 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, mind pump, with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. In this episode of Mind Pump, we are talking to Ryan Munsey. He's the host of the Optimal Performance podcast. It's a great podcast. You should check it out, but we had some great conversations on this one. It got kind of deep, right? Yeah. No, Ryan's been in the industry for quite some time. So we had a lot of stories to share back and forth as far as the industry, technology, where we see the industry going. We talked about things that were even non-fitness related, like how technology is going to impact humanity and some of the challenges it's going to present. Really good conversation, great conversations in this upcoming podcast. Some of the stuff we talk about will get you thinking for sure. Now, you can find Ryan Munsey on his podcast, Optimal Performance podcast, or you can find him on Instagram at ryanmunsey, that's M-U-N-S-E-Y, underscore. And you can find his website at www.optimalperformance.com. Also, this is the last day to register for our free webinar. So we have a new program coming out, Maps Prime Pro. No one else has ever attempted to do what we've done with this program. It's the most correctional, functional-based program I think you'll find. We cover areas of the body that you don't see anywhere else, like your hands. It's designed, even though we call it Prime Pro and I think when we first built it or created it, it was targeting the professional as far as your chiro, your doctors, your physical therapist, your personal trainers. Within the program, we have the self-assessment tool to help those assess themselves. So even if you're not the professional, it is a program for anybody to use. And most certainly, if you suffer from any aches or pain, joint pain, limited range of motion or mobility, this is a must and it complements any program. So if you've got your own program that you follow, or you're into CrossFit, or you have a routine or a class that you go to on a weekly basis, everybody should have this tool and this is why we created it. So this webinar, you go to mapsprimepro.com and register for it. It's free and we are giving away much of Prime Pro for free. So we're basically going over the assessments and teaching them and we're showing movements to correct certain imbalances. It's all free on this webinar. So just go to mapsprimepro.com and register yourself now. Here's what I found. I have found that in our sphere, and maybe you can add to this, but in our world here of podcasting, there's a lot of weird people. Like most of us are kind of... Dev out, Larry. I think it's almost given everybody... It's almost like a green light to fly your freak flag. You know? Yeah, because it's yours, right? It's not sensors, it's not filtered. You can do whatever the fuck you want. You can get crazy on your podcast. You can have whatever guests you want on your podcast. There's no... Podcasting right now is awesome. I hope it stays this way. I do too. I hope that someone doesn't... It's still kind of the Wild West though. Yeah, because it's still a baby, right? It's still kind of a baby. Commercial here soon. I mean, I still meet people all the time where they're like, podcast what? What's a podcast? What do you do? Right. What do you do for a job though? I think maybe part of it too is that those of us, and I say us, because I'm pretty sure I'm in that category, who are a little bit weird. And by the way, I love weird people. Everyday normal people are boring to me. Yeah. But weird... Us weird people, I think we get... There's like a... God, what's the word? A cathartic effect from talking on a microphone. It's almost like therapy. We've talked about this when we first started Mind Pump. We're like, God, this is so therapeutic. And it very much so is. Do you think that's the weird side of you, the narcissistic side of you? Which one do you think that is? It's not because I like to necessarily hear myself. No, I think you do. I think you fast forward Justin and I anytime. I think you can. We'll catch him in the car. We'll be like listening to the podcast, and like Justin and I start talking and stuff. Fast forward just to get to where he's at. Yeah. Well, I mean, mostly that has... We all have a little bit of that in us. That's actually false. I don't do that. I listen to you guys a lot. But when I'm being critical, I criticize myself more than you guys. Okay. Because you guys are perfect. Yeah. I hate listening to myself. Like when you finish these episodes and you go to record them or you edit them afterwards and you're hearing yourself and you're just like, God. I hate that. And then people comment back. They're like, you know, you have a great voice for podcasting them. It doesn't sound like that to me. No, you do. Very good. Sal has an awful one, but you have a really good one for sure. You have that like lean in effect. Hey there. I got you covered. Listen up. You know, you just brought something up about being in this connected world now. What are your thoughts on that? Like I, you know, sometimes I find myself, and I don't express this out loud to anybody else, but I find myself battling and struggling with this. Once you start putting out information and connecting to your audience and followers and listeners, it's like it becomes a necessity and that they want more and they want more and they want more. And sometimes I get frustrated because it's like, man, you know how much work it takes to provide all this free information. And you're giving me shit because I didn't get on my Instagram today or something. Absolutely. And my wife, she gets so upset with me sometimes because, you know, especially now that Instagram has initiated this stories. I mean, those are amazing, but I feel like I have to post something on there two or three times a day so that there's always something on my story. And like even on this trip, you know, I was sitting out there this morning. I was drinking coffee before I came over here. And it was just a chance for me to have 30 minutes to myself, which, you know, I consider myself an introvert. So I love going on these trips and every single day I'm hanging out with amazing people. I'm learning stuff. I'm recording these shows and we're sharing stuff. And I feel as though I have an obligation to document that and put that on Instagram stories and show every little thing. Like so, you know, yesterday I got to go, we did cold water immersion right under the Golden Gate Bridge and we were climbing in trees doing the move net stuff. And then, you know, we had lunch at Mission heirloom and you want to share all this with people. But then, you know, I'm sitting there today and I'm just like, what am I going to post today? What am I going to post? And it's like, am I, are you living your life to document it and share it? Or are you just documenting what you're actually doing? Well, I think it's this weird thing. There's two things. Once you feel obligated, it doesn't matter what you're doing. It loses, whatever it is, it loses its luster. There's actual term that psychologists use for this phenomenon. So let's say you love playing baseball. You're just like baseball is my favorite thing in the world. Then it becomes your job and now you're expected to play and it loses a lot of its luster. And some people actually start disliking the thing that they like very much because they have that sense of obligation. So a lot of that, I think, has to do with our own mind or our own perception. And so if we perceive that we're being, that we're obligated, then it's going to make it, you know, it's going to make it a negative thing. If we perceive it as I like doing this, then it makes it a positive thing. And the other thing is, I think it's real important, especially today, and this is all relationships, by the way, friendships, spouses, whatever, there's a certain level, there's a certain level of separation that you should have before, otherwise you become very codependent. And you can actually become codependent on this faceless audience that you have. And that's what a lot of people have that make that mistake when you become codependent on that audience to make you feel a certain way, make you feel happy, make you feel vindicated or worthy, then you have a problem. So it's important to keep, at least that's what I do. I keep a clear division and I present, you know, what I think is important for my brand and to my audience, but I also make sure to not share the fuck I remember that. Yeah, you want it to be authentic, too, because I mean, you can get into that trap where it's like, well, I have to post something today. I have to do it because it's like the business side of you is like, you know, this is, it's volume, you know, and it's frequency that's going to win. But at the same time, like if you don't really have anything that genuine to say or something to share, and you're just putting it out, like it's just going to turn out like to be this like, like just, you know, whatever, like just random idea that you had that like people aren't really going to connect with anyways. Yeah, you'd almost be better off putting nothing out that day. Right, exactly. And that's okay. Yeah. But to what you're saying, Sal, I think anytime we are seeking that external validation, you're removing your locus of control, you know, your happiness, your satisfaction with, you know, who you are or how you're living your life or what you're doing. You're voluntarily handing that over to somebody else and that's a very dangerous place to be for your own health, happiness, your long-term feeling of fulfillment and you know, are you really doing what you're supposed to be doing? And I mean, I think you guys know this, like you said, you guys have sort of found your superpower. You're going to do this regardless, you know, and I think as long as we're staying in that realm, then it's okay. Well, you know what's challenging about it is, so I'm reading this great book right now called Irresistible. It's got a picture of you on it? Yes. I was going to say me. A picture of your face on it? Well, I taped a picture of myself on it. Just my glutes. So the story or the book is about tech right now and the addictive properties and that it's actually, how much of it is engineered to be that way and how much science goes into that and that no one's really talking about it because really, you know, Facebook and Netflix and all these things, they're all less than 10 years old. So we really haven't seen the long-term effects and in the book they interview this psychologist, right? And she's sharing some of her experiences when she's interviewing somebody that's in like their mid-20s or younger and she always has to ask them, is this a person-to-person conversation or is this on text or is this on a social media platform because when they share their problems, their issues, the struggles, the fights, all these things are going on, nine times out of 10, it's not even really person-to-person and their brain doesn't disseminate the difference of that to them. It's the same thing as if they were getting in a physical altercation with somebody in real life and so they were going into, you know, a lot of us don't realize what this could lead to in the future as far as its addictive properties and how much they're engineering it. To the point, which is crazy to me, I didn't know this until this book, that Steve Jobs and many of the other tech moguls, do you know that don't even allow their kids to have an iPhone or an iPad? Is that a trip or what? And didn't want them to use it? Yeah, I mean, that should make us all think twice about, you know, living by these things. Right, that should be our first flag right out the gates is like, the dude who invented it says no, he says it's the greatest thing ever, but it doesn't get no. It's just like the Monsanto memes where you see the guy out in the field spraying crops and he's wearing, like, the bio hazmat suit that you see in, like, Contagion movies and shit. It's perfectly safe. Yeah, I don't want to breathe this stuff in. I don't want it touching my skin, but you go ahead and eat it. You'll be fine. Didn't they try and corner him to, like, drink it? Oh, I saw that on that interview. That was a French interview, I think. Oh, my God. I was like, yeah, drink it. I think, you know, when it comes to technology, first off, humans we are, we're dopamine and serotonin-seeking creatures. Those are the only two things that make us happy. Yeah, and we're constantly seeking them out. We're constantly seeking novelty. We're constantly seeking some kind of growth or learning or to satisfy some kind of either primal urge or to run away from some kind of pain. And technology is this like, it's like the cigarettes of, you know, communication, the sense that the reason, one of the reasons why cigarettes are so addictive is because you get a quick hit. You smoke it. It's gone. You need another one right away. And drugs that tend to do this tend to be more addictive than longer acting drugs. Like less people are addicted to like eating marijuana. More people are addicted to smoking marijuana for that particular reason. Tech hits you fast, hits you hard. You get that dopamine release. It's gone quickly. You're seeking more novelty. And so you seek more of it. And that's why it blew up so fast. It exploded out of nowhere. We just haven't really learned how to control it. We haven't learned how to control it because we've never been in this position before. And the best example I can think of, where you can see this playing out is pornography. Pornography online demonstrates this very, very clearly and very easily because it's a very clear, it's a very specific thing. And you're finding now. You hear that kids write that down. Yeah. Kids need Viagra. Yeah. You're finding now young men in their 20s and teens having erectile dysfunction because they're literally training their brains to react to this extreme novel situation and seeing this visual stimulation that changes with every click, with unlimited supply of stimulation, their brains are literally changing to model after this. And nowhere in all of human history did this ever exist unless you were maybe some kind of like king with access to like thousands of women at your disposal. You'd never experienced this. So it's ruining their sex lives. We've talked about how hard it used to be to see porn. Yeah, I mean like... Can I say something? I'm ashamed like walking back in the back of the video store, you know, going through the curtain. Dude, when I was 15 years old, you could literally trade like three dirty magazines for a bike. I'm not even exaggerating. Like kids would give you their fucking bicycle. Oh my God, that was the holy grail, the kid that had the magazine. You're like, oh dude. That's how valuable it was. You have all my candy. And now we have access to all of it. And tech kind of represents that. Tech represents that because of its ease of access. The fact that we can share so much. So all of a sudden everybody has a voice, including all the idiots out there. And it amplifies some of the ugly in humans. But it also has a power to amplify the good. It's also driven a lot of these amazing movements. Well, you use the analogy of cigarettes. The book actually gets into this and they actually claim it to be worse. Because with something like cigarettes, alcohol, you know, drugs, you have these side effects. Like someone who does a lot of drugs, like you can normally tell. Like you look at him like, okay, that guy does a lot of drugs, you know? Or they smoke a lot of cigarettes, right? Or he's always drunk. Like there's these side effects that the average person can see, which actually makes it more difficult to be addicted to it. And it'd be an issue because you actually kind of have to conceal it and hide it. Where with tech, it's become so normal and accepted that everybody uses it. And it's the norm that these people that are really, really addicted to it have no idea. Like in, in fact, the average person, like think about this. And I was actually going to do, I'm going to do a post on this on social media sometime this week because I thought this would be interesting to do with my followers, which is here's a test. If you had to guess how many times do you actually pick up your phone throughout the day? What would that number be? And then if you had to total up the total minutes and hours that you are on your phone surfing the web. So that's not talking on it. That's not listening to music. That's actually Instagram, Facebook, web browsing, YouTube, that type of stuff. How many minutes or hours do you think that would total up in the day? I just did a solo episode and we talked about five ways to increase happiness. And one of them was to ditch social media. So we may have seen different studies, but the study I saw came out in March of this year and the average person spends 116 minutes a day on social media. That's two hours. Four minutes shy of two hours a day. So that's 10 to 14 hours a week. And it came out to be over five years of your life on social media. And that was YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. All the main things. The last time I can think of where humans went through a fundamental shift where something that we desired so much became just super plentiful in our face all the time was with food. That's the last thing I can think of where for most of our human civilization, we're seeking out food and it's scarce. And look how that's messed us up. Right. But I think we're learning. You know, it's funny. I know we work in fitness, right? We're in the fitness industry and I know the statistics, right? Obesity, rampant, diabetes going through the roof, like people are getting sicker. But there's some interesting signs that are starting to pop up. Soda consumption has dropped for the past couple years, for the first time in a long time, in decades. People are starting to change their habits a little bit. I think it just takes time and in the grand scheme of things, it's actually a short period of time because the obesity epidemic really didn't kick into gear until about, I don't know, 60s to 70s. So I think we may start to see some shifts, but there's that period of learning that we have to go through that takes a few generations. And I'm hoping we don't go through that with technology because like food, the abundance of food solved starvation. It solved malnutrition. It solved a lot of these huge problems. It just presented new ones that we've never encountered before. Tech has solved a lot of problems. It's the greatest decentralizer of power that man has ever seen, which is a fucking great thing. Anytime power is centralized, you have problems. But there's some side effects that we're seeing a little bit now, some unintended side effects. And there's some side effects that we have no idea. I was going to say, I think there's more that we don't have any idea. Think for a second. When I was reading the book, I'm going, God, think about that. If these kids or these young adults that are in their early 20s that don't even know how to disseminate the difference between a conversation on social media versus an in-person one, what are their kids going to be like? And what's the communication and conversation going to be? Especially when VR makes its way to the mix. When those kids today become parents, like how are they going to raise their children? Right. Here's a question I have for you guys. So recently I was in Sweden for the Biohacker Summit. And one of the movements that I'm seeing in that community is an affinity towards implants, chips. So, I mean, we're well aware of the rise of wearable fitness trackers and things like that. So, you know, the next evolution of that may be implants. And to me, that's a very, very scary thing. Because I've always seen these sci-fi movies, you know, like Total Recall or Gattica and, you know, the powers that be are controlling society through these technological advances. And I always watch those movies and you're like, how does it get to that point? You know, are people, however these people being oppressed in that way, but with chips and with wearable technology, we're opting into this, to that state. And it's, you talk about decentralizing power, we may be opting into actually centralizing it and giving the powers a control. You could, I mean, look, I'll tell you what. That's like a conspiracy theory, like fear thing. It's actually, it is a very valid, very valid point. Look, if Facebook was a country... Got my aluminum tinfoil hat. If Facebook was a country, it'd be the most populated country on earth and it would have the most, by far, detailed information on every one of its citizens, period end of story, far more than any spy agency could ever do, any communist regime could ever do with its citizens, and it was all voluntary. That's how gangster face it is. But it was all voluntary. I mean, you're posting pictures, what you like, what you don't like, wearables and then implants and then eventually hybrids and then eventually probably not being an organic person. That is 100% gonna happen. It is our evolution. We've been doing it forever. The airplane, the car, your shoes, your shirt, a dishwasher, all these things are technology that did that. I mean, we can't fly. We developed something that made us fly. We get in it and it becomes a part of us and now we're flying through the air. Your car does that. The headphones that you have on your head right now amplify your ability to listen to sound in your head. It's a 100% natural progression of mankind to do that. Now, is it scary in the sense that it's an increase the ability of one person to influence or control us? Perhaps it could also be the opposite. If you look in the past, when information was less available, so let's say during the Middle Ages when the church ran everything and they were the disseminators of information. They controlled information. You wanna learn something? That's where you went. You didn't know how to read. They'll read it for you. It was a lot worse. When we had access to information ourselves, I mean, when books were first printed, that was actually one of the things that the church was said against books. I was like, oh, who's gonna write these books? They're gonna control your mind. They're gonna tell you what to do and it's not good. Yeah, we can't have people thinking for themselves. That's right. So I think it's a valid concern, but it still has never played itself out that way. I think what's always happened is every time we see an advancement that changes what it means to be human, the current generation is scared. There'll always be a counterculture and then it'll always be about balance and self-control, right? Even on the analogy you just gave of the car, the headphones, the airplane, if you spent your whole life always in an airplane and you never touched the ground, you'd probably be very disconnected from society and what the world was like and it would probably be unhealthy. If you always walked around with headphones and you only heard sound amplified, then if you ever tried to take them off and have a real conversation, it would affect that. Well, that's the difference. You're talking about implants. How do you turn off access to you? Versus we've always had the ability to opt out of something. Or can you? Maybe your implant has on and off switch. You'd be like the James Bond character taking it out with a knife. Maybe it's Bluetooth to your computer, just like my Fitbit is and I can turn the access on or off. Here's the bottom line. Let's say there's an implant right now invented. You could buy it for $1.99. You put it on and now you have telescopic vision. You can see a fucking telescope. How many people would say no to that? Not very many at all. There's this question posed in scientific philosophy. It's been around for a long time, but it's becoming more and more reality. At what point do you become more machine than human? Is it when you're 50% machine, 51% machine, when your brain starts to get augmented, what does it mean to be human? These are all questions that I think philosophers have been posing for ever and I don't think we'll ever really have the answer and it definitely isn't going to slow down. There's no way in hell. To bring it all back full circle, you said the printed book was a revolution of sorts at that time and allowed people to hear things that they weren't hearing from orthodoxy. Podcasting is doing that now. You talk about people, are we more weird now? No, you just have more voices where people are able to share what is in their head or what's going on or what information needs to be disseminated. If you really pay attention, we are seeing, when I say the greatest decentralizer of power, I mean it. We've already seen industries that were untouchable, that ran shit, be completely turned upside down. Uber, Air BnB. Music. Look at music. Do you know that 30, 40 years ago? Music ran the world. You go to third world countries, they knew who Michael Jackson and Madonna was. It was one of our number one exports, it still is, but the music industry could not stop it. They had all the money and all the power in the world. They could not and they still cannot stop people sharing music for free. In fact, they had to join them rather than fight them because they would have lost. Movies now and Hollywood is encountering that same. These are hugely powerful industries, probably two of the most powerful industries in the world. You're seeing that with media now. Look at news networks. You know that a record number of Americans do not trust mainstream media anymore and their numbers are dropping. I think CNN just fired like three or four of their top editors or whatever because of some story came out and everybody's saying fake news. It's a war of media and don't think for a second that that war of media isn't caused by the availability to just share information. Anybody with a phone is a journalist all of a sudden. Well, they're getting all their leads from Twitter anyways, right? I think it's a good thing. Have you watched like news today? It was so crazy. Somewhere we were traveling and news came on. I'd never watched news. And I was like, holy shit, like half of the news was reporting on tweets. That's fucking crazy. That's true, man. Just five years ago, nobody was even tweeting and now half the news is centered around what's trending on Twitter right now and it's like, whoa, that's fucking and it makes sense why they're doing it because they got to, right? Because if they're not, it's going to surpass it. Like people want to know. Would I say if you can't join them, beat them? I mean, if you can't beat them, join them, sorry. Yeah, the other one. That's where people are going. They're going on Twitter. They're going on social media. You can get online and see you don't have to wait for the USA Today to come out tomorrow to find out what's happening now. I'm going to talk a little bit of this on our show. Do you have practices that you put in place to try and keep that balance? Assuming you're probably like our age so you were probably before and after it. Yeah, I'm 33. I remember to your point about porn earlier, I remember in elementary school we had recycling bins outside the elementary school and one day a friend of mine and I, we took the newspapers or the magazines out of the classroom and we found dirty magazines in the recycling bin and we actually got inside, like, you know, those like, I mean, it's like a 20 foot long thing. The big green ones. Yeah, like we got inside there and we were looking at it. Oh, it was like you found gold. Yeah, you're like, I mean, you're in like fourth, fifth grade, like you'd never seen this stuff before. Chitties, whoa. Yeah. So, I mean, I remember dial-up internet, you know, somebody calls and you get kicked off the internet and you're like, damn it, mom, I'm on the internet. You know, and then when Instant Messenger came out you can see the same thing happening with fitness. The fitness industry is now getting completely turned upside down. We're seeing it in the small world of like bodybuilding and aesthetics. Like a few years ago, wasn't that long ago, you'd go to these huge fitness conventions and the top competing bodybuilders had these long lines, you know, an hour, two hours long to get a signature and a picture with Ronnie Coleman or whatever. Not anymore. The people with the long lines now are the Instagram stars. The social media stars, you know. And it's not even an autograph. It's let me get a selfie with you so I can post it on social media. That's right. And now it's the people who are kind of spreading the new information for fitness are people like us, people on podcasts and people social media. And I think that's actually, I think it's a good thing. I've heard more good information, although there's still tons of crap information. I've heard more good information today than I did before. Yeah, but I wonder sometimes too, is that because you see lots of minivans because you drive a minivan now? No, that's interesting. Is it because this is the topics we talk about? I don't know, dude. We connect with other like-minded individuals. So we all have these similar ideologies so it sounds like we see it all the time but really the same amount of minivans have been sold. Maybe, but I picked up, when you pick up a magazine like Flex Magazine and there's an entire article on intermittent fasting, like you know that there's an impact that's being made right now. Bodybuilding.com is writing articles on this kind of stuff. They would never have touched fasting. Fasting means you don't take protein powders. Why the hell would they ever promote that? Yeah, to hear a bodybuilding mag talk about not, you might not have to eat protein every three hours. I mean, that's a huge paradigm shift in that world. Very, very true. When did you learn that one? Because you were in the strength, in the strength, right? You had a gym, you said. Yeah, I started my gym in 2012. My degree is actually food science and human nutrition. Oh, awesome. And I changed majors when I was in college. It would have been 2006 when I changed majors and that was my major. So for me, I did more self-education outside of the classroom than I did in the classroom even though that is my classroom degree. So when you take a nutrition course or the curriculum is sponsored, paid for by big food. So I'm in my classroom and half of the curriculum is every science imaginable, biochem and molecular biology and all this stuff. And you learn physiology, you learn metabolism and then you go to your nutrition class and it's, hey, if somebody's diabetic, we're going to reduce their total carbohydrate intake from 60% down to 50% and that's going to fix everything. And I'm the guy in the back of the class and you know, no, that doesn't work. I'm the only male in my family who's not diabetic. I've got personal experience with this. I've read about it on my own. I've educated myself. We just took all these science classes last semester. I know that's not how the body works. You've got this dysfunction in carbohydrate metabolism. Why are you still going to keep that as 50% of their intake? So for me, I have always asked questions. I want to understand how systems work and men's health was like, my intro into lifting weights, you know, in high school, I saw that, but I never wanted to be the guy that had to rely on them telling me how to train. So I've always sort of wanted to understand those systems and in college, like I said, I did all that self-education and I'm reading at the time, TNation was, I read every article on TNation between like 2004 and 2010 and Elite Fitness and you know, all these places that we could go back then before podcasting to get that information. And I actually started, I've tried every version of intermittent fasting. I've just always gravitated towards that. It works for me. So I actually started that really, really early on. I remember, I think it was the TNT diet by Jeff Volick way back in the day. That was, and even the precursor to that was the anabolic diet. And I started that when I was still in college, in 2006, 2007. Well, it's great to be that open-minded to do that. I've always seen myself as an experiment. Like I want to touch everything and experience it and see, okay, does this work for me? Well, you know, you're telling your story and two things really pop up for me that kind of really anger me about our Western medicine ways. Before I go into them, though, I will say that Western medicine is a huge revolution in health and if you had to pick one. Yeah, if you're in a trauma situation, there's no better place to be. No, and it's brought in us incredible advancements and the scientific method is part of that. But, you know, we talk about the strengths of Western medicine. It's also become some of its weaknesses and what I mean by that is we become so specialized in particular study, like nutrition or biology or chemistry that we learn these topics very, very deep but then we don't understand how they all communicate with each other. So you lose that holistic ability. You know, when you learn nutrition, how much of the nutrition did you learn? How much of it came from understanding human evolution and learning how humans ate as we evolved? Probably zero. In the classroom? Yes, you're correct. But on my own, I mean, I remember like Lauren Courdain was like the paleo guy before paleo was a hashtag, you know, before it was a popular thing. And I, like I said, I always sort of gravitated towards that because I understood what I learned in science class and I think, I don't know how many people have been down that road and have nutrition degrees where there's such a stark contrast between what you learn in science versus... Like human physiology versus nutrition, right? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I'm not sure what you guys studied in school, but I mean, you have like the core classes that you have to take and then there's like the stuff that's relevant to your major. And, you know, in food science and human nutrition, we had, you know, you had to learn food labeling and food safety and, you know, then you have all these like nutrition and so we had a medical nutrition therapy. That was a two semester course and you have these specific nutrition courses. And it's those courses, it's that program that's paid for by, you know, General Mills and, you know, all that shit. Craft. And the stuff that you're taught in there just doesn't match what you learned in physiology or biochemistry. Have you seen, so obviously, I'm sure you saw all over social media the whole coconut oil is bad for you and then there's that documentary that people are messaging us on. With the health. With the health, I don't know if you saw that. Somebody actually texted me that and asked me a question about it and I watched the trailer for it and... That's probably enough for the trailer. Yeah, yeah, so at least that's all I would have watched. We forced ourselves to watch it. So when you guys watch that, did you see that it's by the same people who did Calspiracy? Yeah, yeah. And you know who the, like, the funding behind Calspiracy was? It's Leonardo DiCaprio. Oh, okay. And he is, I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's him or if it's everybody behind it, but they're pushing. There's a vegetarian or vegan bias. To both of those. Of course. To both of those movies. And when Calspiracy came out, I actually wrote a really, really big post about it and it was well received. But basically, you know, they're ignoring, you know, they're just looking at factory farming and saying that that's a problem. Well, we all know that. Yeah. Even meat-eaters, you know, who want to eat grass-fed and high-quality food, you know, we're against factory farming and all of the arguments that they make about how that's a broken system are completely valid. But they ignore, because of that vegetarian bias, they ignore the fact that there could be a solution. There is a solution. You know, we can sustainably, even regeneratively, farm, feed the earth. I mean, I've interviewed Joe Salton twice, been to his farm, I visited it and I know he's just one of the people doing these things. We can, we already have enough food on the planet to feed everybody. We do. It's a huge myth. It's not a production problem. It's a distribution problem. 100%. And the best way to, that's so far that we have found, is open markets. Let markets be open and the signals become very accurate and things become very efficient and people get more food. We have plenty of food. In fact, we produce way more than we need. Americans throw more food away than some countries eat. Yeah. And there's, I forget the, I love John Oliver. I don't know if you guys watch him tonight, but he did an episode on the amount of food waste just in the state of California alone. It's ridiculous. I don't remember the number, but like you said, it's more than some countries eat. Greater efficiency and distribution is what's important. Market systems seem to be, or not seem, definitely are the best. You have other centralized systems. Soviet Union, for example, had thousands and thousands and thousands of acres of wheat that would go rotten because they didn't have accurate, you know, market signals to know where to send them where and how much they should cost and all that stuff. But it is a distribution problem. It is getting solved as societies become freer with their markets. You're finding that they're shifting from food scarcity to overabundance. And then they ran into, you know, western problems like obesity, of course. But, you know, what the health goes so much further than calispiracy. What the health literally tries to make the case that first of all, all animal products are poison, that if you eat animal products, you're racist. I'm not making that up. By the way, that was in there. Yeah. That it's horrible for everything from the environment to, you know, causing cancer. It is a propaganda piece by people who are vegans and what people need to understand about vegans, which by the way, I have nothing wrong with, I have no issues with vegans whatsoever. And if you're a vegan for moral reasons, I respect you. But you also got to understand the moral reasoning behind veganism with vegans and that is that they firmly believe that killing animals is, many of them believe it's equivalent to killing a human. And so if you put yourself in their mindset, you are going to do everything you possibly can, including spread propaganda that may be false to get people to stop killing animals. And that's what they did. It's really vegan propaganda. It's really there, you know, they're really trying hard to just by all means necessary reduce the amount of meat that people eat. And so it's completely false. So a lot of the stuff that they say is false. It's really unfortunate that the bias takes that story where it takes it because a lot of the information in there is really good information that people need to know. That's the problem is you get these documentaries and they pluck the information. It's like, yeah, there's some truth to that, you know, but the spin you just put on it, it's fucking backwards. Right, right. So how do you guys help your listeners disseminate, you know, what's valuable there and how do you see through that conversation? It is a constant check. We constantly check ourselves. When we first started Mind Pump, we set the precedence that we would be as open, honest as possible and that we were, that if we made a mistake or if we gave advice that was wrong and we found out later that we would come out and we would call ourselves out before anybody else could. Actually, we pride ourselves in doing that. What's the biggest thing that you've had to call yourselves out on so far? Pre-workout supplements. We actually wrote a guide initially on how to make your own pre-workout supplement because at the time I looked at pre-workout supplements and I saw the ingredients and what they were supposed to do and I'm like, this is overpriced and you can buy all these, what's effective individually and make your own pre-workout and it's not gonna taste good but who cares, you're saving money and it's, and then when we dive deeper, we realize that pre-workout supplement, you take out the caffeine and for the most part, you know, it's bullshit. It doesn't do anything for just a stimulant. It's a flavorful stimulant drink and that's why people like them and then there's a lot of detriments. It causes a stress response in the body which is not conducive to building muscle. It causes down-regulation of receptors in the brain and so you end up getting this tolerance and this almost addictive properties of some of these things and of course they're loaded with all this coloring and artificial flavor and all those stuff. So we actually came out and like, hey, don't take a pre-workout. If you want a little stimmy drink, some coffee before you work out and you're set, completely different from some of our early episodes where we talked about the benefits of taking arginine and citrulline and all these other things that we said were good. Well, we've also had to do things like, which is a little bit different than what you're talking about but we've had to openly discuss this on air. After we had DOM last year, we all decided to go ketogenic. DOM to Augustino? Yeah. And so we thought, okay, this will be cool and I was a major carb eater so I was like, I mean, when I compete, I'm doing four 600 grams of carbs every day and I was totally fine on that. I've never been someone really, really overweight and I've always been able to control that, keep myself in a pretty lean condition and eat a ton of carbohydrates. I love carbohydrates. Why would I ever want to get rid of carbohydrates? I don't care about this. I don't care about the health benefits. I'm fine. Why would I do that? But I thought, well, that's not being very open minded and I would love to go through the process and after talking to DOM and stuff, I thought, you know what? Like, let's do this. Let's go through it. Let's commit to it and then I can talk about it afterwards on the show. Well, we all did and just I had some, all of us had just an amazing response that we got a chance to share and talk about. And after that, everybody started doing it. All of our followers, everyone who was on our forum started doing the ketogenic diet. And then really quick, it went from us never really even talking about it to like looking like it was the staple diet for the mind pump. And, you know, we'd start to get people in boxing us saying like, oh, I'm just, I'm getting like the flu from it and I feel awful. They're like, well, stop doing it. You know, like it's not for you. We never said it was for everybody. So I remember having to come out and be like, listen, I just want you guys to know that like, just because we say there's, here's the positive benefits that we have noticed and we're sharing this information from you and sharing the science that supports what's going on. It doesn't mean that it's for everybody to do it. It's that, listen, there's some health benefits to doing this. And in fact, like we had Dr. McCullough, it's not the official diet of mind pump. Yeah, it's not. And in fact, I don't eat ketogenic. Sal eats like a modified version that Justin doesn't eat that way at all. But we do have to, we have to have these checks and balances when we share things because even if we, we don't attach ourselves to anything. In fact, we pride ourselves on not being put in a box. We still, if we are positive about something, it's people want to put you there. Yeah. And even terminology too. We've had to kind of check ourselves. Like I remember even with self-mile fascial release, which is like most trainers are pretty familiar with that term and like how we describe like foam rolling and all the benefits of that. And just listen to people like Dr. Andrew Spina and like talk about my fascial release and what it actually takes to release, you know. So we just had to like come back and kind of revisit that and like kind of explain like what we've learned. And, you know, there's still benefit, but actually, you know, here's actually ways to apply it. And this is where it may fit in your workout. And so anyway, stuff like that, we always tend to revisit, especially if we get new information that, you know, is counter to what we've been talking about. We're open to that. But one of the most, one of the best things you can do when you're an open-minded individual or you wanna grow, and I'm sure you do this as well, is try to find evidence for the contrary. So if I believe that, you know, protein is really good for me and I need to eat, you know, close to a gram per pound of body weight to build muscle and I want, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go and search for the contrary. I'm gonna search for evidence of the contrary. And sometimes you'll find that the evidence is bad, is poor and you're right all along. And that's cool, but it's not as awesome as actually figuring out that you were wrong. That's fucking awesome. It's so great to learn and be like, oh, wait a minute, this is something that I was wrong on. And the more often that happens, the more likely you are to start questioning everything and learning more and being more open. One of the first things that I questioned, probably the first thing that I really questioned in my fitness career, and I've been professionally in fitness now for 20 years. Eating multiple meals a day. No, actually that was later on. No, that was later on. One of the first things that I visited was, so my goal was always building muscle. I ran gyms, loved training clients, loved managing health clubs, but my personal goals was always build muscle. I grew up very skinny, so I was insecure about my body, so it was always about being muscular and getting as muscular as I possibly could. And all the information that you read or read about, especially at the time, in terms of training, was body part split. This is how body builders train. Today's chest, tomorrow's back, the next day's shoulders, and so on. And you do your 12 to 20 sets per body part, and that's just the way you train if you want to build muscle, and that's the way I always had trained. And training any of the way was just not nearly as effective. So it was sold in my head. When I owned my personal training studio, and as I'm training clients, every once in a while, in that common, most clients just want overall health and fitness. Every once in a while, you get someone who's like, I just want to build muscle. And I had a couple of people like that. I just want to build muscle, but I can only afford, you know, three days a week with you or whatever. And so a couple of times, I would put them on kind of these full-body routines, and the results were just incredible. So I took my own training, and I would read old bodybuilders' routines, and I found that a lot of old-time bodybuilders did these different splits where they would hit each body part twice a week instead of once a week. And so I started playing with that, and I noticed that I needed to reduce the intensity sometimes to be able to do that, but I got an incredible aesthetic shape as a result of that. So I'm like, oh, wow, this is the way I need to train from now on. But then I went deeper. I started questioning everything, and I went deeper, and I started looking at the strength training routines of strength athletes and bodybuilders pre-steroids, pre-protein powder, pre-creatine. And first off, when you read about some of these people, some of these men, their feats of strength were legendary. Some of them photographed legit, like they weren't bullshitted. They looked incredible. No fake weights. You look at pictures of these people and... I mean, just in bodybuilding, look at what Sandow looked like. I mean, he's the guy on the trophy if you're Mr. Olympia. That's right. And he was so strong and did some incredible things and looked incredible, and you look at their routines, and none of them were body part splits, not a single one. All of them trained more frequently. They all trained with kind of a full body approach. In other words, they would do full body, like three days a week or four days a week. And that kind of opened my mind a little bit. And then I looked at strength athletes, and I said, okay, let's look at the top. Exactly. Let's look at the top strength athletes. Let's look at Olympic lifters. Let's look at power lifters. All of them trained with more frequency. So I switched my split routine... And they trained movements, not body parts. Right. So I trained... I switched my routine out and I stopped doing a body part split. And this was the beginning of how I created the first MAPS program, which is the program that we sell on Mind Pump. And so I switched out my routine for a basic full body routine. I got stronger within the first three workouts. I started building muscle on a frame that I had been working out for years and thought I had hit my limit. And little by little, I started changing and modifying my routine, and now it's more of this kind of what we call a MAPS methodology. But that was my first foray into questioning what I had always thought was the truth and common knowledge. And now I find that to build muscle for most people, an approach that's more of a full body approach or an approach that utilizes more frequency of training is far more effective. And now we actually have science to support that. We actually see now that when you lift weights, you get this protein synthesis signal, which is telling your body to repair and build, but it lasts for 48, 72 hours. It drops after that even if you're still sore. And so it makes sense to work out your body again albeit with less intensity, but to keep that signal loud. So you just said at the beginning of that to look for science that proves the contrary. Yes. So given what you just said, how would you reconcile something like body by science? Are you familiar with that? No, I'm not. Explain. I think it's Doug McGuff. Okay. But it's basically a theory where, and he's written a book and a lot of people adhere to it. A lot of the people, we were talking before we sat down and recorded about ARX and minimum effective dose, which I'd love to get into with you guys, but the premise of body by science is once or twice a week, maybe once every six or seven days, and you do extremely high intensity, like a full body circuit, but it's only like four moves. I think it's like a hit workout. Yeah, it's like, and I've never actually practiced it, so I don't know, but I think it was like an overhead press, like a lap pull down, a squat, and something else, but it's usually done like on machines, like a lap pull down or a leg press, and you're going to extreme muscle failure. You're going to like, it's like a 10 second negative, maybe an explosive concentric. I forget the exact prediction. And he's only training one time a week? Once, it's minimum. It's like once or twice a week. You only do one set. Well, I could definitely argue and debate that for the good, for overall health, but not for muscle build, not for hypertrophy. That's not a new, by the way, that's not a new concept. Arthur Jones pioneered. The old Nautilus. Yeah, the concept that, you know, the signal that you, you really want to hit to, or at least the way you send the muscle building signal is you hit momentary muscular failure. And from that point, the muscle building signal has been sent and you want to rest and allow that signal to do its work and do its job. And that was the theory. And there's some, there's some benefit to that, or at least there is some evidence to show that it can work sometimes, but definitely not all the time and definitely not as effective as sending a more frequent signal. Here's an example, and you can, listeners can test this out on themselves. If that's the truth, if that's really how things work, go hit your legs really fucking hard on Monday. I mean, go beat them up and go to failure on four exercises for your legs. Get yourself really sore and then dedicate the next six days to bed rest. Yeah, lay on your bed. Lay in bed. Don't move. Don't damage anything. Let everything just rest and recover. Yeah. Go back and do that work out again and I'll guarantee you that you'll be weaker. Yeah. I'll guarantee you that you lost muscle that you've atrophied. There's no way you're gaining strength off of that work out. No, it's all about, it's all about which signal is working. And yes, an intense workout sends a loud signal, but when you add up a lot of small signals, those can overpower that loud signal. And what happens when you train less frequently, like he's talking about, is he's relying heavily on intensity. And by the way, intensity doesn't just affect muscle. If it was just muscle, we wouldn't have a problem. It also affects your central nervous system. And if your central nervous system is fried, and if it's taking time for your central nervous system to recover, your muscles don't mean shit. I mean, I've used this analogy a million times. Your muscles are like speakers and they don't produce sound without a good amplifier. The amplifier is like your central nervous system. You could have the best speakers in the world, but if your CNS is fucked, you talk about the biggest paradigm shift for you. That was for me. Coming from the athletic world where every single workout is a max out effort workout. And intensity is the holy grail of all your pursuits. And so for me to then step outside of that and realize, I wasn't in athletics and I wasn't under that same protocol anymore, but I had to stay in shape and I had to try and keep my lifts consistent. And so just to be motivated, I would go some days a little less intensity and I'm just working on movements and skills and then realizing how much that charged me going into another intensified day and then applying three days of intensity versus five, six days of intensity and how much better my body performed. And then we dive deeper and I met Sal and we got into more of what he kind of coined as the trigger session concept where we're going through those same movements but we're going out a load of moderate type intensity and it's just... Like band work or body work. Exactly. And so now my body is fully recovered and I'm going through these same movements and the blood flow and oxygen is helping me to recover. So it's a totally different mindset because when you're in the gym, you want to kill it and that's the athletic mindset that you have. And then once I can kind of step out of that and stop two reps short of complete failure, how much more effective and my lifts would go up, my strength went up, my PRs went up. Don't just take our word for it, by the way. This has been studied. So they've already done studies on this and shown that if you do 21 sets in one workout versus seven sets for three workouts, the three workout will build more muscle and be more effective. Here's what you want to understand. The three main variables that you manipulate with resistance training or your frequency of training, the intensity and the volume. And there's volume per workout and then total volume, right? If you neglect one of those, you have to really push the other two. If you neglect two of them, you have to really push one of them. And pushing any one of those variables too hard will result in lower or worse results. So if I took out intensity and I just did frequency and I worked out three times a day, I would build less muscle as well. What he's talking about, what you just referred to, this one super intense once a week workout is eliminating frequency or at least negating the hell out of it. Volume is going to be affected as well, total volume at least, because you're only doing one workout. So you're relying super, super hard on one variable, which is intensity. And that means it's easier to mess up. I mean, you have one workout a week to get it right. If you don't have a perfect day, if something happened, if you think you're using machines too, think about how you could injure yourself if that's your mentality and you're not hitting those movements all throughout the week. Speaking of machines and high intensity, low frequency, I would love to hear you guys' thoughts on sort of the minimum effective dose movement that you're seeing in people that may not be strength athletes like we are. The four of us are always going to lift. That's what we like to do. Not everybody fits that. So you see a lot of people talking now about how they're getting the benefits of all the health benefits of working out but only working out for an hour a month. I have two thoughts on that. I see the positive side because right now the average American steps less than four to six thousand steps a day. That's not even walking for fucking 60 minutes. And we know that anything under seven increases mortality, all calls mortality. So if you have a fitness tracker and you get to 10,000 steps a day, that doesn't mean you're healthy. It just means you're not at risk to die sooner. Right. There you go. Right. So I feel like because that we are going so far, so far backwards so fast in the grand scheme of moving and exercising that someone doing even something that bare minimum, I feel like, fuck, you know, it's a step in the right direction at least. Right. But I think there's there's there's so much more benefits to moving more frequently with less intensity than doing something super intense one one day like Sal goes back to the central nervous system. But I mean, everything from blood flow and oxygen and nutrients getting to the body and just being connected to your muscles. I mean, one of the things that was mind blowing for me getting getting older now at 36 years old. And when I was in my early 20s, even as a trainer, I never did any mobility work. I never did any corrective stuff. Sure, I told my clients to do it some of that because they were old and they complained of aches and pains. But I never applied it. I really never did until I had to. And then I then it like dawned on me like, holy shit, like what's really happening here. And we we really just kind of graze over it. We talk about like aches and pains and things like that. It's like, oh, I've got a bad shoulder. Oh, I've got a bad knees. Oh, I've got bad. But wait a second. How did it get there? And why did it get there? And a lot of it is a loss of connection. We lose connection to our own body. That's fucking nuts. And I was blown away just this last year or two when I had Dr. Brink, who's a good friend of ours, movement specialist, and I had him break me down and pick me apart where he sees and he just ate me alive on my feet. He's just like, dude, you have no connection to your feet whatsoever. What's crazy is that we lose that connection to our body, to our ability to move. And I mean, you only get one body. Like this is it. This is the vessel that takes you through everything that you're going to do. Like, how do we, how does that happen? The brain develops through necessary use in practice. So you take a child. You never speak a word to them. Let them grow up, never talking. Once they reach a certain age, you can teach them language, but they'll never be able to speak normally. As children, we put shoes on. We're taught to sit down. We're taught to do certain things. A lot of these things aren't going to, we're not going to get like super, super good, but we can make improvements. But a lot of the damage, unfortunately, when we talk about feet, Adam's talking about feet, like you can work on your feet all you want. You ain't going to have the connectivity to your feet that a hunter-gatherer maybe had because we've been in shoes for a whole lives. But I have a great analogy for you in regards to, you know, what you're talking about with this minimum effective dose. First off, before I get into my analogy, minimum effective dose changes all the time. It's very individual. Because you'll adapt to that quickly. If you're super inactive and you're on the couch all day long, the minimum effective dose to get your body to change in the positive is very little. It's like a 20-minute walk every day. The minimum effective dose for me, who's active pretty regularly, is a lot higher. So that changes all the time. So that's number one. But when we talk about the systems of adaptation and make no mistake, getting stronger, burning body fat, improving performance and mobility are all systems of adaptation. Your body is adapting to stressors. Believe me, your body needs a reason to add calorie-expensive muscle to its body. It's not gonna do it for no reason. So these are all adaptation signals. Now, if we look at other systems of adaptation of the body, they all have this similar way of working. Let's use your skin, for example. Your skin adapts to the sun. And the way it adapts to the sun to protect itself from the damage that the sun can produce is it gets darker, you get a tan. So if you take an individual and you want them to get a good tan, to build a nice, even tan, what's more effective? One super high-intensity sunburn day, you know, every other week? Or a little bit of exposure every single day. Which one's gonna give you... Turn into bacon. I've never heard that particular analogy, but the one I've always used was, like, so take Tiger Woods or any golfer, you can only hit 700 golf balls a week. Are you gonna hit 700 on Monday and then not come back until the next Monday? Or are you gonna hit 100 a day every single day? You know, you're... Especially, like, from a skill standpoint, because you never reach fatigue, you never reach compromise muscle movement. You're more focused on the integrity of that movement and that nervous system connection than... Swing 699 is gonna be awful. What are you learning? You're learning bad recruitment rights. And then you can take it a step further and we break it all the way down to the learning curve from the brain side. Like, think of learning a language. If you only had 700 hours to learn a language, would you do it over the course of... Or one day, you know? I am so lucky to be able to have met a memory grand champion, Matthias Ribbing. And if you guys want to go on your show, I will connect you to him. He would be a fascinating person for you guys to have. But when I was in Sweden, we had dinner one night and he was explaining to my wife and I how we could learn a language faster. And he absolutely despises all of the technology that's available to us to learn a language now because he understands how the brain works. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier. You understand the system and then you can apply that to whatever it is that you're trying to do. But our visual memory is so much stronger than verbal or language memory. It goes back to just how we're wired. It's how our brain works. It's the first thing we probably saw things before we ever learned how to talk, right? Yeah. And so he says you look up any language you want to learn. You look up the 1,000 or 2,000 most commonly used words in that language. And then for however many days it takes, you break it down into chunks of 50 and every single night you attach an image to those words. Oh, shit. And he can explain like the process of using images to remember things. Last year at PaleoFX, he's Swedish. So English is like his third or fourth language. And he memorized the Austin newspaper in a non-native language in like five minutes and then came on the podcast and was just reciting things back because he's attaching words to images. That's crazy. So like we wanted to learn Spanish. So you just Google 1,000 most common words in Spanish and then the first 50, it's all like L and Lose. Biblioteca. Yeah. You attach those. So like, okay, Biblioteca is library. You would imagine like a giant book and you can remember a book much more easily than you can remember the word. But if you do 50 words like that every single night, in a week you're at what was it? 350. 350 words. So you hit, it takes you like three weeks to learn the first. Wow. That's even more effective than singing it right off. But then you, once you learn the words, it's much more easy to learn how to use them in context and converse because you understand them and you can watch something in Spanish, watch Narcos in Spanish and you can learn or have these conversations and you learn. But that completely matches what you're saying about frequency, small doses of exposure. You never get tired. You are staying on point. You're focused. It's better quality. I'll tell you, because if you're looking, of course, if you're trying to maximize muscle growth or maximize performance, there's a way you train. And if you're looking for longevity and just optimum health, there's a, the principles are similar, but it's different, right? If you look at studies of the world's longest living people, you know, they call them the, these areas of blue zones, blue zones in the world. And they've done these studies and there was one huge one done, I think National Geographic funded it. They found less things in common than they thought they would. They thought they'd find some silver bullets, but they didn't. But there were certain things that they did find in common and none of it was a super high intensity exercise. It was daily purposeful activity. So it was, you know, the old man is 85 years old every day, gets out, goes on his little boat, rose out in the ocean and goes fishing or the woman who climbs up the mountain to collect berries or to milk or goats or whatever. It was daily purposeful activity. So going for a walk, literally, if you're just looking for a health and longevity, it's a very easy thing to do is walk everywhere, every single day. That alone will make a huge difference. Now, if you want to add a strength component to it, which I think is hugely underrated, I do believe 100%, I'll make this argument all day long, that strength training is the answer to aging more than anything else. It combats all of the things that happen with age from all the way down to a cellular or hormonal level all the way up to, you know, just mobility and strength. You know, do some strength training every day. It doesn't have to be tons. You could pick two or three exercises. You can work your way up to higher intensity, but when you first start, just do the movements, feel a little bit of a burn, feel what's going on, get used to the movements. Do a little bit every day and you'll get tremendous benefit from doing that. Now, if you want to take it a step further and you want to be more advanced and build more muscle and whatever, then there's a little bit of a different approach. So, when you said, and I completely agree with you, but I'm just looking at the trends and what I'm seeing happening in the world, a lot of the people who are the biggest proponents of the high intensity, minimum workout time are people who are chasing immortality, anti-aging longevity. And it doesn't match to the science, which is fascinating to me because everything else they do is so grounded in science. Well, what it does is it appeals quite a bit to the mentality of someone who considers themselves to be a biohacker or somebody who wants to learn how to optimize, right? So, if you look at the mentality, it's all based around doing the minimum. They're freeing their time up for all these other things they're incorporating. Yeah, you're hacking it, right? You're hacking it. So, oh, I only work out one hour a month or whatever. So, I've hacked that particular thing. Well, I feel like that. The problem is it doesn't work. I think that's the argument where I said, where I said there's two sides to it, right? I feel like you could debate that if it's better than no workout and if I was only going to do the bare minimum of 20 minutes, what would it look like? And that's probably what it would look like. Super intense, 20 minutes. I mean, if that was like all I got, but I mean, you can't compare it to, you know, three hours spread out over three. It's just not even comparable. But if you're somebody who doesn't even want to exercise, but you recognize, okay, there's health benefits to it. I'm too busy doing all the other bio hacks, like sticking things in my ears, my nose, and taking weird pills and shit like that that, okay, I don't have a lot of time for exercise. What it's the least I have to do to get some benefits from it. Okay, this is the science supports doing this one. But not over, you know, three days a week of one hour of walking and doing other movements. I just, you know, it's, I think that's, I think that's the argument, right? Is that where they're trying to come from? Yeah. No, yeah, it just doesn't work that way. But from a muscle building perspective, that signal dies off pretty quickly. Centra nervous system takes a little longer to heal. If it's more than what you're currently doing, you'll see some change, but you'll quickly, quickly halt. I think the appeal of it, just like when Arthur Jones came out with his, you know, one set to failure, per body part type deal, the appeal is, I don't have to work out that much. And it sounds different. It sounds opposing. And anytime, I mean, here's a little trick if you want to sell a lot of anything. It's always less is more. Yeah, if you want to sell a lot of anything, the opposite of what everyone else, what else is saying. Five minute abs. Yeah. And you'll see all of a sudden people are like, oh, shit, that's the answer. You know, like, you know, so carbs are bad. You know, that got real popular because fat was bad for so long and whatever. Or people always want to hear what's the least, right? Yeah. I think that's what it is. What's the fastest, what's the least I got to do to get there? Nobody wants to hear. That's what has the appeal. Everybody's trying to avoid the labor intensive stuff or like, look at that as like, arduous. Like I'm already working really hard at my job. Why do I need to work at, you know, my body and improve my body? Like that's just another job like I'm adding to the mix. In reality, what you have to understand when it comes to optimizing your life is not a time, you don't want to look at things that necessarily say time spent is time wasted or whatever. You want to look at the return on that particular time. So I'll give you an example. At ROI. Yeah, I'll give you an example like meditation. Meditation for me was, it still is rather difficult to do regularly, but it was impossible before because in my mind, I'm sitting there for 30 minutes and I'm not doing anything. When I could be reading, I could be working out, I could be working, I could be doing something else. Like I'm just sitting there like, and for what? What's the big deal? If I want to go to bed tonight, I'll sleep and then I'll calm you down type of deal. But when I started to realize that that 30 minutes of meditation translated into another hour or two of productivity, and I don't mean that I spent an hour or two working more, just that when I did spend an hour working, I was so much more effective. Then I started to say, wait a minute, it's not 30 minutes that I'm actually taking, I'm actually trading 30 minutes for 60 minutes. Imagine if you could do that all day long. Imagine if you, imagine with money, what if I could give, what if for every dime you gave me, I gave you 15 cents back, you would give me all the dimes you had and you would continue doing that. Yeah. Because you'd make, you know, you'd make way more than you invest. Absolutely. Exercises like that. Now at some point, there are diminishing returns and that's the extremes. I'm not talking about that, but you want to build muscle, you want to burn body fat, you want to feel better, you want to move better. It doesn't take a shit ton of time. You're looking at maybe a grand total of, I don't know, four hours a week for the average person to get really, really good results, maybe five a week total. That's not much time at all. But that five hours, once it starts to show up in the way you feel, your body, the hormonal changes, all these other things, it's going to turn into something like 10 or 15 or 20 hours of better productivity and quality of life. Well, I like this topic too, because this is a lot of what inspired maps is we do teach the minimal effective dose. I mean, that's really maps, maps read our foundational program, Maps and Abalic, is literally a two to three day a week routine. That's it. And it's a full body. You're only doing like three sets of an exercise. It's, you know, it's not designed to kill you. Which is funny because that's what been like the most criticism we've had because we get the other side of, you know, the audience of all the people that want to live in the gym. Like I don't want to be there. Like you tell me, I have to work out only twice, you know, or three times a week. Yeah. You know, like we had a little bit of revolt. That's the hardest people to convince to trust the process are the ones that are already addicted in our over over training. Right. They're going in seven days a week, hammering muscles like crazy, beast mode, all that stuff. Right. So they've fallen into the sexy side of all the marketing and stuff. Right. Do you want to look like me? You got to train harder than me. Beast mode. Whereas people, you know, they're going to see that message and be like, I can't do that. I can't have like live in the gym for seven days a week. You know, that's ridiculous. I got a full-time job. I got kids, you know, it's like, like so I can understand where they're coming from like once a week. Oh yeah, cool. That's all I have to do. Yeah. Yeah. When you, when you set those wheels in motion and really work with your body, the body changes and it responds and it doesn't feel like you're forcing it. It really doesn't. It's because your body wants to change. You know, I've said this before on previous podcasts. If you're fighting your body, you're loose. At some point you'll lose. Eventually your body's going to win. You're going to either get sick or hurt or something's going to happen to you. So you're not going to win. Learn how to work with your body. And proper resistance training does not look like for most people, for the vast majority of people, does not look like hours and hours and hours in the gym every single day. I think the people that, in fact, the people that respond and do well with that, I think do well in spite of that. Doing well because of that. For most people, I mean, and it all goes down to programming. I want to be clear now. If you go into the gym four hours a week and you're doing shit programming, you're not going to get much out of it. But if you've got good exercise programming, you're doing the movements that matter. You know how to phase your work out so you're training for different types of adaptation and you're organizing them properly and you're doing the right, all of it, the programming is good. You're going to get a huge return on that time being spent and your body's going to change and the comments that we get all the time for people who've been working out for years is I can't believe I'm building muscle like this. I can't believe I'm getting stronger. I can't believe I'm burning body fat and I ask them, well, what do you mean you can't believe? And they're like, well, it feels like I'm not really doing a lot to do it. I'm like, well, that's because you're doing the right thing. It makes a huge difference. Well, we talk about how you should feel when you walk out of the gym. You should feel better than you did when you walked in. Yeah, you shouldn't feel defeated. But that's the message again. Before we even started my bump, a lot of when I started my social media, I was that guy because I was a men's physique guy and I'm in this competing world and everybody's trying to be a fucking martyr. It's about who suffers the most, who trains harder, who starves harder, come train harder than me, beast mode this, no days off. It's crazy. This is interesting. On the flight out here, I actually watched a documentary called The Rise of the Suffer Fests. Have you seen this? No. Have you seen this? No, I have to watch it. It's all about like obstacle course racing. And as I was watching it, it's really fascinating. I mean, there's some really interesting questions posed and I made notes. And one of the things that I wrote down was, is obstacle course racing today what bodybuilding and physique stuff was? Because I competed in that too. So when you say suffering, I know you had that drop set on the hack squat and you just had to go somewhere else in your mind that like you got to find something that's going to get you through that. Do you think that the rise in obstacle course racing and all these weird things like maybe people who are not into bodybuilding are finding that? I'll tell you exactly what this is. Like why do we want to suffer? I'll tell you exactly what this is. And we do talk about this on Mind Pump is a lot of people have a very poor relationship with exercise. And they don't realize what they're doing. And a lot of the times, and this is purely from experience. This is from training thousands of people. And you get these clients and they look at exercise as almost like a form of punishment and they're punishing themselves. In fact, most my obstacle course racers, most my marathon runners, most of them did not have a good relationship with exercise. They did it because it was the only way that they could get in shape to prepare for this torture. And I would argue that it's not just the relationship with exercise, but at that point in their own evolution, it's a relationship with themselves as well. Absolutely. They go hand in hand. They go hand in hand. Now that all being said, because that's 100% true, and it does tend to attract, marathons did this before obstacle racing. That's not everybody. It does tend to attract the person that wants to beat themselves up, punish themselves, or needs an external goal in order to motivate themselves to go to the gym. And to be fair, I mean, I think you guys have talked about this and I know for me, I mean, we all were at that point in our lives at some point as well. I mean, that's why I got into lifting and strength and physique and modeling. And that's why you guys got into lifting as well. Well, and I was just going to say that there is another side to that. There is a very cathartic effect that comes from exerting yourself, reaching your limits, and realizing that you're stronger and tougher and more resilient than you ever thought possible. And in today's lifestyle, I don't see, first of all, I don't see obstacle course racing declining in popularity. I only see it increasing. And the reason why I see it. The numbers that he presented are staggering. The reason why I think it's exploding and will continue to explode is because our lifestyle is posh. We're all a bunch of pussies. We don't experience temperature changes. Air conditioning and heating. We don't experience lack of food. We eat three meals every single day. Sometimes two or one. Nobody ever fasts for a day. And if you do, it's like, it's scary. We don't feel pain. Our bodies evolved experiencing these stresses. And so we develop all these nervous disorders like anxiety and paranoia and depression deep down. We're craving all this. We need to challenge ourselves. This is why contact sports is so popular. Why do we like watching this freaking thing? And hearing the story behind it. Here's the argument to that and the positive side to that. And we just literally came off a great conversation about stressing the body for adaptations and how there's a way to do it and not do it. I feel the same way with obstacle course racing, with marathon runners. I think there's even competing. I got a lot of positive things health-wise from actually competing. I think stressing the body intermittently is actually really good. It's peaking. You're experiencing the peak of that. But you have to go through the process of training leading up to that. Whereas you can see somebody abusing the obstacle course racing, bodybuilding, crossfits, whatever they're competing in. But they're doing it way too frequently. They're not really giving their body a chance to live, adapt, and go through the training and the strengthening and leading up to a peak. Or it's like what he said. It's the relationship that they have with themselves. I love asking you, why do you do this? What drives you to do it? I get in great shape. They have this connection to how they look or maybe the competitive side of winning with it. If you're doing it for health, there is a healthy way to do it. There's a healthy way I feel like to incorporate it into your lifestyle. But most people don't get into it. They get into it for either the addictive properties or they get into it because of it. It makes them look a certain way. Or it's the only way that they can be in shape as if they're training for it. Will they associate that with being in shape? What was the moment for you guys where you made that transition? Because I think we're all kind of on the same page that we're all down to suffer and we need that, we're too comfortable. But you guys got into bodybuilding or strength sports as kind of the gateway into your own self-evolution. What was the point for you that it mattered more what you did with those lessons outside the gym as opposed to just how much you squatted or what you looked like with your shirt off? So I had a clear event. There was a single event that happened to me that made this fundamental shift for me. And then I also happened to be in an environment that fostered that change. Before I get in there, I do want to say, though, with what we're talking about with these races and intensity-based type of events, we can't discount the psychological and emotional benefits that come from those ones. So you can train your body. I think the stress, that's what I meant by putting the body through stress, there's lots of positive. I totally agree. One of the most life-changing events I've ever done was I did Seelfit, the 20X challenge. I mean, it was 12 days. Not good for your body, great for your psyche. Right. I mean, I learned lessons that I still go back to. Exactly. It's amazing. And that's my point. And that's why I asked what that moment is for you guys. Because I'm not saying that obstacle course racing is bad. I'm not saying that bodybuilding is bad. I mean, it's just how these people are... It's our own individual vessel that we're using for that. Of course. I had a fundamental shift years ago. So I've been into lifting weights since I was 13, driven heavily by insecurity. I was a skinny kid growing up and I wanted to build muscle. But I'm also very passionate. I get to be very obsessive. I tend to be, excuse me, very obsessive with subjects that I get into. And I do this with anything that I really get into. I got really into the science of the body and building muscle. And I learned everything I possibly could. And I abused my body quite a bit. I abused it with supplements, with workouts, with nutrition to try to build more and more muscle. So I did this for a long time. And right around the age, I'd say I was probably either 29 or 30, my body retaliated in a very, very big way. So I've always had a tendency towards gut issues, even as a child. I was a little more sensitive to food than most people. But I was okay. I could eat things and it wasn't a problem. Well, now, you know, I had been for 15 or 17 years of stuffing my face with the same kind of foods all the time without paying attention to quality of food, with taking supplements day in and day out, several times a day, protein powders, bars, you know, exotic supplements, pro hormones when those were over the counter and they were legal. Like just going crazy that my body retaliated. And I had severe gut issues to the point where I thought I had maybe Crohn's disease or something. Like I lost 15 pounds in a very, very short period of time. Nothing I could eat would stay in me. I got very sick, very weak. It was very, very scary. Got lots of tests done. Nobody could figure out what was going on. And at that time when this was happening, I had owned a wellness facility, or personal training studio slash wellness facility. In my facility, I had some workers in there that were very holistic with their approaches. And I love the fact that they were holistic. They were different than me, which meant we could offer different things to our clients. I also respected and honored their methods. I didn't use them myself because I'm a meathead, right? I live whites. And I know you're telling me about, you know, avoiding certain foods and don't eat artificial sweeteners. And, you know, I need to meditate on this, but whatever, I'm just here to build muscle. I don't care. That's cool that you do that. And that was my attitude. Well, now I'm sick. Now I'm really sick. And I was very reluctant, and I took one, you know, took them aside and said, okay, like I need help. I can't figure out what's going on. And we went deep. We talked about my relationship to food. We talked about, I did gut testing. And I found I had all these different food intolerances. And I learned about leaky gut syndrome and look like I definitely had all the symptoms of that. And I had to completely eliminate certain foods out of my diet. And I had to reexamine my supplementation, which was at this point, I was addicted to taking supplements. And through that process of being forced to examine these things, I kind of examined everything. And that's when I started looking at my training. That's when I started looking at, I was able to open my mind and look up and figure out that eating small meals throughout the day is bullshit. There's no science supporting it. In fact, eating less frequently may be better for us. The ridiculous amounts of protein that I was eating, there was no science supporting it. High protein works for building muscle, but not the ultra high amounts that I was eating. My training changed. All these different things changed. And my body responded. And it was after that that I got the, I mean, aesthetically speaking, the best and most fit that I had ever been. But it was completely as a side effect. It was no longer my focus, or at least it gradually became less and less of my focus. I wasn't really caring so much about what I look like. And yet I looked better than I ever did before. And so that kind of changed my evolution. But I, for me, it required a massive wake up call. So it wasn't, it was gradual after that, but it was definitely like a slap in the face. And if I ignored that, I'm sure I don't know if I don't know where I'd be right now. Yeah. I kind of remember a moment. So for me, basically like, what happened? I was like such an intensity based person. And so all my workouts, like I had mentioned, like it was all about killing the workout, going max intensity. And really it wasn't until I had kids that like my first son was born that I just, and you know, thinking about this now, I didn't even really realize that that was probably the moment where it changed because my mentality would bleed through into just my temperament. And my temperament always having to, you know, ramp myself up and get prepared to, you know, do really well in my workouts and move weight around. Like I had to really like keep that sort of intensity and carry that with me. And that just was not... I had no more sleep, you know. It's like I was irritated. It was just not going to benefit me anymore. The second your child is born, your purpose in life completely changes. Completely changes. My whole mindset towards my own health, wellness and well-being shifted. And even like leading up to that, I didn't even realize, but like I had like a tumor in my adrenal gland. I had to deal with like all these things that were kind of coming up as a result of the way that I was treating my body. And yeah, so that was like a total like shift for me in the way now I have to approach just working out and having it benefit me more than me really trying to like always increase numbers and get better performance and, you know, like take on my workouts. Like it's this like perform mentality always. And the irony is then you perform better. Yeah, I started performing better. It was crazy. Yeah, exactly. I've had many paradigm shattering moments in my fitness career. If I were to pick the first big one, I would probably have to say steroids. In my early 20s, I think I was about 23 or 24 the first time that I did any steroids. And before that, so I'd already been, I was a trainer by 20. So I'd already knew my way around the gym and could get myself in pretty good shape. But I never, I always wanted to be like cover the magazine shape and I'd never seen that. And after being a trainer, after training consistently in the gym for a long time, I was just certain that those guys were all on steroids and that's the difference between them and me. I work hard in the gym. I'm consistent. I've been doing this for a long time. I know what I'm doing in here. These guys just must be on testosterone and I'm not. And I took a huge stack because I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. Some dude advised you, right? Yeah, bodybuilder. Well, the nice gentleman with the fanny pack. Yes. The guy's telling you, never take advice on how much you should take from the guy who's telling you. He has a mullet. And all that sounds so obvious but to a fucking young 23-year-old, of course, none of those light bulbs went off. He was four times my size and by looking at him, obviously, he knew something more than I knew. He knew something that I didn't know and he had it, right? So I dabbled in and out of that for probably three years and did enough damage to where I have to have hormone replacement therapy. He is a 35-year-old man now if I want to have a normal sex drive. And when I did it, I got bigger. I got bloated looking. But I didn't look like the men's health cover and that really was like a major moment for me that I didn't have this figured out. There was a lot more for me to learn and that sent me searching, I think. And before that, I think there was actually a little cocky arrogance. I mean, I'm a personal trainer. I know a lot of this and that and I thought that those guys were all on steroids. I needed to take steroids to look like that. I didn't. Ended up doing more damage than anything else. Never looked anything close to what any of those guys on a magazine look like. And then I went on my journey of really diving deeper and getting my paradigm shattered many more times down the road, for sure. Yeah, it's most kids in that particular scenario like yours, Adam, they end up just going heavier and heavier and higher and higher doses. And it's terrible to watch. Well, that was even me. I mean, that's the reason why I said it went on for three years because it wasn't like I took my first cycle and I said, like, oh, it doesn't work. It was like, oh, I just need more. Yeah, I need more of it. Like the very first one, I still remember this day because I was the skinny kid trying to get big and the very first cycle I took, it was such a large cycle that all it really did was speed the fuck out of my metabolism, the super fast one I already had and I couldn't eat enough calories. I was burning so much that I just got lean. I got ripped. I was super strong. So I was like this strong skinny kid. So I was all of a sudden pressing, you know, I went from pressing 70 pound dumbbells to pressing like 130 pound dumbbells, but weighing a buck 85, you know, and I couldn't, it just didn't make sense to me like what's going on here. So there was even an evolution of my steroid taking because I was just like, oh, or maybe it's not the right stuff. Oh, I need to do this more. So I went through this progression of trying all these different things until the light bulb finally went off that that's not the answer, you know, and it's not, and I think this is something I share a lot on the show because of my experience in that because I'm trying to save a lot of kids that were my age when they were thinking, like in your early 20s, before you do something like that because nothing sucked worse than being in my 30s and realizing that I actually have to have testosterone. So I have just, because as a young kid, you don't ever think like you're such a horny kid that you don't ever think that you're gonna, like, and I know every guy in this room can relate to being a 17 to 20 year old looking at a 40 year old who says he never has sex and you're going like, that'll never happen to me. Like, that's all I want to do. In fact, it gets me in trouble. That's all I want to do. In fact, I could probably use less of it in my life and then it happens to you. And then, so a guy like me who abused testosterone ends up, you know, on the other end of the spectrum where, you know, it killed my sex drive and now that has become something that has put stresses on relationships. Like, try being in a relationship with a woman. Now she thinks it has something to do with her. You know, so talk about all the problems that you just don't foresee and think about that it had caused in my life. So I speak really passionately about that to people in our audience that, you know, it's, steroids aren't what everybody thinks they are. They think they're a lot more than what they are. There's genetics play a much bigger role, nutrition and programming is king over all things. And really that is the kicker that takes the elite bodies to the next elite level. Yeah, you're starting to see this. So the reason why this happened with fitness with a lot of us, with most people, I'd say, really get into it is because fitness is so, humans in general are like result-driven and, you know, aesthetic and what I can do with it. And so once you, when you go into working out with that mentality, then it's not, it's not, you end up making decisions based on that and decisions end up being typically the wrong ones. You're actually starting to see, and I want to touch on the subject, you're actually starting to see that happen with a lot of the brain hackers and the, who want to optimize their learning and optimize their mental performance. You're seeing the same stuff where these guys, these guys and girls are pushing it to the point where they may be not only getting diminishing returns, but doing things that may be detrimental to themselves. Well, they can't eat enough new tropics, I'll tell you. Yeah, I mean a lot of this stuff is so new. What is going to happen after, you know, 20 years of taking medaffinil? I cannot believe that people, you know, like, you know, the certain people out there in our world who talk about like, it's this great new tropic, like taking medaffinil. Medaffinil's got, long-term's got some serious side effects. For some people, it's just documented will create facial twitches that never go away. So you want to create some weird shit in your face forever. Most people I know who've experimented with it are only using it very infrequently and, you know, and they know. And it's only like a short-term thing. Like, they're not using it every single day. But I do hear reports of a lot of people taking it every single day. It's just crazy. And like anything, you know, we push it to a limit and we end up with negative results. And so we'll see what happens in 10 years. But, you know, something that I realized, we talk about this online pub all the time, is if you want to optimize all performance, nothing, your body will always perform its best. And maybe not as the most extreme in one particular area. But when I say performance, I'm talking about broad spectrum, full performance. The ability to think, the ability to relax, the ability to connect and love, the ability to be strong, to have stamina, to all the things that we talk about when we talk about total human performance or, you know, optimal performance or optimization. All of that comes from optimal health. Not being super extreme in one thing and also not pushing yourself to a point where obviously you hurt yourself or you get sick. So being healthy, you'll blow yourself away with how well you think and how fast you think and... How great your metabolism's responding, you know, because you're healthy. That's it. It'll blow you away. So if you seek out, if you're looking, if you're truly looking for total or full spectrum performance on the whole body, mind, spirit, what you need to do is focus on optimal health, total health and longevity. And then you'll achieve those things. It's not about the cosmetic or the extreme performance. Well, one of the things people don't realize when they're chasing those other attributes, if your body's not healthy, it's not going to devote resources to laying down new muscle tissue. You know, if you're spending too much time in the sympathetic state, your body always thinks it's being chased by a saber-toothed tiger. It's not going to devote resources to recovery. And you don't see all those performance aspects that we chase are just expressions of, you know, that's the epitome of how we express the qualities that we possess. You know, you want to have a 12-foot broad jump at the NFL Combine. Sure, we can train for that, but you're not going to develop those qualities. You're not going to be able to express that if you haven't, you know, created that foundation to begin with. It is. And that's why when I hear people, we get lots of people asking us how they can improve their performance of their brain. And I'll ask them about the nutrition and workout. And they'll be like, no, no, no. And sleep. Yeah, and they'll be like, no, no, I want to talk to my ladies. Listen, I don't care what you take, take all the Adderall, Modofinil, you know, microdose acid, whatever you want to do to optimize your brain. If you're not sleeping well and you're not eating right and not exercising right, you're not going to reach nearly your full potential. Well, we say the same thing about people that ask us what's the best muscle-building supplement or what's the best fat burning is that, well, let's look at your sleep. Let's look at your nutrition. Let's look at your programming. Those are all much bigger rocks before you decide to take something else into your system that doesn't even make sense. Yep, absolutely. So that's a lot about what mine talks about, which is also what's fucked us, because these are the companies that pay podcasts like us to actually advertise. Completely transparent. I mean, that's the tough part. Before you guys walked in, we were talking about owning gyms. That's a great topic. Yeah, right. And it's funny, right? So you walk in here and ours looks kind of like a gym, but really what we are, we're the old retired guy who bought a bar. Like it's not making any money. It's just for us. It's just for us and our friends to come on by and work out. It doesn't need it. No one needs to do anything for it to pay for it. So like that's literally, and I remember telling myself too, because being a guy who operated a gym for 10 years of my career, and I was always responsible for anywhere between a quarter of a million to a half a million dollars a month of revenue, I know the stress, the hard work, the amount of people advertising, everything that comes with it. And the fact that revenue does not equal profit. Right. Exactly. Even a huge number like that, that was the big number, but we needed to hit at least 200 of that to be even making money really, right? You know it's funny talking about that. So I started my fitness career with 24 Hour Fitness right around a little bit after when they kind of melded or purchased Ray Wilson's Family Fitness. So they were 24 Hour Nautilus. They bought Ray Wilson's Family Fitness and became 24 Hour Fitness. And so I get in there and I remember learning the Ray Wilson Fitness model versus the 24 Hour Nautilus model. Now the 24 Hour Nautilus gyms were out producing in terms of total revenue, the Ray Wilson Family Fitness gyms. They were just huge numbers, but profit-wise, the Family Fitness Centers, the Ray Wilson Family Fitness Centers were extremely profitable. And it was all in how they set up their pay scale and how they managed the facilities. And at the Family Fitness facilities, you were given a budget. Whatever you saved from that budget was yours. You kept it. You pay yourself. 24 Hour Fitness gave you goals and gave you staff. And so the 24 Hour Fitness clubs were hitting these big numbers, but the profit was, you know, they would have certain amount of loss from supplements or whatever, shit gets walked out the door. They would have staff and they're not being super productive. Lots of overtime. Lots of overtime. The Ray Wilson Family Fitness guys were in their bell to bell, very, very bare-bone staff saving money and they were making more money as a result. And it was really funny to learn that as a young kid walking in going, oh, shit, like that makes perfect sense. That had to have been such a valuable lesson for a business man and entrepreneur. Oh, God. We talk about, I talk about 24 Hour Fitness. We all came from 24 Hour Fitness. Ironically, none of us really, well, Justin worked with me, but Sal and I didn't know each other, knew of each other, but didn't know each other. But I talk about 24 Hour Fitness as being like... It's a formula. Like bad parents, that's what I say. Yeah. So, and by bad parents... They're our bad parents for sure. Why I say bad parents? By bad parents, I love them and I will always have a lot of respect for them because they taught me many things. But by bad, I mean like, they're a bad example. They hit us around every once in a while. Well, they... Then they gave us an ice cream. They're similar to the rest of the fitness industry of preying on insecurities. You know, we were taught to sell to people based off their... Like I got all of us in here, all have records and sales. We were really good at what we did from that aspect. I don't think I was a very good trainer. I was good at selling you training though. You know, I knew how to poke at your insecurities to get you to invest in lots of money on me and I got really fucking good at that. And I justified it and was proud of myself for that because I got trophies for it and I got paid a lot of money to do it. And you're doing a good thing, right? You're getting them to work out and all that stuff. You're choking them into fitness. It taught me a ton about business with fitness. It was an incredible teacher from that aspect but I also think that back to the bad parents analogy that we do things completely opposite and different and that's a lot of our messages against that. I'll tell you what, working for 24 Fitness is that they were the first fitness company to hit a billion dollars in value and they did a lot of things right. And I had never... I took for granted because it was where I started but they had statistics and tracking on so many different variables and they taught managers... The analytics were crazy. They taught managers and staff how to read them, how to turn different knobs and squeeze out revenue out of gyms. They also taught the sales process that was very, very effective. And it wasn't just what Adam was talking about. There's actually a structure to it that's really, really effective and it's actually the base of excellent communication. 24 Fitness did such a good job of that and then going into seeing other fitness organizations and other gyms and seeing how shitty they are and what it takes to really make a lot of money. When people ask me, hey man, I want to open a gym. What do you think? Is that a good idea? I'm like, you have no idea what it takes to make a lot of money owning a gym. It takes a lot and you're probably not going to do it. Cut out for that. Yeah, not a good idea. I remember all the time like... At all times I had anywhere between 15 to 25 trainers that were underneath me that I'd be hiring and mentoring and training and developing and it was always the guy or girl who was on the bottom 10 as far as performers, revenue, our service so that they were the least busy. They weren't doing a lot of them. That would approach me after a year or so of training there and go, you know, this place isn't for me. I think I need to start my own. I'm going to do my own thing and I'd just be like, oh man, you don't want to do that. You're having a really tough time here. You have no fucking idea how much it's easier for you right now. When you walk out that door, it's going to get tough but I'd always be supportive and whatever. I'm always here and I continued to mentor a lot of trainers after they moved on but rarely ever did you see a trainer leave that unless they were like a top performer already. They got it. They figured the business model out. They were appreciative that they had these 2,000 workouts a day so they looked at it like, holy shit this is 2,000 leads I'm getting every day. They were talking to members. They were booking free appointments. They were doing all the things they had to do to build a very successful business so that translated into the real world when they had it but they all of them and Justin can definitely talk about this because he went through this and tribute what a difference that is. Oh, yeah. Even like you're explaining that for me I recognized all those things right away. Like, oh my god, I'm getting all these leads. My schedule is completely full. I'm making, I kept out at the amount of money and revenue that I could possibly squeeze out of this company and just for me it was all about the carrot in front of me and it was the upper management that the promises and this and that and I just, I was so self-sufficient and good at what I was doing that I was pretty arrogant to where I was like I'm out of here. I'm going to do my own business and then immediately being humbled because knowing that but realizing how much money goes into just marketing yourself and then getting yourself out there how much time that takes to rebuild an entire business around just yourself as a brand and then so that actually detoured me from wanting to open my gym. I was like, no way in hell. I see all the staff. I see all these moving parts and people like for the majority it's the low performers that are going to stick around, right? So having to deal with that and manage a staff that's like all your best people are going to leave and you have to realize that. It's so fascinating to hear both of you guys talk about. I was on the opposite end of the spectrum for both of those. So I was the guy when I left Gold's Gym I was the guy who probably spent the least time on the training floor and in the facility and probably brought in the lowest amount of revenue that a full-time trainer could bring in. Oh wow. And I looked at instead of looking at the opportunity for leads that were coming in kind of as like shooting fish in a barrel all I saw was the limitation of, okay, I'm in this city and I can only potentially train people who are members at this facility. So I saw it as a huge limiting factor and in my mind it was if I'm going to put in and as a trainer there I think at the time I was making like 47% or something so it was less than half of you know, so if somebody's paying me 50 bucks an hour for a session I'm making like 2350. So I see all these numbers and I'm like I can reach more people I can put 100% of that towards me and not somebody else which again is one of the lessons once you start your own business you learn the difference in revenue and profit but I thought completely differently and I wonder how many people who are out there as trainers look at it one way or another. I would say you're the exception of people who did it and succeeded. Well also, yeah, how did it all work out for you? Well yeah, I mean that was the thing is I knew, but I've always been sort of that person that you guys read Steven Pressfield. Oh God, you gotta just start reading Steven Pressfield. Turning Pro, do the work and I always say this one backwards it's the war of art not the art of war. So his book is the war of art but he talks about something called the dead zone where like when you finish a project you throw yourself back into the next one and you put yourself a lot of people are such that they put themselves in a position where it's sink or swim like it's literally get this shit done or not be able to pay your rent and put food on the table and for me I have always found that comfort is the enemy of motivation and if I'm in a position where I can work the minimum and bring in the minimum and be comfortable and have that lifestyle like I'll kind of do that and I think that's human nature but the second I put myself in that situation of shit, if I don't get more clients if I don't build this thing if I don't turn this thing into something you know I've got a girlfriend we just moved in together at that point in time I've got to be able to pay my half of the rent I've got to be able to get groceries I like eating grass fed meat which is more expensive than the bullshit chicken that you can buy at Walmart and B, I'm going to be really embarrassed if this thing fails there's that whole ego side like people now see you're doing this they know you're doing it so I think those are huge motivating factors and it turned out really well you see all these people it's zero to six figures six figures is like that threshold if I can get there now I know okay I made it, I did it it was there within a year I guess I could say it worked out but I quickly found and I told you this before we sat down to record two years into that just the sheer everything that you dump into it you put all you have into building this thing two years go by, two and a half years and it's just like man I'm so burnt out I'm so done and I just didn't want to do that anymore and I mean I couldn't get out fast enough it's like owning a... I think the gym failure rate is probably higher than the restaurant failure rate it's tough to scale it's really tough to scale because it's completely dependent on you being there and you only have so many hours a day if you build it around you there are a lot of people who are succeeding you know putting the people in place and building a business so if it can't run without you it's not a business it's just a hobby that makes money and a lot of people don't realize that when they're building their gyms or any business for that matter there are a lot of people who do realize it and I think it's when people start a gym now there's so many resources out there you can find, get the done for you systems and marketing and all this stuff but I don't think there are enough people educating young gym owners on how to build a business that can run without you and to avoid that burnout and to avoid creating something that eventually you hate because it drains you and takes everything you know who's doing that for the CrossFit community is Barbell Shroud and Mike Blutzo and those guys are they teaching people they're coming up with the systems for these boxes to operate for building it so that they don't necessarily have to be there all day every day yeah lead generation and just the whole business side of it I'll say this I managed big box gyms what I see now and it's real evident now is that the big box gyms are not where the growth is in the brick and mortar fitness industry the growth is in the small box more of the niche type training type stuff so like yoga studios Pilates studios, bar classes Crossfits those orange classes have just exploded in orange theory so if you're a trainer first off it's very expensive very difficult to compete with big box gyms so you can do it, you can open a big box gym a lot of moving parts, it's going to cost you a lot of money and you're going to compete with companies that have been doing this for a long time who are probably going to kick your ass so my recommendation would be to go small focus on something that's a little different whether it be spin bikes or yoga or whatever that appeals it's a little bit different it's got that feel to it it's going to cost per person coming in so it's a high service high cost, lower volume type model and then systemize that and learn how to get that Crossfits is a perfect example of this they're a perfect example of that growth in orange theory all of them why I think that is my theory on that has a lot to do with our ability now with social networks a different type of community what we couldn't do 15 years ago our community was literally within the gym was only in the gym and didn't expand beyond that it was your lifting group and then the other guys that you knew where now and you can see it too I was a part of the first orange theories that came to San Jose my buddy owns a bunch of them and helped them start and you can see the systems that they put in place right now to connect to the members they put a lot of emphasis on the social media side of it and the networking and the connecting to each other and the competitions creating that community that's why Fitbit are leading the way as far as wearables are concerned because their entire focus was on their community and that was so big because now everybody's connecting interacting with family members it really wasn't about they have a quality product as far as step count and all that's concerned but really they focused most of their attention how can we get them to connect and interact with each other whether it's leaderboards or whatever it is they made a really their entire UI is focused on that and I think that's 100% the reason why they just went ahead of everybody that's a great point because there are a lot of wearable fitness trackers out there and Fitbit is definitely at the top of that market. I'll tell you what though the book that I'm reading is that was the one thing where I'm kind of the verdict isn't out yet with me on it because they actually think that when we were talking about addictive and being connected and things that could end up being bad for us they actually talked a lot about wearables and saying that they could be the worst that this whole because of the steps and the leaderboards and the progression of people like just trying to get more and more and more and more and you're becoming so dependent on that so there's definitely a side that is arguing the negative side. I'm a huge, I actually make anybody who's ever been coached by me in the last three years, it's mandatory I make you get a wearable because I have been able to coach so much more precisely when I can tell what's going on. You guys have known this from the very second you started in fitness if somebody, best case scenario you train them three or four times a week, you get them for four hours you have no idea what they're doing the other 160 some hours a week now with wearables you can see how they're sleeping and it's not just when they come in you ask them how do you eat, how are you sleeping? Right, because we know that's fucking way off Now you can look at this and you can tell exactly it is beautiful for coaching especially like virtual and online remote coaching I think anything that humans adopt strongly, they do it because there's benefits but there's also always with anything with that much power there's potential You still have to know when to put your tools down we can use it but then we also have to step outside of it as well and I think that we're still figuring out what that looks like and it could totally, it could feed into your obsession with hitting metrics and numbers and that's the same thing as me chasing a PR all the time and always trying to get to that within my workout it's not going to benefit my body necessarily There's a quote we recently had Chris Dancy on our podcast the world's most connected man and he shared a quote, I forget who said it but we don't know how to measure what we value so we value what we measure and that can be said for squatting, you know if you're a power lifter and you're always chasing a squat or a deadlift number, if you're an obstacle course racer and you're always chasing a time or a distance if you're chasing a number of steps these are sleep metrics I think that's in part probably the fault of what's been so glorious about modern mankind is that we discovered how to measure and test and live in this world of measurement and testing and it's benefited us in great ways the industrial revolution and the agriculture revolution and the scientific method these all came from being able to do that but we may have lost our ability to sit quietly self-examine or to come up with those ideas or to connect with things other than things and this may be why at this particular time now in history you're seeing people who have money spend it on doing that you know how many people I talk to now that are super successful like executives who fly down to South America to do ayahuasca ceremonies because that helps them out and that was one of the things that was posited in the Rise of the Sufferfest documentary the guy's like you know it is the epitome of elite privilege to pay $150 to go run through the mud and crawl under barbed wire and you know do these obstacles outside I mean really like we're paying for shit that we used to do all the time I pay a gym membership to go lift heavy shit and not do anything with it I'm not building anything I'm just lifting heavy shit and putting it down and I mean it's just I don't know I tell people right now if you want a place to invest in invest in all of the businesses that are popping up that are counter this right float tanks your day spot that's actually what I was going to bring up exactly because you were saying how hard it is to just sit and meditate and think and be 150 years ago it was nothing to just sit on the front porch and just you know watch the world go by and think now we're literally I was thinking that as you were saying it and that's what just slipped my mind was we pay to go sit in a float tank we're paying for sensory deprivation because we're so we don't know how to do it and we're more stimulated now than we've ever been there's a study I love this one this is crazy 19 no so in 2007 they did a study that found that we consume 174 newspapers that are like 85 pages in length worth of information every single day well and we produce six of those newspapers with what we text and email and say that was in 2007 there wasn't Instagram back then Twitter was a baby Facebook was maybe in colleges only so I mean we're talking probably in order of magnitude higher now with what comes in and that's just communication overstimulation and it's called excitotoxicity so your nerve cells are just constantly being bombarded and so we have a neurotransmitter GABA that is responsible for it's the inhibitory neurotransmitter that counteracts that, serves as the brakes and that's why you're seeing so many people turning to alcohol or some other altered state marijuana raises GABA too this is why you're going to see though you're going to see invest in that for sure I mean you see people like Elliot Hulse getting into starting his grounding camp business you're seeing the float tank starting to pop up your day spas are packed like crazy now I mean shit our best affiliate that we have out of everything that's connected to us is our brain FM why because it really fucking makes a huge difference for people right now we're so tapped in connected and it was a game changer for me was to get this silly little app that I can listen to that helps me focus or meditate or sleep because through the sounds and it just totally relaxes me and it was a game changer we had those guys on our podcasts probably over a year ago how are you connected with them so we interviewed we interviewed Kyle Kingsbury so Kyle Kingsbury a good friend of ours and I connected us and we met with them and we tried their app out extremely we were all very very difficult version I use all of it the sleep is amazing and and focused focus yeah I use it all and I use it pretty pretty regularly I there's it doesn't a week doesn't go by that I don't use it at least once but I do I like anything else I try to be intermittent about anything like I don't ever like to become dependent on something but man it would take a day where my business brains flying like crazy and I know all entrepreneurs I know can connect to this like you lay in bed and your body may be tired and you're telling yourself you gotta go to bed because you gotta get up at 5 or 4 in the morning but your brain is telling a million things going and nothing has been and I'm pro cannabis for that reason too because that's been the one thing that's kind of helped me settle that down the only thing that's ever surpassed that was brain FM as being able to put those headphones on put it in sleep put it in meditate and and then I'll do like a little breathing like some box breathing it'll it'll put me right down it's amazing game changer yeah because of the the modern world we're just gonna have to plan we're just gonna have to plan and figure these things out it's not on that it doesn't happen every day now because that's the way we live it's it's only gonna happen if we schedule it unfortunately in plan for the same reason why you have to make time to exercise is because if you don't you don't fucking move but you know 400 years ago nobody needed to plan the structure yeah movement they exercised on accident you know I mean life was exercised everything exactly yeah so today you know you need to schedule and plan these things and again the return on investment is in my experience it's incredible it's incredible so you will be more productive anyway so for those of you listening who are you know freaking out like I don't got time to schedule a float tank or I don't want to you know and you'll learn more efficiently you'll do better you're the person that needs it most yeah and you'll and you'll do better as a result so man what a pleasure dude I spin a blast thank you guys it was a great time having you down here man we're gonna have to do this more often for sure very cool thank you for listening to mind pump if your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance check out our discounted rgbsuperbundle.com mindpumpmedia.com rgbsuperbundle includes maths anabolic, maths performance and maths aesthetic nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks feels and performs with detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos the rgbsuperbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers but at a fraction of the price the rgbsuperbundle has a full 30 day money back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com if you 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