#207 – Chris Duffin: The Mad Scientist of Strength

Chris Duffin is a strength athlete, coach, and engineer, setting multiple strength world records including squatting and deadlifting 1000 lbs for multiple reps. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Headspace: https://headspace.com/lex to get free 1 month trial – Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex and use code LEX to get $5 off – Sun Basket: https://sunbasket.com/lex and use code LEX to get $35 off – Ladder: https://ladderlife.com/lex EPISODE LINKS: Chris’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mad_scientist_duffin The Eagle and the Dragon (book): https://amzn.to/3Ckpfoj Chris’s Website: https://christopherduffin.com Kabuki Strength: https://kabukistrength.com PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:10) – Performing feats of strength (13:52) – What does it take to lift 1000 lbs for reps? (16:43) – From 500 to 1000lb (17:15) – The mechanics of heavy lifting (28:32) – What did it feel like to do 1000lbs for reps? (30:26) – Achieving peak performance (35:16) – Importance of singular focus (37:48) – Chris’s childhood (50:37) – The Eagle and the Dragon: A Story of Strength and Reinvention (58:21) – Lex on business (1:04:52) – The Disciplines of Strength (1:09:33) – Powerlifting (1:22:37) – Role of strength in MMA, BJJ… and baseball (1:32:38) – What is Kabuki Strength? (1:38:55) – Equipment (1:50:09) – The importance of strong feet (1:59:15) – Chris’s diet (2:05:37) – Lex on moderation in food (2:06:11) – Steroids and PED’s (2:24:14) – Whiskey and deadlifts (2:33:03) – Is it better to work hard or smart? (2:41:52) – Advice for young people (2:45:02) – Fear of death

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Chris Duffin, the mad scientist of strength. He's one of the strongest people in the world, but is also an engineer of some of the most innovative strength equipment I've ever seen. Check out his company Kabuki Strength. He is the only person who squatted and deadlifted 1,000 pounds for multiple reps and achieved many other amazing feats of strength. He has lived one hell of a life of hardship and triumph as he writes about in his book called The Eagle and the Dragon. Quick mention of our sponsors, Headspace, Magic Spoon, Sun Basket and Ladder. Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

• 0:43Lex Fridman?

  As a side note, let me say that I was always a fan of strength, both powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting, both as a fan and practitioner. Mostly, I'm a fan of people who are willing to put in years of hard work towards finding out what the limits of their body is and then smashing past those limits. People like Chris Duffin, or on the Olympic weightlifting side, people like Dmitry Kolkov. That guy's great. This is why I love watching the Olympics, both the heartbreaks and the triumphs. They all reveal the incredible heights that the human mind and the human body can reach.

• 1:22Lex Fridman?

  As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps. So if you skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. I'm fortunate to be able to be very selective with the sponsors we take on. So hopefully, if you buy their stuff, you'll find value in it, just as I have. This show is sponsored by Headspace, a meditation app. I've used it off and on for many years. I've looked into this. It's since 2014. I've used it both for more and less structured meditation sessions. Friends have told me that they love using it for, quote, "emergency meditation sessions", like if there's drama at work or a fight with a significant other. I find it fascinating.

• 2:07Lex Fridman?

  How much of a roller coaster the human mind can be? Like, one moment, I can just be full of temper and passion and kind of intensity and the whole world seems like, uh, like it's in turmoil. And then the next, my mind can be calm. And all it takes is just to breathe, bringing the mind back to a calm place, letting your thoughts of doubts, or even just like thoughts that are just polluting your mind slip away. The whole thing is a really important, powerful process that Headspace can guide you through. It's meditation made simple. Go to Headspace.com/lex.

• 2:48Lex Fridman?

  That's Headspace.com/lex for a free one-month trial with access to Headspace's full library of meditations for every situation. Again, that's Headspace.com/lex. This episode is also sponsored by Magic Spoon. Low carb, keto-friendly cereal. It has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, only four net grams of carbs, and 140 calories in each serving. You can build your own box or get a variety pack with available flavors of cocoa, fruity, frosted, peanut butter, blueberry, and cinnamon. My favorite still, after all this time, is still cocoa.

• 3:29Lex Fridman?

  Eating this keto-friendly, healthy cereal is one way for me to combine the happiness of childhood with the happiness of adulthood. Happiness of childhood is you don't really care about anything. You just enjoy sweet things. And happiness of adulthood is sort of having everything together, just being healthy and not going off the rails in any kind of way. So, it's the best way to be a kid and an adult at the same time. Anyway, Magic Spoon have a 100% happiness guarantee, so if you don't like it, they'll refund it. Go to MagicSpoon.com/lex and use code LEX at checkout to save $5 off your order.

• 4:14Lex Fridman?

  That's MagicSpoon.com/lex and use code LEX.

• 4:19Lex Fridman?

  This show is also sponsored by Sun Basket. Sun Basket delivers fresh, healthy, delicious meals straight to your door. They have prepared meals, meal kits, raw ingredients, like just a nice New York strip steak, but also trout, sea bass, salmon, and much more. I've been trying to find a way, the reason, to go out fishing every week in Austin. I love fishing. I used to fish a lot. It's just such a meditative experience, but I also love eating the fish I catch, like cooking and eating it, just the whole process. It's a celebration of life. It's a celebration of just nature.

• 5:04Lex Fridman?

  It's probably also connected to sort of childhood roots of fishing with my family. I just love it, just me alone with nature. Anyway, like I said, Sun Basket has both the sort of the raw ingredients, but I also really just love their prepared meal kits and they're very affordable too, which is great. They are now offering $90 off for your first four deliveries, including free shipping on the first box when you go to sunbasket.com/lex and enter code Lex. That's sunbasket.com/lex with code Lex. This show is also sponsored by Ladder. I often talk about Ernest Becker's work Denial of Death.

• 5:47Lex Fridman?

  I often meditate on death together with the Stoics. I think meditating on your own mortality is both honest and clarifying for who you are as a human being and for who you want to be and how you want to spend your remaining days. The fact that life can end at any moment is one hell of a motivator to live an amazing life, at least it is for me. If you are the same and you also have people in your life you love, you should consider getting life insurance. Ladder can help you out with that. Pay a little every month in case something happens to you and the ones you love will be protected.

• 6:29Lex Fridman?

  Anyway, go to ladderlife.com/lex to see if you're instantly approved. That's L A D D E R ladderlife.com/lex. Once again, for the seats in the back, ladderlife.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast and here is my conversation with Chris Duffin.

• 7:10Lex Fridman?

  You've been a part of several incredible feats of strength. Which was the hardest or maybe one you're most proud of?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Definitely the one I'm most proud of is that journey for the grand goals. It was like a five-year scope that I chased this. And so when you think about training, it took more than five years, obviously. By that point, I'd been training for over 25 years. But it makes me proud. I mean, there were three distinct things that I wanted to accomplish out of this. So it was really thought out. And this was kind of my exit from being a competitive lifter. And basically saying, hey, I'm gonna be, you know, an Instagram lifter, an exhibition lifter, or whatever. I've done this for 16 years. I was number one in the world for like eight years straight, all-time world records. And I'm like, I'm not gonna do that anymore.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  What I want to do is just something deep down to me that is really important. And there's three things that were driving this. And this is a five-year journey that I went through to do this. I really wanted to showcase that you could do something that is well beyond the scope of what people think is humanly possible. So just this inspiration thing, this...

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Grand, over the top, like if you set your mind to a single minded goal, you can go so much further. And I didn't even say what the goal was upfront, because it was so far out there, I would have been laughed at. And that's, I, I think big goals should be kept pretty damn close to start with for that reason, too. But, and then the second piece was to, to, to walk the walk, to show like the principles of what I believed in around human movement, the ability to manage and control the spinal mechanics and the output that can have on the body. And so I wanted to take the two most basic movements that every able bodied person should be able to do. So fundamental movement patterns, the squat, which is like, in the developmental approach is around nine months as a baby

• 9:09Speaker 01

  from a developmental kinesiology standpoint, and a really basic pattern that every able bodied person should be able to master. The other one being the hip hinge, being able to pick something up off the ground, a deadlift. And I wanted to do those two, not just one, because I wanted to show the principles, that I wasn't built for one. I wasn't a specialist because of my lever links, torso links, all that, any outliers, because nobody had ever done a thousand pound squat. So this is it, is, and a thousand pound deadlift. It was outside of the scope of what anybody's, there's like half a dozen people that have

• 9:52Speaker 01

  done one or the other, but nobody's ever done both. And I wanted to do something unique. I wanted to do them, not only do it, but do them for reps, to leave literally no question out there. And there's no competition for that. So it was, this is what I'm gonna go do. And to pull it off, I had some past issues with my elbows and stuff that I couldn't work around. So I had to wear straps, which was another reason I couldn't do it in the competition setting. So the first year I worked up and I did a thousand and two pound deadlift. We, plates were weighed afterwards, it was a couple, little bit over. And I did it for almost three reps.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  And that still stands as Guinness World Record, just the one rep does, is the most weight ever sumo deadlifted. And one other person has deadlifted a thousand for reps at this point, and that was Thor Bjornson from Game of Thrones. He's done a thousand for a double as well. So then the next four years, and I did a bunch of feats of strength on the way, but it was all about building that axial loading capacity, the strength that, because now I'm moving the weight from my hands up to my shoulders. And so to do it for reps is like so much harder than a single, like five to 10 seconds versus 30 plus seconds to be able to buffer and manage all that. With that kind of load is just crazy. So

• 11:13Lex Fridman?

  It's literally about the duration that your body is carrying the load.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a big part of it. Yeah. Because you have to, you're using the resource of the diaphragm for stabilization. And so it's also responsible for respiration and all this other stuff. So even when you're not squatting, you've got to be handling those loads.

• 11:30Lex Fridman?

  Just holding that weight is fascinating. It's like, it's fascinating that the human body can do that, can can maintain that structure, just everything working together, that the biology, the skeletal structure, the musculature on top of that can hold the weight. It's fascinating to watch.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Everything is very intentful about positioning and how you're creating pressure and all this sort of stuff, especially for me. So when I mentioned that half a dozen people have squatted it and half a dozen people have deadlifted it, you understand those people all weigh 380 to 440 pounds. I weighed 265 to 285, depending on where I was between the two. So there's that as well, right? So big, big difference. And over the course of that, I did a lot of other feats of strength that fit in that capacity. And we can skip over those, but that was hugely invested as far as, you know, what I put into being able to accomplish that because it's it's over the top, which means the other stuff had to shift. And I had to learn something. There's so many things that came into place to pull that off.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, last March, two days before the world shut down, I did it. It was supposed to be at the largest equipment exhibition in the world down in San Diego as an event, and that got shut down a week beforehand, obviously. So we moved to, let's do it in my gym and invite people. And that was on a Saturday and Thursday or Friday, they limited it to 25 people for gatherings. I did it on Saturday and then Monday, everything shut down. So it was kind of surreal for timing wise, right? And so if I hadn't done it, it would have never got done. Like, cause I, I'd pushed to the limit. I couldn't come back and do it. It was at the total limitation of my capabilities. So I'm pretty, I'm pretty proud of it.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  And the last piece was, uh, every one of these feats along the way, I collaborated with a charity that I believed in and there was a lot of those tied to my life story, uh, which we probably will get into. Um, so it was threefold. So that inspiration piece, inspiration, motivation, walk in the walk and show one, like just the, these methodologies that a guy that had to learn to walk again can do something like this with no back pain. If you, if you, there is a way. And the third one is, is to provide awareness and recognition around a lot of, um, key charities. So.

• 13:52Lex Fridman?

  So your heart was in this journey, but also your mind, it's just, you're like a scholar of strength, a scientist of strength, an engineer of strength. For reps, do a thousand pounds of squat and deadlift. Let's first talk through the actual day you did it. What does it take to lift that much for reps?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  The day of is really easy. The, the lift itself, other than a few seconds, is really easy and not challenging. People always ask me, what was it like? How beat up were you after that and the deadlift? And the simple fact is it was easy. The work to get there was horrendous.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  So.

• 14:38Lex Fridman?

  So even the psychology of the day, you weren't, there was not a fear, there was not a nervousness, there was not a doubt in your mind?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Uh, there were certainly doubts on that day, um, from some training history. So there was some major breaks to my confidence in the couple of months leading up where I had issues with passing out under the bar. So completely losing consciousness. And this was on weight less than a thousand pounds even. So that was like all this buildup in me going, what if, what if it, I think I have this resolved, but what if I get up there and I can't even do a rep? How embarrassing will this be that I've been talking about this and planning for this for so long? But outside of that, I knew I could do it. In fact, I wanted to do even more, even up to

• 15:27Speaker 01

  the, the second rep. Training is about, you know, working into a fatigue state. So you're building, uh, an amount of fatigue in your system. And then when you let off of it, that's when you get a compensation and that's how you stair stop training. This is periodization, but leading into a big event, you're accumulating this massive amount of fatigue. And so I was performing at a level that I could do it. And so I knew I was going to be able to on me because then you, then you give yourself that window to be able to recover and super compensate and be able to do a little bit more. So like that first rep, when I did it, strength wise, I went, I could do this for five reps. Like it went through my head. I'm like, I mean, it was easy

• 16:11Speaker 01

  and it was fast and it felt like amazing. And I'm like, I'm gonna crush this. And then set rep two, uh, the realization kicked in is like, oh, this is for reps with a thousand pounds on your back and you're fatiguing just like, and then the third one was every last thing I could muster to just finish. I mean, and I just barely got it done because it's, the strength is like there, but like that capacity to be able to manage all those resources for that amount of time. Cause it's not just leg strength when we're talking about this stuff. So.

• 16:43Lex Fridman?

  What does it take to go from? From, I don't know what, like from 500 to 1,000. That feels like a journey that's like exponential.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  It is. It gets exponentially harder. It does. In the early 2000s, like I said, I started lifting in 1988. But my first meet in the early 2000s, my, my max deadlift was 523 and my first squat was 550. So.

• 17:11Lex Fridman?

  That's a heck of a journey.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  That is a journey.

• 17:14Lex Fridman?

  For people that like to lift, what should they understand about the difference between doing 500 and 1,000? In terms of the actual lift that you were experiencing that day, in terms of the mechanics, in terms of all the things you have to be, like the neurological adaptation, you mentioned the breathing, the core strength, like techniques, like little tricks, psychological tricks, anything that kind of stands out to you?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  The level of intent and the opportunity for error are a different level. So just the minutest changes of position by quarter inch, half inch can be make or break. At that level. So these things, everything gets amplified. So the ability to, to start with having the pelvis just in the right orientation to the diaphragm before we start initiating what we call the, the eccentric loading of the abdominal cavity to create this intra-abdominal pressure of working against this outward expansion, working against the outer sheath of abdominal thoracic lumbar musculature, obliques, causing the co-contraction at the pelvic floor, all this stuff and how you cue that.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Cause you can't think about all this stuff. You need to break it down and distill and practice to like it's one simple cue that we now lock down and control this torso stability, because this is what these fundamental movements are about, is being able to control our spinal mechanics. And then now be able to maintain that while articulating the joints around that through a range of motion.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  And then using the main power drivers. So in this instance, both instances, it's the, you know, the hip complex to generate that power and transfer it from how we're rooted and connected to the floor through to the distal end, you know, which would be the barbell on the shoulder. You know, there's a couple of key concepts. So one is that what we just talked through is how to actually maintain that stability. So if you have either the diaphragm, so which is connected at the rib cage, so out of alignment in any position, it needs to be in alignment with the pelvic, the pelvis. So those two in opposition. So this is simple engineering here because what we're going to do is eccentrically load

• 19:32Speaker 01

  this, we're going to use the diaphragm, just like you would in a diaphragm pump where it's going to press down on all the tissue in there. So we're not using breath. So our breath was actually a lot of times a default pattern when people do that because they'll bring it into their chest and raise their rib cage. So what we want to do is just initiate the diaphragm. Air can be used as well over the top at the final to create just a little bit more downward pressure. But if we have out of alignment there, we have a pressure leak where it's going to be push out the front or the rear, if you're either inflection or extension. All right. And then that causes this co-contraction and all this pressure of, of the organs essentially

• 20:14Speaker 01

  against outward against all those tissue for the co-contraction as well as surrounding the spine to be able to stabilize that. And then it puts all the muscles on both sides of the body in what we call the, the best length tension relationship. So if you think about a curl and we reach our arm out at the extended length, our bicep is not as strong and then all the way in the curl position, it's not as strong. There's somewhere in here that's this control of both. And so when you're sitting there arched or bent over, we have muscles that are past either one of those ranges. So they've got a lot of tension, which then will create relaxation on the other side. Right? So we want to have, and all of that needs to be working. And now the next important thing is the foot.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  So it's actually this connection to the ground and how we're actually using the foot and ankle complex to grab and grip this connection to the ground and elicit an effect. And because of this and then the everything between will naturally kind of do what it needs to do. So people like to focus on knee, knee position, or how far out their hips are, or all this other stuff, which is outputs of this. So if we control the torso and the knee, the only thing that can happen from that point is for the squat to happen. All right. So this allows us to use this massive, you know, the hip complex for all

• 21:41Speaker 01

  the muscles around that that are built to drive through hip extension to complete the squat. I did actually miss one thing in there. So this torso, people often miss, the lat is a spinal stabilizer as well. So that's key in controlling function at the TL junction, which is just above the lumbar spine. So kind of right opposite where your sternum is, and you'll see people kind of roll over sometimes like in an Olympic squat or something like that where they lose position. And that's often because they're close grip, because you can't engage the lats very well that way, and they're pushing up in the bar. But you want to be able to drive and pull the bar to your center, and that's going to create and use the lats now to drive and connect the shoulder into this, and we're kind of

• 22:23Speaker 01

  congressing and tightening all this stuff towards that center to create that entire torso stability. That's why I was using torso stability, not just core stability in my conversation earlier.

• 22:34Lex Fridman?

  Torso stability. Okay, so there's all these like modules

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:38Lex Fridman?

  of the body, then connected to the grounding with like your feet on the ground. Everything you're speaking to, how do you work each of those modules? Is this, over time, you kind of develop the feel that ultimately boils down to this one simple cue that you mentioned? Or do you, can you like literally? Study each particular module in yourself and see how it affects the lift.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  So the best way, and I believe it's because I hate just like people getting out and just doing just movement stuff and not actually adding load because we only adapt when there's load. Maybe we can get some, you know, some proprioception or awareness of position and other stuff, doing some, some corrective patterns and other stuff. But this is basic physiology is that there must be an imposed demand for us to have adaptation. And this is mental, this is emotional, this is all these areas. But and people miss that. So I prefer to be able to look at a person, and this is our methodology, and do the assessment in any basic loaded movement. So with developing

• 23:44Speaker 01

  an eye for that, you can actually see and go, okay, we've got a fault pattern right here in the foot and use a cue or a set of cues, doesn't really matter till we find the one that works and bring that. And now we know, we want to simplify this. Stuff I just walked through, that sounds really complicated. And it is if we try to break down and distill it all. But like, let's just find the basic stuff that gets us in the range, start working and then find the next as we add load. Now we find where's our next area that we're starting to fault that, and then go there again next. So this is what we do, what we teach in our educational platform. So we are the only, I believe, everybody wants to do a lot of these like assessments, you know, on a bench, on a table, body. And it's like, no, let's, let's go squat, let's go deadlift. If you do strongman and a C O carry, let's go carry because these are basic human

• 24:29Speaker 01

  fundamentals. It's not powerlifting. Like, this is how we function. This is why we, we work with 29 of the 30 major league baseball teams and 90% of all professional sports out there in North America. Sorry. Although we do some work with Tour de France and other stuff as well. And North America, I do mean hockey, too. But these principles of like, you know, if, if the Dodgers won't bring us in, they're not learning how to. Power lift, you know, we're gonna, obviously, we'll probably be do, we do a little bit more shoulder focus than hip focus with their athletes or their coaches. We're usually working with coaches, not the athletes.

• 25:05Lex Fridman?

  And so you help them and then the same thing on yourself to understand the role that these different muscle groups have.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:12Lex Fridman?

  On the holistic.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's all about getting the joints in the appropriate position so that we can, that we can manage loads so that we're not putting undue stress in the joint. We're getting the proper link tension. We're getting these basic fundamental things with the body. And so the, the largest global impact that you will have is through spinal mechanics. I can't look at a shoulder if I'm not managing this because it's your spine. So for those who are just listening, like I'm arching and then, and then flexing, that's going to affect shoulder extension, flexion, all these sorts of things. So it could even affect things down of what's looking at dorsiflexion issues on the foot, like, and then that's why I go to the foot next, because it has the second largest global impact. And then from there, now I'm going

• 25:56Speaker 01

  to look at the big energy drivers, which is be hip complex, shoulder complex. And then we can start looking at kind of the peripheral things, but usually that's some sort of output of the other, but the knees, the elbows, the things like that. So it's all about getting the stack, which affects neurology. So let's talk in engineering terms. You get in a car, modern car today, and a lot of them will have this traction control button in there. And there's a big misconception that, you know, I'm, I'm out and it's, it's snowy or here in Austin, only rainy. Well, it probably doesn't rain much, but you're going around a corner, start slipping. It's like, oh, it's going to send the powers from the wheels that are slipping to the ones that are gripping and keep me from crashing and dying a fiery death. Well, that's not how it works. It's the exact same. We've got, we've got the, we've

• 26:40Speaker 01

  got the tires, which are our foot, you know, the connection to the ground, right? We've got the power driver, which is, you know, the, the engine, the transmission delivering, you know, the power through it. And we've got the stability or suspension. And then we have the neurology. And what the neurology is doing, it's sensing. That we don't have good stability or a loss of connection somewhere. And so I need to save you from crashing and hurting yourself. And so it goes to the engine and says, let's retard the timing. Let's reduce the shift patterns and we're just reducing the power output. And that's straight how the human body works. So when I do this stuff, it's actually affecting that.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  I mean, I can take somebody and do some minute changes with the neck position at the thoracic outlet. Okay. And immediately see an enhancement in power output. And I can measure it. We measure this stuff with velocity devices and see like a 10% boom, jump. And so if you think about that, what about all your training through the years? Where you actually had additional capacity? But you weren't using it because your traction control was on. Now you figure this out stuff and now you start stacking it. Now you can see so much greater. So it's not just injury prevention. This is performance and additive performance over time. This is huge and people don't really think about this stuff.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  But we can turn that stuff off, which is actually going to also again, make us, make us safer. But what we want to do is the performance tuned race car. Do they have a traction control button? No, they got some amazing tires to grip the ground, a performance tuned suspension. And that driver is going to put what? His foot to the metal. He's going to put it to the floor. Okay, that's a performance vehicle. That's what we want to be.

• 28:32Lex Fridman?

  I want to continue on that line, but first I have to ask, like, how did it feel to accomplish the grand goal?

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 28:38Lex Fridman?

  Okay, when you just stand back.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Oh, my.

• 28:42Lex Fridman?

  Thousand pounds for reps. What did it feel like?

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Anybody can go watch the video online.

• 28:50Lex Fridman?

  It's all filmed, by the way. Got me all like excited.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Oh, well, the the movies, so we actually have the final footage of that, the good footage not posted yet. So it's literally just an Instagram video or a phone video right now, the only one online.

• 29:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's on your YouTube channel, but it's dramatic.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Yes, it is. Yeah, it came out just timed to the music perfectly, too, which is I listened to some odd music, uh, which there's some reason behind that.

• 29:13Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Um, but, uh.

• 29:15Lex Fridman?

  I liked it, though. It was great. You're saying there's full length footage.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  There's a documentary that's it's got a little slowed because of COVID because it's also a backstory of The Eagle and the Dragon, my book, about why I do kind of the things that I've done in my life. Or that's what I'm assuming the director's working on. I don't really have the control of the movie, right? Uh, but.

• 29:38Lex Fridman?

  But, okay, but the video is incredible. How did it feel?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  How to feel? I started crying. It was overwhelming to have worked so intensely and so long and hard at something that pushed every ounce of me to the limit that. And and I did it. I'm so I'm getting a little emotional. I did exactly what I said I was gonna fucking do.

• 30:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Like, and it was it was overpowering. I mean, I was just crying uncontrollably.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Um, just with a mixture of I I I don't know what the mixture of emotions is hard to explain.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Because it was the completion of something. It was a new phase of my life.

• 30:25Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's so many things here. So one, you set an impossible goal and you accomplished it. One. Two is like on the broader humanity aspect, like how many humans in this world accomplish perfection in a particular direction required to do this. So like, you're basically representing like, uh, one little likes, like little glimmer of excellence of the human spirit.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  There's always more. So understand this. This is a basic fundamental. You can always do better. There is no such thing as perfection. You could always. There is always more. So anytime you reach something, any amazing workout or accomplishment in life, could you have put more into it? Could even? Yes. But here's the thing. I left on my terms.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  I said, this is it. I'm gonna work towards. I've been training for 30 years. I'm gonna do this thing that is un- like, I couldn't even say that I was gonna do it years before.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do it and then I'm done. I didn't leave from an injury. I wasn't forced to. I wasn't. I left on, I did exactly what I said. I, I, I went to a level that I. I left on my terms and that's unique. Cause that's usually not the case. Usually you kind of either taper out or it doesn't matter. I'm talking like anything in life in general, right? Like, um, you taper out, you fail, you hurt, like you lose, you lose a job, like something. You know, you roll into retirement, like.

• 32:04Lex Fridman?

  You've accomplished something truly great and you walked away on your own terms. Is there a sadness?

• 32:10Lex Fridman?

  Completing something like that because it's, it's. In one perspective, the greatest thing you'll ever do. And like, when you accomplish such a great height, in some sense, you have to face your mortality at that point.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  So, good question, but it is certainly not the greatest thing that I'll ever do. The greatest physical street I'll ever do. The greatest, yes. But that was an expression. Of some of my values and the way that I want to live. It was a way of expressing it. So, understanding that is hugely fundamental. Because we do see so many athletes. Get to the end of a career and then they fall into. A depressive state and struggle with drugs, alcohol, depression, so on, because. They lost how they identified themselves and trying to figure out where to turn, what to do, but a big central component of their identity is lost. So.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  I knew that this was one way to express that and my grand goals have shifted. They're shifted to other outlets that allow me to express that, like my companies, Kabuki Strength. I'm going to change the face of fitness as well as all the way through with its integration with clinical medicine and telemedicine. And, you know, I got another five years before even people see what I'm working on. I'm five years in right now because I had to invent equipment, have to develop methodologies that we're talking, had to do this stuff that ground layer wasn't done to create a cohesive ecosystem of training methodology tied to the tools that we're using today, to the environment tied to the clinical practice assessment tied to the, the interaction between all those.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  And how that actually needs to be reframed because so much of this is broken. Okay. So, but there is sadness. I won't deny that. And the sadness comes in the singularity of focus that I had at that time. The being in the process, not necessarily do it, but like having, being in this place that the rest of the world kind of fell away for me in those final phases. To have something so intense, to have a team around me so focused on supporting and like,

• 34:33Speaker 01

  it took me a couple of months after that squad, I finally, one day I woke up and I was like, oh, welcome back to the world. Like I was in such a mental fog, like I was,

• 34:46Speaker 01

  it took me a while to climb out of that, but that, that space, that level of intensity and drive and, and living and being in that space.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  I, I do miss that, but I also, I can't continue that. I couldn't continue, like there's a point of like, you push it so hard. The level to try to go from there is not acceptable for what you, the impacts that'll have on your life or how you want to live. And it was taking away those final, like I, I had to do extreme things and live in an extreme way to, to, to get there.

• 35:16Lex Fridman?

  You're just a genius in this whole space of strength and health and almost like biology. That the strength fee is just one representation of that. But this particular strength fee required that kind of singular focus, which I think.

• 35:33Lex Fridman?

  I don't know, there's something beautiful about that singular focus.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  There is.

• 35:37Lex Fridman?

  Often only truly perfected in athletics. I see it with the greatest Olympic athletes as well. The kind of singular focus required there is incredible. It's somehow some of the most beautiful things that humans can do.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  And it's not just that thing. So that's the thing. It's like, oh, that must be it. When we say singular to focus, it's not like here's it because it it covers a vast array of stuff. Like I was working with people, you know, all, well, yeah, all around North America. I wouldn't say anybody around the globe, but professionals coming in, working on different aspects of rehab and and recovery and like, I mean, I'm tapping all sorts of stuff in so many platforms from nutrition to drugs to, again, like, you know, various Chinese medicine, you know, as far as, you know.

• 36:29Lex Fridman?

  But also the humans in your life, just love and positivity and just inspiration, all those kinds of aspects. I mean, you probably would have done much more if you went outside North America, talked to some Russians, just between you and I, some Russians.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Possibly.

• 36:45Lex Fridman?

  They give you some, I don't know, those, there's some incredible strength athletes in Eastern Europe.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I've got the best one coming in September to get fixed, so.

• 36:57Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean by fixed?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  So I'm not sure what his particular issues are, but he has held the all time world record repeatedly for a long time and he hasn't competed for some time and he just reached out saying he would like to come and have me take a look and see if I can get him fixed because he needs to return.

• 37:13Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so it's more injury centric versus like form and fundamental centric combination of everything?

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Everybody always wants to focus on the output. How do you, how do you give me the fix for that? But it ties right back into all those other things, right? So, but yeah, the Eastern, the Eastern Bloc continued to be a dominant force in regards to athletics and strength athletics without a doubt. Some of my big rivals in my competitive days were, that's who it was.

• 37:43Lex Fridman?

  Rivalry brings out the best in us. Can you tell me the story of your childhood?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  It's definitely outside the scope of the norm. Well, today, maybe not 150 or 200 years ago, but my parents, highly intelligent, you know, people coming out of the Bay Area. My mom was, you know, going to school to be a chemical engineer. She was a top, top student athlete graduated of her school. My father was a member of Mensa. My stepfather was just a genius, but not able to really function in society. But my mom was, you know, she had some demons and some other stuff and just, she just said one day, she's like, I just don't want to be part of society. She still isn't. Lives out in the desert, but has her minds, but she wanted to figure out a way to make a life outside of that.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  And so that's where we ended up is up in the mountains in Northern California. And a lot of that was, you know, them trying to get into successfully growing marijuana, which back in that, you know, wasn't legal back then, highly illegal. And in fact, those areas were, some of the areas where we lived were quite dangerous. So there's a documentary, Murder Mountain that came out recently. If you watch that, you'll tie into my book, just the understanding of the stuff that I was talking about dealing with serial killers, human trafficking, police corruption, murderers, like just how real that stuff is if it doesn't capture you from the book. Okay?

• 39:17Lex Fridman?

  The book, by the way, is The Eagle and the Dragon.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Yep. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. I'm a terrible salesperson, like I told you. So.

• 39:26Lex Fridman?

  But a good, it's a good title. I don't know if you came up with it, but.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  I did. Yeah.

• 39:30Lex Fridman?

  So, yeah, we'll talk about that anyway.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  We're living by a stream, you know, off a meadow. There's no roads into where you have to hike in. And we've got beams lashed into the trees up above us because that's where our bedding is because there's rattlesnake dens all around. And six years old, I'm being taught how to capture and handle live rattlesnakes. Because that's what I need to do to be safe. And you can imagine six years old, sitting there with a live rattlesnake in your hand, grabbing it, you know, by the side of the hedge, controlling so it can't, can't bite you. And it's just wrapping itself around your arm and you're staring at it like its only intent is. Right then is to kill you. Like, that's it, right? You want to take a bath, it's filling up the jug in the stream and setting it out on the rocks during

• 40:18Speaker 01

  during the sun, so you can dump it over your head. And, you know, not all the living was that way. You know, good part was similar to that, tent living, living in a 16-foot trailer with a family of six, which is not much bigger than the space that we're sitting here. So, and we're talking hard winters with feet of snow on the ground, nowhere to go. I'm living in the back of the pickup truck and a, just a standard sleeping bag that we get from the Salvation Army, not the, not the blow zero, so I'm, I'm, I'm not sleeping well. There's living in homes that were maybe condemned, there's no, no doors even on them, no electricity or running water, or one or the other, or both, and sometimes a little bit better. By the time we got to high school, we had a mobile home.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  So, my stepfather had won a disability payment because he had a broken arm that whole time, from an accident a long time ago, and finally got an award and got a down payment on this mobile home that didn't have, again, doors on the inside, it did have running water, it did have electricity, didn't have a kitchen. You know, the windows would crank close and open, but they wouldn't close all the way, so they'd trim them in with plastic to be able to try to protect from the elements. That was my environment, like, learning how to forage for mushrooms. I mean, there were summers I would send, and my parents would be out. They were in the drug trade earlier. We got taken by the, by the police and put into foster care for, for a while,

• 41:46Speaker 01

  which ties into some of the stories with human trafficking. And honestly, it's in my book, but it's really hard for me to talk about that stuff. And obviously, not all that's in the book, so. But, they got us back, moved to Oregon, and they stayed out of the drug trade from that time to ensure that they didn't lose us again, but quickly, we kind of fell back into the same thing. So, at that point, it was learning about geology and starting to do mining and firewood cutting, but mostly the mining, because Pat's broken arm chainsaw made it a little tough.

• 42:22Lex Fridman?

  If you remember just the sequence of moments, do you, are you haunted by the darker moments of your childhood? Do you remember?

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Moments of simple joy and happiness. Outside of the living around dangerous people and the interactions that came from that, we were a family, like we were a cohesive unit battling against the world together. We spent all our time together, work, play, I was there. I was helping raise my my siblings or I was working with them and you know, it was a constant. Like I said, we were very physically active. So you know, I had that in my upbringing. That plug for my shoe company Barefoot, B E A R. I ran around the wilderness in bare feet all the time, you know, but it was. I had a lot of great moments and I'm thankful for a lot of that childhood.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Once we take out the trauma and the other stuff associated with it, right? And so the connection that I have with my sisters is is is huge. That goes a bit further to, because I am kind of like a little bit of a father figure, because I was at home raising them and then later I took custody of them. While I was going to school, because the environment at home deteriorated further. Their stepfather, like I said, was.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  He wasn't capable of managing life and my mom had a mental breakdown and took off to Montana. And he descended into madness even worse. Actually took my my 13 year old sister and kicked her out in the middle of winter. Couple of feet of snow on the ground because he thought she stole his favorite cereal bowl.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Type. So yeah, that's when I took in and I was going to college, putting myself through college. And I started taking custody of my sisters and raising them. So anyway, we're still like very, very tight family. It took, there was a few years later in life, like that the connection with my mother was kind of broken. I didn't speak to her for years because of her basically abandoning my sisters and me having to come in. But that we've worked through that as best we can. So you anger on your part? It wasn't. There might have been some anger. Did you always love her? Yes, and I still do. And I'm so, she's taught me basically everything I know about strength

• 44:46Speaker 01

  and perseverance and living life on your terms and being able to to create that. And so much of what I am is from that, right? We've all had to learn to.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Be okay with the way she is because she is just blunt. But you know, she's the one that

• 45:09Speaker 01

  figured out that the human trafficking situation and got, uh, got the DA involved and got all the

• 45:17Speaker 01

  she's the one that

• 45:21Speaker 01

  I've learned a lot from her and

• 45:23Lex Fridman?

  Did you inherit some of the demons?

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Oh, most certainly. And I, it's something I've continued like, uh, in my father's side of, has been really tough on that because some of it is just based genetic as well. So my, my stepfather made, I think, six or seven attempts on his life during his lifetime. One of those in front of me.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  His mother blew her head off with a shotgun. Uh, her brother jumped out a window in LA. Their father did something similar and I don't know how far back it goes because there is no family except for me and my, my children.

• 46:00Lex Fridman?

  You spoke about going through depression yourself.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:05Lex Fridman?

  Can you, um, talk about some of the darker moments of that? Have you ever? Like many in your family, have you ever considered suicide?

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Yes, I have. Yes, I have.

• 46:17Lex Fridman?

  You've achieved a lot of exceptional things in your life. Can you talk about those early days of depression and how you overcame it?

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the things that I did that people give me accolades for are the things that I did selfishly to save myself. The things like taking custody of my sisters. Being the person that everybody around, you know, the, the important people relied on. The fact that I had to step to the plate and be present and be that person. Because if I failed.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  They failed. They would be like the people that I grew up with that are dead

• 47:05Speaker 01

  or in prison

• 47:07Speaker 01

  or on drugs and they're either way to to one of those, right? That's where everybody ended and I wasn't gonna let that happen. What about saving yourself? And so that's how in those early days, that's how I did it. Not saying it's the best approach, but it was survivor mentality. It was I can't selfishly do that because I have them to take care of.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  Right? And then that continued where I would keep putting myself in these leadership roles or other things and there's always being this person that was at the center, at the hub that

• 47:44Speaker 01

  forced me to be there. And so it's only in the more recent, you know, last decade or so that I have had to really learn how to come and start confronting some of those demons. And you think, man, why is the guy so successful? Like, I mean, and we haven't talked about all the stuff that I've done, but like, I've seen a lot of success in both business, leadership, athletics, academics, entrepreneurship, all these sorts of things, right? But if it wasn't for, you know, having kids and the same being in the position, I wouldn't be here. If it and that's just, that's the reality of it.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  And I'm learning to to come and manage those as best I can. Learning to meditate into those things and really feel what the driver is. So I can get to those those root understanding and and having some guidance doing so. Like, if you've got mental health issues, this isn't something that you need to tackle on your own. Like, having a professional that can help guide you on that introspective journey is is something like.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  It's not like, hey, I'm big tough guy. I can handle everything.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  You know?

• 49:00Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating that you saved yourself. That's quite powerful to save yourself by having others depend on you and so you can't fail. You can't fuck it up and that's a reason to keep moving forward. But on the flip side, that's not addressing the darkness.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  It's not, and it probably not a sustainable strategy either, right? So I recognize these.

• 49:29Lex Fridman?

  I don't know.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  And.

• 49:31Lex Fridman?

  Perhaps it is sustainable, perhaps, I mean, there's something beautiful about giving yourself basically in service of others and thereby creating purpose. And then like, it's almost like fake it till you make it and then you make it eventually.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  That is purpose, though.

• 49:50Lex Fridman?

  That is purpose.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  That is purpose. I mean, you have to, to me, life is about taking your cup and how you choose to pour it out, how you choose to give. What is your purpose? What is that connection with everybody around you? This is, that's, that's the intent, that's the life, that's, that's what life is about. How are you going to help those around you? How are you going to help the world? You know, your purpose is, is right here, figuring out what this is and then how to do that. But at the same time, you can't let that run dry. So you have to make sure that you're filling that cup. That's the other side, right? That's the other side.

• 50:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Well, return to your engineering degree, which you're obviously scientifically engineering minded, which is fascinating.

• 50:37Lex Fridman?

  Your book is titled The Eagle and the Dragon. What do the eagle and the dragon symbolize?

• 50:44Speaker 01

  They're pretty big symbols for me. In fact, that covers my entire body as a tattoo. So the first one I had done is around 19 years old. And so this is, or started at 19. It's an eagle that covers my entire front, you know, my stomach, rib cage. And, and one that was on my back that covered most of my back. And there's chained at the, well, at the claw, I guess. And the chain wraps down around and attaches to, to my ankle and there's a shackle there. And so this was something that I had done at that age because it was, to me, it was a representation of. Your potential, your strengths, your abilities, that you can fly to whatever height

• 51:28Speaker 01

  that you want in this world. The only thing holding you back at the end of the day is yourself. And this was, I hadn't necessarily accomplished a whole lot at that time. I mean, I was valedictorian for high school, small high school. Does that even count? I was a state level wrestler. This was my belief and.

• 51:51Lex Fridman?

  You sensed that there was a potential in you and the only thing that could stop you from realizing that potential was yourself.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 51:58Lex Fridman?

  That's a heck of a tattoo to get, by the way, at 19, but.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. About 40 hours went into that thing.

• 52:06Lex Fridman?

  It shows you got some guts.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  And then the next tattoo, so I only have two. I had done in 2015, 2016, when I, so at this point in my life. So I had done that. I had flown to whatever heights, right? So I had, I had proven to myself and, and maybe done what I thought I needed to do to show the world that this poor kid from the sticks, this, this kid growing up in the mountains with nothing could achieve the American dream. I was a corporate executive sought after that I'd come in, I'd fix companies, I'd turn around and prep them for sale. I'd take a company and grow it from a regional to a national to a global presence.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  I did this in the automotive manufacturing, aerospace manufacturing, high tech, heavy industry. And I had a house with a white picket fence. I was a successful athlete with all time world records. I owned a gym on the side where I coached people and I had a comfortable marriage that everything was hunky dory with no arguments at home. And I walked away from all of it. I left everything behind, except for my kids. I wanted to chase what I was meant to do and chase what I was capable of doing.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  I wanted to become a better version of myself, but very intentfully.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  And that's what I did. I sold, I had multiple homes, sold my homes.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  I cashed in all my retirement that I'd earned for 20, nearly 20 years. And I've lost all that. I leveraged myself millions of dollars of personal debt so that if I failed, there was no way out. Even going back to that old career that I did well, I'd be living in an apartment the rest of my life, paying it off. People questioned, people questioned me at the time because I had a comfortable, easy marriage. And I chose to ask for a divorce. And I ended up living in an apartment for a couple of years with no income. Selling off every last thing that I had, except for my two vehicles that I built. And with my, with my kids.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  And I started my businesses to help people live a better quality of life. To get them out of pain, to help them live better through strength. To realize that stress, demand, those things, they don't have to be the thing that if you look back, made you have the bad back, made you have the bad D's, but they do the opposite. They get you out of pain. And then I started working on my book to, to hit on those other things. The mental, the emotional, maybe even spiritual. I don't touch on that one too much in there, but it's all the same. That things that happen around you to you, like maybe they're bad.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  I can't take away that, but why can't you use what you have of it to become a stronger and better person? To become more resilient, to be able to take the, the things that you don't know that are coming in the future. And so this is very intentful. And that's what the second, I'm long-winded to answering your question here. The dragon. The dragon. The dragon is an aura Boris. And so it is, it circles my entire upper body, my shoulders, my back, my chest, everything. It's right here. There's this big dragon head and its tail is right there in its mouth. It's eating itself. It may sound a bit graphic or whatever, but it is, it's the eating of the old, becoming the new. It is the purposeful reinvention of oneself. It is the deciding.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Not realizing just your potential, but deciding specifically who you want to be in this fucking world. And becoming that person.

• 56:11Lex Fridman?

  Can you comment on the, the value and the power of

• 56:16Lex Fridman?

  putting a flame to, you know,

• 56:20Lex Fridman?

  your old life, your old self, just destroying all of it? As you walk into the new life, you know, did you have to do that?

• 56:29Speaker 01

  I don't recommend this, by the way, because when you put yourself in no way out, there is no way out.

• 56:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Okay, like, you gotta really,

• 56:42Speaker 01

  but I, I can be an overconfident individual at times and I live, I live through extremes. I think it's a great way of actually finding your real values and how you want to live, honestly, to chase having absolutely perfect squat technique, but chase putting every freaking thing that you got in it, which most people would say those are, those are opposite, those are diametrically opposed.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  I wanted

• 57:11Speaker 01

  a better home life. I wanted to do more in the world through my work.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  And the burning the bridges mentality is not necessarily, you know, the, the best. There was some temperament in that though, because I, I was not, I was slow to make the shift for a long time because I'd been thinking about doing it. But I was thinking about doing it in a healthcare perspective. I'm going to go back to school to be a surgeon or a physical therapist or a chiro, because that's where like all my research and stuff was in this, this human movement and rehab and recovery. This is the mentors that I'd been developing were the best in the world in these things, in these disciplines. Those were my friends and, and, but I wasn't able to compromise my family's certain quality of life. I wanted to, to keep this. It was, it was slow and hard for me to make that transition,

• 58:01Speaker 01

  but I didn't do it until.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  I had a platform built enough that those first few years I did have an income. I was able to make enough from the business until it grew so fast that I needed so much more needed to come in. The living in the apartment piece and doing all that, that was actually a couple of years into into that process, maybe like two years.

• 58:21Lex Fridman?

  I'm with you on that. So I'm actually going through that very process now. I put everything, I quit everything, gave away everything and starting anew. And unfortunately, or fortunately, this podcast somehow became quite popular. So it's getting in the way of my burning everything to the ground.

• 58:43Lex Fridman?

  But in that it's a source of joy, but the main thing I'm after is the similar project as you is building a business.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Sense of joy. So this, this is the point I want to drive home right now, right now. Because when I say burn, I learned the burning the bridges works because that's how I had to succeed when I was earlier. The bridges weren't burnt, they didn't exist. There was no couch to go home to. There was no, there was no fallback plan. And it forced me and gave me the confidence to know that I can pull it off. But I don't encourage people because there's so much out there of this hustle porn and other stuff going, just grind, just go after it. Get in and start your, like, you'll get there. And it's all about the output to make money, to be somebody, to do this. And I'll tell you what, that is some short term motivation right there. I feel like dropping a few swear words, but.

• 59:38Lex Fridman?

  You're always welcome.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  We've already done a few, so we'll.

• 59:42Lex Fridman?

  All right, bounce it out.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  That is short term. That is not going to keep you going. This need, if you're going to go that approach, it needs to be because this is your north star. There's going to be so much hard work. There's going to be years of just pushing through where your quest. Not only is everybody around you questioning you and your family's questioning you, you're questioning yourself going, man, I don't know if I can pull this off. You're going to be stressed. You're going to be pulled to the max. If somebody comes up to me and says, should I start a business? I'm going to say, no.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  And they'll be like, oh, you're supposed to motivate me. If you need me to motivate you, this is the wrong damn approach for you. This is gonna be hard. This is gonna be harder than you expect, even with me telling you this. And so it better damn well be worth it. This better be your north fucking star. This better live and be a way for you to be able to articulate or realize those values that you want to live. This isn't something to make money. This is a way for you to live the life and be able to share the values that you have with the world. And that's what it is. And if you don't have that, which is gonna give you joy,

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  then freaking walk away.

• 1:01:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  This is not some way to make some money and be known.

• 1:01:05Lex Fridman?

  I mean, this, this includes both like simple day to day joy and also deep meaning. The whole thing. And then that allows you to overcome all the, all the pain along the way. But I gotta say, I mean, it's a difficult thing because you run a business.

• 1:01:22Lex Fridman?

  This podcast and a lot of things I do research wise is full of joy, but it's simple. Running a business is hard. So it's something that I'm very hesitant about. In that, to almost push back a little bit. I think if I do get the guts to start the business, it will not be because I'm not choosing a more joyful life. Cause I'm already truly happy. The reason I'll choose is because I just can't help it. There's this, I've always had this dream. And I know it's gonna lead to suffering and I know it's gonna

• 1:02:04Lex Fridman?

  be a life that has less happiness in it. As sad as this to say.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  But it won't be. It won't be less happiness. Because we talk about this cup and where you choose to pour it and what you choose to do with it. And when you look back on things, the things that are gonna give you the most joy, the most proud, the things that are gonna stand out in your life that you really remember are gonna be those days. And you're, those years you struggle, you're gonna look back on 10 years later and go.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  Those were the glory days. Those were the glory days.

• 1:02:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  And it won't feel like it at the time.

• 1:02:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  So that's what life's made of. And so this is your, this is your opportunity. You feel that. So right now you got this, when you think about it, you got this little thing twisting up in your gut, right? It's like it's a mixture of anxiety and fear as well as excitement. And that is, that's your signal that this is your opportunity for that personal growth, to challenge yourself. This is your going for a run or working out in the heat. It's, it's those things. It is your opportunity to go, heck, maybe it even fails. Maybe it even fails. But by turning into that, you're going to learn so much and it's going to make you so much better. And it's the path that you should take when you have this stuff rolling around in there.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  And I don't, it could just be a hard conversation with your partner or your boss. It could be taking on a project that, you know, the, you know, the, your boss is throwing out to the team. And you're like, I'm going to hide in the back. I don't want that one. And it's like, maybe, maybe you do. Maybe it's going back to school.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Maybe it's making that career move that you always wanted, but you're just, you're just afraid of.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  All these things are your opportunity for you to turn into that. It is your workout. It is your practice because if you don't, you'll get soft. And who knows what's coming and you're not going to be ready for it. And it's going to run right over the top of you because you're going to be weak. You're going to be soft.

• 1:04:18Lex Fridman?

  There's some aspect in which choosing that hard path is actually the, the way to arrive at the richest kind of happiness. The, the greatest fulfillment. That's the funny thing about just the.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Just make sure you're filling the cup as you're going through it, not throwing it all out. So that's, that's the part to figure out, right?

• 1:04:37Lex Fridman?

  Sure. Well, life is short anyway. Um, eventually, eventually the cup will be empty.

• 1:04:45Lex Fridman?

  So maybe time the refilling of the cup correctly. So you maximize the little time you got. Let me talk to you about strength a little bit. First, high level, what are the differences in the different disciplines of strength? So powerlifting, we talked about. Maybe just to clarify for people, powerlifting, Olympic lifting, just regular gym fitness, bodybuilding, doing curls in front of the mirror for hours like I do. What's the difference between all of these? Oh, and also strongman.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Every one of those, as far as the athletic disciplines, are different qualities. So we want to think about things as terms of qualities. So there's strength, there's power, there's endurance, there's the ability to be coordinated and athletic. There's all these things and they're different. They're different qualities. So your training as it relates to that is how you cycle in the development of those qualities. What we want to think about is there's a lot of different frames of thought. Some very classical, maybe not classical Russian approach, because there's a lot of different approach from the Eastern Bloc. But one of the ones is developing all the qualities at once.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  You know, focusing on building those. More of a periodization effect would be focusing on one quality at a time or one quality while maintaining other qualities and then shifting that around. So it's just going to be a little different based on what the output is and what the desired. So like powerlifting is actually, power is the wrong word. There's actually no power in it. It's just brute, it's strength.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Application of force. Olympic lifting would actually be a better name. Powerlifting? Because that is more explosive development. There's strongman is again, now we're getting a little bit more athletic. It's equipment based on the implements and stuff that are used. How fast you can move your feet and run mixed with more endurance, but still very strength focused. And there's some things with strongman that is straight. Like each one of these is very also focused on. Different genetic dispositions. So actually, if you look at the history of sports, you'll find that they're a lot of times based on different populations. And it sounds like it's very un-PC, but like Highland Games, they've got deep, deeper hip sockets that are shallow.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  So you're going to see a lot of short hip hinge movements like the the caber toss and things like that. Muay Thai wrestling, they've got a completely different hip joint. And so Strongman itself is gonna be for very large framed individuals. If you're not well over six foot and a large person, you're probably not going to perform well. Very few people at sub six foot have ever done well at Strongman just because it's it's leverage based, right? Olympic lifting, we see consistently in in Europe, the the history tells us a high level of hip and back issues because of the depth that that hip socket has to go in to be able to complete that lift. And so you're

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  going to see issues with populations that don't have the ability to do that. So so we've talked a little bit about training as well as disposition.

• 1:08:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So and also cross resistance to that. That's more like Strongman, but for a wider variety of bodies, I suppose.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Yep. And definitely more metabolic conditioning focused than the than the strength aspect of it. And and conditioning is an interesting thing, too. So that quality, in my opinion, can be developed a lot faster, but kind of peaks much faster as well. So where strength, we can continue to add and add and add over time. So it's for me, like for conditioning with any strength athlete, I don't like to spend as much time on that. So I'll cycle the conditioning work for our strength athletes and then taper that off leading into meat. So the more metabolic work, that means the more capacity in strength training that you can accomplish, which is the goal, and recover from. But then, as we

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  lead to a competition, we want to spend more time on recovering from that. So we have to pull things out. So we'd pull out less. So like, typical approach would be like taking a six week cycle for conditioning and ramp. Ramp up over three weeks periods of time, then dropping back down again. And ramping up and being slightly offset by like a week or two from your strength peaks. So that you've actually tapered the week prior in your conditioning work to your strength work. Right. And but that way, we're not hitting conditioning hard all the time, which is a common. Common misstep that people make is going, well, I need conditioning. So they just hammer that at a base level over the top instead of cycling that.

• 1:09:34Lex Fridman?

  If we talk about powerlifting.

• 1:09:37Lex Fridman?

  In terms of regimen.

• 1:09:41Lex Fridman?

  In terms of exercise.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Lex Fridman?

  In terms of the process, the wood consistent with what? Is there something to be said about general qualities of the consistency of the regimen required to get strong?

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Yes. So. Let's talk about some training principles. As a whole, and this will. I think this will break down what you're what you're wanting. The more work that we can fit into a given time. The more progress we're going to make. But that doesn't mean doing the max amount of work. Possible at any given time. So we know that we're always to to accomplish more, we're always going to have more. And there's a certain ceiling that you're going to hit that you're not going to be able to add more. So you want to start and get the most amount of results that you can with the least amount of work. Because you're going to have to do it again.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Like this stair step over and over year, decade, so on. So when people is a big miss people got, they look at. A Chico program from Russia or so on, and they go. I'm going to follow this. And it's like that was specifically written for somebody with 20 years of experience. That's already built the capacities to be at that level. So it's all about building that work capacity. So how much work can you give in a given time? So now we want to look at some research is it relates to injuries? Because injuries are going to be a big driver over time of what. Holds you back. So when we talk consistency.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  Training hard for three years, five years, it's gonna be really good. But what we find is a lot of people train really hard for nine months, have to slow back for a month, get back into it and miss another week because and so on. They're always like this little nagging, that little nagging. And so it's pretty clear in the research. We want to, we're looking at when we're stair stepping this stuff. We're looking at acute and chronic loading. So some fancy words for average and like what's happening right now. So this given week would be our acute. Chronic would be what is our average loading? Let's say over the last six months. Okay. So the more that we can move the chronic loading up, the more work we're getting done on as a whole. Over time, we're going to get stronger.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  The way that we build the capacity to do that is having spikes in acute loading. Okay. Now, as we do this, the, the acute loading, if it spikes more than 10, maybe 15% from what the chronic loading has been, that accounts for 80% of injuries out there.

• 1:12:19Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  So it's not actually the movement quality or this misstep or the other. It usually happens about four, five, six weeks later. It's like, oh, this nagging and then it gets worse. And then now you gotta, you gotta do some rehab. Your training sessions aren't as good and so on. So now we're starting to look at this. Okay. It's like, I want to do the, I want to do the least amount of work where I can still progress. I want to be able to have spikes in my weekly demand that don't go above 10 to 15% of what I've been averaging for the last month. But every time I do a spike, my, my average goes up, right? Boom, boom, boom. And then that becomes very particular also when you take, when you do take planned time, time off. So a lot of people, oh.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Training session, maybe they're doing a five week block with a, a, a deload week. Or you go on vacation for a week, or any of those things that were a downward. What does that do to your average in chronic loading? It brings it down. And then what does the person want to do when they come back? Make up for it. Now they have a huge spike above. Five weeks later, we're dealing with, ah, this elbow, this wrist, whatever's kind of bothering me. And now you're not performing as much. So these are some really fundamental pieces of, of, of, of training. And then now we can start overlaying the qualities that we're trying to develop that we were talked about earlier. So now it's, let's talk about my deadlift, my thousand pound deadlift. We'll talk about the training cycles for both the thousand, uh, deadlift and squat.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  So backing up a year out from the deadlift, knowing I was training at the time, heavy deadlifts once a week. And usually it was two of those sessions a month were really heavy and the others weren't. And it's like, okay, how can we get this up to where I'm deadlifting twice a week? Because that's where I want to be. Uh, to be able to accomplish this, I need to be loading about that much with frequency with a certain volume to be able to accomplish this goal. We're not going to go through all the math and stuff like that and how that's arrived. But there is math. There is math behind this. And so instead of just like, oh, well, let's start deadlifting twice a week. No. So we start and we take the one session that we've got. And we split it, part of it, take part of it away and put it in the second half of the week.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  So the total volume is still the same. And then, um, we start adding some volume, but I'm doing it at a, off a block. So that the actual load is, accumulative load is less because I have less range of motion. Okay. And then we start building that closer to the ground, closer to the ground and so on. And now we start getting to where I'm almost doing two sessions, full sessions a week. And then we start adding a little bit of load. And so at my level, this isn't talking about adding another set or another day a week. We're talking like in my squat, it might be one rep. Instead of doing three sets of three, at one week, I do two doubles or two triples,

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  then two doubles to give me one more rep. That's it. And so we're doing that from one week to the next, and that's a cycle, training cycle. It might be five, six weeks and then so on, and then the next one. And slowly bringing that average load up. So the last phases of the squat, for example, we took the average loading every week. So my, of my heavy sets. So once we developed all this stuff over the last year to get to this point, now it is taking and going, okay, my average load this week is eight reps at 955 pounds. And then the next week, let's get it to nine, 957, 963. And this was pretty aggressive, working up to where my average loading, the final,

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  that at the final was 985 pounds, average load for eight to nine reps. And that's why I said, this is the intense part. That was why it was, the day of was much easier. That week over week is pretty brutal. Um, may not sound, oh, you're just squatting. And now let's back it up. Let's look at the quality development. So a year out from the squat, um, obviously I've been working on developing axial load capacity. My capacity to withstand load from top to bottom. So I like thinking about things in movement vectors. So this vector is an axial loaded vector is the hardest to recover from.

• 1:16:32Lex Fridman?

  So what's axial, so like is deadlift or are they both?

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  They're both. Yep. So a horizontal, a front to back would be like a row or a press.

• 1:16:42Lex Fridman?

  Why is the axial hardest to recover from? Cause it's entire body, the entire torso?

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  Entire body, just anything that is, that, uh, taxes the, the spinal mechanics. I, I don't, I could tell you my beliefs. It's studied, it is, okay? Um, we can just keep the discussion on that, but short like that. So, uh, so we start looking at those different vectors that we're training in. So this is why, this is important to understand. So I'm not just getting into nuance here. So, hey, squatting is going to make me, make me jump further because it's legs. Well, squatting is an axial load vector and jumping is a vector this way. So actually hip thrust would help with your, and this is proven in science, with your forward jumping ability.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Uh, they're both working similar muscles, the glute extension, but. They're working it in those different platforms. So it's really important to understand because people don't understand. I'm building my work capacity by doing sled pushes. You're not developing your work capacity for squatting.

• 1:17:46Lex Fridman?

  Most movements, even ones as holistic as a squat, require specialization.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:54Lex Fridman?

  You can't get strong at the squat by doing.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  You're gonna have some carryover, right? Obviously, but because taking an untrained person that hasn't done it is still not gonna do as good as somebody that's done non-specific work, but done work. So, but yes, for the most part.

• 1:18:10Lex Fridman?

  To get truly strong, you need to specialize.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  So, but not all the time. So now we're talking about qualities. So, and if we specialize in the same thing too long, we stagnate because the body adapts to a certain point and just can't make progress. So we wanted to save the actual squatting in the pattern with the bar that I was doing for the very end. So, starting a year out, I started doing work, front squatting, like a squat, axial loaded pattern, and worked on maximizing that up. Then I started shifting to doing transformer bar squat. It's this bar I developed that actually changed, manipulates spinal mechanics. So I started loading in these more forward positions and being able, again, so now I'm getting closer than a front squat, but not quite squatting.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  And then I would start adjusting that bar every training cycle to closer to a squat, closer to a squat till it finally was, right?

• 1:19:02Lex Fridman?

  What's the difference between a front squat and a regular, like a back squat? Like, in terms of the stress on the body, the mechanics? Was there something interesting to be said about? Like, how fundamentally different are they?

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  So what's interesting? People think about the weight in position to them like, oh, the bar's in front of me, the bar's behind me, which is not the case. The bar is above your midfoot. The load is above your midfoot.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  So we're actually manipulating the spine behind the bar. So we're causing spinal upwriting behind the bar, getting in a more erect position, which is going to change the relationship of the hip angle. It's going to change our ability to maintain the spine. It's going to change the, uh, how much the, the core comes in, how hard it is to maintain that sternum to diaphragm relationship that we talked about. All this stuff starts changing. So the bar stays in the same place. Bar is still behind you, but the load moves around. So, but we're actually manipulating the spine around the load. Yeah. That's incredible. We can tailor it to an athlete, which is great when you've got a seven foot plus tall baseball player or basketball player. That's why we work with all these teams. Anyway, so it's like you're taking something and getting closer and closer to it.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  At the same time, we're looking at the quality. So like, I needed to be able to really hold this torso position with the weight moving up here. Now, unlike the deadlift, the ability to manage this TL position becomes much more challenging. So that was also why I was choosing the transformer bar, because it actually challenges that more in those big forward positions. I was also working on my back strength tremendously to be able to hold and maintain position. So there was a lot of like, I chose a bent over rows. So a bent over row is a mixed vector. So it's a forward to back. So it wouldn't have as much carrier, but it's also, um, uh, got some axial loading component in it as well. Um, so we're working on that. And then as it, as we get closer and closer to competition, I'm developing those strengths, but now I need to start tapering those out.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  So all of my recovery needs can now go into the more specific that I'm actually ramping the load up. So as I'm ramping the load on the weight, I'm able to ramp it a lot faster because I'm tapering out the other stuff. So I can still keep my total load high, but now get it very, very specific.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  Wow. So everything that I've done has always been kind of an annual training cycle. And then again, this was like a, this was a five year training cycle, but we just kind of walked through the last year of each and you can see how these concepts play out in reality.

• 1:21:31Lex Fridman?

  So in the cycling, so this is both for you, but also for more recreational strength athletes. Let's say there's variety injected into the system.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  You need variety. Yeah, yeah. Because you will basically stagnate at some level, right? So you should always be kind of shifting a little bit. So three to four month blocks in general for an average, you know, just a gen pop fitness is pretty good. Where you're going to spend more time, maybe in a higher rep range or lower rep range, a little bit more work on endurance capacity. Or maybe some more time, hey, I'm playing around with boxing or jujitsu or something like that. Bring that a little bit more to the forefront for a while and bring the other out. But like mixing, mixing those variables up, but trying to keep the total load the same and always kind of like, do we add a little more? Again, it doesn't have to be major and it shouldn't be major.

• 1:22:25Speaker 01

  You don't want these big jumps. You don't go, oh my God, let's move, let's jump into squatting every day. You've got to build the capacity to do that. It's simple.

• 1:22:37Lex Fridman?

  What role would you say strength has in sports that combines skill and strength? So for me personally, maybe I'll just ask it selfishly, which is grappling, wrestling, MMA?

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. How about I start with baseball?

• 1:22:54Lex Fridman?

  Please. No, okay. The sport, okay. Baseball and golf are two of my favorite sports. No, I don't, you don't have to be in shape at all to excel at those sports.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing.

• 1:23:08Lex Fridman?

  There we go. We're gonna get this argument.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  Well, I've got a perfect example because this is, this is why I sell so many transformer bars into the, the major league baseball. So they get these people that come in, these athletes that have been baseball their whole life. It is part of the culture and so they're great athletes. They've got all this skill. The only thing they have to do is develop a little bit more resilience. So that they don't have the injury, they can push their training a little bit more. They can add a little bit more force output and be able to recover from it. So the only thing they've got to do is add some training, but there's no training culture there. So they don't have any experience, which is why they love the transformer bar. Because they don't have to worry about teaching the technique. We can actually set the bar on a setting that makes their squats perfect.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Like queuing all the stuff with actually not having to coach it. Because when you're coaching a room full of athletes, it's really hard to teach the nuance of all this and not sure that all that. But that's all that they have to do with these players with a huge level of skill. So once you reach a certain level of skill, adding strength is the only real forward path. So that's the basic, simple answer to that.

• 1:24:21Lex Fridman?

  So one of the benefits there being like injury prevention, actually.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  Injury prevention, resilience, because especially fighting sports. You're going to be challenged and thrown and other things happen to you. And the more resilient you can make your structures, the better you're going to be. Even a cyclist, mountain biking, why would they need it? Why would they need to do upper body training? Take a crash, your shoulder's gone.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  You're done, your career is over, unless you've done a little training. Right? So there's value in all this stuff, but the resilience is like, that's huge. And then we can overlay strength. The people, where we miss is this focus on strength when we haven't developed quality motor patterns first. So this is a huge thing with children, because people want to know what's the appropriate training age. I'd had my daughter training before my son, because she developed movement patterns that are better quality earlier. There's no age, because it's going to be very dependent on the individual. There's no point in having adaptation if we don't have the right thing to adapt to yet.

• 1:25:23Lex Fridman?

  And that applies to general movement, but also the sport. So you're saying the skills should be developed first and then the strength applied on top of that?

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:25:31Lex Fridman?

  Maybe you can educate me, but I actually quit lifting and powerlifting for a long time. After I started Judo, Jiu Jitsu, grappling, all this sort of combat sports. Because I found that it was preventing me from relaxing my body enough to load in the skill.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  So this isn't a problem with the training. This is a problem with you. Yeah. So this is actually really, really important. The first product I ever released was a loadable mace. A swinging mace. And because every powerlifter and body, well, not every, but most serious powerlifters and bodybuilders, like shoulders, mobility is pretty limited. And most of them really, really struggle with this. The problem is they've been taught to have tension all the time.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  And that's not good. So when we talk about like the joint positions that we were talking about earlier and having those and the muscles and the right length and tension relationship.

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  Athleticism is the speed to relaxation. Because the counter is speed to, to speed to contraction. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Right? And so what a mace can do is use that because this is a, ties back into a developmental kinesiology. Because a lot of like reset patterns are getting back into these basic movements, but it's as much about relaxation as it is contraction. Okay? So a mace, we have this weight on a big, long lever. So I, if I grab a kettlebell, and it's gonna be like, that's the same movement as a kettlebell halo. It is the same movement as a kettlebell, but here in the halo, I'm on the whole time. With the mace at the proper length, with the right distribution,

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  you cannot do the movement. You could not move, force your way through it. The only way that you can accomplish that is by relaxing. And then now we, now we can contract all the muscles related around that shoulder girdle. All at once, we're working on off, on off, on off with moving and contracting. And now, so what happens a lot of times as we, you know, this stiffness and tightness happens. If we're in poor positions, we start using stabilizer muscles to do the movement. And then that's where this stiffness come from. So it means that in some of, whatever training that you're doing, there's a deficit in the movement quality. Okay, or there's a deficit in the training program and you're not recovering from.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  And 80% of the time, that's the right answer, right? But yeah, that's where the, where the gap is and learning how to relax. And the way a lot of the exercises are taught and have been taught for a long time, which is why there's a big gap. And this is why both clinical rehab and all these other components are mixed in my philosophy and what I'm trying to do with Kabuki Strength. Because I'm looking at holistic movement. I'm not looking at powerlifting. Base movements are what I want to load and be able to assess on.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  But this affects all sports, all activities, and strength doesn't have to be that. I mean, I, I'm freaking a thousand pound squatter and deadlifter. If you, have you watched any of my videos where I do like complete quad fallbacks? I don't stretch at all. I can usually get close to a full split, like if I want to.

• 1:29:00Lex Fridman?

  What? No, I did not see those videos.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:29:03Lex Fridman?

  That's, uh, it's hard to believe. Wow. Okay.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  Well, actually I do. I just did one recently, a quad fallback with my, with my mace loaded way out to the end, torsioning on both ends of the other. And like I do a lot of, I do a lot of weird stuff.

• 1:29:17Lex Fridman?

  That's awesome. Okay.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Squatting doesn't make your hips tight. Squatting like shit makes your hips tight. And so, but there is no perfect world. We're always, our training program isn't quite perfect. Our movement isn't necessarily perfect. Like, so you're going to have the needs for this stuff. But if you're always have to do some soft tissue work to loosen up the same one for that exercise, to be able to get a joint in position. There is a problem and I'm not saying don't do it, do it because I don't want you to have a joint. Like if I can't get my shoulders in a position, I can't do overhead presses because I'm going to compromise my spine position. Then I'm going to end up with some other problems, right? So go ahead and clean that up so you can get in position. But go figure out why it is and fix it.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  And then maybe next, you know, three, four months from now, they're going to get a little something else going on. Fix it, but go understand the deeper root reason of why. So I'm, I, I believe I am the only company manufacturing and selling, you know, facial soft tissue tools. And I'll tell you, I don't want you to use them.

• 1:30:21Lex Fridman?

  Because it's not helping you get to the why, why it was caused in the first place.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  Yep. The goal, the goal, the perfect state is not having to use them. Reality is you're gonna have to use them from time to time because the world's not perfect. Yeah. So your discovery is 100% on point.

• 1:30:38Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's another side to combat sports. When you're beginning a particular combat sport, strength can be a negative because human psychology, because you can get away with a lot when you're stronger.

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  Yes, you can.

• 1:30:54Lex Fridman?

  So if your mind is strong enough to where you can just turn off that advantage and be a beginner truly in a particular art, that's probably the best way to do it.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  But you can get away and then you don't learn.

• 1:31:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:10Lex Fridman?

  It's hard.

• 1:31:12Lex Fridman?

  It's hard not to use the little advantages you have because like jujitsu is a big hit on the ego for, you know, especially guys. You know, when like a smaller person just destroys you, dominates you. When you can, I don't know, deadlift whatever number of pounds. And it's hard not to use that strength to then resist

• 1:31:37Lex Fridman?

  slow the ultimate destruction by like 120 pound.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  But that, and that's why I recommend developing the skill quality first. But it doesn't, it doesn't mean that you can't.

• 1:31:46Lex Fridman?

  You can't. That's right.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  You can still do it. So that, don't take it as a like, oh, I can't go that direction. That's fine, but understand those things and then also understand the jujitsu is additional load on the body.

• 1:31:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  So you have to, you can't just add it on top.

• 1:32:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  You've got to taper back the other. You're gonna have to make a, I'm sorry, you may not want to hear it, but you're not gonna be able to do as much and add that here.

• 1:32:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  It's a compromise because your total volume still has to be there and there's not, unfortunately not really a way to measure what the jujitsu volume is with this. So you've got to take a look at that. And that's where like measuring like heart rate variability or other stuff can be useful. So you can see what is happening from me from a sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous system standpoint.

• 1:32:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Making sure your body recovers sufficiently and trying to put numbers to it. You mentioned Kabuki Strength. You run the Kabuki Strength Lab, previously called the Elite Performance Center in Oregon. You called it the perfect gym. What makes for the perfect strength training gym?

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  I wonder where I called it the perfect.

• 1:32:53Lex Fridman?

  In a video somewhere I watched.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  Oh, man. I mean, that's where my testing grounds for developing all this stuff was through the years. And, and so this is, like I said, I started developing relationships with the best developmental kinesiologist in the, in the US. The best, arguably the best or most well-known physical therapist in the world, the best spine biomechanist in the world. I started doing continuing education with these clinical courses and learning this stuff and going, but how does it work in my world? Right? And then I started lecturing with them and all this other stuff, but the lab was like, where do we test this stuff? Right? And so let me get to a point. There's three things. There's always three things.

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  So to be a success, to achieve success, I believe there's three things that really, really come into place. And it's the right methodology, the right tools, and the right environment. And so it was all about building that. And so the methodologies came from a lot of that different, that gray area, interaction of clinical with sports science, right? And then the tools I had to start creating and designing and then the environment is having this, you know, focused environment of people that want to do better and push each other and having community and culture.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  Right? I end up building these connections, this network. Everything that I'm doing with my businesses is trying to create that into a scalable fashion. And so I'm building the groundwork because to have a system that like, yeah, I had clinicals on site that knew exactly what we were doing. And when it's me and a few people in a small team and all this stuff, we're all just like easy to manage. And you can see these, there's other models around this. So I've been other areas since maybe whenever it was I filmed that video that said that, that they have that same, same model. And it's taken probably about a decade usually to develop that, you know, and having the right people in this community. They can create this, this network and the tool and all this stuff, right? Except they still don't have the best tools because Kabuki Strength didn't exist.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  But, uh, but, and so out of that was, is essentially I started building this business and people like, when did you know how all this stuff was connected? And I'm like, I don't know. I didn't, I just started creating on the outset, the things that worked until finally I'm like, oh, I'm recreating a scalable version of this stuff. Here's the methodologies and a coaching platform that we can manage clients around the globe and see what's working and not based on the scientific principles of training. Right? How do we create that into a database that now we can train new coaches and they can use those same metrics and tools to create programs that are tailored to fit

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  person's individual needs. Right? Now, how do we integrate that with, um, assessment and clinical care assessment and, and all these other pieces? So there's a lot of work in that. And so that's where Kabuki Strength is the genesis, but we have, we call our gym, the Kabuki Strength Lab. Literally, people find about our, our gym in the neighborhood and like, how long have you been here? Why, why do I not know about this? We don't advertise our gym at all. I feel like that makes no sense. Well, that's because the only reason is to have a testing environment for the tools and methodology and having enough people to have the culture and fit and to be able to be part of the experiment.

• 1:36:21Lex Fridman?

  What about the environment of the, the feel of it, the actual gym? There's a, I don't know, a grunginess to it. I've recently became a member of Planet Fitness.

• 1:36:33Lex Fridman?

  For, for reasons that have to do more with the heat in Austin, that sometimes I need to put in time on the treadmill.

• 1:36:41Lex Fridman?

  I don't like.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  I don't have any judgment, honestly. I don't.

• 1:36:43Lex Fridman?

  The best gyms I've been in are kind of dirty.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  You walk in and you know that work is to be done.

• 1:36:50Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  There's not another reason to do there. It is, the, the environment is tight. There's a big piece of that.

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  I know it's studied sociologically, I believe. I just, I just butchered that word too.

• 1:37:04Speaker 01

  But the intensity, when you start growing a space, the intensity drops. And so I, I had that experience when we grew, we went from a 4,000 foot to a 9,000 square foot gym at one time and. Everybody's like, it doesn't feel the same. Like, people are complaining for years, we've shrunk it back down. We're down to 3,500 square feet. And it creates that intensity. It creates the closeness, the connection with the people around you. And then, like I said, the grunginess, like you go in, you know, the intention when you walk in. That environment creates that tension. But when I speak environment, it's not just the, it's not the physical, it's the people.

• 1:37:40Lex Fridman?

  But you know, when the gym is a little bit beat up.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:37:43Lex Fridman?

  It also tells a story, like, there's a history to it. You could tell that not only is there work to be done, that work has been done here.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:37:53Lex Fridman?

  Like battles have been fought. There's something to that where you're just in a long line of people, you know, that've fought and won.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  And we could get into a whole nother space, so this would be a whole nother topic. But that existing energy of a space.

• 1:38:10Lex Fridman?

  I mean, we mentioned offline, Joe Rogan, he talks about the same with comedy clubs. There's certain, there's certain clubs that just have a history. The, there's an energy there, you can get all woo woo, but you know, there's.

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  There, it's a, it's a real thing, I think. You walk in and you can feel it.

• 1:38:25Lex Fridman?

  You feel it.

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  Feel it. Yeah.

• 1:38:28Lex Fridman?

  That makes me feel that somehow all of us humans are connected in ways that's hard to describe, even the ones who are no longer here. Just the greatness that once was is still in the walls, in the space, present there.

• 1:38:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:38:46Lex Fridman?

  And we somehow can plug into that energy.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, we can go down a, go down a path there.

• 1:38:53Lex Fridman?

  There's something really powerful there. You've also mentioned a bunch of cool equipment that you've developed as part of Kabuki Strength. Probably a little bit of that has to do with your engineering education, but also just generally with the spirit of the innovator that you are. What are some cool, maybe revolutionary pieces of equipment that you're particularly proud of? Or just you've been obsessed with recently, that you're developing?

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  Love to talk about that. So we've got some wild, crazy stuff that just came out and it's coming out too. So, everything that we create and release at Kabuki Strength, the industry hasn't seen before. There's stuff that's basic foundational, it's been around forever because it works.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  But there's always more. It could be better. And why are we not looking at these things, these foundational things? So when people are coming up with novel things, they end up being way different outside the perspective. And I'm coming up with things that are way different that are plays on what we already know works. So we talked about the transformer bar, the only bar in the world. We can manipulate spinal mechanics. We can, so everything, everything for me, from a design concept that we develop is all about creating products that can rapidly accommodate to the variability of an individual's leverages, mobility and training needs. Okay. And that's going to also create and distill down the size and scope of space that we need,

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  which is going to be, continue to be an ongoing thing. Check out my Instagram after this and you'll see I put an entire gym on the bed of my truck. And went on vacation last week, drove to the desert. Oh, no. And by entire gym, I mean squat rack, full complement of our specialty bars, a horizontal and vertical pulley system, handheld weights, shoulder, like a complete, an entire gym in product that took up the space, the size of this bed, right here. That's incredible. Because of the design scope of what we have. So the cool things, there's two other bars that fit our biomechanically sound barbell lines. We talked about the transformer bar. The other two are built on this thing I call playground physics.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  So we have these bars with handles that are off, off parallel with the axis. So they've been around the market for a long time. One is a hex bar or a trap bar. Another one is a, it's a pressing bar with the handles turned as well. And both of them suck. They're horrible. Anytime, any lifter knows if you pick it up, it's going to break your wrist and crush into your face. And it just, it just doesn't feel good pressing. But it alleviates the strain on the wrist. So people use it for that reason. And the, the, the trap bar, same thing. It's always diving forward in your hand. So it's kind of limited. It's also limited in use because you could, you could do a lot more with it.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  So these bars are really cool playground physics. So as soon as the center of rotation.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  Is on the same axis as the center of mass. And the handle is off center, you have, you have a teeter totter.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  So, and a teeter totter has a balance point, but it's infinitely perfect. So technically you can never find it. So always going to be sitting on one side or the other in a playground. And that's what these bars are designed. So you've got instability right here. You can't find the center. The bar is always trying to tip in your hands on the trap bar. So you can't do carries with it because you're doing forward momentum and it wants to, it wants to dip on you. Right? The Swiss bar wants to crush your face. Well, what do we do? We just make a swing. Put center of mass below center of rotation. And what does it do? Oh, it always finds center. So, so the handles on the, our pressing bar, it's arced so that the handles are above center of rotation. And then, and then every angle, instead of just being a certain fixed angles, each angle is based on the width,

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  the average width of an individual. So the internal and external rotational bias is based of the shoulder is based on the width, leaving just a little bit left because we talked about the lat being a stabilizer. You still need to have a little bit of cue of external rotation to engage that as a stabilizer. Boom. Now all of a sudden you have a bar and I kid you not, this is a great story. Major League Baseball, when I presented it, every head strength coach for a Major League Baseball team, maybe not every, but damn near most of them have bad shoulders. They can't press, they've got shoulder surgeries, so on. And so we're showing, they love all our stuff. And I'm like, hey, I've got this cool prototype I want to show you. It's a pressing bar. And they're like, oh, you know, Major League Baseball is a little hesitant on pressing because the dangers for the shoulder. And I, I can't, I haven't been able to take a bar to my chest. I mean, I'd really love to.

• 1:43:43Speaker 01

  It's been five years since I've, I've been able to, to XX train. And I'm like, just try it. Like I can't even get a bar to my chest without pain. Like just try it.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  Oh, that feels good. Now the arc makes it actually three inches deeper. So people are automatically scared. I can't do that because that's an extra range of motion. Right? Like, oh, put a plate on there. They're doing it by that time, the staff's like, they're all standing around. You see like, what's going on? Put two plates on. You see the, just like, he gets up, how do you feel? I feel fine, no pain at all.

• 1:44:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  I did this with five teams, with five of the, it happening repeatedly, five times. And that they, and every one of them worked up to two plates and did, the reps varied, with zero pain to a three inch range or greater range of motion. Because what did we do? We stacked all the joints and we provided stability at the end. We balanced internal and external rotation. I mean, just basic playground physics and it changed the game. Now we get a greater range of motion with a greater training effect with the negative stresses removed. Our trap bar, opened up one side, which there was already something like that out there, created, it pops up so you can pick up, take the weights on and off. It's got a built in jack.

• 1:44:55Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  And then created the high handle position, which already did, everybody uses the high handle on a trap bar. They just don't know why they like it. The handle that's on center, we offset just a little bit, not enough to make a difference on the range of motion lift or even notice visibly, but it still has the same effect. So both handles now have that.

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  We added the option of different handle sizes based on whatever your needs are, even a one that rolls to develop a grip. And then different widths that you could choose from based on whether you're training a teen athlete or a seven foot six NBA player or a NFL lineman. So that we can accommodate for all these differences. And so, and then now it becomes the most functional all around bar around. Because now you can do carries with it, you can do split squats with it. You could do curls with it because it goes around the body. You can do overhead presses because you don't have a thing that gets in your way and you can flip it up into position. You can do bent over rows and not run into your shins. You can do seal rows off of a bench. You can do ab rollouts. You could, should I go on?

• 1:45:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so you can use it as like the main bar.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  The best multipurpose bar around. You got a home gym, one bar.

• 1:45:55Lex Fridman?

  Like, how do you develop totally new equipment like this?

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  I scratch it on paper, maybe, maybe weld some, cut up and weld up a prototype. But usually I just hand the scratched up paper to my engineering manager. And that's what he says his job is to distill my chicken scratch into something real. And then that team picks it up. But in the old days, starting out, I'd just walk out, I'd just walk out and do it. I, you talk about engineering, I'm actually more, I work more of an artist fashion. It's in my head and I just go create, with no plans. And so they have to pick that up and actually do the engineering and testing and all that. And then we got two other products came out this year, freaking wild. They're, are you familiar with Training with a Flywheel?

• 1:46:37Lex Fridman?

  No, what's a flywheel? Maybe I am.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  A flywheel is a spinning object that creates an inertial mass.

• 1:46:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:44Speaker 01

  And then it reverses direction. So whatever you put into it, and there's ones out there. But ours is the first patent pending. That's all, everything all in one unit. So it's a floor-based as well as a horizontal. So you can basically do any pulling movement in the world. And now, everything that you put into it on a concentric force, it whips right back as a concentric load.

• 1:47:05Lex Fridman?

  Got you. So there's an accelerating whipping motion?

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  It just, yeah, basically.

• 1:47:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I have trouble imagining exactly. Many of the things you're describing, I suppose, have to be experienced, right?

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:47:19Lex Fridman?

  Cause there's a magic to it.

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  And there's a lot of research. They've been around. They're adopted more heavily in Europe, quite heavily in Europe, but not as much in the US. Because they sell them as a be all, end all tool, which they're not. They're crazy for what they do. But it's not the, it's another tool. And so we have a very high quality unit now that is half the cost of everybody else's. Because the innovation of a movable mount point that you, for them, you have to have two pieces of equipment. We have one. So, and then a few other things. Better platform to be able to do things. And that we can do what we call off-platform work, which allows us to do movements like punches and stand-ups, things like that. And then I've got a handheld weight coming out next month that we can actually play with.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  So varying the load with it never leaving your hand by changing the leverage point. And so what?

• 1:48:10Lex Fridman?

  What exercises are we talking about here?

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  Anything that would be a dumbbell or a kettlebell movement. So it functions, it does the function of a kettlebell, a dumbbell, and what we call a center mass bell, as well as provides variable loading within a range.

• 1:48:24Lex Fridman?

  So how can you change? Like, how can you change the load?

• 1:48:28Speaker 01

  Because load, well, we don't actually change the load. We change the torque on the, on the joint that we're working, which is the same, that's actually what is creating the force, right? So if I'm doing a front raise, it's where this, this downward force is times the distance away, right? Which also then makes it no force when I've got it at the bottom of the front raise, which is why it's so easy. With this. It's like a kettlebell, it's offset, except it has three different handles. But it's offset just at a kettlebell, you can't do it because the offset so far it becomes a wrist movement. So ours has three different sizes and the offset just enough so that you can pick, if I put it in a front raise position or curl position, I could put it in outward position.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  And the force is almost what it is at the, at the top, but then I get to the top and it's the same exact, or the curl. So I can actually change the force curve in the movement. And then I can just release the pressure a little bit and let it swing into position and keep doing a drop set with never letting it down.

• 1:49:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's got a really nice texture grip that allows you to hold it in different positions. And then the load offset is just enough that it doesn't overpower the wrist. And then you got different hand sizes so that you can maximize this relationship and hit whatever joint that you're applying.

• 1:49:36Lex Fridman?

  That sounds incredible.

• 1:49:37Speaker 01

  It's really freaking, well, it's awesome because you can, because of the variable load, now I could go straight from front raises to side raises or rear or curl because

• 1:49:45Lex Fridman?

  Without like putting it down.

• 1:49:46Speaker 01

  Because I don't have to put it down. So now my time under tension goes through the roof. And by the way, the same effect with the flywheel trainer, because the variable, whatever you put into it is what it kicks back. So you have a constant time under tension because there's no rest points either. So all this stuff is working on maximizing time under tension, which, anyway, it, it's cool, cool stuff. Anyway, I get, I get excited.

• 1:50:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me ask you about another thing. You've already mentioned, but I find this really interesting, which is barefoot running. And your sort of company, Barefoot Athletics?

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:22Lex Fridman?

  B E A R. And the tagline is optimizing the human to ground interface. We've talked about this a little bit with the powerlifting. How do you think about the, the foot ground interface?

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  It's interesting that we know that we should train all these parts of our body to be able to be stronger, be more resilient, like.

• 1:50:52Speaker 01

  But we think that the foot is different, that we need to package it and modify it. And somehow that that's the science of making, you know, it healthy. Where I challenge people, think about that, like, first thing you do in the morning is roll out of bed and put your weightlifting belt on and wrap it on tight and wear it till you go to bed at night. Do it with your shoulders, your knees, put, wake up and put some knee wraps on, okay? And elbow wraps and see what happens. One, you'll get weaker, you'll lose movement capacity and you'll start affecting other areas of the body very negatively because they will start picking up the compensation for those joints that are not moving properly. This is it.

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  What shoes are for is to protect you from the environment, from cuts and abrasions and heat and things like that. But the foot, let me, this mind blowing, is like every other area of the body. You need to use it and you need to strengthen it and you need to learn to control it. That's it. That's all I have to say about the subject. Okay? It's that simple, but somehow we have been sold entire industries, like the orthotics industry. It's completely false. Meta-analysis of the data shows that orthotics do nothing beyond temporary relief from pain over a six, eight week period of time and provide no long-term benefit.

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  And I can't tell you how many people I've eliminated back or knee or hip pain from getting, from working on strengthening and controlling the foot and ankle complex. We believe we've villainized and said, a low arch is a condition that needs fixed.

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  Like when it really is just controlling the foot and ankle complex and how they relate to each other and how we use that. Is it like, go put on boxing gloves in the morning and do that for the next 20 years and see what happens. It's not about finding the right shoe that fits because your foot has been deformed. And so I'm not like some wacky, like, oh, you gotta be barefoot forever or do this. Like, no, I'm just saying, go spend some time using it. Strengthen it, learn to control it and you'll work better in a shoe. But the whole running shoe movement with the raised heel, that was the person that, that suggested that, that into Nike way back when they were trying to figure out what to do, the reason, and he says it's. It's the worst thing that he ever did.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Because we were coming from an era of people wearing heeled shoes, which by the way, came from stirrups way back in the day. That's where the whole heel came from is to go into stirrup, but then it went into fashion. And then the running craze started coming around in the 70s. They're, uh, they're starting to push this to the general mass population and they realized that they were causing injuries and like, what are we going to do? Well, that's because everybody was in this position and had a shortened, uh, shortened calf muscle. It's like, well, the workaround, let's just put a heel on it so we don't injure them.

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  That's it. And now because the raised heel, you gotta raise the toe. And then now with that, if you go stand on something and pull your inner toe in and, uh, in a squat position, just reach down and do it, you'll see that you have no control over internal or external rotation of your, of, of, of your leg. You don't. And, or your foot. And you actually have to put a support in for the arch to be able to passively control those structures. It's just Band-Aid on top of Band-Aid on top of Band-Aid. Use it, strengthen it. If you want to wear some shoes because they look good or fancy, I'm like, I have no problem. I mean, I go out on a wife, my wife will put on some high heels every now and again. Right. But all I'm saying is use your foot. My thousand pound squat, my thousand pound deadlift,

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  we're done barefoot. I'm not trying to sell you shoes. Go do it with no shoe. That's what I've been promoting. I did that for six years and I promoted it, but people ask me like, well, what do I do? Because my gym requires shoes. Okay. What do I go? And, uh, and then I go, well, you know, you could pick up these, uh, other finger shoes or whatever. And they go, man, my wife won't have sex with me if I do that. And I go, I know, mine either. Like, trust me, I'm not making this up. Everybody in that market markets to one segment and they're still missing some gaps because they, they still have a little bit too narrow of a toe box. And if you're lifting, you have the opportunity to really get that splay and start working on this stuff better. So, um, I just wanted to create a shoe. These ones are odd colored because it's a partnership

• 1:55:17Speaker 01

  with Kabuki. Normally we've got a black or a gray, uh, low top, high top, sticks to the ground for lifting. So we can do that and very pliable. It's a moccasin. It's a modern day moccasin, but looks okay that you can wear it around in other areas if you, if you so choose. Like, you know what the number one healthcare cost in America is? What's that? Diabetes, uh, heart disease, cancer,

• 1:55:45Speaker 01

  low back pain.

• 1:55:49Lex Fridman?

  Now, what do you attribute low back pain to?

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  Well, it's attributed to a lot of things, um, but inability to control spinal position, um, which starts happening from, uh, some breathing issues. Uh, it also happens from the foot. Um, so there's a lot of stuff, but everything that I do actually focuses on improving this.

• 1:56:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Uh, and it all starts with the feet.

• 1:56:08Speaker 01

  This is one thing, like this doesn't affect breathing, but, um, so it does actually affect breathing to some actions and spinal stabilization. So the raised heel and toe will make you stride further, um, because of just how it operates, but that overstride is a result of opening this. So we open the pelvis and diaphragm. Did we talk about that and the impact that that has for controlling and spine? Yeah, I think we touched on that.

• 1:56:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  Um, but it, it's all this stuff plays together.

• 1:56:34Lex Fridman?

  So the gait affects that. And so the shoe affects the gait and then so it's all connected.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  All connected. Let me be very purposeful with some conversation here, though. We've talked about periodization. This was a big gap. So, um, people go, yeah, well, when people started running with those, they started having injuries back when, uh, the finger company produced those and didn't do the education around this very simple concept. You do not walk into the gym if you haven't squatted and start squatting 225 from, for max recs every week, day or every day over day.

• 1:57:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:04Speaker 01

  And that's what people did because they didn't, weren't told that you need to build the capacity to do this. You go wear these and walk around in your office or wherever all day long, your feet are going to hurt. They're going to be sore.

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  Do it for 10% of your time.

• 1:57:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  Do that for a month, then add some. That will build the capacity to do this. And then that's going to start having the ability to strengthen, manage the foot. And there's a whole lot of other stuff. I've got videos on things that you can do. Buy whatever you want or just, just spend some time out of them. Like that's all that I want people to do because it is so simple and it has such a profound impact.

• 1:57:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it does. I, what I did, uh,

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  And I noticed when you walked, uh, when I walked in, I was like, oh, hey, you're spending some time without the, without shoes on.

• 1:57:52Lex Fridman?

  Well, what I did, I think it's already now two years ago when I was doing a lot of running, I do like a 10 mile run, I would take my shoes off for the last like half mile and I run like that. And that was for me really helpful to ensure that I have proper form, form that minimizes pain on the way I run. I still like shoes. I benefit a lot from shoes, the protection they provide, but it's for running we're referring to, especially trail running and so on. And in the city when there's glass and all those kinds of things. But it's really important to have minimal sort of protection on your feet. For me, at least it was to figure

• 1:58:31Lex Fridman?

  out the ways that my form, basic movement and like the positioning in the foot, the impact of the foot and everything, you know, the, the, the lower leg, the entirety of the torso, really how it's improperly positioned in terms for the objective of minimizing pain. And barefoot running really helped fix that for me because I figured out that I need to take shorter steps, more frequent, you know, all those kinds of things. And that really helps me figure that out.

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  Like, let's be realist about stuff. Like, spend some time using it, strengthen it. And I've got some great ways to do that and learn how to do that. So, yeah.

• 1:59:15Lex Fridman?

  What is a good diet for strength development? I've, just to give you some context, I've been eating mostly meat, not for strength, mostly for mental performance. I just enjoy it.

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  Yes, you need to have a base level of protein building blocks for tissue, right? We need to have enough fats to be able to have hormones work and key processes in the body. We need to have, well, you don't need to have from a performance aspect carbohydrates necessarily because the other ones can convert into injury sources. But for a performance athlete, carbohydrates can be very beneficial as well. So, so I look at is you want, you need a base level fats, you need a base level of proteins, and then you adjust the carbohydrate intake based on the needs. I'm not anti carbohydrate by any means. Because a lot of people, well, they look at me now when they see like how lean I am and they, they jump

• 2:00:09Speaker 01

  to a conclusion, you must be keto, you must be carnivore, you must be whatever. And it's like, So losing and gaining weight is simply eating less or eating more. I mean, it's ah and we get so complicated. Oh, that my fat like what's your fasting window? If I'm if I'm doing fasting, it's just because it works with my my environment. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don't. All that does is control how much calories that you take. Big success with keto and carnivore diets. It's hard to eat a lot uh and and put on weight with those with those diets. Um, you know, protein actually has a thermogenic effect. And so you have to have a massive amount of fats if you have a only meat diet,

• 2:00:53Speaker 01

  because you can literally starve to death. There's a there's a a show where they put people out in the wilderness. And this guy, the one that won, one of the ones I looked on, they threw him way like up in the uh up past the lot, you know, out the way out there, there was nothing. But he somehow got a caribou and killed it. And he still lost a pound a day for 30 days with a caribou. Because his fat was stolen by a uh uh and and he could eat all the meat he wanted. And they he almost got pulled because his weight loss, right?

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  But that isn't actually a performance. So those type keto and carnivore are not performance diets. So they're not going to be as effective at supplying uh the energy needs for high capacity training. So don't get me wrong, you can do training, but like you can be a successful like elite athlete with a with a vegan diet, but it's not as easy to do it with other diets. So and you're missing some base nutrients. So many nutrients in meat. I believe uh having greens in your diet is really beneficial, lots of research. But there's people in the other worlds that argue that you don't need them, but they help clear organs, provide micronutrients, all this sort of stuff. So I eat simply a whole well-rounded diet.

• 2:02:07Speaker 01

  And I've gone from I can go from 285 pounds squatting a ton of weight to eating less and dropping all the way down to, you know, seven, eight percent body fat with veins standing out everywhere without a tissue on me, just with amazing, great tasting food. To lose weight or be healthy does not mean that you need to eat flavorless bland food. So that's the main point. But you control portions. It's eat less to lose weight, eat more to gain weight. Yep. Make sure that you've got enough protein. Make sure that you've got your micronutrients covered, which is going to cover by eating real food. Don't go low fat, no fat. If you want a performance, don't go no carb. But if it works, any of those things. So diet approach, when you look at diets,

• 2:02:52Speaker 01

  understand that they're how aggressive they are. So like keto can make you lose a lot of weight. Carnivore can make you lose a lot of weight. A lot of that upfront is actually dropping glycogen stores. So you're actually just reducing water in your muscle and fat tissue. So which is why it doesn't isn't as great for a performance diet. But understand that every diet also has a level of discipline and does it fit your lifestyle. So I suggest people don't find a diet. You need to find a lifestyle because that's what's sustainable. I hate the word diet to begin with. What behaviors are sustainable? And then do that.

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  And then over time, the things you'll get to where you need to get. Diet itself, just by the name of it, is not sustainable because it is a short term thing to get somewhere.

• 2:03:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I tend to try to measure it because I definitely have a love hate relationship with food. I tend to look back and say like, by following this particular protocol, lifestyle, whatever, what was the level of happiness?

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:04:02Lex Fridman?

  So not like weight loss or weight gain or all those kinds of things. It's the entirety of the picture. Productivity, just feeling good throughout the day socially also like interacting with people because so much of human connection, like I mentioned before, is over food. And if you're going to limit yourself in that regard, you're limiting a certain fundamental aspect of life.

• 2:04:24Speaker 01

  A number of years ago, I did like 20 to 22 hour fasts every day. And I'm like, well, this doesn't work. I can't do business lunches and stuff like that. So when I was in my fasting thing, I went to a 16 so I could have a light lunch, just for the social aspect of it and perform that. And then that's why, and that's why like the typical bodybuilding, like the eight meal a day diet has never worked for me because I've always been a very bit like trying to fit that between meetings and other stuff. What that diet provides is it just, do you get less bloat and distension of a larger meal? But at the end of the day, you get the same exact results. Pick a lifestyle, live that. You can have really great tasting food. And that to me is the same thing.

• 2:05:09Speaker 01

  And this is why I'm like really hitting this point because also with the dieting and like the approach like, oh, I'm gonna do this and people pick these chicken and broccoli recipes and guess what? You're going to break. If you do not, if you do not enjoy it, you will break. So it's, it is a very important point.

• 2:05:32Lex Fridman?

  Well, I also slightly push back or maybe to elaborate. If you don't enjoy moderation, for me particularly, I have trouble moderating certain things. Most foods, I would say. So my source of happiness comes with foods, even if they're bland. The ones that can enjoy, but enjoy moderation. So there's, I mean, I enjoy every piece of food. So it's like, it's a, if you can enjoy the, the full lifestyle. It's not just the particular experience, but like the full journey.

• 2:06:07Speaker 01

  Yep. Does it fit your lifestyle?

• 2:06:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:06:11Lex Fridman?

  So let me ask about a complicated topic that's sometimes a bit controversial, which is steroids. It may be TRT, testosterone replacement therapy. What role does that play in strength training?

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  All right, we're gonna, we're gonna go there.

• 2:06:28Lex Fridman?

  Let's go there.

• 2:06:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's an important discussion to, to have. I think that it's something that I can be more transparent on. In my past, I wasn't able to, due to the career that I had. So just like covering that stuff in a, you know, one of the, on a public forum. When you're highly looked at being an executive for recruiting and other stuff like, it was an area I had to just kind of pass on, right? Now, I've used steroids. I've used them since I was 33. And I basically just use TRT now, after my big squat. So for 10 years I used them and.

• 2:07:17Speaker 01

  There's some interesting components to this. So one is just the gray area of what we call performance enhancing supplements. So performance was a PEDs.

• 2:07:31Speaker 01

  That the line of what defines a PED is ever shifting. And it's shifting based on society norms, cultural norms, government bodying agencies, all these sorts of stuff. So I'm not making excuses here. So I just want to elaborate before I actually start digging into the details here. Because performance enhancing, I could take sodium bicarbonate and enhance my ability to perform deadlifts for reps. Guess what? I did that for my Guinness World Record for deadlifts in a minute. Okay? People do it for rowing or other, they use high capacity type stuff. It is performance enhancing. It is a chemical. It is baking soda.

• 2:08:15Speaker 01

  All right?

• 2:08:15Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:08:17Speaker 01

  They're not able to make it illegal because they, everybody eats bread. Well, not everyone. And so it's a little hard to test for. No matter what you do at any level. So that's an extreme example. But other examples, you're drinking an energy drink in that cup there a little while ago. And in America, you can get an energy drink with 240 milligrams of caffeine in it. In Canada, it's too dangerous. You can only get 140. But you can go buy a fedra. And a fedra is illegal in America. And so these things bounce back and forth all the time. I could take yohimbi. And in Europe or Australia, it is a drug and classified. And America, it's, it is not.

• 2:09:02Speaker 01

  It's a, it's an herbal root in a lot, I actually, one of my supplements, except for the overseas version. Anyway, the point I'm getting is no matter what you do at some point, there's, by someone's standards, you are cheating. And Because it is, you're taking something that, but you could work around these things with nutritional ways or other ways versus taking a chemical. There's a whole lots of ways to do this, but it's like, oh, no, it's steroids. It's not. It's injectable. It's not. Well, somewhere there's a culture or a person that will say you're cheating no matter what. So it's a self-defined, you need to define it for yourself unless you're competing in an organization that has

• 2:09:45Speaker 01

  testing, then it's a straight ethical thing. And it's either right or wrong, in my opinion. That's, that's kind of the, the overall dilemma of it is if you want to see what you're totally capable of, you have to decide, decide yourself what's okay or not to, to that level. There is no, there is no body that can say something yes or no.

• 2:10:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. When there's an event like the Olympics, maybe then you have a standard that you're all trying to adhere to. And then it makes sense to keep a certain, like, to be within, there's an ethical imperative there.

• 2:10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not talking about that. I'm agreeing to compete in this by these, by these rules.

• 2:10:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But when you're trying to maximize your own performance, whatever that journey is, whatever that goal is, that's a different story. And it's not, it's not easy to figure that out.

• 2:10:38Speaker 01

  You go, you're just like dancing around the subject, whatever. Well, guess what? I've got, I've got a prescription for growth hormone and testosterone. It's legal for me to take. And you know what? A lot of the people that are in front of the camera in the media, politicians and news people and the people that are there saying the, the no drug stuff, they're going to anti-aging clinics to look better and they have a prescription for growth hormone and testosterone themselves. But in their eyes, it's okay. It is a prescription from their doctor because they have the money to do it. So it's legal and it's fine. If I,

• 2:11:21Speaker 01

  it's interesting in Oregon, anybody, and I don't know what other states, over the age of 16.

• 2:11:28Speaker 01

  Can, without parents' permission, by the way, walk into a gender clinic and as a female and get a prescription for testosterone. But as an athlete, if I've got low testosterone, I am so low, I've got depression, I can't have sex with my wife, it's affecting my quality of life, I will have to fight tooth and nail to get testosterone, just as a prescription, and then I will get kicked out of my organization for competing. Like, so you understand how gray this stuff gets?

• 2:12:00Lex Fridman?

  Do you think the stigma on testosterone is the reason we're not having like a healthy conversation about when it's proper, like what are the proper uses of testosterone in an athlete's life and just the regular human life?

• 2:12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and it's just, it's like anything, it's like I said, it is lines that we pick and draw. Anytime you put that out there, people are gonna have different opinions of where those lines are. So now, when it comes to strength, here's an interesting thing. In powerlifting, there's tested federations and non-tested federations. So we can literally look at the statistical data and actually find out what do steroids do? And so it's pretty clear that steroids provide about a 10% increase in strength on average over not. Now, that does take out the fact that steroids will put you in, allow you to put on more mass, so you'll go up a weight class a lot of times.

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  So as a whole, you could definitely lift more probably than the 10% over time, right? And then we think about steroids as the ability to just put on muscle. And here's where things get a little interesting, even with people that use steroids, is not understanding the neurological impacts that steroids have. Because you could take some steroids right now and be stronger in 10 minutes. That's clearly not done anything, you know, from a physiology standpoint to make you stronger, but we have tapped in neurologically to elicit those gains. And there's a whole lot that happens neurologically.

• 2:13:31Lex Fridman?

  Like, how much science is there?

• 2:13:35Lex Fridman?

  In terms of all the different ways you could take steroids, which kinds of steroids, the timing, the dose, all of those things to develop the neurological, the physical, the skeletal, like all, you know, you've talked with such depth about the science of strength building in terms of form, in terms of the equipment that you use. It seems like a component, you know, the use of steroids should be an equal level of scientific rigor when applying them.

• 2:14:07Speaker 01

  It is. Now, the research is harder to get because of what it is. But there is a lot of research that was done when they were legal. So they were legal up and through the, I think, the mid 80s. And so a lot of the classical, high benefit to low risk steroids were studied. And then since then, there's a lot of like designer steroids or new steroids that have come up that don't have a lot of research around safety and risk and things of that nature. And we can't do that because it's, you know, because of the legality around these things. But some of the stuff on the neurological function is really just understanding how

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  that chemical structure works and what it's doing to the neurotransmitters, what it's doing. And so some of it is, is really talking to people that have experience with it. And the other is understanding those structures and what they do. The neurological component, I think, is more interesting than, than most because the, most steroids act through increasing muscle protein synthesis. That's how you add more muscle is they have an anticatabolic effect and they have a muscle protein synthesis enhancing effect. So it reduces the amount of muscle that you waste and increases the amount of muscle that you put on. But.

• 2:15:34Speaker 01

  The neurological component is tremendously valuable for what it can do for your training workout. Like if I handle more load over time, I'm going to make more progress. If I can actually just stimulate more neurological effects for a specific event, it's gonna have an impact, right? But there's other ways that you can tap into this too. Things that you can tap into mentally with great practice with meditation and other stuff that will have the same effect. People probably think I'm over speaking, especially steroid users that are listening to this. Well, Kelly, I'm talking out my ass, but I'm not. Because I have experience with this stuff on both ends.

• 2:16:16Speaker 01

  And some of those areas, a lot of people don't have the experience with that.

• 2:16:21Lex Fridman?

  What I've kind of heard from people is the confidence that comes with steroids. It feels like, not to call it placebo, but it seems like the psychological benefits of steroids is huge. And that you feel like there's a confidence that seems to be coupled with the actual biological and chemical effects.

• 2:16:42Speaker 01

  I have actually a neurological condition. So I actually don't feel a lot of that stuff that people, because there's certain steroids that like people are like, you're like very extreme ones. Like that would make somebody bite someone's ear off in a fight, for example.

• 2:17:00Lex Fridman?

  Almost like aggression.

• 2:17:01Speaker 01

  And they'll literally do nothing. I'm like always just chill and mellow. They don't like have an effect.

• 2:17:07Lex Fridman?

  That's great.

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  But neurologically, they're still having those effects, but I don't get those feels that other people have from those. But yes, there's that immediate boost in aggression and a confidence and stuff that come with a lot of those ones that deal on the neurological. Overall, a good sense of well being, just like from being on testosterone, like it's gonna affect your mood. And it's interesting. So testosterone replacement therapy, if we walk down that path now and kind of switch gears. You know, we find that men today have declining testosterone over what has historically been in the past. So, right now, I think a thirty-five-year-old testosterone is shown to be about half what

• 2:17:50Speaker 01

  it was just fifty years ago. So, I don't know if we could argue the point. We don't really have the science to validate any of it, but it could be society as far as the impact that it's having on the mental health. For men, it could be the the estrogens floating around in the water from all the chemicals and birth control and all this sort of stuff. Could be a lot of things.

• 2:18:18Speaker 01

  But it is a fact that average testosterone is significantly lower, and that is going to end up affecting life, quality of life, as well as your longevity, because it will affect those things. But on the other end, steroids and TRT, particularly steroids, come with a lot of negative health benefits. Not benefits, a lot of negative health ramifications. And so, you know, if I knew what I know now, I don't know that I would have gone that path. I didn't. I didn't till I was thirty-three, which is kind of an outlier for a strength athlete. I was I was a four-times bodyweight deadlifter, eight hundred-plus pounds at one ninety-eight, and I was pretty dang strong before I went down that path. And that's because I wanted to see what I was capable of, but I was

• 2:19:03Speaker 01

  reaching a point that it was either I need to do that or not. My testosterone, my natural testosterone levels were actually, I think, below three hundred is actually the threshold. So, I was being told to go on TRT for the last couple of years, probably just because I was pushing so hard and the stress level was driving my test down. So, it was self-imposed, more than likely. But I put it off because I wanted to set all the drug-free records. And I set the ones that I wanted. And then I was thirty-three, I'm, you know, entering the age category, and I'm like, I'm gonna go on TRT. I did not feel like I should be with TRT. Personally, my ethical standard was I shouldn't be competing in tested events anymore. There are federations that will allow you with your, you show up with your script and you do your test and you're below a certain

• 2:19:47Speaker 01

  level, but you're still on. But for me, I'm like, that's not okay. So, I'm like, I may as well, at this point, use steroids. But since then, you know, understanding all those ramifications, you know, I might not have gone down that route quite so fast and easily.

• 2:20:06Speaker 01

  But I continued because I also have a lot of resources that other people don't in being able to assess and understand and put things in place to mitigate that. So you need to be, and the other thing is, once you go on, it's literally a decision for life.

• 2:20:21Speaker 01

  Not in a, but realistically is because your, your quality of life, your feeling is going to be enhanced quite a bit. And you're not going to want to go back. And if you go back, it's going to be less than it was before. Uh, that's how the endocrine system works. There are ways to try to recover and bring that up, but it might be a while. And if you've been on for a while, it definitely is not an option. So those are big things that people need to understand that you're going to have some things in there. And even TRT has some potential, especially with at higher levels, that it's going to, you know, increase the risk for prostate cancer. It's going to potentially cause some hypertrophy of the

• 2:21:04Speaker 01

  left ventricle of the heart and some potential plaque buildup of the, some of those key arteries around there that's going to have an impact on your cardiovascular health. There's things that you can do again, but everything is like the shoe story, right? Where I'm anti, anti shoe, but I'm going, well, we could put Band-Aids on this.

• 2:21:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:21Speaker 01

  Um, so it's.

• 2:21:24Lex Fridman?

  There was a quality of life that comes with it, the increase in quality of life. And if you do it correctly, I think.

• 2:21:29Speaker 01

  For me, for me, I definitely would not live without TRT, even with knowing what I know now. Um, it this age and the quality of life and being able to be there, have the energy, the recovery. Um, that's a big thing where all this, though I talked about muscle protein synthesis and anti-catabolism is being big drivers, but recovery is the other big aspect, uh, that they, that they offer probably as a result of those. But, um, that's gonna, th- those are gonna be the big enhancements. So, um, just doing steroids. Steroids is going to increase all the other stuff that you do. So if you've, if you have good training, you have good diet, good quality of sleep, like all this other stuff, then

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  you can take advantage of that. But you could choose steroids and nobody would know. And honestly, you go down to 24 hour fitness and you'll see a bunch of, you know, late, you know, 19 to 21 year old kids that are all kind of red and 150 pounds that look like that, don't look like anything.

• 2:22:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:28Speaker 01

  And they're, a bunch of them will be using steroids because

• 2:22:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:33Speaker 01

  They're not like, so it's, it's not the, it's not going to make a champion.

• 2:22:37Lex Fridman?

  Like you said, 10% at most.

• 2:22:39Speaker 01

  Guess what? I was already at an elite level. I was one of the best in the world before I started using. It doesn't, it doesn't do that. It does a 10% increase at best.

• 2:22:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:50Speaker 01

  And that's proven in the statistics, which is interesting because most people don't know this, like, it, it, the data is right there.

• 2:22:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah. And that's why I'm often saddened by maybe um, the negative view of somebody like Lance Armstrong, who's one of the greatest athletes in history.

• 2:23:13Speaker 01

  And everybody else that he was competing against, I'm sorry.

• 2:23:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:16Speaker 01

  I hate to blow anybody's bubble, but regardless of I told you my ethical pieces with saying that you're going to be at something at an elite level.

• 2:23:26Speaker 01

  You look at a most, a lot of those big figures out there. When their income in your life relies on it.

• 2:23:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:33Speaker 01

  You're going to push those limits. So maybe, maybe my ethical would change if, if, if I was in that position too, because here's the thing where I believe like, someone is, I think people should avoid steroids. Um, TRT, probably something worth taking a look at what your levels are when you're in the 35 to 45 range and see what decision you decide to make from there. And that's a decision that you make for the rest of your life. The only times that you should be taking a look at steroids is if it's, it's funding your life. It's creating that it is your job and it's doing like, and honestly, it was for me. Like I, so was it the only thing? No. No.

• 2:24:14Speaker 01

  If you want to get into neurology, uh, neurotransmitters and alcohol, there's really interesting discussion on performance enhancement. Um, so when I lift heavy, um, and so I always promote it like not more than a drink or two, like once or twice a month is what all I'm talking about when I, when I'm saying this. What's the timing of the drink that we're talking? Uh, it's about three to five minutes. Before? Yes. And we're talking about beer? It doesn't matter the, uh, the source. So, um, I shots are the easiest. You want something that is not going to have some sort of regurgitory effect or bloating effect or anything like that. Uh, but you want to have the quick hit of energy. So it's a preferential energy source moves above ketones, carbs, everything.

• 2:24:56Speaker 01

  Uh, it's seven calories per gram, but then there's some really interesting things that happen. Spikes blood pressure, which is going to make weights feel lighter. So when you're in your early twenties and you're trying to hit up, you know, some attractive person at the bar, you're with your buddies and you're like, ah, you know, and you got second guess, oh, should I, should I? And they go, have a shot of liquid courage. And you have one and all of a sudden the, the second thoughts, the second guessing, all that drops away. Like you're focused in the moment, uh, and you walk over and you actually perform a little better, like conversation wise than you normally would. Now, if you have five or six and then go over, you're going to make a fool of yourself. So it's all about timing and amount. But there is a reason that that happens. So anyway, I'm known for promoting this whiskey and deadlift concept. Um, I love this. But it, but it works.

• 2:25:41Speaker 01

  Like the Eastern Bloc, uh, so. That's where it came, that's where I stole it from because I was watching all these Russian lifters would have a shot of vodka or something before they go lift. And I'm like, there is something here. So I started experimenting with it and I'm like, that works. And then I started researching, nobody talks about this stuff. So it takes a while to start piecing together all the stuff that actually happens to make that happen. But it moves away the things that you're going to, the concerns about the ramifications in the future and the other stuff. So the, um, but brings you into the moment and then the, the dopamine hit in the other, and then it, uh, enhances whatever mood that you're in. But all of a sudden you get in the state much easier.

• 2:26:26Speaker 01

  And so it's really, really interesting, but it's very, it's a very small amount needed and very time sensitive, but it can be so much more powerful than like drugs people use for this stuff.

• 2:26:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:38Speaker 01

  It ties really together with meditative state and other pieces to, to, to get you into that flow state. Those thoughts about failure, what if, what like all that you, you get into that zone, that moment, that time. So anyway, so interesting, and alcoholic is promoting out, you know.

• 2:26:58Lex Fridman?

  No, but there's an important point here, which not often talked about. I think it is fascinating that because you can get into so much trouble with alcohol when used in excess, people don't often talk about the, the positive aspects of alcohol, even in your college years.

• 2:27:16Speaker 01

  It had a, it had a lasting effect on who I am as a person.

• 2:27:19Lex Fridman?

  I don't think people are not giving enough credit to the positive aspect. See, you could have accomplished a lot of those same things with a little more moderation, which I think people should talk about more, which is like the, the way to open up a personality, like the flowering of the full character and the weirdness and the, the like, the beauty of who you are as a human being could be opened up with alcohol. And that's really interesting to think about.

• 2:27:43Speaker 01

  You should try some podcasts with a, with a shot in, in these.

• 2:27:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:48Speaker 01

  You, you, I actually, I do that sometimes with myself and guests and it will change the conversation, lubricates the, the conversation. Definitely not the excess, and which is what I learned because I went all the way in because I do everything at extremes.

• 2:28:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:04Speaker 01

  So it was a really hard lesson that took me a lot of time to unwind. But it, it is interesting and people don't discuss those things because it's, it's either this or this.

• 2:28:15Lex Fridman?

  You're one of the greatest strength athletes of all time. So it's worthwhile to consider how you optimize the, the feats of strength that you reach for with things like steroids. It's, it makes perfect sense. And I think that was a, from my perspective, I think it was probably the right decision. You've achieved something incredible that inspires a huge number of people.

• 2:28:40Lex Fridman?

  That's it. And you've shown to yourself and to the world what the human body can accomplish.

• 2:28:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:28:45Lex Fridman?

  That's incredible.

• 2:28:46Speaker 01

  And no matter if I pushed to a less weight and if I disclosed everything that I did and I didn't, and I wasn't using steroids, in my opinion, if we went through everything, there were people that would say, you're using performance enhancing.

• 2:28:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:00Speaker 01

  No matter, like, it is, it's straight up. So you just need to be okay with it yourself. And so I had to make the call. I want to see what the true potential is of every, let's throw everything out the window that I feel, unless I feel it's a risk from a, from a health standpoint that I'm not willing to take on. And because that's, how do I, like, it's just picking and choosing.

• 2:29:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:22Speaker 01

  It's just picking and choosing. I, here's what I want to know. This is what I want to be able to try to achieve. And so, yeah, yeah, that's what I did.

• 2:29:30Lex Fridman?

  And, and what you did is incredible. Like, it's, it's just awe inspiring.

• 2:29:34Speaker 01

  And what Lance Young did was incredible.

• 2:29:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and that.

• 2:29:37Speaker 01

  And that, and that aids me up. And what's funny is the people that bash him are like on the media or politicians or maybe some actors. And guess what? A ton of them are doing the same thing. It's hypocrisy at its finest, trust me.

• 2:29:50Lex Fridman?

  But.

• 2:29:50Speaker 01

  How many, how many of those figures you're watching in movies that love to talk, you know, be, you know, be political and do this and the news and all this, I'm telling you, they're, they're anti-aging clinics, like, all over California and everywhere else. Who do you think just keeps them in business? Well, it's not a competitive lifter, I'll tell you that.

• 2:30:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's, you're.

• 2:30:14Speaker 01

  And they're using peptides and all sorts, and sarms and all sorts, like.

• 2:30:19Lex Fridman?

  Wait, you're speaking to the hypocrisy. I also want to speak to the, the fact, you know, somebody who's a friend of mine, David Goggins, I don't know if you know who that is. Ultra marathon runner, Navy SEAL.

• 2:30:30Speaker 01

  He gets. Pretty incredible person, yeah.

• 2:30:31Lex Fridman?

  Incredible human being. And he gets criticism like, you know, what you're doing is, um, is bad for the body, you know, you're, you're pushing yourself too far.

• 2:30:42Lex Fridman?

  I find that the people that criticize are often people that haven't truly pushed themselves to the limit. They haven't actually worked hard in their life. When you work hard, you realize how incredible it is that a human being can dedicate themselves so fully to an effort, the way you did, the way David Goggins does, the way, the way the greatest athletes do. And there's nothing that should be said beyond just sitting back in awe that humans can achieve that. And that inspires me to do the best, whatever the hell I do, to be the best version of that.

• 2:31:22Lex Fridman?

  There's something about like athletic feats, especially like strength, that just inspire us to do the best, to be the best version of ourselves. I don't know. That's the only thing you should be saying as opposed to criticizing some little detail of this and that. It's just awe inspiring that you push yourself to a limit.

• 2:31:45Speaker 01

  Talk to anybody that is at that level. And this is funny, like in competitive sports, like you go online and people, it's just bash, bash, bash, bash, bash, bash, bash. You go talk to anybody, anybody, anybody that's a high level athlete within that field, and nobody has a single bad thing to say about each other. But all this chitter chatter down there, I mean, I know exactly what you're saying.

• 2:32:07Lex Fridman?

  So if you, I would say, because I have love for all those folks, especially when you're younger, you have a little bit of that desire to criticize others. Like, I think that should be channeled in improving your own life.

• 2:32:21Speaker 01

  Anytime that you feel that way, that is when you need to turn inward. And it's hard to do. But there is a reason that you have those emotions around someone else and what they're doing, that you have an opportunity to look at yourself and know why you feel that way. And that, guess what? That's going to be the hard thing to do. That's going to be the thing, again, that's stirring you a little bit because it's so much easier to sit there and, or talk to your confidant or whatever, instead of go, why does that bother me? Why does what that person doing or what that person's achieving bother me?

• 2:33:02Lex Fridman?

  It's a good, difficult question that I often ask others.

• 2:33:10Lex Fridman?

  Whether it's better to work hard or work smart. I like to ask that question because it helps me get a sense of the human being. And I think I, let me just say, like, I often, I often like people that answer that with work hard. Even though the quote unquote right answer is work smart, meaning like finding the optimal, efficient way to achieve a certain goal. I find that people that answer work smart don't actually find the optimal, efficient way to achieve a goal. It seems like the people that at least certainly early in life,

• 2:33:54Lex Fridman?

  strive to work their ass off, even that means doing the inefficient, the dumb thing, just to learn the mistake. The spirit behind, the human spirit behind the person that says work hard is the one I connect with, but I'm torn, especially in the, in the work culture, in the tech sector where people answer work smart. What would you, um, what would you say about that tension?

• 2:34:19Speaker 01

  This definitely encompasses like, I'm the intellectual and I'm the meathead. I'm the work around the clock.

• 2:34:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:29Speaker 01

  And go fix the processes and make it so much better type person, right? That's, that's, that's me in a whole, that's everything. That's my life story, right? Busting your ass to find the easiest way possible.

• 2:34:41Lex Fridman?

  To both.

• 2:34:42Speaker 01

  So like, I will, I will build a custom hydraulic cart that will lift my plates up to the height of my, my squat. So that I can minimize, roll it over next to it and then minimize the effort of it going on and off.

• 2:35:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:01Speaker 01

  To be able to lift the most amount of weight as possible.

• 2:35:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:06Speaker 01

  So, so that I can save the energy from here, from lifting those up and the fatigue of my back being in a bad position. So I can nearly kill myself over here.

• 2:35:16Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:35:17Speaker 01

  Right? I.

• 2:35:20Speaker 01

  My, my wife, anybody will say, I'm a workaholic.

• 2:35:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:24Speaker 01

  And the, the first thing that I would do when it would be, uh, doing a company, a company turnaround. They'd hire me, come in and I would be taking over for someone that wasn't successful. But it was usually hardly ever for lack of want or trying. So a lot of times they knew they were unsuccessful and they were running around working six, seven days a week, 12 hour days, doing so much. And it'd be like, well, you need to do this. And they'd train me on like all the reports and this and all the things and like, good luck. Good luck. I couldn't do it. And the first thing I would do is nothing.

• 2:35:59Speaker 01

  I would do nothing.

• 2:36:03Speaker 01

  Because then I would find what actually keeps coming back. The things that I need to do and how much of it was filling the space. Because so much of human nature, when you're failing is to make yourself feel like you're accomplishing thing. This is when things go on your list, on your checklist and you start like rolling up. So you're running around just getting shit done.

• 2:36:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, being busy.

• 2:36:30Speaker 01

  Right? And so.

• 2:36:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:33Speaker 01

  So, but at the same time, like find somewhere in my career, something I've done where I haven't outworked everybody. Just so much on distilling things down to what's important.

• 2:36:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:45Speaker 01

  And you've got to make time to sit back and assess and think and be introspective. You have to make time for this. Cause if not, you're going to waste so much time sitting there, walking sideways when

• 2:37:07Speaker 01

  all you gotta do is move just one step in front of the other each day, just one. That's all I say.

• 2:37:14Speaker 01

  Because it's gonna add up, but you could spend six months knocking shit out, doing your routine, busting your ass and not take that one step.

• 2:37:26Speaker 01

  So you've got to distill stuff down. You've got to really understand like what's important to you in life and where you're going. And when you're looking at anything in your life, the first thing that you need to do is figure out, do I need to do it and just quit doing it? Just quit doing things in your life. And you'll see that a lot of stuff that you think has to be done, doesn't have to be done. You'd be surprised. And then from there, this is the tech. Okay. And then of that, what can I, what can I automate? What can I not have to do in a repeated fashion? And then the last one, yeah, wherever possible, if it's not something that I'm adding tremendous value to,

• 2:38:11Speaker 01

  like my uniqueness, people like, oh, you must like do the auto work on your vehicles because you love working. I'm like, fuck that. I don't. And they're like, what? That doesn't make any sense. And I'm like, no, I love creating things. But I don't want to do that stuff. So you could use delegating if you're a manager position, but it's outsourcing, whatever, what, whatever it is, but there are also so many things this, and this, this ties back to your point around just doing it. There's a point to like experiencing all levels to really understand things. You need to spend time at the same time doing all those things because there could be good, huge, massive gaps in there

• 2:38:53Speaker 01

  that you're not aware of that are key for you or key to be having done different or so on. So like in my company days, I was one of the few executives that came in that could do anything on the floor from code to machine, run a lathe, mill, weld, do all, step into engineering, like.

• 2:39:16Speaker 01

  And that added tremendous value to me to having had spent time being a doer. And not enough people want to be, you've got to just go do shit.

• 2:39:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:27Speaker 01

  You need to spend time in your life chopping wood.

• 2:39:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, get a lot of shit done, doesn't matter what shit is.

• 2:39:32Speaker 01

  Have experience trying and doing all these things that you would never like. My skill set is massive because I want to know, like, you need to have those touchpoints. My job, my title is chief visionary.

• 2:39:49Speaker 01

  But I've spent time doing everything. It's not about just like creating this amazing strategy or vision and I'm just going to be there in this person that directs and like, like,

• 2:40:02Speaker 01

  you can't be effective, you cannot connect the dots.

• 2:40:06Speaker 01

  Unless you've been in the moment with everything.

• 2:40:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, low level stuff, sometimes it's doing stupid shit that you're not uniquely qualified to do than anybody could do, but you did it anyway.

• 2:40:18Speaker 01

  Just the training environment. People hit me up at a, at a, at a school or wherever like, hey, how do I get into, I want to grow my, grow my brand online. I want to do this, like, where do I, where do I start? I'm like, go get a job at Planet Fitness or 24 Hour Fitness. They're like, but I want to, you know, where, how do I get, you know, recognized and write articles and be an online coach? I'm like, you need to go spend a few years, one-on-one training people to learn, like the interaction, how people were, there's base levels you have to do. You've got to go work your way up from the ground.

• 2:40:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:55Speaker 01

  I truly believe it.

• 2:40:57Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think that's the hard work piece that I'm speaking to, that I like it when people have been humbled by the hardness of life. Like how difficult it is to do stuff and it does.

• 2:41:09Speaker 01

  I went and got my MBA, I went to MIT, I don't need to do that stuff, I'm above that.

• 2:41:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, that, that's, once you've been humbled by doing those things, I feel like you can truly explore.

• 2:41:22Lex Fridman?

  The optimization that you're talking to, finding the ways where you're uniquely capable to add value to the world. And then, and then again, work your ass off to be the best in the world at that thing.

• 2:41:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:41:36Lex Fridman?

  Uh, so it's always.

• 2:41:37Speaker 01

  But then don't waste your time on shit that's not aligned.

• 2:41:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:40Speaker 01

  That's the only, so that's, I guess there's a lot of context I put around that. Uh, but.

• 2:41:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that was like a long answer to a, a long, beautiful answer to a unanswerable question. Do you have advice outside of all this discussion to young people today about career, about life? Since you've done so many things, you've, uh, overcome a lot of things. Think high school, college student, thinking about what to do in their life. Do you have advice for those guys and girls?

• 2:42:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. First is, you don't have it figured out. So don't worry, just jump in.

• 2:42:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:17Speaker 01

  Uh, we talked, uh, you know, a lot about, uh, understanding your values and aligning all that stuff, but you gotta have a base level of start exploring and learning and, uh, just spending the time. Doing like, pick something. Let me elaborate a little bit.

• 2:42:36Lex Fridman?

  No, you know what? A lot of people struggle with that aspect now because the choice, there's so much choice. It's difficult to pick something, but I think it does boil down to you should pick something and don't worry about it.

• 2:42:46Speaker 01

  And then, but within that, you can start discovering the things that are there for you. Like I, I talked about, I made this huge shift. I threw away my whole life. But I, I don't regret anything about that. I wouldn't be where I was if I didn't walk through and learn those things. And in fact, in the course of that, I learned just how much that inspiring people and helping them realize the potential far beyond what they thought was capable. And guess what? That was leadership 101 and managing people based level, floor level, right? And I got a lot out that was perfectly aligned with, and that's what I realized. It didn't matter, um,

• 2:43:30Speaker 01

  what industry I was in or any of those other things. But I was able, you can see so many things. There's so many paths that you can go down to help you realize what those things are. And you're going to be able to find a lot of those nuggets and develop those. Do you think that I could have just at a, at a, gone to school and got out and started a, a globally recognized brand within a few years without having been schooled in business while getting paid for it by others for years? And in fact, that entire time, I knew that that's what I wanted to do, but I didn't go out on it. I mentored some of my friends along the same

• 2:44:14Speaker 01

  path to go, no, they're like, I'm ready, I'm ready to go do this. And I'm like, no, now you need to go get a job. You, you, yeah, you know, engineering management design, all that stuff. Go get a job as a, as a manager now. Like, oh, that's a step down. I can't do that. I'm like, go try it. A couple of years later, oh my God, that was such a good move. I didn't know what I didn't know. And now they're an executive for freaking a Fortune 500 company. And the same thing, like, I sat there knowing that I was getting a free education. Don't stress yourself out is my, that's my advice. Don't stress yourself out that you've got to have this perfect thing. Because this process of understanding your values and the interest, but that takes time.

• 2:44:54Lex Fridman?

  You can get a job where you're getting paid to learn.

• 2:44:57Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:44:59Lex Fridman?

  That's a good deal before you launch on your own. You mentioned going back to darkness. I'm Russian, so like going back to darkness. You suffer from depression, you consider suicide. Do you ponder your own death these days? Do you think about your mortality? Are you afraid of death?

• 2:45:19Speaker 01

  I definitely think about mortality. And am I afraid of my own death? It depends on the moment. If I'm in the middle of a project, I definitely want to finish that project, man.

• 2:45:34Speaker 01

  But I don't fear it so much. I fear leaving my kids or my wife and not being able to be there for them. That bothers me. Outside of that, I know that I put everything into what I, the life that I've lived. Like you said, there's always more, but like, I've lived hard. I've loved hard. I've.

• 2:46:10Speaker 01

  Every moment in my life, I've made connections and impacted people around me for the better. And this tracks back, which is crazy when we're doing the documentary and they're interviewing people through my whole life and the consistency of the themes of anyone like, anything for Duffin, like just, sure, I'll fly in from Boston, all the like, these people like all like, it was crazy, like, everybody had a story about me giving, like, just over and over and I didn't even really,

• 2:46:40Lex Fridman?

  It's just the way you were.

• 2:46:42Speaker 01

  But I've been all in. I don't have like, I have a lot more I want to do. But I don't have things that regret have not done in like, I don't fear it. I don't fear it.

• 2:46:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's like the, I don't know if you know the Bukowski poem, Go All The Way. Otherwise, don't even try. Uh, it seems like you embody that poem. And you've accomplished some incredible things and serve as an inspiration to a huge number of people. Chris, you're an amazing human being. I'm really honored that you would spend your valuable time with me. Thank you so much for talking with me today. It was incredible. I can't wait to check out all the cool stuff you've engineered with Kabuki Strength. So I'm, uh, obviously I love the, I love strength. I love strength training. I love the idea of strength. I love the, uh, the equipment and the engineering approach that you take to strength. You're an incredible human, both on the things you've accomplished

• 2:47:42Lex Fridman?

  in terms of your own strength feats and, uh, the kind of science and engineering you bring to the field, uh, that many others could use. So, thank you so much for talking today.

• 2:47:54Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me on. That was, that's quite the final. Thank you.

• 2:48:00Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Chris Duffin, and thank you to Headspace, Magic Spoon, Sun Basket, and Ladder. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words from Arnold Schwarzenegger. "Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardship and decide not to surrender, that is strength." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.