Build Muscle & Strength & Forge Your Life Path | Dorian Yates

When people come to train with me, I said our objective is to get an exercise and go to real muscular failure. You've got to give it more than it's used to. The body does not want to change. It wants to keep status quo. So you've got to give it a bloody good reason, as we would say in England, to change, right? So you've got to put more stress on the body than it's used to, and then you need to recover from that. That's the idea, to do enough to stimulate, but not more than that, because this is an overload that you've got to recover from. And the number one thing that I hear from people is, I don't really have time for that. I have a business. I have a family. I said, if you could give me 45 minutes twice a week, that's all you need to do. And it's not theory because I've done it. You change your life, literally, with that and a good diet. So the whole time thing, excuses, it's not relevant. I'm not listening. You don't need a lot of time. Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dorian Yates. Dorian Yates is a legendary six-time Mr. Olympia winner who is also considered one of the greatest pioneers of training methods for bodybuilding health and fitness. He is known for using and recommending low-volume, high-intensity workouts, meaning very few sets done with maximal focus, perfect form, and directed muscle engagement taken to muscular failure and beyond. Today, Dorian teaches us how the typical person who is not interested in competitive bodybuilding should train for health and fitness and overall best results. We cover muscle building, fat loss, mobility, what forms of cardio are best, when to do them, and much more. The advice Dorian provides today is immensely valuable and applicable to everyone, men, women, young and old. He explains how for most people, the best muscle building and strength results will be achieved by training no more than three and in some cases only two days per week. Dorian also shares valuable insights on how to mentally frame and navigate your life and goals, how to use your hardships as fuel. He has a lot to say about that based on his own experience, but also how to recognize and lean into your natural strengths, how to be practical in choosing what dreams you chase and how to know when to pivot from one endeavor to another. We also discuss cannabis. In fact, even though I, of course, knew he was, Dorian and I first connected because of an episode that I did about cannabis both the potential benefits of cannabis as well as the very serious risks that may exist for certain people Dorian experience and read of the data on cannabis contrasted with mine. And that led us to an ongoing discussion that we continue today on the podcast. And that has me now reading into some newer studies. And I promise that I'll update everyone on my take of those studies once I get through them. Oh, yes. And Dorian also took me through a Yates style high intensity workout at Gold's Gym Venice. We trained back, we filmed it, and it's posted to our Clips channel, so you can check that out. It's linked in the show note caption. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dorian Yates. The Dorian Yates. Welcome. Apparently, yeah. Yeah, certainly. Big fan for many years. Thanks to you and thanks to Mike Menser and a few at the time, real iconoclasts. I trained differently than everyone around me told me to. And while I never became a competitive athlete at anywhere near the level that you did, certainly, it got me the results I wanted so much faster. I feel super healthy and great at 50. And I really want to talk about this high intensity, low-ish volume training that really can be credited to you. Because for those that don't know the community that you come from, there have been people who have been big proponents of long sessions, many hours in the gym. At the opposite extreme, there's been people such as Mike Mentzer who have been proponents It's a very brief, very high intensity, even one set to failure and that's it. And you brought things into some sense of moderation. This is almost like a hybrid. Yeah. I guess. Yeah, exactly. Between the purest HIT, which, I mean, I didn't come up with the idea. The guy that really initiated the whole thing was Arthur Jones, who was the guy that made the Norton's machines. And then he passed it on, right? And Mike Mensah made it more popular because Mike Mensah was American champion, Mr. Universe, and he was in the magazines. And I read Arthur Jones's books. And I think I'm a logical thinker. So it made sense to me But if it made sense to me and it didn work out practically who cares you know so like yourself I was kind of training like that and everyone was telling me this is not the way to do it you need to train more often do more sets and so on so I tried it and the whole thing with my career it's a bit like a science experiment in a way that I documented everything so I've got every workout the first time I stepped in the gym and said seriously okay I'm going to train and I want to be a competitive bodybuilder and this is how I'm going to change my life and maybe I'm going to go to gym or something like that that was about it at the time but I said okay so I'm tracking everything my progress is going really well I'm training like three times a week for maybe 45 minutes an hour but I'm working as well I'm doing construction I'm doing some heavy jobs so this is taking energy going well going well okay then let me try it let me jack it up on train four times a week could do a little bit more what happened nothing that's what happened everything stopped for three or four weeks I cut it back started growing again so I didn't really need to learn that lesson too many times um and I got to be British champion I got to be pro, turned pro, and I read everything that Mike Mensah wrote in the magazines and everything like that and got to meet him when I came out here. And we discussed training and said, okay, what are you doing? You know, I'm warming up, whatever it takes, a couple of sets. I'm doing a set to failure, and then I'm resting two or three minutes, dropping it down 10%, maybe, and going to failure again. So I'm hitting that nail in twice just to make sure it's in there. so mike said why don't you try cutting back to one set to failure so i started that around 91 92 and i feel like i got another you know another level of growth from that um so people say oh dorian doesn't do hit i don't know what category we want to put it in but it's probably somewhere between conventional bodybuilding and the extreme of HIT that Mike Mensah was doing and Arthur Jones, which would be perfect for the average person. I mean, Arthur Jones was doing like a whole body workout a couple of times a week That was his initial recommendation And I agree for the average person that great because you want to build a certain level of muscle mass for your health But I was a competitive bodybuilder so you got to be concerned with a little bit like you know side delts, rear delts. Average person could do one shoulder exercise, it would be enough. So you need to do a little bit more as a competitive bodybuilder. So somebody came up with the moniker Blood and Guts. They saw my training, that looks like blood and guts. So that's what we called it. So it's high-intensity training, a lot less than the other guys were doing probably, but maybe the HIT purists will say, oh, it's not. But it is what it is, and it's all – I've got every workout written down so people can see what I did. And call it what you will, but, you know, it was briefer than everyone else I was competing against. And it had an effect, although not everyone followed what I was doing, but prior to myself being successful, it was like six times a week. Some people were doing twice a day. Not very often, to be honest. There's a lot in the magazines. Arnold promoted that a lot, right? But if you look at Arnold, he was probably a full size when he was 21, 22. He was huge. How did he get there? He was bench pressing 500. He was doing deadlifts. He was doing squats, whatever. He built the foundation. And I believe competitive bodybuilders back then, they kind of used the weights as a calorie burner as well. So they got the muscle mass. Then they're doing more volume and more sets and more reps. And obviously this is helping to maintain the muscle while at the same time burning a lot of calories. So I said, wouldn't it be better to do the weight training just to build muscle and maintain muscle and do some cardio exercise to burn extra calories so then you'll be able to recover properly. So that was my approach. So it probably falls somewhere in between the two camps, to be honest. Yeah, I remember trying the one set to failure, a couple of warmups, one set to failure, you'd pre-exhaust, you know, leg extensions into leg press. And it occurred to me after about a year or two that I needed to do a little bit more. I mentioned that because I think I'm like most people in the sense that, and let me frame this right, I could get certain movements to really thrash the muscle that I needed to with one or two sets. But if there isn't really good mind muscle connection and fiber recruitment, you might need a bit more. It's possible. Yeah. I mean, none of this is written in stone when people come to train little bit more it's possible yeah i mean none of this is written in stone when people come to train with me i said our objective is to get an exercise and go to real muscular failure we'll need to get there safely so we'll do a couple of sets to warm up but if somehow you don't feel or i don't feel you nailed it in that set let's do another one you know there's there's no law we can't do a little bit more so you are correct in saying that somebody that's very experienced they got that mind-muscle connection where you can just link in and you can fully destroy it. So it depends on the person. But the idea is to not do more than is necessary because then you're going to find it harder to recover. And the process is stimulate, right? So you've got to train, you've got to overload. And during this process, you're not growing. You're creating damage, stress to the muscle that then has to recover and then overcompensate. So two things need to be in place. It needs to be sufficient intensity or overload or there will be no reaction. And then you need to recover from that. And let's just put it straight out there, man. There's a big difference between somebody using anabolic steroids than somebody that's not. So somebody that's using can recover from that process more quickly than somebody that isn't. So I feel I should always say this because when you're looking at a champion bodybuilder and how he trains and you're a young guy trying to build up, that's probably not appropriate for you right now that guy has already got the size and is refining for a competition or something so uh that's the idea to do enough to stimulate but not more than that because this is an overload you gotta recover from so you gotta recover before you grow as well so you don't want to go back to the gym before that whole process is uh has taken place so i i use some simple analogies sometimes when people are training with me like we're going in now, we're knocking a wall down, right? We're rehabbing your house. We're knocking a wall down and the guys need to come now with the bricks. So they need materials and they need to do it, but they're halfway through building that wall and you come and knock it down again. We're not getting anywhere, you know? 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Again, that's Juve spelled J O O VV.com slash Huberman to get up to $400 off. One of the really kind of unfortunate things about resistance training is that it fills the muscle with blood temporarily, in part because of some quotes that came from Arnold in Pumping Iron that the so pump it an illusion right It transient And while it can be helpful in letting you know that you targeted a given muscle correctly I think people get addicted to that feeling, but they're not realizing that the damage to the muscle tissue that then is allowed to recover is what makes the muscle actually larger when you're outside of the gym. A pump is just a temporary extra blood flow to the area that feels good. You're pumped up, you feel tight. but you could get a lightweight and get a great pump it's not going to stimulate any growth so don't be fooled by the pump it's nice and it's part of the process but you've got to overload the muscle you've got to give it uh more than it's used to the body does not want to change it wants to keep status quo so you've got to give it a bloody good reason as we would say in england to change right so you've got to put more stress on the body than it's used to otherwise you won't adapt so even if it's like you know half a pound more or one rep more there's got to be something more that the body says hey this stress i can't handle it i need to reinforce myself and adapt to this stress so next time it won't be so stressful that's basically the the process so and it can't be linear forever right maybe in your first year of training first 18 months you just go in And like I put 20, 25 pounds on in the first 18 months that I was training and natural as well. So, you know, it becomes a case of diminishing returns. And at some point you can't just keep going up like this. So I tell people train real hard for like five or six weeks and then come down for two weeks, maybe submaximal. So you'll sort of sawtooth it like that hard for five or six weeks, then back off. And during that two weeks, are you telling people to stay out of the gym entirely? No. I'm telling him he can go in and do some lightweight but nowhere near failure blood flow, keep the maintenance if you want to take a week off, I think it's good a couple of times a year when I had a gym, the guys I'm stuck on this and that I said okay, take a week off what do you mean? I said man, just take a week off come back in a week and tell me how you feel I came back and I was stronger, I was like no shit because you've rested you let your body rest and rebuild so that'll be a lesson to you So if I could travel back in time, I wouldn't have called the movie Pumping Iron. I would have called it Stress and Adapt. Stress, Recover, Adapt. Not quite so sexy as like I feel like I coming all the time But that whole notion of the pump plus this idea that you know many many hours in the gym is what required I think it kept a lot of the general public out of resistance training Yeah. I think now that's changed. And fortunately, because I think it is very beneficial, if we could get a little granular about training and recovery, I think it'd be helpful for people. I realize that you laid out the top contour really nicely. So for a person who's natural, not taking hormone replacement therapy or anabolics, you think two, maybe three whole body sessions to start out to learn the movements. Is that doing one or two sets to failure? What does that look like for the raw beginner? A raw beginner, first of all, you need to learn how to do the movements correctly before thinking about going to failure. So it would be a certain period of time learning to do the exercise correctly. uh put in some kind of idea in their head of what's going on uh you know what do the pecs do bring your arms down and across the body what do your lats do they bring your upper arm down and back so you'd be amazed like if you're an f-100 pro bodybuilder some of them don't know like why they're doing what they're doing what's the mechanics involved and i get them to do light sets very perfect do you feel that do you feel how it contracts when you latch and you squeeze and you contract yeah i feel it feel it okay now you've got it but you've got to try to maintain that when it gets really hard because we're going against the natural mechanics of the body here right because we're as i say we're doing chest yeah we're trying to isolate the pecs there's some doubts involved and triceps and work that or we're working legs we're working back the body normally doesn't work like that it works as a unit right if you throw something you don't do that from your tricep right it'll be from your foot through the hips through the shoulder whole body thing so when the exercise gets really hard your brain is going to try to recruit or change the exercise to make it easier so i got to get people to override that instinct just stick with the form until we get to the point where you can't do anymore and understand you know that's why i get them to do light stuff at first to really feel it understand I explain what's going on a couple of weeks after that we can start pushing to failure actually I had a guy recently that we had a business meeting and he told me he was diabetic and had liver problems and it was overweight and this and that I gave him a challenge I actually had a guy recently that we had a business meeting I actually had a guy recently that we had a business meeting and he told me he was diabetic and had liver problems and he was overweight and this and that. I gave him a challenge. I said, he'd train with me for a month. I'll fix all that shit, yeah? Oh, but my doctor, this and that. I said, listen, he trained with me three times a week for about 45 minutes. After one month, obviously I changed his diet as well, basically for a short period of time, very low carbs. after one month he was not in the diabetic zone he was out of the pre-diabetic zone he was in the normal range great and his liver function that was three times the normal amount liver enzymes was back to normal uh i told him check it out you got a fatty liver so yeah i had a fatty liver i said i know he said my doctor told me not to eat fat i'm like man do you know how long at least i don't know here but in england how long an md a doctor spends studying nutrition no it's trivial one afternoon two or three hours i mean you can learn nothing so the doctor was telling me he's got a fatty liver so stop eating fat i said that's absolutely the worst advice you could get because the reason you've got fatty liver is because uncontrolled blood sugar so we get your blood sugar down one month his liver was normal his blood sugar was normal he lost like five six kilos of body fat just in a month and we're doing three times a week whole body uh we split it up actually into three workouts so he's hitting everything uh once a week when our uh mutual friend you knew him better than i did uh the now deceased unfortunately mike mentor told me to train each body part once per week yeah at first i thought he was crazy so legs once a week calves once a week maybe twice for some people the calves but um shoulders and arms and chest and back on three separate days legs chest back shoulders and arms i thought he was crazy but then you know i thought about it and the chest and back workout you're indirectly targeting the arms yeah legs is a if you do them right as a whole body experience and uh stress on a lot of stress on your nervous which has to recover independently of the whatever muscle group you're training. If you do legs, I mean, really to failure, there's a lot of stress on your nervous system as well. So that also has to recover. That's why I say after six weeks, I've just noticed with myself and many people, it seems to like you hit a plateau there So I try to push through it come down and I take a rest and go again later So I know that your opinion on real world results versus laboratory studies but these days let me just put something out there I'd like to see your response. These days, you know, people will talk a lot about, okay, the studies or muscle biopsies show you train a muscle and stimulate hypertrophy, growth. and then muscle protein synthesis peaks, you know, 48 hours later, which means that you can hit the muscle again, ideally three days later or two days later. I tried that because I thought, hey, listen, I'm a scientist, I'll try it. And I immediately started going backwards with my progress. This was a few years ago. And went back to training each thing directly once per week. And where there's indirect stuff, you know, arms getting hit once indirectly because of a chest and back workout on a separate day, found, I went right back to progress again. And so, you know, I'm a scientist trained to do science. So what, how do you think about something where in a laboratory, you can see something like protein synthesis peaks 48 hours later, except therefore train every 72 hours versus the real world phenomenon? It's all very interesting, but if it doesn't work in practicality, what's it worth? You know, I hear this a lot now about this science-based training, but I actually don't know what science they're talking about i mean some meta studies i think but how were those studies carried out with whom and so on and so on i don't know i know the case of the ator study where he put on 65 pounds of muscle verified in a month by training like less than about an hour a week i think it was your whole body i think it was low sets to failure and yes he was very underweight because he wasn't on anything and then he got sick so he's underweight so he's building back muscle but he wouldn't build it back without much stimulus so 65 pound of muscle although it was uh muscle memory let's say he had been that big before but he put it on in a month and you compare that with arnold that dieted down to 210 i think to do this film stay hungry then he went back up to 230 for the mystery olympia but that took him like three months so you can compare the two so when the people talk about these science-based studies and he shouldn't train to failure it's better to keep reps in reserve. I don't know which studies they're talking about. I'm not saying they're not out there, but I'm not familiar with them. I'm not familiar with how they carried out the studies But if it doesn work in practicality does it really matter It doesn matter I spent some time with these and you might not be surprised to learn that a lot of times it you know we got some college students they doing leg extensions you know, we're looking at biopsies of the quadriceps, this kind of thing. Rarely is it the kind of compound movements, multi-joint movements, sometimes, but not always. Well, look, my experience with the HIIT, high-intensity, low-ish volume training, has been, I'll say it's not just about gaining muscle. I mean, I'm now 50. I know you're almost 64. Yep, coming up. Looking amazing. You'll tell us more about longevity stuff in a bit. But I have to say part of it is also that if one trains the way that you're describing, each muscle once per week, focusing on intensity, not volume and so forth, six weeks or so, then backing off for two weeks. You also find that in your peer group, you're not the one always complaining about pain and you have energy for other things, which we'll get back to. I mean, unless you're a competitive bodybuilder, most people, including myself, need energy to tend to life and want to be able to not be, it's not the soreness, it's the constant aches and pains that come from overtraining, I think, that most people don't have to live with but think they do. It depends on your goals, yeah? But I really believe the average person, yeah, that wants to get health benefits from bodybuilding, weight training, resistance, whatever you want to call it, right? they they have a guy that's 40 or 50 or 60 guy or a lady whatever the idea is if you could because you've lost muscle mass slowly since maybe one percent a year since you're 40 right and this is affecting your health your metabolism the ability to process sugar many many things uh bone strength and the number one thing that i hear from people is i don't really have time for that. I have a business. I have a family. I said, if you could give me 45 minutes twice a week, that's all you need to do. Okay, you need to eat properly and everything like that. But that's all you need to do for the average person. If you took eight to 10 exercises that covered your whole body and you did it twice a week, that would be enough for the average person. One for chest, one or two for back, one or two for legs. Hey, if you want to do some bicep curls and some triceps, you You can do it, but you're doing pressing anyway. So for the average person, that would actually be enough. And it not theory because I done it with people Like I saying this gentleman that came along we put 45 minutes in uh nearly an hour three times a week because i had him doing cardio as well well guess how long the cardio was six minutes six minutes you have been pedal hard we're doing we're doing in um sprints like on an air bike it's my favorite because it engages every muscle push pull legs if you do a 20 second all out and you can see how you got on the side of the thing you You can see how much watch you're generating. So now you have a target to hit or exceed every time. So do a minute, minute and a half warm-up, whatever. Feel warm. All out. Balls out like the devil's chasing you for 20 seconds. First one's tough, but it's okay. Go down slowly for a minute. Do the second one all out. The second one's really tough. The third one is I've never met anybody that wants to do one after the third one because literally you can't breathe um and the benefits from that again i think there's a book called the one minute cardio it's a bit tricky because it's not really one minute it's one minute of sprints but it's six minutes in total and they compared that to 45 minutes of steady cardio on a treadmill or whatever it is and the results are more or less the same so what do you want to do you want to spend six minutes you want to spend 45 minutes i'd rather do the six minutes I do a bit of long cardio as well myself because I like biking in the mountains and stuff but if you did that twice a week along with some weight training that would be amazing you change your life literally with that and a good diet so the whole time thing excuses it's not relevant I'm not listening you don't need a lot of time what I love about you is that you've done things at the ultra elite level within bodybuilding but the advice that you're giving right now is very practical for the everyday person. And I'm not a psychologist, but I'm going to venture a hypothesis here, which is that some of that has to do with the fact that you grew up blue collar background from Birmingham, working full time while building out your bodybuilding career. You didn't come to it with a briefcase full of cash and have the opportunity to just say, well, how much training can you do? Well, let's figure it out. You had to be very practical. And my guess is that you had to be very practical about recovery and nutrition as well. You probably, I'm guessing there was a in your life where you couldn't afford, you know, grass-fed meat shipped in from south of France and this guy? I'm not saying you do that now, but... Let me tell you a story, man. When I was a British champion, I was a big you know, grass-fed meat shipped in from south of France. you know, grass-fed meat shipped in from south of France. I'm not saying you do that now. Let me tell you a story, man. When I was British champion, that was a big thing back then, British champion, right? 3,000 people in the audience packed out. We had buses coming from our gym, all this stuff, you know, air horns. British bodybuilding crowds, they're pretty rowdy. I think the Brits around any sport get pretty rowdy. Pretty rowdy. If you see boxing in Vegas and there's a British fighter, they take over the whole place. So anyway, this great accolade, I'm British champion now. And I went home. I got no car. I'm living in a council estate. It's like projects, you know. Council estate. I got no carpet in my bedroom. I don't even have a proper bed. I just got a mattress. I got a TV that barely works. And I got a trophy. I'm like, wow, look, I'm British champion. but nobody gives a fuck really like you know I do and the people that's in the bodybuilding community but this hasn't translated into anything yet it took me about five years of really like you know 100% dedication for me to be turn pro and the ironic thing is I guess like when you're starting you got nothing nobody's very interested and nobody wants to help you and you start when you become successful then successful people want to help you because they want to help themselves which is it's fair enough it's a transaction but until then no so uh i got my first car when i was 25 all my friends were driving 18 19 but the funny thing is i didn't feel like i was missing out on anything i knew i was on this mission and this in itself was so powerful like nobody else had this mission that I was doing, which was to change my life, basically. And bodybuilding was the vehicle. And I think something that really helped me is I'm an avid reader. I have been since I was about 10 years old. And I can take in a lot of information on a subject if I'm very interested. I'll almost get obsessed with it for a while. And then I might just say, oh, I forget about that. I'll go interested in something else. So all the guys that I was training with, they They were like just watching videos and listen to other guys in the gym I was reading Mike Mensah I was reading Arthur jones i was trying to figure it out for myself um which means you need a very uh independent kind of personality so yeah let me try do a bit more doesn't work finished you know and the fact that i've got all this every single workout from 1983 to 1997 written down all the diets later on when i'm using anabolics what i'm using and how long and all this stuff so i could uh analyze it you know see what's working and what's not working a lot of guys were like shooting in the dark uh hoping they're gonna hit something but they don't and i you know i didn't have time to waste this was a mission uh i didn't have skills i didn't have a family you know all this stuff so bodybuilding was my road to change my life. Where it was going at first, I didn't know, but I knew it was going somewhere. I knew I could be very good at it. Did you have the sense, even before all this, that perhaps you were different or that you were destined to pursue something? 100%. What's your earliest recollection of knowing that you were going to aspire to some very high peak? Well, the first thing I was into was Bruce Lee, right? So, you know, Bruce Lee. Even I was impressed with his physique then. Now I look, compared to a bodybuilder, it's very lean. But the abs and everything had that poster on the wall, you know, with the cuts down there and everything. So I was doing push-ups. Just in my last year at school, I started getting bodybuilding magazines and doing a bit of weight training. So there was that then. i left home at 16 and i just didn't have the lifestyle to pursue it and for some reason i'm not doing this i said i'm not doing this until i can do it properly and uh i always knew i was different i guess you know but you didn't i didn't know why and i didn't know where it was going but i knew it was going somewhere and it's a strange feeling through my whole process i feel like i've done it before almost, you know, like it was destined. It wasn't a surprise. In the earlier years, it's like I just knew I got to just put everything into this. I got to put everything into it, and I can't let anything distract me, 100% into this. So yeah I knew I was destined for something and when I started doing bodybuilding I was like ah so this is it I don know if you heard the story but I got in a little bit of trouble Just rowdy guys, really. We got picked up on the street at the wrong time because there were some street riots in Birmingham, which we weren't involved with, but wrong place, wrong time. Got sent to a detention center, and in there they had weights, and there was 300 guys and like I was nearly the strongest guy in there there was the only guy who was stronger me was like 50 60 pounds heavier and I was really lean I had abs and everything everyone was like wow the physique even the prison officers in there were like you should do something with this so don't worry I'm gonna so that was another one like hey you've got something here you know there's a crossroads here and I was like I never want to be in a place like this again and lose my freedom but you literally become a number and you're told when to get up and when to do this and those places suck and i saw people in there that would i knew they were destined to like this is their life even they didn't care yeah i know but i don't give a fuck i might be in jail but this is just the life i've chosen good luck with that man it's not for me you know so that again was like hey you need to do something with this and uh when i left there i didn't start training And I was like, I got to get a job. I got to get in a part. I got to get stability. And when I did, I was like, right, I start my bodybuilding journey. Write it down today, the day. I still got it, man. What's in those notebooks? Everything from what you did for a warm-up, how you felt going into there. All the sets and reps, warm-up, how I was feeling that day. Some days I was feeling overtrained and tired. Even though I was training three days a week, sometimes I had to back off the intensity because of work and stuff like that. but how I was feeling and you know it's interesting if I look at my books over the years the first ones are quite childish got these little go for it you know mass and power kind of cool too I'm glad you actually mentioned that I've kept training logs inspired by you and by Mike for many years and getting to read that kind of stuff the kind of silly stuff yeah I mean it captures the spirit of it at the time not only that I would forget half of the stuff that I did if I hadn't documented it. Even now, I'm like, my guys on social media was like, when we're doing this exercise, and when did you start, when did you change to this one? I'm like, I don't know, man, I have to go back and look. And sometimes it's not as I thought it was when I go back. It was a little bit different. So it great that I got all that written down and documented and I used to have every month a review where I at and the goals for the next month Try to make them realistic but you know goals in mind for the next month Super methodical. Very methodical, analytical, logical. Do you get that from one of your parents or to go in the opposite direction of your parents? Well, my mother was actually quite very educated. she was private school and everything but my dad was very working class car mechanic and everything but he managed perfect combo yeah he managed to uh you know i was young i lost my father at 13 right from a heart attack um but he was a working class guy that managed to buy a small farm he managed to learn to fly an airplane i went out with my dad when i was like four or five years old He was flying four-seat Cessnas and everything like that. So, I mean, he must have been a smart guy and very driven to be able to do that as a working-class guy. Imagine back in the 1970s flying airplanes and you work as a maintenance engineer at the rover plant or something. I think for Americans they don't realize how stratified the class system in England was in that time. Yeah. It's very different. Absolutely. A working-class guy flying an airplane. There was nobody else doing that. so he must have been a guy above average intelligence so my mom was as well so I probably got the logical stuff from my dad I would say and you know my mom's more female more emotional my dad was probably very uh you know logical in his ways and an engineer you know engineering is about numbers and everything so uh a lot of people ask me what happened if you didn't lose your father when you're 13 you during the bodybuilder problem wouldn't exist because if life's comfortable you won't put yourself through this shit man i mean it's a lot of work a lot of dedication a lot of sacrifice and uh over many many years it's not a you know it's not a short-term thing to get from being starting bodybuilding to bet to be a pro body builder took me seven years and that was quick that was relatively quick so seven years of absolute So this is my main focus of life. This is what I'm doing for seven years to get to be a pro. And then I was seven years as a pro as well. By now, I'm sure that many of you have heard me say that I've been taking AG1 for more than a decade. And indeed, that's true. The reason I been taking AG1 for more than a well. By now, I'm sure that many of you have heard me say that I've been taking AG1 for more than a decade. And indeed, that's true. The reason I started taking AG1 way back in 2012, and the reason why I still continue to take it every single day, is because AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. What that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals, but also probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens to cover any gaps that you might have in your diet, while also providing support for a demanding life. Given the probiotics and prebiotics in AG1, it also helps support a healthy gut microbiome. 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How long gear, for the folks that don't know, is a verbiage for steroids. TRT, testosterone replacement therapy, lower dosages designed to bring things into upper normal range, in some cases a little higher. From the time you picked up a weight, maybe in this youth detention center, until the first time you went on gear, How long was that and how much did you achieve doing the sorts of training you were talking about before? I want to separate this out from the competitive phase. In part because, frankly, I think, and I've been very open. I'm on low-dose TRT. I started when I was 45, about 125 milligrams a week. Okay. Same as you. We're on point with that. The same. Yeah, same as you. But I always tell people they really, really, really should wait, if do it at all. How long did you have without anything? Whereas, you know, food, training, sleep, maybe some supplements like some creatine, some protein powder. Right, so I started in 83 earlier in the year. I was 180 185 but very lean You can see some pictures of me after six months training Yeah well you have those thick joints I mean you having athletic I got very low body fat as well naturally My son and my daughter, they both like had abs and like when they were 11 years old, very, very lean, pale skin, low body fat, thin skin type of thing. So you wouldn't say, wow, look at that guy, he's big. But you'd say, wow, he's really cut this guy. that's how I started 180 so uh after six months I think it was 195 and the gym owner put on a contest in Birmingham local gym thing and he was like come on go in a contest and I don't know okay so I went in no diet no steroids nothing it was the first time as contest I still got the pictures but the two guys that I was competing against they came second and third I won but both these guys were already on stuff so i was able to beat them not using anything right because genetically i'm better i guess i'm not saying in six months uh i overtook them i probably started ahead of them so that was with nothing i got up to 210 so i'm just looking back because we did some social media posts with my early training yeah so i'm benching three plates aside for like three or four reps and I want to go now into the IFBB and compete, which I know everybody's using, right? So I was 210 when I decided I'm going to do this competition and I did some D-ball, 20 milligrams a day for about six weeks and I switched to Anovar for the contest. so I went from 180 to 210 so that's 30 pounds I put on in a year and a half training or something then I decided to do the competition so in six weeks I think on 20 milligrams of debar I went to like 230 you know it's a big boost in six weeks but I already put on 30 pounds like without anything um and for me it was always like I'm going to do competitive bodybuilding and I intend to make a career out of it. So I just want to be on the same playing field as everybody else. So I won the novice competition in the IFBB and like everyone was like freaking out. The guy who was the head of the federation who also a judge at the Mr Olympia and some other guys came backstage and said where the hell have you come from and why are you in the novice competition i said well i'm from birmingham and it's my first competition in the federation so i start at the bottom and wait you're probably better than our best heavyweight i'm like no come on and they were laughing like this kid it's like we want you to join the british team in two weeks' time at the World Games, which is a world championship. So I went from a novice two weeks later to compete in the World Games against Barry DeMay, who became a top Olympian, Matt Mendenhall, who was the best amateur in USA at the time, and I got seventh place there. And I remember, like, I basically spent out all my funds to get ready for this concert. I had nothing left. I had to buy a tracksuit, tanning lotion. like I was earning very little money. So this took all my money and I'm broke. And I had to ask my brother-in-law, can you lend me like 20 pounds because I need to do this and get a taxi to the team selection. So I went to the team selection. I got picked. But I was like amongst all these guys and I'm thinking like I just borrowed some money to get here. But they picked me for the World Games team. So I went quite uniquely I think from a novice competition to a world championship in two weeks. So that's, you know, kind of the level I was at when I first started competing. I don't want to put words into your mouth, but do you think it's fair to say that for people who are not going to pursue competitive bodybuilding, that it's probably best to explore how far they can go with their training and good nutrition? and perhaps even without hormone replacement until they really need it or later. I mean, to me it seems like given the health risks, unless there's – it's sort of like boxing. Like boxing is fun. I've done some boxing, done some sparring. But at some point you realize, wait, if I'm not going to make money doing this, if this isn't my career, getting hit in the head is just not worth it, especially for my job. I'm not asking you to be a public health advisor, but you've been in this sport. a lot of young guys and gals are interested in looking better, feeling better, and going immediately to what peptides can I take? Should I be on HRT? Should I take Anovar? And I've got my opinions, but you're the expert here. Well, it's my opinion. And the way I looked at it was like, I'm going to do this as a sport, right? So I justified it because everyone else is doing it. opinions but you're the expert here well it's my opinion and the way i looked at it was like i'm opinions but you're the expert here well it's my opinion and the way i looked at it was like i'm going to do this as a sport right so i justified it because everyone else is doing it and i did it as a professional and uh 1990 so i was two times british champion overall british champion in 1988 i got my pro card and my first pro contest was night of champions which was probably second or third you know uh below the mr olympia because those of you don't know you can't just go into mr olympia right you have to win a pro show or place in the top three as it used to be then i'm not sure now they seem to give out so many pro cards it's kind of lost its value but then it was tough to get a pro card so i said look i've been doing all this yeah i'm taking steroids which may have some negative effects on my health later on, may do. So I'm going to go to knight of champions. If I don't get in the top five, I'm not good enough. So at that point, if that's the case, no longer justified to take the steroids or compete because I've gone as far as my genetics will allow me. As I observed the history of bodybuilding, the guys that were great champions, they were great like out the gate. They didn't get, I don't know, 12th place in Mr. Olympia and then next year win it, right? You got it or you don't have it, right? That's what I thought. I'm going to be brutally honest with myself. I have a gym. I'm making okay money now. If I don't compete, I could open more gyms, put more time into that. I have a young son. You know, they're kind of making a sacrifice of time and energy and everything because I'm putting everything into this. So if I don't get in the top five in the Knights of Champions, competitive career is over, steroids are over, do something else within the sport open more gyms or something like that anyway the story is I got second so I continued to do what I got to do as a professional and I feel it was justified because I was earning a lot of money more money than anyone else I knew ever earned but what's my advice if you were a 20 year old guy and you were speaking to me and and I'm giving you advice. Get as far as you can naturally, yeah? And then look at it. But whatever gains you make by taking anabolics is a temporary situation You will lose it when you get off right So it a merry Once you get on the merry you don really want to get off because when you do get off, you start to lose all those gains. You start to feel mentally depressed because now your hormones are on the floor. So what are you going to do? Jump right back on again. And it becomes this merry-go-round. as far as i'm concerned everybody should make their own choices in life and be able to do what they want to do but keep that in mind is it worth it because negative possible negative effects uh physically and also not talked about a lot mentally i believe there's a lot of people in the sport with mental health problems especially women now because they're in the high doses now where before they really weren't. And we're in this age of instant gratification. Everybody wants everything now, right? And I see it a bit like this, maybe from the guy's point of view. Well, listen, women are having breast implants, right? They're having lip fillers and Botox and all this shit, so why can't we take some anabolics just to look good and have abs on the beach? Why not? because of that. And ask yourself if it's worth it, because this is a reality. You can't keep those gains, so you're probably going to be forced to continually do this over a long period of time, and that might be bad for your health. I seem to be in very good health, but I've changed my lifestyle and done a lot of different things to kind of recover from the stress that I put on my body in a professional career. And I'm here today, and I'm healthy, and I'm successful, and my business is good and I'm happy. But it could have been different. You know, it was different for a lot of guys that I used to compete against. Yeah, a lot of them are dead. Yeah, so is it worth the risk? I mean, that's their question to answer, but I would say it's not. But, hey, that's just my opinion. Well, I'm struck again by how rational you were. If I place in the top five, et cetera, I'll move forward. If not, very grounded. Yeah, so that was the first question, and we will return to some training things. But the second question relates to this thing that you mentioned about your dad, had he not passed away young. A friend of mine, we were talking recently about having daughters versus sons I won provide the context for this but and he said to me he got three daughters and he very happy with his three daughters And he said and he said you know the one thing about sons is they feel I think he was talking about himself they feel like they have to fill their father's shoes. There's going to be a phase where they're competing with their dad, no matter what. And my reflexive response was, and then I realized, listen, I went through all that stuff, all that stuff. And in many ways, my dad and I are on good terms now, but we had some choppy years in there, but for sure, but now we're good. But the friction, I mean, that grew me a lot too. I mean, it forced me to work harder. I mean, there were probably some long nights that, you know, I just, I wasn't consciously tying it to like, oh, I'm trying to, you know, outdo him. But I pushed myself to become somebody that was at least as, you know, successful in certain ways and ideally more. And so do you think this is a real thing? I think every situation can go two ways, right? I mean, you have a son now. So how do you think about this with him? I think he found it tough. He confines with my wife a little bit that he found it tough. Like, well, I'm like, don't try to compete with me in what I do because, but take the principles of discipline and hard work and he can apply that really to anything uh but yeah i think you know my son did some bodybuilding i was he was uh playing with the idea of competing which he probably could have done quite well but i said look you're a sensitive guy yeah much more sensitive than me i got thick skin but let me tell you what will happen if you compete you win yeah of course he won historian son you lose how can he lose historian son i said either way that's be prepared for that's going to be the reaction so you know if you want to do it i'll support you but he decided not to get into the competitive side of things um well he trains people and stuff so you know he's still both of my kids are in the fitness world let's say um but competitive world is a It's a different thing. And there's very few people that can get to the top and make it work for them. More people now, because before you had to compete, and you had to win, and you had to be in the magazines, now a lot of people can make money online coaching or whatever it is So there more avenues now that you can go into to make money In what called now the fitness industry it's so much bigger than when I was competing, but I would say purist bodybuilding is less people doing it. More people going to the gym and doing fitness in general, but I think bodybuilding per se was more popular in the 80s and 90s because it was all new. and there was a list there was no crossfit there was no mma there's you know things have changed since then there was no fitness mr olympia there's no i don't know they've got so many classes now so there's many more things for people to do than you know maybe they figure it's not worth it to be a competitive bodybuilder if you can learn uh earn an income online and not you know put yourself online in competition. So things have changed a lot since then. Yeah. And the bodies that are in movies have changed tremendously. The average size of a male or female, the shape is so much more bodybuilder-esque now. Yeah, because everyone's using juice, right? You know, it's mainstream now. When I started bodybuilding in the 1980s, I don't think the general public really knew about steroids or, you know, they got a little inkling when Ben Johnson got a positive. Now everybody's, it's mainstream right everybody knows about steroids and i think it's seen as by males as a cosmetic enhancement just like females put in blush plants and or botox and whatever they put in their lips and everything to make that change so it's mainstream you got rappers you got movie stars like they want to get in shape for a movie come on man and it's not happening in two months that transformation without some chemical help which you know they're earning million and the millions in the movie so maybe it's worth it for them of course you mentioned you have a thick skin um one of the things that uh got me to learn about you early on because frankly i i was involved in other things a little bit of martial arts some soccer some things and and bodybuilding to me wasn't something i really wanted to pursue as a sport but i wanted to put on muscle i was a tall skinny kid um that's what led me to mensur and how i learned about your training, discovered what you were doing, and then really learned to extract what I think is the best of bodybuilding for somebody who doesn't want to do it. Like how are they training? How are they eating? What are they doing that's separate from the drugs that I can benefit from? This kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. And to be fair, TRT can be very useful to treat depression and other things are they training? How are they eating? What are they doing that's separate from the drugs that I are they training? How are they eating? What are they doing that's separate from the drugs that I can benefit from? This kind of thing. And to be fair, TRT can be very useful to treat depression and other things for men, and in some cases, even women. We'll get back to that, but I want to just kind of frame this in a certain way. However, one of the things that I think drew me to what you were doing at the time is that you had this kind of like mellow, or I would say kind of like quiet, at thick skin stance. We also have kind of commonalities through our music taste. So I saw that and I'd recognize certain things. Still get that punk inside of me, man. In the tattoos, the punk rock thing. Yeah, Oye music and that kind of thing. And so you go, oh, here's somebody who's kind of different than the rest of this community. But when people see the videos of you training, we'll put some links to those. It's so striking because you're like this, but then in the moment of a set, It's like, I mean, intensity doesn't quite explain it. It's like, and I'm curious because people can see those videos. What was going on in your head? Were you think going into the set, through the set, were you thinking about, I'm just guessing your dad, how you were an underdog? Were you just thinking about the muscle? What were you using besides listening to loud music? And intensity doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from someplace. What's your internal narrative at those times? Well, I always prepared myself before I went to the gym. Just walked through doors casually. I'd review my training before I went there. This is what I did last week. This is what I want to do today. And I would sit and do a visualization. so I'd have specific clothes for the day and like OCD maybe and I used to have this thing which seems strange to me now yeah I used to iron my clothes before I went to the gym right they had to be ironed they had to be thing and I just read a study how ironing clothes really lowers your cortisol by about 40 percent I didn't know that I was just doing it I trained with my friend in He's like, what the fuck you're doing, man? Just put your t-shirt on. No, no, no, I got to iron it. There was a whole game preparation going on to get me in maybe OCD, maybe too much. But it worked for me So I review go to the gym and have my targets and uh i use a special type of motivation it called fuck you motivation huh fuck you to all the teachers at school that said you couldn get anywhere fuck you fuck anyone so i'm gonna show you fuck you so fuck your motivation it's a great one yeah whatever you've got inside you anger negative emotions use it all use it all like fire and then when i go home i'm like i'm chilled i've slayed dragons in the gym i've hacked people up with my sword i've and it's like a form of mastery over oneself mastery over the whole thing with the dieting as well for competitions maybe i went a little bit overboard with it and came down a little bit too much because then it was like mastery over my instincts to want to eat and do that no i'm deciding here i'm in control and maybe this worked against me a bit as well because i would be like going to the war i don't care if you're if i feel a little i'm going through it you know so um yeah i used all these anger negative emotions whatever it is i'll show you i'm gonna make it i'm gonna do this so whatever works for you but for me that worked you know the anything negative turn it into something positive you know it's um transforming the negative energy which could be destructive to myself or maybe other people around me taking it alchemy you know changing into something else so i used all that negative feeling negative emotions and i stayed in birmingham as well while i was mr olympia for six years more opportunities here and everything but more distractions as well so i wanted to stay in the same gym try to keep that same attitude even though i got more money in the bank and i'm driving a mercedes instead of jumping on the bus right but i wanted to keep that that's why i didn't move over here a lot people ask me, why didn't go to the States? Because the industry is there. But by the time I got to be Mr. Olympia, I could kind of dictate things. So I did what I wanted to do, which was keep my head down and keep that hunger going I love the transmutation of anger and everyone got their stories of the and I can remember in the third grade someone said something about the jacket that my mom gave me that day to wear like these little things i mean they don bother me anymore but there were times when you you know you we can we can layer in it fuel man use it for fuel yeah yeah take that anger the negative thing whatever change it into something positive uh and we were discussing earlier like do we know any like elite level athletes that came from a very comfortable, wealthy family. I don't know any. I'm not saying there isn't, but I don't know any. Maybe involved or something. You need that motivation. You know, you want to make something. You want to make something of your life. You want to prove to yourself and everybody else, you know, that you've got something. And I just, when I was young, I looked at life around me. I said, Adam, what is this? I'm going to get a mate, have some children. go to work, come back. For a lot of people, this is great. Maybe the love of the family and everything like that. But I didn't have that. Even when I had a family, it wasn't a family. My mom and dad were kind of together because it was the 60s. But I got the idea that that was because of me, maybe. So we never sat down and had a meal as a family. Never. So we were, mom and dad were married, but they were leading kind of separate lives. And I was in the middle somewhere, I guess. yeah so if I didn't have that motivation you know maybe my dad would have taught me to be a maintenance you know car engineer or something I don't know it would be a whole different story I'm sure I have this theory that barring accident or injury that we kind of have a unconscious sense of how long we're going to live I started thinking about this when I read the biography of Steve Jobs, who, you know, he was really on a mission early on and kind of an odd guy. He was in the area I grew up in and, you know, this whole thing with LSD, but also scream therapy, but also he thought that objects had personality and things like that. He was quite different. He was doing something different. He was doing something different. He saw the world very differently and he changed the world. Like him or hate him, he absolutely changed the world. If you learn about him, you realize that he had some sense that he might not live a very long Yeah. And he died quite young, pancreatic cancer. Is it a sense or is it a premonition? Is it... Yeah. You know? And you can edit these thoughts I think Because I always had this bit of a fate listed thing maybe because my dad died so young so my dad died at 42 my mom quickly met another guy that she wanted to marry and he also died at 44 so I saw two guys okay they both smoked 40 cigarettes a day which was usual at that time and don't exercise and drink alcohol sunlight not to get enough sleep and no sunlight all these things but you know i've i've changed this over the years because now now i'm 63 going on 64 and uh appear to be very healthy i feel great and i'm looking forward to the future and i don't know none of us know right i'm just trying to live the best life that i can live day by day and uh you know be the best version of myself and have a good quality of life and appreciate every day at a time i mean this is what we learn from dogs yeah they don't live in in the future they don't live in the past they're just there all the time they're there as a reminder we're both dog lovers so we're talking about that earlier on so we don't know how long we're going to live just make the most of it every day and uh i will you know i said i read a lot so i this book by a lady that works in end care, you know. So she interviewed all these people that, you know, they know they're dying, right, they're on the way out, and what they regret and all this stuff. Mostly it was not doing the things they love, not telling the people that they love that they love them enough. Not one fucking person said, I wish I worked harder or anything like that, you know. So I think we have to just make the most of the moment, make the most of each day and appreciate it. Because, you know, it's going to end, right? We're going to move on. I don't believe we stop. We just move on. Yeah, I think we continue on in some form. We're already there. We're already everywhere at the same time. And that's what I think. We're just aware of this. We're on this channel right now. We're on this radio wave. I certainly subscribe to that. And I want to get into kind of your exploration of psychedelics and consciousness, and then moving on from it, which not everyone is aware of. But before we do that, which not everyone is aware of. And consciousness and then moving on from it, which not everyone is aware of. But before we do that, despite the living for the day by the day, you had this sense that like you're going to put everything you have into something. And you went for it in this. I'm realizing now very logical, like if this, then that. If that, then not this. It wasn't do or die. It was maybe do or die during the training. But it was when the feedback signal was there's a real opportunity here, you put everything in. Exactly. But you weren't foolish with your life resource. No, I did it step by step. You know, and anabolics that I took when I was amateur was, you know, is fairly low. So I don't think there was that much risk there. When I was becoming Mr. Olympia, it went up another level. And growth hormone was not available early 80s. So that came in later 80s into the 90s and so on. But I don't think there's much danger in that. The danger is in the body weight, high blood pressure, inflammation. Diuretics. Diuretics, I mean, that's an instant death sentence if you overdo that. And it has happened. The guy, I mean, it hit me, the guy that I got second to at my first 90 champions, Mohamed Benaziza. I don't know if you remember him. I do, yeah. He was a short guy, but amazing, a lot of muscle. And he passed away on a tour because he was doing extreme things with water and diuretics. And they actually did introduce testing for diuretics, 1996 in the Mr. Olympic, because people were concerned about this. There was a few guys that died just trying to get dehydrated and get in condition. but I think somebody failed the test and challenged it legally and it didn't stand up so then they just dropped it they did steroid testing interestingly in 1990. How did that go? Sorry. Take a look online. I mean it's good you know it's funny there it used to be a big deal to try and figure out is somebody taking stuff or not I mean there's just these telltale signs right a certain leanness a certain you know protrusion of some vasculature in the neck I mean, you can tell when people are on and when they're not, right? And although there are a couple of genetic freaks out there, like yourself when you were younger, my friend Nasima who works with Mark Bell who you know he got really long muscle bellies He naturally lean And he a real athlete And according to him I think as of last time we spoke you know he hasn touched anything and people would you know die to have his kind of musculature But he trains hard, he does everything, but it's kind of scary to think what happens when guys like that would go on. You could look online, 1990 Mr. Olympia. I don't know because they didn't publish the weights. But Lee Haney still won it. He was maybe a bit lucky to beat Lee Labrada. I'd say Heine was probably 20 pounds down. I mean, the fans were like, fuck this. We want to pay like a couple hundred dollars to see, you know, guys that are a lot less than before. We want to see the same or more. You know, nobody wants to see a guy run 100 meters in 11 seconds when they've seen under 10 seconds. So I think the people that control the sport, they realize this is not going to fly. So they dropped it. It's so interesting because, you know, bodybuilding is an unusual sport. But for that matter, so is free solo rock climbing. We had Alex Honnold on here. He, you know, climbed El Cap, probably the most dangerous athletic feat of all time. One slip and fall and you're dead. He said you can make mistakes, but not slip and fall mistakes. Things like that, things like bodybuilding, things like what we see from the Red Bull athletes, I do think that serves an important role in getting us, as the rest of us, to think about what's possible with the human body, technology, and pharmacology. And I do think that from each extreme sport, even skateboarding, a sport I was involved in early on. By the way, street skateboarders putting themselves at extreme risk, only one, one guy wears a helmet. Yeah. One. Okay. On vert, they wear helmets, right? But on the street, they don't do it. Why? Because it's not part of the culture. It would be like asking professional bodybuilders to stop taking gear. It's not going to happen. It's embedded in the culture to see how far you can take something in a certain dimension. I think these things provide a useful role in getting the rest of humans to understand what's possible. And there's usually valuable takeaways like resistance training. Absolutely. Nutrition. The new nutrition guidelines for the U.S. just came out today. They basically inverted the food pyramid. Limited amount of grains, fruits, vegetables. Oh, great. eggs. You know, it's funny. It's basically what has been talked about in the fitness bodybuilding community for a very long time Insulin management low sugar I mean it so funny because now everyone like oh you know this is so outrageous But that was pulled from the sport that you describing So for people who might not be familiar with the names because our listenership is broad I think it important for people to understand how something like fitness or health progresses. It pulls these things from the pioneers that were willing to, frankly, go pioneer how it's done. It doesn't come from university studies and i say that as a university professor it comes from the real world it and then back through we're probably 20 years ahead i mean i don't know about the u.s but uh i went to a conference in london and it was a national health service how they're now uh gonna study more nutrition because in their five or six years they do they do two hours study on nutrition which is like i mean you can't even get high school level understanding in two hours right so i was pleased to hear that now they're you know they're going to look at nutrition as part of the health thing but it was funny because uh they were promoting a plant-based diet but you know unfortunately it's going to lack this and this and this so we need to reinforce it with supplements it's all in the animal based diet but that raises cholesterol so that's bad but we'll have a very deficient diet and have to supplement it i felt like wouldn't it be better just to take the diet that has the nutrients in in the first place so i see competitive bodybuilding is like the peak of an iceberg. You know, it's an extreme. It's right at the top, yeah? But the basic things that we learn can apply to somebody that wants to improve their health. So at an extreme level, we could say maybe it's unhealthy. But if you take the basic principles, it can be very healthy. Having your hormones in the correct place, building muscle mass, there's incredible things that you can do for your health. And you won't be needing to rely on medications to control your blood sugar and your blood pressure and whatever else. Your body can do it itself, you know. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. 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I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. This is perhaps a good moment to tell a brief story about our mutual friend, Mike Mentzer. I'll keep it really brief. I paid for an online consult with Mike. It was like a hundred bucks. I had to wire it to him, which was a fortune for me. It was like all my money. I was in high school, right? You know, I was working at this little skateboard shop, you know, selling shoes. Maybe it wasn't all my money, but it was significant. I had to wire it to him. He calls and my mother was like, why is this grown man calling? Who's this grown man calling the house? He laid down the program. He barked when he spoke. I don't think people realize. He literally barked when he spoke each word. But there was a real kindness way back somewhere in that bark. and the methods worked, but he gave me some, we stayed in touch. And for a couple of reasons, first of all, he emphasized on that call, but in subsequent calls, stay away from anabolics. I didn't ask. He just said it. He said, and he said, learn to enjoy training really fucking hard. Those are his words. Mine is a beautiful thing. And I was like, all right. Like I was coming from skateboarding. He's like, I'm used to getting hurt. Right. And I was like, you know, but he's like, learn to enjoy training really fucking hard, his words. And then he also encouraged me to read. He was like obsessed with philosophy. He was like obsessed with really fucking hard, his words. And then he also encouraged me to read. He was like obsessed with philosophy. He was obsessed with the Pan-Rand, objectivist epistemology. A lot of that stuff I found to be somewhat interesting, but I mean, he was super dedicated to that, but he also embedded in me. He said, he said, you seem like you like learning. Maybe you should focus on school. I was I go, all right. And at the time I was kind of rebellious against my dad. And I took his advice because it was coming from him. And then when I got to school, we stayed in touch. I was in Santa Barbara. And he said, just remember, I'll never forget this. He said, just remember 90% of what you're learning is completely wrong. And the worst part is they don't realize they're wrong. And I said, 90%. And he said, 90%. He said, but the 10% that's right, those are the gems that you build off of. And I thought, man, and now, you know, 30 years, more than 30 years later, as a professional scientist and now podcaster, I can tell you, having spent a lot of time running studies, writing grants, reviewing grants, like I've been deeply in that community. He's exactly right. Yeah. And so he was wrong about a great many things, but he had some real gems embedded in that, like barking of a voice. You remember? Yeah, you've got to take the boxes, right? He'd yell at you, basically. So anyway, I'm grateful to him. And then he also said, you'll love this he also said and also you're not dorian yates so don't try to be he's a lot of guys right now this is when the grainy photos of you will put a link to this when that transformation happened when those photos came out i think people saw that and it sparked this aspirational thing and mill like millions of people like holy shit that's possible but he said listen you're not that but it doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy training hard you're not that but you could do this other thing. Take the benefits from it. That's a really good coach. The last thing I needed was somebody to tell me, hey, listen, do this because he needed someone around to talk to or something like that. Anyway, that's Mike. Let's talk about those photos. Because I think, and we'll put them up. We'll put a link to them. What happened in that one year? And why do you think that that sort of transformation is so much different than somebody getting big? just big or somebody getting real strong or somebody like something happened in that one year trend the before and afters that changed the way people think about fitness in general not just the sport of bodybuilding but but fitness like what the human body can do yeah it was a breakthrough level uh for the sport you know as people say before dorian and after dorian the sport changed uh and my approach was unique as well and Joe Weider. You know he has his way of doing things, right? This is the guy, by the way, folks that ran Muscle and Fitness and a bunch of other magazines. He basically took the sport of bodybuilding and popularized it into what is now the health and fitness industry. He was a brilliant marketer, you know? Joe Weider, trainer of champions. He didn't know nothing about training, but he knew about marketing. Here's the thing, right? 1992 Mr. Olympia and then 93 so people think that between 92 and 93 on stage 17 pounds of muscle I put on in one year is not really true in 92 six weeks out from the Mr. Olympia I was probably five pounds six pounds less than the next year, right? But I knew Lee Haney wasn't going to be there. I knew that the guys I was competing against were smaller than me. So I said, I don't mind sacrificing some size to get, like, super shredded, like as shredded as the smaller guy, right? So I was coming down, coming down, coming down, thinking I'd get, you know, more shredded. maybe i did a little bit but i realized analyzing because we don't have no iphone or nothing right but i used to take pictures every week take the camera roll to the you know wait for them to develop it and all that and then look how do they look uh and i looked at 92 six weeks out i said i'm pretty much contest ready then but i just kept dieting dieting so i sacrificed a lot in 92 and I determined that I wouldn't do that in 93 I still did a little bit because I tend to overdo things right so 93 I would say I put on six or seven pounds of muscle as a Mr Olympia this is outstanding right Because you already at a high level But I didn sacrifice 10 pounds of muscle that I wasted the year before So it appeared that I put on 17 pounds of pure muscle in a year. I didn't. I just simply didn't sacrifice as much as I did the year before. So it was a great year of progress. And the pitches that were taken in 92 were taken a week after the contest so I had lost that muscle so if you compare that one to that one it looks like wow it's night and day it wasn't really I got pictures from 92 where I'm almost as big as 93 but nobody saw those pictures and the pictures that I took in 93 was my friend with the camera I said hey would it be good if you come up and did those pictures that we did last year in the same spot in a gym yeah let's do that and when he showed them afterwards even i was freaked out what and he's like i'm sending these to the magazines they were not meant to be they were meant to be just for my record and he had a better camera than me so that's what i wanted them for that's why i got my underwear on and my socks yeah because i never think these photos are going to be published right but he sent them to weeder and uh the editor at the weeder magazines was peter mcgough he was english so we were friends so he sent them to Peter McGough and Peter said all the guys are coming to the office and they know that I'm friends with you so they're you know looking for something so you know how's it going he said oh I've got these very casually I've got these pictures would you like to see them he said I put them on the desk he said they went white they just went and just stood there shaking their head like okay it's on for a second then I mean And six weeks out, everyone gave up when they saw those pictures, more or less. How did it feel to be at one point an underdog and then you're the winner? Well, hold on. Before I was a winner, very difficult because I had this underdog thing. I'm from the streets and nobody thinks I can do this. And I'm from England and all American and this and this and this. That's against me, theoretically. So I thrived on that. You know, fuck you, motivation. As I said, I'm gonna show you. So I got second to Lee Haney, but then he retired. So now the title open and logically I the favorite And actually I struggled with that for a while like first of all it was like I the favorite now I don have that underdog thing I don know what to do now and then I was like so I'm probably gonna be Mr. Olympia this it's a real you know when I went against Haney I wanted to try to win but I was a new guy and wow so I can be Mr. olympia and then i just kind of turned it around in my head yeah but why not man somebody's got to be a mr olympia and do you know anybody that's dedicated themselves to the craft the way you have absolutely not so yeah god damn it i deserve it and this took about a week to like change this whole uh point of view where i was comfortable going in as the favorite because yeah i'm going to win so i should be the favorite but i struggled with it man because the whole time i was the underdog even when i was in england i'm not social so i didn't talk to the judges or socialize or do anything it was like you know who is this guy what is it why is it like that just comes here and disappears just i wasn't interested in socializing or talking or trying to get favors and just doing my thing here you know well dopamine is all about the pleasure of pursuit not the pursuit of pleasure and the problem with reaching a goal line is for many people they don't know what to do at that point in fact uh one of the coaches for the boston celtics who used to be a former chess prodigy josh waitzkin uh was on here and he said you know it's very different when you're defending a championship you're now the defending champion as opposed as opposed to You've been climbing up. Exactly. I'm going to get that bastard up there. Exactly. I'm going to knock him off. Oh, now you're there. Now everyone's trying to knock you off. Once you hit the peak, because I think this, the reason I'm asking is I think this is important for many people who are on the climb, want to be on the climb, want the peak. Once you're at the peak, it sounds like you did a very good job of rotating your mindset to no one's going to take this away from you. Yeah. Like a bulldog. And don't get comfortable. Don't get comfortable. So how do you do that? Like the Rocky movie. Remember the Rocky movie? When he gets comfortable, he's got the big house and everything, and starts getting, and you get Mr. T coming along, the badass from the ghetto, kicking his ass, because he got too comfortable. So I always remember that. Like, I'm just going to stay here, train in the gym with the same guys I train with. You know, they don't fucking treat me like that. comfortable so i always remember that like i'm just going to stay here train in the gym with comfortable so i always remember that like i'm just going to stay here train in the gym with the same guys i train with uh you know uh they don't fucking treat me like a superstar or nothing you know they know i'm the man but we're friends we've been friends for years they know me uh keep my feet on the ground if i came here i potentially could have made more income but it probably would have lasted shorter so in the long run i probably would have made less because just too many distractions uh i wanted to keep my way away from everything and it's different days then everything is the magazines so with the magazines i would come here uh do the mr olympia do one week of intensive photograph sessions video the everything for the magazines so they have enough material for a year then i simply disappear and go home and nobody would see me There's no social media. You don't need to keep up the constant flow of attention in order to earn income. I earned my prize money. I got my contracts. I go home and start work again. And I loved it. I loved having that mission. But I can tell you something. It's very difficult to find a picture of me smiling because I was so intense in this tunnel. And at the end, there was no joy in it. Like the last year, 97, I remember getting ready for the contest. I'm like, wow, this feels like Groundhog Day. I've done this process so many times. And I started to think this is starting to feel like a job. I mean, it was, but it was a passion more. It was a bit of both, right? But now it's starting to feel like a job. And I start to think about what am I going to do after this? Because it's starting to, I don't want to feel like that, you know? Sounds like I'm just jocking you, but I'm telling you, like, that's a very wise perspective because a lot of people don't want to let go. Yeah. They don't see themselves in anything else, and therefore, they don't know what to do. Also, when you reach a certain level in anything, it becomes easier to just make a little bit more money over here. I mean, you know. Plus, you're the king there, man. People will just pay you to be in the room. You're the king there. Yeah. You're the king, right? Yeah. So maybe you don't want to give that up. So yeah it was tough and I kind of observed a lot of athletes from different sports how they really struggle Because yes you can still go to the gym and lift weights but why are you doing it now That absolute tunnel that you put yourself in like you go in a battle every day for this goal, that in itself is a high. The dopamine, as you say, as a chase, I mean, a competition is once a year, right? For me, at least, it was once a year. so it's the whole year that you you know aiming on that target i can see that day the whole year i'm thinking about that day like i'm in a tunnel or probably my best friend is like it's great to hang out with you now because you're in the room he said i'd be with you before but i'm well aware that your mind was not there like you know now you're like here now i'm enjoying life then i couldn't afford to really enjoy it Like I'm on a mission here. I'm in a war or whatever I had in my head. But it's a huge part of my life. Without that, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you now. I wouldn't be, you know, would have met my wife. She's a competitor as well. So many things. So I knew I had to do it. And now it's obvious why. And I think, I mean, I had people coming up to me with tears in their eyes. many people saying bro I know you don't know me but you saved my life you know just something you said or you did or inspire me and this is like fucking this is worth more than the Mr Olympia trophy so I did it for myself it was a selfish pursuit it's bodybuilding it's all about you yeah but now it's changing to something else where I can use my position my influence and at my age, my life experience to help and inspire many people. And maybe that's the whole point of the thing. Ultimately, you know, there was a there was a plan you weren't aware of. Yeah, absolutely. I just know I had to do it. Not I want to, like I have to like my life depends on this. That was, that was my mentality. Well, I certainly get that feeling. And I can say for myself and and many others that you have really inspired me. I had no, as I said, no aspirations of becoming a bodybuilder, but the idea that I could strengthen my body and most importantly, do things differently than everyone else said, and know that it works. I think that as much as the titles that you achieved and your backstory is super impressive and all of that stands forever right You on the rush more of bodybuilding that for sure This notion that you went about it differently right Like you said, you weren't out in California. They called you the shadow because you disappear and then come back. The way you trained, the low-volume, high-intensity training, I don't think people realize just how opposite that was to everything that was being thrown at people. And so what it told me was that one should trust experience and try things at the margins safely because oftentimes there's real pearls there. And when there is, you have to discard of everything else you hear. And I hear I'm talking about fitness, but I've seen this in my science career, in media and podcasting. I mean, you know, the number of people that told me, like, don't do a podcast. Like, you know, close family members and scientists told me, like, what are you doing? And it's like now they're coming to me asking, hey, do you have a job? Because I want to get out of the science thing. It's a grind. And like you said, you catch so much friction early on. There must be something that pulls Iconoclasts forward. It's like you said, I have to do it. Yeah, I have to do it. Despite everything else that's happening. It doesn't matter what's happening, man. I had to do it. And day by day, I was very conscious. I need to do my best today. Every day, every day, every day. and in that tunnel. And also, you know, post-career, I talk about my experiences then and depression and so on. This can affect anybody and actually affects a lot of athletes from that extreme. You're in the extreme tunnel, stress, goals, and then it's suddenly gone. So you don't have this goal that was like in a way giving you a lot of dopamine. You can go to the gym, but there's no purpose now, really. I know someone whose child just went off to university, and they were so committed as a single parent that they're in a little bit of an existential crisis right now. Yeah, they don't have that thing now. Who am I without that role? And they'll figure it out, but I think it's athletes. It takes time. I think it's this identity thing. So where is that boundary between you need to identify with something as it being you and you are it in order to really go to great heights in anything. But then you also have to be able to dissociate from that identity piece. Well that the question Who am I That was the question Who am I now What am I going to do with life What am I supposed to do I was only 35 you know and I retired It's like, you know, when a guy retires at 60, even if he's just been working in a bank or whatever, it's very often that they get depressed because they're going to work every day and they don't have this, you know, it's not a mission, but they don't have this routine anymore. They don't know what they're supposed to do with their time. imagine the intensity of an athlete and then that's not there anymore so it took me time to change the mindset from oh look what i've lost and i don't know who i am anymore because i was the king and now i'm not or whatever to like yeah but there was a lot of things i couldn't do then like my life was so restricted then i wouldn't even go out if i'm gonna get back after 10 30 because I've got to be at bed at 11. I mean, this was all year. It wasn't just for competition. Now I'm, you know, doing fairly well financially. I don't have to do anything that I don't want to do, and I can go. And I've always been in love with animals and wildlife, and I used to sponsor mountain grillers in Rwanda and Uganda because there was like only 600 of them in the world. So I used to sponsor them. So one of the first things I did was went on a safari out to Uganda, guerrilla trekking in the mountains. And I couldn't do that before. I mean, maybe I could, but in my mind I couldn't. I didn't want to take the time off. So it started to open up more possibilities slowly, but it probably took me a couple of years to start to come to terms with it. I mean, I had a business. You had kids too, right? I had a son, yeah, at that point. He was coming to the end of school age. I had a business, but it's like, you know, it's not exciting. There's not that passion. So I decided I can do lots of other things. And slowly I started to get comfortable with it. And I'm whatever I want to be. You know, I'm not Mr. Olympia. You're not a scientist. It's what you do. It's not who you are, right? what you're doing at the point of time so it was a whole journey of exploration and I've always been very good at why you know time so it was a whole journey of exploration and i've always been very good at why you know i was 21 years old i started bodybuilding why why is that the best way to train just because everyone's doing it am i sure tried it out no it's better to train more briefly i get better results so fortunately i always had that uh independence of thought even though other guys at the gym saying I'm wrong. I'm like, okay, you're right. Thank you. It's really interesting because, you know, we've created this little backdrop, this kind of ghost of Mike Menser. And for those who don't know him, he barked when he spoke. He was a real iconoclast. He carried this bitterness for never having, you know, become Mr. Olympia. I think Mike was too rigid in his thoughts. You've got to be a little bit flexible. yes mostly it was right but maybe for this guy is a you know you got to be a little bit flexible and I think it was a bit too extreme in the end like training once every 10 or 12 days and so on and he became unhealthy right he smoked he yeah he was open about it I didn't understand yeah amphetamine use I still don't understand it I still don't understand I understand ex bodybuilders or athletes that don't want to like, you know, maintain their peak. Of course, it's ridiculous. You can't as you get older. But I didn't understand somebody that was in health, fitness, bodybuilding that suddenly didn't want to exercise and got overweight and smoked cigarettes and so on. I didn't really understand that. That was one thing I didn't get with Mike. He was very like pissed off about the Mr. Olympia, that Arnold won in 1980 and got disillusioned with the sport and he carried it around with him. I mean, it was one of the first conversations we had. Like when we first met, he told me Arnold is not going to like me and I said, well, not that I really care, but why do you think that? And he's like, because you're better than him. Well, you know, it's debatable. But let's say if I was, why would Arnold give a fuck? I mean, he's making movies, 20 million movies. I wouldn't give a shit if I was him. He's like, you don't understand Arnold. So he was carrying this still around with him. It wasn't healthy, I guess. I don know and I not a psychologist but I going to venture that he wanted to be a winner the winner more than he probably loved the fitness piece and the training piece And I say that because you know it sounds like I'm name dropping here, but I'm fortunate to be very good friends with the great Rick Rubin, right? And Rick has worked with so many amazing artists. And he'll tell me stories sometimes about people who really didn't make music or do comedy because they loved music and comedy. They wanted to be loved. When they got maybe attacked about a song not being as good as their last song, it crushed them. And he would say, just go back and make music. Yeah, do what you want. And this is one of the things that makes Rick so brilliant. But then he eventually, he would share these stories in private, of course, that some people aren't doing the thing for the thing. It's about they weren't loved as a kid or they need the adoration. And so it's not, maybe Mike could, we're speculating here, but could smoke cigarettes and let himself be out of shape because it wasn't really about bodybuilding. He just maybe needed to be a champion so he could validate something. We don't know, right? I always got the impression with Mike that it wasn't really anything to do with health. I mean, it's not at competitive level. Let's say maybe it could be unhealthy. But you can be healthy with it. But I love to train, man. I mean, it doesn't matter what it is. I could hike, I could ride a bike, do Pilates, I could do yoga, you know, done boxing, done loads of things. But I just like to exercise and I like to feel good. And it's nothing competitive anymore. It's like this is my vehicle that I've got to experience life in a physical reality. This is it. If this isn't working well, I'm not going to have much fun. I'm not going to have a good quality of life. and what do I want for the next, you know, however long. I want to be functional. I want to be able to do these things that I love to do and I want to be around and be healthy for my kids. And I just love to exercise, man. I do something every day, different things, not lifting weights. I do that maybe a couple of times a week, moderate weights, because I don't want to – I've got injuries. I've got a torn bicep on this side, a torn tricep tendon and some shoulder issues. I don't have any pain or anything, but it's just mechanically, my right side is stronger than my left. So I just try to overload it. You look lean and strong. Yeah, I'm lean, I'm strong. I don't push too much with the weights. And you kept your height You know a lot of people who don train start to shrink It interesting I didn keep my height Really I got taller Did you really No I posted about a month ago six weeks on my page just teasing people Because I went to get some orthotics in my shoes, you know, to balance out. And the guy's got the measuring thing. So I just stood on it and said, you're 183. Like, I've never been more than 180 before. Metric system, folks. Yeah, yeah, right? It's like six foot, right? I was 5'10 and a half, 5'11 maybe. So did I physically grow a bone? No. That's what I thought because I'm 6'1. I heard you're 5'10. I walked in thinking maybe. People usually lose a little bit of height unless they train real hard and they make sure to take very care of themselves. And then I walk in and, yeah, you're about six feet. Yeah. But the thing is, why? Because I've been doing Pilates and functional training and resetting the shoulders back. my posture is much better so i'm standing straighter which gives me an extra inch of height so i've actually got taller no i haven't taken huge amounts of growth hormone and suddenly grew when i was 60 years old it's just my posture and the way i stand there's less curvature shoulder there so you lose a bit of height because when you lift and your pecs get bigger and your lats your shoulders rotate forward you're trying to hunch forward so you're sitting a little bit lower i didn't even know i was like measuring myself like wow that's just because i'm standing straighter and my shoulders are back the lost that cervical arch it's more it's straighter now and we call the text neck for the kids yeah shoulders forward yeah you know a lot of boxers have it because they're always like forward with the shoulders so i've just got my posture really good i've done yoga for like seven years i've done pilates do some functional training so it's all about getting this thing in the best shape i don't have any pain joint pains i'd hit replacement like 14 months ago which is great and you're just so i train for what i need what do i need right now i need some good cardio but not excessive so i do some sprints and some bikes outside i do a little weight training in order to maintain not trying to build nothing just trying to what's the split people are going to want to know i don't even have a split man i go in i generally do some upper body once a week and some lower body once a week. Some pushing, pulling, some... Yeah, I do, you know, things that I can do. With chest and shoulders, it's very light because of the pushing. So I do some dumbbell press Any compound movements for your lower body At this point no because my legs are really big like because i didn have any injuries on the lower body i think i maintained a lot more muscle mass here uh so i do bike uh i do some uh what's it called bulgarian squats with light weights so i can do one side at a time but like heavy leg presses and things like that why why would I do it? It's because potentially risking an injury and yeah you can like press a ton of weight but you can't touch your toes what's the point you know? Well and you're also maintaining some muscle that you've laid down for many decades prior Absolutely it's not going to go anywhere as long as it gets a little bit of stimulation I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors Function Last year I became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health. This snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health, hormone health, immune functioning, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added tests for toxins, such as BPA exposure from harmful plastics, and tests for PFASs, or forever chemicals. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, But it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors who are expert in the relevant areas. 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As a consequence, I decided to join their scientific advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try function, you can go to function health dot com slash Huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over two hundred and fifty thousand people, but they're offering early access to Huberman podcast listeners. Again, that's function health dot com slash Huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman podcast listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman to get early access to Function. For people that are interested in longevity, who are maybe a little bit, quote unquote, lighter boned, do you think they should emphasize cardio more in strength, less, or the opposite? Whereas you are able to get away with doing quite a lot of cardio, Pilates, and yoga, but you don't need much resistance training. And we don't talk about this anymore. It used to be endomorph, ectomorph, mesomorph. Nobody talks like that anymore. I had excessive amounts of muscle mass, actually. I was, a few years ago, still at like 250, you know, just on TRT and some training. And I went for a checkup. My blood pressure was a bit high. And it just triggered something. I mean, like, I've been eating still like a bodybuilder. You know, frequent meals, chicken breast and rice. I don't know, it's just habit. So I kept doing it. I said I'm going to go on a lower protein diet, more plant-based, and lose some weight, right? But which weight am I going to lose? I'm not fat, so I guess I'm going to lose muscle mass. But it was an interesting exercise in that I dedicated my whole life, earlier life, to building muscle mass. Now I'm actively trying to lose it for health reasons, but also I wanted to check my ego. You know, I think everyone else was more concerned than me about, oh, he's looking skinny now and everything. Yeah, I don't care. You know, I don't care. I'm just doing what I think is best for my health. I'm losing some weight because I think if you're carrying a lot of weight when you get older, even if it's muscle, I don't think it's ideal, right? So I brought my weight down from 250 to 230, and at that point I put more protein and fat. So right now I eat probably twice a day in between 12 and 10 and might have a shake or something like that. So it's more higher protein and fats, a bit less carbs, intermittent fasting, and I feel great on it. I go in the morning, get up, do my things. And speaking about breathing, I mean I became a lot more conscious about that through doing yoga practices. At one point I really got into yoga and the breathing different breathing techniques or different things I mean you can do breathing to like produce dmt and like you can really shift your yourself just with breathing it amazing what you can do so i went through all that and became much more conscious about breathing and trying to breathe through the nose wearing the gym you know you know naturally got your mouth open and trying to gulp in as much oxygen as i can so uh breathing is definitely important i try to I'm doing yoga, trying to breathe through the nose and become more conscious about breathing, and I feel like I can speak to my whole body. Like anywhere I want to go, speak to my cells, contact my organs and check in with them and make sure everything's all right. I had exterior muscle consciousness, but nothing else. Now I'm whole body conscious, and health has a lot to do with the mind, maybe more than we even realize. I think unresolved traumas leads to a lot of disease. So it's good to explore yourself and your mind and how you look at things and maybe change the way you look at things and don't carry this weight around. I have a friend that practices different kinds of medicines And he had three cancers, and he's convinced that it's trauma-based. Well, certainly there are data and there are a lot of real-life examples where when people hold in their pain and in particular shame, it causes disease. We've had a couple of guests that have talked about this. But it's kind of interesting. the original naming of the type A personality was all around people who were prone to heart attack because they didn't actually let out what was going on for them. And it's been a ride for the psychology science world to try and figure this out. I think we'd be remiss if we don't talk a little bit about psychedelics and your experience with those. But I want to preface that with saying that my understanding is that right now you're not a psychonaut but you did explore which i find really interesting because people think if you start something you got to do it forever with the exception of maybe fitness and sleep and all the the basic health stuff what's so striking is it seems like you're able to go into something deep get the best of it and then get out yeah that what i did with psychedelics i feel i wouldn say i never do psychedelics again because I may be in a different space and may feel the need to do it but i went through that whole experience and it was amazing i mean it gives you a totally different perspective on life you said 97 was last olympia you realize you're done 98 through 2000 you're kind of going through a reframe yeah a whole lot of things happened as well in my personal life. My nephew passed away at 15 years old in my house and there was no explanation. It was very close. My marriage was, everything was falling apart. You know, everything was falling apart in my life, but maybe it had to, to get reorganized. And I think I went through a period like, I just want to have fun here and just, you know, I don't want to really go too deeply into stuff because it was i kind of get into it and it was too heavy so i'm like i'm just gonna have fun and uh later on a friend of mine was like you should try dmt he's over in california and he had some pharma grade stuff and i'm reading only in california yeah i read this book when i was living in amsterdam for a couple of years there was no internet so i read this book dmt the spirit molecule you can get that all about dmt so i'd heard about it oh yeah i heard about that stuff uh so we got the powder and i smoked it and i saw the uh behind reality if you like the construction the the numbers and the geometry and everything's connected uh and everything's one thing and we're having an experience and uh we can choose you know to experience good bad whatever in this uh in this reality and it's a temporary experience and everything is forever there's no time and all these things came in uh but dmt is a very short experience like 10 seconds or something so then i got invited on this podcast in uh in england called london real yeah yeah and it was very early small podcast at the time they invited me down i said it sounds interesting because I like to talk. I can talk about different subjects if you want, whatever. So we're back, you know, before we do the podcast, we're talking away and I don't know, it came into conversation. Yeah. DMT. Oh yeah, I've done that. What? You done it all Yeah Would you be willing to talk about it on the podcast I said is London real or London bullshit What the name of the podcast man And I talked about the psychedelics and my experience and it went absolutely huge because this was, I think it was like 2012. That's early. But people were stopping me on the street, and they weren't stopping me because you're that guy on, oh, it's fascinating what you talked about, And because I was on that show, then this camp from Costa Rica, they got in touch with me, and we're an ayahuasca camp. I did it once in Spain, ayahuasca. It was a great experience. And then these guys got in touch with me, and they said, how do you feel about coming to Costa Rica and being like a headliner? I said, I don't know about that, man, because it's very private. I just want to do my own thing. like in spain nobody knows who i am so i did it once there and like i'm just doing my thing man i don't want to be you know hey you're a diary and i'm just here for my personal experience and they're like well when it's the ceremonies that's the shaman and the facilitators and you're just another guy once you go in there but during the day can you look after the guys i said i don't know okay let me give it a try and people from the fitness industry or the gym or whatever were coming and i said why are you here because i was kind of interested i was kind of curious but i didn't know i didn't know if it's for me maybe it's a hippie thing maybe i don't know but when i saw that you're doing it i said oh it's cool if darren's doing let's go so we did three camps there with like 20 people ahead in one week you do four sessions so i probably done like 20-something ayahuasca ceremonies and each time was different each time i learned something uh but i got to the stage where i'm like what more can i learn i'm not i'm not coming here to be a tour you know psychedelic tourists they call them people that keep going back keep going back well if it was helping you why don't you keep going back once you've learned uh i can't remember who it was but they said You know, once you pick up the receiver and you get the message, put it down, right? So it was over a period of time and I was like, wow, I just, I don't feel like I need to do it anymore or I want to do it anymore. It may change. But I feel like I learned just I don't feel like I need to do it anymore or I want to do period of time and I was like wow I just I don't feel like I need to do it anymore or I want to do it anymore it may change but I feel like I learned what I needed to learn and I helped other people on their journey as well so I got the message you know what more do I need to know if I would have sat down with you prior to your psychedelic work like right here right now would you feel different be different? I believe so. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's hard to describe the whole experience. How is it? How is it? It's like, wow, well, it's different for everybody. But in terms of the takeaways, were some related to... The biggest takeaway is everything, everything, everything, everything is one thing. We are one thing. We're not a drop from the ocean. We're the ocean in a drop as roomie that's a roomie saying right but i get it i was saying that before before i even read that i was telling people what i said imagine an ocean yeah that's everything but there's a spray that's come out like a little drop and he thinks i'm just a little drop oh poor me i'm no you're the ocean as well you'll drop back into the ocean when you so everything is is one thing we're all connected having we're the same thing having separate experiences that's what i got and we're all connected and the whole experience we're having is mental like nothing exists without observation so this is all created by us everything it's our imagination that doesn't really exist if that makes sense it might not because you've got to experience it listen i'm very open like Like as a neuroscientist, I understand for certain that our brains are very good at extracting certain kinds of information. That's red. That's blue. I can hear your voice. That's Dorian. I'm me. But that's through a certain set of filters. Yeah, you're a machine with a computer and it's limited. Certain filters. It's like someone described it. I forget who it was. If you were in a house and the windows were open out onto a yard, you would hear certain things and see certain things. And that's your conception of a yard. But if you were outside in the field on the other side of the yard you get a very different picture a very different experience of it Let me give you another analogy like that I don know where this one came from but I used it one time Because there so many different levels to psychedelic experience But I said it like this. Imagine you're in a room, whatever shape, square room, and you're in this room, and that's all that exists. You can see it. You can touch it. there's nothing more because you're not aware of it right how about if i bought a little trampoline in here and you bounced up on a trampoline and you happen to see over the wall and you see there's a whole fucking other world out there that you didn't know about but now you've seen it you can't forget right so you'll come back to this room with a different perspective knowing that this is not this is not it really so it gives you a totally new perspective on life i think I'm totally on board. I will say I do think there are certain people with predisposition to psychosis that should be cautious about psychedelics. Oh, the camp I went to in Costa Rica is like they do a full review. They've got doctors on board and everything like that. So they do vet people before and get their medical history and all that stuff. So I'm sure there's some exceptions where maybe it might not be beneficial, but I'm not an expert on that. But if it's a real camp, and that is the thing, a lot of them are not. Or they just get as many people in there to get as much money and they don't get the attention and everything like that. So if you're going to do it, I mean, do your bit of research on who's doing it and how are they qualified and what the facility is like and everything like that. I mean, I've done it in Spain where it's kind of Wild West. They don't really tell you too much. But I can handle that. Not everyone else can. So better to go to a place where they do it very professionally. And with a shaman, you know, a proper like traditional, not a guy. I mean, I could say I'm a shaman and put camps on if what I'm not, you know. These guys, it's passed down through the family and they do maybe a decade of training before they're going in there and actually administering the ceremonies. So I think that's important. Yeah I think the data on psilocybin for depression MDMA not recreationally but therapeutically for PTSD Ibogaine for PTSD and for alcohol and other substance abuse disorders is very intriguing And I not trying to hedge here and play you know but I think it very interesting I think we headed I think people forget This is one of these things where I almost forgot to say this whether or not it therapy working out a pill or psychedelics ultimately what we're after is this thing of brain plasticity, right? I mean, they're all aimed at the same end point, but the psychedelics are particularly interesting because the experience of them, not just the effects they have long-term, but both the experience of being in the psychedelic journey as well as the long-term outcomes seem to create something that done correctly brings people more peace. Well, there's a guy in England that's now funded and has been doing the experiments, and he got like brain activity before and afterwards. I don't know what basis it's on, but let's say the brain activity that they can see is like maybe 30%. Litop, 100%. So it's activating parts of your brain that's kind of sleeping, I guess. Yeah, it's revealing a bunch of lateral connections in what we call the default mode network. Basically, more brain areas are talking to one another in the psychedelic. Which change your perspective. That's right. And the way you think. Yeah, change your perception. Affects everything. That's right. There was a guy, funnily enough, he used to work for the government in UK, right? So they had him do a report on drugs and recreational drugs and what his conclusions were. And he said people that take ecstasy, MDMA, on the weekend, statistically they're much safer than somebody that does horse riding. I mean, this is a scientific, and they fired him. And a lot of scientists that work for the UK, they retired. They're like, we're scientists. You can't dictate to us what the conclusion must be. We're scientists. We just look and give you the conclusion. anyway uh professor not now is working independently and funded and uh in london and he's doing a lot of these studies um on different psychedelics and brain activity and uh depression and so on so a lot of people that came to the camps are struggling with depression and different issues and some of the experiences might have been unpleasant at the time but everybody at the end of the week is like, wow, this is the most important thing I've done in my life. This is life changing. I heard that so many times, like literally from, from everybody that's, that's done it. So uh it worth looking into definitely And uh no beyond whatever you might feel at the time there's no side effects afterwards or anything like that. And another thing after doing these camps, I mean, you're restricted with your diet. And before you go, they give you a specific diet and things to cut out like alcohol and any other kind of drugs drugs and and so on and I feel like if my brain was a computer like at the end of the week all the junk files have gone out and it's just having so many ideas and inspiration and ideas for business and like it's on fire and eventually it settles down to a more normal pace but you You feel like your computer's just been upgraded. Yeah, defragged, as they say. We mentioned schizophrenia a couple minutes ago. Reminds me, there are these very interesting findings. You know, there are a few exceptions to what I'm about to say, but I know that your wife is from Brazil. Yeah. And we were talking about the value of sunlight, you being from the UK. You know, you don't find schizophrenia near the equator. Because of the light. I'm not going to say schizophrenia is one thing, and I'm not going to say it's caused by one thing, But there's some very interesting hypotheses about certain types of winter infections make people more prone to them. Now, why would those winter infections only occur closer to the poles? It may be that this is a theory that some of the long wavelength light from the sun, the reds and orange and yellows and so forth, provide a protective function on the mitochondria. and at certain stages of pregnancy, because there is a genetic component to schizophrenia, but there's also an environmental component. Identical twins don't always both have it. Sunlight seems protective. The amount of sunlight seems protective in a way that is not trivial, that statistically is very impressive. So it's interesting, right? I think overall health, the sun is essential. I mean, I've talked about it before to friends and everything. I was like and I mean I was in the club right Isn't it a ridiculous joke How we've been told to be scared of the Sun when it's the giver of all life on the planet somehow it can be bad For us that's just ridiculous. Yeah If you go in the Sun to be scared of the sun when it's the giver of all life on the planet? Somehow it can be bad for us. to be scared of the sun when it's the giver of all life on the planet? Somehow it can be bad for us. That's just ridiculous, yeah? If you go in the sun and you start to get burnt, get out of the sun. Or throw on a layer of clothing. Yeah, and put on a hat. Yeah. Listen, man, I'm as white as they come, naturally, yeah? I'm like a bottle of milk, man. but I went to Spain and I guess my nutrition improved much better fruits and vegetables there so that might be something but I slowly introduced myself to the sun and now I can stay out all day I might get a bit reddish because I'm pale skin but I don't get burnt or nothing I can stay in the sun all day and yeah I just feel much better in the sun everybody does people come from England to live in Spain because of that fact. And if we look between the UK and Spain, there's about a six, seven year difference in the life expectancy. Yeah, maybe the food's a bit better, but the sun is the key, I believe. I won't launch into a whole scientific lecture on this, but it's very interesting and not a coincidence at all that dopamine and the synthesis of dopamine in the body, it's L-tyrosine, but there's a enzyme called tyrosinase, and it's the rate-limiting enzyme for dopamine production. Dopamine makes you feel good, motivated, et cetera. It's correlated with the sex hormones. We know all this stuff. Certainly you do. It's also responsible for pigmentation of the skin, which is why, for instance, an Arctic fox, which is white in the winter, becomes brown in the summer through the dopamine pathway. So the feeling good in the sun is not a trivial thing. It's through the dopamine pathway and the melanin pathway. The other thing that's really interesting is that there's been a study recently where they gave people a glucose tolerance test, how well they manage blood sugar, insulin, et cetera. And in sunlight or even with some sunlight just landing on their back, their metabolism goes up by about, I believe it's, you know, 29%. And their blood glucose regulation is far better. And it's because the sunlight actually gets through the body, charges the mitochondria. And it actually reaches the mitochondria in the cell? It actually will. The long wavelength light will go all the way through your body and charge your mitochondria on the way. And this is not like hearsay. This is documented in beautiful studies Glenn Jeffery at University College London another formerly pasty pale Brit who I known for many decades came here sat there and said the more time you get in the sun the longer your life The more time you get in the sun, the better your blood glucose regulation. The more time you get in the sun and on and on and on. And the opposite is also true. Too much time under just LED lights and not enough sunlight is damaging to mitochondria. And it's a very big effect. I think this is going to be one of the biggest health issues. Beyond vitamin D production. It includes vitamin D production, but actually vitamin D comes from the UV. The stuff they say is bad. The UV light is what triggers vitamin D production. So look, you don't want to get a sunburn, and I'm glad you mentioned that. But we have been sold a bill of goods about the sun, and I think in the next 10 years, it's going to go the same direction as lifting weights turns to fat. No one believes that because it's not true, but we were told that for decades. Oh, they used to believe it. I mean, when I started back in the 80s, very few women wanted to lift weights because I was scared they would get too big. And, yeah, it was funny. Like people would come down the gym when I was British champion or something, you know. Yeah, you know, I don't want to get too big. Like something like you, that would be great. Don't worry. It's not going to happen by accident. Don't worry. Yeah. I always tell people, especially if women want to train, the pump you get in the gym, that's as big as you're ever going to get within a couple of months. So if you ever see yourself in the mirror at the gym and go, oh my god that's far too big go ahead quit for two weeks but you know exactly i mean people think they're going to go to sleep and it's interesting you know like i hadn't went in spain yeah and we live right by the beach me and gal a lot on the beach we're outside a lot right i had my vitamin d tested and it was only 35 i thought just from the sun some people just don't convert vitamin d that well um and or produce vitamin d that well and need to supplement it and it does seem to have some genetic component, which makes sense. Speaking of which, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about cannabis, because I think one of our early correspondences, I did an episode about cannabis and I said, listen, I'm worried about psychotic risk. But I said, listen, there could be medical uses. And I've done a couple of different episodes. Also you had Peter Attia on here, right? I had Attia on. Yeah, I had him on my podcast, but we didn't touch on the subject. Okay. No, I mean, I think that I want to be clear. My stance is one where I've seen people benefit I seen data that for people with a predisposition to psychosis the high THC can be problematic This is just what I seen But you sent me a note saying that first of all that your experience with it has been good. So I want to give you the opportunity to share that. And then some of the things that you speculate about, because I'm an open book. Well, to give you some background, yeah, I guess cannabis is a bit like cultural. in Birmingham where I grew up. They have a lot of Jamaicans. So, I mean, Jamaicans, they smoke cannabis, they make tea. It's just a cultural thing. It's normal for them, right? So it was about, I had a couple of friends, their dads were Jamaican. So I was smoking it anyway, but I wasn't smoking it because I thought there was any particular health benefits. I was just smoking it and drinking alcohol, like hanging out. but my friend's dad's who were Jamaican was like oh this is protects against this and we drink tea for this and the women take it for menstrual pain so I kind of heard that but I'm yeah okay whatever and I would smoke occasionally when I was training and when I went to live in Amsterdam for a little bit as I said I did a lot of reading I started reading about it. I started searching for studies. And I found there was massive, massive health benefits from THC and different cannabinoids. Some of it really counterintuitive, I guess, for people. You had Peter Atiyah on here, right? So you asked Peter, I think, what about smoking cannabis? How does that affect your lungs? And I think he was pretty much saying it's probably like the same as nicotine. Tobacco, right? I think that's what he said. But he's probably not aware of a 25-year-long massive study that was done at UCLA. Dr. Donald Taskin, I think his name is. So they put these people into groups, cigarette smokers, cannabis smokers, and control group that didn't smoke anything. So after 25 years, what did they find? Cigarette group, we already know, right? Loss of lung function increased cancers blah blah blah blah yeah In the cannabis group and heavy daily smoking 25 years I'll agree because I've been heavily smoking every day for 30 years, right? So what was the effect on the lungs? Some negative, yes, because of the heat and the tar and everything like that. It could irritate the airways. it reduced somewhat the antioxidant layer on your airways so statistically it would be more susceptible to an infection maybe bronchitis or something like that although of all my friends i don't know anyone that got it but statistically you would be more likely to get it lung function interesting 25 years of cannabis smoking compared to the non-smokers there was a slight increase in lung capacity in the cannabis smokers i have to check out this study yeah no cancers other groups got cancers but this one don't after 25 years so that's the lung cancer so maybe peter was not privy to this information well i'll check out the study i'm not familiar with it but i appreciate you raising i wonder um if it's the thc and whether or not edible forms of thc would have the same effect or whether or not it's the smoking of cannabis so you know rick simpson I know of Rick Simpson. RSO. Rick Simpson, anyway, he made a concentrated oil from cannabis. Now they sell it in all the pharmacies called RSO, although I spoke to Rick. It has nothing to do with him because he's the guy that originally did it. In Canada, and he cured hundreds of people with cancers, he made a doctorum entry called Run From the Cure. So the guy was growing cannabis on his farm in Canada, making the oil from it because he discovered by mistake he had some skin cancer and he discovered by mistake that the oil got rid of it and he started anyway he was persecuted by the authorities in Canada because he wasn't selling it he was literally putting his money into it growing plants and giving it away for free right watch the documentary is very explains it all and he was persecuted there and he lives in Europe now and there's a lady at the University of Madrid dr. Sanchez she has proven in a lab setting THC you can even get the the video the speed it up video, literally eating the cancer cells. And she has proven in a lab setting, THC, you can even get the video, the speeded up video, literally eating the cancer cells. Yeah, I've seen this. I think we're finally in 2026, breaking into new ground where people are looking at psychedelics, looking at other compounds, nutrition, etc. I do think we're, I'm an optimist. I like to think that in part because of discussions like this and an open-mindedness that has not existed before, that we're starting to break new ground in at least exploring things, right? Being willing to explore things. You won't be shocked to hear, but many people might be shocked to hear that the initial group that was exploring different types of breathing to achieve different brain-body states, people like Stan Graf and all those people, a lot of them were run out of universities. They thought it was, somehow it was looked at as too counterculture. Now, my lab, I'm not running a lab right now, but I still teach, but my lab has published clinical studies, right? Federally, well, in that case, privately funded, but peer-reviewed studies on breathwork for anxiety control, breathwork for sleep augmentation. And so to us now, like breathwork sounds like the kind of like, oh, of course, right? But 20 years ago, if you said breathwork, people were like, okay, where's your magic carpet and there's the door and let's lock you out you can manipulate your your brain and your body with uh with breath sure yeah you can really shift your state and the thing with the cannabis i've also seen it in my life i've seen it with real people and there's there's thousands of people out on the internet if you search you know well certainly for glaucoma a field that i was involved in for a long time you know eye pressure cannabis is a well utilized a tool to relieve eye pressure and the major cause of blindness second to cataract only is glaucoma. Due to elevated eye pressure and cannabis, it reduces that. That's well established. So in the ophthalmology community, they've really embraced it. I do have one question that I think is in the back of many people's minds or should be. You were clearly and still are a very driven guy, although now you have this kind of additional. I'm balanced. I'm trying to be balanced now. Yeah, you have an additional. You have an on-off switch right now. Maybe it was all gas pedal before. many people that I know who smoked a lot of weed, some of them became very amotivated. They like... I'll do it tomorrow. Yeah, exactly. So you are a unique specimen in the sense that you super driven right And so I had this dime store psychologist theory for a long time with my friends which was hey if you really driven maybe you should do some things to relax maybe cannabis is right for you a little bit but if you're lazy i don't know if that's the right if you're lazy you're lazy right maybe it just amplifies it um you know there's a test you can do now i don't know if it's here but i did it in spain so we have an endocannabinoid system right inside your body but it varies so there's a swab you can do and it gives you a report on your endocannabinoid system right and uh there was one of them is a likelihood of negative effects from one to ten so the lady did my thing and i was kidding around with her i said what does it say there do i need to thc for life just messing about she said well you're not far off she said look at this the likelihood of you having negative effects from cannabis you're on one out of ten so uh for instance my wife we've been married 12 13 years now sorry gal if i made a mistake she's not going anywhere near it she feels totally paranoid if she has a little bit of cannabis so i'm well aware of the you know different endocannabinoid systems maybe or different personalities so for some people they will get a lot of negative effects uh so you have to find out for yourself but it's interesting they got this test now that actually proves that your endocannabinoid system might be slightly different for mine so i might benefit more from thc maybe you benefit more from cbd or a balance so it's interesting now that we're able to get this information. And I'm very driven and I'm very disciplined. And, yeah, my wife thinks I'm hyperactive. I'm kind of quietly. I look very relaxed, but I'm constantly thinking and moving. So probably for me it's beneficial at this stage. And I'm having this discussion with my friend. Oh, it's not good and it's only for losers. I said, you like to watch that American football, don't you, on Saturday? He's like, yeah. I said, you know they did a survey with NFL players and NBA players? How many of them use cannabis on a daily basis In between 70 and 80 percent so we talking about the most elite athletes in the world highest paid athletes they wouldn be doing that if it wasn benefiting them and they're saying it's benefiting them but more to the point how about the owners of these clubs if they thought this was having a negative effect on that they would stamp it out right away but they don't. And these are, you know, the basketball players are saying they smoke blunts before they go on the court, and they play better, and they recover better, and so on. It makes sense. So I would say it's good to hear you say that it probably varies by person. Your wife, it's not for her. It's clearly for you. And it probably varies by profession and natural drive. But maybe other things too. I mean, I know some artists, musicians who need to drink and smoke. It's creative, yeah. And others who don't. And, you know, now nicotine's made a big comeback in the oral forms of nicotine. You know, I feel like just like with dogs, there's tremendous variation in body size, temperament. Absolutely, even food. Humans are different. Some food for some people, they're allergic to it. It gives them bad effect and somebody else, not. So there's no rule that applies to everybody 100%. But cannabis has a very negative image, let's say, because of over 100 years of propaganda. It was a medicine. You could get it on the shelves in America in 1900. It was for many, many things. Queen Victoria, the famous longest queen, she used to use cannabis for period pains and this and that. So it was used as a medicine for a long time until the pharmaceutical industry came along. And then all of a sudden, they're making movies. You know, if a white woman smokes cannabis, she's going to sleep with black men and all kind of crazy stuff. There was one called Reefer Madness. You know, smoking. They're going to send you crazy. I mean, this is in people's minds, you know. It's a bad thing. It's a drug. It's not. It's a plant medicine. and it grows from the ground like that. It's stronger now. It's higher in THC because it's been crossbreed and crossbreed. Like a dog, you know, you want a dog with a long nose. It's the same thing with plants. So people want to get more bang for their buck. So the breeders are trying to breed more THC into it. And sometimes this is not good for people because the CBD is kind of calmed down and balanced with the THC Now the CBD is down and the THC is up there So that why it more likely to make you feel a little edgy now because the THC is kind of active I had a guest on here named Chris McCurdy. He's a scientist out in Florida. And he taught me three things I think that you'll find interesting in light of what we're talking about. One, that every pharmaceutical company has what are called bioprospectors that send people quietly to the jungle, to other places, and not just the jungle, to find plants that are used locally and then to find specific molecules and develop highly potent extracts to grab just one effect. The second thing is we were talking about kratom. I think the proper pronunciation is kratom. And he was talking about how the kratom plant and even the cocoa plant, chewing on the leaves, is known to give people a kind of balanced, in both cases, kind of stimulant relaxation effect. I did that in Peru when we went to Machu Picchu. Interesting. I feel like maybe I had a coffee or something. Okay. That's about it. Well, it's interesting because what happens is people take the plant, find the molecule that produces like the real dopamine high in the case of cocaine or kratom and they then develop kratom isolates or kratom-like synthetics or THC-like synthetics. And so what, especially in the United States, there's this tendency to take a plant which is very balanced in its chemistry and then to extract the thing that gives you an amplified effect, which is most habit forming and addictive, and then drive that to market. But then we demonize the whole plant. It's natural form. You can't patent it. So you can't make a lot of money. So you need to change it a little bit or extract something out of there. Cannabis grows from the ground. Yes, it's stronger than it used to be back in the 60s. because the growers bred it like that. But it's not synthetic. It's just a plant crossed with a plant. Like, you know, it's a natural process. That's why farmers can't make money from it. They have to change it from its natural form balance. But when they do that, it doesn't work so well. Well, the internet has caused a great many problems, instant gratification, this kind of thing. But I also think it's solved a great number of problems. And one of the things that it solved is that the discussions about plants versus isolates, about cannabis for one person, solved is that the discussions about plants versus isolates, about cannabis for one person, maybe not for another, psychedelics, TRT versus steroids. I like to think that we are in a whole new era now where people hopefully are starting to search for information differently. It's not like it was. You can find it now at your fingertips, man. It's great. I mean, it's great. When I first was starting to get into, interested in psychedelics and cannabis i mean i as i said i was in amsterdam so there's stores there with a alternate with books in it that i wouldn't normally find even in england so that's when i i had to you know when i started bodybuilding i had to go out and buy magazines or get a book it wasn't so easy uh now at the your fingertips you can do anything don't listen to me go check out that study if you want i didn't make it but i can tell you after 30 years of daily smoking I went for a fitness evaluation I was in Brazil a couple years ago they said the test biologist I should be 38 and my breathing and my heart rate recovery from exercise is excellent well no one's doubting your vigor I promise you that Bruce Lee I'm similar to your wife and that is it's not for me but but but I'm you know like to each their own right I've have the things that work for me and the things that don't. And I'm open-minded. I have a couple more questions. One is about your wife vis-a-vis training for women. Early on, we were talking about training and I'll point people to some other references that you've put out there about training, but you made it very clear kind of what the beginner versus more advanced stuff is. I want to make sure that we touch on, she's quite the athlete. Do you think women who want to get stronger, maybe just a bit more size here and there, but not overall size. Do you think they should train differently? And if so, how? Differently from men? Yes. I don't think so. I mean, the same muscles in the same place, same rules apply. The muscles are not going to grow unless you overload them. It's just going to be limited by the fact that you're female and you don't produce a lot of testosterone, which makes it much more difficult to build muscle. So we used to have this nonsense word. I said, it's a nonsense word. No, I don't want to I want to get toned. All right, but there is no such thing as toned. What you mean is you want to look firmer, right? Yes it called building muscle and losing body fat So your arms might be the same size but it a different composition now It looks leaner It looks more shapely It the same thing It bodybuilding You building muscle and losing body fat. That's the only way you can change your shape. You can do yoga. You can do all these things. It's great for your mobility, your internal musculature. But the only way to really change your physical appearance is resistance training, weight training, whatever if you want to call it maybe they don't want to call it bodybuilding oh no resistance training that sounds better but it's the same bloody thing you know you need to build muscle and lose body fat then you'll look leaner and don't worry about building too much muscle unless you're a genetic outlier that's genetically very muscular and maybe higher testosterone levels the girls that you see in competition they're all using steroids all of them even the bikini competition they had this bikini class for women that introduced years ago because the idea is the women are getting too big now in the other classes so we'll make this bikini class which is a fit you know young girl that's been trained of a little bit bikini on the beach they started doing juice and got bigger i'm like what they're going to do next bikini light unfortunately that's what you know when it gets competitive people start using products so all those girls you see doing competitions they're using steroids so you're not going to get like that by mistake uh you need to build some muscle mass you change your appearance and be healthier resistance training just the same as a man maybe you want to do extra work on your glutes or something because that's a big thing for women maybe you do a bit another exercise there that the man doesn't do but the same thing applies right stress adaptation recovery adaptation it's the same principle it's not voodoo there's no uh you know that there's a whole industry now right online and simple easy facts don't sound sexy so that everybody tries to make everything very complicated in order to make the client perceive more value uh i gotta change the real i was talking to a guy once who's the top trainer i said why have you got to train your clients routine every random four weeks six weeks whatever it is you do i said it's nonsense people just do the same exercises that work right don keep changing it around you can even track it yeah i know but they want it they like to change it around like yeah maybe it a good business strategy but i like just tell people the truth and it is what it is it's much harder to package and sell drive yeah it's hard work sweat push yourself but there's a beauty in that there's a beauty in pushing yourself and And, you know, once you overcome something, then you feel more confident and stronger to overcome something again, right? And this bleeds into everything, right, into your life. Like the gym is a microcosm of your life, right? If you're going to push your butt in a gym and not push yourself when it gets tough, you're going to, oh, no, screw that, put it down. I'm probably going to do the same thing in life when things come along that are tough, you know? So it's not just a physical thing. It's the mental thing that controls everything. If you become a more resilient, more confident, stronger person, that goes into everything in your life. So there's more to bodybuilding than big muscles and competitions. And iron your shirts. Yeah, iron your shirts, lower your cortisol. I don't even know why I was doing that. I was just doing it. I'm imagining that now. I'm going to start ironing my own shirts. Um, tell me about DY Nutrition. I, um, I'm not getting paid to ask this. I'm just very curious. Uh, you know, what, where is it? What is it? When I was bodybuilding, I was competing. Uh, I was contracted to work with the Weider company, you know, be their guy in the magazines and hold the product and everything. But I was interested, you know, in supplements. I was always reading nutrition supplements, anything to do with my craft. and I spoke to Joe Weider and I said, listen, can I work with the guys? And, you know, no, no, no, just be the guy. So I was interested in getting involved then because I thought the Weider supplements definitely could be better, right? Well, he didn't want me involved in that. So through various businesses over the years, I built DY Nutrition, which is my own brand. I was just doing it myself, me and a partner and doing it ourselves. And over the years then I found some good partners. And we got to the point now where we have our own pharmaceutical facility in Europe And we been hitting the bodybuilding market all over Europe and Middle East And now we shifting We're still going to maintain that, but we're shifting into health, wellness, all the things that we're talking about and making some real kick-ass product for that market as well. So there's almost like two Dorians, Dorian the bodybuilder and Dorian now who's in his 60s. and being concerned about my own health and longevity and quality of life and what supplements can you take to help in that area. So we're developing that whole kind of new area that I'm really interested and really involved in the development of the products and everything like that. And we are, after many, many years of demand, coming to the U.S. pretty soon. And so that's one of the reasons I'm over here, meeting with some people and everything. So look out for us. We'll be in the U.S. soon as well. Great. So I imagine it's the quote-unquote conventional stuff like whey protein, creatine, glutamine, but some additional things as well? Yeah, we've got pre-workout, creatine, pre-workouts called blood and guts, and that's the first product we're going to be bringing here to the U.S. There'll be a lot more shouting in gyms. Yeah, I'm working on something special. I don't want to say what it is yet, but something special with the Blood & Guts product. So you get a bit more than a product for myself. We'll wait till that's ready to go. Cool. Yeah, let us know. Final question, and it's arguably a big one, but feel free to handle it however you want. you've had a very unusual life relative to most humans on the planet past it's been interesting it's been it's been a wild ride and um and um again i'm struck by your you know internal sense that you were destined for something different and great you're really leaning into it in such a logical way and also knowing when to rack that and go to the next thing keeping the best of what and grabbing the best of what's next and so forth, as well as maintaining your health. So here's my question, because you did all that, you're doing it now, it's not over, and you also have this experience of psychedelics and consciousness and you're a thinker, you're thinking Because you did all that. Because you did all that. You're doing it now. It's not over. And you also have this experience of psychedelics and consciousness, and you're a thinker. You're a thinking guy. That's one of the reasons I like to smoke cannabis, because I just go into thinking. It's like breaks all the boxes. You and Rogan can talk about it that way. And for the rest of us, we end up in a little ball, scared that the lint is going to put you in a choice. Don't worry, it happens to a lot of people. I don't need to smoke with me. Oh, man. My wife says when they're like, she's like, don't do it. Well, I can't, I don't enter marital disputes. But so what do you think this is all about, man? Not just for you, but for everyone. I mean, like a lot of people look up to you. They look to your story, but it's your insight and your experience that I think is what's so intriguing. What do you think it's all about? I mean, why are we here? we're god playing hide and seek with itself we're consciousness having an experience being in a physical reality and we're all the same thing we appear to be different and separate and we are we're having an individual experience but ultimately we're the same thing having all those experiences at the same time if you want to call that god uh it's just everything that's what I got from psychedelics and we're all on our own journeys in this reality maybe to learn things or maybe to explore what it's like to be in this reality because consciousness is not physical it's just consciousness and I believe it's in everything in the plants in the animals in us it's all the same thing having kind of different experiences and it doesn't end, you know. It's like we've got the TV on, right? TV's on there, we're watching it, we turn it off. Or the TV blows up or whatever. But the energy that was going into the TV is still there somewhere, right? So we are still somewhere even after this experience finishes. This much I'm pretty sure about. That's what I got. and live life to its fullest Like you going to come here and have this opportunity and just stay here and go from here to here and do this And I never wanted to do that I knew I felt there more to life And there still is. I want adventure, I want experiences. And it's been up and down. And I feel like now, like, I'm the most balanced and the most peaceful that I've been. I know my place and try to enjoy every day and spread love, you know, because that's where we come from. We've forgotten. But it's all creation is the same as love. It's the same frequency. That's what I get from my experience, and I look forward to every day. and being somewhat of a mentor and a teacher, I guess, at this point. You know, I do these camps like once or twice a year, just like six people or something, where I take them through my training methods in the gym and we do the theory and they become certified at the end of the week. So we call it DYHIT training certification. But I said to the guys, I said, I think I'm going to change the name of this thing to the DY Experience. because the training is part of it but it almost becomes something else by the end of the week spending so much time together and talking and training together and i see the people when they're under stress in the gym i see things about them that i could maybe share and and to be helpful so i feel all the things i've been through is giving me the the experience to be able to do that and help and inspire other people and my own kids and anyone that's around me can benefit from my experiences I think at this point that's that's probably the reason I did it all in the first place you know I wanted to be this guy I wanted to be Mr. Olympia I wanted to have this trophies I wanted to make the money and be famous and all that stuff I suppose but what was the I think I get it now more than ever. Yeah, so I'm feeling in a good place. I feel peaceful, I feel balanced. And that's my role now, I think. You know just to inspire and help other people from my experiences and my knowledge I think that where I at now Yeah Well you have certainly inspired me and millions of other people and you going to continue to by virtue of your accomplishments, what you've said here today and everything going forward. I can't express enough gratitude to you. You've really been a leader without realizing it in domains of life that you don't realize for, you know, like a guy who was plugging away in the lab also liked working out who didn't become an athlete or a bodybuilder, but really loved fitness. Like I'm just one example of millions of people who have been truly inspired by you. You've shaped and changed millions of lives. That's really powerful, man. And I really appreciate that. Well, it's real. It's real. And when I, you know, and when I saw that you were into some of the same music and that you you uh you like blondie and you know and bulldogs and i met her did you really oh yeah you know it was 1990 in new york i met her in the gym there and man i don't have a fucking camera man she's amazing i remember as a kid and i was like man you know some guys like the swimsuit models i'm like no she was punk i'm like i'm like blondie is it um and uh so just you know there are these points of convergence that one feels. And again, I'm saying this for me, but millions of people feel it. They go, oh, bulldog or blondie or whatever it is that you like the hack squat, not the Smith rack at a certain stage of your career. I guess you liked both. But, you know, these things matter in ways that most people will never get the opportunity to say directly to you and thank you. So on behalf of all of them. Thanks. Thank you. And also just on behalf of myself. Thanks for having me on the show. This has been awesome. and I'm super grateful that we did it and I'm excited to train tomorrow oh you're gonna get ass kicked tomorrow man nice yeah I'll admit I'm one percent scared but 99% fired don't worry you'll be alive I still got some I told the guy once in a they were filming me so it came out I was like just fucking get on this leg press and do this and bring it down on a control and press it up and just fucking do that till I tell you to stop yeah I said listen you're not gonna die But if you do, you won't know about it. So don't worry, man. Let's go. Awesome. All right, man. Let's see you at Gold's tomorrow. See you at Gold's tomorrow. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dorian Yates. To learn more about Dorian and what he doing now please see the links in the show note captions Also linked in the show note caption is the video of the high intensity low volume workout that Dorian took me and my producer Rob through at Gold Gym Venice We trained back it was brutal and it was awesome If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. 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