Physical Perfection | @ChrisBumstead | EP 423

hello everyone I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024 beginning in early February and running through June Tammy and I an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the US you can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on my forthcoming book out November 2024 we who wrestle with God I'm looking forward to this I'm thrilled to be able to do it again and I'll

be pleased to see all of you again soon bye-bye all of a sudden I start breaking down crying and I didn't even realize what was in me myself and I'm not wanting my wife to see me in this point of weakness because I feel maybe I would be judged and I've had a lot of men as I've spoken about this tell me I couldn't tell my wife that she would judge me too much she would leave me if I broke down crying in front of her like that she didn't she pulled me in closer and

she was like told me every single time she like I know this is difficult I know there's a lot of pressure on you right now you can quit if you want I will love you regardless but I believe in you to get through this and you will get through this if you choose [Music] to hello everyone today I'm speaking with five time consec Ive Mr Olympia Champion Chris Bumstead and so what do we talk about well we talk about the utility of aiming at something high and pursuing it um the opportunity cost that comes along

with that the challenge of balancing that kind of single-minded and maybe necessary obsession with developing everything else that makes for a full life we talk a lot about marriage and about how he's integrated his relationship into his into his highlevel professional Pursuits Chris's wife is having a baby very soon we talked a fair bit about Parenthood talked about the role that his father played in his life U we talked about his the pleasure he takes in and has discovered in being a role model in sharing his disciplined Journey towards a pinnacle with his followers we

talked about his practice of identifying the things that are impediments to his progress forward his fears his insecurities his insufficiency genes his determination to face those things voluntarily his ability to overcome those impediments as a consequence that was particularly relevant on the public speaking and social engagement front the way that him and his wife have negotiated that within the confines of the relationship and um his his plans for the future that continues after his Stellar athletic and public career comes to its particular close so join us for that so you made your debut on the

professional stage at in 2017 how old how old were you then in 2017 I was 22 years old 22 okay so like I'm very ignorant about the domain of activity that you are engaged in so I'm going to ask all sorts of stupid questions and to to catch myself up so what did it mean to what does it mean to debut professionally in the in the in the world of bodybuilding and and maybe you could also tell us about that world in general I don't understand its structure or or you know the the hierarchies of

competition how you move up and all of that like what sort of world is that yeah so it's there's an mainly just an amateur in a professional league and it changed a lot over the years where it used to be a much bigger deal if you turn pro and you call it getting your pro card in bodybuilding so you compete as an amateur usually in your city and then in your state and then you'll do a national level level show and that's all an amateure and typically when you win a National level show you'll get

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

the end of the day okay so the so Olympia is the Olympia is the P the Pinnacle and you won five consecutive championships and is that the right terminology even did you is it a championship that you win what what's what what's a yeah okay okay and that was the you want but but yeah so I had won five olympias over the last five years exactly yeah right and are you the and are you the current holder of the title that's correct yeah the five pre okay good good good good just one of and has

has anybody else managed that for 5 years in a row no so it's actually a pretty new division I'm in so that's another different tier that's within bodybuilding there's open bodybuilding which is there's no weight limit and those are like the people like Ronnie Coleman and the huge people that a lot of people know the big names of and there's no weight limit there and I'm in a division called classic physique which is meant to bring back more of like the Arnold days a little bit more aesthetic and not quite as big so I have

a weight cap that I have to match so my division's only been around since 2016 so there were two previous winners before me over the three years but the division's only been around for eight years and I've won five of those eight years so no one's really had a chance to beat that okay okay so I was noticing yeah with regard to weight I was noticing I don't know how accurate Wikipedia is but it listed your weight um as 234 but in the off season as 264 that's pretty accurate yeah oh okay so what's what's

the reason for the discrepancy there so in bodybuilding it's all about like bulking and cutting mainly you spend a majority of your year trying to put on muscle and to do so you need to put on a little bit more body fat eat more food train a little bit more intense do less cardio so your body's growing and then when you enter prep which is like the big thing of bodybuilding you enter like a 12 to 16 week prep which is very strict dieting and it's whole intention of that is stripping as much fat as

possible while maintaining as much muscle as possible and so that's where the weight fluctuates so you want to get to a healthy body fat but a higher weight to put on some muscle and then you chop that down and that's where the weight discrepancy comes in so I'll be 265 is at my highest and I'll come down to about 240 when I'm right on stage okay and that's and that's to to to make the most of your to make the most of your shape for the competition I presume to make you to make you as

cut as you can be for the purposes of the display is that is that the case exactly yeah it's like chiseling down a stone down to the all the excess Stone bring it down to just the art of it right right right and so when you're in that 12 to 16 week period what what do you do on the diet front what do you have to do in order to lose that 30 pounds and what what does your diet regimen consist of um it typically consists of you start building up to a maximum amount of

calories that you can throughout the year so your metabolism is flying and then when you start prep you just slowly start bringing down the calories while increasing the amount of cardio you do so let's say in my offseason when I'm at my heaviest I'm eating about 5,500 5,000 calories and at my lowest at the end of my prep I'll be eating about 1,500 calories so it comes down quite a bit and within that you're adding in cardio so you're expending a little bit more calories doing that and it's just kind of changing the energy output

versus input to make sure that you're inputting less than you're outputting I see so it's basically it's not so much if I if I have this correct it's not so much what you're eating at that point point it's how it's How much you're eating essentially assessed by by caloric intake I mean I'm curious about this because as you perhaps know know I have a almost entirely carnivorous diet and have for a long time and I've been watching sha Baker a lot on on especially on his Twitter feed Doctor Who's been promoting the carnivore diet and

um it seems to be unbelievably useful for adding muscle mass but also decreasing body fat content so I was curious ious about you know the the ratio of carbohydrates to proteins or if if there's anything additional that you're doing apart from adjusting caloric intake per se yeah yeah so typically there's like a set amount of protein people will eat and it stays around then so I'll eat about 300 gram of protein in a day and as my calories come down I'm normally pulling away my carbs and my fats and keeping my protein the same so

calories are coming down but protein staying the same so that ratio just changes and that's why bodybuilding is uh so much different than a lot of other sports if you can call it that because it's not just about how you perform but it's about how you look so typically in sports it's like what's going to allow me to perform the best whereas in bodybuilding it's like no I've just got to look the best and then I still have to go and perform in the gym as best as I can so it's kind of balancing those

two to allow yourself to be in the gym getting the best workouts and you can but you also can't be eating too much to perform at your best because then you'll be holding on too much body fat so it's kind of an art of balancing all that right right okay so so let's go through the progression of your career from amateur to professional and then I would like also to talk about the criteria by which you're by which you're judged exactly what it is that the judges are looking for we can talk a little bit

about the popularity of the the sport as well so you said when you were an amateur there are local comp so what exactly are the structures of the competitions and how popular is this so you started I I believe you started weightlifting when you were about 14 is that is that correct yeah it was right around then yeah okay and and and why did you start when you were 14 and what was the consequence of starting um I just started I started in the gym because I played a lot of sports and I was very

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

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

then it was when I was in grade 12 my sister started dating a local bodybuilder and they're actually married now he's my brother in-law and he started coaching me into the the true realm of bodybuilding because before that I was just training to be strong I didn't understand bodybuilding to how precise it really was so he started teaching me the intri intricacies of that and he saw the potential in me he's like you're young I've 18 years old had a lot of muscle on me he's like you should try doing a bodybuilding show I'll coach

you we'll see how it goes have some fun with it why not oh yeah so I was like sure you know I'll give it a shot okay okay so let's let's walk into the practicalities of that because there there will be lots of people who are watching and listening who in principle would like to discipline themselves in principle they'd like to hit the gym and you know undergo some physical transformation to make themselves stronger and healthier and more attractive and like I started weightlifting when I was about let's see 21 22 something like that I

was very very very thin and not very strong and I I packed on about 35 lbs of muscle in about 2 years I had to eat like a mad dog to do that and um there's a reason I'm telling you this I mean one of because it did a lot of things for me that I didn't understand that weightlifting would do now I used free weights and one of the things I noticed apart from the fact that I packed on muscle and was Stronger was that my posture improved a lot I was starting to get

hunched a little bit because I was typ sitting and writing a lot and it pulled my shoulders back up straight and then it was really good for my coordination especially my lower body my legs got a lot more coordinated and uh the other thing it did was produce and I think this went along with the coordination and maybe that was from working all the little tendons and so forth that you do with free weights it also made me a lot more physically like confident and I think I don't think that was nearly as much a

consequence of the strength as it was a consequence of the increase coordination okay so back when you were 14 you were already athletic you started but you started hitting the gym more thoroughly what what like what size were you what height were you when you were 14 how were you built physically when you were when you were you know that young uh teenager I don't remember my exact size but I was like a lean skinny kidish I was probably like just under six foot maybe 180 lb 170 lb or so so I was never really

small and even when I graduated I was about 220 lb so definitely notice some of the same things as yourself I was definitely a bit of an anxious kid quiet and introvert and going in the gym by myself playing some music just enjoying that allowed me to like control the outcome of all that and it was really fun for me and obviously like you said you noticed as well it builds confidence in you even just being good at something can build confidence in you so obviously that was that was part of what I started to

do and like I said you get a little attention from having some muscle at a young age and that builds a little bit more confidence and all these things started kind of trickling in my mind being like oh wow I really like this I should keep doing if I do more of it I'll get more of these good feelings from it right okay so so you are a pretty big kid you you're already 6 feet tall you're you're and you're pretty built it mean 180 and 6 feet at 14 you so you have okay so

you had the natural physique for this and then how how did you start like had you been a disciplined kid up to then how had you done in school like were were you someone who had regular and good habits were you a conscientious person to begin with you know I'm kind of wondering how you managed to develop the discipline to start working out in the gym and how regularly were you walk me through how you learn to do this and and step by step so that people listening could figure out for themselves what they would

do if they decided to go to the gym and also the obstacles you know when I went to the gym I went at Migel and like I said I was very thin I was about 6 feet tall but about 135 lbs like very very thin and not very strong and one of the obstacles to me of being in the gym was that it's it's it's embarrassing even to some degree to recount because when I was there people would come over and show me how to use the weights and you know that that's friendly but it's

also very annoying and I think I was bench pressing like 75 pounds with some difficulty at that point and so you know that's not very much weight and so one of the things you can imagine that when people are going to hit the gym there's there's a couple of especially if they haven't been athletic there's a couple of things that are going to be impediments they're going to be self-conscious they don't know what the hell they're doing plus hypothetically they they lack discipline now you had the advantages of being slightly you know somewhat on the

larger side and also being athletic but how did you develop the discipline and what impediments did you have to overcome as you were developing that discipline yeah so I mean I heard a quote the other day that stuck with me because I thought of this it was you don't start something because you're passionate you stick with it because you're passionate so I kind of just started it I fell into it naturally and like I said as I started to see results and get a little bit more joy out of it I started to become more

passionate and put more effort into it and every year since I was a child I've become a little bit more consistent a little bit more passionate and put a little bit more effort into it so my discipline has continued to grow over time because I just stuck with something for a while and want to see how it went and it just kind of tumble affected but I definitely had some of the similar feelings and I hear from everybody about being a little anxious being in the gym and it's funny it's people will come help you

to make you feel comfortable but like you said it could almost be demeaning make you feel a little bit like all right you think I need your help but when I was young right great yeah so my dad actually had one of those old sand weights it was like a weer bar with sand weights in the basement and I remember setting up some boxes filling them up with stuff and lying on it and trying to bench press on it because it's hard to balance a bench press at first like you talked about the stability and

all that it's difficult so I was a young kid in my basement doing that with push-ups and pull-ups and that's really what got me into the whole weightlifting building muscle thing and that was purely like I mentioned just to get better at sports I assumed if I was Stronger I would be better at Sports and then after that I joined a gym at a young age there was a summer program that gave kids a free membership over the summer and I had to ask my parents to come sign me up because you had to be

16 and I was 14 so they had to come in and sign a waiver for that and it's I wasn't the most disciplined kid for sure my parents definitely made me independent and to to have some of the free reign that they gave me to be able to go out with friends and do stuff I had to earn it I had to have a job finish my chores do my homework and all that stuff so my parents definitely raised me to have that kind of mindset and I grew up in a town with some good

kids luckily didn't get stuck into anything bad and we were all very all my friends were very passionate about sports and I wanted to excel so I kept putting myself in the gym and at a young age I remember I didn't have a car or anyway to get there all the time my parents would work late and I remember I would run even in the winter in Ottawa it would be like a foot of snow on on the ground and I'd be jogging to the gym it was about a mile and a half but still

a decent little run in the snow and I was just super dedicated from a young age because I loved it so much and as I mentioned sometimes just being in the gym with my music and that Focus was just like a point of solitude for myself to enjoy and there was a quiet gym luckily and I I slowly learned over time that no one in the gym is looking at you or judging you everybody who's everybody who's been in there was a beginner at some point so they're not looking at you making fun of you

they were you probably a year or two go and everyone's just truly there to help out and I've discovered that the fitness community in general is a very encouraging Community because everybody has the same experience as you they get in they feel better they get some confidence they're like this is great like I would love for other people to feel this too you hope if they're nice enough and that typically allows them to be very inclusive and want people to come and join and just be a part of it all so I found it's not

a judgmental people think when once you're in it right well that's a really good that's a really good point you know because part of being self-conscious in the gym is and this is true for overweight people and for anybody who's out of shape or for anybody who just doesn't know what they're doing which is pretty much everybody when they go to the gym the first time especially if they don't have a as we pointed out a history of athleticism it's very easy to think that these people who are throwing the weights around in there are

judgmental you know it's really a consequence of your own self-consciousness and and proclivity to to self judge judement but you know the fact that those people are in there working on themselves does indicate very clearly through their actions that they believe that they still have work to do and as you said the probability that many of them who are in there or perhaps all of them to some degree were in the same boat as you at some point is very very high you know and it was certainly the case that the people who were coming

over to help me weren't doing it in a judgmental way you know that was my problem and there's another thing to to concentrate on on there too you know one of the things that one of my favorite thinkers um his psychoanalyst Carl Young pointed out was very very helpful to me to understand was that he said the precursor to the Redeemer is the fool and what he meant by that was that if you're going to master something the first thing you have to do is admit to yourself that you're not a master of it already

because then you wouldn't have to do anything so you have to allow yourself to be the fool and you know one of the things I've noticed about people who are highly successful is that they will jump into new things that they don't know anything about and be the fool be the person who doesn't know anything be the person who's low man on the totem pole start at the lowest rung and they won't pretend to know more than they do know they ask the stupid questions that are necessary they humble themselves in accordance with their novice

position they like they accept that weight and but they also do so in the understanding that if they're honest with themselves they can make the kind of incremental progress that you described right because you said you got more and more disciplined as the years went by and that it doesn't matter it doesn't matter if you start at the bottom what matters is that you're so stupid and blind that you refuse to learn and that you stay there right so it's it's trajectory that matters and not absolute position and so that's a useful thing for people

to know it's like of course you feel like a bloody fool when you do something the first time what the hell do you expect like you are a fool but that doesn't mean that you can't you can't move beyond that yeah yeah no you touched on something great there when you're expanding if it's something that makes you feel worried or anxious or you thinking other people are judging you it's probably actually reflection of yourself something that you need to grow on and that's something that I really noticed cuz I used to be super anxious in

public speaking and I remember you've done a lot of talks on fear immersion and stepping into and the confidence that can build and I didn't really understand this whole mindset of all the confidence that would come from that and I but I would always do podcast or public speaking or I started to get in some of seminar events or being asked to come talk from my success as a bodybuilder and every time I went there I'd be Mr Olympia walking into this thing terrified out of my mind like hand shaking stumbling my words and I

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

and getting off stage but I also have a lot of memories now where I've killed the good talk and I've stepped off stage feeling so confident and over that Realm Of Me becoming better at something I wasn't good at I noticed my confidence in all aspects of my life started to increase not just in public speaking so I think that being able to have that humility like you said look at yourself be the fool and understand where you need to grow and put yourself into positions to grow is something that has helped me immensely and

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and if you call today you may not have to make next month's mortgage payment that's 888 84303 or visit americanfinancing.net nmls 182 334 nmls consumer access.org APR for rates in the five start at 6.46% for well-qualified borrowers call 888 8433 for details about credit costs and [Music] terms yeah well let's delve into that a little bit because we can imagine your situation you know like you're a big guy and you're Better Built than anyone else in the world arguably and so what people would assume looking at you it's the halo effect like if you see

someone who's attractive and who's in very good physical shape and who's strong you're going to assume automatically that every other good thing that's confident goes along with that so that actually puts you as a you know that puts you in a kind of a double bind because not only do you have to get up and speak publicly but people are going to assume a priority that well you've got this like why the hell would someone like that be worried about it and so and you are worried about it as and and public speaking is something

that does terrify people it's it's one of the most highly cited it's fear of public exposure right and fear of making a fool of yourself and and being and being judged harshly by a lot of people and following falling in status because of it it's a major league fear now but so so you had reasons to be afraid now you said that you had decided to voluntarily confront that regardless and there's a real key lesson there because one of the things that's been extraordinarily well documented among psychologists and and uh well we'll stick with psychologists

who deal with anxiety is that the the universal Pathway to overcoming Anxiety is to voluntarily face what you're afraid of in graduated doses it has to be voluntary it can't be accidental you have to you have and that's partly a mindset issue and you know that mindset goes very very deep it's not just something that you think when you decide that you're going to confront something voluntarily you change you probably change yourself all the way down past the cellular level you you change the way that genes code for proteins you change the way your cells

operate you change the way the neurons communicate like everything about you changes and what you're doing what you did let's say with public speaking is not only did you develop the skill set that was associated with public speaking and we can go into that a bit more but you simultaneously develop the part of you that is capable at the physical and the psychological level of confronting everything that's frightening as such you know it's so cool because it means that you can what what you do with people in therapy when you do exposure therapy which is

essentially what you did let's say when you decided to arrange for yourself more and more demanding speaking opportunities is that you you don't become less afraid exactly you become braver and braver and braver and that's different right because you're always going to be facing challenges that are Beyond you to some degree there's always a reason to be terrified into paralysis but you can learn to be a more courageous person and that's not just an attitude like I said it changes you at every single level of your being all like really all the way down to

the molecular there's a lot of work done on this now on in a field called epigenetics there's even some possibility like this is you know more on the edge but but there is some possibility some of the changes that you can make behaviorally can change you so profoundly genetically that those changes can be transmitted to your children let's say so you know that's really something that that's about as profound a change as you could possibly imagine so let's let's talk about your experience with your experiences with public speaking so you you mentioned that there were

tell me exactly if you would what it is that you were afraid of to begin with what what would go what were the thoughts that would go through your mind that were that were intimidating I mean definitely as anyone can imagine when you put yourself in front of a bunch of people you're in a position to be judged the very vulnerable spot and I can't really pinpoint exactly where it came from but I have some minor memories from a child in front of a class or something like that being super embarrassed and sweating but I

do think a lot of it comes from I have a speech impediment I've had a lisp since I was young and when I get nervous it gets worse and when I was younger it was much worse so I used to be teased for that a little bit which made me I'm sure much more quiet and introvert and just not wanting to talk so not wanting to talk around anyone obviously he's much scared to talk around a large group of people so now Standing On Top of people my mouth will get really dry I'll start to

be like my tongue will stick out of my mouth I'm like oh my God I'm going to sound dumb people are going to laugh at me and judge me and it led to this kind of spiraling effect and you really hit the nail on the head when you talked about the visual Persona I give off when someone sees me or hears about my career or something they already have an expectation of who I am and that's something that I've worked on a lot in the past couple years of this differentiation with my therapist who helped

me with this between what I would call seum versus Christopher and the difference of what people expect me to be what I think people expect of me and who I should be versus who I really am and allowing myself to be that person who is a little bit scared anxious has a list can step on stage and kind of embarrass himself a little bit so that's something I've worked on and this public speaking with part of that process of working on all that but overall I would before getting up there hands would be shaking heart

would be racing I wouldn't even have concrete thoughts if these people are going to think this about me it was just like nerves kind of like almost black almost like blacking out nerves just like oh God here we go I got to do this and as you mentioned voluntarily doing it is the whole secret to it so when I started taking those nerves and those butterflies and that kind of feeling in my heart as a good sign as a chance for grow growth and changing my perception on okay me feeling this right now if I

step into this this is giving myself an opportunity to grow and become something better so try and enjoy that a little bit more you know this is the feelings of racing your heart of being fear scared all these things it's part of the human experience and I think feeling anything is something great better than feeling nothing at all so I started to kind of try and enjoy it and be excited for what would result of it and that's kind of continuously helped and obviously when you're stepping on stage if your if your goal is for

people to like you you I've heard someone in the past say I believe they said then you're putting your self worth on the line you're giving your self worth an issue to be judged versus if you step on stage and your only goal is to be yourself then it doesn't matter if they accept you or not because you can succeed just by being yourself and that kind of leads that can lead to even more self-confidence obviously it's a better goal to just be who you are rather than have people like you it leads to a

lot more fulfilled happiness rather than a false sense of reality of people liking a false sense of yourself so that was a huge process of what I kind of step through and all that and like you said you don't get less scared you get more Brave even before getting on the podcast I was a little bit nervous I still get nervous now and I just I believe in myself more I have more confidence from my track record in the history and I'm more Brave to step into it a little bit more okay so you covered

a bunch of things there that I think are are interesting and worth delving into it's like okay what do you want when you step on stage so let's say well you want people to like you it's like well what what the hell do you mean by that first of all it's like what PE which people and does that mean that you're going to present a false front so that they like that because that isn't you so if they like that false front you you haven't been humiliated I mean you you've definitely circumvented that but it's

not like you got people to like you because they don't know who you are so that's not a really good victory like I mean I understand why people might want to craft what they're going to say so they don't fail cataclysmically but that's also not how you ever succeed as a public speaker you know like so when I go out on stage I wouldn't say I'm nervous about it anymore but I've done it so much now you know and and it's certainly it takes a very long time before you won't be nervous at all it's

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

that allows you to step on stage not with a mindset of Suspicion and paranoia and distrust of the audience which is part of the fear of being judged but the recognition that you're among people who wish you well which is certainly going to be the case for you in most most of the places that you're speaking and anyone who isn't there for that reason they're the sort of mean-spirited person you shouldn't really care about you shouldn't really care about what they think anyways and then with regards to what you're going to say you know if

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

is where you have to decide what you're going to put your faith in you know and like when I'm on stage when I'm talking to people as far as I can manage all I'm trying to do is to say what I believe to be true and try to make my thoughts clearer and the thing that's so fun about that is that if I'm trying to make my thoughts clearer to myself I'm simultaneously doing the same thing for the audience if I'm trying to track the truth as I speak and move forward then they can come

along with me and then the whole thing works out like it just strips all it strips all the deception out of it you know and Chris one of the things too that I used to tell my socially anxious clients or or or help them conceptualize is that if you go to a party and you're nervous you're primarily concerned about whether or not you're at ease like you're concerned about your mental state but if you go to a party and you're focused on making other people comfortable and welcome well first of all they'll be really bloody

happy about you because you'll be attending to them but the fact that you're attending to them stops that self-consciousness it's about the only thing I know that really works CU you can't tell yourself just not to be self-conscious and so when you're going now like when you're going on stage or even when you're going on a podcast let's say what is it that you've learned to focus on because you're hypothetically you're not focusing on your sweaty hands you're not focusing in on your you know cuz you said most of your responses are physiological rather than

than thought-based in terms of what's what's what's the manifestation of the fear what are you now focused on when you're trying to communicate I mean part of stepping on stage at least as I kind of mentioned I actually am focusing on that physical part there was a quote from Tim Grover to Michael Jord from when he was younger talking about instead of trying to fight the butterflies just send them in the right direction so when I start to feel the butterflies in my stomach getting a little nervous it's like all right you know this is

be this is because changing my frame of mind rather than fear I'm feeling these because I've worked really hard to be here I'm very excited to be here and I'm sure you know anxiousness and excitement are almost the same thing so if I can like allow myself to believe how hard I've worked to be in this exact position how long I've waited to hear and of course I feel nervous and excited because this is really important to me so feel all these feelings right now because I compete once a year so all my year is

working said words that one day and on that day I want to feel everything I can rather than numb anything out and avoid it so I'm like this is part of this experience that I'm going to remember feeling nervous and I've done this the history helps me I've done this five times I've won seven times I've been on the stage now I can step on the stage with experience and I can have these nerves and the nerves are going to fade and I'm going to be left out there purely being present and joyful feeling all

of it and I've just had that experience to go through it and a lot of it has come from doing it numerous times the the work I'm doing outside believing in myself and that kind of change of frame and I mean the understanding that fear anxious and excitement are so similar that you don't need to focus on it being anxiety and bad rather it could be a good thing yeah well okay so when you confront something new let's say an opportunity on stage especially if it's a high stakes opportunity what your body basically does is

put itself in a position where you're more primed to do everything and and they this the physiologist psychophysiologist calls that call that uh heightened non-specific arousal right and so that's really what you're referring to and what your body is doing is is saying well this is a complex situation God only knows what you're going to be called upon to do so let's just crank everything up so that you can respond rapidly if that's necessary and that can easily tilt into anxiety or it can shade into excitement it's much more likely to tilt into anxiety if

you start to get afraid of those responses right so you've learned to reframe them you know as the kind of excitement that you described people fall into these feedback loops this is what produces Panic by the way where you're afraid you see that you're afraid or at least you interpret those that emotional state let's say as fear you get afraid of the fear that makes the fear Mount then you get more afraid of that because the fear is mounted more and you just spiral right and that can turn into a full-blown panic attack and so

okay so you've learned instead to attend to that and to and to I would say interpret it in the best possible light right it's a realistic light but it's the best possible light you also pointed to something else that everyone should know see here's one of the things that people do that tilts them very hard to toward maintaining or increasing a phobia or even something like fear of public speaking so as you're approaching your debut on stage let's say that tendency for arousal is going to increase and it's going to increase to a maximum generally

right before the event begins now I'm sure you've observed this if you don't run during that period see if you run during that period then you've learned that the event is terrifying if you if you wait that out and you actually go ahead with the event what you'll find almost inevitably is that that high level of arousal will decrease once the event begins and then you then you can see you've learned like through practical experience that if you just withstand the anxiety it will decrease now you you made illusion to the fact that even in

the bodybuilding competitions where where you're not speaking Yeah yeah maybe you can differentiate that for us I mean you said to some degree that you were worried about being judged as a speaker but then of course when you're on the on the stage you're being judged on the basis of your physique and your performance and so it obviously it isn't judgment per se that's causing you to be nervous it's more and that's where you referred it to some of the things that had happened in your childhood for example you know proclivity for a lisp a

bit and the fact that you had experienced some public humiliation doesn't take much for a kid by the way especially when they're you know standing up in front of a class one bad experience like that can color you for quite a long time how how do you differentiate between what you feel when you're on the stage when you're being judged on the basis of your physique and your work compared to being evaluated with regard to speaking how do those how are those different for you um I mean when I was younger and I first started

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

only start to progress in the last 2 years where I've had the last 10 years of competing to work on that so right now I definitely still have nerves in both but they're much less in bodybuilding and I'm much more able to change that frame of mind like I mentioned of being able to enjoy that excitement rather than be worried about it and it feels easier for me to perform physically and get on stage and do what I need to do rather than start to pull my thoughts together and speak and all that stuff I'll

notice I'll get a lot more tongue twisted then I will mess up my posing on stage so definitely more difficult speaking but as you said that fear of judgment feeling on stage I do get a little bit on both but now the bodybuilding aspect has transferred a little bit more into pressure and expectation because when I was younger I felt it but it was a little bit different cuz I was just new and nervous but I was the underdog and no one really cared there was nothing expected of me so I was just feeling a

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

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performing professionally was proportionate to some degree to your degree of experience and also to some degree proportionate to your success right because you could imagine that as you got more successful you got more confident but you know you're pointing to something else that's a little deeper than that too which is you don't want to be duding yourself into thinking that you're ever going to get to a point where you have nothing on the line and you're just without fear that's why it's so much better to practice being brave than it is to assume that conquering

fear means absence of fear that isn't what it means it means getting better and better at being able to deal with fear because you know one of the perverse things you're pointing to is you know someone seeing this from the outside might think well you know what the hell does Chris have to worry about I mean he's already hit the peak of his profession of course he can go out on stage and be confident it there's no nothing Brave about that because he's in a an optimized position but you you know you're giving us a

Viewpoint from inside which is yeah but the stakes have changed now the Situation's different and the the downside consequences are different than they were and so the M see I've I've seen this often one of the things I saw among professors was and students was that they would falsify the way they presented themselves what they said what they wrote because they weren't in a secure position so an undergraduate would write a false paper for a professor because they had to get the grade and then as a graduate student they'd write um they wouldn't say what

they really meant in a seminar because they didn't want to cause trouble with people who might write them letters of reference and then when they became Junior professors well they didn't have tenure yet so they still couldn't say what they thought and then the next rung of professorship well that's not all the way to the top so there's still something to sacrifice and people would falsify themselves you know and it was based what they would tell themselves is once I get into a position of security I'll be comfortable with who I am and what I

think and what I have to say and then I'll start speaking but the the lie about that is that you're never going to get yourself in a position where security makes you Brave that isn't how life Works security doesn't make you Brave what makes you Brave is the decision that you're going to confront things that you're afraid of and even Su like the people I know that are radically successful and obviously you're one of them in in your domain it's not like they're now bereft of challenges like in some ways the challenges actually get bigger

you know with when you're playing a higher Stakes game so and I'm I'm saying this as as you know is that to let everybody know that you're never going to be in a situation if you're especially if you're pushing yourself forward where you're not confronting something that is a genuine threat and a genuine Challenge and you should you can get yourself in a place where you're actually happy about that you know so why do you keep let's delve into that a little bit you've won five championships right and so one of the questions that someone

might ask is well why continue like why do you continue to do this what's what's driving you forward still I mean it's a great question and it's one I've I've been been honestly asking myself for the past couple of years especially this year there's been times where the risk versus reward hasn't felt like it's all there for me and you know now my wife is pregnant I'm having a child life's changing I'm getting older there's a lot of stuff coming into my life and I've been asking myself that a lot and it's definitely it's not

so much being a champion that I love and I have this thing called Champion mentality and I say how it's not about the trophies or the medals around your neck it's kind of more about the person I've become in this journey and I've heard you speak a lot about how humans take value from the uphill climb you know we it's finding a new challenge climbing that mountain that's where we find Value and growth in ourselves and I've almost become addicted or just fallen in love with the self-discovery and growth that I have discovered through bodybuilding

by pushing my limits physically and mentally by going through states of suffering overcoming these odds that hit me at the worst times and being able to see how far I can take a goal and how far I can push myself I've fallen in love with that growth that has come with that and so that's continuously what pushes me and we spoke about the feelings I have on stage and I think a lot of successful people and myself have gotten really good at things for our ability to compartmentalize and to suppress things and continue to work

as things are going on but what I realized from a young age was that if I suppress things compartmentalized and push them to the side for too long without keeping them back up I start to suppress everything so the kind of thing I said at the end of this year was if you numb the bad you numb the good you start to numb your whole life and you start to feel less and be less present and I didn't want to be that person anymore so partway through my career I was like I'm winning but what

I feel is relief that it's over at the end I want to feel Joy I want to fear the feel the fear and anxiety before and the joy afterwards all of it rather than nothing so that was a huge transition that I've pushed through in the last few years and it's pretty cool cuz I've documented a lot of my preps my friend Calvin here has been my videographer through everything and you can see almost a shift in previous years of where I was a lot more stoic and hard-faced to being a little bit more light-hearted

and laughing and joyful hanging out with people backstage before getting on stage because I'm really present and enjoying all that and that's because when challenges come up in the middle of prep which they always have I I tore my lad I injured myself this year I have an autoimmune disease as well which has affected me in the past and having to overcome those things if I allow myself to feel that fear and stress and sadness and let out my tears and cry with my girlfriend who's supported me or my wife now and be able to

move through that then when I'm in a position of joy and success I feel way more joy and success I'm able to embrace all that a lot more so that's part of the personal growth that I've discovered through bodybuilding and obviously I'm only 28 year old I know there's so much more for me to discover part of me is almost worried if I step away from this mountain am I going to have something challenging enough to continue to push myself enough to grow and obviously I believe there is especially fatherhood is going to be a

whole new challenge that will teach me a whole new lessons yep yep definitely yep but honestly even a question I could ask you is cuz you've I touched on you've mentioned it's the uphill battle that brings value and when you reach the Pinnacle of that mountain what you want to see is another higher mountain in distance in the distance for you to accomplish y y but what do you do when the previous years have felt like Mount Everest and just's a lot of suffering a lot of difficulties a lot of pain had to push through

a lot of joy as well but you almost want to step back and be like okay do I need to find a higher Mountain than this a more difficult challenge to continue to grow and to find more value or can I maybe find a more lateral Mountain a sideway movement rather than an upward movement and I mean that's it's a question where I well I think well I think some of it look you could imagine that there are a variety of of of really quite qualitatively different mountains to climb the height might not be so

much the issue although it's one issue as the diversity of the clim so imagine there's two ways of making progress right you can go up a more and more difficult terrain which you've already done with the Olympia contest you went up a very difficult Mountain a very steep Mountain all the way to the top but then you know now you're at the Pinnacle you could look around you could see oh well there's all sorts of different places to climb okay and one way of becoming a better person is to do something very difficult and to

attain a pinnacle but another way to become a good person like a fully-fledged person is to take on a lot of different challenges and you don't have to be like every single challenge you have to that you're going to undertake doesn't necessarily have to be another Mount Everest right because there's something to be said for many different climbs now in your own life you know you mentioned two things that are right there in front of you mean the first is that you're going to be a father okay well that's going to that's going to keep

you busy like that's a bottomless well you know it's it's an opportunity and a challenge and there's no limit to how good you could become at that right there's no limit to how good a mentor you could be to your son or your daughter there's no limit to how good a relationship you could establish with them with them if you made that a priority so you know that's something right there that could easily occupy like a third of your life cuz it's it's a big deal and that'll that area of opportunity will grow up even

more if you have more kids right because well then there's more challenges of that sort and then you also have your marriage right and that's something one of the things I've discovered with my wife and this has really become more tangible for us in the last few years because both of us almost died and not just a little bit like brutally and over you know months and years it was very rough and one of the consequences of that was like we were apart really because of our illnesses various illnesses we were apart for Something approximating

2 to three years depending on how you look at it and we grew apart during that period as you do because that's a long time um but we've found new depths to our relationship that we didn't know were achievable in the aftermath of that and so I think there's there's no end to the depth there's no end to the mountain that you can climb with your wife and that's even more true once you have kids together so you've got that now you also said you're working on your ability as a public Communicator well that's something

that's there for you because you've already got a huge following you know people are interested in you because you've mastered a particular discipline and so you have the opportunity to continue to do good on that front that would be proportionate to the to your developing ability to express yourself and so you know we have this program online called future authoring it's at selfauthoring.com and we try to help walk people through the problem we're discussing with that program so this is how it works we might as well walk through this a little bit this is how

it works generically it's like okay imagine yourself five years in the future okay now here's the here's the deal and here are the conditions the condition is you have to imagine yourself as if you were trying to take care of yourself like you were someone you cared for so you could imagine someone you care for like your wife maybe and you could think okay if I cared for myself like I cared for someone I love what would I want for myself 5 Years From the road what sort of person would I want to be what

sort of challenges would I be facing what would I have around me how would I like my life to be but more importantly what sort of character would I like to be and then you you have to ask yourself that you know and you'll get a vision and some of it'll be concentrating on the remediation of your flaws because maybe part of you will go well you know here's some of the things you do wrong that you know are wrong and here's ways you could sort that up and out and clean it up you know

you could become a better public speaker for example you could take note of the things you're afraid of and that you're avoiding and you could decide that you're going to face those and fix them so that's and then on the other side you'd say well you know what are you interested and excited about that you could pursue and so you want to develop a vision and it's it's really you do that in dialogue honest dialogue with yourself it's like okay I'm taking care of myself what do I want and then we broke it down in

this process because if you ask someone what they want for their life that's a pretty hard question you know it's so open-ended it's so large but then you can differentiate it you know people used to come to me as a therapist or as a professor and they'd say well I don't know what to do with my life you know I'd say well what do you want say well I don't know what I want I don't know what to do with my life it's okay fair enough if you don't know what to do with your life

look at what other people do that works and maybe think about how you're doing there so you could imagine this what sort of people do you want to be surrounded by you know what sort of friends do you want and what can you offer those people how do you want your family to be functioning not be your wife and your kids but also your extended family you know how could you repair those relationships or make them grow what educational opportunities could you pursue know how are you going to take care of yourself mentally and physically

what occupation are you going to pursue and how are you going to make that Thrive and what are you going to do with your life outside of your work and then more broadly speaking you might say too how could you be of the broadest possible service to other people now each of those is a microvision right and that what that does is it provides for you because you you you you pointed out something extremely important there you know you said you fell in love with the process of climbing mountains right and that speaks also to

your motivation to continue pursuing your bodybuilding which is you know an extreme preoccupation a difficult preoccupation people might say well why do you do it and you know your answer so far has been well you like climbing mountains and then you might say well then the mark of your success isn't going to be which mountain you climbed the mark of your success is going to be how good you've become at climbing whatever Mountain presents itself in front of you and then the goal would be something like what would you say the eventual Mastery of as

many mountains as you could possibly manage so one of the things that kept me motivated as a professor has kept me motivated all my life it's like I I've asked how much can I do in the shortest possible time like and that's such a fun game to play and I pretty much take that question into everything I do you know it's like where could I see this going and then the question of efficiency well that's partly because well if you want to do 10 things you're going to have to do them pretty efficiently because otherwise

you won't have the time but then you get in that challenge mindset right it's like okay here's an opportunity now sorry I'm rambling a bit here but I wanted to point out one other thing you you pointed to that's very very important you know you said that as you've mastered the current discipline that you're pursuing you're more and more able to do it playfully mhm you know that you have more fun backstage you know that you're joking around more that and I would say that's also if you're looking for a marker of Mastery that's the

primary one you've really mastered something if you can do it in a spirit of play and this is something to really know about the baby that you're going to have like one of the things that kids love playing and one of the things they can deliver to you as a benefit is to pull you into that play and there isn't anything that they want more than that and there isn't anything that they need more than that and men can really offer that to children now it's you know not so easy when they're six months old

and younger but after that man the the field of play is open and you can have an immensely productive relationship with your kids an unbelievably enjoyable relationship if you introduce and focus on that Spirit of play you are at a pinnacle in your career and as you said you're you're not a you're not very old you've got a lot of life ahead of you like what do you think and you talked about fatherhood in your marriage what do you think is beckoning to you and also calling to your conscience like where do you see your

life progressing I know that's a complicated question yeah for sure I mean I've always been pretty transparent that bodybuilding isn't forever for me I'm grateful I got successful at a young age so I can retire at a young age I always said I wouldn't go past 30 so now that I'm approaching that age I'm coming to that point where I'm like coming to the understanding that there isn't going to be one mountain there's going to be many and also this past year I had a lot of things on my plate and I spread myself a

little bit too thin and I wasn't able to compete at the level I wanted to at the beginning of the year and I read this book called The one thing and it was talking about how if you want to be like the top 1% in something you need to focus on that one thing and so I kind of realized I was spread I was trying to be too good wearing too many hats while still being Mr Olympia but it also showed me if I want to be the best father I can be the best husband

I can be the best businessman the best everything I can be bodybuilding is going to take away from that at least for parts of the year so if I want to be at least like top 5% in a lot of these things I can work really hard at that but if body building is still being the best in the world for me at least it takes a lot out of me therefore it's sacrificing from other things and I started to notice that and that's not what I wanted a biggest the biggest goal I've ever had

in my life and I've always said this why I'm so excited right now was to be the best father I can be and in turn also the best husband I can be because my biggest role model in my whole life was my father and the impact he had on me I was always feel grateful for it and being able to think of the impact I can have on another child is something that really excites me and backtracking a little bit when you were asking me what motivates me to keep going that's one of the biggest

things that keeps me going is some of some of the stories I have heard from people who have followed my journey you know I've worked hard like I've said on on being my true self through it all by showing a lot of things and honestly I've been very grateful for everything you've put out because you have also been a great role model for men you're very intelligent well spoken all these things but you can also be very vulnerable you know you you're not afraid to cry when something is very pass you're passionate about and I've

noticed myself I'm a crier sometimes I just start crying and I've expressed that I've cried on stage after olympas I've cried on videos talking about stuff that scares me I've talked about my list which is the vulnerability and since doing that more I've had more and more kids come up to me and share those kind of same things with me and this past year at the Olympia I had I don't know if he was 12 or 13 years old he was a young boy and he came up to me not able to speak too well

with tears in his eyes just thanking me for all I had done for him and how I had helped him and he handed me a note he handed me a letter because he said he wouldn't be able to get all those words out and I I thanked them give him a hug took a picture and kind of went about and then few hours later I was waiting eating some food it was a night before the Olympia getting on stage the next day I opened up his letter and I started to read it and he expressed

how he had Tourettes and he remembers hearing me talking about my lisp and how I was embarrassed about it and how I still have moments where I brings me back to my child feeling embarrassed but working through all that stuff and he talked about the impact that it had on him and how he'd been bullied and how sad he' been the past but how he's building up all this courage that he pulls a lot from me and it was a very nice heartfelt note and I said backstage or back where I was at the time

just crying like sobbing just tears running down my face just it still makes me emotional when I think about it now just feeling so grateful for the impact that the work I'm doing for myself and my family is also having on the community around me and that story and that feeling alone filled me with so much energy to keep doing what I'm doing and like a belief that I'm on the right path and so that really that just it just felt right I'm like I'm where I need to be right now and this is this

is why I do it this is why I'm putting myself out there at the same time of putting this much work into something and I like I said bodybuilding is forever I understand they'll so when I bring down to a bunch of other mountains I would like to I've put a lot of focus on my relationship over the past few years and that will never stop the amount of Joy I've gotten from that like you said it's an endless battle I want to put that energy into being the father I can be and I want

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

like the biggest thing I'm I'm excited and passionate about it's what has kept me bodybuilding at least for the last year and if I do another one it will be be a huge part of that as well and a huge part while while I bodybuild I share the ups and downs and the fears and the excitements of the entire Journey starting a business can be tough especially knowing how to run your online storefront thanks to Shopify it's easier than ever Shopify is the global Commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business

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level sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com sjbp go to shopify.com jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you're at that's shopify.com [Music] jvp right right so you can see that as you said that that your progression has been you know that you focused in a very disciplined manner on one thing and and to some degree that was something that served your own individual interests particularly well but that as you've got better and better at that and become more successful at that the relationship with you have you have

with your wife is is beckoning as extremely important the potential relationship with your child and also this pleasure that you see and take in modeling discipline for people and also mentoring them so I just had a chat with Joo willink and Joo is quite the bloody monster and very disciplined man you know and he's joked with me several times that you know if he'd taken a few wrong turns when he was a a young man he could have easily been a criminal type cuz he he a tough son of a you know one of the

things that really changed Joo cuz we talked about this to some degree was his experience in the military and I think he was interested in the military to begin with perhaps for some of the same reasons that you were interested in bodybuilding you know it was the personal self-development element of it but what he learned as a leader in the military was that he had the opportunity to model appropriate conduct for other people and to help them develop and he said he he didn't ever find anything that was more meaningful than that like that was

even more exciting than excitement that was more exciting than Adventure certainly more exciting and worthwhile than anything you know kind of troublemaking criminal Adventure which does have that adventurous element to it you know it's it's like we it's why we like watching bad guys in movies you know it's at least they're not sitting around doing nothing you know and so but the it certainly it's been true in my life too that I don't think there is a deep deeper pleasure and a more sustainable pleasure once you've learned to walk up mountains let's say with some

degree of facility than to see the positive effect that observing that has on other people and then also to Foster that and you certainly have a walloping opportunity to do that as a father and then you know you I want to talk about a couple of things you also mentioned this is a particular conundrum that men have I would say even more than women but to be extremely successful at something you know the top 1% you said and you're actually above that in your particular discipline you really have to be hyperfocused on it like the

great scientists that I've known I worked at Harvard for six years and the senior professors there I was an assoc assistant and associate not a full Professor the full professors were guys who were at the Pinnacle of their career and they were at the Pinnacle of that type of career period because Harvard would go around the world and find those mostly men and aggregate them together and so then you might ask well what do you have to be like to be someone like that and the answer is well being smart that's like pretty necessary and

that's kind of a gift that's given to you by Fate In God like you can interfere with it but if it's not there naturally you know it's a real impediment um it's sort of like height you know if you don't have it there's not a lot you can do to get it um but then insane dedication is the next thing like if you want to be the best of the best you're going to be working flat out like 16 hours a day 7 days a week hopefully not exhausting yourself because you're in one hell of

a competitive environment and there's real utility in that especially for men because if you get really good at one thing there's the cascading benefits that you pointed to for example when you found when you started to to work out in the gym when you were 14 that you were getting more you know you get more attention from girls because of it MH so but the price you pay is that it's harder to do many things at once and you said you've come to realize that if you want to compete at the highest level that that

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

and that is something you the advantage to doing that is that there's no limit to it you know I don't care how good you get at public speaking for example you could still get better there's no and I don't care how good you are as a father there's no limit to because you could be a father to a lot of people as you found out you know when that kid gave you the note not least when that kid gave you the note so you know that's definitely an exciting Horizon of opportunities um what's been your

experience you said that you know we talked a little bit about your fears today we talked a little bit about how you overcome them how also they were linked to things about yourself that you regarded as inadequacies you we talked a little bit about public displays of emotion around that or maybe admission of that you said your your observation has been that you doing that like it's like admitting to your weaknesses at the same time that you're celebrating your successes right it's that balance you can imagine why that would be inviting for people because they

might look at your success and thinkoh my God there's no way I could do anything like that you know you must be some sort of superhuman creature to manage that but then when they hear oh no you know you manage that despite the fact that you have an array of insufficiencies that's where the person that might be a place where the especially the younger guys they can identify with you more clearly a so an honest admission of that kind of opens the door to them they might be able to think well if if if he

could do it under those conditions I could do it under the conditions in my own life that's the advantage of that emotional honesty maybe e yeah for sure and I mean you spoke at the beginning we're talking about and you always speak about speaking the truth and I I almost fell across this way of living by accident because when I would be nervous all I could think of to do was to speak the truth and if I was on stage and I was nervous something I would just start by saying I'm up here and I'm

really anxious right now and people would be like oh like that relatability he's human like they start to see past that and then I lighten up a little bit there's no more false falsehood I have to put on pretending like I I'm not anxious or something so that really helped me a lot and yeah it's it's been a process for sure but it's helped a lot and like you said a lot of people have viewed me it's funny there's an internet term people call and they started calling me a dad in the fitness industry and

it was quite a it's quite ironic because I wanted to be a father so bad and that's when I really started to realize the the responsibility that came in the position I'm in and I mentioned the champion mentality and I use that as kind of a brainstorming topic I continuously go back to and adjust what that definition means to me and I grew up looking up to people like Kobe Bryant Michael Jordan Tom Brady all these highlevel athletes but when you take a zoom out at their life most of them don't have long lasting at

least not happy relationships they typically end partway through or near the end of their career which in my mind starts to look like these high level of success is requiring them to sacrifice their connection and relationship to be where they are and I started to realize that's not what I want and the rule I have of champion mentality is not about any rules to it it's just about how you do it I can do it and I can make my own rules as long as I'm feeling like I'm winning I'm progressing I'm growing doesn't matter

about the medals or anything outside of that it just matters the progress I'm making and so I wasn't willing to sacrifice my relationship or if I started to sacrifice my relationship I pull back from bodybuilding I had a few more guidelines that I wasn't willing to give up on and seeing the responsibility I have to people looking up to me I believe that younger kids looking up and chasing success longterm are going to be happier while still focusing on connection and meaningful relationships without sacrificing those just to become successful because anyone can see at the

if you're at the top of the mountain alone you're alone right well you know the other thing too is that and I'm interested maybe and how you've managed this you know cuz we could say well your relationship is something that could interfere with your bodybuilding right cuz time is a zero sum game but then we could say well no no not necessarily like if you got your relationship in order well first of all you wouldn't be wasting time chasing other women and and and falling into whatever pitfalls and complexities might be associated with that plus

you could ally yourself with someone who was there for your support and who was along with you for the ride you know assuming that she could find a way that would also fulfill her own goals so and that's a better Vision right I mean it's certainly the case since I've hit the road in 2017 you know my wife and I have negotiated and searched to find where she fits into that not shoehorned in you know and and not as a necessary accompaniment not not that at all but in a way that would bolster the entire

Endeavor and also keep the relationship strong so how long have you been with your with wife or fiance fiance or wife at the moment wife we've been together for five and a half years yeah how long have you been married uh less than a year okay okay so you're in your first year of marriage what do you think that what do you think you've done right and what has she had done right that's enabled you guys to develop this relationship to to move towards marriage to decide to have a baby well you're pursuing this very

very specific and difficult goal what have you both done right let's start with her what do you think she's done right um she has definitely taken a full responsibility for where she needs to come in and I the biggest thing that comes into my mind is we don't leave any monsters under the bed we don't leave anything under touch or the dragon as you've mentioned we we do we do not not allow that and at the beginning of our relationship we've been through some hell we've been through some chaos we've been through some fights and

we've been through some but we're at a point now where because we have processed all those we fought through them we pulled each other apart and then back together and we went through that dance now we understand each other so much and there's nothing there's nothing under the rug our carpet's flat it's all on the surface we've committed to speaking the truth speaking to how we feel and not allowing anything go between and I mean she's done great at holding me very accountable she she's no pushover I don't get away with anything really if I

if I come in with a bit of an attitude or even talk about making me better as a bodybuilder too if I'm a little Snappy because I'm dieting or tired she won't have it she won't let it go she's like she holds me to a high standard she knows what I'm capable of and that holds myself to that standard where I know that she's doing that because she loves me she's willing to call me out for my faults and make the best version of me because of how much she loves me and values our relationship

and I think that ability to communicate and to to work and battle through the problems rather than push them aside and move over and wait till there's too many of them piling up to face it's allowed us to like I said we've gone through some fire in the past but now we're in such a stable place where when I found out she was pregnant and we're getting married there's no fear there's no what if there's no oh my God there's just pure excitement and absolute confidence and Trust because we know we can get through it

together anything so I think that's the greatest thing well that pure excitement the emergence of that pure excitement you know and that I think that's particularly true when it when it emerges as the spirit of play that we were talking about before you know I mean there isn't anything more really that kids like boys and girls playing together than playing house successfully you know and and that's a game for kids but if you do it right as an adult it's a game too and you could imagine that if you got all the monsters out from

underneath the rug and dispensed with them so they weren't cluttering up your house that you could do something like entertain the possibility of having a family in nothing but in almost nothing but a spirit of excitement so so I think you know the other thing I've noticed is that if you clear away all those lurking skeletons in the closet or dragons under the carpet then that Spirit of play can emerge right and then that that's when your relationship is optimized what do you think how did you guys go about jointly Det determining that you were

going to face the issues your own personal issues and the issues in your relationship instead of pretending they weren't there and how did you negotiate your commitment to the truth within your relationship I think I think it was a bit of a a bit of a dance when we first met she has had she had a much more difficult childhood than me and some stuff some stuff that she was processing still and those were more on the surface and I was the one looking back at my past with Rose Colored Glasses thinking I had it

all good and myself was a little bit deeper under the rug and so as stuff started to come up I I I think I think part of it comes from myself I grew up in a family that wasn't always great at communicating about things and so when I was entering relationship I wasn't going to have the same thing I was going to make sure everything was spoken about and brought to the surface and work through and at first she didn't love that about me it wasn't always fun but it allowed us to continuously grow stronger

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

to be all myself she's seen me at my weakest at my worst and all these things and she hasn't run away she's pulled me in closer and and you talked a bit about relationships not sacrificing or taking away from success but actually being able to add to it and that's where she's really helped me because she has understood so much of it that she has pulled out all the realness in me and as I'm trying to feel and process emotions she would be able to see on my face if something was like off and she

would ask me are you okay and I'd be like I'm fine I'm good and I'm very good at hiding that but she's very good at seeing it now and she' ask me 10 times what what's going on what's going on pull it out all of a sudden I start breaking down crying and I didn't even realize what was in me myself and I'm not wanting my wife to see me in this point of weakness because I feel maybe I would be judged and I've had a lot of men as I've spoken about this tell me

I couldn't tell my wife that she would judge me too much she would leave me if I broke down crying in front of her like that she didn't she pulled me in closer and she was like told me every single time she like I know this is difficult I know there's a lot of pressure on you right now you can quit if you want I will love you regardless but I believe in you to get through this and you will get through this if you choose to and she instilled that confidence in me and it's

that dance we've had back and forth where it started with me pulling it a little bit of her and then now that she's in a much better place she's able to start pulling the things out of me and we show each other the dark sides and we've pulled each other closer and closer over the years to now this point where we have this pure excitement bringing a child together which is the ultimate form of connection and trust that you need it's it's it's the most beautiful thing and it's something that I'm very grateful to share

because nothing's more meaningful in life than getting to share these experiences and these moments I have with someone who loves you and sees you for all of who you are yeah yeah well that was all good Chris I mean I mean I I like that story a lot it it's it has the Ring of truth about it I really like two things you said the first was it's so it's so interesting a because you said that when your relationship started her issues things those would be problems that she brought to the situation that had remained

un solve to some degree that's what baggage is it's like impediments to people's development that they haven't been able to overcome or conceptualize properly you said hers were more on the surface right and so you could you played the role of the person who was willing to confront those and you guys got through them and dispensed with them and then things turned around a so because once she got better at that the things you said the things that were about you that were perhaps not as evident on the surface those started to emerge and could

be dealt with you know and so so that's cool and and I think it's realistic I I don't think it matters in a couple where you start delving into problems you delve into the problems that make themselves manifest if you do that honestly together you'll end up dealing with all of the problems right it doesn't matter who they are they're going to they're going to rise up and you're going to be able to confront them you know and then you said that having done that successfully partly because she is bonded to you in this vow

she isn't going to run away when she sees the parts of you that aren't everything you might hope they would be at that moment and that means that you can what that actually means instead of making it worse it means that you can actually admit to and confront your problems so that you have some possibility of solving them because you know it is humiliating in the in the true sense to notice that you had a problem you didn't even know you had you know but it's it certainly gives you an opportunity then you know it's

there man and then you guys can take it on and you concluded all that by saying that there isn't anything better than having the opportunity to share your success with someone you love and I actually think to some degree if that's not the fundamental benefit of marriage it's certainly one of the benefits like working through your problems jointly that's a major one and whatever pleasure you get out of each other's company that's a major one but this this ability that a long-term relationship has to allow you to it deepens your experiences e the the fact

that you have someone to share them with it makes your own triumphs much more real and much more profound to have someone along for for the adventure and then you also have the same opportunity in relationship to their successes that's a good deal for sure yeah and especially as I was talking about her pulling out those those fears and those things in me that I'm holding in and seeing all that and truly seeing all of me and everything that it takes to to become Mr Olympia or to get through whatever I'm getting through and then

be together at the end and to step off stage and go behind the curtains and to see her there looking me with tears in her eyes like getting emotional now thinking about those moments and being able to embrace her and in that moment feel that this person you're holding who you love has seen the entire Journey with you you don't feel alone at all there's no like standing on stage being like you don't know what I went through no you she seen and she felt everything I've been through and she was beside me the whole

way and therefore we are both able to feel this Victory together it's hers as much as it is mine so that's as you mentioned there's there's nothing more beautiful than that right right well then yeah well that's the most real part of whole celebration because I mean you get the award and you get the public Acclaim and you get the Triumph but if you've been honest with your wife and all of the problems that went along with that all the obstacles that went along with that have been laid out and you overcame them jointly then

the true celebration in in the deepest sense is actually the one with her because she knows the story better than anyone else mhm yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah that's a good deal that's definitely a good deal so when is when is when is your child going to be born uh baby girl is going to be born in April in April so you've got about three months oh yeah okay okay so your wife is pretty pregnant at the moment she pretty pregnant yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah those last few months that's I just I just watched

my daughter go through that because she had a baby in mid December and so we were there for about a about the month leading up to that yeah and that those last couple of months of pregnancy that's quite the well the whole thing is quite the trip but the last few months in particular for sure yeah obviously too as a as a man Your Role at the beginning of the child as you mentioned that Spirit of play doesn't really come in until they're a little bit older which is easier for a man what would you

say is some good tips for me entering this right now especially for that first phase that's a good question well look the de when after my wife and I got married I was about 28 or or so and she's a year older than me she was ready to have a baby pretty much right away and I still wasn't firmly situated in my career although my prospects were good I wasn't worried about it and I wasn't in a hurry but she was more in a hurry and I thought well I don't want to stop her from

doing something that she wants so why am I resistant to this so I went for a walk and I thought about it and I thought okay well I have things to do to finish develop my career and I have to do them right now I was finishing up my PhD and like I have to do that there's no way around that and so nothing can interfere with that because that's not going to be good for me or for my family so that's one possibility and then I thought well also I don't know what the hell

to do with an infant like it's not in my and look I'm relatively maternal man I worked with little kids I worked in dayc carees like I like little kids and so I would I'm more prone to take care of little kids than most men by by temperament but even so like infants I don't know what the hell to do with an infant so I thought oh I'll maybe that's the problem I don't have any problem with kids at all once they're sort of ambulatory like older than nine months let's say and by the way

you can start playing with a baby very very early like the play is very subtle you know I had taken my granddaughter my son's daughter and put her on my knees standing up when she was about 4 months old and I got her to play a head bonking game you know I'd bring her forward and bonk my head on hers I'd go 1 two three Bonk like really lightly obviously and then wait because babies are slow way they their pace is slow 1 two 3 Bonk and then I did that like five six times so

she knew the pattern and then I went one two three and pulled her forward but didn't Bonk her and she laughed and I thought Hey kid you got the game you know you establish that little pattern and then deviate from it that's the game it's like peekaboo too you know it's like it's a surprise there's a bit of surprise in it so you can start playing with a baby very early it's very subtle to begin with but I would say so know that know that that you can start playing and and interacting very early so

and that's a good thing to have at the back of your mind and that ability to play just gets more and more important as the baby gets older but I would also say that your role is to take care of your wife while she takes care of the baby so that means you got to watch her cuz this is going to tire her out like it's a it's a fullbody experience for a woman right I mean first of all she's pregnant and that's a hell of a thing especially in the last month then she has

to give birth and you know I I think that's something men have no real comprehension of and then she has to recover and then that baby is like desperately vulnerable and requires everything the woman has to provide for the first absolutely for the first two months and pretty much absolutely for the first six months so you got to stand in the background and you got to watch her and you got to make sure that she doesn't get overwhelmed because that's when you need to be in there you need to go in and say look you

know you need a rest you need to have a nap you I'll take care of the baby I'll watch and so everything's going fine and I'll wake you up if it's NE necessary but you got to spell her off and so you need to make that Arrangement and uh that's the primary you know you think that's how it looks to me is her primary responsibility is to take care of the baby and your primary responsibility is take care of her and and then you have to understand that she's going to be gone from you for

like six months and if you can engage in that wholeheartedly you can get to know the baby and you can set the stage so that that baby is really well attached to the mother like firmly and that'll save you so godamn much trouble for the rest of your life you can hardly imagine it because that initial bonding that's what provides the scaffold of security like the physical scaffold of security for that new person and if that's disrupted it's real trouble so you know in six months it's not you know an instant but she's going to

come back and then you'll also have when when when my son was born when Julian was born my daughter Mela was only a year and a half old and that's a bit of a tricky age Gap because a year and a half old kid still needs her mother quite a lot and then you have a new baby and if you have a year and a half old kid and then a new baby that the year and half old kid looks like a teenager it's like they're not a baby anymore compared to a newborn and so

they can easily get kind of shunted aside and that can produce a lot of sibling rivalry and jealousy and bitterness and alienation on the part of the older child so we taught her very early to take care of the new baby and to understand that if she established a relationship with him you know that would be a benefit that she could derive from the new situation she'd have three people to love instead of two and that's a good deal the same applies here in relationship to your wife and the new child it's like you're going

to have to let your wife go for six months but if you're very careful with that as I'm sure you will be and you really take care of her you know she'll come back to you and then you'll have this other person a daughter you'll never have anybody in your life who loves you as much as your daughter will mhm like if you do that right and it'll be the same if you have a son and that is a bloody good deal tell you man I loved hanging around my when my kids were little I

would way rather be with them than anyone else they were fun you know and that's it helps if you have the right disciplinary structure in relationship to your kids and you've worked that out with your wife so I have a rule it's a very good rule you know don't let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them and if you discuss that with your wife and you make that a rule you know you can note to each other that kid's annoying us that kid's being annoying and then you can work together and you think

okay what's annoying how do we stop it because if he's annoying you he's going to annoy everybody else and if he's annoying no one will like him it's not good for the kid but if you can get that right you'll there'll be nothing more enjoyable that you do in your whole life than spend time with your little kids because they really want to like you more than anything else and that's a great deal man for sure yeah no def I'm definitely very excited for that that relationship building and like you were saying and luckily in

the past we've had almost a little bit of experience with the flip where when I was I got better this year but in the past when I was a little bit more stressed out about entering a prep we would communicate before getting into it in the past past we didn't but we started to communicate be like okay I'm about to enter a really intense phase of my prep right now so I just want you to know preemptively I love you you were my number one priority but right now I may not be able to show

you that as much as possible but I promise afterwards we will reconnect we will do everything we can and also in the process I will do the best I can so now that we've practiced that you mentioned six months it's going to be pulled away so we've already been communicating and we will more and especially you giving this tip I'll go even talk to her again tonight and be like I understand that you're going to be stepped away for the six months and give her permission to be there for the baby and also understand that

afterwards we'll reconnect and come back to each other but rather than finding it out along the way understanding it before it comes so that we're able to prepare for it and not build any resentment that that might come so so the other thing that Tammy and I figured out at that time was um because your wife is going to be very preoccupied with this new person and to the degree that you want to be around your wife that's going to leave you on the outside like that's going to happen and that's also a place where

the kind of resentments that tear families apart can start to develop hey because you can be resentful about your wife cuz she isn't there and then you can be resentful of your daughter because she's taking you away from your wife and then you'll deny all that because you'll think well I'm not the sort of person that could be jealous of a baby it's like oh yes you are you definitely are and so is everyone else so these things have to be managed and so one of the things we discovered this was actually my wife's suggestion

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

can possibly imagine once you have this baby and even more so if you have more kids like it's a real threshold transformation right because now you have someone really vulnerable and you are responsible for them like it's unlike anything you'll have ever done now you're a disciplined guy so you know you have taste of that sort of thing but it's still it's it's a watershed moment and uh because you're so busy now it's easy for your relationship with your wife to become secondary or even number 11 on a list of 10 priorities you know and

that's not good and so my sense is that couples who are embarking on the process of having kids have to make a conscious commitment to placing each other first at for some amount of time during the during the months the weeks and months ahead it can't you can't just wait around for it to happen cuz you don't have the bandwidth and so and this has been this is something we've got better and better at too and I would say cumulatively you know over all the decades is that the dates we have just get better and

better just like because of practice but nego so if you know you know you're you're going to have to leave your wife to the baby for six months and then maybe she'll be able to come back to you and then but having a plan for that you know like to begin with she's still going to be pretty tired it might be that you know you have someone take care of the baby while you're at home and you guys have dinner together something that simpler you watch a movie together you know it's got to kind of

start out slow but having a conscious plan for how you're going to prioritize your relationship given that you now have a baby to take care of that's going to save you a lot of misery and grief as well absolutely yeah that preemptive planning is something I've been processing a lot especially recently cuz she's also in pregnancy of course they create connection and they're they're building their home and almost nesting I guess you could say and I've been going through a large very large growth phase of uh my business that I own here in Florida and

we've been traveling a lot for that so I've been out of town a lot and you were talking about part of your worries when you were having a child where you got to get your PhD which is also good for your family longterm so that you're able to provide for them and that's partly what I'm processing and going through right now is it's taking me away a little bit right now but I understand long term it's it's going to provide for for my family it's what's going to be best for them but then let's say

over the last over the next 3 months in the first 3 months of the year I'm home for about 8 Days 10 days and Courtney's home all the time so I need to be a lot more conscientious when I come home of being planner like okay I'm only back for 3 days we need to plan ahead that we're going to do date nights every time I'm back because we need that time to connect and that's even that's also great practice like you said where I I I might feel busy now but when there're the child

in the mix of all that it's it's going to be tenfold so being able to pre ly plan ahead and actually build structure and routine where you're planning those moments of connection rather than just waiting for them to naturally happen which maybe when you're young and you just it's Friday night let's go out we're not tired let's have fun it used to happen naturally but as life get picks up you need to be a lot more attentive to actually planning ahead and making sure it happens well and you also got to learn with each other

you know because there's going to be imagine there's an optimal balance between look if you're going to have Thanksgiving dinner m want to eat a pizza like at 4 in the afternoon right you want to be optimally hungry and it's a state of optimal deprivation and so you also want to negotiate with that with your wife you know as as you progress through your marriage it's like how much time do you have to spend with each other but how much time do you have to spend apart or in a state of desire right to make

all of that optimal you know and that's that's a very subtle thing to get right you know like my wife needs to be alone more than me and she is a lot more fun to be around and a lot more interested in me if I leave her the hell alone more and because I would likely choose what would you say I'm more cuddly God what a horrible thing to say and admit than she is you know and it's easy to be put off by her somewhat prickly exterior she's very playful but kind of rough you

know and so she she's kind of a prickly person and it's actually something I like about her but you know we've had to be very attentive to find exactly that balance you know so that I'm not around her too much so that she can come to miss me so that when we are together that we're both extremely happy about it you know and that's something that this regular practice of planned togetherness that can also Foster that because you can learn that it's like well cuz you can watch yourself so like you'll find out well when

am I H when am I truly happiest to see her like under what conditions and she has to figure that out with you too you know and that's a good thing to discover and and you can Discover it if you if you make that effort so well you have a big year coming up e with a new baby and and where when is your next major competition it's in October this year end of year and so you start really ramp ing up for that when depends on how everything goes in the year but maybe around

July right okay okay and you're going to figure out how to do that with this new child in your life too that's that's the challenge that we're going to be working on this year yeah right right right well you got a lot of good things sitting there in front of you lot of new mountains by the sounds of things MH for sure and so I've been lucky that last I was talking about bodybuilding forever for me so as I'm approaching what I feel like at the end of my career these new mountains are forming in

front of me so I it feels like everything's kind of coming as it's meant to be and a hopefully beautiful culmination of the journey with the beginning of a new one that is will be discovering my new mountains and new forms of growth and new ways to find fulfillment so I'm very excited right right well it's very wise to be looking ahead to that already and not to be it's a really good thing to know this is something you can learn as you get older and hypothetically are like it's not such a bad thing to

to leave the party when it's going strong especially if you got something else exciting you know beckoning to you around the next corner you know and you can imagine athletes in particular you know they have their Glory Days for sure and it's very much dependent on Youth and and The Cutting Edge that that youth gives you and you have to know when you're at the peak of your game and when the time to move on arrives that is earlier in athletes lives generally than in other people's lives and having the wisdom to see that and

to not only accept but welcome it know that that's one thing you can do to make that transition I wouldn't even say easier but to allow yourself to transition to something that could even be better I mean you've already had spectacular success but that doesn't necessarily mean that you've reached your Peak and that's a good thing to know too for sure sure yeah I'm I'm glad you pulled back that word easier because as I'm coming more face to face with the the transition and as you said leaving the party while the part's still fun it's

feeling more challenging than I thought it would be and it as it should be it shouldn't it shouldn't feel easy especially because I'm not leaving something that has turned into something I resent I'm leaving something I learn to actually enjoy more but everything comes to an end and like you said sometimes that leaving something great behind will lead to something even greater and I'm glad that I have the my family in front of me to be that something much much greater yeah that's a good deal that's a good deal all right so everybody watching and

listening I'm going to continue to talk to Chris on the dailywire plus side of the platform I think we're going to talk to begin with about his father because he's made some comments in this YouTube uh com uh discussion about his admiration for his father and also his Discovery or adoption even of the role of dad in the in the Enterprise that he's pursuing and so we're going to delve into that a little bit further as well as some other autobiographical details and anything that happens to come up that's interesting as a consequence so if

you'd like to join us there please do you can consider throwing some support the daily wire plus way which I think isn't such a bad idea given that they're staunch advocates for the kind of free speech and free inquiry that we all desperately need especially now and so Chris thank you very much for agreeing to talked to me today that was that was very engaging and and and a lot of fun and I appreciate that and also for your willingness to discuss so forthrightly the obstacles that you know you still see in front of you

and that have caused you a certain amount of distress that you're busily working to master and overcome it's very useful for people to hear about that sort of thing so you know I think you do people a real service when you are willing to talk so straightly about such things as you've seen you know we've seen the impact that that's had on people and to the dailywire plus people thank you and for the film crew here in Toronto for facilitating This Much appreciated and to everyone watching and listening your time and attention is always appreciated

and not taken for granted CH Chris good to get to know you man yeah likewise I appreciate the conversation it's been an honor and you've helped me as well just talking through things that helps me process and learn so thank you for this conversation and the previous one-sided conversations we've had listening to over the years it's an honor to be on this podcast with you thank you very much [Music] sir