Why Hormone Health Is Key -- Mike Mahler | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] all right here we go Mike Moll are good to see you man thank you a pleasure welcome time a long time coming delighted to meet you can't wait to get into all of this stuff with you man you're you're a fascinating dude there's so many areas that we could explore but I think the first thing I want to launch into the thing that's kind of top of mine for me personally and I think probably with the audience yeah is your your interest and your research and specificity in the area of hormone optimal yeah sure sure really cool so first of all like well how did you get as a strength coach as a fitness person personality instructor whatever you want to call it how did you decide to dive deep into this area because it's kind of a it's the bastard stepchild of everything else Fitness but of course essential to optimal health and athletic performance yeah it's critical for athletic performance and just feeling good even for people who don't work out if they just want to feel good and vital I got into it because I went through a serious health crisis I was living in Los Angeles I was around 29 so this is 2002 mm-hmm and I had a lot of stress going on at the time I was in a really self-destructive marriage my finances were really bad just stress coming from all angles so personal life stress financial stress I was just getting my business going and this culminated in me getting a serious case of pneumonia right where I nearly died from it and being the smart I am I decided to fly to Uganda to visit my parents while I was fighting this pneumonia I didn't go to the doctor and get a diagnosed okay so I went on about 20 hours of flying with maybe 10% of one lung functioning so fortunately I was told the other way no I didn't know like I said I was really stupid at any time you have a respiratory issue you go to the doctor you don't mess around with that because that can spiral it started off as maybe bronchitis I thought I would kick it but it just kept lingering for a long time but I just tried to fight through it I was just being really dumb about the whole thing and I was scheduled to visit my parents in Uganda I didn't want to cancel out on the trip so I went but when I got out there I just you have to get me to an emergency room immediately because it's probably 110 degrees out and I'm cold just had that feeling like your life-forces way withering away so the doctor diagnosed me pretty fast with pneumonia just looking at my symptoms they did an x-ray of my lung so you couldn't even see my lungs there were so much just bacterial fluid just covering up everything so a long story short he took a needle shoved it in my back pulled 40 liters of what looked like murky green tea out of me at 40 liters went back the next day another 40 liters but the first day when he pulled that out it was such a relief and I was in so much pain and discomfort he goes this is gonna hurt I go look you can I don't care where you stick that needle you know at this point anything's better than how I feel right now and it was immediate relief so where I'm going with this story is that when people say stress kills they're not kidding you know this is the culmination of stress when it's not checked out so it's if it wasn't for all those things that were going on I wouldn't lead to this point and then if I at least had done a few early steps go to the hospital get checked out it wouldn't have led to this point right so in other words this understanding that it's not just yes you had a pneumonia but what contributed to you incurring that obviously like you know severely repressed immune system functionality exactly and then what led to that well the anxiety and the stress in the in play if that has on your reticle your lymphatic and hormones oh yeah 100% I mean I lost 30 pounds of muscle during this whole phase and this is when I was heavy into teaching kettlebell seminars you know so I want to look a certain way I wanna be strong and vital this is 2002 this is a long time ago so I gave my supp after the trip I got back to America gave myself about three months to get my fitness back before I started teaching again started promoting courses but I go I need at least 12 weeks to get back into thanks but I didn't want to just get back to where I was I wanted to make myself much more resilience than I was before this and that eventually led to hormones now as a fitness person you're always thinking about testosterone anyway so to some extent all of us are interested in hormone optimization whether we realize it or not but the mistake that a lot of men make in particular is that the overly fixate on what's my testosterone level yeah testosterone is important but so is DHEA so is pregnenolone the mother of all hormones you know so it's leptin so since there's so many other things so you got to look at hormones as an orchestra when an orchestra works in unison it's really special like I was watching hand zimmer on YouTube right does all the background music for a lot of movies and he did he there's a footage of him doing the song at the very end of Inception and when you watch the orchestra it's a totally different experience than when you just hear the music in the movie you don't realize how complex it is until you see it live how many different performers there are and how the timing is perfect and if anyone is off the whole thing is going to be a disaster this is gonna be a bunch of noise yeah well this is true of everything yeah it's not just true of your hormonal health or music it's true with every function and facet of what it means to be healthy and as human beings we always want to narrow in on that one thing like whether it's protein or testosterone or even macronutrient like oh let's take all of us and boil it down to three things we're always trying to reduce it down to one control group or one variable when in when in fact it's this interplay of systems that's so complex and the you know this drive to kind of reduce it down to one thing yeah always leads us astray and yet we continue to do well we always do and dr. mark Gordon will say it's only if you know dr. mark Gordon I've heard it he's been on Joe Rogan's show many times he's the foremost anti-aging expert he does a lot of stuff with soldiers with PTSD that's how he got into the whole thing because a lot of soldiers have PTSD not because of what they have experienced overseas but because they had some kind of head concussion and when you have a head concussion your testosterone growth hormone completely shuts down you're not able to produce it naturally so of course you're immediately gonna be depressed and they go to the doctor and they're just given antidepressants and so forth no one looks at their lab work but he does and when he gets these people on testosterone replacement or whatever the protocol is to get their hormones back in the play he has a supplement he makes that increases growth hormone but sometimes they need the real thing it's just night and day they go from being depressed alcoholics non-functional to being vital excited about life and very functional but he'll say that when you take you put someone on testosterone let's say it's trt whether it's a shot cream pellet whatever it is you have to also replace the hormones that are the precursors because they get depleted so if you just replace testosterone but you don't replace DHEA and pregnenolone it actually has a negative impact why do they get depleted because the body goes oh we have enough testosterone we don't need to create the precursors that's probably part of it because that means historic comes from the precursor so that's definitely part of it I think the body is always looking for him for some kind of balance as well so when something goes really high it just wreaks havoc because you have to remember any kind of hormone replacement is not natural you're taking an exogenous hormone and you're putting it into the body so it's gonna be complex what the interplay is with anyone the way you react will be different the way I react and anyone else you just don't know what the ramifications are gonna be so I'm not quite sure why there's an upstream depletion but I think what you said it's probably a good part of it right so yeah oh I'm low on testosterone so I'll just get a shot or I'll take it exogenously right or you know I'll take growth hormone or whatever it is and I've solved the problem as Americans we always want to improve numbers on a piece of paper right whether it's our income or whether it's how much we're lifting in the gym or how many miles we've run so hormones are no different and guys get very competitive too it's like sometimes they'll they'll see their number like oh man my testosterone is 650 I feel great and then they find out someone else has 800 or like well wait a minute how come now how come that person has so much I go you just said you feel great you know who cares what the other number is this is the new this is the new like pissy contest you call as your buyer which like you were happy to tell you tell someone else's number just like your income could be it was like I want make 300 thousand a year I feel great and then you find out your neighbor makes five hundred thousand all of a sudden three hundreds not enough now and what does it matter exact all of your other hormonal levels are thrown out of whack or or you know that interplay isn't functioning properly so you really have to look at it and this is what you've done and what I want to kind of learn more about that sure is go to the go to the source go to the origin and kind of an Ayurvedic perspective of understanding that the body works as a system and interplay of all of these systems work together as a whole and that when there's an imbalance you can't just supplement to cure that impotence but you have to get at the root cause of what is contributing to that yeah yes exactly you want to address the big picture and then supplements come into play supplementally so with the big picture with hormones you have to look at what are the master control hormones what are the hormones that have the most impact on everything else because testosterone that's a downstream hormone that's way down the line it's not a master control hormone so for both men and women it's leptin its insulin to some extent growth hormone to some extent adrenaline but definitely leptin and insulin being the most and out of leptin and insulin it's leptin that's definitely the master control so we're all familiar with insulin and insulin resistance right like but but let's talk about leptin that's that's sort of the bastard step of the master hormones what is leptin do why is it important leptin is our fuel gauge it's just like with our car we don't have to wonder when to fill up we know when we're low and we know when we're filled up so you don't go to the gas station and just put gas in and then wait for it to overflow and say okay I have enough now and you don't wait until you're you run out of gas on the side of the road to realize okay I should have filled up so what leptin does is it's in fat cells and it communicates with the brain it lets us know when to stop eating so when you start eating a meal leptin starts rising and when rep leptin reaches a certain points you get the shut off signal meaning that you've derived enough nutrition from the food you're eating anything you bet you consume more is gonna result in nutrients spillover you go beyond this it's just gonna go into store body fat so shut off right now now people are hearing this going man that sounds like an incredible thing to have I don't have it but it sounds like a great thing I got last time then I would need it much yeah well that's what people supplement with leptin well that's when people started thinking they go they go how do I I go the thing is is that people that are overweight they don't have a deluxe in deficiency they have a humongous amount of leptin production what they don't have is leptin sensitivity just like insulin resistance they have leptin resistance so the leptin signals not getting to the brain the receptors are dysfunctional exactly and that can be from stress that can be from poor diet you're eating so much garbage there's so much of what we eat is not even real food our body doesn't even recognize it as food so it just wears leptin receptors they just get tired and weaker and weaker and weaker to the point where they don't respond at all and now you just have this feeling that your stomach is a bottomless pit doesn't matter how much I eat I'm not content I can just keep going do you think that that's part and parcel of why you know people that have chronic obesity struggle so much with weight loss and keep on off yeah 100% another thing with leptin that's that's really troublesome is that when you have leptin resistance it lowers your metabolic rate because even though you're in this this state of consuming excess calories to your brain you're deficient so it's like well look we're not getting the nutrition we need so let's just go ahead and slow down all metabolic functions so any energy that was going to be allocated towards growth hormone production testosterone DHA is shut off because those are not survival hormones those are basically thriving hormones when you feel great during the position of luxuries like yeah let's get your sex drive up so you can go procreate but they're not survival hormones so now your body is going to conserve whatever energy it can just for everyday existence just getting by right so now you're hungry all the time and then you're tired all the time and then on top of that you're many more yeah exactly you would think that when you eat more your metabolic rate goes up but when you have leptin resistance that's not the case so you're consuming more than you have ever had and you're not burning any of it and it's not being allocated properly to useful you're as hungry as ever yeah and your body is telling you I'm undernourished exactly so mister but your brain can't see you in the mirror right so if you're looking you're overweight and you're in the mirror you're looking yourself going okay I have excess energy reserves everywhere that's really what stored body fat is it's just excess energy in case of famine comes right where we're sin some ways were created to survive famines so which we store our energy easily as a result of that so I would imagine it's also not as simple as that I mean if you have a dysfunctional digestive system over here if you're if your gut you know if your microbiome is screwed up and you're not able to absorb the nutrients that you're getting which might that's a bit problem as well digestion is a huge problem that's one of the ways to improve EPS insulin Center leptin sensitivity is most of us eat too fast and I'm definitely guilty of that myself you're in a hurry you just gobble down something you barely chewing it you really want to chew 30 to 40 times with every bite but if you do that it's gonna take a long time to eat but that's not a bad thing mm-hmm because III tend to be a big dinner guy that's my biggest meal yeah I mean I have this huge plate right and sometimes you just want to get through it quickly so you can get back to whatever you're doing sometimes you're just thinking about dessert you're gonna have afterwards so you could let me get through this so I can get to that coconut ice cream in the fridge so you tend to eat faster than you should but if you slow it down and are more mindful like tic not on the Buddhist monk he has this whole philosophy of being extremely mindful when you eat he goes eating an orange can be a form of meditation yeah you just peel it back and very good just take pleasure in what you're doing and if you're with people why not pause have a good conversation rather than everyone's eating and looking at their phone the whole time and what is that that process of extending the digestion you know sort of time curve what is the impact on that on microbiome health well two things two good things happen here and I'll come right back to that two things happen one you're going to extract a lot more nutrition from the food you're eating you need to have the saliva mix with the food so you're gonna get way more you're gonna be way more energized to you're giving yourself time so that you're knocking it gets that bloated feeling that just worn down sluggish feeling like a lot of people have to take a nap right after they eat because they're eating way too fast you're not giving yourself enough time also you're giving time for the leptin signal to get to your brain because you're eating so fast leptin is telling you to you you ate so much so quickly that by the time left and told your brain to shut off to stop eating you've already gone way past this or plus point well if you slow it down you have time for that signal the satiety signal to get to your brain so you're not going to over consume either it's one of the other benefit right there that's one argument that's used against drinking smoothies yeah you know that recently yeah yeah I mean there's a there's a certain action within the the medical community the nutrition community and even the the vegan plant-based community that smoothies are no no bueno because you really need to take that time to digest the foods you're eating but the counterpoint to that for me is that as an athlete like I'm not gonna sit down in the morning and eat a massive salad like I'm just either I'm gonna get the nutrients in a smoothie or I'm gonna just not do it exactly and it's a great way to get a ton of super dense high nutrient high you know phyto-chemicals oh yeah that's in your body in an expeditious way I'm definitely in that and the blending is sort of a digestive process actually I think I actually think all the the negatives that are brought up are actually positives when it comes to smoothies that goes predigested okay that's good especially for someone already has digestive stress now it's less than your body has to were less weight loss is the priority I suppose yeah I think someone brought that up it might have been on Joe Rogan show I think Joey Diaz brought that up where he said that he stopped drinking smoothies because I think when something about blending the fruits your body absorbs it differently and if you eat it whole yeah I don't know about that but I think I don't know there's a big difference between a smoothie that's packed with kale spinach beets hemp seeds flax seeds blueberries versus the one that's you know all coconut milk and peanut butter and you know you're taking in 2,000 calories like that's different exactly different animals so when somebody says a smoothie that can mean anything yeah exactly I mean I I do what you said I pack it with greens are you ginger cinnamon nutmeg cacao powder protein powder flax seeds hemp seeds so for me it's a very convenient way to get a ton and nutrition in early in the day because like you I'm not a big appetite guy in the morning I get up I want to get my day going and then I think also in terms of consuming it too fast what i do is i dilute it a little bit more than most people do so it's probably about 64 ounces and then i just drink one glass at a time right I don't just down it all and then they arcade yeah yeah I think I think you can just take the same strategy I just mentioned they're just slowed it down to just take one class at a time dilute it a little bit more that's what I do I'll do one glass and then I'll thermos the rest and I and I just take it with me and I sip it throughout the morning that just keeps my energy and it keeps the appetite up yeah it makes me feel good some workouts I like being on an empty stomach sprinting for example I do ten hundred yard dash is a couple times a week and I've always found that that I like doing on an empty stomach but if I'm lifting heavy weights intermittent fasting doesn't work on that day I'm not gonna go into the gym and try to deadlift 500 pallets for reps and haven't had a thing to eat that day rice is not happening alright so back to leptin yeah so what are the things that that let's say you you have leptin resistance or you struggle with your appetite like you're hearing this and you're like yeah that's me yeah how do we write that ship and and get that regulated properly okay so we'll talk about the quality of food in a second but just a meal frequency planning taking longer stretches in between meals is gonna help a lot of people and it doesn't have to be extreme such as and intermittent fasting where you sleep eight hours and then you don't eat for eight hours so it's sixteen hours without eating some people do great on that they feeling like a million bucks others they're just they're just this is not gonna work for them what you can do and what will work for everyone essentially is let's say three to four meals a day with at least four to six hours in between each meal so let's say for the average person three meals a day I mean that's what most of us are used to your breakfast lunch dinner so six hours in between each meal what that allows is these insulin receptors and leptin receptors to have a break because when you're eating constantly they're constantly working as well so you increase the sensitivity in between meals with longer stretches that's interesting I mean that cuts across the philosophy of just grazing throughout the day as opposed to sitting down for people do all that to but those are generally people that don't have any kind of leptin resistance or anything like that those are athletes such as yourself you know people that are training really hard it's a different story so I think it sometimes it's a mistake when people look at what athletes do going okay so and so in the UFC's five times a day I'm gonna start doing that too you have to keep a new I can't take into account they train three times a day and that's their whole lifestyle rolling around that I mean you can probably make the more frequent meal approach work but for many people what they're gonna find is if you miss one of those meals you get a blood sugar drop you get really tired now now you're basically making your body less you're making it more you're never going to store body fat or not going as much because you're always focused on the calories that are coming in and if you don't get one of those hits then you feel the negative consequences that's what I always found with myself when I did really frequent eating right so so in other words it's it's trying to create a little bit of metabolic resiliency by taking these breaks right right exactly and then you know several hours so you basically go to stored body fat in between each meal as well because those are pretty long stretches so after a couple hours the hormones decline and you go okay we need to pull from stored body fat to keep our blood sugar level stable so now that's when another hormone kicks in the icky or ghrelin which is a powerful inducer of growth hormone as well and that's a hunger hormone that lets you know case time to start eating again mm-hmm but it's also good to experience a little bit of hunger in between me I'm not talking about ravenous hunger were you ready to pass out yeah but just a certain level of hunger is not a bad thing that's the other thing that a lot of us get paranoid about especially those of us that grew up when I did in 80s and 90s where you would read the magazines to look at anytime you have hunger you're a cannibalizing muscles issue I first started doing the warrior diet are you familiar with that or ehof Meckler he's the author of that he basically made intermittent fasting fashionable before it became fashionable this is back he maybe in 1998 or so and he wrote about this going the entire day without eating or just having light meals very light meal such as a salad or a few nuts but essentially a water fest for the most part and then over consuming in the evening and this this website tea nation put this article about and at that time especially this is when everyone is deep into five meals a day seven meals a day some even more than that eight meals a day some would recommend waking up in the middle of at night and having a protein shake what do you have to go to the bathroom have a protein shake right there down that because I purposely yeah a lot of us did that because we're like oh cool I'm gonna get more muscle growth by taking that little protein shake head right people really got crazy with it but when you when I started doing his strategy of essentially no eating during the day I just I just worked into that it was amazing how much more energy you had initially at least for me because now you don't have to allocate any time towards eating so you're just focused on other things and I would find that I'm actually I wasn't hungry I would get hungry when actually if I started snacking then I would get hungry so it was actually easier for me to go the whole day without eating then it would be if I actually started tried if I had to have a few light meals that would make me more hungry now I'm not saying this is the best way to go but what I bring this example up that you realize that your body is a lot more adaptable and resilient than we realize you're not gonna just cannibalize muscle tissue just because you went a couple hours about eating so it's like just like the whole narrative of post-workout nutrition right II let go if you don't give something in that window of opportunity that 45 minutes you know that workouts a waste and when there's the only study on it shows that if you get a meal within 4 hours of the workout you get full recovery so even that is just clever marketing and generally it's usually coming from a supplement company yeah it's interesting how these these ideas get planted at our heads and become canon right before we really fully understand what's going on and how they shift yeah it was always you know within 30 minutes that's what that's your zone but your body's most receptive to you know receive that kind of nutrition right and now we're I think at the very beginning stages of people starting to understand the benefits of fasting intermittent fasting water fasting and you're seeing all these people online who are trying different modalities and variations of this and sharing their experience and this is really a new media alternative media like YouTube so right thing right like we're hearing a lot about this no on the nightly news no not at all but if you're online and you're paying attention to trends and health this is this is forefront at the moment I mean I know Tim shieff just you know Tim shieff is the new Ninja Warrior guy oh yeah sure he just did a 35 days water fast or something like that when he blogged every single day of the experience and I had Valter Longo in here talking about the fasting mimicking diet and the rice such and Panda who's a you know doctor down in San Diego who's doing a lot of incredible work in this area and people are getting hip to this and it's cool to watch people experiment with it and and share the results and I think there's still a lot that we need to learn about it but this idea that you can't go more than three or four hours without eating is insane right we're all of us we're over fueled and undernourished like now right right are we starving or are we obese well right both yeah exactly most people the last thing you have to worry about is starving you have so much excess energy that you could live off of that for probably a month right a lot of people probably could do the I'm not recommending someone listening just go not eat for 40 days you would definitely want to do that under some kind of supervision works you do it at all but the fact that you can do it and survive that that'll tell you something about the way we look at food is a lot different than reality really is is that yeah missed a couple meals it's not the biggest deal in the world yeah and and I think we need to look at it from a broader context than just muscle mass loss or fat loss right Walter long I was talking about how it stimulates tissue regeneration stem cell growth that's what it'll kill cancer cells yeah you know but but create you know brand new cells right healthy cells and I'm speaking out of school and you know I'm an idiot I don't know there are very smart people that are looking at this and and and discovering that there are some pretty cool things that go on when a growth hormone goes way up when you fast insulin sensitivity improves a great deal too there was a doctor on Carlin or show superhuman radio and he said just one 24-hour fast can reset your insulin sensitivity so essentially I don't know if this is just pervasive across the board or categorical across the board but you can either get someone out of insulin resistance in a 24 hour fast or at least improve it dramatically and that's just one 24 hour and that's huge given that you know pretty soon 50% of America is gonna be diabetic or pre-diabetic and this is all about insulin resistance yes this is something that they've been treating patients TrueNorth for a long time you know these clinics you can go to yeah you know and they they put you on these supervised fast for better either chronically obese or have these chronic health conditions and they see some pretty amazing results oh yeah so again more to be learned about that but all right so back to leptin is there are there certain foods that we should be eating that can contribute to you know sort of making sure that our leptin receptors are functioning properly I think I think the more nutrition you eat the less calories you actually have to consume and the more nutrient-dense your food the less energy you have to waste trying to extract everything you need so when you eat so that we both do you can dive so if you focus on a whole food plant-based diet eating a lot of fruits and vegetables legumes nuts and seeds these are all really healthy foods that are giving you a lot of nutrition without taking in an excessive amount of calories so focusing on a real food as much as possible I always like having some kind of balance of macronutrients I know some people say you don't need to waste any energy on that and I don't think you need to be overly pedantic about it but I think it's a good idea to have protein source a good low glycemic carbohydrates source and some healthy fats at every meal and that could be as simple as one of my evening stor fries could be garbanzo beans with an avocado added in or hemp seeds or pistachios after I do the store fry mushrooms tomatoes a variety of vegetables put some spices on there and now you're getting a balance you're getting everything right and so when the leptin is functioning properly the levels are appropriate and the receptivity is there what happens downstream well now yeah of energy now that leptin is thriving you have all this excess energy your metabolic rate is doing really well and you have energy that can be allocated towards other things such as improving testosterone improving DHEA improving downstream hormones because now you're more in a thriving state and those are thriving hormones in particular DHEA which is the ultimate stress management hormone and without optimal DHEA you're not going to have optimal testosterone even if your testosterone levels look pretty good compared on the range that people look at it can still be improved dramatically with DHEA because DHEA protects testosterone from cortisol cortisol is actually an anti inflammatory hormones we always hear about cortisol as a stress hormone and yeah that's what it does but when you have inflammation damaged either from maybe poor food choices or you worked out hard cortisol comes in as an anti inflammatory hormone to address that inflammation there's something wrong with that but the problem is is that when you're always in this inflammatory stage you're always increasing cortisol and if you're always increasing chorus though you're not in an anabolic State anymore DHEA is depleted and without DHEA to protect testosterone cortisol is gonna nullify your testosterone and that's when you get into this depleted state of your sex drive is poor your mood is poor you feel like your body's falling apart you're weaker instead of getting stronger these workout you're getting weaker that's the hole that that I could fall in from oh yeah I'm with the kind of training that I do and the workload that I shoulder and you know just family life and everything like that is I just fire on all cylinders and I'm just like I can get I'll get it done you know get out all that I'll crush this heat workout and I'll go right into the work day and family and all of that and and on some level I think it it this is totally anecdotal but it almost I feel like it almost feeds my adrenaline like yeah yeah you become addicted to it but then I get into this chronically depleted state right right and I don't know if that qualifies as adrenal fatigue how you would define that but I know that my hormonal balance gets out of whack because I tried to push myself too hard I try to do too much and eating a clean plant-based whole food diet is great but that's not the whole oh no no it's not the whole thing the thing else though is there's nothing wrong with what you're doing you're a successful just success sex driven person and I am as well so there's nothing wrong with pushing yourself hard and wanting to achieve impressive feats the thing is that you have to balance the equation so if I work out hard four times a week I need to do some restoration activities too I get a massage once a week I started doing that maybe a couple years ago and once I once I realized the benefits of that are really I'm not talking about just a little fluff down she gets in there and works out probably Active Release yeah exactly so any any problem you created that week from your workouts it's getting addressed with Justin just build up it doesn't multiply with successive workouts I'll have days where I just go to a spa sit in the hot tub steam room you know just relaxation strategies do joint mobility Qigong type stuff every day go take long walks on my dogs clear my head now you got to do restoration activities as well so you can push yourself as hard as you want and you'll be fine you just have to balance the equation yet the other things I'm not so good yeah I'm not I'm not the best either it's actually that pneumonia story I'll tell you that but I've but because I had such a negative experience with that pneumonia now it makes me I realize the consequences of not balancing this equation and those always you get older I'm 44 now and I still like to lift heavy weights and I still have goals I'm pursuing so I can I can do those make sure that my hormones are optimal or if they're doing well and then I make sure that the restoration is there so I get the optimal recovery and how do you gauge that through blood work for hormones there's there's two other things you can do you can do saliva work you can do blood work now you'll hear pros and cons from different experts some will say they prefer saliva because it tells you what's going on on the tissue level others will say they prefer blood because it's more accurate they say oo saliva is not accurate because we concentrate a lot of hormones in our saliva as it is so you're gonna get two schools of thought there the blood work everyone is used to doing that that's standardized the problem is is that if you get your testosterone measured via blood for example it tells you what's floating around the blood stream mm-hmm doesn't necessarily mean anything useful is happening though is he getting picked up by androgen receptors and you may have a lot of testosterone floating around the blood stream that actually may be a negative thing and may be so much floating around the blood stream because it's not getting utilized at all mm-hmm because those of us who work out hard we often have low levels of free testosterone yes our based on the difference between total testosterone and testosterone okay total is basically your life savings this is exact this is the total amount of testosterone you're producing free is what you actually have access to so you can imagine let's say you have a million dollars in the bank but you can only pull out a hundred thousand so you have access to ten percent of the million dollars free testosterone tends to be low with people that work out hard and in particular professional athletes now there's a couple reasons why one people will say well they're under a lot of stress and so forth okay that's part of the reason the other reason is that androgen receptors are pulling it out of your bloodstream to be utilized by the muscles liver cells etc brain so that the free level may be low because you're actually utilizing it so it's not just floating around the blood right so so an indication that you have low free testosterone isn't necessarily determinative not anything yeah so you don't want it to be at the very bottom of the scale I say the scale is 8 to 25 you want to be around 12 13 now if you're lower than that it may be because you had a hard workout the day before maybe you didn't sleep well the night before there could be a lot of factors so if you want to get a more accurate number you could just take a week off from training rest up a little bit and then see what if you're free levels low under that circumstance then you have some problems you want to make sure that you put some things in the play to increase it but if it's in a good range at that point and then let's say it's lower during a week when you're working out really hard then it basically just supports what I just said it's lower because it's being picked up it's being utilized and then the other enemy people often bring up is sex hormone binding globulin they say all your free testosterone is low because sex hormone-binding globulin is attaching to it and making it inactive and that's completely incorrect - I mean six hormone binding globulin is a transporter hormone so it's what takes testosterone the places where it can be utilized so having good levels of that is not necessarily a bad thing at all in fact it's a sign of a good thing and then you have to ask yourself why would we have a hormone whose sole purpose is to make another hormone inactive you know we just produced six home run by neglecting one for what purpose oh so we can't use testosterone well that doesn't really make sense but now people understand it more as a transporter hormone where it's actually attaching to testosterone in taking it places not making it inactive that's interesting and so when you get blood work done does he tell you like this is your free testosterone yeah darker and this is your total testosterone yeah and so if what so so what does it mean if you're your total testosterone is low or high okay if your total testosterone is low that means you're not producing as much as you should be producing now some will say the total doesn't matters to free that matters and that's not true either because the more total you're making the more free you'll build actualize you know if my total is only 200 how much of that am I gonna build a free up to even utilize if you only gonna bail to free up a small percentage so the higher your total the more opportunity you have to benefit from utilizing more of the free testosterone I see and and what contributes to low testosterone stress is number 100 percent is stress and most guys are pushing themselves so hard that you're in this stress state all the time and every time cortisol is going up your testosterone is going down this is the way it goes so stress is the number one thing and like I said it's not even so I should say it's not even so much stress it's just not balancing that equation you can push yourself hard there's no reason not to you so a lot of times when people hear me talking about this kind of stuff they're saying what do you recommend that I just sit around do nothing I got no of course not I work out hard I push my business hard I have goals I have a lot of different nonprofits I I like to supporting I want to put myself out there and make things happen I'm just gonna give myself the tools I'm gonna take supplements like I've designed I have a natural testosterone booster which is amazing for athletes because anytime you're working out hard your testosterone is going down it's not going up from your workouts so if it worst case scenario it's gonna keep my testosterone from going down and best-case scenario it's actually going to go up while I'm in this adrenalin stay awhile I'm working out hard while I'm pushing myself right so that's where supplements come into play sleep is number one if you want to improve your testosterone and growth hormone you got to get sleep in and I like to get at least eight hours of deep sleep at night and my lifestyle is organized in a way where I can do that you know I work at home I don't travel much anymore so even if I stay up late doing whatever I'm doing whether it's playing cards on the strip or just working on my business at home I can get eight hours in no problem you can spend one thing yeah you know kids or anything like that dogs week that's one of the things that becomes an increasing struggle for me and I don't know whether it's just age or whether it's something I'm not doing properly but I no matter what time I go to sleep at night I'm pretty much going to wake up at the same time and yeah yeah like earlier and earlier as I get older and so it becomes incumbent upon me to be more and more diligent about making sure that I go to bed early because if I go to bed early then I that's the best chance I have for getting eight hours right and also having you a diligent pre-sleep routine yes that's very important which I give myself like a C I'm pretty good sometimes and then you know it's like I'm out late I just get home when I go right to bed I go through phases I there's a there's a really good program it's a meditation program my life's called holosync only people reused that and you can download these programs into your phone and then you can play it while you're sleeping they have one that's that you listen to you before you go to sleep right it gets you relaxed and then you put one on while you're sleeping so it just stays on the whole tumbler I've done certain things like that are they certain tones that are that are supposed to trigger brainwaves yeah I forget what it's called binaural or something like that I forget exactly the terminology but that's what it's supposed to do and you you definitely feel like something's happening it could be totally psychological it could be just be a total placebo effect but you feel like something's happening in a positive way you just get more relaxed maybe it's just the fact of of focusing on just that you put these this meditation in some headphones you just sit there and listen to it maybe just that act alone is relaxing because you're not looking at your computer you're not talking anyone you're just focused on the moment right there right but that kind of stuff makes a difference because I'm not a good sleeper either I'm not someone who can just watch four hours of TV then just go right to bed just shut it off or it can be really active and then shut it off I have to go through down phases where I get into a relaxed state mhm and then the challenge for me is falling asleep and then staying asleep because I wake up really easily any little thing yeah I didn't know wakes me up and then I take a long time to fall back asleep mm-hmm so I'm getting better I'm getting better at this taking magnesium before bedtime I gave I don't want to plug every single one of my products I have a transdermal magnesium and zinc and MSM and the MSM acts as a permeability agent to help get the magnesium and zinc more into the skin but magnesium through the skin absorbs better than taking it orally and especially on the cellular level and people will find that if they put on maybe an hour before they go to bed you just start get some muscle relaxant - magnesium and a lot of people who work out hard are magnesium deficient and magnesium magnesium is crucial for testosterone free testosterone growth hormone and insulin sensitivity we get a lot of it through our food kakaw in hemp seeds I'm a big hemp seeds guy you get a ton of magnesium in there but some supplemental on top of that some supplements that thing just to give yourself some insurance whether it's mine or another option some sinc magnesium B vitamins certain things I think are used use worth adding on top of the equation to make sure no I I do like magnesium powder in warm water or tea Epsom oh yeah drinking yeah like the call it's called call yeah I think that's magnesium citrate that's great is it and so is there a vent is there an added benefit by doing it transdermally I think you get a better absorption rain so you're just gonna be more impactful but Xia may is a supplement that many people use and it works well if you're taking an oral magnesium supplement and you find that it's helping you relax and it's working well for you then keep doing it does it have something to do with melatonin regulation as well melatonin being one of the other master hormone yeah yeah I definitely helps with melatonin production magnesium is important for that as well something about putting magnesium through the skin also improves DHEA more than taking it orally there's some kind of enzyme in the skin that's activated so that's one of the other benefits that's interesting yeah it's not quite clear it's not quite understood a hundred percent but there's definitely a difference with the DHEA production via transdermal magnesium versus oral magnesium on the subject of DHEA I mean that's a big one that people point to if you're vegan say well you know if you're vegan like good luck you're gonna be screwed with DHA DHA on a vegan people say oh you're not oh you're a vegan what about your DHEA levels once you've knocked off you know it's down in the pad yeah but I've heard it come up before well I like it like Joe Rogan made a point when he interviewed Lois Simmons now I love Lois Simmons I think he's the best rent coach out there powerlifting parallel team genius but he was talking to him but I don't know why it even came into the conversation because Louie's not a vegan or anything but Jo said Oh a lot of these vegan bodybuilders take testosterone you know because they're not they're not gonna don't have enough saturated fat in their diet to get the testosterone production through food and that that's in corrects incorrect literally but it's also incorrect for other reasons one there are sources of saturated fat if we feel we needed coconut oil cat cows so forth right but you don't need saturated fat to fuel this hormone chain you know any healthy fat will do it whether it's olive oil if you don't want to take oils just get whole food fat sources as well so whether it has fat in it yeah exactly and even if we do need saturated fat it has some of that as well and I don't think you need saturated fat to fuel this hormone chain I just think you need good fats in general whether it's flax seeds hemp seeds cashews and doesn't matter so you don't think being on a plant-based diet has any deleterious impact on your body's ability to produce regulate whatever the proper terminology is DHEA and then there's DHA also DHA is a that's an essential fatty acid metabolite and that's that's an interesting discussion too because a lot right now fish oil is all the rage right right and I'm not a big fan of fish oil at all I think fish oil is at the at best it's not causing any problems at worse it's causing problems and I'll get into that fish oil is full of EPA or DHA and EPA right so these are downstream essential fatty acids that's all fine and good but if you take too much of these it does lower inflammation but it does so by suppressing the immune system so unless you have an autoimmune disorder that's not something you want to do you don't want to suppress your immune system rather than suppress the immune system the lower inflammation let's lower for let's lower the reason for inflammation to be high in the first place let's avoid inflammatory foods let's avoid inflammatory habits etc and then if you want to lower the need for inflammation you take systemic enzymes that lowers inflammation c-reactive protein in particular which is a blood marker of inflammation now way more effectively in my opinion then fish oil does without the negatives so when so suppressing the immune system is not good and then thinning the blood too much is not a good thing either so I think high dose fish oil is problematic you have to remember fish oil used to be something people threw away it was a garbage byproduct of that industry all of a sudden is like hey we can make money off this thing yeah I mean it's been hyped as this panacea it's interesting that's that's a similar story to how whey protein oh yeah exactly discarded exact product that they turned into this mega billion dollars a guy named Brian Peskin he'd be great on your show I'd love to get him on my show too he is he has researched this topic of essential fatty acids exhaustively and he doesn't have a vegan bias and I'm bringing that up because he is very anti fish oil and he's very Pro plant essential fatty acid sources such as flax seeds hemp seeds etc because he goes you have alpha lanolin linoleic acid and what that is is a parent's essential fatty acid meaning that it can convert into DHA and EPA but not the other way around and you will convert ala into the downstream metabolites as needed so it's basically regulated well whereas you needed that conversion it'll happen women actually convert a lot more especially if they're pregnant because the baby needs EPA and DHA are important I don't want to diminish their importance but you don't necessarily need to supplement with them to improve those levels if you get parent essential oils you're gonna get the benefits of ala plus the downstream conversion into EPA DHA as needed that's interesting I if memory serves me I think it was Chris crecer on on Joe Rogan where they were talking about this oh yeah you saw that lb is a poor Chris was saying something about and I'm sure I'm butchering this and I'm gonna and I like Chris yeah yeah yeah he's like and he really knows a lot about a lot of stuff right you know I like him personally but if I recall correctly it had something to do with the inability of somebody on a vegan diet to to properly or efficiently do this conversion process that's that create a problem right well I mean even if that's the case there's still options marine algae there's still are options that are vegan that are sources of brain Michael Greger did a video on on fish oil and sort of debunking some you know panacea hyperbole around it and he was saying that that even like they tested a whole variety of like the cleanest the supposedly cleanest versions and they still found some pretty high levels of mercury toxicity in them yeah so even ones that were saying like we're mercury free still tested right so it's always advisable to use an algae based yeah I think so too exactly so if you're gonna go that route I really personally I don't even think that's necessary unless for some reason you've done testing and you find that you're really deficient in DHA EPA and I believe there are right I believe there are tests for that there are essential fatty acid tests but but you don't think that's really where we should be focused I don't think so I'm always I'm always focused on what the big picture is right when it comes to weightlifting I focus on compound exercises when it comes to a hormone optimization I focus on what are the master control hormones that have the most impact the downstream is met is important as well and we should address that but let's focus on the big picture and then anything we need to do supplemental we done get into I want to go back to the big picture of master hormones but but we touched on testosterone and I want to just kind of see that through sure so a lot of guys you know I'm 51 now I'm gonna be 52 soon a lot of guys in my age bracket are like well my testosterone is low and that's just because that's what happens when you get older right or you know I'm genetically predisposed to low testosterone and you know this is just is what it is and my doctors recommending hormone replacement therapy I know a lot of guys that are doing this right now so again this is something that's specifically focused on just this one downstream hormone right but what do you say to the person who says look I got low tea there's nothing I can do about it it just is what it is well one if you're gonna go that route that's fine that's your choice but just make sure you're working with someone like dr. more at Gordon's someone very knowledgeable or not dr. Nick Delgado people that know what they're doing so that they can make sure that you're getting the full benefits of hormone optimization not just replacing testosterone make sure everything else is working in that Orchestra you're probably gonna have to replace a few other hormones to pregnenolone DHEA in particular but if you focus on on regulating the master hormones ya downstream effects should take care of it so I think so I mean certain people those there's a couple things one you know at a certain age I mean body would go low when you get yeah I said a certain age this there's gonna be an inevitable decline so then you have to ask yourself okay I'm 60 now you know how people come to me they're going look I'm 70 I've been diagnosed with low testosterone but I don't want to shut down my own production I get well look you're 70 you're your own production the store has been closed for a while your production is is very poor let's be really honest there and how much time do you want to waste trying to figure out how to get it back naturally even if that's if that's even possible and I've had older people use my natural testosterone booster with great results but a lot of people that are at a certain age it's just not going to come back to arraign to well to a level that's good for you because here's what I mean by that also is you may be seven in your total testosterone is 500 and that's considered a pretty good number but for you to feel your best this person in particular they need to be they may need to be at 8 or 900 to feel perfect or their sex drive is good their mood is good and they just feel like taking charge of the day now can that person get back there naturally let's take a look at what's going on in their lifestyle before we answer that is they are they sleeping properly if the answer is no then okay let's improve your sleep it's their diet part all right let's improve that how much stress is going on in their life let's improve that you can try to improve all those other things and then see what happens or you can have the attitude of look I don't want to change anything else you know just give me the testosterone yeah they have to modify their lifestyle habit I do uh had high cholesterol and the doctors I look we can either change your diet or we can get you on lipitor it's like okay I'll just take the lipitor all right there's a reason why that drug is so successful but at some point though you're gonna you're gonna be doing everything right and it's still not gonna be working any avail and that doesn't necessarily mean you need testosterone replacement you may need to try something like clomid which is a fertility drug that dr. mark Gordon's been using with a lot of his patients and he has them do 50 milligrams every third day and this is basically a it's an anti estrogen but a very interesting anti estrogen it lowers estrogen in the brain which signals your brain to produce more luteinizing hormone in FSH so for for some reason the low levels of estrogen in the brain signals the testes to produce more testosterone quite understand why this is the case I have a theory my theory is that for men a lot of our estrogen comes from testosterone conversion and estrogen rightthey from the aroma taste enzymes so it's possible that low levels of estrogen detected in the brain you may be trying to produce more testosterone so that you convert some of it back to estrogen but that's just my theory that's a separate point but what clone made he'll have before even going the TRT route they'll try this because this drives up your own production of testosterone which is what you want to do right and also it fuels the entire bus Assam I go well what about DHA and pregnenolone does it improve those as well he goes yeah that's what we've seen so it's not just improving testosterone it's improving the entire chain so that's a more comprehensive switch now there's some that say there's some side effects some say that's there's ocular potential eye damage that can occur which he says it's not the case dr. Gordon that's only if you go way too high so again these are these are drugs these are medicines this is not something where you want to say wow that Columbus sounds interesting let me go buy some from offshore start playing around with it yeah let's be very clear like I'm not a doctor I don't play one on the internet them yeah Melia is like I'm not recommending anything here I think anybody who's listening to this needs to seek out the best professional advice they can get yeah I'm more of a researcher an enthusiast I'm just hoping to get people to start the conversation with it yeah so when they hear this they go you know what that's not something I've ever looked into I need to look into that and I need to find someone that can guide me on that process and they're focused on you know building their strength or losing weight right that's kind of where it ends and you know like we said at the outset like this is a complicated array of many systems that work together and yeah this system of hormone regulation doesn't get enough bandwidth which is well no it doesn't talk to you today we were talking with your crew I go you know hormones have way more effect on how you think in field and the other way around so if you're depressed and you're thinking let me just think a certain way and I'll feel better or you can improve your hormonal profile and you'll automatically feel better so that to me is just more efficient on the subject of testosterone is there a biological rationale or imperative as to why it would reduce as you get older and what is the if any the long-term is there a long-term negative implication to taking it exogenously or yeah therapeutically yeah those are good questions I mean never want I'd like you should do it it's like you know you're messing with this system yeah and you are what are you actually you're gonna repress your body's own ability to produce it right endogenously that's right but what else is it doing right suddenly boosting your system with this incredibly powerful hormone well apparently has a lot of health benefits it improves heart health and many other things improves brain health now they're more and more research is coming out about the importance of testosterone with pushing off dementia with any kind of decline in cognitive health so I think I don't think there's any negatives if you're doing it properly so in other words under a doctor's supervision so but if it's going too high in there and you're you're having these chemical reactions that your individual endocrinology is having is having a negative impact you want to catch those things early and that's what a good doctor will deal they'll go okay your liver enzymes are too high so we need to reduce this or your converting way too much to a stretch in that happens a lot people take testosterone and their levels go way up and now their estrogen goes way up too so now they got to get you on something else to block that conversion of course your choice it gets complex right yeah it's kind of like you go to the doctor and you go my cholesterol is too high then you get a lipitor and then you go you know and then look at one of the negatives of lipitor is you start losing memories and you start having a decline in sex drive or total shutdown of sex function so now you got to go back and go okay my sex drive is not working okay well here some by agra now you're on two medications then you gotta take something else for the negatives of that so it could become I'm not saying that TRT should be the first line of defense I don't think it should be you know I don't use testosterone replacement therapy and I'm 44 and my testosterone levels are great but I thought but I don't think it should be ruled out as an option either I think some people are in such a depleted state like for example these people dr. mark Gordon works with who have PTSD from head trauma think about how many of us have had head trauma that we just don't think about now I went snowboarding when I was 15 one time and I had a really nasty fall my head boom hit the ice that could have had a negative impact or no more hormone production a lot of us have been in car accidents where we had some kind of it doesn't take much you know the brain is delicate so if you have any kind of damage to your pituitary gland you're not going to produce testosterone growth hormone naturally and certainly not to the full benefit of your potential right Wow all right let's talk about insulin let's uh you know maybe we'll well debunk a few myths I mean it's impossible to talk about insulin and insulin resistance without the subject of sugar coming up and diabetes right and your experience in your research and everything that you've learned like what is contributing to insulin resistance and why is this a master or hormone and how can we best ensure that we're regulating it properly it's a complex subject because there's so many intelligent people that have different views on the topic so I can understand why the average person gets confused you know on one hand you have people like dr. Nick Delgado who say that high levels of fat caused the insulin receptors to be weakened so that they can't process glucose properly and now you have high glucose levels as a result Neal Barnard says something similar yeah and I dr. Gork Davis I think you've had him on the show you know that he basically talks about it because it's not sugar is not the problem it's your but insulin can handle sugar the problem is when you have way too much fat in his warts in particular animal fat that dulls these receptors now you can't handle the sugar right now and when these guys come out and say this it provokes quite the response oh yeah like I love Garth I love Neal like I trust these people and I know like both of them have done extensive research right and I believe them but that's anathema to the conventional wisdom that this is a sugar thing and a sugar thing only well I think I think it's probably more complex than either one person's right or wrong all the time you know they may be right in certain circumstances while other people who talk about high sugar consumption being a prom they could be right regarding other people in certain certain circumstances meaning that some people could have pre-diabetes and insulin resistance because of high sugar consumption this is the way they're metabolizing it other people could have the same diet and not have any issues right so we're all very complex different things we're going to have different biochemical reactions no matter what the case is I think the way to to cut through all of this debate is to look at the common ground of let's focus on reducing garbage food because that has no benefit maybe it's not causing diabetes maybe it's not causing my glucose but it has other problems let's just cut it out anyway because what the last thing we want people thinking is that okay sugars not the prom well I'll just cut back on fatty need a lot of sugars like that's not good either yeah clear life I'm not saying and I would never say that that just eating sugar is Meli I'm addict you know and when I say sugar I'm talking about refined [ __ ] like that yeah but can we can we at least say that like this idea that you're gonna get diabetes from eating fruit is no it's ridiculous I pad and I've had I've seen people posts up such as oh here's a candy bar no difference between that and fruit I got so absurd I had a guy at the dog park asked me he goes you know I love eating a banana every day but someone told me it's really bad for you I go come on huh I go banana one banana is bad for you let's let's get real here so no I think I think this carbohydrate phobia that society has right now and I noticed that at least when I lived in Los Angeles I noticed that bread stores never made it hi great harvest didn't have a location out here because everybody's on this low-carb cake or at least they think they are I mean it's kind of like the whole low-fat crazy never really happen people go and remember when everyone did low-fat and everyone got fatter and it didn't work yeah but no one did it exactly but no one did it what they did is added more low-fat packaged foods to their existing high-fat diet super highly processed so nobody nobody cut nobody cut out all this fat and just drank orange juice and cornflakes they did that on top of everything else this whole low-fat craze has never happened now I'm all about balance and it doesn't have to be 30% this 40% that 30% that but I think you we all need the older macronutrients some are gonna do better on more fat less carbohydrates some more carbohydrates less fat you don't know until you try I find that for heavy weight lifting I like to have a good amount of fat in my diet and I just I don't keep track of this stuff I just add it to meals and so forth I just made I make sure I have good fatty sources so I think that with insulin resistance though let's cut back in all the crappy food that we shouldn't be indulging in anyway let's start there because that's definitely not helping just says the way it causes leptin resistance leptin and insulin are intertwined so if you have leptin resistance you have insulin resistance and if you improve leptin sensitivity you improve insulin sensitivity so let's do all the same things that we just mentioned for leptin now when it comes to carbohydrates if you meet a lot of if you're out let's say you're on a plant-based diet and you're eating legumes nuts and seeds fruits and vegetables and you do it for 90 days oil free and your blood sugar doesn't improve which I would find hard to believe I would think your blood sugar would improve a lot but let's say it doesn't okay at that point let's start playing around because 90 days is long enough to see whether you should have an improvement probably don't even need that long but it's certainly long enough but if you have a traumatic brain injury stressed out and you're not sleeping yeah exact you can eat whatever you want but that's also true see that's the other thing that people don't think about is that it may not even be what you're eating it could be everything else that's going on in your life so where it gets all right so so cut out all the lousy processed foods longer stretches in between meals just like that improves leptin that improves insulin sensitivity intermittent fasting improves insulin sensitivity a great deal as well there so you may find that your blood sugar improves a lot now you have to be careful especially depending on you know what kind of diabetic you are some if they if they go too long without a meal they can have a blood sugar crash exact yeah that can be a problem as well but let's just say you're somebody who's maybe teetering on the precipice of being pre-diabetic or perhaps you're even insulin resistant and you don't even know it like what are the downstream you know setting diabetes aside like what are the downstream implications of just having sub-optimal insulin receptivity yeah when insulin doesn't work well cortisol has to come in and pick up some of the slack you know to get glucose where needs to go and then anytime you have an increase in cortisol you're gonna have a negative impact on testosterone so when insulin is not working properly cortisol comes into play and then when cortisol goes up that has a negative impact on testosterone DHEA and so forth right so that's all intertwined in that respect but all of the like the sort of top-line lifestyle protocol to regulate these master hormones seem to be the same whether it's whether it's insulin or leptin or or what are the other ones melatonin yeah melatonin is important growth hormones know the adrenaline at Ronald renal fatigue is a big thing but we're talking about adrenal fatigue earlier where you're like I'm not sure if I have it well one easy way to know whether you have it is if you wake up tired let's say you slept for eight hours and you wake up and you're still tired and you don't you have to get that cup of coffee and to go and I'm a coffee drinker I enjoy coffee but my attitude is always if you need a cup of coffee then you have a problem you should skip it if you enjoy a cup of coffee that's different in other words I wake up I'm excited I'm energetic and then I love having a cup of coffee kick back in my backyard and just get my day going right it's a nice ritual but that's not most people's experiences most people they get up they're tired you know they don't get their motor going until they get a cup of coffee it's kind of like imagine your car battery is dead every time you come home and you have to charge it in the morning to get going well that's a big inconvenience but that's what most people are doing they wake up tired they need some kind of stimulant whether it's coffee or some other stimulant redbull etc to get their day going that's extremely problematic and then what happens is your adrenals don't kick in because you want cortisol to be high in the morning and low in the evening so you're desperately trying to get the cortisol output so you can get through your day to no avail and then it happens late at night it finally kicks in and then you can now you can't sleep right so you're stuck on this vicious cycle of I'm tired I'm tired in the morning and then I'm tired all day and then just what I think I can go okay fine let me just wind down now I'll be better tomorrow boom it kicks in then you lie in bed you're going I'm just tossing and turning so Charles Poliquin has a really good strategy for him for flipping this he recommends licorice supplements and what licorice does is it actually increases cortisol and conversion into a longer-lasting cortisol so that if you take it in the morning you get a cortisol boost I mean you take it in the afternoon you get another one and then what happens is your cortisol naturally goes down and evening as a result of that flipping it and you only need to do it for about a week right we've 210 days now some will say all that increases high blood pressure it's like okay if you have high blood pressure be careful again even with supplements we want to make sure you're getting checked out before you add anything to your regimen so that's important and the other thing is there : well I thought I heard that increases estrogen I was like yeah it increases estrogen in menopausal women terrified yeah yeah you got a better look at where it's like yeah II did show that you increases estrogen with menopausal women are you a menopausal woman then you sit there for naught then you don't even in the Word of God right and it's a week to 10 days you're not getting on it for a year I've used it many times right go through periods where you just crash Riley you were talking about that sometimes you're just you just crash from doing stuff and then I'll wake up and I'm tired I'm like going man I'm just exhausted like your arms feel really heavy I hate that feeling your arms feel heavy just feel tired you're like man I don't know how I'm gonna get anything done today and then whenever that happens now though I just have a bottle on hand at all times metagenic makes a really good one it's vegan no gelatin caps and it's a tablets you just chew it it tastes like licorice I chew it just to digest it better and one tablet in the morning one in the afternoon for about ten days seven to ten days and then you're good no flips it you feel way better I'm gonna try that yeah that makes a big Poliquin is also the guy who said you couldn't be a successful athlete on a vegan diet anybody he also brought up my name in that question you prep you stop Brendan real yeah that's where I'm friends with Charles and he's been on my podcast many times and I've always had a good relationship with Charles I think he's a very smart strength coach but he comes from that old guard up you got to eat a lot of meat right strong and that's just what do you see the thing is is that we look at professional athletes when we go okay they only eat a lot of meat fair what is that the reason why they're professional athletes and performing at such a high level these people are also very genetically gifted and they put in a lot of hard work and all that meaning that they could probably have crappy diets and still perform at a very high level exactly shocked I think so we don't have enough professional AB we have a lot more now than previously that are on a vegan diet but until we have a lot more you know we can't say that yeah it doesn't work or that this is a superior way to go because we don't have enough to go on yeah I agree with that I mean I but it's changing you know you're changing a lot more and more and and I would like it's a risk like if you're coming up let's say you're you know 20 years old right you're showing huge prowess and promise in your respective sport you're being you know you're being you're the next big thing and then somebody's like well you should go vegan like that's that's all yeah that's scary so there's so much that you're wagering than that like how many people are willing to take that bet so it's a hundred percent to date it's only been like the the rare outlier who grew up vegetarian or had the hippie parents or whatever who kind of just were brought into it and it felt natural to them and so they don't feel like it's a risk side good point but that's why we need more examples and I had I just had me my delgado in here the other day yeah I just saw I started him on Instagram that's a I mean you cannot I you to find anybody with a more impressive physique sure there's no but like how old is he pretty young Gus Chico's remember how old he is yeah it looks like he's pretty young very impressive I mean yeah and in the sweetest guy he's never had me try sincerity he grew up with Hari Krishna parents really it's got a crazy certainly interesting there's a lot more than meets he's that dairy then though growing up Danny when he went vegan a couple of years ago okay so going toka vegan is new but but that's really when he stepped into bodybuilding in a big way yeah and the proof is in the pudding with that guy I mean he's like that guy's physique is insane oh it's amazing the fact that he's never eaten meat his entire life yeah and that's important that it's impossible for you to look at that and go bro you know like all those arguments go out the window but and that's why I think he's really important in this conversation but he's you know one of the few and we're just gonna see more and more and more and it's it's gonna take a long time before we reach that tipping point where a mainstream society just goes okay yeah I guess you can do that no definitely and then you can't come back to your point with a professional athlete it can be very daunting to just overhaul your diet because let's say you're a UFC fighter right and someone comes along and says hey man I think you do great on a plant-based diet you go okay that sounds good let me give it a shot and then you go to your next fighter you just get your clock clean right you just get your but kicked it's gonna be hard not to think well what did i do differently in the last cabbie maybe maybe you did a lot of things differently maybe your training was different maybe you had personal life problems going on but the one thing that's gonna stick out is oh I changed my diet that's gotta be what it is right okay and maybe it was because it takes time for your body to adjust as I'm sure you hear this all the time like well I tried it but then you know I felt like lightheaded or I felt weak or I had bloating in my stomach yeah and you know it takes the body a certain period of time - oh yes your microbiome do it just to figure out like oh I actually need to eat more calories that's a big thing I visit people think it's protein but they're actually under fuel like exactly and and this you know there's nothing wrong with a gradual I know your you know your transition was gradual very gradual yeah you know there's very few people that flick this switch and go a hundred percent yeah one day to the next and you know it's not surprising that that the body you know needs an acclamation period yeah some people do I know people that have flipped the switch and they do great and then there's other people that have done a more gradual approach myself my mother is Indian she's been vegetarian her whole life so I grew up with her as a role model for vegetarian she wasn't vegan but it was there and I ate me growing up and so when I was 15 I really got into animal rights and I knew I just had to cut this out I just want to go what happened specifically well a couple things happened its I was 15 and I was really into a band called The Crow Max and I know you know John Joseph knows cro-mags are one of my favorite bands period they had a huge impact not on just my diet but I actually majored in religious studies because I really got into Hinduism through the cro-mags even though I grew up with Divya my mother it really got into it so it was when I got into the cro-mags the bassist Harley Flanagan was the singer John wasn't in the picture at that right there's a whole drama around and I'm friends with both guys believe me I'm I know all about every facet of the drama since its inception I know every narrative of it yeah and John's one of my best friends I love it I like both guys so I'm not gonna say negative anything negative about either guy I'm really good friends with Harley and I like John a lot so here's the thing I was reading this interview with Harley on the way to Kenya because my dad worked for the International Monetary Fund and we thought it was important for us to travel internationally so he wanted to take us out to Kenya to go to safaris in Sienna in their natural habitat amazing trip so on the way they're done reading this interview with Harley Flanagan and he talks about how he was always very violent and aggressive and had all kinds of proms and that giving up meat and eating a vegetarian diet and leading this Hari Krishna lifestyle really helped him and then he said a line in there that really stuck with me he goes look we can't talk about peace and all that when you're eating a steak because that animal died in agonizing pain and you contributed to serious violence and you're trying to talk about peace so that really stuck with my mind because I've always even when I ate meat I considered myself an animal lover right I had dogs and so forth so I didn't really think about the hypocrisy of it until reading that so that was the first seed planted the second was when I was in Kenya and I saw these animals in their natural habitat and you can say well what about seeing a lion kill an animal big see what I go vegan is then what it wasn't that so much it just made me think about all the animals that don't live like that that are in factory farms that are being experimented on and so forth so that's there was another light bulb going off in my head and then I saw this movie the fly - and it's a lot of people is probably one of those forgettable movies remember nice lie I don't know if I saw the fly - the fly the original I don't think was all that great the second one I thought was really good and it touched on the topic of animal experimentation pretty profoundly well whether that was their intent or not I don't know but that's how you took it you wanna you want to get someone interested in being anti lab experiments on animals to show them that movie because there's a heartbreaking scene where this golden retriever is experimented on and mutilated and you see this animal in agonizing pain and this that get that guy who becomes the flight goes in and puts their dog down mercifully but that made me start thinking also about what actions am i doing that are contributing to laboratory experiments so anyway I just wanted to change my lifestyle so that I'm not contributing to animal suffering now I know it's in it's it's impossible to not do it to some extent just being alive right so I'm not delusional to think that I'm no longer harming any animal in any way because I've been vegan since I was 20 years old there's 25 years now but it's definitely lessening the negative impact format it's an it's an aspiration to create less harm right to kind of live in accordance with this principle of a times that comes from you know the heart that's the other thing too Hinduism and Sufism in particular really resounded with me when I got into college I really got into those things but I was when i when i first became vegetarian my mother recommended that i just keep eating fish and cut out all the other meats by vegetarian mom yeah she was eating some fish because of my dad's influence at the time so she's so that was kind of what she was doing that whole pesco veg type thing and i was like okay that's sensible a gradual thing and then when I was 18 I cut that out but I was still eating eggs and dairy not much I was in college at the time but I would have it and then I got some literature on factory farming from PETA or some other organization I forget which one now this is maybe I was 20 at Lewis and Clark College I was out there for a year and that stuff is horrible that's heartbreaking stuff to watch yeah so I don't know how anyone watches that and then feels good no but yeah well it's a grenade it's tough either you avert your glance and why do we avert our glance like exactly like well like wait in line to go see a violent movie right but if you flash like an image of somebody beating a goat or you know like or a cow or a sheep we just I don't want to see that because yeah exactly I don't think about that we're all inherently compassionate and if we really take a moment to look at that will realize that we're not living in accordance with that compassionate disposition right I think we all have and that creates internal tension and anxiety so yeah better like well I don't to look at that and then I can just keep doing what I'm doing and I don't have to wrestle with that that just you know that discrepancy that that internal yeah changing anything in your life is can be difficult whether it's a job you hate or a self-destructive relationship or whatever it is any kind of change can be difficult even if it's something that you hate you're used to it so if it's it can be difficult to transition from that and sometimes we hear arguments now of like all vegans are killing more animals than anyone else because look of all the deforestation that has to be involved to grow these crops and they take out the pay they forget the point that the majority of crops are grown to feed the billions of animal rider killed that's a lot not the one personally I overlooked yeah not the 1% of the population that's vegan yeah all of that land that's now being used to grow crops for as feed for these animals we would free it up for grinds right a huge thing that doesn't get addressed the other argument that kind of comes up and I've heard Joe say this a number of times like and I think he's he's sort of aiming at more at the sanctimonious oh yeah sure well it stands on a pedestal that he'll say look if you're eating a vegan diet but you're eating grains or you're eating you know you're eating conventionally grown crops like the the the threshers and the you know the the way in which all of those crops are harvested kills all these rodents right inside it's like yeah it does right it's not about a completely harm free life right about reducing our footprint and your connection to that yeah so again it goes back to the aspiration it's like of course we're we're not current we're not living Karma free oh no I don't I don't you know it's not my place to judge anybody's lifestyle and stand in you know in reckoning of that like this is just what works for me and if you want to hear about it I'm happy to talk to you about it that's the best I think it's you know that's what's interesting about you and your journey with all of this is that you it's not that you it's not that you hide it hide that you're vegan but you don't put it out front yeah and so there's a lot of you like people come to you they want to learn about kettleball exercises they want to learn about fitness and then it's not until they're totally on board and invested and right in you and they've learned something and then they find out like oh my god he's weak like I know people have known me for years who didn't realize and it's yeah it's not and that's a good point I'll bring oh yeah yeah sure see when I first got into the business I was I wanted to be a strength coach and train people I didn't necessarily come in saying I'm a vegan strength coach I'm just a strength coach right and that allowed me to reach an audience that someone who identifies himself as a vegan strength coach is not going to you because once you say that now people think okay I have to be a vegan to follow his information his training system is only gonna work for that so that's just where he's gonna hit me up with all this propaganda yeah exactly anything negative associated with vegans gonna be now I did write articles about being on a vegan diet for magazines and on my website it's always been something that's out there and people that know me know that I donate a lot of money to different charities and so forth to help people and animals not just animals but kids that are being exploited in sex trafficking one of my favorite organizations is Project child-safe that helps kids get out of that world so it's it's never been something that I don't I don't have a tattoo in my chest and show it proudly but it's something that had that I've never hidden either this is not something that I use as a number one selling point I kind of like the idea if someone gets into my information like wow this guy's badass look what he can do and then they find out like what he's vegan too right then I think it's really impossible where if I led with vegan oh like people may not even look at the message right then they're like oh I don't even want to see that yeah interesting yeah it's gotta be I mean I'm sure you've been in situations where that realization occurs and they're right in front of you and you're right like you know like deal with that as it's like dawning upon that but you know honestly when I was in in this when I got into the strength world and I started making a name for myself it was interesting because in some ways I would feel like imagine someone imagine a black guy who has never been around racist people and all of a sudden you are but those racist people like him for whatever reason even though they're racist they're like oh you know we like we like John let's just keep them in the fold here sometimes I often felt like that because I would be around all these people that are eating meat and I'm the one vegan guy at the table and people or these people always these people had very negative views about the vegan diet like oh that can never work you know Mike's just different no Mike's cool you know I don't know these vegan idiots always talking about this I can't stand those people but Mike you're cool you know you're flying right ha ha but it felt like that odd man out ha ha type thing there what does Poliquin tell you Poliquin and I never discussed he doesn't tell me anything in fact he wrote a very nice article saying how much he respects me because he's not a fan of kettlebell training either he thinks it's bad for the body and that kettlebell swings are gonna mess up your back which I of course disagree with but that's what he thinks and but he wrote this article saying hey I really respect Mike because he does a lot of charitable work and he's written some good articles and strange training I'm not a fan of kettlebell training I'm not a fan of the vegan diet but he makes it work you know it's always that kind of narrative was like he makes it work no I find that as well like in the kind of things that I do as an athlete the more you become the outlier exception when you're doing it from a place of like well I'm trying to show that like anybody can do this all right whatever but then it just it isolates you even I've had a lot of people that have gone vegan recently and a large part of it was just my example and they also conveyed to me that they appreciate that I never pitched them on hey you shouldn't be eating that way you got to eat this way but they were watching they're going okay let's he doing and why is he doing it you know it was terminating in their mind right so I think the most powerful message you have is your example you want to talk like I have this motto live life aggressively right take charge of your life now a lot of people that message resonates with a lot of people but the only reason why it does is because I actually do take charge of my life you know I live in a way that embodies that motto if I didn't that motto wouldn't mean anything so if if I'm healthy and strong and vital and passionate and then I'm also on a vegan diet people look at all those things they could mean I want to be like him it's like oh you two vegan diet too huh let me look into that a little bit more so you're setting yourself up as a role model without saying you're a role model you're just living your life and people find that impressive may want to know more they get curious yeah I think we're in this interesting time in our culture right now where we're having a conversation about gender in a way that that we never had yeah I think that brings up not just gender identity but like what does it mean to be a man what is mental inity mean and masculinity gets oddly conflated with dietary choice yeah in a very strange way and so well you know it's interesting on that as beer is considered a very manly drink right let's go get a beer uh-huh and beer is extremely estrogenic right the Hogs and beer is extremely alcohol in general SSO genic that's other thing I didn't bring up before it's like every alcohol converts testosterone estrogen doesn't matter what it is yeah your buddy Mike no Pete like and all your stuff you're like no beer I have a drink no I would let Barrett role in the why alcohol is not your friend like you take it a fairly hard stance oh yeah I'm pretty out you take it pretty hard I mean I have a drink every once in a while must've never touches a drink I don't have it at the house you know I don't have like a wine cellar at the house right like your and so forth if I go out to a concert or something like that or I play blackjack you know I'll have a gin and tonic or something like that I think someone who has high estrogen levels and low testosterone they should definitely cut out alcohol at least until you get back into balance mm-hmm so I just thinks the depends on where you are if you're if you're fairly helping you're happy with your levels and so forth and you want to partake every once in a while no big thing you know we don't have to do we can partake in things that are not good for us as well you know so we enjoy it laughs a little bit yeah you can have it not every meal you eat has to be healthy I like vegan desserts too you know it's right not everything I do is under this health umbrella but most of it is so that when I stray on things it doesn't really matter it doesn't have a negative impact if I'm having a couple drinks every night that's a problem yeah and a lot of people need a couple drinks just to unwind so just the fact that they need it is a problem and you're basically a functional alcoholic at that point yeah it's like well I just have three or four beers every night before bed awesome okay cut it out for a week well I don't need to cut it out there's some negative downstream hormonal impacts of that sansa load resistance is alcohol it definitely contributes to that uh-huh and it definitely contributes to the conversion of testosterone estrogen adrenal issues you know again we're talking about someone who's drinking a lot yeah if you have a drink or two yeah but if you have even one drink a day that's not a big deal if you have a couple in the weekend not a big deal every time you go out on a bender though let's say you get hammered I mean your testosterone growth hormone shut down for many days and that's not something that's hard to believe and anyone who's ever had a hangover you know you're not feeling in an optimal state at that point back on the subject of masculinity and yeah there's somebody your strength coach you're just you're jacked you can deadlift 565 pounds like you're throwing massive weight around you were an early pioneer in this kettlebell revolution yeah you're a you know prime example of like this super strong you know alpha male type personality and so what's interesting is is how that fits into like how that plays culturally in turn of you being a vegan and and and you being a vegan for for you know coming into it from a perspective of animal rights and compassion so when right when you think about what it means to be a man like what is you know where does compassion come into that equation and how do you think about that yeah I think compassion is the most important form of strength I look at compassion as a form of strength and one of the other reasons why I have a lot of compassion for not just animals but people and well in particular kids especially kids that have been through any kind of abusive situation like I said one of my favorite organizations is project child save involved with them and what do they do well the founder of project child save is ty Ritter you'd love having him on your show he's one of the most interesting guys I've ever met and he is he has a team of former operators some of these guys are former Rangers Navy SEALs etc and what they do is they will rescue kids at gunpoint from human traffickers really bad people that are doing horrendous things to kids so rather than try to go through quote-unquote legal channels they will go into country just bashing a sponge blaze and yes like an episode of 24 right yeah it's like an episode of 24 when you hear the stories so they will go in there guns blazing if necessary and a lot of times it has been necessary and get these kids out of these situations so when you donate money to them you're funding those missions is that is that legal can they do that outside of longed-for so here's the way here's the way law enforcement looks at it they can't publicly support it but privately they don't disavow it because they like what they're doing who doesn't want to see a vigilante thing go right it is yeah yeah it definitely is it definitely is and if they get captured in some of these countries then mm-hmm you know they could be those do those those operations take place outside of the US or yeah yeah it's not having it's not a raid happening in Minnesota or some like that turns the other no it's happened in the Middle East it's happened in South America because that's where most of these a lot of times it's American kids that are being kidnapped and smuggled over there because blonde blue-eyed girls are very high premium blonde blue blonde blue-eyed boys are also very high premium but there's any kid is a potential target for this sometimes you hear about American kids that have gone missing and the bodies never found and the reason or possible reason it's because they ended up overseas somewhere in some kind of sex trafficking slavery type situation it's so hard to believe that this is actually going on it happens a lot more than we would like and there's a ton of money being made in this industry which is why it's so pervasive and these kind of pedophilia type people are everywhere there's people on this street there's people in my neighborhood they're everywhere they infiltrate every facet of society every ethnic group every socio-economic group every political group it doesn't matter they're around and that's why parents have to be extremely vigilant with protecting their kids and especially after having Thai on the show I am always keeping an eye on kids as a way as in or the who's this adult and why is this adult talking to this kid where are the parents in relation to this kid because these kidnappers know what they're doing and they'll snatch your kid in a heartbeat and I see parents all the time that are on their phones [ __ ] around and their their kids are playing 50 yards away and they think it's a safe neighborhood no problem but I will tell you that he has profiled pedophiles in person and he said that they will say that they can go anywhere with I believe you tell me what kid you want I'll go get that kid within an hour it's like oh you want a blonde blue-eyed kid cool I'll go to this neighborhood and snatch him real quick because no one's watching that's terrifying yeah so it is it is really terrifying and it's extremely horrific and when you hear the stories Tyus told about the kind of abuse they've seen when they go into these situations to rescue these kids he told a couple stories when he was on my show and then he prefaced it by saying that's about a three on a scale of one to ten and these were horrific stories kids brutally raped on video you know things like that it means horrible stuff but he didn't mean I don't even want to know what ten is yeah he told me three I was like that's enough for me to become a monthly supporter financially I don't need to know number ten like you know I don't need to watch factory farm footage at this point to not want to contribute to that I've seen it so there's some things you just don't want to sow so his organization had a real impact on me and when you're money to his organization it's not going to someone's Hawaii vacation or for him to get a new car this guy barely pays his rent ty Ritter because he puts all of his own money into this whole thing that's amazing and you can tell me he's in his 70s now so he doesn't go on the actual missions anymore he's more mission control he's the guy who plans out stuff and he has younger guys go in and rescue the kids but you can hear in his voice that this is not something that he could turn away from he used to be a security guy in Las Vegas people like Steve Wynn and so forth like that right and then he started learning about some [ __ ] sometimes kids would get kidnapped and he would help get those kids back and through that he started learning about the larger picture of kids being kidnapped and put into sex slavery human trafficking and he said that with my skill set I couldn't turn away from it hmm but in some ways it's ruined his life because when you talk to him he's you can tell the emotional toll it's taken on him you're just dealing with his day-to-day the tough thing I mean I had mark Chang yeah yeah I support his organization and it's the same thing I think he's doing better now but when he came in here he was in a rough state and it's because he's so empathetic yeah he can't create a healthy boundary around his emotional state and what he sees and and it impacts him so deeply that he literally has devoted his life to this thing but it's it was it was I don't I think he's like I said I think he's better now but yeah it was killing him yeah and it's something I've talked to gene Baur about also right you know from Farm Sanctuary how do you do that he's like you can't save all of these animals it's like you can't save all the kids you have to just you know do it you can do and find a way to make peace without and be okay with that right as you're in it for the long haul otherwise it will just it will it will devastate you and destroy you that's what ty says too he goes he used to keep track of what happened to the kids after he saved them but some of their stories were really tragic and he didn't want that in their head meaning that some of them went on to commit suicide when they got older they just couldn't deal with what they've been through ah yeah exactly some of them have gone on to do really well though in one lady in particular she called him up when she was a grown woman and she has kids now and she said you don't remember me but you saved my life when I was a kid you rescued me from these human traffickers which is like I'll never I'm always gonna be indebted to you for that and it was his it was I think I was really glad that he got a call like that because I think it's really important for someone like him to get a call like that just to know people support what he's doing because when he goes out and lectures about stuff a lot of times people not answer like oh I don't want to hear this like I want to hear this if he just freaked out like that it's like that's not making the problem go away this stuff exists yeah so you want to have an attitude of coming back to masculinity is to me masculinity is being very compassionate very taking charge these things so when I hear about that kind of suffering I want to do something about it get him on the show donate money raise funds my friend Matt Brown UFC fighter he he and he's not an emotional guy at all anyone who knows him he's a killer you know straight up killer he's a great guy but he's like a psychopathic killer when he's fighting but he heard those episodes he's like look I'm not an emotional guy but those episodes had a real impact on me and he's been supporting projects outside save sense and he wants to do more you know so it's just one of those things where a lot of people don't want to hear about this kind of thing and I get it you know when I kick back to listen to a podcast I don't necessarily want to hear about this topic either you know but at the same time what are you Jay I thought we were gonna trafficking yeah but at the same time once you find out about this stuff you have to do something about it and for me it's a little bit more personal because when I was five years old I was sexually abused myself I don't we were living in Korea and my parents used to leave my brother and myself with a maid who acted as a babysitter and we have some that were nice but one lady was I always equated her as that if you ever saw that Mommy Dearest movie with Faye Dunaway's it was like that kind of personality right this was real hideous person and so I was abused by heard multiple times and when you're five years old you don't know what's going on you know you can't even you don't even know what to tell your parents about what first of all you trust adults oh you think that okay my parents left me with this person so whatever she's doing that's just acceptable behavior even though it doesn't feel good you know what's going on is it's not acceptable but you don't really have the capacity to handle it at that point so what happens is is you suppress that deep you bury that deep and it's gonna come out of some other point it's like a sleeper cell right it's always affecting you it's in your subconscious mind so it's always affecting your action but you're not aware of it and that's what's danger he didn't have a conscious memory of it not until much later so once I was 28 and it was it was actually not long after that whole pneumonia incident I was watching this movie still one of my favorite movies now Antwone Fisher in Antwone Fisher went through a very similar thing and in the movie they showed that scene where he's around five six years old nism he's in a foster home and he's being abused by this lady and that had a real impact I mean I kept on watching that scene over and over again and there's a scene at the end of the movie where he confronts the people that abused him this is really powerful inspiring scene where he just said you could you tried to break me you couldn't break me I'm still strong and that basically I lived vicariously through that in that that's what I would have liked to have done to the person to the lady who abused me but I can't do that because I don't even know who she is or she might not even be alive at this point and it doesn't matter because I'm over it but that movie left an indelible impression on me because one it gave me total recall of what happened and part of me starts thinking maybe yeah this didn't happen maybe it's just a fantasy in my head you know maybe I maybe who knows what's real or not you're five years old so I talked to my brother about it I was like look I don't know if you remember this but I just got these memories of you know this happening and he he got really choked up because he does what he did remember he's like yeah I remember that the older yeah he's a couple years older and he has a lot of guilt because he fought her off she tried to do the same thing to him but he was a couple years older and he was a little bit more defiant than I was at this time at this time of my life I was very quiet and you know what didn't have a large personality or anything like that but my brother Roger fought her off and I think at one point bitter you know stuff like they really fought her off viciously so she's left she's like okay I'm gonna leave him alone so this is a good lesson for anyone who's being bullied you know how you fight back you're gonna be left alone because bullies are they're cowards and they just want to deal with people that are not gonna fight back so with me I didn't fight back because like I said I didn't know what you're supposed to do in a situation like that you know you're five years old snot like my parents ever said hey if anyone ever touches you and appropriately you know you tell us you do this nobody thought they'd have those conversations at that point you just didn't think that was gonna happen so he has a lot of guilt in that he feels like he should have done something to protect me and I basically absolved him of that by saying look you're eight years old man you're a kid - what are you supposed to do you don't even know what's happening but that confirmed that it actually did happen so okay now that I know this happened it started making me think about you know why one of the reasons why I'm so compassionate to animals is because I don't like seeing suffering of any kind exploitation of any kind so if I see a dog suffering or if I see footage of animal suffering that that hits me on a deep level because I know what it's like to be in that position of being helpless powerless so how did you ultimately work through this well one is I talked to it to a lot of close friends I just brought it up and you know that wasn't I didn't just call people up like hey guess what I remembered it would just come up in conversations and a lot of people have been through the same thing I'm talking about men here I had many of my male friends have been through very similar things just about all of my female friends have been through some kind of sexual abuse so it's really rough and when you have the courage to talk about it everybody else does too because nobody wants to to bury this deep you just don't you just don't want people to look at you a different way so a lot of people don't want to bring it up because they don't want people to think that they're broken or that there's you know scarred in some way but it reminds me of a story that I read about this this world war two soldier where he died recently there was a CNN story about him and he survived the internment camps in World War two but he didn't tell his family everything that happened to him then because he was a young guy and some things he just didn't want people to know about but as he got older he didn't want to die with this secret in him and the secret is that he was raped repeatedly by Nazi soldiers not only rape but it was a spectacle where people would rape him while other people watched and Lee cheered and you know made fun of him and stuff like that and he's a young guy he's only I think he was 17 he lied about being a teen Latino guy and he carried this with him his entire life and he never told his family because he didn't want because they they held him in such high esteem as this world war ii hero and so forth he didn't want to diminish that in any way but at the same time he couldn't keep this to himself anymore so i believe he told either a family member or a therapist he just got it out of his design of course his whole family just was very supportive and didn't change how they looked at him at all of course they were very supportive and they were just glad that they could be there for him the way for them was there for them so much in their lives and then he's he just said that the idea of me dying not without anyone knowing about this would have been more tragic than it actually happening in in in Johan hores book there's there's older women who say the same thing they go you know I went through this and I grew up in a time where nobody talked about this kind of stuff if you brought out for like whoa don't bring that up and keep that to yourself but for them they're actually able to unload that burden at some point in their life was really powerful for them right so how did that so you saw that and that impacted how you were gonna deal with this or I think my attitude is like when you when you when you be when you go through serious abuse you either have to embrace compassion fully or you're destroyed by anger some attitude was embraced compassion fully now use this to be a stronger person use this to be a better person and be more caring be more resilient be more vulnerable you know just be a better person as a result of this don't be a war sport those don't continue this cycle of abuse don't abuse people don't abuse animals don't none of that stuff be use this as a fuel to be more powerful than you could be if it didn't happen you know make it a positive people struggle with understanding that that that vulnerability is actually a strength yeah we perceive it as a weakness and it takes courage to be vulnerable yeah because you are exposing your weaknesses but the strength that comes from that and the strength that can be given to other people who have had something similar happen to them is super powerful and I think that that's also part and parcel of what it means to be a man and to kind of imbue this sense of masculinity I mean the most the most alpha guys I know are the most compassionate people you'll ever meet and they're also really cool guys - none of them are bullies or jerk-offs or someone who picks a fight at a bar or talks to a woman inappropriately now these are all really cool guys on multiple fronts those behaviors derive from insecurity exact yours overcompensate that's all you're doing it's like someone who picks a bar if charged they get into a fight at every bar that's not too much testosterone that's not enough it's too much estrogen if anything is someone that's overcompensating okay I got to show people you know how manly I am pricing or someone who goes through gems like okay I'm lift more than anybody here who cares right yeah so it's just those are just overcompensating type measures is there not coming from a real place of strength yeah like I said the most alpha guys I know we're extremely compassionate people there they're always looking at protecting people around them you know that's that's the ultimate man right to be the protector yeah so so you start off as this quiet shy kid yeah you know you didn't play sports and no I was just I was a screw-up and I'm like DC area now so I was really into the hardcore scene not this great edge hardcore scene that's just hardcore and heavy music where were you cuz I grew up in DC did you okay I went to Langley high school I grew up in McLean Virginia right so I used to go to the 9:30 club I'm sorry yeah it was the spot that brains and Agnostic Front and kromaggs and DRI got into that scene a lot yeah so I was a very shy guy not a popular kid in high school and not confident at all in terms of talking to people so I think this was kind of an outlet for me it's like you wanted to have those things but you don't so like what's the next best thing you go this new intense music from people who embody it I mean the cro-mags don't get any more confident that right John and Harley onstage these guys exude confidence and still do you know to this day right so you're kind of living by your kind of feeding off that energy I didn't get more even in college I became more social a little bit more confident honestly for me it was a nugget negative thing like my face got this scar I have in my face is not VTOL ego it's called a colburn where I was snowboarding when I was maybe around 28 in Utah with my parents and I got sunburned really bad uh-huh and everything healed except this area this is like a residual scar so this darting to somebody yeah usually it's just congenital or exactly so fetal ego basically starts off as a small white patch and then it spreads right it's never something that that's this big so immediate so basically one day I didn't have this the next day I did mm-hmm and initially how can I just say I have to interrupt you on this because for people that are listening and they're not watching on YouTube you don't have like a discoloration on part of your face right but the awesome part of this is that on your goatee it splits one half of it like perfectly down the middle being white and being black so you're almost like James Bond villain that's the look I'm going for yeah I got the Devils peak in the go team yeah actually yeah that's why I grew out the goatee because once I - do you that - no no I don't have it I don't have it there yeah that's ah this if I grow out a beard it would probably be white here and there like a no it's I'm old I'm older now we like you dyed it to me I too died getting full disclosure right do died now because I've gotten older it goes I'll come out great but when I when it first happened it was black of what I've just keeping that look alright Keith yeah so the dust that's when I embraced it instead of trying to get rid of it because when I first happened I'm thinking okay this is just a temporary problem you know my skin is gonna heal and then after a while you realize it is in - how old were you I was 28 yes I'm going to dermatologists left and right and they're diagnosing it as beetle eco and I go well I've researched beetle you know it doesn't make sense that that's what this is you're born with it the way it manifested right yeah beetle Iike you can develop later on in life but it's not gonna start with a big patch like this it's gonna be a milky white patch usually on the forearms or hands sometimes on the knuckles and then it spreads gradually it can start becoming 50 percent of your body at some point over time but it never starts like what I have were boom just comes right there from a sunburn so anyway I would bring this up and they would just be incredulous and say oh it's just coincidental that this is something that was always latent I was like really this is something that was latent this was just waiting to happen if it wasn't that sunburned would it just magically appeared like this so anyway after going through a lot of doctors I realized that first of all not only did I go into these doctors I actually went through the treatment for V talega which is basically burning your skin again they have this thing called PUFA treatment where they expose it to ultraviolet light at a high degree which is supposed to stimulate pigment but I would say that doesn't sound like a good idea because I have this because I got burned and they're like oh that this will work and then I got burned again so I mean it was almost worthy of a lawsuit honestly because I got burned so bad that the skin was peeling it was really painful I go look this is I'm definitely not doing it again and even after that the doctor was like yeah you should try it one more session I was are you kidding me this is worse than ya know it's just worse than it was before fortunately it didn't leave any permanent scars or additional scarring but it was definitely something I realized I was clearly not the solution so long story short after going to a variety of doctors to no avail getting the answers I needed some recommended getting on immunosuppressive drugs because sometimes beetle ego is a autoimmune disorder or it is an autoimmune disorder where your immune system is attacking healthy tissue instead of just damaged tissue but the idea of suppressing my immune system didn't sound like a good idea so I go you'll be more prone to getting colds and fevers laws like that doesn't sound like a good idea hey you know yeah now I'm gonna have this scar and I'm gonna have a flu and forget it so the final stop for me and this is where I realized okay you're just gonna have to live with this is I went to this one lady who was basically some kind of tattoo specialists for medical conditions where she said what we can do is permanently remove the hair on that side and then just color it and permanently I go well that's gonna look funny that means I'm gonna have hair growth here I'm not gonna have it here and she goes yeah it won't be perfect I was like we'll forget it I was like this sounds stupid and if you're like in the Sun and you do get some coloration from being in the Sun right won't affect that area exactly this coloration anyway yeah exactly exactly it's like how do you keep it anyway it just sounded more complex than it was worth so then I used to put like dermablend on which is this makeup that people have for scars right and I would I would spend morning putting it on like covering up this area and that work to some extent in terms of my confidence because I was really insecure about this that's right that's where I left out is that I was already pretty insecure before this in terms of relating to people but after this I was even more insecure where I used to talk like this right so you would be on this side of my face yeah I used to do that I used to try to hide it as much as possible I have my hand here like that so I would put the makeup on and I was working in business developments at a company called respond comm at the time over there in Fairfax it was more for me it wasn't because I was getting negative flak from people I'm not saying like I had a bunch of negative spiria like whoa look at that it was this more in my head you know you're being self-conscious going home I'm getting looked at people are staring at me and so forth so I started doing this but after a while I was like what am I doing this for Who am I doing this for for strangers that who cares what they think yeah this is not my fault and I don't want to be a slave to this where I'm trying to where I'm not in break where it's it's having a negative impact on my life so after wash now I'm not gonna wear it anymore than I grew out the goatee this is when I moved to Los Angeles so I'm just gonna make this part of my look that's just the way it's gonna be because you can't do anything else everyone has scars you know mine are just some of the merges on the outside yeah it's like God gave it to you as a as this obstacle or like this talisman almost yeah you to sit for to say like look man you gotta like own yourself in your that's right right like are you comfortable with who you are yeah like own it or are you gonna skirt it and try to find ways of hiding it and continue on this path that you're on it just made me more confident me I did more public more seminars and public speaking all of that stuff I became way more confident with as we know in Ischl II you're kind of insecure but after a while I would in some ways I don't mind I don't mind being paranoid or insecure or nervous because that means it's actually meaningful you know that means I'm actually gonna I like being a little bit nervous before I give a lecture because that means I'm gonna be sharper if I go in there go yeah I got this and so forth and then you blank out and you might panic but if I go in a little bit nervous I'm gonna be more engaged everybody fitness fitness and strength training came in before this though oh yeah he started kind of got into it like it's 17 or 18 I did I thought I did and I got into it because partially I wanted to build an armor so that I was protected from the outside world and what I mean by that is if I'm bigger I'm not gonna get messed with because I've been abused as a kid in the breast as a kid I don't unconsciously I exactly it's like I felt it was important to embody strength II project strength exude strength as a way to avoid conflict mm-hmm it's like if I look tough and I'm big and people aren't gonna mess with me you know for the most part is true so that that would that was well part of the reason why I got into it also I just wasn't healthy at the time I was drinking a lot and I was doing a lot of drugs I was doing LSD and just doing a lot of marijuana and drinking that was very unhealthy you know excessively and I just didn't feel good now I'm 17 years old and I feel terrible yeah like I gotta pull it together if you have like a moment of reckoning like an epiphany or was it just like a gradual I think was more gradual yeah yeah I just start again I remember my father bought me a weight training stats just a banshan some dumbbells and fourth and as I started working out more I started feeling good from doing that and then as you started as your physical appearance changed that was very motivating and then getting I'm more into strength than I am they're trying to be big and muscular I'm more of a strength guy so as I got stronger that was very inspiring to me because I was really weak when I first started you know I couldn't bench press a hundred pounds I got pinned with that but that to me was motivating I was like wow I'm super weak so let's get strong and every time you had a positive step forward in terms of strength development it was very motivating and it still is to this day I love the feeling of lifting heavy weights and blasting through plateaus so you so you you start doing this before college but then you go to college and you major in religious stuff that's right which is super interesting yeah College you know think about college is that I didn't know I was I was I wasn't a good student in high school until like the last few years I did pretty well and that's why I was even even I was able to get into college because otherwise forget it but once I was in college nothing was grabbing me in terms of what I wanted to focus on nobody's thinking about a major necessarily as a freshman I mean some people are pre-med and so forth but that's that's supposed to be an exploratory year where you try a lot of things and I did and nothing gravitated towards me so I I decided I wanted to move to another campus let's try something else let's go to Lewis and Clark College in Oregon let's go to the west coast instead of being in Ohio I was at the College of Wooster in Ohio mm-hmm and it was I'm not as someone who necessarily believes and you know everything happens for a reason a lot of times I hate that saying because it doesn't take into account that a lot of the negative things happen and there's nothing good that comes out of video that's a separate line but sometimes I really believe in that statement because the one year I was in Lewis and Clark College the mentor who got me in religious studies this guy named art Bueller he was only there that year he wasn't there before he wasn't there after so if I didn't go there that year I never would have met him and if I didn't meet him I definitely wouldn't have majored in religious studies so I met him took a class on Hinduism liked it familiar with him new wisdom I read the Bhagavad Gita growing up and my mother my mother used to buy me Hindu comics and eggs are into this exactly the cro-mags like it up down my mother would buy us these comic books that had Krishna and Arjuna and stuff like that and those are that yeah we we have a bunch of those you really well you can get them at the Hari Krishna's okay and you always ask like super violent yeah they're like your original super here and they're like the stories are super complex yeah like they are the Mahabharata I was sorry he grew up reading those yeah yeah yeah so I grew up reading those for sure and then I took the Hinduism class it wasn't until I got to Sufism which is Islamic mysticism people like Rumi and rubia Hafiz it was their poetry that really impacted me this notion of being one with God or one with your higher self and not being a slave to your ego can't get rid of your ego but your ego doesn't pull the carriage you control a baker so basically ego there's there are the horses but you're the person controlling the carriage you're guiding your ego and that word that the so Sufism really left an indelible impression on me this notion of just living in the world but not being attached to think so much that it has such a negative impact on your psyche you know striving for a higher purpose a more cognizant way of living that kind of stuff really resonated with me that's the what I don't really consider myself religious and I don't call myself a Hindu or a Buddhist or anything like that but Sufism is definitely something that affects my everyday life well it you can see it infused in all of your writing and the work that you do like this idea of you know merely the existence of the highest of your higher self or the highest version of who you can be kind of plays into that your tagline or ethos of like live life aggressively not live life aggressively like pound your chest like a gorilla but be intentional with your actions like have a plan like have have a destination that you're working towards understand the goals you're setting for yourself and how you're going to arrive there so for me when I see when I what I read in to live life aggressively is really live life with conscious intention yeah yeah just porpoise it just have have strong reasons for why you do anything mm-hmm to have meaningful actions yeah and what's interesting about just just a gorilla's when I was when we went to Uganda we did a guerrilla track out there so as my parents my brother and I and when you run into it when you run into a flock of guerrillas they base are a group of guerrillas they basically say that when the silver but if the silverback approaches you don't look him dead in the eye you gotta you gotta lower your gaze and challenge yeah yeah exactly now Nick Delgado will say that guerrillas know who the Alpha is in the group that they come across so the silverback is gonna challenge that person and this silverback in this group nak again this is not a this is not a super high testosterone group this is my family but this gorilla stopped right in front of me was probably about as close as you are look me dead in the eye massive gorilla huge bag this exuded power you're like way bigger than any massive bodybuilder but just exude it's serious power look me dead in the eye I didn't even have to think twice about power I dropped to my knees and looked down immediately and then this grill it just kept going - Wow but that was such an amazing experience to be that close and there's no filter here - you know there's no cage protecting this gorilla from me we're right there this run you end up so close though isn't that that's gotta be incredibly dangerous it's not something that they don't try to get the gorillas to come closely but when you're going on a gorilla track your goal is to go out there and see gorillas now you're not necessarily they're not necessarily trying to get you that close to the gorilla but sometimes the grill isn't gonna come up to you and if you start running they're gonna chase you know you can't just run off or run up a tree or anything like that you just basically have to let them know hey I'm not challenging you in any way right they're peaceful animals they're not they're not going around ripping people's heads off unless they're challenged or you're hurting one of they're young and all that you know gorillas in particular they don't have no chimpanzees can have any evil streak and so for gorillas are different than that so anyway that and in there and then the group is just gonna follow the Alpha so if the Alpha doesn't see we're a threat and the group is just gonna go with that right but you could just it was it was like a scene out of Planet of the Apes or something like that you ran in the Caesar how does that play into like what we talking about I forgot I'm not even sure why it brought it up I just remember saying rail I thought was a funny story like you like you have this sort of online persona that's like a no-bullshit like don't pull any punches like I'm gonna time I'm a straight shooter I'm straight talker exactly on your [ __ ] and like your book is in that tone and you have like this thing that you're doing on Twitter now where you go like once you start doing blank like there's no telling how messed up your that'd be and it's like a litany of like all of these [ __ ] up things that like we as humans can fall prey to that kind of lead us astray right and so but like in person like in real life like you're a much sweeter guy than I expected oh yeah you know I mean but I appreciate like that no nonsense yeah you know no filter like let me let me cut through all the BS that you know maybe you've heard and and and and and tell things to you straight based on my experience which is kind of the set title of your book which is things that you know I don't know exactly what they should be telling you and I think it begs the question of you know what's going on right now online like a well-intentioned person can go on YouTube or on the internet or on the podcast sphere or wherever trying to get good information about everything from health diet nutrition fitness you know strength training self-improvement psychology right and there will be like somebody there who's gonna tell you something along the lines of like everything you ever thought you knew is wrong and go behind the velvet rope here for this amount of money and I'm right tell you right truth and and and and I think the techniques that are being employed are getting more and more sophisticated like it used to be you could kind of smell that from a million miles away I think you still can to a certain extent but it's getting trickier to separate who's real from who's full of [ __ ] right so how do you navigate that see yourself within that ecosystem and you know what are your thoughts I just try to be as authentic as possible in old format so what first of all when I'm on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook I post with my real name you know no on anonymity no fake handles or anything like that so whatever I say I have to own it's coming from me that I think is important because a lot of these a lot of times we see these negative YouTube comments is never with someone with their actual name there was someone that just wants to ruin someone's day or feel like they're powerful I can get on social media and just be mean-spirited and I don't like that trend of trolling where people feel that the way to empower yourself is to diminish others or put other people down I think that's a big mistake I think we can have differences and be respectful about it you like for example I don't eat meat for the all the reasons we went into but I know people who eat meat who are very healthy so I wouldn't tell someone you can't be healthy and eat me my grandmother great-grandmother lived in to be a hundred eating mean not a lot but she ate meat so I think by that not only is that what I believe but I think by the fact that I'm not so dogmatic about you have to do things my way if you want to be optimal that makes people more open for a civil discussion as opposed to hey if you don't do this and you're an idiot right they'll be here that kind of thing too it's like oh those of you guys you guys who don't eat meat you guys are stupid so there's there's a lot of like what a mean-spirited dialogue but I don't think it's useful in any way yeah there's been de evolution in the civility of discourse in general that's that's being fomented by what's happening politically and and and economically right now yes but you see it in the health space online you know in this kind of ongoing you know I want to call it a discussion but it's really that would be putting it nicely people feel like they need to be on some mud slinging yeah everyone's siloed it was vegan venom anti anyone who's there's a tribalism that's happening and it's really not serving anybody no it's not it's not so how do we transcend that I think I think I think it's important to interact with people that you disagree with and and to not dislike them just because you disagree with them so I think the more and also I think what happens is what happens is if you step outside your silo and and adopt a talking point that doesn't adhere to your you know yeah we just saw this last week when Mark Duplass a writer director actor in Hollywood who's you know like a strident liberal yeah said hey you know like I had this encounter with ben shapiro who's a you know more of a right when he's a right-wing yeah personality and pundit and you know if you're gonna if you really have an interest in expanding your mind and hearing other people's opinions like maybe have a look at this guy and he got crucified and he had to delete the tweet and i think it came from a good place in him of trying to build a bridge but you can't say that if you're a member of this tribe right right so he had to take it down and he had it was a tree was trending on twitter and he just got reamed you know and so when i see that like shitty you said that should he said we can debate that but the bigger point is how can we have a civil how can we extend our hand across the aisle and have a civil discourse that will move us forward culturally i think yeah i think too many people have this all or nothing attitude it's it's a very binary approach right so either this or that and I've gotten flag from vegans for not being more like oh you should you have a platform you should be more out there just converting people and so forth I go look this is not my thing I'm not gonna be that guy who disparate someone for lunch or whatever they're eating plus I don't think it's effective because they're not gonna want to have lunch with me again number one we're not forever we're not gonna have were not gonna become friends and they're also gonna have a negative impression of that you know those vegan guys are a-holes I had learned from Mike one time the whole time he's just telling me about what I'm eating and I've had many people like I said before that have other transition to vegan or are much more in that direction as a result of becoming friends with me because they see why do it and so forth that never would have happened if I just berated them from the get-go so I think I think those kind of approaches or I think also the fact that I feel online for marketing purposes people often feel like they have to take a very stringent approach on something be very controversial as a way to separate them self from their heard so if you're a balanced a reasonable person people like oh that's boring just kids not it's not gonna you know promote its if it's not clickbait then right you're not [ __ ] it's called clickbait for a reason yeah I'm being baited to click right like if you're taking a balanced approach like right well let's see what this guy's nuance is all about yeah yeah exactly now so a lot of vegans will say you can't be healthy not only is eating meat unhealthy for animals which is clearly true but you can't be healthy at all doing that now that's not true because we know a lot people that are healthy who eat meat right now we can still we don't like the fact that the meat because it's hurting animals but let's not the reasons for not eating meat are good enough that we don't have to add on top of that mm-hmm that's kind of where I go with that and then who opens it makes you more open to these people wanting to talk to you you know I've had people like rod what Rob Wolf's Paleo diet guy on the podcast he was a really cool guy no he has different views on nutrition than I do the whole paleo family I've had civil you know emails with Robin yeah and you know does and we may disagree on certain things but yeah I noticed like when I was doing research for this like he wrote a really nice post about your about all the work that you've been doing and yeah that's very nice and all that kind of very nice and then and then there's there's a lot of things he's doing that I do like he's trying to get people to eat more fruits and vegetables he's saying that and the animals that the factory farming is definitely not good for you she care from these sources now animals are still being killed you know right so I don't like those options either but it's definitely better than factory farming and that's the other thing it's like oh it doesn't matter if these animals are grass fed and all that they're still dying it's like yes that's true I understand that completely but you have to understand that factory farming is so bad and it there's so much suffering involved with that that anything that's in a better direction than that is a step in the right direction you know the biggest culprits right of you know things that we need to go away and I the great not the great thing I mean the thing about factory farming is that that's something we can all unite and agree on exactly that's where ever you are nobody is in favor of what's happened 100 percent a litany of reasons exactly we can unite on this one issue alone we can create you know incredible change exactly and that's where as someone like Joe Rogan who is he says he said negative talk about vegans but not always he's had people like mac danzig on there he's been complimentary of me before on his show but he definitely agrees that factory forming his factory farming is harmful and he had the guys from Cal spirity on there and he definitely said this is horrible and it shouldn't be happening right so even though he's a hunter he's a meteor and all that that's a common ground we can all work on and that is the biggest source of animal suffering yeah agree I mean I've been on Joe's show twice he's about to have John Joseph on oh really cool we've had a little dialog like Joe really wants to he he sees the toxicity of this debate right oh yeah and he really wants to inject it with a little civility and I really respect the fact that despite some differences that he has with people like you and I he's willing to have us on the show yeah and he's gonna have John on it and they're gonna have a discussion about this really interesting you know he doesn't have to do that no he doesn't mean and and I think that that that's really cool that he could he could lend his giant platform to a voice that is coming from a different place from where he's coming from John Excel is we won't we will unite on factory farming if anything right and this is something that really needs that's got press at the highest level that's gotta go I mean I think the future of meat production is not I don't think the demand for meat is gonna go away at least not significantly but I think the way it's manufactured is and what I mean by that is I think in vitro meat production that technology is already being utilized now and I think that's going to become more ubiquitous more pervasive there's no question about it and and ultimately it will render factory farming exactly and I'm all for that yeah so I mean if you can I don't know about what do you mean under those circumstances and you know you're not harming an animal so that's that's an interesting one but I would definitely be for other people consuming that 100% and I think people will people would do it right now if we were available and cheaper see that's the most important thing if you're more expensive yeah convenience and price point it has to be the healthy choice or the more environmentally sound or the more compassionate choice has to be as accessible as convenient as any other choice and it has to be at the same or competitive price point as right other products and until you get there you're pushing a rock up a mountain exactly so it's a hundred I think we're working towards that and it's exciting so we're gonna see what happens but I think so too you know I'm in the same boat like I'm not that target audience for lab-grown meat not the target audience for the impossible burger right but I'm glad that these things exist what exactly is the impossible burger is that something that's injected with in vitro cells what is that no there's no there's no animal cells in the impossible burger it's a plant-based burger but what they have done that distinguishes it from the other products out there like beyond meat is how they have infused it with some form of heme iron that gives it that bloody taste okay it gives it gives it a much more meat oriented texture and flavor than a typical plant-based okay got it and that makes it kind of a game-changer in that space and there's a lot of people that love it like it's not for me it's like it's freaks me out yeah it's just been so long like I don't need that or what is that what fat burger is using now and their petit I know they have a veggie burger now I'm not sure I know think it is I paddling out well they have impossible sliders at White Castle now okay and they're like every week there's more and more cheddar that are carrying it I think you know fast forward a year to five years it's gonna be pretty much available everywhere and by that point the lab-grown meat thing will have come down in price like this is only gonna become more and more integrated into yeah food system yeah a hundred percent so yeah so I like the direction that we see the you can't it can't happen soon enough you know the sooner the better but at least it's happening yeah all right so we've we've gone over to ours and we have a yeah right like we haven't even we ate we haven't even talked about kettlebells except for me mentioning how we haven't talked about it yeah yeah sure so so this is your thing like you are early like early adopt our early fan of kettlebell training now it's everywhere oh yes totally bigamous but you trained with the original guy right pavel thought Celine who I know has been on Tim Ferriss his podcast so convinced me why I need to start using kettle balls okay as an endurance athlete well the thing think about kettlebells is that no wait kettle balls a lot of people that's always someone who's ever lose to kettle them it's like calling kettle biking you go bike riding or what do they call a soccer calling it calling football song right and usually I'm just demonstrating so I'm a grandparents on this subject well what I like about kettlebell training is no weight training system improves muscular endurance more than kettlebells that's just lending my attention now yeah and kettle the ballistic exercises right kettlebell swing kettlebell snatch kettlebell clean and Jurek or push press these are full body motions where you use your entire body to project that weight where you want it to go to you now when you do it in high repetitions or for time because there's a kettlebell sport where people do two lifts for time where it means 10 minutes without putting them down either it's cleaning two kettlebells and jerking them overhead and you can rest here in between reps but you can't put the bells down for 10 minutes or you're doing a one-arm snatch which is an uninterrupted motion of taking the Bell from the floor to overhead uh-huh and in 10 minutes is you can switch from side not you can switch once so you can't switch side to side over and over again but once but you can't put the belt down so if you can lift a 70 pound kettlebell for 10 minutes without putting it down imagine the structural integrity meaning your body's ability to delay breaking down and the endurance that you'll get from that because you're breathing has to be on point your structural integrity has to be on point meaning that your body's ability to sustain a performance against time so you don't break down and then your cardiovascular vo2 max has to be amazing so developing these things would definitely help you with what you do but even taking that aside because I don't do a lot of V I mean I do high rep double kettlebell swings and so forth now so and watch the 10 minute stuff that's there never cooked with me but I definitely see the benefits but even even just set to 10 which short break set to 20 just working on volume you're using your full body so it's not an isolation move so you're building up a lot of endurance with it then you're also learning how to use your body as one unit which definitely carries over yeah I think that's that's the big thing the functional strength aspect of using your entire body to do a movement with a heavy weight that is somewhat awkward and requires not just that isolated that isolated muscle but rewrite your entire body yeah that's what distinguishes it primarily from all of these other sort of you know weightlifting etc and I do know a couple things I know the difference and how I perform and how I feel as an endurance athlete when I'm functionally strong and particularly when my back and my core is strong right it's a huge difference not because it necessarily is gonna make me run faster in the moment but when I start to get fatigued I'm able to maintain my form I and my technique for much longer which then translates into a performance gain exactly I'm somebody who just wants to be outside and I'm long so for me it takes a lot of like mental discipline to go into the gym and do these things and and and I call about kettlebells you can go to a park where I live in Santa Monica I usually go to the beach and train with them I'm gonna I've actually ordered a couple for the house are cool my coach is really intent on getting me on this and I've had fits and starts with it they're my gym has them and my coach will right out of work out for me and they all have these crazy names and I don't know what that means so I go to the gym and work it out the latest kettlebell possible because I'm just skinny and I haven't had I haven't been in the weight room in a very long time and and this is I've committed this year to becoming functionally strong like I know I need it and that at 51 like you know my lower back it's tight and I'm a little creaky in the morning and like things aren't you know it's like I can't I just can't get away with stuff I used to be able to get away with ya know if I want to continue to perform as an athlete like this is no longer negotiable like it's absolutely crucial no it's that good I delete it for waistline so I get the latest kettlebell whatever that is and then I have to go on YouTube and go I don't even know what the names of crazy exercises aren't have to watch a couple of videos of like the guy doing it to try to figure it out and I and then I try to mimic it and I do it in the most in elegant way I know I'm doing it wrong I'm like it's something you need training for yeah I'm supposed to be this athlete and I'm in here like I don't know it's like for me I really have to get out of my comfort zone right vulnerable because like I'm terrible at this right but I know that I need to learn and I'm like committed to doing it so much so that I that I have ordered these for the house so that I can do them here yeah they're fun moves I mean the kettlebell snatched a double kettlebell swing is one of my favorites and that really strengthens up the hamstrings lower back in particular when you're using one heavy Bell like you said your midsection has to engage right a bit with that and so any any one-handed lifts especially with high repetitions your lower back in your midsection strength is definitely gonna go way up why did you pick this as your specific focus especially before it was a thing yeah I got into it a good friend of mine at O Sturgis you asked me hey have you heard of this kettlebell stuff yet I got now let me take a look and it looked intriguing to me I never I'd seen kettlebells in the old time strongman magazines and so forth but I didn't really know what you you would do it was like from the 20s he did these old strongman guys holding these things I just thought that maybe they predated dumbbells and you just did the same thing that we do with dumbbells with this I didn't really understand that there was a whole system of exercises specific to kettlebell training I was already a fan of Pavel thought Celine's work at his power to the people book it's already liked what he was doing I liked his message and then I wanted to get into the fitness industry and I wanted to get in with the unique selling points now I wasn't thinking oh let me go try that that I've never used before that's gonna be the unique selling point this was just was in my head when I started playing around with kettlebells just for fun I wasn't thinking like let me learn this as a way to go teach it I was like let me just play around with this I enjoyed the movements the kettlebell snatch in particular came really fast to me that's that movement where you take it from the floor to overhead uh-huh and I got really good at that fairly fast so yeah so I enjoyed the aggressive nature of the moves you're putting up you felt like you were just tearing something apart it's this real primal feel to it so that intrigued me to go take Pavel sawed Celine kettlebell certification and this is 2002 in Minneapolis and after taking his course was how many people showed up for that probably about 20 people this is really ER this is the second one he ever taught the second he taught one before that that's my friend Steve Maxwell was that he's been on show so many times too and I took that course and then things weren't the same I was like wow this is also I didn't even have actual kettlebells then I had this handle but you put dumbbells on it was a plate loading kettlebell but I didn't want to make the investment yes I was just using that after I took the course though I immediately bought a SEP so I was like wow this is totally different and I love the way these things feel I just like the whole thing they look cool the movements are fun and I also felt that this is a perfect home-based training system that the average person can really get behind because the average person is not really looking to get big and so forth they want to have more like you said functional strength they want to build a play with their kids and not get tired they want to feel strong and healthy so I felt that what kettlebells delivered in the way that Pavel taught it would be perfect for that audience right I went on to develop my own style within it but initially I learned from him and then I took it in my own way and my technique is different than what he teaches and so forth and I learned from other kettlebell people so it evolved over time but that was definitely the most important step for the direction I ended up taking getting into this whole have health and fitness thing uh-huh it started with if it wasn't for the four years I spent working I didn't work for Dragon Dora Paul's publisher but I worked with them heavily meaning that I taught at a lot of their certifications there were about five of us that were considered their elite team they called them the senior KC's back then and Steve Maxwell was one of them Steve Carter who is the best kettlebell instructor by far he's still out there I don't teach kettlebells anymore I just do my supplements now but Steve Carter is the best kettlebell instructor he's still out there and Nate Morrison was there at jf Marton who's very immersed with CrossFit he's there he's the kettlebell expert in the CrossFit world so there were about five of us that were early adaptors who all left this organization at one point I left before some of the other guys did this guy Jeff left before I did and we all went on our own directions but the reason why we were able to go in our own directions is because we built up right we had we spent so much time getting exposed through bubbles organization he was very generous with allocating time to all of us it just got to a point where was I wanted to go my own way you know I just wasn't happy being subjugated to their business philosophy of you know as long as I'm involved here these are the expectations that are on me and I go you know what I want to be my own guy I don't want to be known as his guy I don't want to be like oh yeah Mike's one apostles guys I want to be known as Mike Mahler the Strand coach in and of himself not because I'm associated with someone else necessarily so after four years and it was an amicable play it wasn't like hey screw you and all that some of the other guys had really negative falling outs but that's the nature of any organization you know people just butt heads it's almost impossible so as a endurance athlete what do you think like if you were might if I hired you as my strength coach I mean obviously you'd have to like evaluate where I'm weak right sort of stuff but just in general like there's a lot of endurance athletes runners triathletes cyclists swimmers that listen to this show watch the show what are some key like strength exercises or perspectives that you could share like what are the things that like everybody should be doing who wants to like an excel in the endurance world I think I think the most important thing with a straight training regimen for endurance athletes is to make your body more resilient you're not trying to become more muscular you want to make your body stronger you want to make your structural integrity more sound so that you perform better you know what you do there so we look at what the we're sorry I mean there's a huge fear of like they don't want to be like you're trying to get lean like it's all about like your power-to-weight right right Mike right swing runners you can never get like they're just trying as skinny as possible I'm like I don't have you ever seen a Tour de France cyclist shirt off but like you know twelve-year-old boys yeah yeah yeah and they're so terrified of any additional weight I found like if you want to have a long career and you want to remain injury free like you need to be functionally strong or something's gonna give eventually so I would say that you know shoulders lower back ankles and so forth feet strength is really important that's why a lot of us do strain training barefoot I like to do my sprinting barefoot in front Vibrams you know I'm not running bare feet on a field so I mean basically just making the body more sound like Frank Shamrock oh he said that he did a lot of body building stuff not necessarily to make his body look a certain way but so that his strength was sound he didn't have him balances so that when he's fighting when you're fighting you're using certain muscle groups more than the others so it's actually important to use the muscle groups that you're not using in your sport running training or balance right and that's why bodybuilding gave him because people are like bodybuilding that's not functional you don't use those moves in in the actual sport and I think that's a mistake too with a lot of strength training now is you're actually trying to mimic the moves that somebody does with resistance and that's not necessarily the best way to go out there I'm not gonna hold a kettlebell and throw punches with it that's not that's gonna change the technique I'm not gonna take a heavier basketball and try to shoot that because that changes the technique now I'm not gonna put a weight vest on and go sprinting because my technique with the vest on is gonna be different than without so it's actually gonna be counterproductive so you if the looking at a strengthen the supportive muscles exactly everything that gets atrophied through the repetitive motion of whatever the specific sport is exactly so whatever imbalances you have your strength training regimen should address it so that you're not imbalanced any more and you're less injury prone the most important thing that a strength and conditioning program does is make you less injury prone like Steve Maxell makes a great point of saying you should never get injured when you're lifting weights because the whole point of lifting weights is to make your body stronger so that you don't get injured in your sport so the last thing you want to do is push it so hard with weight training that you get injured I mean imagine him someone who's a UFC fighter and they they decide to find out what their deadlift max is now they blow out their back and that was like well I had a million dollar payday on Saturday I guess that's gone right there's the gym and everyone's watching you know it's a big dick measuring I don't think a lot of those guys care I mean someone like John Jones is really into powerlifting but he's an anomaly that guy's just good at whatever he does he's just extremely gifted if he's dead lifting 600 pounds and he's he's just started maybe this was after maybe six months after starting you know this is unheard of but he's just a gifted athlete but he's but someone like him I wouldn't I wouldn't have anyone who is well first of all there's really no reason to max out at all let's start there if you're a power lifter you do it for your sport but pretty much every Power lifter has serious injuries at some point they do a long enough that's so not so it's not about going to failure no I think you should stay away from failure like I lift weights with like right now I'm looking really frequently I'll deadlift five days a week but I only do three sets of five with 70% of my one rep max you know so that's about four hundred and five pounds from me I'm just working on technique I'm working on technique and I want my back to feel great afterwards I don't want any tightness and as a result of not lifting so heavy I can do it more often and if I do it more often I get better neurologically I get better and just from the simple act of doing it and that's probably pavo's most poeple sullens most important contribution is this high frequency of training with keeping several reps in the bank staying very far from failure it's all the other problem with going to failure is that I need a couple days of rest that in your technique is never good on that last rep right you go to failure and number 10 is the only is the last rep you can do it's not gonna look like number one through seven even that even a few reps before that rep your technique probably started degrading and what about like heavy weight low rap versus low weight high rap yeah that just depends on the context as well so I mean if you're weak in those areas and improving it would be useful to you so for example like a UFC fighter that the stronger you are the better you are you know to a point so if your technique is great and you and you get stronger you're gonna be a better fighter so getting and then a lot of these guys have to our men and women have to stay within certain weight classes so lifting heavy weights and low reps that allows you to get a lot stronger without getting bigger that's pretty much the way I train so I'm not trying to get bigger even the size I have is more of a side effect of the training it was new it was not necessarily intense you know early on it was as I said I wanted to kind of build a shield to protect myself but at this point I'm not trying to get bigger I just like lifting I just I like King I like I like the act of demonstrating strength mm-hmm yeah so for me like where I'm in a very low resistance high rep you know sports right basically going long distances would I be better served by doing heavy weight low rep I think so you do yeah because it's also you're also gonna be one you're gonna be way less sore from that and two it's gonna it's it's a totally different stimulus than what you're used to just someone doing and you can not to say that you can't do some high repetition maybe at the end of a workout you do a finisher kettlebell swings or snatches or you just throw it in the mix but that wouldn't be my the focus of the regimen it would be more heavy weights low repetitions to make your body more resilient and to a point and again it wouldn't be anywhere close to failure so these wouldn't be maximum efforts they would be challenging but not to the point where an injury is even likely or even close to being likely yeah I got it man all right we got to wrap this up but I want to leave people with I want to go back to the hormone thing yeah sure you know I want to leave people with some things that they can take away and and implement it in their own life like to get a better sense of whether their hormonal e abnormal and some practices to help optimize hormone functionality well I mean one thing people can do the one test you can do that doesn't cost anything is like Charles Poliquin has this whole bio signature approach right where he goes where where you hold body fat is an indicator of your hormone imbalance so if you have a lot of pictorial fat that's way too much conversion of testosterone to estrogen if you have a lot of stomach fat that's basically adrenal issues your cortisol so this is whether you're a male or exactly this is this is across both sexes so you can do the merit test and just look at where you store a body fat that gives you a pretty accurate idea it's not 100% accurate but it gives you a pretty good indicator of what's going on with you if you have a lot of tricep fat it means low androgens means your testosterone estrogen ratio is not is poor and most are more often than not blood work will confirm the assessment from this I'm not saying that it sits in place of it but that's something you can do right now get an idea and a lot of this is I mean we look at ourselves in the mirror everyday is that nothing's gonna be a big surprise like oh wow I didn't I didn't think about that until you brought it up so you now you just know why it's happening maybe you're storing a lot of stomach fat because you're under a lot of stress and if you want to get rid of that stomach fat training and nutrition are important but you have to mitigate the stress as well otherwise you're just gonna hold on to it so that's one thing people gonna do blood testing I recommend direct labs calm if you want to bypass a doctor you can go to direct labs calm they have different panels for men and women if you don't know how to interpret the results it's not going to be that useful so then you can contact someone like dr. Thomas England on or dr. mark Gordon dr. Nick Delgado all three of those people are really good right one of the things that you recommended in one of the articles that you wrote is that you shouldn't that your workouts shouldn't shouldn't exceed one hour yeah that doesn't work for me [Laughter] provide some context I get what you're saying though yeah I can provide some context though it's an intense workout shouldn't last more than an hour I got you some people they go to the gym and they're just [ __ ] around they're taking selfies and so forth they don't need to finish that up and for you I mean if they should but let said that workout is it's not they're not training so intensely that it's gonna be negative now here's the thing if you workout really hard you're not gonna want to go more than forty five man yeah that's what my workouts are forty-five minutes I was like dude I thought you were in the gym like eight hours a day sometimes it's even less nap cuz I train frequently right actually in five six days a week so when I go sprinting it's ten hundred yard dashes that doesn't take long I just drive to there close by feel bang out the runs and come home that's less than twenty minutes easily and then with my weight training workout somebody do at the home gym somebody at a gym to you but it's always a couple compound drills three or four movements four movements at the most sometimes it'll be squats weighted ring pull-ups and some kind of overhead press and then that's it maybe glute/ham raises or some kind of torso work dragon Flags is one of my favorite that Bruce Lee exercise that's one of my favorite to have exercises but you get so much abdominal strength from heavy deadlifts and heavy squats and also ring pull-ups weighted especially and overhead that your your midsection is getting is getting hit even though you don't hit it directly so I I don't think any of this stuff has to be consumed a lot of your time these workouts don't take me more than 15 to 20 minutes I go in my garage I hit three or four moves I'm out of there one of the things that you also talk about on the nutrition side of this I mean like we could talk about superfoods we talked about ginger and turmeric about that forever but really basic stuff like spices like cinnamon and everybody has or like you know starting your day with water with like lime and sea salt yeah things like that says you like talk us through me can kind of wrap it up with just a few few of these yeah yeah there's a couple things you can add today for so every morning I start with I take a lime and I squeeze it into about 12 ounces of water and put a little bit of sea salt in there and what this does is basically it nourishes your adrenals so it's a great tonic first thing in the morning and it's very alkaline as well and it's very cleansing I mean you're gonna have to go to the bathroom with it you know a few minutes of doubting this it just cleans you right out you're feeling good so I do that every morning that's a good morning ritual and that's something anyone everyone can add that right now like well I don't know if I have adrenal issues you probably do know if you live in society you probably do you just get this in it has a lot of health benefits anyway so that's one thing people can do the spices I like to add ginger nutmeg and cinnamon to all my protein shakes I only have one a day but I add it to that and then with cook meals basil garlic made not only does it make the food taste better but you're just amping up the health properties of it even more so and it's easy you just add it right in there mm-hmm yeah that's good and what's your what's like a day a day in the life of food like say so it's some days I do intermittent fasting well I'll wake up I'll have the lime and sea salt and then I might have a cup of coffee with almond milk a little bit of stevia and then I won't eat until later on in the day a lot of days when I am when I'm gonna be lifting heavy weights because I like to lift weights about four to six hours after waking up your body is decompressed you're less likely to get injured and I just feel stronger I'm not thinking about lifting heavy weights first thing in the morning body's tight you know I need to loosen up through mobility exercises so I I do it some joint mobility exercises that I learned from Steve Maxwell and Paul basalt saline and I have a YouTube clip it's me and my dogs doing it in the backyard it takes more doesn't take more in ten minutes and that's something I like to do every day if I slack on that I feel it right I get tight real fast especially if you're lifting heavy weights and just getting older so that's part of the routine and then I'll have this super shake where it's eight ounces of almond milk eight ounces of water 3 tablespoons of hemp seeds one tablespoon of flax seeds one scoop of organic food bar protein powders is one of the ones I like has five different vegan proteins in it a teaspoon of ginger maybe 1/4 of a teaspoon of nutmeg cinnamon what else do I add in there I take a tablespoon of cacao and then I a bunch of frozen fruit so acai mango blueberries whatever whatever fruits people like they can add in their dry have to be those I blend that up and this is a big shake and then like I was saying earlier I just drink one glass at a time that gets me through the entire day I don't have a big meal until much later in the evening right and that'll be a stir-fry usually I'm just a lot of vegetables and some kind of some some legumes so maybe Monday it'll be black beans Tuesday garbanzo beans out of zucchini it's a different legume each day sync it up yeah exactly what is when people come up to you and say well what about protein or and what you know what how do you answer that well you know but since we're essentially thing about protein is that I used to get chiropractic adjustments from Franco Columbu when I lived out here in Los Angeles and he still has a chiropractic office zeruel yeah he does he's just so surprised I know that you should usually go to him just for the hell of it but anyway I talked to him a lot about training and nutrition and he told me that even when he and Arnold were in their heyday the only ate one gram of protein per kilo which is considered extremely low by today's standards and then they would add in your daily recommendation is 0.74 just an average human yeah and I think is our name I think I don't think you need that much I don't know so one gram a kilo per one gram a kilo and then 30 to 40 grams when you're trying to put on size so if they're just maintaining they don't even do that just an extra 30 to 40 grams of protein now these guys are big meat eaters they're not doing it because you know a vegan diet is inherently lower in protein so maybe you're trying to skew the fact to say you don't need protein that's not what they're doing but what they what and then people will say well they were taking steroids I was like well steroids improve protein utilization so that would be more reason to take even more protein right so the fact that they're on our bollocks and that's all they felt what they need it for protein says a lot and these guys also did a pretty high carbohydrate diet about 60% of calories coming from carbohydrates and in fat was I think 15 to 20 percent right so it's quite a bit different in these guys look great that was the Golden Age of bodybuilding people like Franco Columbu and Schwarzenegger and Frank Zane these guys looked incredibly team 7088 or whatever yes exactly so one I don't think you need one gram per pound to definitely don't need that and some recommend even more than that and I just think that's absurd are they won grand prix which is what I get so I weight 200 pounds I get around 90 to 100 grams of protein sometimes less sometimes more right you know just depends and I've gone through periods where I've taken a lot more protein and never found it to have any additional benefit I wasn't getting strong or fast or a game bigger my friend Christian Thibodeau who's a strength very well respected strength coach he said the same thing and he's a big guy he's jacked here and he weighs around maybe 230 pounds solid and he said that he never found any more than 150 grams of protein and even that was that beneficial right and most of these big guys are eating multiples of that yeah yeah exactly and then but they're also taking anyone that's a professional bodybuilder they're using anabolics as well now you can get away with a lot and when you're doing a bollocks and you could say that that's more the reason why they're at a certain size look I'm amber testosterone a magazine wrote this article about you know how to how to survive with the high-protein lifestyle what they meant is tell me the name of that magazine this is called tea nation calm are you serious as of magazine called testosterone nation it's just called tea - nation it's just a websites not it's not a physical magazine they had a physical magazine for a little bit these are guys who used to be with muscle media 2000 and then they ventured off I mean they've been doing this for a long time 1990s but anyway they talked about how a lot of body builders have serious flatulence because they eat so much protein and how some of the big bodybuilders at Gold's Gym would carry around lysyl containers with them these are just farting on command everywhere they go okay now if that's something you're doing you're taking in way too much of something so let's let's get to the point of and also here's the other thing longer stretches in between meals better digestion better digestion means less need for protein intake because if you're digesting more of the protein less food intake and junk yeah exactly I don't even eat as much as a lot of people think Oh any most people think I probably eat five six thousand calories I probably eaten less than 2500 calories a day but what I'm eating is very high in nutrition forget about calories it's very nutritious in the more nutrition you take in the less you have to worry about calories right that's my take so I think a lot of things we have been taught we just believe because someone said it but there really isn't anything to substantiate so you do do some plant-based protein in your smoothie what else do you supplement with and I know you have your own line of something yeah I mean I I take one of my favorite supplements is one eye cells called restores I'm it's a systemic enzyme which lowers inflammation by it induces healing so it lowers didn't the need for inflammation and if I could recommend one thing that you will be that because that will help tremendously with aches and pains yeah I think I see you were nice enough to send me a box of your stuff yeah you need more just let me know that's my favorite if I could only take one supplement it would be systemic enzymes and people are surprised when they hear that because they go man your testosterone booster is so awesome it's a natural testosterone booster your brain communicates with your testes more to signal more testosterone production and it works extremely well way better than anything on the market doesn't come close just just look at the testimonials from people that have used it nothing comes close that's my second favorite product because as you get older your I mean it's not even so much as you're getting older it's just is this more wear and tear right it's more mileage those of us that are working hard physically and on our businesses and in our life and we're being we're being inundated with different stresses what about b12 D I take a beat I take a B 100 which has b12 but at that way I get all the B vitamins covered I don't take an actual b12 vitamin d3 I do take and I actually did score a low on that and they did a blood test a while back which is not too surprising because it's so hot in Las Vegas we're not out in the Sun all day long you know so I mean if I am out in the Sun I'm not walking around half-naked or anything the irony of being like the sunniest place I know is that you might outweigh it it's like I have to take vitamin D in a sunnier but ridiculous yeah but I do take that and there's vegan options for d3 right and I'm playing around with DHEA cream right now because that is really intriguing to me and DHEA cream not only increases DHEA levels if you get the right one right there's a company that is a former compound pharmacy guy so he created a DHEA cream which delivers through the skin really well a lot of the ones in the market they don't deliver well at all so you don't you don't end up increasing DHEA or anything useful I'm just playing around with that because sometimes for me when I go through periods of stress my DHEA can be depleted I'm just playing around with that to see how I feel how different I feel what I'm using that so I tend to play around with a couple what's quite few things but the staples are that restores on my testosterone booster I used eight weeks on four off because you never want to get too adapted to any herbs I'm a strong believer in cycling herbs I have an adrenal energy product called red which has rhodiola and has ashwagandha chillage it's an maca now that's really good for rejuvenating your adrenals and those of us that are working out hard just giving you more adaptogen properties that magnesium oil I love putting on before going to sleep because I do sleep a lot but I'm a light sleeper is anything that helps me relax because I'm always thinking you know when you're I think I'm just naturally a thinker but when you're an entrepreneur you tend to always be thinking of stuff have you experimented with CBD oil I have yeah I like CBD oil I you know I use marijuana recreationally just for fun you know not something like everyday to go to sleep or anything like that but if we're that's that's my recreational mr. alcohol you know that would be something I use if I want to go to a concert or something like that not driving around on it just so people know I'm down there spending the night but uh CPD I think is great for pain inflammation some of my dogs take it I have an older dog he's a senior he's got some heart issues so I give it to him just to keep him calm it was hearts enlarged so I have to keep his lifestyle as stress-free as possible so that he's good to go on that so I do like CBD yeah I've never noticed anything profound taking it right like I've never taken it and been like oh wow I know this so I got bone-on-bone arthritis in this elbow and I've had stem cells injected in there which helped the most yeah there's a friend of mine in Vegas dr. Garcia I had these mesenchymal stem cells injected in there that helped a lot but I've got this bone spur in there where it looked like it exploded so it's everywhere and I can't have them operated on or shaved down because I went to a couple surgeon they say it's too close to the nerve so that impinge is full range of motion like I can't extend this arm fully but what the stem cells did is they got rid of the pains I used to be in pain all the time and I just dealt with it I was like oh well I'm gonna have to deal with this and it was a nuisance stuff because you're always aware of it right but once I got the stem cells in there the pain went away pretty fast so that's been pretty powerful yes CBD oil is I mean for me like I haven't I've tried it a couple times I think it helps me sleep a little bit but it also gives me it kind of makes me depressed really yeah I've gotten that with certain things like I remember I tried say me one time which everyone said was great for a mood I actually found it to be the opposite and actually made me really depressed yeah so you different man yeah we're also going which is kind of goes back to the whole thing with your hormonal yeah like you know so so somebody's listening to this and they're like man I should think more about this I should look into where I'm at with this whole hormone thing like should they get a blood test like what's the first thing somebody should do to get on top of it and begin the process of trying to optimize this well what I would do is one go check out run article I wrote on leptin just to remind yourself of all things we discuss it that's on my website mic male comm I have a hormone optimization lecture series T which it's eight hours it's fifty dollars it's really comprehensive so that's good stuff information to have to refer back to you in terms of testing like I said you can go get the blood work done but if you don't know how to interpret the results it's not gonna be that useful and sure you can resource these things but it's always good to have a set of professional eyes anything you're doing is there a place where either you can go and figure out if there's a doctor or a professional in your area who knows what they're talking about with this stuff not that I'm aware of and honestly it's it's hard for me to recommend someone I don't know personally you know and stuff like this I'm sure there's plenty of good doctors out there that I don't know that are great but I've also had a lot of people like giving me negative experiences they've had with anti-aging doctors where they walk in there and they just want to get them on stuff it's like all your testosterone is low let's get you on this to a growth hormones let's get you on that it's like well let's get my advice is to work with someone that wants to address underlying functional medicine integrative medicine I think Delgado is great Nick Delgado and he does distance consulting I think dr. Thomas in Cologne he's based in Phoenix Arizona but he also does distance and what I like about him is the first phone call with him is free where he'll assess your situation and he'll let you know if he can help before he charges you anything and he'll have you do even more comprehensive testing such as mineral imbalances and so forth because you could have low testosterone because your copper and zinc are low you know and you just addressed as zinc imbalance all of a sudden your testosterone is great complicated it is yeah it really is that's why it's it's hard to stay you know just do this one thing and you're going to be great because you need to know the more you know about your exact situation the better it is to know what to do about it and otherwise it's just a guessing game so you get the testosterone test done and it's low okay we don't know why it's Lola this could be so many reasons why slow it could be lifestyle could be stress maybe you hate your job and it may take you quite a while to figure that out yeah exactly that's why it's good to have someone who knows what they're doing what he or she is doing look at it because they've seen this kind of stuff a million times no Thomas inkling on it's not gonna look at your lab work or mine and be surprised by anything he's gonna be like yeah I've seen this before I know what they do that's what you want you want someone looking at it going you know what I know exactly what to do instill that confidence alright man thank you talking to you man that was awesome thank you very much pleasure for informational and you gave me a lot to think about and I'm excited for my kettlebell training kettlebell I said Carol you got it man thank you so much thank you I really appreciate it that was really cool if you're digging on Mike you can find him at Mike Muller calm as it h yeah you're at Mike Mahler on Twitter you gotta like unlock your Instagram right after this Mike baller 73 on Instagram and Facebook is a aggressive strength right yeah so and if you just go to my website all the all the bunnies there exactly on there and the live life aggressively podcast and the book by the same name yeah yeah my friend sincere Hogan and I do the show we've been doing it for five years and it's a lot of fun so I encourage people to check that out and check it out man thank you so much all right dude be good thank you [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 283,601

Keywords: rich roll, vegan, health, fitness, diet, nutrition, athlete, podcast, plant-based, wellness, self-help, sleep, hormones, testosterone, leptin, cortisol, dopamine, supplements, strength, power, kettlebell, strength training, WOD, workout, mike mahler, human trafficking, animal rights, animal abuse, ty ritter, sex drive, sex slavery, project child save

Id: _vD4XgvbRBg

Length: 163min 49sec (9829 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 09 2018