. His awareness of that age is so great, the fact that, but he was that, you know, big and strong at one point felt like he wasn't big and strong. Got lean, got super shredded. Lean felt all scrawny. It's really interesting how you play mind games. I mean, I think that everybody has a little bit of this in themselves. And I always think, and I think you've said it before in the podcast, how like, you know, how many times have you looked back at a picture and said like, and go like, damn, man, I looked really good there, looking back at the picture, but then also go like, have the awareness to go, oh shit, you know what though? I remember now that I think about it, when I was there, I thought I was this, right? And it like, it really takes you to get outside of yourself in that moment and to look back and go like, damn, that's wild. It's really hard to be present, you know, and like really acknowledge, you know, how you're feeling in that moment. Cause yeah, you look back at those pictures like, man, I was awesome back then. And like, you know, you're like starving yourself or whatever. And it also highlights what the main driver many times is for all of us, you know? And it's, it's, it is that process of getting to a place where you choose exercise, you choose dieting, you choose training because like Sal always says, you love yourself, not because you don't, you know? And when it's driven by, I don't like the way I look. I don't like the way I feel. Distorts the hell out of everything. Distorts, because even when you're doing great, you still don't think so because it came from a place that is great. I literally, I mean, okay, so two things happened. Jessica saw a picture of years ago, her and I went on a vacation. She was like, oh my God, look how great, you know, cause right now she's pregnant, right? So she's like, well, I can't wait to get fit. And I said, do you remember like literally that morning, cause there was a conversation we had that morning where you were super self critical. She's like, yeah, I know, I know. Same thing happened to me. I saw a picture of myself at 15. I was at work with my dad. I was wearing a tank top. I mean, 15 was like the height of my insecurity, like the peak of it. And I looked at him like, bro, I was a Jack 15 year old. I had been working out already for a year, but I was so, so self critical. I thought I was like the skinniest, weakest looking kid in the world. So really commenced with you. And then, okay, now to go and kind of touch on what we said with Caesar, being too aggressive with your calorie changes is gonna make it much more challenging, bottom line. Can you get there faster with a more aggressive cut or a more aggressive bulk? Theoretically, you can do that. I mean, there are studies that'll show, yeah, you know, if you cut way more calories, you can lose more body, but the way it affects your behaviors and the way it affects how you feel, I always completely disagree because how you feel is gonna dictate your behaviors. And if you feel like shit, okay, fine. You lost into the five pounds of body fat. Let's see, we're gonna be out in five months or six months. You're gonna rebound in the opposite direction. Also, you know, one of the things that played into his favor is that, you know, at that, there's a little bit of, I don't know what's a term, a good term for this, like a metabolic resiliency at that age, you know what I'm saying? Like, you can get away with doing some pretty extreme diets and stuff when you're in your teens and 20s. You've, if you've done that, you know, 10, 15, 20 times over the course of a decade or two decades. Or you're in your 40s and your sleep isn't great. Yeah, yeah. So part, half of the great results that he got from the massive cut was just cause his body is that resilient and he's got a lot of things working in his favor. You can, and it's so great that, like you said, he had the awareness to know this already because it, you know, it could, you could fall into that trap of that's how you do it. You know, oh, this is how, the way it's time to diet. I just starved myself for the next month and it'll get me to where I wanna be and to be aware enough to catch that this early. Like he's really gonna save himself from a lot of headaches in the future. Totally. Our next caller is Brian from California. Brian, what's happening, man? How can we help you? Hey guys, really appreciate you having me on. And first and foremost, I wanna say I respect a ton that you guys are able to build a business around getting people like truly healthy. I work in the healthcare industry and unfortunately a lot of times the people that I talk to aren't that healthy. So it's really cool that you guys are able to do that. So hopefully business is booming. Thank you, Brian. Brian, real quick, I'm gonna interrupt you because I love what you said and that's our goal. We wanna prove that you can build a business in the fitness space doing it the right way. That's really our goal. Anyway, continue. Yeah, I mean, cool, cause it's kind of rare, right? Like nowadays I feel like sick people are where the money's at and so it would be nice if everybody started listening to Mind Pump and then you put me out of a job, I'd be happy. He'll work for us. We'd have to hire you at that point. So here we go. Yeah, perfect. Sign me up. Well, so last month I purchased the Skinny Guy Bundle and it's been a super cool in anabolic phase two right now. First and foremost, hopefully it's okay. I split it up like upper or lower just because I enjoy lifting six days a week. I know for most people, the full body works better cause they only have to go three days a week, but I mean, is that kind of similar results anyway? Yeah, that's the same. Yep, you're fine. Okay, cool. So my question was there were some novel exercises in there, like stuff that I don't normally do, one of them being shrugs. And so it's been really fun doing the shrugs that I don't always do, but my question was, I know that it takes a long time to build muscle, but like how long realistically, if I'm doing it correctly, should I expect to actually see results and hopefully get traps like Adam, as long as it doesn't make me moody? Wow. That was like a shit sandwich right there. You can't have it all, dude. It takes approximately 23.7 days. There's no number. It's hard because there's such an individual variance on how quickly you could build muscle, then there's a context of your life and what you're doing. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I barely do them and Sal does them all the time and look how much butter mine look. I mean, that's- It's really crazy. There's gonna be like a genetic side through this. It's wild. God damn it. I work out twice as much as you do. No, you know, and there's also, you know, the other thing too to keep in mind, there's not just genetic variance on how fast you could build muscle. And so we're a limit. By the way, I'm taking out all the context of everything else you do, right? We're just talking genetics. But then there's a genetic difference between your own muscles. Like, you know, you may have body parts that respond really well and other body parts where you're like, okay, why doesn't this seem like it even exists? Like it doesn't even respond at all. So I can't answer that for you. And I can't even give you a straight answer as to whether or not shrugs are the best exercise for your traps. I know people where, you know, high poles just blow up their traps or farmer walks way more than shrugs. So I can't answer that question, but I can say that if you consistently get stronger, consistently feel more and more connected to an exercise, you're moving in the right direction. I can tell you one of the probably challenges that you have, you actually look like you're, or not look, but you, based off of your numbers are probably built similar to myself, six, three, two, oh five, having to eat 4,000 calories just for maintenance. I imagine one of the challenges that you have is actually probably bulking and building muscle because it's just hard to eat that many. Are you super active at work? Is that what causes this? I mean, I'm walking around all the time. I mean, I don't do like a ton of extra stuff. I mean, I play golf mostly on the weekends. I'll walk and carry my bag, but other than that, like primarily, I just like to get in and lift and then just a lot of walking. So there's not a ton of extra stuff just cause, I mean, by the way, the golfing burns a fuck ton of calories. You, a lot of people, yeah, especially if you, I mean, even if you do the cart, I mean you still, I mean, that's a, you know, four hour day plus of a sport and most of that is walking around. I mean, the swinging sure makes a little bit more calorie burn. But I mean, you, I burn a ton of calories when I golf. So I mean, it's, don't downplay that. I mean, there's a lot. And so I think a guy who has a 4,000 calorie maintenance and then you add in a golf day, I bet you burn like 6,000 calories on that day. That's hard to be in a surplus. So do you tend to struggle with that where you have a hard time gaining weight? Yeah, I mean, that's been primarily the goal I mean, it's really slow. Like I've definitely gained weight, like especially since listening to you guys and like kind of prioritizing my protein and stuff. It's been very, very slow, but I have noticed like I'm building, I'm getting stronger. It just takes me a long time. How long you've been working out? I mean, I've been working out most of my life, but I don't know if you guys recall it. I actually called in one time before and I showed you guys a story. Like I primarily lifted in college, but then I got really into like Spartan racing and stuff, lost like a ton of weight. And then during COVID, like around 2020, I started listening to you guys and was doing mostly like strength training. And then it's been over the last couple of years, like I've put on a solid like 15 to 20 pounds muscle mass. Oh, wow. So when you put on muscle, like what did that look like on the rest of your muscles in your body parts? Like what did that look like? Like as far as like proportions or? Well, you're asking about like how long it takes you to develop, you know, your traps. Like what did that look like in terms of gaining muscle elsewhere? I mean, just very slow and gradual. I think my main, like the main question I was getting at was because I never do anything really on the traps. Like would I expect to see quicker growth because it's so novel? Oh yeah. Potentially, yes. But Sal's way of answering it is still true, right? Like there's certain things, there's certain body parts and you probably already know this about yourself that you touch the weights and you see like a response right away and there's other body parts that you feel like you hammer the shit out of it. That's what I'm getting at. It's like, you know, you're gonna notice that like for me as a chest or legs specifically anywhere in my legs, like we'll just grow. And that's just one of those things like certain muscle groups just respond quite more substantially. What body part do you have that doesn't grow, Jeff? I feel like, I feel like. I don't want to talk about talking to hard gainers, you need to shut up. Yeah. Yeah, whenever, go get a sandwich guy. Yeah, whenever Adam and Sal are talking about the calves I'm always like, man, I understand the struggle. Yeah. Well, you know what? I tell you what, Brian, muscle building is slow. There's very, very few people on earth where it's a fast process. I think I've met one or two people in my entire life. Oh, we didn't even ask you how old you were too. How old are you, Brian? 32. Okay. It's a slow process for everybody. I mean, look, a man, typical man, which most of us, when I say typical, it's like 95% of us are gonna fall in this category. 4.5% of us are gonna be a little bit better. 0.5% of us are gonna be better than that. And then of that 0.5, there's like 1% of that where you just build muscle and it's crazy fast. So for the vast majority of us, the average man can gain in a year with really dedicated, proper training and diet. And I'm talking about lean body mass, not body fat. Just pure lean body mass. Maybe 12 pounds of lean body mass in a year. Maybe 15 pounds at the most for the average female, six, eight pounds, maybe 10 if she's super consistent with everything. And then after that, it really slows the hell down. It's like, then you're gaining like three, four, five pounds a year or less. Like if I gained two pounds of lean body mass at 43 years old per year now, like I'm ecstatic, but it's not happening. I just wanna let you know, I'm not gaining any muscle anymore at this point. So it is a slow process. And so really, it's really a game of can you push your body to be more anabolic than catabolic? Cause you're always either, right? You're either losing or gaining. And the goal is to be a little bit more gaining than a little bit more losing. And at some point, you're just gonna maintain it. At some point, you're just gonna fight being catabolic. That's once you pass a certain age, maybe in your 60s or whatever. So it's a slow process. That's about it. The best metrics are how you feel, strength. And then even after that, it's gonna be connection. Do I feel the muscles working? Do I feel connected? Do I feel really good? That then becomes the best metric long-term. One of the things to help do what Sal's saying as far as being anabolic more than your catabolic is being aware of your activity and movement. Like that's why I brought up the golf thing. Like I don't know if you do a good job of making sure on those days, like you're staying fuel. Yeah, eat more, you know, make sure that you. Can you bring food on the golf course? Yeah. Okay, I was like, shit, bring the cooler with sandwiches. Yeah, and they have a golf cart goes around. No, seriously though. I mean, and this is by the way, this is terrible advice, but I'm just gonna tell you something that I used to do in my 20s that kind of got me over this hurdle of not being able to put weight on because I played a lot of basketball was I had to pound like a sugar drink, like a 500 calorie drink of just calories and sugar before I played. And then again, refuel with something right afterwards just to account for all the calories I was burning, playing basketball and then on top of my regular day. So, you know, and that really helped me get through this, that phase of not being able to eat enough. So pay attention to, you know, your activity and try and make sure that you're increasing your calories on these days when you're probably burning a lot. Here, I'll make it even easier. Brian, are you dairy intolerant? Can you have milk? Yeah, I mean, I could, I do like a way I split protein and cheese and stuff. Like straight milk isn't always the best, but. Well, forget that. But I mean, I can, I can. Why are you saying like drink some milk? Bro, listen, if you can have milk, I want to say this right now on the podcast. It is nature's best bulking, you know, muscle building, easy beverage. There's nothing better. There isn't a protein shake that's better than milk. Now the problem is a lot of people can't tolerate milk, especially in large quantities. But if you added a glass of milk to breakfast, lunch and dinner, you added like 400 calories and you had a good quality protein. You added some sugar and the fats aren't bad either. So just, I mean, literally you could just drink milk. Adam said drink a, you know, a high calorie. If you added milk to every meal, you're totally wrong. That's it, you're done. You don't got to do much more. It's a Midwestern thing. Bro, I see that a lot. Drink milk, like every meal. That's it right there. I'll have to, I'll have to revisit that because I tried, after listening to Carnivore MD, I tried the raw milk and that was kind of gnarly. So maybe I'll just do regular, regular whole milk. But if you can't tolerate milk and a lot of people can't, then I, you know, make it a protein shake and you can throw, you know, maybe some fruit in there or something like that. And that'd be totally fine. I mean, the key is to make sure you're just getting, you're getting calories before and after you're doing the activities like that, that just burn at times. And for a guy that struggles, like that, remember for our audience that's listening to, this isn't like general advice that we tell everybody to do. It's like, this is somebody who is struggling to put weight on. And so the advice starts to change a little bit. Like you have to do different strategies than the average person. But you're on track, dude. If you gained that muscle mass that you said you did earlier and you're feeling stronger, you're on track, bro, it just takes time. Three, hey, thank you guys so much. You got it, man. Thanks for coming in, Brian. Absolutely. Have a good day. You too. You know what, Adam? I'm going to touch on what you just said, because I 100% guarantee you triggered a bunch of wellness freaks. So here's the deal. Okay. And this is a fact. Now I'm not going to say that this is everything because it's more complex than what I'm about to say. But this is a fact, 95 to 98% of the detriments that comes from things like sugar, saturated fats, ultra processed foods even, is when your calories are higher than you're burning. So if you drink a 500 calorie sugar drink and that puts you at such high calories that you're like a thousand calories over and you have to lose fat because you're overweight, you're going to have lots of health detriment. If your problem is like with Brian where you can't get enough calories to gain weight and that 500 calories of the sugar drink makes up the difference, he's probably not going to notice any health detriments. Now that doesn't mean he may not notice effects on his behaviors. Cause what may happen is it may make him feel lethargic, it may make him feel crappy or irritable, in which case then it's not a good idea. But based off of just metrics and blood lipids and just overall health, like taking behavior out, which again, behavior can definitely be affected, then it doesn't make that huge of a difference. So when I'm talking to a hard gainer and I'm like, yeah, you know what, make a shake with ice cream in it and throw in some peanut butter and some protein powder and whatever. And I'm like, you know, if it doesn't make you feel crappy and that helps you hit your calorie targets, you're fine. I'm right, that's just the bottom line. I know people are going to get trouble. Oh, I knew they would too. I know they will too. And the truth is that it's, I'm not saying what I think the best thing for your body health-wise, it's like I'm trying to help something that I know that you're having, I mean you're 30 something years old, you're having a hard time still putting weight out. I've been there, like I've been there before, training like crazy, trying to eat all about, and it's just hard to get four, 5,000 calories without using that. And do I think absolutely you should have chicken breast and white rice instead? Would that be a better choice? Yeah, okay. Try doing 5,000 calories. Yeah, try doing that before you go golf, you know, it's just not, it's not reason, it's not realistic for most people. And so- It could also be unhealthy another way at them because imagine if you tried to go at 4,000 calories and do it with like, what would be considered super healthy food? And as a result of that, you're there literally force feeding yourself, right? It's also psychologically- Trying to get your way through it the entire way. There's a psychological unhealthiness, right? I did that, I did that. What if you could make up the different, what if you could eat 4,000, let's say you could eat 3,000 calories of these really healthy foods, that extra 1,000 calories, you're like, if I do it with chicken breast and vegetables and what I'm gonna force feed myself, or I can eat this hyper palatable food that actually will make me wanna eat it. Well, yeah, there's a way off. And one of them is like, well, I'm not gonna sit here force feeding myself for an hour. So I think that that's a better option. So my point is it's way more complex than the way me people make it sound. And people in our space often do the whole black and white thing, which it's never black and white. Our next caller is Alex from California. Alex, what's happening? How can we help you? Hey guys, how's it going? Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it a lot. So I guess it's a pretty quick back story. I started wrestling when I was about four years old and continued on until about 17. But never stopped. I continued to help coach and still wrestle to this day. I started working out at about 13, 14 years old. I now work in law enforcement. I worked night shifts and about three to four, 16 shifts a week. And I started noticing a really big downfall in my mood, my sleep, appetite, workouts and all that. So I went to go get tested. My testosterone was a lot lower than I expected. It was about 307 and they put me on TRT. So I do feel a lot better being on it. It's been about six weeks, seven weeks, give or take. So my question is pretty much, how can I produce my testosterone naturally to eventually get off of this? Because I don't want it forever. Yeah, good question. All right, so a couple of things I want to touch on. First, I want a little disclosure. I'm not a doctor, but I'm going to speak out of personal experience, what I know. And then I'll recommend you do to a doctor that I think is probably- Yeah, are you not in our private forum or our forum for testosterone? No, I'm not. I didn't just have that shame on you. Yeah, it's Alex, but when we're done, I'm going to point you in the right direction. Okay, but a couple of things I want to mention just to paint the context. So of all the sports you can compete in and train in, especially as a kid and up through high school, the hardest working, I mean, just physically hardest working athletes among the top are wrestlers. Wrestlers, polo is another, water polo is another one. Like, you know this because you wrestled, they beat the crap out of you. And then on top of it, especially if you wrestle in a weight class, like what weight class did you wrestle in? High school, it was 115, but off season I was about 135, 140. There it is right there. So unless you're like heavyweight, super heavyweight, where there's no weight limit, when you wrestle, they beat the shit out of you. And then on top of it, unlike football, where for the most part, either like just go ahead and get bigger, especially when you're in high school, they're like, you're going to have to drop 20 or 30 pounds every season just to make your weight class. So it's one of the most, and by the way, this is why wrestlers are such hardworking people. If you've ever, I mean, if you watch MMA, you notice the wrestlers and they're going to out grind anybody. They have another gear because their whole lives, they just know how to deal with just feeling like shit. It's because they beat the crap out of you and you got to make weight and you got to diet and you got to do all this crazy shit and use the sauna and all that stuff. So which I hope you didn't do in high school, but I knew a lot of high school students where the coaches would actually make the gym a sauna to help them make weight. So I'm sure that happened to you too. So it's insane. And what this will do is this will beat the shit at your hormone levels. This will hammer your testosterone levels. And then you combine that with working a night shift and there's a direct effect with your circadian rhythm and testosterone. So my guess is because you train since you were four as a wrestler, you have a very distorted view or perception of appropriate levels of training. For you, appropriate training is probably overtraining. So you're probably working out too much and too hard. And I don't blame you. You just- I get enough recovery. Yeah, you were raised this way, man. And so you really don't have a good gauge. So what I'm gonna tell you right now is I'm gonna, I'll send you a workout plan and just follow the workout plan and do nothing else. Do no other workout plan, do nothing extra on your own because your gauge of intensity and volume is all messed up. I'm gonna tell you that right now, especially since you've been wrestling at four and having to make weight classes. I could tell you that right now with almost all certainty. Now with the hormone, the testosterone replacement therapy, I'm surprised that they put a 26 year old on testosterone before trying to get your testosterone levels to raise with something like HCG and chlomaphene, which are medications designed to get your natural levels to come up. So- Typically what you do first before you do TRT at that age. At your age, yeah. Cause when you're under the age of 30 or 35, usually a hormone specialist can say, you know what, let's try this first and see what's happening. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna point you to mphormones.com. And what you can do, Alex, is you can go on there and get an evaluation. So you can request a 30 minute or 60 minute evaluation, bring your labs, bring your whole thing. And then the doctors there, which we've already vetted, are gonna go through your protocol and they'll tell you, based off what you're saying, hey, we think you should do this or maybe you're doing the right thing or the wrong thing. I think what they're gonna recommend is that you try to go on something else to see what you can do naturally with your testosterone levels. That's what I think they're gonna probably do. But again, I'm not a doctor. So I can't put words in their mouth. And even if they don't, they might say, you know, let's stay here with a TRT until we can balance everything kind of out and you feel actually good. And then we can start talking about how we would pull you off. So that might be a possibility. Now the other thing I'm gonna say with your night shift is here's what you're gonna have to do. And if you're not already doing this, try doing this. Your bedroom at home, you're gonna need to black out completely because you're going to sleep during the day. So you're gonna need to black out your bedroom 100%. And then about an hour before the shift is over, I want you to wear blue light blocking glasses. So, and because of your job, you need to stay sharp. I would use Felix gray glasses because they don't change the color of everything because normal blue light blocking glasses will make everything orange or red. So you wanna wear blue, Felix gray has this patented way of blocking blue light without changing everything, the color of everything. So put those on an hour before your shift is over. And what that'll do is it'll tell your brain, hey, the sun is going down. It's kind of time to get ready to go to sleep. Then when you're off, keep those glasses on, go in your bedroom that's blacked out and then try to go to sleep. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to trick your body into thinking it's nighttime when it's daytime. And then when you start your shift, when you start your shift, you can use red light therapy after you wake up or you can get and or use these kind of full spectrum light bulbs. Because what you wanna do is you wanna expose your body to light to trick it, basically wanna trick your body into thinking it's daytime when it's night and nighttime when it's day, that's your best bet. It's not perfect, but it's better than what you're doing right now. Yeah, all these interventions make perfect sense in this situation because I mean, how long do you anticipate being on the night shift? Is this gonna be like a few years? Is this something that you know, you're just gonna do for this year? It's been about three years now and then probably another three to four. Okay, yeah, that's a tough place. Like you said, any intervention at this point is gonna have to be accounted for just because it's so important with circadian rhythms to be able to try and get adequate recovery and sleep. That's your utmost importance. Yeah, you're gonna have to hack. This is where biohacking becomes valuable because you're literally gonna have to trick your body. That's what you're trying to do. So two hours before your shift is over, don't eat any food. One hour before where blue light blocking glasses, when you wake up, expose yourself to red light, red light therapy or use these kind of full spectrum, what are called light bulbs that simulate sunlight. If you will, it's not a sun lamp, you're not gonna tan, but it gives you this kind of broader spectrum and make it bright. Wait about 45 minutes to an hour before having caffeine and then go ahead and eat food. But so your goal is to really trick your body as much as possible because working the night shift and having your body be up when it doesn't wanna be and asleep when it doesn't wanna be, it's got some serious long-term health effects. There's some health effects. My wife was on this for at least five years and it was pretty detrimental. So we had to do everything and anything we could to try and get her to get good sleep. How many days a week are you training? Right now, only three of my assigned three days off. I'm gonna send you maps into Bollock Alex. I want you to follow the two day a week plan on it and that's it. I don't want you to do any more. So just do the two, there's an option for two or three days. Follow the two days on it. You could do trigger sessions on your off days which are just like five to 10 minutes but I don't want you to do any more than that. And I want you to be very careful with the intensity. I want you to train at a moderate high intensity not at a high intensity. So go easier than you think because like I said, you have that gear that's kind of now a part of who you are. And I'm pretty sure I was hitting the nail on the head with how you trained as a wrestler and how you probably push yourself too hard. Yeah. I mean, I know I realized that but that's just the way I was, like you said, the way I was raised and trained. So it's kind of hard to shut it off. Yeah. So just like literally follow the programming and just don't listen to what you think is hard enough. Yeah, less is probably more. Yeah, less is gonna be more and do that for a little while. I think you'll feel better. All right. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. You got it, man. And thanks for your service. Thanks Alex. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. No problem. You guys ever work with somebody who's wrestled since they were kids? Oh yeah. That is so brutal. I mean, it's a tough one to unpack. I mean, I really think it's all athletes but wrestlers are up there at the top as far as their ability to endure. Right? And they got to make weight classes. Yes, I mean, they put them, they pushed them through a... One of the most disciplined athletes. Yeah, as far as the levels of exhaustion and the amount of caloric, you know, deficits. And yeah, no. You ever see wrestlers walking around in high school spitting into cups and trying to get rid of walking? Oh yeah. And wearing those suits that just, you know, they have to sweat to make great cuts. I mean, you train your whole... And you know what? He was probably successful, right? He did it most of his life and I was a coach so I'm assuming he was pretty good at it. You have a lot of success with that. I think that's what makes it even worse, right? It's one thing if you like went through a phase, oh, I played sports in high school for a little bit, we trained this way. What about before? Yeah, well, since I was a kid, I was really good. It's a part of his identity. Oh yeah. 100% it's a part of his identity. And so, yeah, I mean, I had nothing really to add to yours as far as the advice because that is, you know, he needs to pull way back. It's one of the sports. It's one of the only sports I can think of. Well, there's a couple that says, work until you throw up and then also watch your food intake and don't eat too much. Other sports don't necessarily do that. You said something I want to add to though about the biohacking and this is really an interesting point that you made. So rarely ever would I, you know, talk about the red light and the felus grays. And doing all those little things. Yeah, doing all these little kind of, we'd always be like, okay, let's assess your programming, let's talk about your diapers. But this is an exception to that rule because he's working the night shift. He's right too. Honestly, yeah, there's, you're basically creating an artificial environment for yourself because you're not, you know, going to sleep when everybody else is. So it's like, you have to like create this little bubble for yourself to be able to get adequate recovery. I mean, just an example of what there's always an exception to the rule. This is an exception where this person, my advice starts to change. It becomes more about just getting him to feel better, minimizing the amount of stress that his body's feeling right now, getting him as much adequate. And that's us, you normally wouldn't do that. You normally wouldn't say that to a person who's struggling with their training. We would go so many different directions, but in this case, that makes a lot of sense. And I really do hope he goes to mphormones.com because again, I'm not a doctor. We'll help him out. But I do find it a little strange at the first place that they went with a 26 year old with testosterone, that was, you know, low, but not so low that it's like, oh my God, right? But it's still low. I'm gonna make a prediction right now. You know, I said a long time ago on the podcast that I think that the hormone replacement therapy is going to be the next cannabis. The next thing that we're gonna see is a lot of this now because they have opened it and there's kind of this gray area they're operating in very similar to the cannabis industry. And just like what I saw there is this is where, you know, you get so many people in there, you're gonna see a lot of shady, but it's gonna be hard to find the really, really good companies that are doing this because everybody's gonna be doing it. And people are gonna attach themselves to what a good company is based off of, you know, some popular influencer or a bunch of people, oh, I tried them, they're great. Or oh, they hook you up or they give you more than everybody else does. Like, so you're gonna see a lot of that competitiveness to get customers, which is gonna be unfortunate because I bet we're gonna see more and more questions. There's a big difference between a 26 year old with low testosterone and a 46 year old with low testosterone. Oh, massive difference. Usually in how you treat that. Again, I'm not a doctor, but. Especially if he's saying that his goal was to not. That's what I thought was kind of crazy. I mean, general, your typical GP would like be hesitant to even give it to someone like this. And then if he's also saying like, hey, how do I get off this? My goal is not to be on it forever. I just, that's really weird to me. It smells like, okay, some, you know, company that's. Like just here, pay this monthly fee is cheap. Here's your testosterone. Yes, yes. Our next caller is Chris from Oregon. Chris, what's happening, man? How can we help you? Hey, thanks again for being here and answering this question for me. So my question is really more about performance rather than health and, you know, basic long-term sustainability. So I've been lifting for about 50 or about 12 to 15 years pretty consistently. I'm 35 years old right now and I'm 511 184 pounds. So over about six years ago, I got into marathon running and I've been trying to balance marathon running with weightlifting. And I've kind of hit a plateau with the marathons and, you know, it's a pretty good marathon that I can run, but to really kind of breakthrough that next level, I think I need to be a little bit lighter. And I've been DEXA scanned about three times in the past year and a half. I always come in at about 11% body fat. And I find that if I try to get much below that, maybe into the very high nines or low 10s, I really start struggling with my training and basically I don't know how to now get to maybe 175 pounds so I can race faster without feeling either like total garbage and therefore not being able to train for the marathons or pairing off some muscle. So I have MAPS anabolic and I have MAPS performance, both fantastic programs. I love MAPS performance. It works so well for me. I love that type of workout, but running it even at those higher rep ranges that, you know, faced, I think two and three both have pretty high rep ranges, I'm not gonna lose any muscle at a minimum. So do you have any suggestions on how I might go about this with the MAPS program or am I looking at this all wrong? Yeah, this is actually easy. By the way, MAPS is too effective. So if you follow any MAPS program. No, it's got too big, man. No, no, here's the deal. I could tell you right now what your- Too much muscle. I could tell you what your problem was before. So I've trained a couple of marathon athletes and we had to do this. And the reason why you did this wrong before is you try to do it through diet. Am I right? You try to get leaner, dropping weight by just doing it. That's a problem because you need the calories for fuel. And now here's what you do. Don't think of the losing muscle process as a burning muscle off process. Think of it as an adaptation process. It's literally this easy. This is all you gotta do. Lift weights less and run more. And your body will adapt in a way that makes you better at running. So rather than doing two days a week or three days a week of strength training, keep it one day a week. Keep it very basic. You're training for a marathon so you're gonna be running a lot anyway. And it's gonna help maintain some of your strength and you're gonna lose some muscle. And that's about that. So what's gonna happen is you just get better at running which means you're gonna probably pair some muscle down. So I wouldn't lift more than once a week at the most. Maybe 45 minutes at most. Keep the intensity moderate at high, at the highest level and just do your running. And you'll find that you'll start losing muscle. And don't worry about the diet. You'll your body with the appropriate level of calories. Who's our buddy? Who's a fan of the show? We had him on a long time ago. Zack. Thank you, Zack Bitter. Bitter. Yeah, yeah. You follow Zack Bitter, you know who that is? He's a great one. Oh, of course, yeah. Zack's great. Yeah, did you know we interviewed him a long time ago? No, I didn't. I gotta go find that. Yeah, yeah. Go back a long time. Like five... Fat adapted athlete. Yeah, yeah. I really like what he does leading up to the race and what he does nutritionally I thought was really interesting and counter to what I would have thought back then. So great interview that we did with him and may apply to some of the things that you're doing. What's your time, Chris? What are you clocking in at? Right now I'm at 233 at 185 pounds and I'm trying to get below 230. Yeah, no. Now what is it to qualify for Boston? Is it, do you have to get below 230? Is that why that's your number? No, no. Boston for me at my age is 305. So... Oh, you're there. Yeah, so I'm there. At this point, it's just, I wanna see how good I can do. Yeah. That's purely it. Chris, it's literally as easy as, just keep feeding yourself and run more and lift less and your body's gonna change and adapt. And by the way, here's what may happen. This is gonna fuck with you a little bit. Your body fat percentage is probably gonna go up because you're gonna lose some muscle and the scale may not go down as much as you think because of the little bit of a transfer but you'll get better at running. So I wouldn't even worry. So don't worry too much about the weight or anything like that. Just measure your performance. You'll probably, you'll lose muscle through doing that and you'll lose some weight. Your body fat percentage may go up. Don't get hung up on that though. Okay, cause some marathon runners, actually I would say this, there's quite a few marathon runners that I trained who performed better at 15% body fat than they did at 10% body fat. Oh, I would think that. Yeah. Yeah, no, I would. I mean, it's stored fuel that you can tap into later on. So it's not... They just felt better because they were able to fuel themselves. There's of course people that... Well, you gotta think that the lower and lower we get body fat percentage, the more and more we're sending a signal to our body to freak out a little bit and not operate correctly. You get really, really low like that. And then you're also pushing it. I just think that you're gonna operate better in that 10 to 15% range than you would ever at like a six or seven for a total marathon runner. Do you not feel like as explosive as you're running? Like, is that something of focus of yours that you've noticed? No, I feel pretty great when I'm running. I mean, the training's really, really solid. It's just, you know, people that are my... Yeah, the people that are my height, that are trying to run, you know, sub-230s, they're usually about 140 to 145 pounds at most. So 40 extra pounds carrying around for 26 miles. It's typically not the same guy, you know? Yeah, yeah. Sal hit it on the head though. It's actually not that... You know what's the biggest challenge? Mentally. 100%. You know, because you're probably like, you're probably one of the more buff looking runners out there and that probably feels... Yeah, 184, 510% body fat. Probably look really damn good. And so you're asking a performance question and so the answer is, you know, care less about, you know, kind of how you look and actually just lift a little less and keep running the way you are or more and your body will actually adapt. You could pick one of the workouts for mass performance, one of the foundational workouts and just do that once a week. Once a week. And that's pretty... In the mobility, you can always do of course because that's gonna be good for you. I'm gonna make a prediction, Chris. I'm gonna predict that you're gonna get there and then you're gonna not like it and you're gonna wanna go back. My wife already hates the idea, so yeah, probably so. But I get it, I get wanting to attain goals and it's gonna be a huge accomplishment. You're kicking ass. So I mean, I'd be here. I'd be wanting to kind of see what I could do too. Who doesn't wanna win? Yeah, yeah, so I get it. So season, phase. Yeah, but that's it. Just lift way less and keep running the way you are and it'll happen. Hey, circle back though. I'd like to hear how it goes for you. All right, cool, man. Hey, thanks again for all you do. I really appreciate you. You got it. You know, the first time I had a client that where this became a thing, I did it totally wrong, right? So I got this client, Marathon Runner. That was their main focus. Try to have him do more lifting. Well, I was trying to get him shredded. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, well, muscle is good. Let's just get you lean. And he's like, and he was, he was getting leaner and he's like, but my times are worse and worse and worse. And I'm like, what the fuck? And then I'm like, maybe he just needs to be smaller and maybe have a higher body fat. So I said, hey, listen, man, I'm gonna train you once a week for 30 to 45 minutes. We're gonna stop this lifting. You're gonna just run and you're probably gonna lose strength or probably whatever. And then let's see what happens. And lo and behold, he got way better at running. And then of course it's one of those like face palm moments, like, of course, you know. Well, I did too. I only asked like, I know he's doing straight training. So that makes sense that he would feel like he's strong and like explosive as he's running. Cause that was an issue with some Marathon Runners I've trained before was they just, they didn't have that kind of snap, you know, to be able to have breakaway speed when they needed it. But it sounds like he has that. So now it's really just about, you know, like managing his energy appropriately. Look, if you like our information, head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out our guides. They're all free and they can help you with most health and fitness goals. You can also find all of us on social media. So Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump. Justin, Adam is also on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam. And you can only find me on Twitter at Mind Pump Sal. This one's really important and that is to phase your training. If somebody trains for a full year doing a bench press and they're always aiming for five reps, if you compared that person to a person who did a bench press where they did three or four weeks of five reps, but then they did three or four weeks of 12 reps and then three or four weeks of, let's say 15 to 20 reps and then they'll throw in some supersets, at the end of that year, you're gonna see more consistent progress from the person who's moving in and out. And less injury, that's another thing. You'll see less injury as well.