#851 - Chris Bumstead - Discipline, Motivation & The Champion’s Mindset
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This is going out the day after the Olympia. What do you hope happened yesterday? Well, I certainly hope I won. Definitely. Easiest answer to give. This year is just very important to me to really want to bring my best package. You know, it sounds cheesy to say, but I've been working hard, going through a lot of adversities and challenges over the years. And every year has had something kind of like get in my way and felt like it was holding me back. But

This year's had a few earlier on in the year, but at this point I'm feeling pretty good, feeling pretty set. So I just want to be able to stride into this one. I want to be able to enjoy it. I want to be able to, you know, get off stage, kiss my wife, hold my baby, know that I became the best in the world and maintained a beautiful relationship through it. How important is it to share the success with somebody else as opposed to just doing it for yourself?

It's hard to say how important it is because I haven't had the success without her, but I can't imagine it in any other way. I think, you know, in the meaning we find in life, it's beautiful to do hard things and to accomplish things. But if you were to do it alone, it's just not the same as being able to share it with someone. I think there's a level of, you know, codependence and regulation that can be healthy and can help you push through, be more present.

not have to shut off and numb so much. You know, I think a lot of people who are going through hard things, trying to accomplish really big levels of success, numb a lot to get there. And I think being able to have a partner in which you can regulate yourself with and share and communicate and lean on prevents you from having to numb brings you closer together, which is its own experience of

as well as the experience of whatever you're working towards. So it's like double the amount of joy that you get to feel. Growing in two ways at once. Exactly, yeah. And who doesn't want a big hug after you accomplish something, you know? Yeah, that's cool. What will you be talking about in your speech, hopefully? My speech, hopefully? It's a good question. I would say just talking about this year, I've been thinking a lot about the sacrifices that come with success. You know, like nothing comes for free.

And I've reflected a lot over the years of how much of my mental peace I've had to sacrifice to accomplish what I've accomplished. And it's just been a lot of like,

waking up at 5 a.m., going through the day, wake up, weigh myself, weigh my food, do my check-ins in the mirror, like go to the gym, work out, everything is like, am I good enough? Am I being enough? Am I doing enough to win the Olympia right now? It's all just compared to being Mr. Olympia to that level of success. And, you know, people talk about what you sacrifice to be great at things. And they normally like, you don't get to go hang out with your friends. You don't get to

Go party, go do these things. But I think for me, the biggest sacrifice has just been my mental peace. So the goal this year has been trying to find that, maintain it, have the mental peace while also thriving at a high level and seeing how I can do that as efficiently as possible. And I'd like to be able to say I did so successfully. Talk to me about the tension of being...

as high of a performer, the best in the world at what you do, whilst also not having that neurotic drive, that sort of ambient anxiety that you can never switch off? Because it seems like that anxiety is precisely what creates the perfectionism approach that allows you to cover all of those bases. Is it possible to have one without the other?

I'm not sure. I still have a level of neuroticism in me, even though I've been succeeding for like five, six years now. And it's definitely gotten better. You know, I don't focus on perfection. I focus on just being, doing the best I can. But even within that, I have that voice in my head that will look at myself every now and then and be like, it's not that I'm a shitty person, but if I'm trying to be Mr. Lumpy, like you're not fucking doing enough. And it creates a, like a impeding anxiety upon myself. Like I'm not doing enough. And,

That's not an overwhelming thing all the time. It's a drive for me to keep being better and keep pushing more and more, but it's a lot. I think being able to manage that is one of the most challenging things of maintaining success for an extended period of time. There's two different mindsets when you win something. There's, oh, I won. I did it. I'm done. Then there's, oh, shit.

I better, I gotta do better than this. I won, now I have to maintain this. Not only maintain this, but this is the bare minimum of what's expected of me and I gotta do better now. So there's the balance of all that. And I think over the last couple of years, I've been able to really be able to fix my perspective on just being grateful for the privilege of it. You know, there's been times where I thought I was gonna stop competing because the pressure felt so high. And then when I started to step away from it, I was like, fuck, I would really miss this pressure.

Like I have something I love about it. It's something I love about being put back against the corner. Like knowing that there's a lot of work I have to do, feeling like I can't accomplish my goal and you're going to have to do it. There's something so like simple and beautiful in the meaning of just doing something that difficult under that level of pressure that you're choosing to do. You know, people say you find meaning in suffering. And I think if you put yourself into like a meaningless suffering, it's kind of just

It's dumb. There's no point. You're just hurting yourself for no reason. But if you can find your meaning in just doing hard things that are as close as possible to suffering, that you're still benefiting from and you still enjoy, I think it's beautiful. That's one of the vicious double-edged swords of having success, if you have that kind of mentality, which I know all too well, that anytime you reach a new high or achieve some new kind of bar, hooray, we did it.

immediately the next thought after that is oh fuck i now need to do it again but better that's now the next minimum yeah and i've i've had conversation with many people about the possibility of not having that and just being able to enjoy and relieve the pressure on yourself and you know there's all these studies that come out talk about motivation and drive saying that you can get more from coming from like a secure place rather than beating yourself up and it's like

It depends on what your version of success is. Like, can these people live a life to be more happy and fulfilled? Yes. But will they be Michael Jordan and have six championships? Dude, I love this topic. I love it so much. And I think the bottom line is that if you're talking about beating everybody else on the planet to a thing, what you're actually talking about is what are you prepared to sacrifice psychologically, physically, emotionally?

existentially, relationally, socially, in terms of your self-esteem, your comfort and everything, right? All of that. Because if you're

If there's even a part of you that's thinking, well, I'm going to do this, but I'm going to balance it because I want to feel satisfied. I want to feel comfortable with myself and so on and so forth. That's fine for as long as it contributes to your performance within the domain that you're competing in. But as soon as you sacrifice any output in that, that's just an opening for somebody else that's the competitor that's going to come in and get it. Because I use this example of Eddie Hall.

world's strongest man, 2017 or 18, I think. And he's there, you know, he's worked hard toward this final goal. He wins it once and he's crying and he's saying, Nana, this is for you, his grandma that passed away recently, something like that. And he says, if he hadn't won that year, he thinks that he would be dead, divorced with no relationship to his kid because the weight he was at and the way he was pushing his body with pharmaceuticals and stuff was devastating.

He was working so hard and training so much that his relationship with his wife was in the toilet and he spent no time with his kid. So you think, okay, in order for you to beat Eddie Hall, you have to be prepared to sacrifice all of those things or not have them in the first place. So that's the price that he pays to be him. Do you want to win World's Strongest Man? Because that's the price right there.

Yeah, it's powerful. And that's what it comes down to, like, what are you willing to sacrifice at the end of the day? You know, people don't understand the level of sacrifice it's going to take. And there's been moments where I realize that there are competitors I'm going against, I'm sure, and people in my league who are doing things that hurt their body more than I'm willing to do.

Because I'm not the person anymore. I can't say I'm willing to sacrifice everything to win the Olympia. Like, hell no. I have a family. You know, there's things I care about. Am I willing to sacrifice a lot? My own, like, selfish mental peace and a lot of joy and a lot of things and working really hard? Absolutely. But my health, taking years off my life to not be with my family and stuff? Those are the things that kind of, like, hold me back now. And is that going to make me better or worse? I don't know. But again, you know, I've always...

focused on building my own definition of what success means to me. You know, it's like we were saying in competition, there will always be, I'm trying to be the best in the world. That means I need to beat these people. That means I'm good enough or I'm not good enough in comparison to something external of myself. But internally, the values of the truth of what you hold in yourself of what really success means to you in your entire life, though, they're the things that you kind of have to balance and weigh out and kind of lean into one or the other and

I compete because I want to win. I love winning. I love being the best in the world. I've sat many times trying to find the balance of what I want within all this. If I was losing, I wouldn't be competing. I'm here to win. And it is what it is. I love what I do, but at this point, it's taken away a lot that I just really love winning more than I love winning.

more than I dislike the work. So it's fine, I can do it. But my values are still bigger than that. My success at the end of my life is beyond hurting myself now to do so. So it's a constant check-in with myself of making sure I'm lining up my values and I'm not going to sacrifice winning to do so. And I need to be smart enough that when those start to disbalance, I need to pull away from one, focus on the other, and know when to check out. So what happens next? What next in life? Take it year by year and we'll see. I've been saying

I think 2019 was the year I finished, won the Olympia, went home, and I was like, I'm done.

I'm retiring. And that was the year I was over it. I was done. In 2018, I almost done. And then 2019, I'm like, fuck it. I'm going to go win one. I won one. It came back. All I felt was relief. I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought. I still was getting a little sick from autoimmune. I didn't know how to manage my health properly back then. And it was just so much stress about my health because of 2018 when I was in the hospital for my autoimmune that I was like, this isn't worth it to me. I'm not doing this anymore. And ever since then, I've been like, if I do one more than I'm lucky to do one more.

And I'm going to take it one year at a time. And so every year I've been grateful enough to be able to do one more at a time. My health has gotten better every single year. And every year I find that drive and that excitement behind that pressure to be better and better. And I'm still enjoying it. I haven't sacrificed anything beyond my values and my truth. So I'm here doing my best. It'll be...

maybe even more of an impressive feat to be able to do it without sacrificing that stuff. And it's very unglorious. You know what I mean? It's got nothing to do with how peeled you are when you step out on stage or, oh my God, look at how much back development he's accumulated from last year or whatever. It's one of those very odd private victories. Yeah. You know, like I always think about this, these weird moments

insults that we have to ourselves on a daily basis that no one is ever going to give you any applause for. So you get caught up in traffic in a way that wasn't your fault. And then when you get there, the person that you're dealing with, something goes wrong with that and something else goes wrong with this and something else goes wrong the whole day, all the way down. And no one of these is impressive or grand or magnificent in any way.

And you manage to sort of weave your way through the day, keeping your cool and you don't lose it. And you manage to kind of make the best of that whole day. And you get to the end of it and there's no one applauding you for having got through that. And yet you look back at the day and you go, holy fuck, I'm really proud of myself for that. I handled myself well. Yes. Yes. I think a lot about normal private victories like that. And it's a shame.

It's a shame that there isn't a better way. I guess journaling, gratitude practice would help. I mean, I would argue a really close relationship where you're able to share everything and they're able to see the struggles that most people don't ever see is another experience where when you talk about- Boring wins. Boring wins. You can share them together, you know? My wife is a hell of a lot more proud of me for being myself and being genuine than at ever winning Olympias, you know? So I think that's another-

how we started off the podcast way to experience something with someone else i was talking to benji piro yesterday and he sort of reminded everybody just how much his wife who's like an accomplished doctor and they've got four kids or whatever gives absolutely zero shits about what he does he said that there'd been this week where he'd been to

He'd filmed some really impressive documentary thing over in Europe and then came back and was currently the number one rap artist in America in the same week. And he got home and talking to his wife and saying, how's your week been? She's explaining about, oh, this happened with the kids and such and such. She said, how was your week? And he says...

yeah pretty busy i think and uh he explained he's like i'm currently the number one selling rap artist and he was like yeah yeah that's good the bins need taking out yeah to go take out the trash yep

Yep. That's a beautiful relationship. I think it's cool. That's awesome. And she probably also knows him well enough to know that Matt's probably not a victory that he holds high in his heart as well. It's not like I finished a book that I worked on for a long time. If he was super proud of it, I'm sure she would support him for it. But she's like, all right, you have enough ego blasts. You're competing with Nicki Minaj. No one cares. Talk to me about this prep. How's this prep been? This prep has been good. You know, it's been...

a struggle up and down in moments as they always are. I started a little bit late this year. I feel, you know, I spent my winter down in Turkey getting a new hairline and didn't go to the sweet dude. It's a little straighter than last time. A little, what do they call me? The Lego Roblox character. The comments love it. But, um, it took a couple of months off at the beginning of the year and kind of developed a little bit of pressure behind me feeling behind and allowed me to kick my ass and go through it. But, you know, I feel good. My body's healthy and I'm ready to roll.

What are your biggest cheats for this stage of prep or biggest insights around fat loss? I imagine the hunger that you're dealing with is pretty ugly. What calories you want at the moment? I'm eating about 2,000, 2,200 calories right now. Okay. And we're what, three weeks out? Three and a half. Yeah. So that's going to go down to 1,500, 1,600? It depends every year. Probably though. I still have to lose nine pounds in three weeks. So

Yeah, so probably it'll cut down a little more. How do you deal with the hunger? Because it doesn't matter. People don't need to be trying to win the Mr. Olympia for the sixth year in a row or whatever. Anybody that's on a cut deals with really difficult hunger, and most of them don't have world championship driving them. What's your best ways for coping with hunger and cravings and stuff like that when you're deep into a fat loss phase?

It's hard to answer in that aspect because I always have had world championship as my driving passion. Stopping a pussy, stopping a pussy, stopping a pussy. Don't be a little bitch. You don't need it. But I would say the momentum is absolutely huge.

being able to do something consistently. I've been doing this consistently for a decade. You know, almost everything I've eaten has been weighed out to a T and planned and for a reason for 10 years now. And if I had stopped and eaten whatever I want for five years and come back and be like, okay, diet for an Olympia, it would be extremely hard for me mentally to handle that. Every year has gone a little bit easier because I've gotten used to it. I know what it takes. I know what comes with it. We were just talking about, you said Mike is, we're going to tell us it's the same thing. You just, you stop caring about food. Even in my off season,

I don't like eating food because I'm eating so much food. So I don't look forward to the food that I eat.

eat. I just make sure it's something edible that I can get down if I have to put like bone broth on or some sriracha and just eat it really fast. And then when I come down into prep and I am hungry, I still am not excited to eat the food. It's just some chicken breast and some meal, make it super plain and it is what it is. Get through the day and you're fine. And you also got to create like exciting daily victories for myself. You know, I weigh myself like three times a day and I don't get obsessively worried about it, but I'm like,

Okay, I'm going to weigh myself right now. I'm a pound heavier than I was yesterday. You can't even think about eating any more today. You're heavier than yesterday. You should probably eat less today. Even go do some more cardio. Push it a little bit harder. And then you're just tracking daily victories and every single day trying to be a little bit better, a little bit better. Checking the scale, doing your check-ins, going to the gym, thinking how you feel. And there's something in bodybuilding that's a little sadistic where you just –

When you start to get to that point where you're so tired and like I was telling you, like I dropped something on the floor and I'm like, look at it. And I'm like, I can't pick that up. Like it's too far. I do not have the energy. I'm literally wearing Birkenstocks, dragging my heels across the ground and walking. Courtney's like 20 feet ahead of me. I'm like, I can't catch up. I'm too tired. But there's something about that where you're like, I'm going to be fucking shredded if I'm this tired. If I feel like this for weeks.

My body is burning fat. It has nothing. It has no energy. I'm just holding on to muscle. And there's just something exciting about, you know, achieving that level of like leanness and trying to beat past versions of myself. So it's all mental for me at this point. You know, there's no really crazy diet hacks. I eat the exact same thing every day. It just reduces the amounts over time and,

Go with the flow. What does a, I don't know whether I've ever seen a rebound day for you. I don't know whether you've ever vlogged it. If you have, I've missed it. A refeed day? Yeah, like a rebound day after the Olympics. You know, there's always these, I imagine that you're the sort of person that doesn't do a ridiculous binge because it would actually wreck your stomach. Yeah. But what does, do you even have that? I look forward to eating.

Dot, dot, dot. I definitely still do at times. And I can, I'll say this now because it will come out after the Olympia, but I'd never, I don't think I've said this public cause it's funny, but,

my coach is very i've been very big on when i have a refeed it's the same food i eat every day but more of it but every now and then i'm like fuck i just want a cookie you know i just want a muffin so my coach like what'd you eat today i'm like 400 grams of rice but like realistically i had like i had a bunch of chicken breasts and then i had three cookies with it you know and it's the same amount of carbs but i'm like i'm just gonna have some cookies today fuck it you know and i go for it and i let myself have that now you know there's a

There's a level of intuition I've developed over the years of doing what I do where I might have stressed about that in the past, but it's going to affect me more. And now I'm like, you know what you're doing. You've done this for 10 years. You know what's going to hold you back, what's going to not. I'm going to enjoy my cookie with my wife. I'm going to eat this. I'm going to go to the gym, train some legs. I know, it's good for me. It's fine, and I'll be good. It's the same for me with the show, with prep for the show. There was a long period of...

And still now when I'm in less of a mindful place where I just need to know more, I need to be better prepared. I need to have more stories. I need to have done more reading, even if it's not about the guests, just in other areas. And then there's other times where I go, I don't know.

I've got this. I did five episodes in three days in New York this week. And getting toward the end, I was sitting down with Casey Neistat. He's literally a pro conversationalist that's released an unlimited amount of videos. This is going to be the easiest conversation in history. You don't need to come in

with all of these different interesting ideas and stats and all the rest of it. So I, it's the only equivalent I can find to your, I have the same equivalent with this podcast too, because when it was coming up, I was like in the past, I've done a bunch of podcasts and in the last year or so I was like, I don't want to do anymore.

I felt like I was trying to learn things to be articulate, to say, to sound smart and to sound cool, motivational. And I was like, I don't want to live like that anymore. I just want to live life to live life, not to present it to people. I would learn something and be like, I could say that on YouTube or something and it would sound cool. And I was like, fuck that. I don't want to do that anymore. And then you hit me up to do the podcast. I was like, oh shit, I haven't been doing that. Am I going to have anything to say? But then I was like, you know, I'm not the smart guy. I'm not the guy who went to school and has all this intelligence and these crazy stories and all this stuff. I'm just the guy who talks about his truth and his life.

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Pretty nice insights in captions of videos that are pretty enjoyable to read. They're a nightmare to go back and try and actually write down because they're moving pretty quickly. So I want to go through some of the best stuff I've learned from you over the last few months. The first one is exactly what you were just talking about. If I could go back, I'd tell younger me, you're going to do some pretty great things, but you do not need to be great. All you have to do is be yourself. That will always be enough. What's that mean to you?

You know, I've had a lot of different thoughts that have come into my mind now having a child when Courtney was pregnant, thinking about raising a child myself when I was a child and all these things. And I think I always felt like I wanted to be good at everything I did and be great at what I did. And I never expected to be as good as I was.

So it would just be such an interesting relief to be able to give myself to be like, you are going to be great. You're going to have all these things that you want, but you're also going to realize that they're not as important as you think they are. You know, like you're going to come to the realization where the relationships and your values and everything that you enjoy and the experiences, everything aren't going to come down to those spectacular moments on stage at the Olympia. They're going to be much more simpler than that. They're just going to be those moments where you're being yourself and the people who love you for that is going to be everything. You do not need to be great.

that compulsion that necessity that's sort of being pulled forward the lack i am not enough as i am and if i achieve these great things and if everyone thinks i'm cool or says that i'm successful then i am worthy of acceptance and validation and praise and adoration is that the subtext below that quote like yeah essentially yeah that's um

It's just a drive of self-worth. No, that's kind of a buzzword of what's going on right now. But I think it's, you know, we were all kind of raised in a self-esteem society of being like, you can do anything, you can be anything, go be this X, Y, and Z. And it almost built expectations that we had to be these great things because we could be in our parents didn't have these opportunities and privileges. So we go do all these things and

There's just no need for any of it, you know? And I think when you were able to alleviate that pressure from it, like we were talking about the difference of like the extrinsic goals of trying to be the best in the world versus just trying to be my best self, you know, and setting authentic goals to myself. What are my authentic goals?

Winning the Olympia sometimes is a little more inauthentic than me truly trying to just push myself to be my best. Do I still enjoy that? Absolutely. But those are the more of the need to be great, the little ego, the thing that I'll die not needing, but the intrinsic goals that are

Regardless of things out of my control, you know, win, lose, beat him, don't beat him. What's in my control of just being myself and who I am showing up at my best, knowing that I can go to sleep at night knowing I was myself. We talked about pressure as a privilege last time, but this is actually the same, but in reverse, this is privilege as a pressure.

that the privilege is a pressure yeah that the privilege you have carries along with it this pressure in order to perform well your parents didn't have this opportunity think about your six-time mr olympia you're really going to think about maybe not going for seven why wouldn't you leave it the most dominant athlete in history why are you going to drop it you know like privilege is a pressure yeah and uh

It's one of the odd byproducts of anybody that's doing really, really great things that a lot of people are driven by this unconscious assumption that they're not enough unless they do do great things. And it'll cause you to go and do great things. But to what end? What's the outcome? What's the texture of your mind like when you go to sleep on a nighttime? Do you really want that? Do you feel great doing great things? Do you feel like shit doing great things? What's it worth? What's the price?

Do you think you're like an odd person to become a world champion? I think so. I don't know if everyone thinks so. I think so. You think that's okay. I think you're a fucking weird guy to be a world champion. I totally agree. I think most people would be like, there's no fucking way this guy's going to be a world champion. If they were literally this little bitch, you know? But I don't know. I think in my opinion, what I've learned very deeply over the years is that confidence is just truth. You know, it's just being honest. And there's people who...

put on this false bravado of arrogance of being like you know they were fifth place at the olympia last year don't pick out whoever was fifth and pick on them but someone not winning like i'm gonna show up and i'm gonna win this olympia i know it in my heart it's like you don't know that you're lying it's not confidence it's just a lie whereas when i've speak to myself truthfully and i'm like i don't really know if i can do this like i have doubt i have fear i just wanted x y and z and i'm like being honest to me that exemplifies real true confidence and

you're being realistic with yourself. You know, if you tell yourself you're going to do something you don't think you really can do, you're creating this gap between your beliefs and your reality, and it just creates more stress in yourself and an inability to perform, in my opinion. Unwavering confidence is a lie. The fears never go away completely. They just don't linger as long. What's that?

Is that my quote? To you. Sounds good. You wrote it. I mean, it sounds fantastic. Beautiful. I mean, that's kind of in that same boat. And maybe I'm just a weird champion who's not like that, but I still am full of doubt all the time. And I've tried to

find ways to believe I wouldn't have doubt. You know, I've tried to like talk in ways where I don't have doubt. I've tried to everything. And there's always just lingering doubt in my mind of being like, well, fuck, what if you don't? What if you can't? And it's just the truth of my mind. And regardless of that, over the past five years, I've still been able to perform and,

progress and be the best in the world with that on my mind so who's to say that i can't have that debt on my mind while being a champion there's no rules to it that's why i've always said the champion mentality the rules of being a champion is that there are no rules it's just whatever the champion does to win that's it yeah there's a great story from matthew syed so he's a sports reporter

he's obsessed with tennis and he went to wimbledon a few years ago and a unique aspect of tennis over the last decade or so has been that you had uh jockovich federer and nadal three goats three potentially literally goats all at the same time all interchanging and exchanging who won on this court or this tour with this surface and he went to go and watch them warm up and

And you go in and you see Nadal, and he's just ripped, absolutely shredded. It's all aggression. It's pure sort of raw animalistic energy. And then you go and see Djokovic, and he's sort of robotic, very precise, very curated with the way that he moves. Nothing is wasted. And then you go and see...

Federer and he's playing trick shots and he's laughing with the guy this moment because okay so if you were to take any of those three approaches and say in order for me to become a world champion I must be a B or C and

Well, you can't be all of them and all of them are successful. So what does it mean to say that A or B or C are the right approach in order for you to be successful in the sport of tennis? It doesn't. It means that each different athlete has found a way that works for them. And when you try and take that approach.

and apply it to yourself, what you end up doing is it's like trying to put on somebody else's pair of shoes. You go, well, I'm a size 10 and they're a size 8 and this is not going to work. Yeah, well, the truth is A, B, and C are all wrong answers.

Anything out there is the wrong answer. You have to build it in yourself. Like I talk about the cookies of the intuition. Over time, you build intuition. When you can get into a flow state of just trusting yourself to show up as you are and if it's playful, if it's intense, if it's quiet, if it's loud, if it's doubtful, if it's whatever...

If it's just who you are and you're not needing to put on any facade and you are able to release that mask and show up in a flow and trust your instincts and act on instinct, I don't think you can be beat. What do you say to people who often feel fear? You mentioned the fears never go away completely. Feeling fear sucks. Not very comfortable. Nobody wants to feel fear. I don't want to feel fear. But as somebody that's intimately familiar with that and pressure, yeah.

what do you say to people who notice it come up or what do you do yourself? I would say when I start to feel fear about something now, I get, I turn into excitement because in the past when I've started to feel fear, it's because something big that I've worked hard for that's really important to me has started to come creeping up closer. And there's something beautiful about the human experience of stress and anxiety, nervous fear and all those things and just trying to embrace that and lean into it is the best way I've been able to handle when it comes to performance. But when there's stuff that's actually like

impending fear of my health, let's say something that I can't just be like, lean into the excitement that you, I might have a health problem or something I've found. Again, I've tried to embrace it and just feel it and sit with it and feel feelings as we've talked about many times. And that's helped, but there's another level of,

giving it the validation that it deserves, the feeling of validation it deserves. And to me, that's being able to vocalize it out loud. And I think this is different for everyone, but for myself, I'm a very introverted person and I tend to keep things to myself and I have a brain that's very logical. So it's like, well, I'm scared about my health. Well, you have no reason to be scared about your health. You're healthy. You do these tests and all these things. Well, I'm still anxious. And I'm like working through it logically in my brain and I try and just like diminish the feeling that I have logically and work through it myself.

And it just, it's a dance and it works a little bit, but it doesn't fully go away. It just pushes it down. But when I'm able to vocalize it and express it out loud and get the actual words out of my mouth and share it with someone, typically my wife and able to regulate with my partner and she's able to listen to me and, you know, validate my feelings of how I, what I'm going through. And of course you feel like that, you know, X, Y, Z, this is, this is very normal.

I'm like, oh yeah, you're right. And then it's just all of a sudden like ease. And I'm like, wow, I feel a lot better now. You know, I feel a lot more calm and relaxed that I've released it. So I think a big thing for me, it was,

not feeling feelings numbing, trying to feel feelings, but kind of logically mansplaining it over myself in my head. And then it was actually letting it out, giving it like the attention it deserves to be put out into the world and communicate about it with someone who I trust and cares about me. Do you ever get or feel shame about feeling the fear? Like, oh, this is so stupid. Why are you beating yourself up again? Why are you so worried about this? You should be stronger. You shouldn't be worried in this sort of a way. Because I think...

First order emotions are bad, but the really, really bad ones are the second and third and fourth order emotions. You know, your shame about feeling fearful and your guilt about feeling shame about feeling fearful and your frustration about feeling guilt about feeling fear. You know, it's that it's all the way up.

I think I used to, but in the last couple of years of my attempt to just honor things that come up as they come up, it's gotten a lot better in myself. And I've been able to catch myself now. And mindfulness is another buzzword that people overuse. But if you're mindful enough to catch yourself with those first, second, and third emotions and watch them come up and be like,

Did I just say that to myself right now? Like, that's crazy. Like I felt something, you know, I call myself an idiot for feeling that. And I call myself a pussy for thinking I'm an idiot for feeling that. And that's, that's an insane thought. If someone were listening to your brain right now, they'd put you in a mental hospital, you know, and just being conscious of that and being able to listen to your own thoughts sometimes help alleviate them so much. And just be like, you're human.

And the more you're able to communicate them with other people that you trust and then be like, yeah, me too. I have these thoughts too, you know? And you feel, you feel a little bit less crazy, you know, like we were joking about intrusive thoughts on the drive here. And I was like, do you ever just think about like turning your car into oncoming traffic and just seeing what happens?

And that's the huge thing with having a baby sometimes. I'm like, what if she just, what if I just, I'm holding her, what if I just dropped her and she just died? And I'm like, holy fuck. You just have these crazy thoughts. But then I say that to my wife, she's like, oh my God, I literally was, I had a dream that I threw her off the roof or something. I'm like, that's a little crazy, but me too, you know? And it's normal. We're human. It's our brains just overthinking, putting ourselves into a position to feel fear.

And then trying to make ourselves actively avoid that fear so we don't get there. It's a human response to avoid pain. I think this is one of the reasons that people have sort of resonated a lot with your story, which has been this very, sometimes overly transparent approach to opening up about the, again, sort of boring fears. You know, there's boring successes, but there's also these sort of very, no one's going to give you any accolades for anything.

not dropping your daughter it's like oh congratulations you didn't drop you didn't drop your baby oh you did you're a monster um but yeah just talking about the real finer points of psychology when you're a bit of an introspective person so going back to the idea of confidence and fears what do you think life would have been like for you if you hadn't gone for it whatever that means to you

That's an excellent question. I was thinking about that the other day of how, like again, the thought I was having was when we were young, we were told we can be anything. Then we realized it's a lie. And then we realized we're telling ourselves it's a lie because we actually just realized how much work it's going to take. And we'd rather believe it's a lie than we're not willing to work hard enough to achieve these things. And then it's kind of like this back and forth of like, can I? Or is it just too hard? Or am I just too weak?

And it's back and forth. And, you know, I'm just so grateful I fell into something that I was so passionate about that took a lot of effort and work, but that I also loved to do. And my body was built for, my mind was built for, you know, I was clearly genetically built to be a bodybuilder. Mentally, physically, environmentally, my relationships, all, everything flowed perfectly for me to be in this perfect position. And I think it's just...

It's hard to say where I would end up without this life. And it's, I don't even like thinking about it because it's hard, but the effort that I put into this would be really hard for me to put into something I didn't love. So if I hadn't gone for it, which would be for me back in 2017, when I was in college, drinking, partying, doing all the things and being like, you know what? I'm not good. I'm going to stop this. My friends go out. I'm going to go to sleep. I'm going to wake up early. I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to eat six times a day. I'm going to spend my money on

and chicken breast rather than six packs of beer and all these things. And I'm just going to drop out of school and I'm going to travel and I'm going to try and get sponsors. I'm going to try to win shows. I'm going to do all this and I'm going to take every risk I can. And,

I didn't even think about it. You know, when you're young, luckily you're at the greatest opportunity in your life to take risk and to fail. And then you're like, well, I'm 24 now. I can just go restart. I suppose you're ignorant to the price that you're going to have to pay as well. Do you think that you would have done it had you have known what it was going to, obviously not knowing the outcomes because that's put you where you are, where you're really happy, but going, oh, this is what it's going to entail. This is the price that you're asking me to pay.

I don't know. I'm, I, I mean, blissfully unaware. I would have been too ignorant to say no. So I, yes, I would have for sure. Yeah. You know, you can't know until you're in it. Young, dumb and full of hope. Yep. What was it? What was it you used to say? Full of magic and rubber or something. Yeah. Yeah. Made of rubber and magic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it is dude. You, you know, you, all of the like things that happen to you, the bruises that you get when you're younger, just seem to bounce off in some ways. Yeah.

more easily. And then you go through this sort of period of not hiding from the stuff that insults you or that damages you. And you go, oh, okay, this thing has now happened and I need to actually deal with it as opposed to just using momentum or inertia or distraction or whatever to get me through it. And then the goal is to come out the other side and to actually have done that work and now be anti-fragile, right? So you go from like unconscious competence to

in the beginning to conscious incompetence and then hopefully to conscious competence which is where you've got full control you know that it's happened you've fully sort of transcended and included whatever that whatever that challenge is but um yeah it's it's funny to think about the weird decisions that you make one-time decisions so for me moving to america it was

I'm 33 years old. Like, I don't know. Should I not have had my life together by then? Feels like I probably should have done. Should I really be dicking about trying to change careers and move? Is this not the age by which you're supposed to have all of your life got together and you're going to move to this country on your own? It's like talk to people on the internet and try and make it into a career in like the most competitive city in the entire world to try and do it and see if it's going to work with no...

I didn't even have the visa when I moved out here. It was like under review or whatever, living in an Airbnb. And yeah. Do you think it's possible to discover the limit of truly what you're capable of? Like, do you think you'll achieve a point where I achieved everything I was capable of? And are you working towards that or are you just working? It's going to be hard to do it.

within this industry and it's one of the reasons that I love sport increasingly I'm using sport as an analogy for lots of other things in life because you have very tightly defined parameters of success and failure right you either won or you didn't but a podcast can always be a little bit better your physique on stage three and a half weeks time could be a little bit better but if you win you

that's really all that matters. I will say from my experience, there are moments where you win and yes, and then you go back and you're like, my physique could have been a little bit better. Wow. So you even in the act of winning, you've found a way to sort of want more. For sure. So I don't know. There's a part of me that is, I mean, this has been the most, the hardest I've ever worked this last 12 months, basically since we were last together. It's just been unrelenting and good. And there's a part of me that

I want to look back with pride at a time when I had the energy and the lack of responsibility and the youth and the time that I could dedicate to something like this and go, yeah, I pushed myself as hard as I could. I got out of this everything that I could to.

But after a while, you do start to think, okay, what are the sacrifices that I'm making for this? And how can I get 98% of the outcome that I'm looking for, but with only 50% of the pain? Where are the areas where I'm pushing unnecessarily that I can claw back some quality of life and

especially in, I guess this is the double-edged sword. For you, tightly defined parameters of success and failure, which means that it's easy to work out whether or not it was a W or an L. But on the flip side of that, you...

It's such a zero-sum game that pulling back even a tiny little bit will risk whatever the outcome is going to be. Whereas when you're doing something like in business, right? It's not about being the number one supplement brand or the number one energy drink brand or the number one clothing brand or whatever. It's about reaching a, creating a cool company that you're proud of that facilitates the lifestyle that you want and is maybe able to give back and do cool things within the industry that you like being a part of. So people. Yeah.

There's some people. Maybe for you, the energy drink is like your little, like there's less pressure on me to have to be the best because I just want to build something cool. But the podcast is where all the pressure is and I have to be the best. So it's almost like you're able to alleviate some pressure on some effort you put into the business. But some people, the business is their number one thing. Like I need to be the number one energy drink in the world. That is true. Related to that, you said, I've found greater fulfillment in the journey of pursuing my goals than in the moment of achieving them. Why?

I'd say that comes to the question I asked you of discovering what I was capable of. There's been so many times where I've been in a prep and I felt

way too far behind to win and i had an injury last year when i tore my lat tore my bicep was in the hospital like all these different things going on and like there's no way that i can do this like it's impossible and if i were to ever ask myself in the past like do you think you could win or get through this and do this i'd be like no way it's impossible but i was in it and i did it and i accomplished it and i was like i'm capable of so much more than my mind understands and i think that's just the greatest

part of the journey that I've achieved is like that understanding of what I'm capable of and that belief in myself to what I can accomplish. And it only came through the journey. It didn't come through the winning. It comes through the challenge that came along the journey and coming through it and fighting through it and the beauty of all that. And on top of that, there's just been so many moments in the midst of things where like it's a workout or it's a diet or I'm starving or I'm doing check-ins or something. And I'm just like, this is incredible. Like I'm

peak condition in the world right now fighting to be the best in the world and i'm living in that moment right now i'm doing this is what it takes when people see something on stage this is what they don't see or what i'm feeling in my mind but no one will understand what it takes to get there i get to experience this every day and i think it's just part of the human experience of feeling in life that's just so beautiful it was boring normal victories that contribute to the really impressive ones exactly the boring victories yeah they're important man you know yeah

I think having a way that people could celebrate those on a daily basis, me and a friend came up with this idea of a well done list. So you have a done list, which is the shit I did today, but a well done list allows you to note down. So I...

I got through my training session, even though I felt really crap this morning when I woke up and my mind was mean to me. Like no one, where does that go? Right? It's not grand or ceremonious enough in order to justify an Instagram post. Maybe you'd be able to tell a particularly mindful partner about it, but it's, you don't even tell your friend. You're going out. After you told your mindful partners five days in a row, they'd be like, yeah, fuck off. Yeah. You're miserable every day. Shut up. But yeah, I think,

the opportunity to give yourself a pat on the back like a well done for today i've written on a post-it note on my bathroom mirror what went well today which is my reminder for the well done list and uh yeah when i think about it when i actually do that practice which i need to do more uh but when i do that practice on an evening time i come up with the most boring victories you know the most mundane things um

that person in the Starbucks was annoying and I didn't react. Yeah. You know, or I, I dealt with it with grace or whatever, like little things like that, that I do think over time actually contribute to you being a pretty impressive human and a human that you're proud of as well, which is maybe even more important. I've had those moments. Someone comes up to me and like, I didn't know who to tell. I just wanted to come to you. Cause like, I felt safe talking to you and they like to tell me something and I walk away and I'm like,

I feel good about myself. You know, I'm that person that they wanted to come to. No one gives a fuck. Yeah. I, uh, there's definitely something about the pursuit of goals being more important than the achievement of them as well. That, uh, Ryan long told me this story where he says, uh, there's three men on a ladder, one at the bottom, one in the middle and one at the top, which one is best to be. He said the one that's still climbing. And I think that

Having things isn't that fun. Getting things is fun. And, you know, that's where...

It's sort of the vicious other side of doing anything for the purpose of achievement that when you end up getting to the achievement, you realize that the achievement wasn't anything. It was literally just the end point that gave you direction. And as soon as you do get to that, you know, the idea of false peaks in mountaineering. So it's when you think that you're at the top and you go, you realize, oh, fuck, I got to go down and got to go back up again. But this one's even higher. It's like every achievement is basically just a false peak the whole way up. So that's.

That's what I really like hit me and I thought was really cool about. I've always wanted to be a dad. I've always wanted to be a parent.

And then having a baby, it's not having the baby. Like I did it. I have the kid. I'm a dad now. I'm done. It's like, no, being a father of the, what I want to be, what I'm excited to be is how you show up every single day for that kid's entire, for the rest of your life, essentially, if you're lucky enough, then you just show up every single day trying to be your best. And that's what being a dad is. It's every single day showing up. It's not just

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Absolute love and appreciation for my wife. Especially watching her go through the birth process and everything. Holy hell. Women are incredible. It was crazy. Experiencing that was the most insane thing I had ever experienced in my life. How so? She wanted to do it naturally. She did it just all on her own naturally. That means without painkillers? Yeah, just...

just as nature is you know like nothing in her so she was in a town dog this birth just raw dog and in so much pain and there were so many moments where like she was just shaking in pain and like losing it and i thought she was gonna like snap like i need the drugs i need the epidural whatever and i was like babe come on you can do this lock it in she like she was just you didn't tell your wife oh i told her to lock it in i told her to absolutely bro just lock in come on bro

She had me pinching her like traps as hard as I could. Like literally I was like white knuckling her trap. To try and distract from the pain. To try and distract from the pain. Just like it was incredible. I love the solution to pain being more pain. Being more pain. I know, right? Her doctor was like, you shouldn't be doing that. She's telling me to. I'm not going to say no. Exactly. You tell her to tell me not to. But it was just incredible to experience all that and to see her in such like an empowering moment and overcoming so much. Like there was zero chance I would have gone through that. Like it was so much pain and she just handled it like a champ.

And then you go home and you have to take care of a child and you're not sleeping and you're doing all these things. And there's so much more that comes into it. So I think I just, I developed so much appreciation for, you know, moms, women, my wife being able to see all that. And it's been really cool. And another kind of wake up call that I had in like, there's two things I'll explain. The first one is there's this concept I thought of that your children eventually will know exactly who you are.

For an extended period of time, they're going to think of you as like a hero, as a god, as perfect, like your parent who knows everything. And then they're going to turn to a certain age and realize that you're human and there's a lot of shit you don't know. And any like burdens you have, anything you try and hide from them, they see through it all because they see you all the time. There's no hiding anything from them.

So you really have to like be on your best. You have to work on your shit, solve your problems, not be a passive aggressive asshole, not do whatever your faults are. You need to fix them so you don't pass them on to them. And they're going to see them eventually because you can't hide from them. You can put whatever you want on social media. You can be nice in public, do all these things, but at home, there's no hiding anything. They're going to know exactly who you are. And I think that like just responsibility that withheld within that is just

powerful and beautiful and exciting there's nowhere to escape right it's like accountability yeah it's like a navy seal hell week that never stops you have this permanent instructor over your shoulder at all times the tiniest little interaction how you deal with that one nappy change that one evening that's four weeks after the trip to the hospital at three in the morning yeah

It's like you didn't sleep all night. You have multiple kids, one screaming, one throwing shit at you, throwing food all over you. You burn the food. There's nothing to eat, all this shit. And then how are you going to react? Because they see it and they're going to remember. It's all being watched. It's like there's cameras in the house. Trust you to be able to turn fatherhood into a performance sport. Not meant to be a performance. Accountability to be your best. That's the first lesson. The other one was, it's more of a moment. It was...

a moment i'm already getting emotional thinking about the moment it was she was like a night where she probably was being fussy she was like crying a lot and i took her in the back room and i just laid with her walked around with her and she calmed down and i just laid down and she wouldn't sleep but she fell asleep on my chest and i remember lying there and like just putting my hand on her and i was like like if you could ever just without being able to put into words experience what love is like it couldn't be more powerful than that i was like this is like

There's no way I can put it into words because I wouldn't do it justice. It was just pure love in that moment. I was like, how can I love this little thing so much? It was the most beautiful moment and all it was was lying there with her sleeping on my chest. It was incredible. And every like...

about work, travel, Olympia, all these things that just like wash away. And you're like, it doesn't matter if I have this. This is it. This is like what I've always wanted. This is all that matters. And it was the most perspective changing little moment for a matter of minutes while she was napping on my chest. But it was the most incredible thing. And I think it's just allowed to alleviate a lot of pressure I put on myself to perform, to succeed. All these things allowed me to separate that and

when I talk about the extrinsic goals of winning competition versus the morals and values, like it just made my moral values of family and relationship and love so much stronger. And it leaped, like if you fail over here, you have this and that's all that matters. I think the gym, oddly enough, is that for a lot of guys when they first start going. I know it was for me. I remember that when I first started going to the gym, when I was at uni, it gave me kind of like a safe haven that I knew if I'd face planted in some

presentation that I had to give if the girl that I was seeing broke up with me if you know all of this stuff went wrong at least I got a good training session in so in one area of my life I was making relatively forward progress even if everything else had gone to shit the rest of it's a total dumpster fire this one area is siloed off it's compartmentalized and you know for a long time maybe that was

one of the safe havens for you. And now that is one of the things that can be part of, you know, dumpster fire, maybe the best dumpster fire, but the rest of them are down here too. And then there's this one. And then there's another safe haven now, which is even more indestructible.

For sure. Yeah, it's the most exciting. I can look at pictures. If ever I'm feeling down, nervous, scared now, I can look at a picture of her and I feel better. It's just like, this is amazing. We spoke last time, a year and a bit ago, about the... Oh no, it was when we trained earlier on this year, about how when...

dads get to see their kid for the first time, sometimes this sort of fatherhood compulsion doesn't kick in immediately. And I told you that story about a meeting that I'd been to and one of the guys put his hand in the air. It was this business meeting with a ton of...

high-powered entrepreneurs everyone's a millionaire or a billionaire i was like the poorest stupidest person in the room and they said anyone got any questions they want some advice for and this one dude put his hand up and i was thinking it was going to be about the cash flow conversion cycle for his business or accounting or some stuff like that and he went my wife's eight months pregnant and i don't feel like i'm going to be a good dad and i was like what now i'm interested and um

You said you'd had this conversation with a lot of different guys and it's quite normal. It seems to be very typical for future dads, wife's pregnant, cascade of hormones, all of that's going on. But they kind of aren't even sure, is there a baby in there? Like you're just getting fat. Like what's happening here? I'm not feeling anything. I haven't seen anything. I haven't held anything. How quickly did that switch turn on for you?

It's hard to say because I thought it turned on really quick. And then it just kept ramping up. It was a dial. It just kept going. And I was like, holy shit. I didn't nearly like I thought. But there was a moment at one point where I saw this joke online that it was like,

My husband does the things I can do and he does the things I can or whatever. And it's like, I breastfeed because he can't, he sleeps because I can't. And there was just a moment where she was like, the baby wanted Courtney to cry. The baby wants to breastfeed. She was taking care of her. I was in prep. I needed sleep. I needed rest. I needed to go into the office. I need to travel all these things. And I felt like useless. And I was just like, fuck, like, I'm just this like

over here, this youthful being over here, you know? And I was just not able to help her going through all this stuff. And I started to feel this weird pull of almost guilt of being like, she's a little bit more connected. It wasn't so much about connection, it was just more so about my ability to help her going through such a challenging time of feeling helpless because my wife is overwhelmed trying to become the best mother she can be. Going through the physical, hormonal, lack of sleep transformation, everything, all the chaos. And I'm just over here like,

shit, what can I do over here? And kind of made me feel a level of guilt on an aspect. And again, she's so incredible. I can like talk with her and she will try and soothe me. I'm like, I'm not trying to ask you to help me right now. Yeah. I'm just trying to say, Hey, I feel, I feel shitty that I can't help you. Can you help me feel less shitty about not being able to help you? It's like, come on. Yeah. But no, I was like, no, I just want to be able to be there for you more. She's like, you just need to be here for me. That's it. I'm like, all right, well, I'm here. I definitely think that the, uh,

like totally uselessness that you end up feeling as you're on the sidelines watching your wife give birth kind of just extends out. Look at me talking like as a guy that doesn't have kids talking about this. But it seems like that kind of just continues to extend out from, you know, the next six to nine months because it's,

You're there as a well-meaning coach on the sidelines. Go on, honey. Great work. Good job. Yep. Hooray. Basically moral support. You're one of those mascots in the big fluffy outfit that comes in at the halftime show and maybe gives a bit of alleviation. And then the players go back out onto the field. Good job.

How have you found being able to let go of perfectionism in other areas of life, given that you dial in an awful lot, whether it's with business or branding or copywriting or the way that you and Calvin film your content and put that out in a sort of nicely controlled, curated way, the way that you step on stage, your knowledge of your diet and your sleep and your training and your macros and all that stuff. And then you've just got this

thing which is not subject to chris's desires and will do what it's going to do and also your self-assessment of your own performance as a father and desire to be as good as possible and so on and so is this just another domain for you to find holes in your own performance in the hell of a question um

It's funny because in aspects of my life, I'm the least perfectionist person ever. I'm very just like, it's good enough. Just send it. And then the things that are really important to me, I can be a huge perfectionist, which is where, you know, bodybuilding, relationships, all these things that can start to be a little overly hard on myself. So I think even that contrast of balance of different sides of my personality has helped me alleviate it.

Not everything needs to be perfect. I'm like, that stuff, the YouTube video will get there. Calvin will worry about that. These guys help me with the business. That's all fine. This is what I need to be perfect on. So at least it's not everything. But even within that, just being able to compete at such a high level for so many years, I've seen so many people who have been so obsessed with being, especially in bodybuilding where everything is weighed, everything's about a look. Like when it's something where like,

you know, something was on your mind. So you lost 30 minutes of sleep last night. You didn't enter a deep REM sleep. So you had on some water, had higher cortisol and you wake up and you look different the next day. Like that's how specific a physique sport is when you're that lean and dialed in that anything can change it. You can really start to get in your fucking head about it. And I've seen so many people overthink of to the grain of rice being perfect and eating at the same time every day and everything needs to be so perfect. And just the stress of that making them worse, um,

That I pulled back from the perfectionist of it and just tried to been like, where's the diminishing returns? What's going to keep my mental peace where...

What cookie is going to alleviate enough stress that it's actually more beneficial than eating healthy? Where does that balance lie? You pull and you test and you tug and you go back and forth a little bit and you just figure it out over the years. And luckily, I've just learned to trust my intuition in a lot of things. And I think in being a dad now, my intuition is not as strong as being Mr. Olympia. So I'm re-figuring that one out. Yes. Luckily, my wife is just an incredible mom as she is. So a lot of the time- World champion mother. I just ask her. Yeah.

If I don't know what to do, I'm like, what do I do? How do I do this? Are you saying that Courtney is your honey for child rearing? Oh yeah, for sure. She could be anyone's coach for child rearing somehow. She's just built for it. It's funny that the point you're making, I think, is the stress of trying to be perfect will damage your performance more quickly than the imperfections will. Yes. Which is where the cookie comes in. The cookie. All important cookie. About your wife, you said...

Being with someone who allows others to be their best selves in your presence will quite literally change the world around you. I get to wake up beside that someone every day and every night I go to sleep with more reason to be grateful for you. You will always be my life's greatest blessing. What's your advice for choosing a good partner? I think that sounds like the

summary that everybody wants to to do that but you know so many relationships don't seem to have that positive dynamic in it so what was it about courtney that made you choose her or are there any uh fundamental principles that you think people should be looking out for i would say before what you're looking out for it's what you're putting out you know the law i don't understand the law of attraction exactly how it is but what you put out you attract if you're being you're

your authentic self, our buzzword today, you're being your true self, you're speaking about what's really important to you, you're putting out the energy that you care about, that you want to get back into the world, and you're being real, you're going to get that back. If you're putting on a show and you're chasing these inauthentic goals that are for other people or to keep up with society or pressures or parents or whatever it might be, you're going to start attracting people who are attracted to those goals and that energy, which isn't your real self. What

rather than who you really are. And the incredible thing of how me and Courtney met was I put out my first

like YouTube video crying, talking about something really emotional that I had gone through the year I was in the hospital, talking about a really scary time, how fearful I was being really raw, like first time ever talking about it, therapy session on camera crying. And she saw that and she's like, wow, this guy's different. Like I've never, like this guy just came second in the Olympia and he'd put out a video crying about like his emotions going through this, like that's different. I like that. And then she reached out to me

And that's how we, that's what attracted to us. It was that energy of authenticity and emotion and rawness and realness that attracted us together. And that was the foundation of our relationship of how we were going to build things going forward.

So I think instead of what I was looking for, it was what I was putting out in that moment. And she was attracted to it because that's who she is. You know, when I say she, she's the light that lets everyone be their best selves. You know, she's the type of person where I'll go to the bathroom and come out and someone will be crying and it'll be like, or the store clerk checking out her groceries is telling her about her child who X, Y, and Z and all this. I'm like,

I'm like, what are you? She's like, I didn't say anything. People just tell me all their stuff. I'm like, but it's beautiful. People just feel so safe and comfortable around her because she's such an amazing, like loving selfless person. It's just who her, it's her nature. And she doesn't,

need to be anything other than that it's just always she's always been and i just love that and i i'm like the protector of that energy because she gives out so much so i try and like protect her and then in the confines of our home she gives me the space to be myself and be my raw self of what she saw and protects me in there it's so funny that if you tried to be somebody else the person that ended up making you a better version of you wouldn't have even been interested

Like if you tried to put on some sort of a show, if that video hadn't been there, if you'd kept on closing down your emotions, that was the very thing that she was going to be most attracted to. I think this is one of the problems, again, with the Djokovic-Nadal-Federer way that this is the way that you're supposed to attract. We understand what it is that women are attracted to. And I'm like, maybe on average, but...

You can only put on a facade for so long. Yeah. And everyone's different. Yeah. You're going to end up in a relationship with somebody that loves you for not you. And it's going to be exhausting. Yeah. Some people might not like that version of Courtney. A lot of women might think I'm, I would think overly emotional and weak or something in there. That's fine. But they're not for you. But they're not. And you're not for them. Yeah. And I think one of the cool things I've discovered in our relationship is your ability to be a burden to your partner is important. Yeah.

Like for you to feel safe to be a burden to your partner and for them to still show up and love you. And then you're like, oh, wow, like I don't need to give you anything in return. You're not expecting anything in return. I can put my burdens on you and you love me. That makes me feel safe and love you. So when you put your burdens on me, I'll do the same. It just becomes this like burning circle of love. You know, he's just I feel like that's such an important thing to find someone who you just feel safe being a burden to. Yeah.

not going to intentionally be a burden, but sometimes you suck. Sometimes you're a burden. And if you don't even feel safe being like that around your partner, you have to just withhold things from them and put on that show. You're never going to feel safe around them and you're not going to want to be there for them as much when they're being a burden as well. Just become these two people dividing and conquering all your problems rather than taking on the world together. I really like that idea that

Here I am, not fully competent, slightly broken, in need of help. Oh, and you're still here. Yeah. You didn't leave. Yeah.

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But every Monday, they open a few spots for Modern Wisdom listeners. You can bypass the waitlist right now by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. What do you wish more women knew about how they can help their man become a better version of himself? Because it seems like Courtney is very much able to do that for you. What do I wish more women knew? Yeah, I think...

The relationship that you guys have, which is very open and emotionally honest, seems to be one that a lot of women would want. Obviously guys too, but I don't hear a massive amount of advice for women about how they can cultivate an environment that allows a man to flourish emotionally in the way that you are. What do you wish more women knew about how they could help their man be more emotional safely?

That's a good question. I think being able to both understand and for the woman to be able to express in an honest way, and she has to believe this, that, like I was talking about how confidence is truth. You might want a strong man up a white knight on his horse, but if he's not how he feels, if he's not really that person, then he's not really confident. It's just

Putting on a facade to please you. So if you can truly show him and share with him and communicate with him that even when he's feeling down and when he feels low, when he feels emotional and all these things, him being able to share that with you is actually confidence and strength, which men want to always exemplify.

you're teaching him a new way to exemplify that strength that he wants to be and even if it's only within the confines of you two no one else needs to know about it but you tell him like when you share with me that you feel like shit that you're emotional that you hate yourself that you don't think you can do this when you share that with me i think you're strong like i think you're capable and i think you're strong just for sharing that not because i know you can overcome it but just for saying that out loud that's strength and the men who'd be like wow like you're

shit you know the woman has to believe that you know and those are my beliefs that sharing that is strong and there's a lot of things where i would still feel judged and nervous to say how i feel on online on a podcast with hundreds of thousands of people listening but to her to my wife no you know i feel i share something with her and she's gonna always see me as who i am

And it's strong to share and that I'm safe to do so. It's strange that a lot of people would feel more comfortable sharing that stuff with somebody that wasn't their partner. Or what if they change the way that they see me? This isn't holding a masculine frame. This isn't being the protector provider, dominant alpha that I'm supposed to be or need to be in order to be able to keep her attraction triggers or whatever it is going. Yeah. It's sad. Yeah.

It is sad. Everything's in moderation and balance in its life, you know? You can't be a puddle on the floor 24 hours a day. You can't be a puddle on the floor 24 hours a day, you know? There's...

What, where, where are your weaknesses? Are you always a strong masculine person? You can't show it. Are you always a puddle on the floor and you need to work on being more masculine? There's someone way or the other, you got to find that balance and everyone's on a different end of the spectrum and everyone's partner will want a different spectrum. And then you just got to find the person that fits in there. And obviously over the years now, I've proven to Courtney that in those moments where I've broken down and feel like I'm worthless and can't do something, I've risen up and done it.

And I've always shown up to, I've always stepped up to the plate. I've always been what she needed. I've always done what I needed to do. And I've proven to her that no matter how crumbled I feel in the moment, I've still become a better man and grown. Whether or not I've accomplished what I've wanted, I've still grown, been a better man and shown up for her where and when I could. So she has a trust in me now, whatever weakness I show her, there will be strength too, you know?

If my life was a movie and someone were to watch it, I hope they'd be inspired to take risks, not just risks to achieve success, but embrace feeling both pride and shame, fear and excitement. Personally, I want to experience as much life as possible. And that only happens when you embrace the highs and the lows. And this is your thing about not just numbing the bad, but numbing the good, numbing the joy. Just revisit that.

for me, because I think a lot of people feel like if zero to 100 is the range of human experience, they kind of sit in 40 to 60. What did expanding that window out look like? Yeah, I mean, this kind of hit me a few years ago when I was thinking about, I felt like I had a glass ceiling of joy that I could feel. I feel happy, but I'm not overjoyed and excited and ecstatic. And then...

My therapist put it back on me. She's like, well, what about the floor? Do you have a floor of negative that you're willing to feel? I'm like, yeah. I was like, I don't want to feel the bad shit. She's like, well, they expand at the same time. You open up a broad spectrum of emotion and you build your heart to feel these things. And if you don't have a high, you don't have lows, it doesn't come. If you numb the bad, you numb the good. And that's kind of where that all came from. So learning to embrace all those things and

The funny thing is when you learn to embrace them, they're way more fleeting than you realize. To sit on something in your mind for a while, to stress about it and not want to feel it, lingers for a long period of time. But to just embrace it and to feel it, to cry, to express it to whatever, however it needs to express itself out of you, it happens a lot quicker than you think and you're able to move through it. And then when you look back at it, you're like, that was kind of beautiful. People love watching sad movies and crying sometimes and

and you're sad in the movie, you're like, fuck, that was really sad, but you go back and you watch another sad movie, you know, we like feeling things, we enjoy emotion, it's the human experience is highs and lows, there is no high without lows, and I think just being able to accept that, that there's inevitably going to be shit times in your life, and the more you can lean into them and feel them, the more you can lean into feeling to the high ones as well, and it's just

Part of the journey. It's interesting. Personally, I want to experience as much life as possible. I think when people think about experiencing lots of life, it's adventures and it's travel and so on. But the range of human experience you can have, regardless of what circumstance you're in, regardless of the situation or the flight or the destination or whatever, a lot of that is capped just by experience.

our preparedness to feel different things yeah and uh yeah there's an awful lot of adventure kind of to be had just by opening yourself up to different experiences i often think about how many people sort of go through life just within that 40 to 60 percent range for sure of emotions and you think oh my god you know you had this unique machinery up there in your head for

60 70 80 90 years and you got to explore like this one square of it over and over and over and over and over again yeah why are we told that sadness is bad you know why is fear and sadness have to be a negative emotion i was i was thinking about the other day and i have no idea but if you what if you were to raise someone and somehow not connecting

the concept of bad negative to sadness and fear and anxiety and all these things and it just being like it's just an emotion it's just an emotion there's not good emotions there's no mad emotions they're just feeling

I wonder if you could raise someone to have that belief in them, what it would be like. Because the reality is it's true. There are no bad emotions. Everything has a purpose in why it comes up and it helps process events in our life. Something happens that we don't know how to process. We have feelings and emotions around it and then thoughts come afterwards. It's just how our brains operate. Again, it's that it's not the fear or...

the shame it's the guilt about the fear and it's the agitation about the guilt about the fear because somewhere we've been taught that we should have guilt and fear and shame about the shame and guilt and fear where does that come from i don't know man i think you know a lot of the time we don't feel comfortable to open up about that stuff uh we are ashamed

I think shame is a really big driver. Shame and fear are two sort of fundamental drivers to a lot of bad emotions. I'm worried about what will happen if I allow myself to feel this thing. There's the fear. And I feel guilty and less for having that emotion. That's the shame. Those to me, at least personally, are massive drivers for that. I don't want to appear weak or vulnerable or incompetent or not in mastery of

I don't want to risk this. Maybe this is the real me. Maybe this version of me that doesn't have it all together. Like, oh my God, should you not have it all together? You're not supposed to be someone that's, you know, that is a big driver, I think, for a lot of people. And it's- Have you found it more difficult as you're-

success and popularity and eyes on you have grown have you found that more difficult that battling with that shame of how you need to be and whatnot i think so yeah um it waxes and wanes there's periods where it's better and periods where it's worse uh currently going through a period where it's worse like this year has just been an awful lot of uncertainty like personal uncertainty like a pullback health's been like really rough autoimmunity moldy stuff this year which we need to talk about

on the vlog has just been so scary because it's the main thing that it takes away. It's like, it's literally like somebody designed a personal pathology just for me. One of the main areas of the brain that it impacts is your ability to recall words. It's like, that's my only fucking job.

My only job. That's what's affecting you right now, you think? Yeah, all the time. So my only job is to recall words when I'm either writing or speaking. And I forget people's names. I'm misremembering people's names all the time. Trying to find a word and having to substitute it for something else, which wasn't the thing that I meant. It's so...

It's so annoying. It's so frustrating. And that has sort of pushed me very quickly into a place of fear, which is, oh my God, like what if this is the way that you're going to be forever? The only reason that people liked you is because you were able to say these things. Your competence is being taken away. That, it cuts at the very epicenter of what I presumed and assumed that my value was to be able to offer the world. And you just about managed to get yourself to a place

where you'd achieved something that you were proud of and the very thing that allowed you to achieve it has now been risked, being taken away from you. It's scary. Yeah. Has the intention behind the goals you're thinking changed over the years that have felt like it impacted that mentally? Does it feel like your path doesn't line up with your authentic goals nearly as much? No, I don't think so.

The reason that I started the show originally was I didn't understand myself and I hoped that if I spoke to enough people that were experts, maybe they'd be able to help. And that's still the case. These conversations, the ones that we've had, the one that we had last year, the training vlog we did earlier this year, all of those things I take little bits and pieces away that help me understand myself and the world around me. Then you do start to sort of layer on top of that

hope and expectation and performance in a good way. Stepping up to the plate and wanting to really get the best conversation you can and this pressure that comes along with that. It's very much still the thing that I think I was meant to do, but I don't know what it would be like being a bodybuilder and

tearing a lat before you're about shrinking yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah out of no sort of choice of your own and really they're not you'd sort of scrabbling around trying to find a solution to fix it and uh yeah it's rough i bet i don't connect any of my value to your intelligence chris and have your value to your intelligence well i appreciate that don't stress in the face of adversity make adversity something you desire for an opportunity to grow it sounds an awful lot like probably what i need to

Take a little bit of advice from it. It could be interpreted in a, you can still stress about it. It's okay to feel the stress, more so the stress that leads to avoiding the adversity because you know, I, and the other funny thing that I've thought about very related to this is going through adversity and

My life is very revolved around competing in Olympias. When I go through adversity now, I'm like, this could be a part of my speech. I tore my lat last year. I'm like, when I win this Olympia and I stand up on stage and I tell people I tore my lat in the middle of this prep, they're going to be like, oh my God. And it's going to make this story that much cooler. It's going to push me beyond...

to the levels of which I know that I'm capable of accomplishing. It's going to show me that when something feels impossible, it's not until it's not. You know, I got to keep pushing through and figuring it out. And so the stress is okay to feel in adversity. It's where the stress leads you that you need to avoid. You need to prevent the stress from being strong enough to make you avoid adversity in the first place. If you start to feel stress about adversity, I think diving right into it is like the secret for growth.

If your definition of success is win or lose, giving everything you've got and growing or learning along the way, then you're setting yourself up for success. I really think the biggest cheat code in life is just going after it and not being concerned of whether or not you fail at one specific task. Instead, understanding the big picture, what your long-term goal is, and knowing if you keep driving forward and never fucking quit, in the end you will succeed. Great quote.

I've based a lot of my life in the past about my definition of success and my definition of being a champion and my definition of winning. And I think it all just comes down to, you know, again, your values. When I'm old, what's the end of this look like? You know, my values of being the best partner, father, person I can be.

When I'm 50, if I have five or six or seven or eight or nine or 10 Olympias, are any of those affected by that? No. So in this short-term goals of this moment of me wanting to win, is this very important? Yes. But is the pressure of my life and value and worth dependent on that? No, it's not. It's the big picture of my life that I'm focusing on of who I want to become going through all these things. So if I...

Win an Olympia, how do I want to win that Olympia? Who do I want to be when I win that Olympia? How do I want to win it? How do I want to show up in my relationships? If I lose that Olympia, how do I want to lose? Who do I want to be when I lose? Who am I becoming through all these little challenges and goals along the way that aren't the big picture? Who am I becoming, which is the big picture? And I think that's so important for me to understand that everything that you choose to do and how you handle it

It's shaping who you're becoming. And at the end of the day, when you're old and have grandkids and children in your life, you're the culmination of everything you've accomplished, but also how you accomplished it and how you reacted to it. What's the big picture? Who do you want to become? Isn't it interesting that you could have the same...

mantle piece above the fire that's got however many Olympias on it. And objectively, when grandkids are bouncing on your knee, they can look and see the same thing. But the person behind them and the experiences that they went through and who they became in the process can be totally different, which kind of shows that the outcomes that you get really are

in the end, kind of arbitrary. And it's the person that's behind the grandkid that kind of matters. Yeah, exactly. If I had a picture of myself and I hadn't never won an Olympia, and then I had a picture of myself that won six Olympias and my kids were looking at me, holy shit, you were jacked, dad.

That's where their thought ends. It's not like you had five, you had six, you had seven. It doesn't matter. That's cool, you're Jack, but who are you and how do you show up in my life every day? And how did those pursuits, how did the goals that you tried to achieve or did achieve change you? How did they cause you to be a different sort of father or grandfather or husband or friend or business partner or whatever? And what lessons did you learn and take from them that you can give to me so that I can learn from them and hopefully not go through as much pain while still learning the same lesson?

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Everything changed for me when I realized that we're not meant to feel excited and perfect all the time. I started accepting that where I am right now is where I'm genuinely meant to be. Tough days are all a part of the process. Lean into them. Bad days are also part of a very good and meaningful life. So on my toughest days, I think about getting through one more day, one more workout, one more rep. Yeah. I think, I mean, this applies deeply in the

I mean, on a smaller level of the starvation of prep when you're trying to get through it and you're just trying to get through one more. What was the first part of that quote again? Everything changed for me when I realized we're not meant to feel excited and perfect all the time. Yeah, this was the idea of pursuing happiness, not leading to happiness. You know, you pursue things that have meaning in life and things that you care about. You know, love, challenges, relationships, everything.

And happiness might ensue, but you don't pursue the happiness itself because it's inevitably not going to be there all the time. So if you're just constantly seeking more happiness and it's not there, then you're seeking something that's never going to be there. But if you're able to just stick in what you're doing right now and in those hard times, believing they're going to lead to good times, it just creates a lot less friction in your life. You know, and I think whenever we're going through a hard time, we just want it to end. But

It's those moments that allow us to appreciate the good ones. What would you say to someone who's going through a string of bad days or bad weeks or bad months? Say it's okay. You're not alone. You know, I think sometimes a quick word of just looking at them and being like, I know you're not alone. Give them a hug and be like, this is shit right now. And it's okay, but you're not alone. What does lean into them mean? Lean into the bad days. I think specifically nowadays, it's so easy to numb.

There's so many distractions, so many things that we can just avoid feeling things with, you know, staple being your phone. You want to cry, you fight your tears, you're feeling stressed.

You're overthinking something. So you just pull up Instagram and you doom scroll for 20 minutes, get distracted. You see a funny video of a cat, close your phone and you forget about it. That's not gone. Those feelings are still there. They're just pushed down from a couple Instagram videos that are distracted. And next thing you know, a couple of days go by and you just feel this anxiety over yourself. And you're like, why do I feel anxious? I just feel like I can't, I can't sleep and wake up at 5am overthinking. Like, I don't know what's going on. I have no idea. People are like, well, are you stressed about anything? Like, no.

And this is something that I've had to call myself out on. If you ask me if I'm stressed half the time, my answer is no. You feel, are you stressed? No, I'm fine. I feel great. And then if you look at me, like, do you feel calm? Do you feel at ease? Do you feel relaxed? I'd be like, fuck no. So where, where, where am I feeling? And for some reason, stress to me is like numb, but it's stress. So I don't really feel it.

And it's typically from not allowing myself to lean into the shitty times, the shitty thoughts, the shitty days, and being able to sit with them and be with them, accept what they are, and process them properly rather than just numbing them. It's so funny that you used the word lean into them. Ben Bergeron in Chasing Excellence says, lean into discomfort as if you invited it through the door. And it's a phrase that stuck with me because it feels like

you are in control of the frame. Like, okay, in you come. Let's do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. As opposed to, again, the fear that you have around being guilty or the agitation you have around being shameful or the distraction that you need to do in order to be able to get away from it. It's an interesting one to think about how bad days are also a part of a very good and meaningful life that it does really frame you.

The story at the end, both you and Hormozy have said the same thing in the last two episodes I've spoken to you about, which is the bad days create the story that I'm one day going to tell myself about what I got through. You know what I mean? Yeah. Without the bad days, the story would be way more lame. There would be no glory in overcoming anything because what did you overcome? It was all just 40 to 60, you know, vanilla ice cream, mush, gray, like existence. Yeah.

I mean, it's like the concept of the fear exposure therapy. When you're trying to build confidence about something, you're afraid of being exposed to the fear, helps you overcome that. But actively choosing to take that fear on head on is actually what it takes. I can't throw a spider at you and you're not afraid of spiders, but you choosing in your own mind to actively go to that spider by yourself makes you actually grow from it. So you choosing to take power of what little you can when you're feeling like

When everything's crumbling around you and you feel powerless and helpless, well, what can you take control of? You can take control of opening your door and letting that, embracing that, you know, leaning into that hard time. Like, I'm going to choose to feel this. It's here. I didn't choose that, but I'm going to choose to feel it. And I have power over the choice of what I feel. And then you take your power back and you can build your confidence from there. I had a conversation recently with a guy called Dr. Jamil Zaki, who wrote a book called Hope for Cynics. And

It's interesting thinking about how widespread skepticism and cynicism are. Skepticism being the good version of cynicism, cynicism being kind of total blanket coverage, everything is shit, everything sucks, everybody is evil and out for themselves.

And you had a bit of a rant one day where you said, everyone's hypercritical and terrified to do anything and put themselves out there and fail. So we hyperanalyze, hypercriticize, become paralyzed and end up doing nothing, sitting in our basements, watching TikToks of other people's lives, pretending that they're happy.

I was having one of those cynical days and felt like ranting a little. But honestly, there's optimism here for some low barrier of entry personal growth. Stop analyzing, stop criticizing both yourself and others and go fail at some shit. Go give someone a good job for sucking at something because at least they're trying. Maybe it will even give yourself permission to do the same. We find meaning in trying difficult things, not just in succeeding at them. How do you avoid being too cynical? It's widespread. It's everywhere. How do you avoid it? Mm-hmm.

Don't get stuck in the simulation. I mean, it's all, it's all, there's a million things. It's perspective checks, environment, who you choose to surround yourself with, what you choose to consume. You know, like, are you choosing to consume food?

false simulations of someone's life on TikTok, compare yourself to it and think you're not doing enough? Or are you choosing to live in the real world, having conversation with good people who are being realistic and taking risks? Are you choosing to be around negative people or positive people? Every single day you choose who you surround yourself with, you choose what you do. You're in control a lot more than you believe you are. And I think people like to get caught up in

and norm and feeling obligated to their old friends or family or this or that and staying kind of where they are. But pushing yourself out of that sometimes is exactly what you need. And I think it's just scary for change sometimes. But, you know, there's the concept of living life is just so simple. You could take the words live your life and expand on that into a million page essay and just do it. But just getting out there and living and experiencing life and doing the things that

are difficult and challenging and cause you to grow. And to, you know, if you think of the person that the person that I envy the most, and I enjoy being around the most is just that like old wise man who has all these crazy stories, who's lived all this life. And it's just like happy to sit on the park bench and talk to random people about what he's done. You know, it's, if that's the person I respect, how do I become that person? It's not from doing nothing. It's from doing something. It's funny that,

We kind of see the trajectory that everybody's on because we can all see old people now, old people that seem to be content. We think, well, if that's where I'm going to end up, is there another way that I can just speed run bringing some of that into now? Yeah, you know what I mean? We also see old people who aren't content at all. You see a lot of old people now who are even more stuck than some young people in the simulation of the hyper-reality of their phones and their content and just being stuck into that. You also don't want to

You want to see yourself spend to the future. What if that's a path you're on? Well, it should be a cautionary tale, right? That should be the route that you want to try and avoid as much as possible. I had a conversation with David Sanra, who just found this podcast. You know, he's broken down...

300, 400 famous people from history and he reads all of the books on them and then he talks about them on his podcast. And I was asking him about how people do, most of the people he learns about are successful in one form or another, basically how people do success wrong. And he just

endless stories of people who achieved a ton of worldly success and seemed to have absolutely zero fun in the process. None. None at all. And, you know, there was this one story about this dude, I think worth billions and billions of dollars and was in his late 70s, had maybe grandkids, maybe even great grandkids at this point, and was still showing up to conferences, you know, sort of beatboxes

beating down deals on the door at 78 years old, you know, with this illustrious career behind him. And he didn't, David didn't think that this was coming from some well-balanced desire to maximize his calling in life, which was to be the best business leader salesperson, but just this as yet unalchemized compulsion to need to be busy and to be seen and for validation and for recognition and for success and so on and so forth. And I used to say,

from my old life as a club promoter that there was nothing really sadder than seeing some guys in their 40s for whom the single best part of their life was getting a bag in with the boys on a weekend, the same place, the same clubs, the same parties, week in, week out for decades and decades and decades. But I actually think that the 78-year-old guy that as yet hasn't alchemized is just the

more seductive more publicly acceptable version of that which makes it even more dangerous because there's few people fewer people that are going to say well you know at least you're not going out and getting a bag of cocaine with the boys in 78 year old man uh but yeah it's a cautionary tale i think that we should all be pretty scared about it's a challenge because

I mean, I made the joke about the simulation, but like, it's so easy now for us to see other people's lives in such a specific narrative that they want us to see. And it's like a responsibility for people who have a platform and followers to be honest, but they have no reason to be, they don't have to be. So if we're looking up to these people who have worked 40 years of their life to become this billionaire and, you know, they talk about like,

maximize efficiency be as like use everything for this optimize this be perfect in this all these things and it's all about optimization efficiency make more money work harder wake up earlier morning routine everything all these things and it's like well that'll get me to his life

What if that dude's fucking miserable? You know, what if he's optimizing riches, fucking drives that nice Ferrari, but he hates his life. You know, we'll never know. Maybe he's very different from me and maybe his goals and his morals and his values are completely different than me. And I'm not going to, I can't project onto that, but we'll never really know the truth of if those people are happy or not. But these young kids are watching this story, watching this journey. And they're like, that's who I want to be. I want to live like that. I'm going to work like that until I have that.

very, very dangerous using anybody as a role model that

doesn't seem to be being transparent. You know, I think it's hard though. Of course. And you don't know whether the transparency is performative. Uh, how much of this is, how much self knowledge do people have anyway? Like how transparent are we to ourselves? And then on top of that, how much do we allow ourselves to tell the people? And then how much of that do we allow to go into a public platform? You know, there's so many filters. It's kind of amazing that anybody says anything truthful ever, you know?

There's so many incentives and obfuscations that don't allow us to see what we believe or feel. Yeah. Even if you're not numbing with like...

boring stuff like Instagram. You could be efficient and optimized in your life enough to have a morning routine, a night routine, and work hard enough to never have a spot for introspection, of genuine introspection. You can think of like, this is a cool quote about business and working hard, but it's not really about how you feel.

And you could live your life in a very efficient, beautiful, well-articulated manner and have no idea who the fuck you really are. Busy calendar is a great hedge against feeling feelings. You know, if you just bounce from meeting to meeting, look at how important I am. All of these people need me. They all want me. I've got all of these things going on. There's no...

To go back to the drugs analogy, there's no point where you're at the comedown after the after-party as the cocaine's wearing off or as the hangover's kicking in. There's no hangover. You're just permanently in dopamine party mode for however many decades of life. I think busy calendars for a lot of people protect them against the existential threat

eye-wide pain of having to work out, am I actually, why am I doing this? Am I doing this for the right reasons? Is this what I'm supposed to be doing? Do I really enjoy this? You mentioned, especially now that you've got daddy daycare duty, that you're having to learn to say no more. I think you said previously you said no 90% of the time and now it's 99% of the time. So thank you for saying yes. What

What would be your advice for people that struggle to say no? Perennial people pleasers and those that struggle to advocate for their own needs or put their desires first. How can people be better no-sayers? It's a good question. Because it kind of took me into a cheat code to really get good at it. And that's leverage. At least in my professional, performative life,

I said yes more, but I guess from the beginning, if I really think about it, I've always worked hard to just say yes to things that I actually cared about. You know, I tried not to be in starting out as like an influencer. I tried not to be a sellout.

I got offered a lot of money. I've turned down some crazy deals that I'm still like, holy shit, like a few hundred grand a month deals. And I just said no, because it's not a product that I would use without the money. And it was inauthentic to me. And I was like, fuck. But over time, saying no to those things have opened up more doors and more opportunity. And I still haven't gotten a contract that big. But I haven't sold out and people still trust me at least. And I'm standing behind brands only that I love or that I own.

So I think just being able to stick true and checking in with yourself, being like, who am I? What do I care about? What are, I think authentic goals is like a huge word of mine now. What's truly authentic to me. What am I working towards? It's something I care about rather than things I think other people were care about for me. And I think that's absolutely huge. And, you know, also,

I've worked really hard over the past decade of my life to be in a really highly successful position to have a healthy amount of leverage where now when I say no to people, I get a better offer back. When I say no, I get a better offer back. Like, can you come to the trip? We'll give you 50 grand. I'm like, no, we'll give you a hundred. No, we'll get you a private jet and give you 150. I'm like,

And it's leverage. Whereas before, if they're like, you want to come up? No, but all right, fuck you. We don't care. And it's different, but I've had to work really hard to get there and put yourself in that position. You know, I, there's times where I've said no in the past and people haven't given a shit at all. And over time now I'm at a point where if I say no, it's, there's a little more leverage behind what I can do and I can,

I can finagle it a little bit more, but that has also come from me sticking to what was authentic to me and saying, no, so I built a trust behind what I represent and what I do now in my life. Yeah. You're no now being worth something is because you still said no when it was worth nothing previously. And along the way I was working hard to make it worth more on the back end. I made it worth it. Yeah. That's such a funny point. I kind of brought this up a couple of weeks ago on the show that no one ever gets credit

for saying no to things that people don't know about. So, you know, we got this offer a while ago to bring somebody on the show. I've never once paid anybody or taken money to bring anybody on the show. And we got offered a six-figure sum to bring some guy on to talk about oil or something to do with, like, something to do with energy or maybe it was the Middle East, something like that. And it just stank of deep state,

Saudi, Iranian, some Putin conspiracy thing. I was like, this is so weird. First off, I'm not taking the money. But secondly, there's no world... I guess I'm saying it now, but this was like a year and a half ago or something. And I'm not saying it to flex. I'm saying it's an interesting example. But no one is ever going to give anybody credit. You know, the word grifter and shill get thrown around so much on the internet, it makes me cringe. But

No one ever gets to see all of the stuff that people turn down. Yeah. That you get.

called out for anything that you're associated with and never get credit for anything that you're not associated with. All of the guests that didn't come on the show, all of the brand deals. Absolutely famous people who would have gotten you so much views, but they didn't line up with you. Correct. I didn't want to bring on the episodes that I recorded that I didn't release the people that wanted to come on that I decided not to the money, like so much money that we've turned down on the show. Cause I go, I don't think this product is legit and I don't use it. So I'm going to say no.

Meanwhile, anything that you're ever participating in becomes a vector for attack and all of the things you didn't participate in are not vectors for commendation.

I want to rip my face off. But on the back end, you can attribute way more of your success to those no's. Oh, absolutely. Because even now you're starting a story and saying someone offered me money. I can't even imagine you sitting across from someone and having a conversation and just knowing that you paid him. You would probably be like, here's your money back. I'm leaving halfway through the podcast. If you even got there. I don't care about your oil. Yeah, it's just I wish it's kind of a little bit like

somebody accusing you of not giving enough money to the homeless and you saying but no no I just I just gave loads of money to the homeless over there see how virtuous I are and then they go well no you just done that because you could take a photo and talk about it well in that case I can't fucking win yeah you know what I mean it's very it's it's interesting I think I understand why everyone's kind of grift and chill radars hyper tuned on the internet and rightly so because not everybody's got everybody's best interests at heart but there is a term grift and chill

Shill, S-H-I-L-L. I've never heard that. So I actually asked, two terms that I never use, largely because I think that kind of like racism in the modern world, it gets sort of so overly used that you actually end up diluting it down. So it means everything and nothing at the same time. I asked on Twitter a while ago what grifter or shill means for the people who do use it. And I think the best example was

a person who is affiliated with a product or service that they wouldn't use if they weren't paid for it. And I was like, huh, okay, that's an interesting framework to put into it. But it's a term which now covers a whole range of sins. Interestingly, it's kind of dependent on who the two worlds are that are coming together. For instance, when Rogan got his Spotify deal, the first one,

six, five and a half, six years ago, there was no one that called him a sellout for going to Spotify. Well, why? Well, because there is an assumption that both Spotify and Joe have so much positive brand equity that

that there's no no one's taking advantage of the other it's like both quite high value cool brands coming together um nike comes in and sponsors some huge nfl player or whatever uh no one goes oh my god i can't believe that you sold out to nike but if it was i don't know some russian gas company then they might they go oh my god so the inherent in the deal is this sense of

alignment of value and credibility and sort of cool of brand coming in uh like you you got the new gym shock deal talk to me about that when i was in 2018 and they reached out to me i remember being very ecstatic about them reaching out to me because they were the brand you know that i always wanted to be a part of them they had the cool events the cool athletes all this stuff and i was like shit they're reaching out to me this is really exciting and then over a few years i felt like

They stepped away from being like the workout gym brand. You know, like I was like a bodybuilder. I like to train and it seemed like they were straying away from wanting to be a part of the gym culture so much. And it wasn't really lining up with me and I didn't really want to be a part of brands as much anymore. I was owning my own companies and all these things. And I just, I just stepped away from that. And I feel like as I did, they were,

I've heard now they were going through the internal process of thinking, hey, we're stepping too far away from the gym. We need to lean back into the gym more. And they were like, fuck, Chris is leaving. Like, blah, blah, blah. Like, it wasn't just about me. But then over the year and a half I was gone or whatever, they were like, we're diving all back into the gym. We want to bring the gym to the world, which I think is so incredible because, yeah,

all my success is owed to the gym. You know, if I had stepped in a gym, I wouldn't be sitting here. I wouldn't have met Courtney. I wouldn't have my businesses. Like it's all because I stepped in the gym. It's helped me so much. That's us. That's just the physical success aside from the mental and everything it benefited me from. And I think anyone stepping into the gym is only going to make their life better. So I just love the, their concept of now they're literally concept of bringing the gym to the world.

Not only that, but I've grown a little closer to Ben and to Noel over the years talking to them. So sorry to hear that. I know, right? But having my own businesses and seeing the scale at which they've grown theirs while maintaining majority ownership of it, starting in Ben's garage in the UK to the scale they are now, like I can't even understand the level of professionalism that they have to have come from nothing at his age where I'm

working my ass off with people way fucking smarter than me in business who aren't even close to their level of success and they're just crushing it i just have so much respect for how they built their business the way they operate their staff behind the scenes you know i kept in contact with a lot of their staff just everything the way they operate in their business it just

something i respect you know the morals and values they uphold the athletes that they choose to bring on i think they really care about the the way their athletes represent themselves the way they represent the brand it just it just lined up perfectly and when they hit me back up and they're like what do you think i was like this feels perfect you know and you're part owner now yeah very small but part owner yeah big company very small it's very good who was it i think it was like

an old friend or something like are you a equal owner equal partner and like yeah they gave me a billion dollars but no it's it's it's good i'm super pumped to be back and they made their clothes better i was buying their clothes by myself with my own money on the website and then they're like chris are you wearing gym shirt again i was like yeah this is shirts dope and they're like did you buy it i'm like yeah they're like we would have sent it to you i'm like

I liked it. They have made a big pivot, which has been pretty good. I don't know. It's a, it's an interesting time for training and sort of gym culture. I think, uh, certainly, you know, downstream from, uh, you and your era that we're in right now.

CrossFit kind of was, I think, a big influence on that young people culture for a while, but that really seems to have pivoted off. And now it's all, if it's not bodybuilding, it's hybrid training and high rocks. Yep, fucking Nick Bear and George Heaton, man. Those two guys have a lot to answer for.

you know from fashion and and trend and training modality and run clubs yeah huge huge big deal now they even my partners in raw they're trying to do ironman and shit they're building we're built an endurance line under raw like just because they're so passionate and love it and they're like trying to convince me to do an ironman when i'm like 35 40 and retire and i'm just like you want me to fucking run for how long like no

I'll pass. I might do like a CrossFit style thing in the future, but no Ironman for me. You're the perfect build for an Ironman. Yeah, you think? Right now, this is exactly the time when you should do it. Yeah, I don't know. It is... We're going in two directions as well. We spoke about this last time about the...

It got even worse. I'm not on TikTok, so I don't see this, but I know the world of Psalms. Apparently, people that have got affiliate codes and stuff for... Again, I only hear this third hand through my housemates sending me videos and blah, blah, blah. But it is odd to me that we've got the leader of the sport being...

unbelievably sort of emotionally open vulnerable talking about trying to get as much out of as little as possible pharmacologically and then this other world which is affiliate deals galore for you know teenagers on performance enhancing drugs of varying degrees of toxicity and research it's very strange yeah I haven't

seen a lot of i the weird thing is i know the companies associated with selling those arms but people only promote like peptides like healing peptides and stuff but i i'm not on there either to develop into that but it's definitely a strange slippery slope i feel like for sure it's like a gateway the gateway peptides you know yeah i don't know um i'll be interested to see sort of what gym culture does because i probably wouldn't would i have predicted it

I probably wouldn't have predicted, you know, 10, 15 years ago, the Jeff side, Ziz era stuff, simply shredded bodybuilding.com forums. I probably wouldn't have predicted CrossFit coming in. I certainly wouldn't have predicted high rocks and run clubs and hybrid athlete training. There's no way that I would have seen that coming back around. So I don't know what... I can kind of understand the...

the jogging craze coming back because people are like it's almost like a post-failed meditation app phase that led to running working because like true good running is a meditation being able to be with your breath and to be with your pace to not go too fast you know everyone every running coach says you don't run fast to get faster you run slow for longer and

You have to match your pace. It's a meditation of mindfulness. It's keeping on track. Restraint, patience. Yeah, and I think there's something very beautiful and meditative about running, and I'm horrible at it, but I can kind of understand why in a world with so much distraction and so much going on, why people would be drawn to this moment of the day where they're out in nature, outside, peacefully getting exercise in a meditative state. Yeah.

Yeah, I think run clubs, there's one in Austin that's fighting with the city council at the moment. I mean, it's massive. They do 500 people every Saturday. It's huge. Yeah, it's offensive. But I said to the guys, I was like, if they don't allow you to keep doing this, I would go complete scorched earth with...

austin council i'm aware that you don't want to burn your bridges but everybody's worried about young people's mental health about isolation spending too much time in technology obesity rates blood glucose diabetes all this stuff you're offering a solution to all of the dating like all of these things are fixed in one form or another with some kind of group fitness activity whether it's barry's boot camp or crossfit or gym or run clubs or high rocks or hybrid whatever you're

This is the solution to it. And in the same sentence, they're saying, we're really worried about young people's mental health and physical state. And also, one guy doesn't like the fact that he can't look out of his front garden for 30 minutes every Saturday without seeing young people looking sweaty running past. I don't know. It just seems like...

It's disappointing to sort of see that it's not being facilitated or encouraged in that way. It's like they're not graffitiing things. It's not one of those low-rider drive-by things where everyone's making loads of music at one in the morning out of super loud subwoofers and stuff. Yeah, it's just young people running. Yeah, it's disappointing, but it's not surprising. Yeah, it's the same. We've been here before. Is there anything in your experience that...

I don't know how much you've gone into the science. You might just be someone who happens to be super effective at doing the thing as opposed to knowing the thing. Are there any areas of training or diet or fitness that seem to be surprisingly...

Uh, not what the science or evidence or typical advice would agree with rep ranges, periodization, like overload, any of that stuff. Is there any areas where you think, huh, like this ends up really working for me, but I don't think most people would think that it would work. It's hard to say when something's very like nuanced.

I have been diving a little bit more into proper science behind it. I've had this guy named Justin King helping me with my training, and he's very science-based and very evidence-backed. And every time you bring that up in bodybuilding, you go back and forth between thinking too much and being able to work hard enough and back and forth. And what I've noticed specifically, especially on tired days, deep in prep or whatever it might be,

If you're so focused on getting absolute deep stretch with a four second negative, proper, perfect execution, all these things, 100% or mentally that's fatiguing. And to do that for, let's say, optimized periodization, you're going to do a four week program of 18 to 20 reps. And then you're going to bring it down to six to 10 once your volume's high and you're building your strength with X, Y, and Z. If you can't get there mentally because mentally you're too fatigued to go to failure on that set and you're like thinking too much, like you just stop.

versus just like turning your brain off and just going full tilt to failure, you're not getting as much benefit. Are you failing because your muscles are failing or because mentally you can't keep thinking about the fucking four second negative for long enough, you know? Yeah. So it seems obvious, but if you're holding yourself back by thinking too much, then you're not doing good enough. And I think, you know, you try and reinvent the wheel a million times and it just doesn't work. So you got to find the balance within it. Yeah. Everyone's a little different. That's cool that...

you can try and be as optimal as possible, but there's a time for just sort of pure aggression. Yeah. And I think there was, you might even know it and you probably figure it out better than me, but there was a study that took people and they were testing how high of a step they thought they could step over. And it was just like, guess how high of a step you can step over. And they had to guess. And they put one group of,

through a bunch of like physical and mental fatigue and one with just a fresh group and the group was mental and physical fatigue severely underestimated what they could step over they could only do like two feet and then they got four feet or something they were just underestimating what they were capable of and i mean that's literally bodybuilding prep you know like the day where i'm like i can't pick that thing off the floor i'm like this can is too heavy like can you throw this out for me i'm tired i'm moving in slow motion but i need to go to the gym and

Dumbbell press, 150 pound dumbbells. Like how does that translate? My mind doesn't think I can do it. I'm severely underestimating my strength that I can't pick this can up. But when I get to the gym, I need to overpower myself.

my mind and just do it i need to understand that i still have the muscle i still have the strength of just being a lazy little bitch right now and i need to pick up that weight and do it and overpower it and sometimes when you're getting in there and you're overthinking and all these things come in too much of like i have to do this this and this i have to force it negative oh my god that's gonna be so hard i should drop the weight then like no just fucking get in there know what you can do bust your ass and get out of there yeah sometimes overthinking it holds you back there's a like beautiful stupidity

that i see with a lot of athletes yeah you know that the there are certainly very smart people that have been super successful in their sport but there's also a kind of cultivated idiocy that they're able you know they like uh uh sort of channel their inner you know the midwit meme do you know what that is no so it's a bell curve and on the left is this guy that looks like a neanderthal he's got a brow like mine and then the guy in the middle is this sort of raging um midwit the

that's trying to over-optimize things and failing. And the guy on the right is a sage who's got a hood up. He looks like a Jedi. And the joke is that the guy on the left and the guy on the right always agree that the master and the idiot always end up arriving at the same thing. So it's like, eat protein lift weights. Eat protein lift weights. I must ensure that my pre-digested way is consumed 30 minutes intra-workout with the optimal... You know, it's just...

eat protein left ways is that and it's the this sort of uh yeah cultivated idiocy or whatever where people just i am not going to overthink this coach said go in there and lift to failure i'm just going to go in and lift to failure just going to go do it yeah yeah and it comes down to the experience of trusting your intuition you know i know what my body needs i've been here for 10 years i can just feel it i pick up a weight i feel a certain way in a day i know what i need to do and you just got to trust your instincts and do it not overthink it sometimes

I heard you say, there's only one thing I dread, not to be worthy of my sufferings. What's that? Me trying to be very philosophical. There's a few meanings behind that. I think it's how you handle your sufferings. You know, when you're going through something really challenging, how do you show up within it?

Do you choose to become a victim of complaining and misery and shitty? Or do you find meaning in how you show up in the suffering? And this isn't really my line of thinking. This is like Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl kind of talked about this. And I read that book last year probably when I said this. And I reflected a lot about this honestly when Courtney was going through labor. And she had the child and I was like,

Holy fuck. Like you were going through this. Absolutely. Like, like I've never, I've never experienced that much pain in my entire life. And she just remained calm, controlled her breathing, did what she needed to do. Changed position. When I told her she needed to do within the tub, was on the bed, was doing all these things and was just,

She locked in. Lock in, bro. Fucking lock in. And I just was like, you are suffering, but you are choosing to find meaning in how you handle the suffering. That makes you so worthy of those suffering. And it's such a beautiful thing to experience. And, you know, when life throws some shit at us, you're having this baby. You're not choosing not to have this baby. You're going to go through this pain. You're going to go through the suffering. How are you going to choose suffering?

to show up. Like I was talking about before, there are things out of your control. What's in your control? How can you take that power back into your own hands? And what are you going to take from it? What kind of meaning can you find from taking power out of what you feel powerless in? I heard this rumor from a friend that after women give birth, they have a flood of hormones that allows them to, um,

color the memory of it so that it's less painful in retrospect is this true it's crazy like this is all the nurses it doesn't happen immediately but all the nurses were like ah give it a few weeks and you'll forget about it you're gonna want to do it again and then court and courtney was like after she's like

She's like, why the fuck did I do that naturally? She's like, why didn't you take the epidural? Like that sucked. And then like a month or two ago, she was like, it wasn't that bad. I think I'll do it again like that. And I'm like, are you fucked? That was bad for me just to be in the room beside you. And her mom was with us too. She's like, we have to go through that again. Courtney's like, it was fine. And I'm like, what the fuck? But it's gotta be true. I mean, if you were to go through that much pain, you never want to have a kid again. It must be something that's like,

Just whatever the science is, it makes you just completely forget. It was Andrew Schultz. He talks about it in his new live show. And the same thing. He's there, stood on the sideline, just being hopefully useless. Yeah. The cheerleader, I don't think he even got to pinch the traps. And it's like, you got this, honey. Yeah.

Good job. And then she gets this flood of whatever the men in black flashy thing like neurochemically and it fixes her and changes the way that she, she feels about it in retrospect. And he's like, I remember.

But I remember, what about me? Where's my flood of hormones? Because I saw the person I love the most in the entire world go through all of this bullshit. And now I'm being gaslit to say that I'm making it out to be worse than it was. It's like only one of us has got a rational memory of what actually occurred during this situation. That's hilarious. I've never heard about it before. And now apparently it's not a... I hadn't heard about it either, but the nurses weren't saying it was science. They were just saying like, you're going to forget. It's just going to happen. I was like, damn.

Yeah. Intense shit. Women's minds retconning their own experience of childbirth is wild. I mean, we wouldn't probably have enough people on a Thursday if they didn't. Yeah. Chris Bumstead, ladies and gentlemen, dudes, I appreciate you so much. I know you're in the middle of prep, so I'm really grateful that we got to have another sit down this year. Me too. I said I wasn't gonna do any more podcasts, but here we are. I'm gonna keep tempting you. I stayed awake, so it was an honor. I appreciate you having me back. I appreciate you too, man. Thank you.