423. Greatness, Marriage, Parenthood, & Climbing New Mountains | Chris Bumstead
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Hello everyone. Today I'm speaking with five-time consecutive Mr. Olympia champion Chris Bumstead.

And so what do we talk about? Well, we talk about the utility of aiming at something high and pursuing it, the opportunity cost that comes along with that, the challenge of balancing that kind of single-minded and maybe necessary obsession with developing everything else that makes for a full life. We talk a lot about marriage and about how he's integrated his relationship into his high-level professional pursuits.

Chris's wife is having a baby very soon. We talked a fair bit about parenthood, talked about the role that his father played in his life. We talked about the pleasure he takes and has discovered in being a role model, in sharing his disciplined journey towards a pinnacle with his followers. We talked about his practice of parenting.

identifying the things that are impediments to his progress forward, his fears, his insecurities, his insufficiencies, his determination to face those things voluntarily, his ability to overcome those impediments as a consequence. That was particularly relevant on the public speaking and social engagement front. The way that him and his wife have negotiated that within the confines of the relationship. And he

His plans for the future that continues after his stellar athletic and public career comes to its particular close. So join us for that. So you made your debut on the professional stage in 2017. How old were you then? In 2017, I was 22 years old.

22. Okay, so I'm very ignorant about the domain of activity that you are engaged in, so I'm going to ask all sorts of stupid questions to catch myself up. So...

What did it mean to, what does it mean to debut professionally in the world of bodybuilding? And maybe you could also tell us about that world in general. I don't understand its structure or, you know, the hierarchies of competition, how you move up and all of that. Like, what sort of world is that?

Yeah, so there's mainly just an amateur and a professional league. And it changed a lot over the years where it used to be a much bigger deal if you turned pro. And you call it getting your pro card in bodybuilding. So you compete as an amateur usually in your city and then in your state. And then you'll do a national level show. And that's all as an amateur. And typically when you win a national level show, you'll get your pro card.

And then when you're a pro, that puts you into a brand new division where you're starting back from ground zero and you're competing against usually older people who have been in there a lot longer competing as a pro for years. And there's multiple pro shows around the country and around the world all year. And each one of those shows qualifies you to compete at the Olympia. And the Olympia is like the Super Bowl, just like the Olympia, it's the end-all be-all of bodybuilding. So that's the goal that everybody is chasing at the end of the day.

Okay, so Olympia is the pinnacle. And you won five consecutive championships. And is that the right terminology even? Is it a championship that you win? Yeah. Okay, okay. I mean, you can call it whatever you want, but yeah. So I had won five Olympias over the last five years. Exactly, yeah.

Right. And are you the current holder of the title? That's correct. Yeah. The five previous years. Okay. Okay. Good. Good. Good. Good. Just one. And has anybody else managed that for five years in a row? No. So it's actually a pretty new division I'm in. So that's another different...

tier that's within bodybuilding there's open bodybuilding which is there's no weight limit and those are like the people like Ronnie Coleman and the huge people that a lot of people know the big names of and there's no weight limit there and I'm in a division called classic physique which is meant to bring back more of like the Arnold days a little bit more aesthetic and not quite as big so I have a weight cap that I have to match so my division's only been around since 2016 so

So there were two previous winners before me over the three years, but the division's only been around for eight years and I've won five of those eight years. So no one's really had a chance to beat that. Okay. Okay. So I was noticing, yeah, with regard to weight, I was noticing, I don't know how accurate Wikipedia is, but it listed your weight as 234, but in the off season as 264. That's pretty accurate. Yeah. Oh, okay. So what's, what's the reason for the discrepancy there?

So in bodybuilding, it's all about like bulking and cutting mainly. You spend a majority of your year trying to put on muscle. And to do so, you need to put on a little bit more body fat, eat more food, train a little bit more intense, do less cardio so your body's growing. And then when you enter prep, which is like the big thing of bodybuilding, you enter like a 12 to 16 week prep, which is very strict dieting. And its whole intention of that is stripping as much fat as possible while maintaining as much muscle as possible. And so that's where the weight fluctuates it.

So you want to get to a healthy body fat, but a higher weight to put on some muscle. And then you chop that down and that's where the weight discrepancy comes in. So I'll be 265-ish at my highest and I'll come down to about 240 when I'm right on stage. Okay, and that's to...

to make the most of your shape for the competition, I presume, to make you as cut as you can be for the purposes of the display. Is that the case? Exactly, yeah. It's like chiseling down a stone, down to all the excess stone, bring it down to just the art of it. Right, right, right. And so when you're in that 12 to 16 week period, what do you do on the diet front? What do you have to do in order to lose that 30 pounds and

What does your diet regimen consist of? It typically consists of you start...

building up to a maximum amount of calories as you can throughout the year so your metabolism is flying. And then when you start prep, you just slowly start bringing down the calories while increasing the amount of cardio you do. So let's say my off-season when I'm at my heaviest, I'm eating about 5,500, 5,000 calories. And at my lowest, at the end of my prep, I'll be eating about 1,500 calories. So it comes down quite a bit. And within that, you're adding in cardio, so you're expending a little bit more calories doing that. And it's just...

kind of changing the energy output versus input to make sure that you're inputting less than you're outputting. I see. So it's basically, it's not so much, if I have this correct, it's not so much what you're eating at that point, it's how much you're eating essentially assessed by caloric intake. I mean, I'm curious about this because as you perhaps know, I have a

almost entirely carnivorous diet and have for a long time. And I've been watching Sean Baker a lot on, especially on his Twitter feed, doctor who's been promoting the carnivore diet. And it seems to be unbelievably useful for adding muscle mass, but also decreasing body fat content. So I was curious about, you know, the ratio of carbohydrates to proteins or if there was anything additional that you're doing apart from adjusting caloric intake per se.

Yeah. Yeah. So typically there's like a set amount of protein people will eat and it stays around then. So I'll eat about 300 grams of protein in a day. And as my calories come down, I'm normally pulling away my carbs and my fats and keeping my protein the same. So calories are coming down, but protein staying the same. So that ratio just changes.

And that's why bodybuilding is so much different than a lot of other sports, if you can call it that, because it's not just about how you perform, but it's about how you look. So typically in sports, it's like, what's going to allow me to perform the best? Whereas in bodybuilding, it's like, no, I've just got to look the best and then I still have to go and perform in the gym as best as I can. So it's kind of balancing those two to allow yourself to be in the gym, getting the best workouts and you can, but you also can't be eating too much to perform at your best because then you'll be holding on too much body fat. So it's kind of an art of balancing all that.

Right, right. Okay, so let's go through the progression of your career from amateur to professional. And then I would like also to talk about the criteria by which you're judged, exactly what it is that the judges are looking for. We can talk a little bit about the popularity of the sport as well. So you said when you were an amateur...

There are local comp... So what exactly are the structures of the competitions and how popular is this? So you started, I believe you started weightlifting when you were about 14. Is that correct? Yeah, it was right around then. Yeah. Okay. And why did you start when you were 14 and what was the consequence of starting? I just started in the gym because I played a lot of sports.

and I was very athletic, but I wasn't really good at the skill of the sports. So I played hockey, basketball, football, but I wasn't great at dribbling or shooting, but I was really fast and strong. So I ended up kind of sticking to what I like. I knew I was good at strength, I was good in the gym, so I started doing that more and more. And I just had a passion for that. I slowly built that. And as sports get progressively more competitive, I started to kind of get pushed out of that. But I noticed I had a lot of

A lot of unique skills in the gym, if you will. So I started to excel very well in that above a lot of people. And of course, at a young age, when you're starting to get attention from girls and see some excess and put on some muscle and all that, you start to enjoy that a little bit more. It makes you like the training in the gym even more. So I put more and more focus into that, started nailing my diet, my nutrition, training, everything like that.

And then it was when I was in grade 12, my sister started dating a local bodybuilder and they're actually married now. He's my brother-in-law. And he started coaching me into the true realm of bodybuilding. Because before that, I was just training to be strong. I didn't understand bodybuilding professionally.

to how precise it really was. So he started teaching me the intricacies of that. And he saw the potential in me. He's like, you're young. I was 18 years old, had a lot of muscle on me. He's like, you should try doing a bodybuilding show. I'll coach you. We'll see how it goes. Have some fun with it. Why not? Oh, yeah. So I was like, sure. I'll give it a shot. Okay. Okay. So let's walk into the practicalities of that because there will be lots of people who are watching and listening. Okay.

who, in principle, would like to discipline themselves. In principle, they'd like to hit the gym and, you know, undergo some physical transformation to make themselves stronger and healthier and more attractive. And like I started weightlifting when I was about, let's see, 21, 22, something like that. I was very, very thin and not very strong. And I packed on about 35 pounds of muscle in about two years. I'd eat like a mad dog to do that. And

there's a reason I'm telling you this. I mean, because it did a lot of things for me that I didn't understand that weightlifting would do. Now I used free weights and one of the things I noticed apart from the fact that I packed on muscle and was stronger was that my posture improved a lot. I was starting to get hunched a little bit 'cause I was tight sitting and writing a lot.

And it pulled my shoulders back up straight. And then it was really good for my coordination, especially my lower body. My legs got a lot more coordinated. And the other thing it did was produce, and I think this went along with the coordination, and maybe that was from working all the little tendons and so forth that you do with free weights. It also made me a lot more physically like,

And I think, I don't think that was nearly as much a consequence of the strength as it was a consequence of the increased coordination. Okay, so back when you were 14, you were already athletic. You started, but you started hitting the gym more thoroughly. What, like what size were you? What height were you when you were 14? How were you built physically when you were, when you were, you know, that young a teenager? Yeah.

I don't remember my exact size, but I was like a lean, skinny kid-ish. I was probably like just under six foot, maybe 180 pounds, 170 pounds or so. So I was never really small. And even when I graduated high school, I was about 220 pounds. So...

definitely notice some of the same things as yourself. I was definitely a bit of an anxious kid, quiet and introvert. And going in the gym by myself, playing some music, just enjoying that allowed me to control the outcome of all that. And it was really fun for me. And obviously, like you said, you notice as well, it builds confidence in you. Even just being good at something can build confidence in you.

So obviously that was part of what I started to do. And like I said, you get a little attention from having some muscle at a young age and that builds a little bit more confidence. And all these things started kind of trickling in my mind and like, oh, wow, I really like this. I should keep doing. If I do more of it, I'll get more of these good feelings from it. Right. Okay. So you were a pretty big kid. You were already six feet tall and you're pretty built. I mean, 180 and six feet at 14. So you had the natural physique for this.

And then how did you start? Like, had you been a disciplined kid up to then? How had you done in school? Like, were you someone who had regular and good habits? Were you a conscientious person to begin with? You know, I'm kind of wondering how you managed to develop the discipline to start working out in the gym. And how regularly were you disciplined?

to walk me through how you learn to do this and step by step so that people listening could figure out for themselves what they would do if they decided to go to the gym. And also the obstacles. You know, when I went to the gym, I went at McGill. And like I said, I was very thin. I was about six feet tall, but about 135 pounds, like very, very thin and not very strong. And one of the obstacles to me of being in the gym was that

It's embarrassing even to some degree to recount because when I was there, people would come over and show me how to use the weights. And you know, that's friendly, but it's also very annoying. And I think I was bench pressing like 75 pounds with some difficulty at that point. And so, you know, that's not very much weight. And so one of the things you can imagine that when people are going to hit the gym, there's a couple of, especially if they haven't been athletic, there's a couple of things that...

are going to be impediments. They're going to be self-conscious. They don't know what the hell they're doing. Plus, hypothetically, they lack discipline. Now, you had the advantages of being slightly, you know, somewhat on the larger side and also being athletic. But how did you develop the discipline and what impediments did you have to overcome as you were developing that discipline?

Yeah.

get a little bit more joy out of it, I started to become more passionate and put more effort into it. And every year since I was a child, I've become a little bit more consistent, a little bit more passionate, put a little bit more effort into it. So my discipline has continued to grow over time because I just stuck with something for a while and want to see how it went. And it just kind of tumble effected.

But I definitely had some of the similar feelings. And I hear it from everybody about being a little anxious, being in the gym. And it's funny. People will come help you to make you feel comfortable. But like you said, it can almost be demeaning, make you feel a little bit like, all right, you think I need your help? But when I was young, yeah. So my dad actually had one of those old sand weights. It was like a weeder bar with sand weights in the basement. And I remember setting up some boxes, filling them up with stuff and lying on it and trying to bench press on it because it's hard to balance a bench press at first.

like you talked about the stability and all that, it's difficult. So I was a young kid in my basement doing that with pushups and pull-ups and that's really what got me into the whole weightlifting building muscle thing. And that was purely, like I mentioned, just to get better at sports. I assumed if I was stronger, I would be better at sports.

And then after that, I joined a gym at a young age over the summer program that gave kids a free membership over the summer. And I had to ask my parents to come sign me up because you had to be 16 and I was 14. So they had to come in and sign a waiver for that. And it's,

I wasn't the most disciplined kid, for sure. My parents definitely made me independent. And to have some of the free reign that they gave me, to be able to go out with friends and do stuff, I had to earn it. I had to have a job, finish my chores, do my homework and all that stuff. So my parents definitely raised me to have that kind of mindset. And I grew up in a town with some good kids, luckily didn't get stuck into anything bad. And we were all very, all my friends were very passionate about sports, and I wanted to excel. So I kept putting myself in the gym.

And at a young age, I remember I didn't have a car or any way to get there all the time. My parents would work late. And I remember I would run, even in the winter in Ottawa. It would be like a foot of snow on the ground and I'd be jogging to the gym. It was about a mile and a half, but still a decent little run in the snow. And I was just super dedicated from a young age because I loved it so much. And as I mentioned, sometimes...

just being in the gym with my music and that focus was just like a point of solitude for myself to enjoy. And there was a quiet gym luckily, and I slowly learned over time that no one in the gym is looking at you or judging you. Everybody who's been in there was a beginner at some point. So they're not looking at you, making fun of you. They were you probably a year or two ago. And everyone's just truly there to help out. And I've discovered that the fitness community in general is a very encouraging community.

because everybody has the same experience as you. They get in, they feel better, they get some confidence. They're like, this is great. Like, I would love for other people to feel this too, you hope, if they're nice enough. And that typically allows them to be very inclusive and want people to come and join and just be a part of it all. So I found it's not as judgmental as people think once you're in it.

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Save time, money, and provide your family with a financial safety net using PolicyGenius. Head to PolicyGenius.com slash Jordan or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's PolicyGenius.com slash Jordan. Right. Well, that's a really good point, you know, because part of being self-conscious in the gym is, and this is true for everyone,

for overweight people and for anybody who's out of shape or for anybody who just doesn't know what they're doing, which is pretty much everybody when they go to the gym the first time, especially if they don't have, as we pointed out, a history of athleticism. It's very easy to think that these people who are throwing the weights around in there are...

judgmental, you know, it's really a consequence of your own self-consciousness and proclivity to self-judgment. But, you know, the fact that those people are in there working on themselves does indicate very clearly through their actions that they believe that they still have work to do. And as you said, the probability that many of them

who are in there, or perhaps all of them to some degree, were in the same boat as you at some point is very, very high. You know, and it was certainly the case that the people who were coming over to help me weren't doing it in a judgmental way. You know, that was my problem. And there's another thing to concentrate on there too. You know, one of the things that

One of my favorite thinkers, psychoanalyst Carl Jung, pointed out, it was very, very helpful to me to understand, was that he said the precursor to the Redeemer is the fool. And what he meant by that was that if you're going to master something,

The first thing you have to do is admit to yourself that you're not a master of it already, because then you wouldn't have to do anything. So you have to allow yourself to be the fool. And, you know, one of the things I've noticed about people who are highly successful is that they will jump into new things that they don't know anything about.

And be the fool, be the person who doesn't know anything, be the person who's low man on the totem pole. Start at the lowest rung and they won't pretend to know more than they do know. They ask the stupid questions that are necessary. They humble themselves in accordance with their novice position. They accept that weight, but they also do so in the understanding that if they're honest with themselves...

they can make the kind of incremental progress that you described, right? Because you said you got more and more disciplined as the years went by, and that it doesn't matter

It doesn't matter if you start at the bottom. What matters is that you're so stupid and blind that you refuse to learn and that you stay there, right? So it's trajectory that matters and not absolute position. And so that's a useful thing for people to know. It's like, of course you feel like a bloody fool when you do something the first time. What the hell do you expect? Like, you are a fool, but that doesn't mean that you can't move beyond that.

Yeah, yeah, no, you touched on something great there when you're expanding. If it's something that makes you feel worried or anxious, or you're thinking other people are judging you, it's probably actually a reflection of yourself, something that you need to grow on.

And that's something that I really noticed because I used to be super anxious in public speaking. And I remember you've done a lot of talks on fear immersion and stepping into it and the confidence that can build. And I didn't really understand this whole mindset of all the confidence that would come from that. But I would always do podcasts or public speaking or I started to get in some seminar events or being asked to come talk for my success as a bodybuilder. And every time I went there, I'd be Mr. Olympia walking into this thing.

terrified out of my mind, like hands shaking, stumbling my words. And I still feel like that sometimes, but I've gotten better. But I realized I took a step back after a few times. I'm like, all right, this is something I need to put myself into more to become better at it. And I started to actually plan my events to be more talking based, sign up for a few more requests to talk a little bit more in front of people. And it was terrifying at first. And I still embarrass myself sometimes. I still have memories standing on stage stuttering or my list comes out really bad and feeling embarrassed and getting off stage.

But I also have a lot of memories now where I've killed the good talk and I've stepped off stage feeling so confident. And over that realm of me becoming better at something I wasn't good at, I noticed my confidence in all aspects of my life started to increase, not just in public speaking. So I think that being able to have that humility, like you said, look at yourself, be the fool and understand where you need to grow and put yourself into positions to grow is something that has helped me immensely and something I've taken from some of your words in the past too.

Yeah, well, let's delve into that a little bit because we can imagine your situation, you know, like you're a big guy and you're better built than anyone else in the world, arguably. And so what people would assume looking at you, it's the halo effect. Like if you see someone who's attractive and who's in very good physical shape and who's strong, you're going to assume automatically that every other good thing that's confident goes along with that. So that actually puts you first.

as a you know that puts you in a kind of a double bind because not only do you have to get up and speak publicly but people are going to assume a priority that well you've got this like why the hell would someone like that be worried about it and so and you are worried about it as and and public speaking is something that does terrify people it's it's one of the most highly cited it's fear of public exposure right and fear of making a fool of yourself and and being

being judged harshly by a lot of people and following and falling in status because of it it's a major league fear now but so so you had reasons to be afraid now you said that you had decided to voluntarily confront that regardless and there's a real key lesson there because one of the things that's been extraordinarily well documented among psychologists and and uh

well, let's stick with psychologists who deal with anxiety, is that the universal pathway to overcoming anxiety is to voluntarily face what you're afraid of in graduated doses. It has to be voluntary. It can't be accidental. And that's partly a mindset issue. And, you know, that mindset goes very, very deep. It's not just something that you think. When you decide that you're going to confront something voluntarily,

You change, you probably change yourself all the way down past the cellular level. You change the way that genes code for proteins. You change the way your cells operate. You change the way the neurons communicate. Like everything about you changes. And what you're doing, what you did, let's say,

with public speaking is not only did you develop the skill set that was associated with public speaking, and we can go into that a bit more, but you simultaneously develop the part of you that is capable at the physical and the psychological level of confronting everything that's frightening as such. You know, it's so cool because it means that you can, what you do with people in therapy when you do exposure therapy

therapy, which is essentially what you did, let's say, when you decided to arrange for yourself more and more demanding speaking opportunities, is that you don't become less afraid exactly. You become braver and braver and braver. And that's different, right? Because you're always going to be facing challenges that are beyond you to some degree. There's always a reason to be terrified into paralysis, right?

But you can learn to be a more courageous person. And that's not just an attitude. Like I said, it changes you at every single level of your being, like really all the way down to the molecular. There's a lot of work done on this now in a field called epigenetics. There's even some possibility, like this is, you know, more on the edge, but there is some possibility. Some of the changes that you can make behaviorally

can change you so profoundly genetically that those changes can be transmitted to your children, let's say. So, you know, that's really something. That's about as profound a change as you could possibly imagine. So let's talk about your experiences with public speaking. So you mentioned that there were... Tell me exactly, if you would, what it is that you were afraid of to begin with. What were the thoughts that would go through your mind that were...

that were intimidating? I mean, definitely, as anyone can imagine, when you put yourself in front of a bunch of people, you're in a position to be judged, a very vulnerable spot. And I can't really pinpoint exactly where it came from, but I have some minor memories from a child in front of a class or something like that, being super embarrassed and sweating. But I do think a lot of it comes from, I have a speech impediment. I've had a lisp since I was young. And when I get nervous, it gets worse. And when I was younger, it was much worse.

So I used to be teased for that a little bit, which made me, I'm sure, much more quiet and introvert and just not wanting to talk. So not wanting to talk around anyone, obviously, is much scarier to talk around a large group of people. So now standing on top of people, my mouth will get really dry. I'll start to be like, my tongue will stick out of my mouth. I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to sound dumb. People are going to laugh at me and judge me. And it led to this kind of spiraling effect. And you really hit the nail on the head when you talked about

the visual persona I give off when someone sees me or hears about my career or something, they already have an expectation of who I am. And that's something that I've worked on a lot in the past couple of years of this differentiation with my therapist who's helped me with this between what I would call C-bomb versus Christopher and the difference of what people expect me to be, what I think people expect of me and who I should be versus who I really am and allowing myself to be that person who is a little bit scared, anxious, has a lisp,

can step on stage and kind of embarrass himself a little bit so that's something i've worked on in this public speaking with part of that process of working on all that but overall before getting up there hands would be shaking heart would be racing i wouldn't even have concrete thoughts if these people are going to think this about me it was just like nerves kind of like almost black almost like blacking out nerves just like oh god here we go i gotta do this and as you mentioned voluntarily doing it is the whole secret to it so when i started

taking those nerves and those butterflies and that kind of feeling in my heart as a good sign of the chance for growth and changing my perception. I'm okay. Me feeling this right now, if I step into this, this is giving myself an opportunity to grow and become something better. So try and enjoy that a little bit more. You know, this is the feelings of racing in your heart, of being fear, scared, all these things. It's part

part of the human experience. And I think feeling anything is something great better than feeling nothing at all. So I started to kind of try and enjoy it and be excited for what would result of it. And that's kind of continuously helped. And obviously when you're stepping on stage, if your goal is for people to like you, I've heard someone in the past say, I believe they said, then you're putting your self-worth on the line. You're giving your self-worth an issue to be judged. Versus if you step on stage and your only goal is to be yourself, then

then it doesn't matter if they accept you or not because you can succeed just by being yourself. And that can lead to even more self-confidence. Obviously, it's a better goal to just be who you are rather than have people like you. It leads to a lot more confidence

fulfilled happiness rather than a false sense of reality of people liking a false sense of yourself. So that was a huge process of what I kind of stepped through and all that. And like you said, you don't get less scared. You get more brave. Even before getting on the podcast, I was a little bit nervous. I still get nervous now. And I just, I believe in myself more. I have more confidence from my track record in the history and I'm more brave to step into it a little bit more. Okay. So you covered a bunch of things there that I think are interesting and worth delving into. It's like,

Okay, what do you want when you step on stage? So let's say, well, you want people to like you. It's like, well, what the hell do you mean by that, first of all? It's like, which people? And does that mean that you're going to present a false front so that they like that?

because that isn't you. So if they like that false front, you haven't been humiliated. I mean, you've definitely circumvented that, but it's not like you got people to like you because they don't know who you are. So that's not a really good victory. Like, I mean, I understand why people might want to craft...

what they're going to say so they don't fail cataclysmically. But that's also not how you ever succeed as a public speaker. No, like, so when I go out on stage, I wouldn't say I'm nervous about it anymore, but I've done it so much now, you know, and it's certainly, it takes a very long time before you won't be nervous at all. It's not like I'm not pumped up and also excited. See, that's another thing you said is that you want to get yourself excited

into the frame of reference where you're primarily grateful for the opportunity and you're excited about it, like both of those. So like when I'm going out on stage, my wife does this too. Like we always take a moment or two to remember how bloody unlikely it is that there's all these people gathered there to hear us talk and remember the fact that they're actually there because they want to see success, not failure.

And so that allows you to step on stage not with a mindset of suspicion and paranoia and distrust of the audience, which is part of the fear of being judged, but

the recognition that you're among people who wish you well, which is certainly going to be the case for you in most of the places that you're speaking. And anyone who isn't there for that reason, they're the sort of mean-spirited person you shouldn't really care about. You shouldn't really care about what they think anyways. And then with regards to what you're going to say, you know, if you're concentrating on how it is that people are reacting to you, then you're going to

craft your words as you pointed out so they like you. But that's a false game. You know, you could just, and this works like a charm as far as I'm concerned, is you could just determine that you're going to say what you believe to be true. It's way simpler. Like, you might get into trouble for it right now and then because you're going to say things that, you know, maybe some of the audience doesn't want to hear. But ultimately,

This is where you have to decide what you're going to put your faith in. When I'm on stage, when I'm talking to people, as far as I can manage, all I'm trying to do is to say what I believe to be true and try to make my thoughts clearer. And the thing that's so fun about that is that if I'm trying to make my thoughts clearer to myself...

I'm simultaneously doing the same thing for the audience. If I'm trying to track the truth as I speak and move forward, then they can come along with me and then the whole thing works out. Like it just strips all the deception out of it. You know, and Chris, one of the things too that I used to tell my socially anxious clients or help them conceptualize is that if you go to a party

and you're nervous, you're primarily concerned about whether or not you're at ease, like you're concerned about your mental state. But if you go to a party and you're focused on making other people comfortable and welcome,

Well, first of all, they'll be really bloody happy about you because you'll be attending to them. But the fact that you're attending to them stops that self-consciousness. It's about the only thing I know that really works because you can't tell yourself just not to be self-conscious. And so when you're going now, like when you're going on stage or even when you're going on a podcast, let's say, what is it that you've learned to focus on? Because you're...

hypothetically, you're not focusing on your sweaty hands, you're not focusing on your, you know, because you said most of your responses are physiological rather than thought-based in terms of what's the manifestation of the fear. What are you now focused on when you're trying to communicate?

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I mean, part of stepping on stage, at least, as I kind of mentioned, I actually am focusing on that physical part. There was a quote from Tim Grover to Michael Jordan when he was younger talking about, instead of trying to fight the butterflies, just send them in the right direction. So when I start to feel those butterflies in my stomach and a little nervous, it's like, all right, you know, this is because changing my frame of mind rather than fear, I'm feeling these because I've worked really hard to be here. I'm very excited to be here. And I'm sure you know,

anxiousness and excitement are almost the same thing. So if I can like allow myself to believe how hard I've worked to be in this exact position, how long I've waited to hear, and of course I feel nervous and excited because this is really important to me. So feel all these feelings right now because

I compete once a year. So all my year is working towards that one day. And on that day, I want to feel everything I can rather than numb anything out and avoid it. So I'm like, this is part of this experience that I'm going to remember. Feeling nervous. And I've done this. The history helps me. I've done this five times. I've won seven times. I've been on the stage. Now I can step on the stage with experience. And I can have these nerves. And the nerves are going to fade. And I'm going to be left out there purely being present and joyful, feeling all of it. And I've just had that experience to go through it.

And a lot of it has come from doing it numerous times. The work I'm doing outside, believing in myself and that kind of change of frame. And I mean, the understanding that fear, anxious and excitement are so similar that you don't need to focus on it being anxiety and bad. Rather, it could be a good thing. Yeah. Well, okay. So...

When you confront something new, let's say an opportunity on stage, especially if it's a high stakes opportunity, what your body basically does is put itself in a position where you're more primed to do everything. And the physiologist, psychophysiologist calls that heightened nonspecific arousal.

Right? And so that's really what you're referring to. And what your body is doing is it's saying, well, this is a complex situation. God only knows what you're going to be called upon to do. So let's just crank everything up so that you can respond rapidly if that's necessary. And that can easily tilt into anxiety or it can shade into excitement. It's much more likely to tilt into anxiety.

If you start to get afraid of those responses, right? So you've learned to reframe them, you know, as the kind of excitement that you described. People fall into these feedback loops. This is what produces panic, by the way, where you're afraid, you see that you're afraid, or at least you interpret that emotional state, let's say, as fear. You get afraid of the fear that comes

makes the fear mount, then you get more afraid of that because the fear is mounted more and you just spiral, right? And that can turn into a full-blown panic attack. And so, okay, so you've learned instead to attend to that and to, and to,

I would say, interpreted in the best possible light, right? It's a realistic light, but it's the best possible light. You also pointed to something else that everyone should know. See, here is one of the things that people do that tilts them very hard toward maintaining or increasing a phobia, or even something like fear of public speaking. So as you're approaching your debut on stage, let's say, that tendency for arousal is going to increase.

And it's going to increase to a maximum, generally, right before the event begins. Now, I'm sure you've observed this. If you don't run during that period, see, if you run during that period, then you've learned that the event is terrifying.

If you wait that out and you actually go ahead with the event, what you'll find almost inevitably is that that high level of arousal will decrease once the event begins. And then you can see, you've learned like through practical experience, that if you just withstand the anxiety, it will decrease. Now,

you made allusion to the fact that even in the bodybuilding competitions where you're not speaking, yeah, yeah, maybe you can differentiate that for us. I mean, you said to some degree that you were worried about being judged as a speaker, but then, of course, when you're on the stage, you're being judged on the basis of your physique and your performance. And so, obviously, it isn't judgment per se that's

causing you to be nervous. It's more, and that's where you referred it to some of the things that had happened in your childhood, for example, you know, proclivity for a lisp a bit. And the fact that you had experienced some public humiliation doesn't take much for a kid, by the way, especially when they're, you know, standing up in front of a class, one bad experience like that could color you for quite a long time. How do you differentiate between what you feel when you're on the stage and

when you're being judged on the basis of your physique and your work compared to being evaluated with regard to speaking? How are those different for you?

I mean, when I was younger and I first started competing, I felt a lot more nerves, but I didn't do any public speaking events. So it's hard for me to compare that. I'm sure, I mean, you can actually look back to my Olympia speech in 2019 when I won my first Olympia and I like blurted some stuff out, didn't know what to say, was like, oh, but I felt super confident while on stage. So when I started, there was more experience I had in the bodybuilding aspect than

A lot more experience of that compared to public speaking. So my anxiety and work on public speaking really only started to progress in the last two years where I've had the last 10 years of competing to work on that. So right now I definitely still have nerves in both, but they're much less in bodybuilding and I'm much more able to change that frame of mind like I mentioned of anxiety.

Being able to enjoy that excitement rather than be worried about it and it feels easy for me to perform physically and get on stage and do what I need to do rather than start to pull my thoughts together and speak and all that stuff. I'll notice I'll get a lot more tongue twisted than I will mess up my posing on stage. So definitely more difficult speaking. But as you said, that fear of judgment feeling on stage, I do get a little bit on both. But now...

The bodybuilding aspect has transferred a little bit more into pressure and expectation. Because when I was younger, I felt it. But it was a little bit different because I was just new and nervous. But I was the underdog and no one really cared. There was nothing expected of me. So I was just...

feeling a youthful nervousness. And then now when I get up there sometimes it's like, okay, people are actually here to see me now and expecting me to be the best in the world. There is a standard that I have to withhold and anything less than that. If I come second place, that's bad now. Whereas when I was younger, if I came second place, that's amazing. So any kind of movement backwards, it's just more pressure. So that's a different style of expectation and pressure I feel from being on stage versus the actual fear of failure when I'm speaking.

Right, right. Well, okay, so there's a couple of things there. I mean, the first is that, you know, your comfort on stage performing professionally was proportionate to some degree to your degree of experience and also to some degree proportionate to your success, right? Because you could imagine that as you got more successful, you got more confident. But, you know, you're pointing to something else that's a little deeper than that, too, which is

You don't want to be deluding yourself into thinking that you're ever going to get to a point where you have nothing on the line and you're just without fear. That's why it's so much better to practice being brave than it is to assume that conquering fear means absence of fear. That isn't what it means. It means getting better and better at being able to deal with fear. Because, you know, one of the perverse things you're pointing to is that, you know, someone...

seeing this from the outside might think, well, you know, what the hell does Chris have to worry about? I mean, he's already hit the peak of his profession. Of course, he can go out on stage and be confident. There's nothing brave about that because he's in an optimized position. But you're giving us a viewpoint from inside, which is, yeah, but the stakes have changed now. The situation's different. And the downside consequences are different than they were. And so, see, I've seen this often.

One of the things I saw among professors and students was that they would falsify the way they presented themselves, what they said, what they wrote, because they weren't in a secure position.

So an undergraduate would write a false paper for a professor because they had to get the grade. And then as a graduate student, they'd write, they wouldn't say what they really meant in a seminar because they didn't want to cause trouble with people who might write them letters of reference. And then when they became junior professors, well, they didn't have tenure yet, so they still couldn't say what they thought. And then...

the next rung of professorship, well that's not all the way to the top, so there's still something to sacrifice and people would falsify themselves, you know, and it was based, what they would tell themselves is once I get into a position of security, I'll be comfortable with who I am and what I think and what I have to say and then I'll start speaking. But the lie about that is that you're never going to get yourself in a position where security makes you brave.

That isn't how life works. Security doesn't make you brave. What makes you brave is the decision that you're going to confront things that you're afraid of. And even like the people I know that are radically successful, and obviously you're one of them in your domain, it's not like...

They're now bereft of challenges. Like in some ways, the challenges actually get bigger, you know, with when you're playing a higher stakes game. So and I'm saying this, as you know, is that to let everybody know that you're never going to be in a situation if you're especially if you're pushing yourself forward, where you're not confronting something that is a

genuine threat and a genuine challenge. And you should, you can get yourself in a place where you're actually happy about that. You know, so why do you keep, let's delve into that a little bit. You've won five championships, right? And so one of the questions that someone might ask is, well,

Why continue? Why do you continue to do this? What's driving you forward still? I mean, it's a great question. It's one I've been honestly asking myself for the past couple of years, especially this year. There's been times where the risk versus reward hasn't felt like it's all there for me. And now my wife is pregnant. I'm having a child. Life's changing. I'm getting older. There's a lot of stuff coming into my life. And I've been asking myself that a lot. And it's definitely...

It's not so much being a champion that I love. And I have this thing called champion mentality. And I say how it's not about the trophies or the medals around your neck. It's kind of more about the person I've become in this journey. And I've heard you speak a lot about how humans take value from the uphill climb. You know, we, it's finding a new challenge, climbing that mountain. That's where we find value and growth in ourselves. And I've,

almost become addicted or just fallen in love with the self-discovery and growth that I have discovered through bodybuilding by pushing my limits physically and mentally, by going through states of suffering, overcoming these odds that hit me at the worst times and being able to see how far I can take a goal and how far I can push myself. I've fallen in love with that growth that has come with that. And so that's continuously what pushes me. And we spoke about

the feelings I have on stage. And I think a lot of successful people and myself have gotten really good at things for our ability to compartmentalize and to suppress things and continue to work as things are going on. But what I realized from a young age was that if I suppress things, compartmentalize and push them to the side for too long without keeping them back up, I start to suppress everything.

So the kind of thing I said at the end of this year was if you numb the bad, you numb the good. You start to numb your whole life and you start to feel less and be less present. And I didn't want to be that person anymore. So partway through my career,

I was like, I'm winning, but what I feel is relief that it's over at the end. I want to feel joy. I want to feel the fear and anxiety before and the joy afterwards, all of it rather than nothing. So that was a huge transition that I've pushed through in the last few years. And it's pretty cool because I've documented a lot of my preps

My friend Calvin here has been my videographer through everything and you can see almost a shift in previous years of where I was a lot more stoic and hard-faced to being a little bit more light-hearted and laughing and joyful, hanging out with people backstage before getting on stage because I'm really present and enjoying all that. And that's because when challenges come up in the middle of prep, which they always have, I tore my lat, I injured myself this year, I have an autoimmune disease as well, which has affected me in the past and

having to overcome those things, if I allow myself to feel that fear and stress and sadness and let out my tears and cry with my girlfriend who's supporting me or my wife now and be able to move through that, then when I'm in a position of joy and success, I feel way more joy and success. I'm able to embrace all that a lot more. So that's part of the personal growth that I've discovered through bodybuilding.

Obviously, I'm only 28 years old. I know there's so much more for me to discover. Part of me is almost worried. If I step away from this mountain, am I going to have something challenging enough to continue to push myself enough to grow? And obviously, I believe there is, especially fatherhood is going to be a whole new challenge that will teach me a whole new lesson. Yep, yep, yep, definitely, yep. But honestly, even a question I could ask you is,

Because you've, I touched on, you've mentioned it's the uphill battle that brings value. And when you reach the pinnacle of that mountain, what you want to see is another higher mountain in the distance for you to accomplish. But what do you do when the previous years have felt like Mount Everest and there's

A lot of suffering, a lot of difficulties, a lot of pain you've had to push through, a lot of joy as well. But you almost want to step back and be like, okay, do I need to find a higher mountain than this, a more difficult challenge to continue to grow and to find more value? Or can I maybe find a more lateral mountain, a sideways movement rather than an upward movement? And I mean, that's a question where I... Well, I think some of it, look...

You could imagine that there are a variety of really quite qualitatively different mountains to climb. The height might not be so much the issue, although it's one issue, as the diversity of the climbs. So imagine there's two ways of making progress, right? You can go up a more and more difficult terrain,

which you've already done with the Olympia contest. You went up a very difficult mountain, a very steep mountain, all the way to the top. But then, you know, now you're at the pinnacle. You could look around and you could see, oh, well, there's all sorts of different places to climb.

Okay, and one way of becoming a better person is to do something very difficult and to attain a pinnacle. But another way to become a good person, like a fully fledged person, is to take on a lot of different challenges. And you don't have to be, like every single challenge that you're going to undertake,

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There's no limit to how good you could become at that, right? There's no limit to how good a mentor you could be to your son or your daughter. There's no limit to how good a relationship you could establish with them.

with them if you made that a priority. So, you know, that's something right there that could easily occupy like a third of your life because it's a big deal. And that area of opportunity will grow up even more if you have more kids, right? Because, well, then there's more challenges of that sort. And then you also have your marriage, right?

And that's something, one of the things I've discovered with my wife, and this has really become more tangible for us in the last few years, because both of us almost died. And not just a little bit, like brutally and over months and years. It was very rough. And one of the consequences of that was, like we were apart, really, because of our illnesses, various illnesses, we were apart.

for something approximating two to three years, depending on how you look at it. And we grew apart during that period, as you do, because that's a long time. But we've found new depths to our relationship that we didn't know were achievable in the aftermath of that. And so I think there's no end to the depth

There's no end to the mountain that you can climb with your wife. And that's even more true once you have kids together. So you've got that. Now, you also said you're working on your ability as a public communicator. Well, that's something that's there for you because you've already got a huge following.

People are interested in you because you've mastered a particular discipline, and so you have the opportunity to continue to do good on that front that would be proportionate to your developing ability to express yourself. And so we have this program online called Future Authoring. It's at selfauthoring.com, and

We try to help walk people through the problem we're discussing with that program. So this is how it works. We might as well walk through this a little bit. This is how it works generically. It's like, okay, imagine yourself five years in the future. Okay, now here's the deal and here are the conditions. The condition is you have to imagine yourself as if you were trying to take care of yourself like you were someone you cared for.

So you could imagine someone you care for, like your wife, maybe, and you could think, okay, if I cared for myself like I cared for someone I love, what would I want for myself five years from the road? What sort of person would I want to be? What sort of challenges would I be facing? What would I have around me? How would I like my life to be? But more importantly, what sort of character would I like to be? And then you have to ask yourself that, you know, and you'll get a vision. And some of it will be concentrating on yourself.

The remediation of your flaws, because maybe part of you will go, well, you know, here's some of the things you do wrong that you know are wrong. And here's ways you could sort that up and out and clean it up.

You know, you could become a better public speaker, for example. You could take note of the things you're afraid of and that you're avoiding, and you could decide that you're going to face those and fix them. So that's... And then on the other side, you'd say, well, you know, what are you interested and excited about that you could pursue? And so you want to develop a vision. And it's really, you do that in dialogue, honest dialogue with yourself. It's like, okay,

I'm taking care of myself. What do I want? And then we broke it down in this process because if you ask someone what they want for their life, that's a pretty hard question. You know, it's so open-ended. It's so large. But then you can differentiate it, you know. People used to come to me as a therapist or as a professor, and they'd say, well, I don't know what to do with my life. You know, I'd say, well, what do you want? Say, well, I don't know what I want. I don't know what to do with my life. It's okay. Fair enough. If you don't know what to do with your life,

Look at what other people do that works and maybe think about how you're doing there. So you could imagine this. What sort of people do you want to be surrounded by? You know, what sort of friends do you want and what can you offer those people? How do you want your family to be functioning? Not be your wife and your kids, but also your extended family. You know, how could you repair those relationships or make them grow? What educational opportunities could you pursue?

How are you going to take care of yourself mentally and physically? What occupation are you going to pursue? And how are you going to make that thrive? And what are you going to do with your life outside of your work? And then...

More broadly speaking, you might say, too, how could you be of the broadest possible service to other people? Now, each of those is a micro vision, right? And that what that does is it provides for you because you you you you pointed out something extremely important there. You know, you said you fell in love with the process of climbing mountains.

Right. And that speaks also to your motivation to continue pursuing your bodybuilding, which is, you know, an extreme preoccupation, a difficult preoccupation. People might say, well, why do you do it? And, you know, your answer so far has been, well, you like climbing mountains. And then you might say, well, then why?

The mark of your success isn't going to be which mountain you climbed. The mark of your success is going to be how good you've become at climbing whatever mountain presents itself in front of you. And then the goal would be something like, what would you say, the eventual mastery of as many mountains as you can possibly manage. So one of the things that kept me motivated as a professor, it's kept me motivated all my life, it's like I've asked people,

How much can I do in the shortest possible time? And that's such a fun game to play. And I pretty much take that question into everything I do. You know, it's like, where could I see this going? And then the question of efficiency. Well, that's partly because, well, if you want to do 10 things, you're going to have to do them pretty efficiently because otherwise you won't have the time. But then you get in that challenge mindset, right? It's like, okay, here's an opportunity. Now,

Sorry, I'm rambling a bit here, but I want to point out one other thing you pointed to that's very, very important. You know, you said that as you've mastered the current discipline that you're pursuing, you're more and more able to do it playfully. You know, that you have more fun backstage, you know, that you're joking around more. And I would say that's also, if you're looking for a marker of mastery,

That's the primary one. You've really mastered something if you can do it in a spirit of play. And this is something to really know about the baby that you're going to have. Like one of the things that kids love play, and one of the things they can deliver to you as a benefit is to pull you into that play.

And there isn't anything that they want more than that. And there isn't anything that they need more than that. And men can really offer that to children. Now, it's not so easy when they're six months old and younger. But after that, man, the field of play is open. And you can have an immensely productive relationship with your kids and an unbelievably enjoyable relationship if you

introduce and focus on that spirit of play. You are at a pinnacle in your career. And as you said, you're not very old. You've got a lot of life ahead of you. Like, what do you think? And you talked about fatherhood in your marriage. What do you think is beckoning to you and also calling to your conscience? Like, where do you see your life progressing? I know that's a complicated question. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

I mean, I've always been pretty transparent that bodybuilding isn't forever for me. I'm grateful I got successful at a young age so I can retire at a young age. I always said I wouldn't go past 30. So now that I'm approaching that age, I'm coming to that point where I'm like, it's coming to the understanding that there isn't going to be one mountain. There's going to be many. And also this past year, I had a lot of things on my plate and I spread myself a little bit too thin and I wasn't able to

compete at the level I wanted to at the beginning of the year. And I read this book called The One Thing and it was talking about how if you want to be like the top 1% in something, you need to focus on that one thing. And so I kind of realized I was trying to be too good and wearing too many hats while still being Mr. Olympia. But it also showed me if I want to be the best father I can be, the best husband I can be, the best businessman, the best everything I can be,

bodybuilding is going to take away from that, at least for parts of the year. So if I want to be at least top 5% in a lot of these things, I can work really hard at that. But if bodybuilding is still being the best in the world for me at least, it takes...

lot out of me therefore it's sacrificing from other things and I started to notice that and that's not what I wanted a Biggest the biggest goal I've ever had in my life and I've always said this well I'm so excited right now it was to be the best father I can be and in turn also the best husband I can be because my biggest role model in my whole life was my father and the impact he had on me I was always so grateful for and being able to think of the impact I can have on another child is something that really excites me and

backtracking a little bit when you were asking me what motivates me to keep going. That's one of the biggest things that keeps me going is some of the stories I've heard from people who have followed my journey. I've worked hard, like I've said, on being my true self through it all by showing a lot of things. And honestly, I've been very grateful for everything you've put out because you have also been

a great role model for men. You're very intelligent, well-spoken, all these things, but you can also be very vulnerable. You're not afraid to cry when something is very passionate, you're passionate about. And I've noticed myself, I'm a crier. Sometimes I just start crying and I've expressed that. I've cried on stage after Olympias. I've cried on videos talking about stuff that scares me. I've talked about my lisp, which is a vulnerability and stuff. And since doing that more, I've had more and more kids come up to me and share those kind of same things with me.

And this past year at the Olympia, I had, I don't know if he was 12 or 13 years old. He was a young boy. And he came up to me not able to speak too well. It was tears in his eyes just thanking me for all I had done for him and how I had helped him. And he handed me a note. He handed me a letter because he said he wouldn't be able to get all those words out.

And I thanked him, gave him a hug, took a picture and kind of went about. And then a few hours later, I was waiting, eating some food. It was a night before the Olympia, getting on stage the next day. I opened up his letter and I started to read it. And he expressed how he had Tourette's. And he remembers hearing me talking about my lisp and how I was embarrassed about it and how I still have moments where it brings me back to my childhood feeling embarrassed. But

but working through all that stuff. And he talked about the impact that it had on him and how he'd been bullied and how sad he'd been in the past, but how he's building up all this courage that he pulls a lot from me. And it was a very nice heartfelt note. And I sat backstage or back where I was at the time just

Like sobbing, just tears running down my face. It still makes me emotional when I think about it now. Just feeling so grateful for the impact that the work I'm doing for myself and my family is also having on the community around me. And that story and that feeling alone filled me with so much joy.

to keep doing what I'm doing and a belief that I'm on the right path. And so that really... It just felt right. I'm like, I'm where I need to be right now and this is why I do it. This is why I'm putting myself out there at the same time as putting this much work into something. And...

Like I said, bodybuilding is forever. So when I bring down to a bunch of other mountains, I put a lot of focus on my relationship over the past few years and that will never stop. The amount of joy I've gotten from that, like you said, it's an endless battle. I want to put that energy into being the father I can be. And I want those lessons I have of being able to help people

other people in the bodybuilding community or these other kids who follow me I want to be able to apply more to them more to my family more to the children and all the above and I really realized that the beginning of my career was a little bit more selfish but more external chasing after things making myself better and now that I've realized I still have endless amount of growth to go but I have enough growth inside of me where I can help others grow too that's

That's the biggest thing I'm excited and passionate about. It's what has kept me bodybuilding at least for the last year. If I do another one, it will be a huge part of that as well. While I bodybuild, I share the ups and downs and the fears and the excitements of the entire journey.

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Right, right. So you can see that, as you said, that your progression has been, you know, that you focused in a very disciplined manner on one thing. And to some degree, that was something that served your own individual interests particularly well, but that as you've got better and better at that and become more successful at that,

The relationship you have with your wife is beckoning as extremely important. The potential relationship with your child and also this pleasure that you see and take in modeling discipline for people and also mentoring them. So I just had a chat with Jocko Willick and Jocko is quite the bloody monster and very disciplined man, you know, and he's joked with me several times that, you know, if he'd taken a few wrong turns when he was

a young man, he could have easily been a criminal type because he's a tough son of a bitch. You know, one of the things that really changed Jocko, because we talked about this to some degree, was his experience in the military. And I think he was interested in the military to begin with, perhaps for some of the same reasons that you were interested in bodybuilding. You know, it was the personal self-development element of it. But what he learned as a leader in the military was that he had the opportunity to model appropriate conduct

for other people and to help them develop. And he said he didn't ever find anything that was more meaningful than that. Like, that was even more exciting than excitement. That was more exciting than adventure. Certainly more exciting and worthwhile than anything, you know, kind of troublemaking criminal adventure, which does have that adventurous element to it, you know? It's like, it's why we like watching bad guys in movies, you know? At least they're not sitting around doing nothing, you know? And so, but...

Certainly, it's been true in my life too that I don't think there is a deeper pleasure and a more sustainable pleasure once you've learned to walk up mountains, let's say, with some degree of facility, than to see the positive effect that observing that has on other people and then also to foster that. And you certainly have a walloping opportunity to do that as a father. And then, you know, I want to talk about a couple of things.

You also mentioned, this is a particular conundrum that men have, I would say even more than women, but to be extremely successful at something, you know, the top 1%, you said, and you're actually above that in your particular discipline, you really have to be hyper-focused on it. Like the great scientists that I've known,

I worked at Harvard for six years and the senior professors there, I was an assistant and associate, not a full professor. The full professors were guys who were at the pinnacle of their career and they were at the pinnacle of that type of career period because Harvard would go around the world and find those mostly men and aggregate them together. And so then you might ask, well, what do you have to be like to be someone like that? And the answer is, well,

Well, being smart, that's like pretty necessary. And that's kind of a gift that's given to you by fate and God. Like you can interfere with it, but if it's not there naturally, you know, it's a real impediment. It's sort of like height, you know, if you don't have it, there's not a lot you can do to get it. But then...

insane dedication is the next thing. Like, if you want to be the best of the best, you're going to be working flat out like 16 hours a day, seven days a week, hopefully not exhausting yourself because you're in one hell of a competitive environment. And there's real utility in that, especially for men, because if you get really good at one thing, there's the

cascading benefits that you pointed to, for example, when you found when you started to work out in the gym when you were 14, that you were getting more, you know, you get more attention from girls because of it. So, but the price you pay is that it's harder to do many things at once. And you said you've come to realize that if you want to compete at the highest level, that that is, there's opportunity cost there, you know, that's going to make it more difficult for you to be competitive

well, 100% committed to the other things that you have to do and want to do. It's hard to get that balance right. And, you know, it's probably the case, I don't know this for sure, but it's probably the case that as you move forward and you step back from this particular obsessive concern, that you'll have the opportunity to grow, let's say, in a more balanced way and to pull out of that a more comprehensively developed personality.

You know, and that is something you, the advantage to doing that is that there's no limit to it. You know, I don't care how good you get at public speaking, for example, you can still get better. There's no, and I don't care how good you are as a father, there's no limit to, because you could be a father to a lot of people as you found out, you know, when that kid gave you the note, not least when that kid gave you the note. So, you know, that's definitely an exciting horizon of opportunities. Yeah.

What's been your experience? You said that, you know, we talked a little bit about your fears today. We talked a little bit about how you overcome them and how also they were linked to things about yourself that you regarded as inadequacies. We talked a little bit about public displays of emotion around that or maybe admission of that. You said your observation has been that you doing that

Like, it's like admitting to your weaknesses at the same time that you're celebrating your successes, right? It's that balance. You can imagine why that would be inviting for people. Because they might look at your success and think, oh my God, there's no way I could do anything like that. You know, you must be some sort of superhuman creature to manage that. But then when they hear, oh no, you know, you managed that despite everything.

the fact that you have an array of insufficiencies, that's where the person, that might be a place where the, especially the younger guys, they can identify with you more clearly. So an honest admission of that kind of opens the door to them. They might be able to think, well, if he could do it under those conditions, I could do it under the conditions in my own life. That's the advantage of that emotional honesty maybe. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, you spoke at the beginning, we're talking about, and you always speak about

speaking the truth. And I almost fell across this way of living by accident because when I would be nervous, all I could think of to do was to speak the truth. And if I was on stage and I was nervous or something, I would just start by saying, I'm up here and I'm really anxious right now. And people would be like, oh, that relatability, he's human. They start to see past that. And then I lighten up a little bit. There's no more false

falsehood I have to put on pretending like I'm not anxious or something. So that really helped me a lot. And yeah, it's been a process for sure, but it's helped a lot. And like you said, a lot of people have viewed me... It's funny, there's an internet term people call, and they started calling me a dad in the fitness industry. And it was quite ironic because I wanted to be a father so bad. And that's when I really started to realize the responsibility that came in the position I'm in. And

I mentioned the champion mentality and I use that as kind of a brainstorming topic. I continuously go back to and adjust what that definition means to me. And I grew up looking up to people like Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, all these high level athletes. But when you take a zoom out at their life,

most of them don't have long-lasting, at least not happy relationships. They typically end partway through or near the end of their career, which in my mind starts to look like these high level of success is requiring them to sacrifice their connection and relationship to be where they are. And I started to realize that's not what I want. And the rule that I have of champion mentality, it's not about

any rules to it it's just about how you do it i can do it and i can make my own rules as long as i'm feeling like i'm winning i'm progressing i'm growing it doesn't matter about the medals or anything outside of that it just matters the progress i'm making and so i wasn't willing to sacrifice my relationship or if i started to sack for my relationship i would pull back from bodybuilding i had a few more guidelines that i wasn't willing to give up on and seeing the responsibility i have to people looking up to me i believe that younger kids looking up and chasing success

long-term are going to be happier while still focusing on connection and meaningful relationships without sacrificing those just to become successful because anyone can see it that if you're at the top of the mountain alone you're alone right well you know the other thing too is that and i'm interested maybe in how you've managed this you know because we could say well

Your relationship is something that could interfere with your bodybuilding, right? Because time is a zero-sum game. But then we could say, well, no, no, not necessarily. Like, if you got your relationship in order, well, first of all, you wouldn't be wasting time chasing other women and falling into whatever pitfalls and complexities might be associated with that. Plus, you could ally yourself with someone who was there for your support and who was

along with you for the ride, assuming that she could find a way that would also fulfill her own goals. And that's a better vision, right? I mean, it's certainly the case since I've hit the road in 2017. My wife and I have

negotiated and searched to find where she fits into that, not shoehorned in, you know, and not as a necessary accompaniment, not that at all, but in a way that would bolster the entire endeavor and also keep the relationship strong. So how long have you been with your wife or fiancé or wife at the moment? Wife. We've been together for five and a half years, yeah. How long have you been married?

Uh, less than a year. Okay. Okay. So you're in your first year of marriage. What do you think that, what do you think you've done right? And what has she had done right? That's enabled you guys to develop this relationship, to, to move towards marriage, to decide to have a baby while you're pursuing this very, very specific and difficult goal. What have you both done right? Let's start with her. What do you think she's done right? Um,

She has definitely taken full responsibility for where she needs to come in and

The biggest thing that comes into my mind is we don't leave any monsters under the bed. We don't leave anything under touch or the dragon, as you've mentioned. We do not allow that. And at the beginning of our relationship, we've been through some hell. We've been through some chaos. We've been through some fights and we've been through some shit. But we're at a point now where because we have processed all those, we fought through them, we

pulled each other apart and then back together and we went through that dance now we understand each other so much and there's nothing there's nothing under the rug our carpet's flat it's all on the surface we've committed to speaking the truth speaking to how we feel and not allowing anything go between and i mean she's done great at holding me very accountable she she's no pushover i don't get away with anything really if i if i come in with a bit of an attitude or even an

Talk about making me better at the bodybuilder too. If I'm a little snappy because I'm dieting or tired, she won't have it. She won't let it go. She's like, she holds me to a high standard. She knows what I'm capable of. And that holds myself to that standard where I know that she's doing that because she loves me. She's willing to call me out for my faults and make the best version of me because of how much she loves me and values our relationship. And I think that ability to communicate and to work and battle through the problems rather than push them aside and move over and wait till there's too many of them

piling up to face, it's allowed us to, like I said, we've gone through some fire in the past, but now we're in such a stable place where when I found out she was pregnant and we're getting married, there's no fear. There's no what ifs. There's no, oh my God, there's just pure excitement and absolute confidence and trust because we know we can get through it together, anything. So I think that's the greatest thing. Well, that pure excitement, the emergence of that pure excitement, you know, and that

I think that's particularly true when it emerges as the spirit of play that we were talking about before. You know, I mean, there isn't anything more really that...

kids like boys and girls playing together than playing house successfully. You know, and that's a game for kids. But if you do it right as an adult, it's a game too. And you could imagine that if you got all the monsters out from underneath the rug and dispensed with them so they weren't cluttering up your house, that you could do something like entertain the possibility of having a family in nothing but, in almost nothing but a spirit of excitement. So I think, you know, the other thing I've noticed is that

If you clear away all those lurking skeletons in the closet or dragons under the carpet, then that spirit of play can emerge, right? And then that's when your relationship is optimized. What do you think, how did you guys go about

jointly determining that you were going to face the issues, your own personal issues and the issues in your relationship instead of pretending they weren't there. And how did you negotiate your commitment to the truth within your relationship? I think it was a bit of a dance move.

When we first met, she had a much more difficult childhood than me. And some stuff that she was processing still. And those were more on the surface. And I was the one looking back at my past with rose-colored glasses thinking I had it all good. And my stuff was a little bit deeper under the rug. And so as stuff started to come up, I think...

I think part of it comes from myself. I grew up in a family that wasn't always great at communicating about things. And so when I was entering a relationship, I wasn't going to have the same thing. I was going to make sure everything was spoken about and brought to the surface and worked through. And at first, she didn't love that about me. It wasn't always fun. But it allowed us

to continuously grow stronger and build trust. And as I started to see the worst of her and she started to show me the worst of her and I started to show her the worst of me and we realized we were still together and we weren't running away from each other, we started to build a lot more trust. And it's like, okay, I can show you my deepest, darkest self that no one else gets to see and you still love me. Like that's powerful. And same with me. That's a good deal. Yeah. I know for a fact that

she's allowed me to be all myself. She's seen me at my weakest, at my worst and all these things. And she hasn't run away. She's pulled me in closer. And you talked about, about,

not sacrificing or taking away from success, but actually being able to add to it. And that's where she's really helped me because she has understood so much of it that she has pulled out all the realness in me. And as I'm trying to feel and process emotions, she would be able to see on my face if something was like off and she would ask me, are you okay? And I'd be like, I'm fine, I'm good. And I'm very good at hiding that, but she's very good at seeing it now. And she would ask me 10 times,

What's going on? What's going on? Pull it out. All of a sudden, I start breaking down crying, and I didn't even realize what was in me myself. And I'm not wanting my wife to see me in this point of weakness.

because I feel maybe I would be judged. And I've had a lot of men, as I've spoken about this, tell me I couldn't tell my wife that she would judge me too much. She would leave me if I broke down crying in front of her like that. She didn't. She pulled me in closer and she was like, told me every single time. She's like, I know this is difficult. I know there's a lot of pressure on you right now. You can quit if you want. I will love you regardless, but I believe in you to get through this and you will get through this if you choose to. And she instilled that confidence in me.

And it's that dance we've had back and forth where it started with me pulling it a little bit of her. And then now that she's in a much better place, she's able to start pulling the things out of me. And we show each other the dark sides and we've pulled each other closer and closer over the years to now this point where we have this pure excitement bringing a child together, which is the ultimate form of

and trust that you need. It's the most beautiful thing and it's something that I'm very grateful to share because nothing's more meaningful in life than getting to share these experiences and these moments I have with someone who loves you and sees you for all of who you are.

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Yeah. Yeah, well, that was all good, Chris. I mean, I like that story a lot. It has the ring of truth about it. I really like two things you said. The first was, it's so interesting, eh? Because you said that when your relationship started, her issues...

Those would be problems that she brought to the situation that had remained unsolved to some degree. That's what baggage is. It's like impediments to people's development that they haven't been able to overcome or conceptualize properly. You said hers were more on the surface, right? And so you played the role of the person who was willing to confront those and you guys got through them and dispensed with them and then things turned around, eh? So because once she got better at that,

The things you said, the things that were about you that were perhaps not as evident on the surface, those started to emerge and could be dealt with, you know? And so that's cool. And I think it's realistic. I don't think it matters in a couple where you start delving into problems. You delve into the problems that make themselves manifest. If you do that honestly together,

you'll end up dealing with all of the problems, right? It doesn't matter whose they are. They're gonna rise up and you're gonna be able to confront them. And then you said that having done that successfully, partly because she is bonded to you in this vow, she isn't gonna run away when she sees the parts of you that aren't everything you might hope they would be at that moment. And that means that you can, what that actually means instead of making it worse, it means that you can actually admit to and confront your problems

So that you have some possibility of solving them. Because, you know, it is humiliating in the true sense to notice that you had a problem that you didn't even know you had. You know, but it certainly gives you an opportunity. Then you know it's there, man. And then you guys can take it on. And you concluded all that by saying that there isn't anything better.

than having the opportunity to share your success with someone you love. And I actually think to some degree, if that's not the fundamental benefit of marriage, it's certainly one of the benefits. Like working through your problems jointly, that's a major one. And whatever pleasure you get out of each other's company, that's a major one. But this ability that a long-term relationship has to allow you to

It deepens your experiences, eh? The fact that you have someone to share them with. It makes your own triumphs much more real and much more profound to have someone along for the adventure. And then you also have the same opportunity in relationship to their successes. That's a good deal. For sure, yeah. And especially as I was talking about her pulling out those...

Those fears and the things in me that I'm holding in and seeing all that and truly seeing all of me and everything that it takes to become Mr. Olympia or to get through whatever I'm getting through and then be together at the end and to step off stage and go behind the curtains and to see her there looking me with tears in her eyes. I'm getting emotional now thinking about these moments and being able to embrace her and in that moment feel that this person you're holding, who you love, has seen the entire journey with you

You don't feel alone at all. There's no like standing on stage being like, you don't know what I went through. No, she's seen and she felt everything I've been through and she was beside me the whole way. And therefore we are both able to feel this victory together. It's hers as much as it is mine. So that's, as you mentioned, there's nothing more beautiful than that. Right, right. Well, then, yeah, well, that's the most real part of the whole celebration because, I mean, you get the award and you get the public acclaim and you get the triumph, but it's

If you've been honest with your wife and all of the problems that went along with that, all the obstacles that went along with that have been laid out and you overcame them jointly, then the true celebration in the deepest sense is actually the one with her because she knows the story better than anyone else. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a good deal. That's definitely a good deal. So when is your child going to be born?

Baby girl is going to be born in April.

So you've got about three months. Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. So your wife is pretty pregnant at the moment. She's pretty pregnant, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those last few months, I just watched my daughter go through that because she had a baby in mid-December. And so we were there for about the month leading up to that. Yeah. And those last couple of months of pregnancy, that's quite the... Well, the whole thing is quite the trip, but the last few months in particular. For sure. Yeah. Obviously, technology.

too, as a man, your role at the beginning of the child, as you mentioned, that spirit of play doesn't really come in until they're a little bit older, which is easier for a man. What would you say is some good tips for me entering this right now, especially for that first phase? That's a good question. Well, look, after my wife and I got married, I was about 28 or so, and she's a year older than me. She was ready to have a baby pretty much right away.

And I still wasn't firmly situated in my career, although my prospects were good. I wasn't worried about it. And I wasn't in a hurry. But she was more in a hurry. And I thought, well, I don't want to stop her from doing something that she wants. So why am I resistant to this? So I went for a walk and I thought about it. And I thought, okay, well...

I have things to do to finish developing my career, and I have to do them right now. I was finishing up my PhD. Like, I have to do that. There's no way around that. And so nothing can interfere with that because that's not going to be good for me or for my family. So that's one possibility. And then I thought, well, also...

I don't know what the hell to do with an infant. Like, it's not in my... And look, I'm a relatively maternal man. I worked with little kids. I've worked in daycares. Like, I like little kids. And so I'm more prone to take care of little kids than most men by temperament. But even so, like infants...

I don't know what the hell to do with an infant. So I thought, oh, well, maybe that's the problem. I don't have any problem with kids at all once they're sort of ambulatory, like older than nine months, let's say. And by the way, you can start playing with a baby very, very early. Like the play is very subtle. You know, I had taken my granddaughter, my son's daughter,

and put her on my knees standing up when she was about four months old. And I got her to play a head bonking game. You know, I'd bring her forward and bonk my head on hers. I'd go one, two, three, bonk. Like really lightly, obviously. And then wait, because babies are slow, eh? Their pace is slow.

One, two, three, bonk. And then I did that like five, six times so she knew the pattern. And then I went one, two, three and pulled her forward but didn't bonk her. And she laughed.

And I thought, hey, kid, you got the game. You know, you establish that little pattern and then deviate from it. That's the game. It's like peekaboo, too. You know, it's like it's a surprise. There's a bit of surprise. So you can start playing with a baby very early. It's very subtle to begin with. But I would say so know that know that that you can start playing and and interacting very early.

So and that's a good thing to have at the back of your mind. And that ability to play just gets more and more important as the baby gets older. But I would also say that your role is to take care of your wife while she takes care of the baby.

So that means you've got to watch her because this is going to tire her out. Like it's a full body experience for a woman, right? I mean, first of all, she's pregnant and that's a hell of a thing, especially in the last month. Then she has to give birth. And, you know, I think that's something men have no real comprehension of. And then she has to recover. And then that baby is like desperately vulnerable and requires everything the woman has to provide for the first time.

Absolutely for the first two months and pretty much absolutely for the first six months. So you got to stand in the background and you got to watch her and you got to make sure that she doesn't get overwhelmed.

Because that's when you need to be in there. You need to go in and say, look, you know, you need a rest. You need to have a nap. I'll take care of the baby. I'll watch. And so everything's going fine. And I'll wake you up if it's necessary. But you've got to spell her off. And so you need to make that arrangement. And that's the primary, you know, you think that's how it looks to me, is her primary responsibility is to take care of the baby. And your primary responsibility is to take care of her.

And then you have to understand that she's going to be gone from you for like six months. And if you can engage in that wholeheartedly, you can get to know the baby and you can set the stage so that that baby is really well attached to the mother, like firmly, and that'll save you so goddamn much trouble for the rest of your life, you can hardly imagine it. Because that initial bonding happens

That's what provides the scaffold of security, like the physical scaffold of security for that new person. And if that's disrupted, it's real trouble. So, you know, in six months, it's not, you know, an instant, but she's going to come back.

And then you'll also have, when my son was born, when Julian was born, my daughter, Michaela, was only a year and a half old. And that's a bit of a tricky age gap because a year and a half old kid still needs her mother quite a lot. And then you have a new baby. And if you have a year and a half old kid and then a new baby, the year and a half old kid looks like a teenager, right?

It's like they're not a baby anymore compared to a newborn. And so they can easily get kind of shunted aside and that can produce a lot of sibling rivalry and jealousy and bitterness and alienation on the part of the older child. So we taught her very early to take care of the new baby and to understand that if she established a relationship with him, you know, that would be

a benefit that she could derive from the new situation. She'd have three people to love instead of two, and that's a good deal. The same applies here in relationship to your wife and the new child. It's like you're going to have to let your wife go for six months. But if you're very careful with that, as I'm sure you will be, and you really take care of her, you know, she'll come back to you, and then you'll have this other person, a daughter. You'll never have anybody in your life who loves you as much as your daughter will.

Like if you do that right, and it'll be the same if you have a son. And that is a bloody good deal. I'll tell you, man, I loved hanging around my, when my kids were little, I would way rather be with them than anyone else. They were fun. You know, and that's, it helps if you have the right disciplinary structure in relationship to your kids, and you've worked that out with your wife. So I have a rule. It's a very good rule. You know, don't let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them.

And if you discuss that with your wife and you make that a rule, you know, you can note to each other that kid's annoying us, that kid's being annoying. And then you can work together and you think, OK, what's annoying? How do we stop it? Because if he's annoying you, he's going to annoy everybody else. And if he's annoying, no one will like him. It's not good for the kid. But if you can get that right, you'll.

There'll be nothing more enjoyable that you do in your whole life than spend time with your little kids because they really want to like you more than anything else. And that's a great deal, man. For sure. Yeah. No, I'm definitely very excited for that, that relationship building. And like you were saying, and luckily in the past, we've had almost a little bit of experience with the flip where when I was, I got better this year, but in the past when I was a little bit more

stressed out about entering a prep, we would communicate before getting into it. In the past, we didn't, but we started to communicate. Be like, okay, I'm about to enter a really intense phase of my prep right now. So I just want you to know preemptively, I love you. You're my number one priority. But right now, I may not be able to show you that as much as possible, but I promise...

And afterwards, we will reconnect, we will do everything we can. And also in the process, I will do the best I can. So now that we've practiced that, you mentioned six months, it's going to be pulled away. So we've already been communicating and we will more and especially you giving this tip, I'll go even talk to her again tonight and be like, I understand that you're going to be stepped away for the six months and give her permission to be there for the baby. And also understand that afterwards, we'll reconnect and come back to each other.

But rather than finding it out along the way, understanding it before it comes so that we're able to prepare for it and not build any resentment that might come. So the other thing that Tammy and I figured out at that time was because your wife is going to be very preoccupied with this new person and to the degree that you want to be around your wife,

That's going to leave you on the outside. Like, that's going to happen. And that's also a place where the kind of resentments that tear families apart can start to develop, because you can be resentful

about your wife because she isn't there. And then you can be resentful of your daughter because she's taking you away from your wife. And then you'll deny all that because you'll think, well, I'm not the sort of person that could be jealous of a baby. It's like, oh yes, you are. You definitely are. And so is everyone else. So these things have to be managed. And so one of the things we discovered, this was actually my wife's suggestion, that once

say after that six month period where your wife has the wherewithal potentially to attend to you to some degree, let's say, and to want to do that. We start, that's when we started our practice of regular dates, you know, and we have done that for, I don't know how long, 35 years now, you know, like we make dates two to three times a week and we've done that for that long. And that's a really smart idea because one of the things you'll find is that

you're going to be way busier than you can possibly imagine once you have this baby. And even more so if you have more kids. Like, it's a real threshold transformation.

Right? Because now you have someone really vulnerable and you are responsible for them. Like, it's unlike anything you'll have ever done. Now, you're a disciplined guy, so, you know, you have a taste of that sort of thing. But it's still, it's a watershed moment. And because you're so busy now, it's easy for your relationship with your wife to become secondary or even number 11 on a list of 10 priorities, you know.

And that's not good. And so my sense is that couples who are embarking on the process of having kids have to make a conscious commitment to placing each other first for some amount of time during the weeks and months ahead. You can't just wait around for it to happen because you don't have the bandwidth.

And so, and this has been, this is something we've got better and better at too. And I would say cumulatively, you know, over all the decades is that the dates we have just get better and better, just like because of practice. But negotiate, so if you know, you know, you're going to have to leave your wife to the baby for six months and then maybe she'll be able to come back to you. And then, but having a plan for that, you know, like to begin with, she's still going to be pretty tired. It might be that, you know,

You have someone take care of the baby while you're at home and you guys have dinner together. Something that simple. Or you watch a movie together. You know, it's got to kind of start out slow. But having a conscious plan for how you're going to prioritize your relationship, given that you now have a baby to take care of, that's going to save you a lot of misery and grief as well. Absolutely, yeah. That preemptive planning is something I've been processing a lot, especially recently, because she's also...

in pregnancy, of course, they create connection and they're building their home and almost nesting, I guess you could say. And I've been going through a large, very large growth phase of my business that I own here in Florida. And we've been traveling a lot for that. So I've been out of town a lot. And you were talking about

part of your worries when you were having a child where you got to get your PhD, which is also good for your family long-term so that you're able to provide for them. And that's partly what I'm processing and going through right now is it's taking me away a little bit right now, but I understand long-term it's, it's going to provide for my family. It's what's going to be best for them. But then let's say over the last, over the next three months in the first three months of the year, I'm home for about eight days, 10 days, um,

And Courtney's home all the time. So I need to be a lot more conscientious when I come home with being planned. We're like, okay, I'm only back for three days. We need to plan ahead that we're going to do date nights every time I'm back because we need that time to connect. And that's even, that's also great practice. Like you said, where I might feel busy now, but when there's a child in the mix of all that, it's,

it's going to be tenfold. So being able to preemptively plan ahead and actually build structure and routine where you're planning those moments of connection rather than just waiting for them to naturally happen, which maybe when you're young and you just, it's Friday night, let's go out. We're not tired. Let's have fun. It used to happen naturally. But as life picks up, you need to be a lot more attentive to actually planning ahead and making sure it happens. Yeah, well, and you also got to learn with each other, you know, because there's going to be, imagine there's an optimal balance between

Look, if you're going to have Thanksgiving dinner, you don't want to eat a pizza like at four in the afternoon, right? You want to be optimally hungry. And it's a state of optimal deprivation. And so you also want to negotiate with that with your wife, you know, as you progress through your marriage. It's like, how much time do you have to spend with each other?

But how much time do you have to spend apart or in a state of desire, right, to make all of that optimal? You know, and that's a very subtle thing to get right. You know, like my wife needs to be alone more than me. And she is a lot more fun to be around and a lot more interested in me if I leave her the hell alone more. And because I would likely choose, what would you say,

I'm more cuddly. God, what a horrible thing to say and admit than she is, you know, and it's easy to be put off by her somewhat prickly exterior. She's very playful, but kind of rough, you know, and so she's kind of a prickly person. And it's actually something I like about her. But, you know, we've had to be very attentive to find exactly that balance, you know, so that I'm not around her too much.

So that she can come to miss me. So that when we are together, that we're both extremely happy about it, you know? And that's something that this regular practice of planned togetherness, that can also foster that because you can learn that. It's like, well, because you can watch yourself. It's like, you'll find out, well, when am I truly happiest to see her? Like under what conditions? And she has to figure that out with you too, you know? And that's a good thing to discover. And yeah.

And you can discover it if you make that effort. So, well, you have a big year coming up, eh? With a new baby. And when is your next major competition? It's in October this year. And so you start really ramping up for that win. Depends on how everything goes in the year, but maybe around July.

Right. Okay. Okay. And you're going to figure out how to do that with this new child in your life too. That's the challenge that we're going to be working on this year. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Well, you got a lot of good things sitting there in front of you. A lot of new mountains by the sounds of things. For sure. And so... I've been lucky that I was talking about bodybuilding forever for me. So as I'm approaching what I feel like at the end of my career, these new mountains are forming in front of me. So it feels like everything's kind of coming as it's meant to be and

hopefully beautiful culmination of the journey with the beginning of a new one that will be discovering my new mountains and new forms of growth and new ways to find fulfillment. So I'm very excited. Right, right. Well, it's very wise to be looking ahead to that already and not to be... It's a really good thing to know this is something you can learn as you get older and hypothetically wiser. It's not such a bad thing to...

to leave the party when it's going strong, especially if you got something else exciting, you know, beckoning to you around the next corner, you know. And you can imagine athletes in particular, you know, they have their glory days for sure. And it's very much dependent on youth and the cutting edge that that youth gives you. And you have to know

when you're at the peak of your game and when the time to move on arrives. That is earlier in athletes' lives generally than in other people's lives. And having the wisdom to see that and to not only accept but welcome it, know that that's one thing you can do to make that transition. I wouldn't even say easier, but to allow yourself to transition to something that could even be better. I mean, you've already had spectacular success, but that doesn't necessarily mean that...

You've reached your peak. And that's a good thing to know too. For sure, yeah. I'm glad you pulled back that word easier because as I'm coming more face-to-face with the transition and as you said, leaving the party while the party's still fun, it's feeling more challenging than I thought it would be. And as it should be, it shouldn't feel easy, especially because I'm not leaving something that has turned into something I resent. I'm leaving something I learned to actually enjoy more.

But everything comes to an end. And like you said, sometimes that leaving something great behind will lead to something even greater. And I'm glad that I have my family in front of me to be that something much, much greater.

Yeah, that's a good deal. That's a good deal. All right. So everybody watching and listening, I'm going to continue to talk to Chris on the Daily Wire Plus side of the platform. I think we're going to talk to begin with about his father because he's made some comments in this YouTube discussion about his admiration for his father and also his discovery of

or adoption even of the role of dad in the enterprise that he's pursuing. And so we're going to delve into that a little bit further, as well as some other autobiographical details and anything that happens to come up that's interesting as a consequence. So if you'd like to join us there, please do. You can consider throwing some support to Daily Wire Plus Way, which I think isn't such a bad idea given that they're

staunch advocates for the kind of free speech and free inquiry that we all desperately need, especially now. And so, Chris, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. That was very engaging and a lot of fun, and I appreciate that. And also for your willingness to discuss so forthrightly the obstacles that, you know, you still see in front of you and that have

caused you a certain amount of distress that you're busily working to master and overcome. It's very useful for people to hear about that sort of thing. So, you know, I think you do people a real service when you are willing to talk so straightly about such things. As you've seen, you know, we've seen the impact that that's had on people. And to the Daily Wire Plus people, thank you. And for the film crew here in Toronto for facilitating this.

Much appreciated. And to everyone watching and listening, your time and attention is always appreciated and not taken for granted. Ciao, Chris. Good to get to know you, man. Likewise. I appreciate the conversation. It's been an honor and you've helped me as well, just talking through things that helps me process and learn. So thank you for this conversation and the previous one-sided conversations we've had listening to over the years. It's an honor to be on this podcast with you. Thank you very much, sir.

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