#1006 - Chris Bumstead - Life After Olympia: Fatherhood, TRT & Finding Purpose

You've stopped competing, and you're more tired than ever.

How's retirement going?

That's a great question.

It's a very broad question to start.

I don't even know where to dive into that.

It's both good and bad, in different ways, I would say.

It's interesting because when people ask me if I miss competing, especially right now with the Olympic coming up, it's like there's parts that I miss, but I don't wish I was doing it.

Like I trained with Ryan Terry and like seeing the mindset he's in, remembering the pressure I felt and everything that came with it, I was like, I don't wish I was there right now, but there's aspects I miss.

And I'm happy with my decision, but there's also a lot of like

feeling of like lost in direction and what am I doing?

Where am I going right now?

And I feel like I've filled that up with a lot of busy work, I feel like, in the last year.

It had been business, it had been being a dad, there's been just moving on to one thing to another, and I haven't slowed down to really process.

Like life is very different now.

You know, you had 10 years of chasing a single goal of being the best in the world at one thing, that was eat, sleep, train.

And now it's gone.

You know, so it's definitely been interesting, but I feel like the fact that I'm feeling a lot now in terms of like a bit of stress, this tire to my body, this like somatic experience that I might not have had before, it like shows that things are coming up that might have been masked by the overwhelming pressure of competing.

So there's like this side of me discovering like the new side of myself, like this ego death of like bodybuilding is gone.

Now who are you?

And then there's this other part of my life that's like the most incredible aspect, which is being a father.

Now, you know, my daughter's getting old enough to say my name.

Me and my wife are getting the hang of things.

We're really starting to find our groove in that.

So it's like the most beautiful thing in my life.

And I feel like they're kind of balancing each other out,

but it's still not like

neutral peace.

But I've heard you say physically and emotionally, you don't feel much until you slow down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was a

big awakening for this year for me.

I feel like year after year after year, it's like Olympia, heroes journey, kind of compete, come down, go through it, some type of adverse event, come through it again, win, high, back down, repeat, repeat, repeat.

And I was never able to really experience things.

And I feel like what I really found out about myself recently is that I like constantly feel like I need to improve something in myself.

Like I constantly need more.

I need to progress at something.

I need to make my health better.

I need to.

do X more.

And I was channeling that heavily into bodybuilding, which made me an incredible bodybuilder.

But once, what once drove me started to drain me over time.

So it's kind of started to alter.

And now slowing down and not having that singular goal I was working towards, I realized now I'm trying to find all these other external things to progress in, as if I need to be proving myself that I'm getting better and better and I can't just rest and be good enough as things are.

And I don't think I would have experienced that if I hadn't actually properly retired and stepped away from it.

So it's one of the journeys currently experiencing.

Lots of things get hidden under momentum and bravado and

attention and chaos.

You hide all of the quiet fleeting thoughts.

You're like, no, shut up.

I don't need to listen to you.

Quiet down, subconscious.

I've got a competition to win or a podcast record or whatever.

I can go to the gym.

I can focus on eating.

I do this.

Don't think about it.

Yeah.

You get pulled through those little fleeting thoughts with the momentum.

And then, yeah.

Oh, fuck.

All of those fleeting thoughts are kind of, they're not drowned out as easily anymore.

Yeah.

No, I definitely had this like selective emotional efficiency where I could like understand

what was important to me and how to actively work towards the things and like practical capabilities of applying specific things.

You know, like bodybuilding is important, prioritize life for that.

It makes me feel better to do these physical things, X, Y, and Z.

But I wasn't really feeling the things I needed to feel in the same way.

So like the practical capabilities of understanding emotion and lining up life so I was in a good place with good, but the ability to express the good and the bad through it, the kind of messier side of things wasn't really my expertise.

And it put me in the state of like constant hypervigilance that could be easily hidden from by momentum and competing.

And I could fuel energy and more success and more and more and more.

And I was falling forward and going good.

But eventually I was just tired.

You know, it was like this lack of deep rest.

And like it's the joke that I have the worst HRV ever.

You know, my average is 29 now.

We're chilling.

That's going on

the way up.

And I don't know if that's even connected to it, but I don't need to have an HRV on my wrist to tell me that like, they're like, do you feel calm?

I'm like, yeah, do you feel stressed?

Not really, but like, have you had deep rest recently?

Have you felt deeply calm and at peace?

And it's like, not really, you know, because it's constantly moving through that thing and that state of hypervigilance of, am I safe to express this emotion or am I trying to control progress forward and the practical capabilities to be perfect and progressing in my life so I feel like I'm doing enough rather than just sitting in the moment of what I need to feel.

To me, I feel like I've been rewarded heavily for that side of practical capability, but still the expression of emotion, the going through things rather than learning

felt very like high risk, low reward for me.

So my body just as a way to protect hid from it.

But being constantly hypervigilant means you're constantly on, constantly kind of stress aware, even if I'm not aware of it.

It's like subconsciously happening.

Hence the feeling of tired now.

You know, I don't have that energy burst from the success and progress.

That's gone in terms of bodybuilding.

So now I'm able to feel what I've always been really experiencing for who knows how long.

Funny to say that

you don't get rewarded necessarily from being tapped in to the subtler emotions.

Kind of like

if you needed to drink two liters of wine a day, You probably wouldn't be quite as attuned to the lighter notes and the subtle flavors because you've just got shit to do.

Yeah.

And big goals, especially one that's very difficult.

You don't have time to indulge yourself in, oh, I wonder if this is connected to that thing that happened when I was in third grade.

Shut up.

Like, I need to win this competition.

You know, I don't have time.

And you're right.

It's, it's not a performance enhancer.

Yeah.

How is

maybe,

and I would put you, as far as world champions go, and the time that we've spoken,

significantly more attuned than anyone else that I've spoken to.

And even you are saying, and I was hiding most of that, and it's all coming up now that I've finished and so on and so forth.

So you can only think if you're the, you know, the Tiger Woods is of the world, the Michael Jordan's of the world, the guys who kind of made it their brand almost to

continue to drive through, to not do the tap in thing, unless it, unless the emotion was in service of the performance directly.

It wasn't an emotion that was permitted, if that makes sense.

I had this

journal entry from before I even started the podcast when I'd started doing personal development.

And I remember reflecting on why I always felt like I needed to make progress every single day.

And

I wonder if this resonates with you.

At least part of it, I think, was

even if I don't like myself right now.

And even if I feel insufficient and not enough right now, if I can

project

that where I will be in the future is going to be better, it doesn't matter that I think I might be a little bit of a piece of shit in the moment because tomorrow will be okay.

Like, I don't love myself today, but I might love myself tomorrow because I'm moving in the direction of better.

And that's dopamine, and that's rewards, and that's progress.

But as soon as that starts to either flatten or, you know, very worst, if it feels like it slows down, you go, oh, God, not only am I not enough today, but I might be even less tomorrow.

And I need to take my sense of self-worth from somewhere different.

I need to take it from

God, my honesty, or you know, my openness or

mundane successes and boring victories, or the fact that I was kind to that lady at the supermarket today.

Like, how pitiful, how small is your life?

That that's what's going on.

It's not grand enough, it's not impressive enough, and you're not moving in the right direction.

You always need to be making progress.

So, this

the addiction to progress and what it feels like to be in progress rehab is

something that I feel very much as well.

Yeah.

And I feel like it's a tough battle too, because if you don't have

a goal or something you're working to in your life, it feels like your life has no meaning in a sense.

You know, there's like the idea of that gap between like the man you know you can be versus the man you are.

And it's almost like the meaning you find in life is in.

the journey between those two.

But it's kind of about the tension between the two, so much about the journey.

If there's too much tension, if i need to do x to be good enough or i need x then it starts to hurt you know and it needs to be i was thinking about this the other day it needs to be the goal needs to be a free choice and i don't think i don't mean a free choice of like someone's making you do it but like if you were to think about it your brain like do you think your mind is free

that's a good question as a whole

i don't know That's a good question.

It's not easily.

Of course I'm free.

Yes.

Like are the decisions you make about, like I made the decision to can be in bodybuilding.

It's like, okay, I did, but am I making, I'm making the decision to stay technically, but is it a free choice if I feel like I have to do it to be good enough?

If I feel like my self-worth and my identity is attached to competing now.

So this goal I have, this journey I have now has this intense tension because it's not a free choice of, or a positive choice.

It's not a free choice of like, this is wanting to do this.

It's like I have to do this to be good enough.

So if you can.

reevaluate those goals.

And when I started bodybuilding, it was kind of just like the gym was a beautiful place for me to go and escape and enjoy.

And I loved it.

Started to see progress and it changed over time.

It just kind of like shifted into a bit of a pressure.

And I started to tie my identity to it.

And kind of like I needed a lot of aspects of it.

And I never wanted to.

I never wanted to attach my ego to it.

I thought it was different because I was aware that attaching your identity to something would be bad.

So I was like, because I'm aware that's possible.

I'm not going to do it.

You knew it up here, but you were still motivated by it.

Exactly.

It was like a shell game in my mind of being like, this illusion I created around myself of like, okay, well, if I know that, I can tell myself I'm not and just ignore the fact that I really am.

Yeah.

And maybe there's nothing wrong with that.

It's just a more sophisticated version of cope.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But you're culpable for it because you know.

Yeah.

But it's even worse because you think, well, I've got nowhere to hide.

I have no escape from this.

Stephen Pressfield talks about shadow careers.

So he worked in Hollywood for ages before he became a successful author.

And he saw lots of people whose original aspiration was to become an actor or a director.

And they were scared of going for the big one.

So they ended up working close to it, but in a slightly adjacent industry.

So they'd be an attorney, an entertainment attorney, or they'd be an agent or something.

So they didn't actually go after the thing that they wanted, but they went for something that was close, which is that

like escape valve sort of trapdoor thing that they've got that's going on.

So I guess,

were you aware before you decided to retire and retired

how difficult retirement would be from a existential

who am I in the world's place?

It's funny the way my mind works is like a sense of cope.

I'm like, I know it's going to be hard.

It's not now, but I know it's going to come.

But I don't know what's going to come.

And I think what I thought I was going to miss was like

being Mr.

Olympia, getting on stage, all the things in between.

But it's like

the reason I feel like, I mean the words thrown around but it feels like a genuine ego death is because I was so unaware of what it hit me and one of the moments where it hit me really hard and I'm not even proud to admit this is I went on Instagram and I looked at my followers and it was like last month you decreased 10,000 and I was like oh I fed this feeling in my body that I didn't like that and I was like I've told myself for a decade that I don't give a fuck about that But it's easy to say when it's just constant skyrocket up.

Like, I don't care about the success.

I'm not attached to this.

And all of a sudden it was like not there.

And I was like, it just made me really go inside and be like, what, like, what was I doing it for?

What did I really care about?

What was like the have-tos that I had to do it to be good enough?

Was it because of the attention and all this stuff?

Before it was like

the love of the sport.

It was love of bodybuilding.

And then it became this attachment to this like need of like what came with it.

You know, I started to love the outcome.

You know, when you're doing something for an outcome, you're more like.

bound to it.

You're stuck to it.

It's creating like a tension.

And I think that was like a

very modern day millennial ego death wake-up for me to be like, damn, I thought I was better than that.

And then I had to like really be honest with myself and be clearly you were attached to that.

And now you may lose it all.

Would you be okay with that?

Would you be okay with it all gone?

What's what's left?

You know, and it really made me reflect back on my career of like what served me throughout and why I decided to retire and the fact that like I wasn't getting anything from it anymore that was serving me.

My values started to shift, but I was still doing things in my life that were bringing in more and more success that were separate from my most important values.

And it was almost taking away from what my values were.

And I feel like one of the most important things I've done the last few years is like consistently reevaluate my values and try and make decisions based off the highest ones, even if in the moment I really feel like it's what I want.

So like competing, I could have kept winning.

I could have kept getting more followers and more money and more fame and more success and more X, but those things weren't of high value to me anymore.

You know, starting to be a family, discovering who I was, being present with my family having a mind that is emotional and tuned enough to be there for my family and to enjoy life and to enjoy all the stuff i'd worked for those were values that were much more important to me so then i started to have this like

different feeling around bodybuilding and going into the last year i didn't even i wasn't enjoying it it was more of an attitude of like i have to go work out so i can win the olympia rather than like i get to train today and i have the opportunity to be the best in the world if i do it right it was just this different mindset shift that i realized in myself of of why I was like, this isn't for me anymore.

It's time for me to get off the stage because this isn't serving me and this isn't the proper reason.

You know, why you start something typically changes over time.

And like I said earlier, like why you start something might have driven you, but now if it drains you, it's time to reevaluate what you're doing.

And that was a huge important thing for me to do and make this decision.

And all this stuff are incredible.

Don't get me wrong.

It's not like I don't value having money and attention.

Like I'm human.

I enjoy it, but it's not what was making me feel good day to day.

It was taking away from my ability to be at home.

And I would be like, I have to eat again.

I missed a meal.

I came to an event and I lost a pound.

Am I going to be my legs big enough this year?

I feel like my waist got bigger.

Like on that day, that one day, that 10 minutes on stage, am I going to be good enough to be the best in the world?

That pulls you away from being present in your day-to-day life because you're constantly worrying about that.

And that's because I became more attached to the outcome

than

just the love of the game.

The idea that you're able to

talk in this very

mindful elevated enlightened approach um this sort of abundance mindset when everything is going in the right direction yeah is such a good insight it's fantastic you know it's the uh the billionaire that's able to be generous um as opposed to the person whose wealth is going in the other direction so well how generous are you if things start to feel a little bit more scarce even if you still have lots of money but they're going in the wrong direction And

we spoke about this on stage at the Gymshark event, but

modeling somebody's rise, not their result, I think is a really important insight that hasn't fully caught everyone's attention yet.

Because when you ask,

most people that have the platform to be able to give advice have got the platform because they're successful.

And if they're successful, that means that they have done something for a sufficiently long time at a grand enough scale for people to consider them an authority, one form or another.

But the problem is you

almost certainly are at the beginning of your career and they are the person at the top of the mountain, they might be able to remember what they were doing six months ago or one year ago or right now and the challenges and the very particular sort of unique elite stratosphere that they're in that they need to deal with.

They can't remember what it was like to be a beginner.

So when you ask somebody,

what is the key to success in business?

And they say, Well, you know, it's all about work-life balance.

I think it's very important.

You know, you need to be using your intuition and your gut.

And you go, Huh, what did you do when you were at my stage?

It's like, oh, everything was completely planned out, and I didn't have any time for my friends or family.

You go,

right.

I should probably do what you did when you were my stage, not what you do now that you have the luxury to do whatever you want.

And I think, with

yeah, talking about how

I'm above this, the shallow need for validation and social

love from those around me and the strangers on the internet.

You know, it's all, I don't need it.

Well, yeah, you don't because you have an abundance of it.

You have so much, there's a surplus.

What happens when it feels like that's being taken away from you?

You kind of that old adage of you don't know what you've got until it's gone.

You don't know what you valued until it starts to decrease a little bit.

Yeah.

So.

Yeah, even in like the

like the emotional side of what's driving you.

it's like, well, I the whole time thought it was bad to be driven by like,

oh, I'm not good enough.

So I need to accomplish X to be good enough.

And it's, I don't think that's a way to live, but maybe that's a good way to start.

A lot of people are driven to high levels of success by doing that.

And maybe that puts you in a position of abundance, of success to show you the things that are important to you, to give you enough confidence, to give you enough life experience to go inside and reflect on ways that you can find lasting, genuine self-worth.

You know, maybe if you're like, well, no, you shouldn't do something because you're not good enough.

Well, then maybe you never start.

Or maybe it makes you an incredible bodybuilder.

You go on this huge run and you're able to go on this journey of self-discovery and then figure it out in the end.

But I wouldn't have changed that going back of why ever I started, even if it was coming from an insecure or bad place because it got me to the place I am now.

Especially at the beginning, you just need to use whatever fuel you've got.

Yeah.

And just go.

Yeah, this is again, it's model the rise, not not the result.

It's all well and good saying, it's this beautiful balance.

You know, I don't really think about the chip on my shoulder or the parents that didn't believe in me or the teachers that were mean to me at school.

Well, yeah, because you

used that fuel when you needed to get off the launch pad.

And then you used another bit of fuel after that.

And then it was your competition.

And then it was just something else.

And now that you're

like floating out in space.

Cool.

Okay.

Yeah.

Sweet.

You've got this much more balance.

Because you've worked through all of those things.

Each one of those was a little, you know, the idea of false peaks in mountaineering?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you look and you go, oh, we're at the top.

Oh, shit.

No, we're not.

We're at the top again.

Fuck not this time either.

And

that

those were all false peaks, all of those.

And it's only after reaching them and then going,

damn it.

I thought that was the thing.

I thought that was going to be it.

that you have to restart and go again and go again.

And

yeah, this is a homosyism where he says you know um use the fuel you can and at the start most people have way more hate than they do love so yeah all of the chips on your shoulder and the bitterness and resentment that you've got you just use it you the the need for validation the want to prove yourself i've got to get the girl i got to do the riches i need to you know fine i don't think that that's a bad thing and i think it's largely a luxury belief of people who have big platforms that can say this is the thing that you should do from the very start.

Because it's not how they got there.

It's not how I got here.

It's not how you got to where you are either.

Yeah, 100%.

Even in that direct form, when I was competing, I was at the end, I was like, I'm not trying to beat anyone.

I don't know who's going to come second.

I don't even think about it.

I just know I'm going to come in and be my best and I'm going to win.

But like, I didn't start like that, especially when I was second place.

I was like, I'm beating that guy.

You know, I'm coming after him.

It's a very different game.

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If you hadn't won,

crazy world, I know.

If you hadn't won, would you have still retired?

This year?

That's an incredible question.

I actually haven't even thought about that.

It's so funny because I went into that year without even like

every year.

And my sister one year looked at me in the Olympia.

She's like, are you ever going to fucking believe you're going to win?

Because it'd be the day before the year.

Some time three or four or five.

It was like in between pre-judging and night show when I just dominated the show.

She's like, so you feel good about it?

I was like, I don't know.

Like, maybe I'll win.

She's like, are you ever going to fucking believe that you're going to win?

Like, and I was, and I didn't.

And then the last year I went into that prep and I like, I didn't even, like, I had those moments of, do I love this?

Do I not?

And I worked my way back to a point of like, this is the last time.

And I enjoyed it.

And I like love the experience.

But the whole time it was just like, am I going to do it or I'm going to, am I going to win or am I going to not compete?

That was what was in my brain.

I didn't even think.

And it was finally that point where I just believed in myself, where I knew, like, I know what to do.

I know what I'm capable of.

And like, I'm going to come in and win if I do it.

So I never even thought about it.

But

that is a champion mentality, right?

Finally.

I finally got it.

And then I leave.

Yeah.

But now, yeah, I like to believe that I would have.

retired.

I would have stuck to my principles.

Regardless.

And looking back now, I can't imagine being in a prep right now.

And like I said, it's very different because my mind did just like release all these focuses where it opened up the ability to realize all these things that I had been holding that might have been creating tension in my life.

So I'm in a state right now where I can't imagine trying to lock in and focus on being so selfish at something with a pregnant wife, 16-month-year-old daughter, life-changing like it is.

But

my ego would love to tell you.

Hell yeah, man.

I would have retired regardless.

I wouldn't have

scared if I lost.

Well, it's a luxury belief because you won.

You can say whatever you want.

You can't go back and run the experiment again.

Very true.

You know Mark Cavendish?

He's a cyclist in the Tour de France,

British guy from Manchester, I think.

37, 38 now, so older in the Tour, and he's a sprinter as well.

And

the Tour de France Unchained, if people need a...

good documentary.

So it's Drive to Survive, Formula One, but for the Tour de France.

They've done it for three years now.

And in the second year, he just needs one stage win

to have the title of the most stage wins in Tour de France history.

So it's, I guess, it must be a particular hack that the sprinters have got, that because they work for the finish, they actually end up with more stage wins than the general classification, the yellow jersey.

And he is going for it.

And he's saying, this is my final year.

I just need one stage win.

And his wife's there.

And the kids are there.

And he's sort of working himself up to it.

And he has a couple of near misses.

And then he has a big crash at the sprint finish and he's devastated.

Oh no, he has it.

I think he breaks his collarbone in maybe a pilot partway through, which is even less glorious.

And the whole thing was this was going to be the final year he was going to win.

And then season three comes along and he's made this big song and dance.

He has this sort of tearful announcement about how he's going to leave the sport behind.

And I've

given my life to this sport and he raced for England, Great Britain, all this stuff.

And then it comes back and it's him and his wife.

And his wife basically says, I know that you're not going to rest.

I know that you're not going to be satisfied.

She's like, what does it matter?

You said that you were going to leave.

You're not satisfied.

So run it back.

Do it again.

And he does.

And he gets his victory.

And he sort of goes out on his shield.

But the opposite of that is John Jones.

John Jones,

it seems, wanted to vacate the title rather than lose it to Tom Aspinall, who is a real aggressive fighter, also from Manchester.

Everyone's from Manchester.

And

it just seems like he was so concerned about his legacy being marred with the final fight against this young, very heavy, very talented, natural heavyweight, as opposed to John, who's maybe not quite so in his prime.

And you have someone who, in both cases, have got the same mentality, which is, my final performance cannot be a loss.

I either need to go back and do it again in order to be able to achieve victory, or I need to bow out on my own terms as opposed to stop.

And

people remember the way that you left the party, so to speak, in that way.

Like the footnote or the final song, the encore of your entire career is so amazing.

Shame about how his final competition went, you know, like when he got beaten by whatever, whatever.

Yeah.

So it doesn't surprise me that that would be a difficult question to answer.

Yeah.

No.

It's funny, too.

Hormozzi sent me a text going in the last prep and he had like suspicions that I was gonna retire that year.

And he said something, I can't even remember exactly what he said about me going and winning or something.

And I threw like a little flick back at him because we think very differently.

And I like respect how like what he does is incredible.

This is like the beautiful champion mentality.

Like you can think however you want.

You just have to win.

And I was like, well, what if I lost?

What about the lesson that I could learn in the loss?

And he was, he posted on Instagram the next day, being like, I got a text from someone last night and it made me mad.

He went off and I commented.

I was like, that was me.

But no, like genuinely, like when I, like I was talking about my most important values right now, if I trust and believe in myself to live up to those values, what I would have been able to do was to use that loss, something out of my control, to take what is in my control, how I handle it, to learn something and try and apply it to be the best version of myself and to stick to my values.

And in trusting myself, I would have still made the decision that I know I need to step away.

Because before I won, before I had the chance of losing, I had made the decision why i was walking away what it was and it wasn't to do with and it wasn't about if i win i'll lose or if i lose it was unrelated to all that stuff it was well what's best for me and my life and my family is to step away right now and it's for the love because i love the sport i'm walking away so i don't put myself into position where i'll resent it because people who go too long then they'll stop away and they'll look at their whole career with resentment either if it leads to health issues or injuries or on a loss or something it taints it in your own mind and it loses that like

kind of

beautiful like life that you have on it.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, you're able to

pave yourself into

the rose-colored glasses.

You can look back and be like, it was perfect, you know.

And I have the privilege now to be like, My career is perfect, which it was far from.

Yeah, but well, imagine if it had been the other way and your only second-place victory had been the final one.

Yeah.

Well, I was second before, but it'd be my third second.

Did you ever secretly want to quit before, but you stuck around due to expectation?

I'm still unraveling why I wanted to quit before, but I did announce privately that I was retiring after my fifth win.

Right.

So one year prior to when you actually did it.

And that was the year I had a really bad injury.

We had discovered Courtney was pregnant.

There was all this stuff going on.

There was some personal, all this chaos in my life that was pulling me away from focusing on competing.

And I was like, I couldn't handle all of it in the moment.

And I was like, I can't do this anymore.

And I was stepping away away from it.

And I realized I was stepping away from it in fear.

And because I had so much external things mudding my decision:

is it because I don't love competing or is it because of all these other things going on right now?

The injury that almost made me lose.

I should have dropped out.

I kept pushing through all these things that I wanted to give myself an opportunity to try again and be in it and be like, is this still for me?

Can I still do this and love it and want more?

Or am I going to compete again and be like, no, I am done.

So I actually had this like double moment moment of choosing whether or not I was going to retire.

And that I feel like that, that was the only time where I was really truly like, it wasn't even a quitting.

It was like a peaceful relief of I'm done.

And then afterwards, and this is why I know this year is so different because after that Olympia, about a month after, I was like, fuck.

I've told all of these people in my life.

Yeah.

I made this huge thing.

I cried.

I was like, this is so beautiful.

I had a video on my phone I recorded of me like talking.

And I've only done this once in my life.

Me Me crying in my gym after a workout being like, this is my last Olympia.

Like I got through this interview.

You didn't even do it when you actually left the Olympia.

No, and all the, it's, it's really cool because there's some like unseen, unspoken thing that are all like that video will be in the documentary that's coming out about it.

So that video will be in it?

Yeah.

I've never, it's been in my hidden album for no one to see.

Oh, wow.

It's in there with all of the other unspeakable memes and stuff.

I couldn't watch it.

They were like, you need to send that to us.

I was like, I can't go look at it.

It's too embarrassing.

Blindly, like, exactly.

Yeah.

But no, it was,

that was really the only moment where I was like, I'm done, stepping away.

And then I had to come back and be like, I'm not done.

I'm doing this again.

I think that suggests that it's the right decision.

Yeah.

And that was, sorry, that's what I was getting at.

Yeah.

Immediately after I knew I was like this tense, I was like, oh, I didn't make the right decision.

Whereas this year, I'm like waiting for it to come back.

And I'm like, oh, wait.

Like, I actually am at peace with my decision.

There's a lot I need to do and figure out in life to be at peace in life, but I'm at peace with my decision.

I suppose the, I mean, this is a huge topic a lot of people deal with, which is life change, life direction change.

You finish full-time education, you're 22, 23, and you've been in full-time education since you were five.

University or something, and you go, okay.

I'm not in a set of train tracks anymore, and I need to choose my own direction.

That's difficult.

Or you want to change careers or move to a new city or leave a relationship or start a a relationship or start a family or, you know,

these life directions that split off in lots of different directions.

People have

velocion, scarcity mindset, and some cost fallacy and anchoring bias and the need for validation.

All of this stuff just loops together in this big mess.

And trying to untangle that is hard.

I suppose the...

The interesting thing that I can think about with your situation, which would be different, for instance, to mine,

You're working toward one very big goal, which is basically success or failure.

And that

has identity wrapped up in it in the same way that I do.

But

there's no such thing as this is the podcast that I would go out on and not the next one or the next one or the next one.

And there's not really the same criteria of success and failure either.

Even in sports like football, I guess maybe you've

did you win the league that year or not?

But you're part of a team.

How well did you play?

How well did the team play?

Is it really about you or the team's performance or your performance?

And which league is it that you won?

Was it challenging?

And it's not expected for the same team to win every year.

Exactly.

Yeah, there's way more variables in that.

So

as

solo sports go with a ruthless binary black or white outcome with all of the preparation working towards

how long do you spend on stage each year?

10 minutes maybe in total?

It's probably a little bit longer than that for me, but under 20 probably.

Okay, so whatever, 364 days, 23 hours and 40 minutes of an entire 12-month period to go on stage.

It's about, I mean, I can't think of,

I can't think of much else that's, I mean, maybe the presidency, you've got four years years to try and work toward that as opposed to just one.

The Olympics, in some ways, but at least, you know, there's bits that you get to along Olympics is intense, too.

That's also why you hear of the intense depression afterwards.

Gold medalist syndrome or silver medalist syndrome.

Yeah.

Or even just leaving the weekend.

They come back night.

Do you see the stat that

bronze medalists are less depressed than silver medalists?

No.

Because

they weren't that close.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very funny.

Our minds are so crazy.

Has no longer having the Olympia

impacted your drive and passion in other areas of your life?

You know, you've got the dad,

husband thing,

business,

the desire to work on yourself

from a personal standpoint.

How have you found drive and motivation separate and also wrapped up in what you were doing previously?

I wouldn't say it directly decreased because there's no Olympia, but I think almost as like a byproduct of what the Olympia was for me, of like a schedule of a year of like the first half of the year is X.

You have some time off, you can recover, give yourself a break, and then you start to ramp up, you travel, focus on business, and then near the end, you go inward, you figure out what's driving you, what's pulling you back right now, self-reflect, spend time away from bullshit, focus on yourself, be selfish, work, it's intense schedule, and like it was this like organized routine.

And then all of a sudden it was all gone.

And that on top of the singular goal, being like, where do I put my energy now?

I think definitely left me in a place of feeling a little bit lost of not figuring out like

where do, do I still have the passion for anything?

Where do I find that energy to put into something?

What do I put it into?

Does it even exist?

Will it exist again?

And then it kind of led to me.

Then I had an injury.

I stopped working out for a while.

And I just started to wake up in the morning exhausted and not knowing what to do, going in and helping with this business, going on this trip for debt travel, a meeting here with a distribution center, all these little things for all these other things that weren't really like driving me.

I didn't have like an important big role in them.

I was just like kind of coasting through.

And I started to wake up and feel pretty lost in general of like,

where am I progressing to, essentially?

And that was when I was kind of like, what I'm, honestly, I'm still working through it.

I don't have this answer, but a

thing I'm working for is just like empathizing with myself that I don't need to be constantly progressing towards something, that I don't need to be getting better and have this big goal and doing X.

And I can just sit and rest for a while and like truly just like

do nothing and be good enough as that is and let something come and figure it as it goes.

And that was tough for me.

It is tough for me and speaking in proper verbiage of figuring that out.

And the funniest little thing of what has made made me feel better recently was working out again on a schedule and eating five meals a day and weighing up my food and having that little bit of structure of like, and not having to as well.

It's like all this stuff's going on in my life.

I don't know.

I'm kind of lost.

What can I do?

Well, I can go work out again.

And I don't have to.

So now I'm choosing to.

Well, why are you still workout so hard?

Why are you training so hard?

It's like, well, I just because I love it.

I feel good.

Why I used to do it 12 years ago.

Exactly.

And that's all of a sudden I'm getting more and more excited to go back in the gym or even in prep last year.

I started, oh, I have to go work out and then all of a sudden I just start to feel better day to day and it's these little changes and I realize this is truly how I fell in love with the gym and why I'm such a big advocate of weightlifting.

Like I honestly kind of hope I don't inspire people to get into bodybuilding because it's tough.

It's fucked up.

It's not good for your health.

But I do want to inspire people to go lift weights, get in the gym and want to get jacked because it's such like, oh, I'm lost.

I don't know what to do.

Just go work out.

Apply some discipline, work hard, find something you love that's like difficult, that shows you progress, builds confidence, and just go do it.

And then from there, then you can clear your mind a little bit, have self-confidence, start looking around a little bit more clear, start looking inward and figuring out what is next for you and finding that next goal and working towards it.

So for me, that's why I just fucking love the gym so much.

And I'm so grateful that I'm back to a point of like loving the gym.

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This is the cash value, or this was the price that you pay in retirement, I think.

You know, because what you're talking about, it's going to be difficult and things will be hard and you won't have the

drive or the goal that you used to in the past.

All of those things are kind of fluffy concepts, but they come into land.

They actually sort of meet reality with

I woke up on the morning and didn't know what to do.

I felt tired a lot.

I didn't want to train.

I was short and snappy with my business partners.

I found myself getting distracted with lots of little tasks because it made me feel important and like people needed me.

I packed my calendar out and did, because

a lot of the time in advance of something happening, we probably have a good idea about what it's going to be like in the macro, but what we don't know is how it's actually going to appear, manifest in life.

And it's navigating those things.

So for instance, I've been sick for the last 18 months or so, and that's been hard.

And

I knew

based on what the trajectory was going to be, what was going to be tough, that I was going to have a lot of self-doubt, that I was going to lose confidence and self-esteem, that

I would feel like I was moving backward, all of these things.

But the way that that actually appears, like the individual building block thoughts that you have, like that mean random little voice, or that one night where you ruminate about that one thing, or you're more sensitive to criticism, and that one comment from that person, or you just can't really focus on your meditation as much.

Like, none of those are, I am going to lose confidence.

They are the individual that contribute to my confidence has gone down.

Even if you knew it was going to happen in advance, and even if in retrospect you can say, oh, wow, both of these things converged.

Each of the little steps that occurred to make that happen kind of come out of nowhere a little bit because you don't know the effect of each little thing.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So it's...

The pack calendar, the lots of travel, the I'm tired.

I don't really want to go train.

I don't really, I'm not weighing my food.

I'm maybe eating

weird diets compared with what I used to.

And this lack of structure feels alien and uncomfortable to me, but it also feels like

relapse or

rest or change or variation, but that's also uncomfortable because it's unfamiliar.

And yeah, each of these little building blocks is contributing to that.

Like,

I don't feel like me.

I don't feel like me.

Yeah.

And

not in the way that I wanted to either.

Yeah.

And it creeps in like that.

And you have absolutely no idea that it's coming until one day you're like, I don't feel good.

So it's definitely interesting.

And I feel like you need to, you need to, I've needed to treat myself like a science experiment of like taking and removing pieces and see what's important.

It's like, okay, bodybuilding was creating a bit of pressure and stress in my life.

Is it everything related to that?

Or was it the whole, you know, so like as I pulled out, I was like, well, I'm not competing anymore.

I don't need to eat on a schedule.

I don't need to train at the same time.

I don't need to leave my phone outside the gym and be locked in and focus as much.

I don't need to wake up with my alarm.

I can kind of sleep.

I can do all these little things that I can let go of because now I don't have to because the goal is different.

But then I started to not feel good.

And it was like, okay, it wasn't those things that weren't making me feel bad.

Those were actually making me feel good.

It was the outcome.

Like I said before.

So now taking those things that from bodybuilding put in the back in my life and realizing, oh, wait, the structure and the discipline makes me feel better.

It fills me with more confidence and ability to go do other things rather than taking away.

Regardless of whether it's in service of becoming Mr.

Olympia.

Yeah.

And I mean, I know those things, but like you said, it was all of a sudden it was like, oh, well, I'll just cut one meal out because like I'm busy now.

Oh, well, my shoulder's injured, so I'm going to do my rehab, but like, I don't really want to.

You know, I'm not going to do that.

I'm not competing this year.

Like, who even cares?

Who's cares?

I'm busy.

I'm going to reply to emails in between sets.

I'm going to sleep in because I went to bed late last night.

Like, all these little things.

Next thing you know, you're like, oh, I feel like shit.

I don't want to do anything.

And you're way harder to to pull yourself out of that than if you'd cut it earlier.

So that's life, though.

You know, there's no direct ascent to the top.

It's ups and downs and building a new self as you go.

What would you say to anybody that's lost direction in life in the way that you have?

I would say I'm still in the midst of it, but I do believe it will be for the better.

I feel like the path I was on wasn't,

I knew when I was on, it wasn't the best for me.

So if I stayed on that path, it

might not be lost, but I'm not discovering anything else.

And at least in being lost, you might discover something new that's better or different, but still good.

You know, better is a subjective word, I guess.

Nothing will be like the Olympia, but things will be incredible in my life.

And I would say actively, like I said, the gym has been like the

thing for me of when I'm lost.

It's always always there.

So having a constant in your life, having something within your control when things feel out of control to just go do, just to give you that little postural upkeep, I think is so crucial.

And again, that's why like young kids were like, I don't know.

I don't know too much.

Just go work out, go lift weights, start there.

Just get jacked and figure it out.

Obviously, you can't just figure it out for you.

You can't just stick with that.

But I think understanding that.

A lot of people don't feel lost their whole life, but they're just stuck in this like box until they're 70 and they're like look back and they're like, how did i get here you know because they had such a clearly defined path for them and maybe it wasn't where they wanted to be so an

lost is an opportunity to stop and slow down and reflect where you truly want to go and that's what i'm trying to use that for right now being like oh it's time to do this that that that it's like people are what are you going to do next i'm like right now nothing i'm not adding anything to my life because i'm trying to figure out what that is and it's okay to be lost right now telling myself it's okay to be lost right now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dear Christopher,

it's okay to be lost right now.

It will get better and you'll figure it out.

And just do what you can.

Fill yourself up right now.

Learn who you are in the season of life and just trust that whatever will come will come.

Isn't it poetically ironic that the thing you walked away from was the thing that you needed to give you structure after you'd walked away from it?

The gym was the kind of the thing that I left behind.

And when I worked out what it was that I needed to do in order to get myself at least back in a good state of mind, it was go back to the gym again.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Everyone needs some kind of constant in their life.

And the true cheat code is relationships.

How so?

Just the ability to

be seen by someone else, I feel like it's such a cheat code for life.

If you're feeling lost and you feel alone,

there's like the genuine, the word lost.

Would you rather be in a forest by yourself or with someone else who is lost with you?

It's so, it's just such a drastic thing.

And I feel like that being able to be with someone through hard times and understanding, it's like, I'm dealing with all these issues of identity.

I'm losing this.

I'm losing that.

Did people like me for this?

Am I losing followers now?

Am I going to be the same?

Is this going to still be a part of my life?

Do I still care about this?

But when I go home, my wife doesn't treat me different.

She doesn't see me different.

She just sees what I'm going through and loves me the exact same no matter what I'm doing externally, whatever success I have.

It's like,

can't define define it better than a cheat code for life.

There's no better confidence and ability to believe in yourself than when someone else says and when they see you no matter what and you feel safe to be whatever you need to be with them.

Whether you win, whether you lose, whether you stop, whether you keep going.

Yeah.

I'm still here.

Yeah.

Where does your self-worth come from now then?

I think that's the.

If this challenge is with sort of the structural side, what does my day look like?

What do I do?

What am I working toward?

There is sort of a moment-to-moment who am I and why am I important?

And I've lost followers.

Oh my God, I'm irrelevant.

People don't care about me so much anymore.

Who's the sort of thing that's whatever?

Where do you think about self-worth coming from post-retirement?

I would say

by genuinely knowing and believing that I'm living up to what my most important values are.

Like, for example, if I want to be a good father,

if I know I'm showing up as being a good father, that's my value,

that's within my control, then I feel good.

But the difference of that of like, oh, I want my daughter to love me or be happy with me or whatever it might be, something like that is out of your control in the moment.

And those are what I would worry for, where if my daughter looked at me and she's like, I hate you, dad, which probably will inevitably happen at some point.

And then my self-worth is attached to her not hating me.

So then I have a crumble and I believe it.

And then I act in a certain way rather than being able to dissociate with that and be like, what are my values?

Being a good dad.

Am I being a good dad?

Yes.

I know I have been being a good dad.

My self-worth isn't attached to her not saying she hates me.

It's in how I know I show up and in believing in my character and who I'm being.

So when she says, I hate you, dad, I can not react to that and be able to be like, Something's going on with her.

What is she experiencing?

And I don't have to have the selfish response of, well, I need to get her to love me now.

It's like, no, she's hurting right now.

Let me be there for her.

And I feel like that is, I mean, that's the double cheat code of being a good dad and having controlled self-worth, but learning to apply your values or learn what your values are and live by them in a way that they're within your control.

Well, I mean,

how wonderful it would be if people could do that in the Olympia.

I didn't win this year, but I did my best.

I gave it my all.

I did all the rest of it.

It seems like

I'm trying to work out what the difference is between those two pursuits, right?

Be good dad

is process.

Raise daughter well is outcome, right?

Something like that.

Like

whatever the way that the child interacts with me being a good dad is, right?

It's like even if there isn't specifically an outcome.

We could come up with some equivalent equation for the Olympia.

Like

train and eat in a disciplined manner.

Right.

Win Olympia is maybe one of the outcomes.

But those two things aren't necessarily linked.

You can do the first one and not get the second one.

And you can get the second one without necessarily doing all of the things of the first one.

I'm sure that you had cheat meals at some point.

Someone else will have done too.

But for some reason, the

constitution that you have and the way that you approached it, your cheat meals and volume of and missed reps, individual missed reps and shortcuts and stuff

allowed you to still win at the end.

And for somebody else, doesn't.

So

my point is, I wonder whether it's easier to be a bit more

embodied and mindful and sort of gentle and

like not philanthropic, but like charitable sort of like giving in that way and less attached to the outcome

because it's more

resonant and it's more in inner.

than it is, and I will get the accolade on stage, and I will, which is maybe why the sort of classic tiger mom archetype of the parents who are living vicariously through the performance of their children are stricter with their kids than they've ever been with themselves.

You know, they demand a level of dedication and performance from their children that they don't from themselves because

their children are a performance.

They like that outcome of that child is them.

That's their goal that they're working toward as opposed to, I just want to be the best dad I can be, or I just want to be the best mom I can be.

It's tough.

And I've had this debate, and I have no idea the answer: of like, when you're working towards something like that, and you're like, all I care about is that I gave my all.

I did everything I could.

And then whether I win or lose, I don't care.

Sounds beautiful.

But does it.

And easy to say when you keep winning.

And easy to say when you keep winning, of course.

But does that, is that, is it possible?

Is it, does it make you better?

Or does that level of like enlightenment also turn you into a place where

there's no desire attached to the outcome?

It's just in the effort.

And then does that lead you to less effort?

I think it's unrealistic.

This is where

the rationality and the emotion kind of come into conflict with each other.

And

it's all well and good to say

if I I was a closed system or if I was some GPT that I could program, this would be the optimal way to do it because it allows me to maximize utility in the moment whilst reducing stress about the outcome, which facilitates performance to achieve the outcome.

But that's not how humans work.

Like we are

like telec creatures, right?

Like we're working toward this T loss, this goal, this thing that we're aiming up at.

You go,

without that, all of this is bullshit.

All of the the steps that I'm using to get myself toward the destination,

this is supposedly the reason that the dopamine system, or one of the reasons, that as you approach a thing that you want, let's say it's a tree that's on the horizon that you know has some fruit in that you need to bring back, as you run toward the tree and the tree slowly grows and grows and grows and grows and grows on the horizon and get closer and closer and closer, you feel reward because it motivates you to keep going.

Or else you go, fuck, it's still so far away.

I can't be bothered.

So, but if the tree was not there, or if you didn't know where the tree was, running towards it's way harder.

Same reason that Uber works.

Uber works for two reasons.

First one is that you can order a cab from anywhere on the planet with one app.

The second reason is you know how long the fucking cab is before it gets to you.

So, you go, ah, it's only four minutes away.

That's good.

And oh, it's getting closer.

And think about how frustrated you get when the guy takes a wrong turn and it goes from three minutes to four minutes.

And you're like, God damn it.

He's got to go around the one way.

I think it sounds great in principle to say, detach yourself from the outcome, just focus on the process, all the rest of it.

And that might be a useful thinking tool, but practically, when it comes down to can I grow some fucking corn out of this strategy,

I'm yet to see anybody that performs at the peak of their sport, including you, most mindful champion that I've ever spoken to,

still

like sort of glanced at it a little bit.

Like had a little side-eye look at it and was like, yeah, fuck off.

i would wonder if someone would even be driven to achieve that goal if they were in that place because it's unreasonable because it if they're in a place where like

what what's that outside thing driving them probably a self-worth self-worth issue if they feel like they're completely good as they are winner-lose maybe they'll be like well why am i even doing this you know like the people who like i joke a lot about doing ayahuasca haven't done it would love to one day still haven't done it yet but i've spoken to people like i'm just afraid like i'll just won't like my life anymore and in my i don't know what it's like i haven't done it but in my idea the vision is well if you don't already don't love your job or you're doing it for the wrong reasons it will just show you that people are like well i want to be rich first and then i'll do it because i'll be detached from money afterwards and then blah blah well if you're in a journey to be mr olympia and you awaken and you're like i don't care about the outcome it's like well why am i going to suffer through all this bullshit and beat on myself every day and keep pushing through all these moments i don't want to if I don't even care about the outcome.

Maybe, maybe it is a better way to live to not care about the outcome, outcome, but maybe it will lead you to not doing it at all.

Which, again, if you're there, you won't care, but it's just different.

If you're in a place of your life where you'd rather keep yourself in that box and achieve the things and get the abundance, and you know, it's not really good for me, but I still want to do it because it's fun right now.

And then I'll go on the other side and open up beyond that.

But when are you ready to do that?

Does it matter?

Like,

it's a fascinating question, dude.

I think about this so much.

Sacrificing the thing that you want for the thing that's supposed to get it is,

it's kind of like, again, equations seems like a theme this week, equations.

It's one of these little sequences that seems to show up a lot.

So don't sacrifice happiness in order to achieve success so that when you're finally sufficiently successful, you can give yourself permission to be happy.

And you say, well, maybe I can just,

if it was an equation, you could sort of just cross off success on both sides and you're left with happiness.

Right.

You're making yourself miserable in the pursuit of an outcome that hopefully can make you sufficiently successful to make you happy.

You go, okay,

that feels like sacrificing the thing you want for the thing which is supposed to get you the thing that you want.

But

we're not perfectly logical, rational creatures.

We are social animals.

We need validation.

We want to feel recognized.

And we want to look back and go, I fucking, like, I made a dent in the world.

Like, I actually, I like hit it, and I've left a mark there.

And that's fucking cool.

Yeah.

Uh, as opposed to however many people just, you know,

orange robes in a cave somewhere, which I can see you pivoting to at some point.

And maybe you've got the hair transplant, so you can't do the bald thing anymore.

I can still shape my head.

All right, whatever.

Dick it.

Um, but that,

that sequence, you know, you are a

hard-charging woman in their career and things are going real great.

And you sort of have it in your head, yeah, I think kids would be really, really good.

Well, okay, you're going to sacrifice something that you know already does give you a sense of well-being and fulfillment and recognition and validation and safety, which is your career and all of the accoutrements and stuff that come along with it, for a thing that you have an inclination might be good for you, but you have real no idea about whether or not it is.

So, okay, you're telling me that I should sacrifice what I have verifiable information does make me happy for the thing that I have like a hint that it might be fulfilling, might be more fulfilling.

Well,

how long do I need to stay in the career before I feel like I've got like career saturation or fulfillment saturation or something from this?

Yeah.

And then I can pivot into this other mode.

Again, like the booster rocket thing.

I've spent this fuel and then I've got this next booster rocket and then I've got this next thing.

And

I think a lot about the bravery that is needed to be able to say goodbye to something like that.

Like, I know that this thing gives me a sense of self-worth and fulfillment.

Fuck, that quiet voice in the back of my head keeps getting louder, and it just keeps saying the same thing, which is this isn't right for you, and you should

probably try this other thing.

And how many people are trapped by

loss aversion, fear,

uncertainty, lack of self-belief, scarcity mindset?

Yeah.

I don't think that I can make that jump.

And

you, I was trying to think about this

when I was filming the interview for your doc with Mark.

And

I had it in the back of my mind.

Everybody was like, how many times are you going to stick about?

Like, you know, is he going to go for six, go for seven, do whatever?

And I had it in the back of my head.

I was like, how many

athletes have left their sport

in their prime or maybe even before their prime, right?

Like, there's nothing that says that 31-year-old you, title seven, wouldn't have been better.

Like, who does that?

No one.

No one does that.

No one does that at all.

I told Mark this.

No one does that.

Nobody gets.

even close to thinking because you finally fucking arrived, right?

You just got there and now you're going to voluntarily leave.

You work your entire life to get to this esteemed stage, this very exclusive VIP party of one.

And now that you've got access to it, you're going to go out, yeah, I'm done.

Nobody does that.

I mean, Michael Jordan briefly did baseball, I suppose.

But most people, most champions especially, are forced into retirement due to some sort of an injury.

They

can see the writing on the wall in terms of where that arc is, which is sort of the John Jones approach.

Like,

don't think I'm going to be able to make it on this next one.

Like, I'll, I'll leave it there.

Uh, or they stick about so long, like Floyd Mayweather's

50 fights, 51, 52, 53, 54.

Like, who are we going to fight next?

Yeah, um, just can't say no and can't stop.

Uh,

so I, for me, I think it was,

especially in our world, fitness bodybuilding stuff,

a much needed

example, a much, a very important

role model situation of what happens if you decide to step away from something

on your own terms.

Because people say I did it on my own terms, but it's like, was it really,

you had an injury no one knew about, you had some something coming up, you were

so.

Yeah, it's but I guess how much was it on your own terms?

Because you were in out of motivation, right?

Like you if someone held a gun to your head, I'm sure you could have done it for one more year.

But

like, I don't know, just I think it's

an important example for people to see a world champion, multi-time world champion, decide to step away when he could have got better, not when he was on the decline.

I think it's a.

Yeah.

And I feel like a lot of people think like

everything's very black and white.

Like they're waiting for to be like, I hate bodybuilding and I'm done and I love being retired.

But it life doesn't work like that.

You You know, multiple things are usually true.

It's like I really miss a lot of things about bodybuilding and I'm sad and there's a grief and it's sad and life is good now and there's parts I miss it and it's not like clear, nothing's clean cut like that.

Or like you said, the woman who's working really hard wants kids like, well, like you will miss your job.

You did work hard to get there and it will be hard to pull away and you will love your children and it will be the best thing in your life, but you will miss it.

It's like, it's this constant kind of like,

and I feel like social media fucks us with that that because it's like and i've probably been guilty of this for like exactly what we were talking about the person at the end of their journey is the one talking about it and social media is just a platform of people at the end of their journey talking about like hmm we're here this why like you from the top of the mountains really nice this 50 year old man in the orange robes being like look at me i'm free it's like well

I wouldn't have chosen any way to be different.

There was a lot of stress and pressure I felt through my 20s, but like I would go through all that again because it's the only way that you can have that perspective in the future.

And maybe it's a good thing to go through the shit times.

You don't want to avoid them, the bad reasons why you do stuff, the hell of this, of that.

And you shouldn't try in your 20s to

shortcut that and to detach and let go.

And you should just be like,

my dad never said I was good enough.

I'm going to fucking tell him.

You know, I'm like, fuck yeah, go tell him, you know, maybe you should.

I think, but that's a really nice.

It's a way that you can't really get it wrong.

And I think a lot of the time what people have a fear of is doing it wrong.

Like, I don't want to make the wrong decision.

Like, what if the right decision is for you to do what feels right to you right now and to have faith in the little voice that's sort of in the back of your mind, which is, fuck you, dad.

It's like, all right, cool.

Go and do it.

Like, go and tell him, fuck you.

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I had this idea of unteachable lessons, which are these

types of insights in life that you can't accumulate without learning for yourself firsthand.

Money won't make you happy.

Fame won't fix your self-worth problem.

You don't love that girl.

She's just hot and difficult to get.

You should see your parents more.

You don't need to work so hard, et cetera, et cetera.

Like it just keeps going.

And

there's a lot of criticism whenever people talk about this on the internet for a couple of reasons.

First off, it sounds like a luxury belief.

It's easy to say money won't make you happy if you have loads of money.

Well, it is a luxury belief.

Yeah.

Well, you're right.

It is a luxury belief, but it's also a luxury dream that money will fix my problems of happiness, that fame will fix my self-worth problem, because at least the person who's at the bottom of the ladder still has the belief that there is a solution.

The person that's at the top of the ladder is now rich and famous and still fucking miserable and doesn't have any self-esteem.

It's like, oh,

I thought, I thought that thing was going to,

you're telling me that the external solution won't fill my internal void.

Oh, fuck.

Now I need to, now I actually really need to do some inner work.

The person that is on the come but and both of them will be jealous of each other.

It's like, I wish I had your hope.

Well, I wish I had your situation.

So I do get it.

But

the thing about these unteachable lessons is

trying

to

tell anybody about them

is really interesting

and almost exclusively pointless, I think.

I don't think that people can speedrun this through insight.

I don't think that

Urz or Ramon.

Raymond, the two guys that are sort of maybe battling for your now vacant title.

Earth is in the open now.

Oh, has he?

He's got too big.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, so who's going to be the two frontrunners?

Probably Mike Summerfield, Ramon,

Terrence Ruffin, maybe.

Okay.

Those guys

are not going to look at you and be like,

Chris said it didn't even matter.

Chris said that holding his daughter was the most important thing, or I should just shortcut my, you know, it's just not, it's not the way it works.

And

people are

critical of something that sounds like a trite,

well-worn cliché, platitude-y thing, because they go,

Yeah, money won't make you happy, whatever.

Fame won't fix yourself.

Well, I've heard it before.

And you go, okay.

First off,

if something has been repeated enough times to be obvious and trite, it might be because there's some truth in it.

And secondly,

if it's not true, why does almost everyone who reaches this kind of destination so reliably

start to proclaim it like they've just gone through fucking religious revelation?

Like, well, do you think that there's some weird cabal secret community when people get to a certain level of wealth?

When you hit your first million or something, that they message and go, hey, by the way, you need to tell all of the poor people that it doesn't actually make you happy so that they can keep the wealth of themselves.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like, no, it's not.

It's because everyone arrives at the same place and has the same realization, which was, fuck.

I thought that this thing was going to fix my internal problem.

It doesn't.

I've got the thing and

I still feel the same way about myself that I used to.

Damn it.

Flip like paradoxical way, don't you then think that it is the thing also?

It's not the only route there, but money doesn't buy you happiness.

But if money, having money shows you that money isn't the thing that makes you happy, then it's still having money that's making you happy.

Yes.

Yes.

It's a

offsend way.

It is.

It's not the outcome that is going to make you happy, but it's the stepping stone to prove to you what does make you happy.

Yeah, Naval says it's far easier to achieve our material desires than to renounce them.

Like it's way easier to drive a beaten up truck if your last car was a Ferrari than if you spend your entire life thinking, I wonder what it would be like to own a Ferrari.

You go out breaks down all the time and it's highly impractical and I can't drive it over speed bumps and everyone wants to key it and it runs out of gas and it needs to be in the shop

all the things.

Remember there was this guy I went to uni with and

he was big into pickup artistry.

So he was, you know, doing the cycling through women thing.

But it was almost like a sport.

He's like very, very accomplished doing it.

And I remember thinking, I was like, dude, like, you really love sort of dating girls and going out on dates and working on game.

And he said, yeah, man, my future wife better appreciate this.

I'm like,

okay.

Square this circle for me.

How do we get to my future wife should appreciate me running through half of Newcastle?

And he said, yeah, well, you know, I'm walking down the street with my wife and I see a Brazilian chick going past me and I'm pushing the stroller with the kids in it.

I don't want to think, I wonder what it's like to fuck a Brazilian chick.

I want to have ticked off every different box, all of the different things.

And look, that might be a lot of cope.

But the idea stuck with me, which was it's easier to do the things that you want to do so that you no longer need to do them than it is to try and release yourself of the desire overall.

And

yeah, whether it's the hell of an example.

Look, I know my audience.

Yeah.

That's funny.

I've always connected with the Jim Carrey versions of that.

He has like a couple of quotes of it where one of them is specifically, I wish for everyone to achieve their hopes and dreams so they can realize that it doesn't make them complete.

It's like, damn.

And then the other one was his like ironic, I think it was Golden Globe acceptance speech.

He goes up there and I don't remember it word for word, but he's like, Hello, everyone.

I'm Jim Carrey, five-time Golden Globe winner.

Today I'm going to go to bed, and I'm going to dream about being Jim Carrey, six-time Golden Globe winner, and then

I will be enough.

And then the whole crowd just starts laughing, and they're all just, ah, he's funny.

And like a few people you could see are like, whoa, you know, and like, that's fucking deep, you know, like he's

just up there, like

blasting on the whole

industry, essentially, the whole construct of what they're all seeking after of goals and all these things.

It's just like, he's beyond it now.

And he's just like, when's enough enough, you know?

Did you see, is it Scotty Scheiffler?

Schiffler?

The golfer?

Golfer, yeah.

Hell yeah.

I had like five people send that to me.

That was incredible.

That

speech that he gave

talking about how

and

It must have resonated with you because his entire thing is, I work all this time, I practice, I play all of these competitions for these five minutes.

And I got to go home and change nappies and decide what I have for dinner and continue to play this game.

There's a few

people

in that position that are really sort of tapped in.

You are one of them.

Scotty's another.

Jim Carrey is another.

And

it's never going to be

a lot of the time when you you see something that looks like an effective philosophy, life philosophy or approach, go, wow, if it makes you more happy, eventually it'll be so effective that the meme will spread and more people will do it.

But because of the you need to achieve it before you can get rid of it thing, I think that

the need for validation, meritocracy, chase, chase, chase is always going to exist.

And so will this counterculture.

And it will only be spoken about by people that have already gone and achieved it.

And all of the people that haven't yet achieved it will always call them luxury belief, velvet, prison, like

opulent wankers.

And that will just continue to repeat for the rest of time.

I just don't think it's ever going to stop.

And the people who haven't achieved something and have realized that it's not the achievement that makes them happy and are just happy with their life are just at home happy with their life.

No one will listen to it.

Well, they're going to care about television.

They also don't care to post it on Instagram because they're too busy at home happy with their life.

They don't need to declare it to the world or i didn't sacrifice the thing i wanted for the thing that's supposed to get it yeah uh i'm interested and i'm sure a lot of other people are in how quickly an olympia level physique falls apart when you stop training

it's tough to answer because of my injury i had this year As a whole, it was holding on like real good until I had like the shoulder surgery.

And then I took about three months off training.

And in the midst of that...

It was three full months, basically.

Yeah, I was, I had, I couldn't lift my arm for like a week or two, and then I was using like those fat grips because I couldn't hold the weight to try and do like a external rotator cuff with like a three-inch range of motion.

Like it was like a serious rehab back to moving my arm.

And in the midst of that, I'm like, I'm going to do an 80-hour fast because I have never been able to do this as a bodybuilder, and it's great for my health.

I lost like eight pounds doing that alone.

And then

I only ended up losing like

I mean, I lost at that point, I lost about 25 pounds of muscle, of like pure muscle, which was drastic on my physique, the change that was.

And I was like, damn, that was a lot.

But then it bounced back quick, too.

I think muscle memory is absolutely insane.

But I think it's harder than people in real life to really lose that muscle.

Like, obviously, there's the PED side of things, and I'm not doing that shit anymore.

I'm still on TRT because once you run that kind of stuff, you kind of need to, which is the dangers of doing it at a young age.

But it's life.

So me not doing all that stuff anymore and just eating healthy and training hard because I love it, I can still be 250 pounds, like no problem.

That you can maintain that.

It's on Olympia level physique, but I could bounce back in like six months, you know?

Do you think if push came to shove, do you think that, how long do you think you could take off before it would be really, really tough to come back within the space of a year?

I have no idea.

Interesting question.

It's very interesting.

And I'm like, like most, a lot of bodybuilders, I mean, classic physique is still a new division, but most open bodybuilders peak when they're like 35.

And it's different for classic because we need less muscle.

Your waist get bigger over time.

So it would be a younger age, but still like your ability to put on muscle like that continues into your mid-30s.

Well, look at the strongman, Brian Shaw and these guys, you know,

who's the huge black guy that did that really long hold.

He's in his 40s.

And yeah, strength sports, but endurance sports too.

Endurance, yeah.

Yeah.

I guess fast twitchy stuff.

I'm going to guess weightlifters, probably not so great, like Olympic weightlifters, not so great into later life.

Sprinters, I'm going to guess once you get past 40, probably not quite the same.

I wonder if that's an injury thing, too.

There's a lot more likely to be.

More kinetic

stuff.

Yeah, dude.

It's just an attrition rate.

It's just that these people have been like head shotted out of the

rotator cuff shotted out of the thing.

So your

bloods and stuff coming back down into normal life, what have you learned about the post competition physiology of someone that's done to their body what you did to it

like health-wise in general

and hormones and all the rest of this stuff because i know that you

you were already being as gentle as possible trying to get as much out of as little from pd standpoint trying to just take a month off each year from like even dieting and kind of aggressive training type stuff just that was like a stretch of three where i was in lowering and then ramping up yeah so yeah i'm just interested in what your health after the Olympias look like.

Feeling very grateful that I had that mindset of not trying to do too much and getting the least out of the most because

I had like health issues in the past that were unrelated to bodybuilding, autoimmune and stuff, and that affected my health.

And then it feels like bodybuilding wasn't declining it.

It was kind of keeping it at a level.

And now I'm at a point now where I've worked with a bunch of doctors and they're like, you're actually healthier than I thought you would be given what you've done to your body.

And I was like, well, thank God I retired at 30 because I don't want to hear like, oh, like shit.

You pushed it too far.

You pushed it too far, you know?

And obviously the longer you do something, the better.

And a few doctors have told me like in your 30s, your body is a lot more likely, I mean, obviously to recover than in your 40s or in your 35s or whatever it may be.

So there definitely is some damage that happened to my health.

And it was another huge reason of why it was easy for me to retire because I wasn't willing to make that sacrifice anymore.

I was very conscious of bodybuilding is not good for your health.

And I don't want to continue to do this to me with the family now and priorities and different values shifting.

So there's a lot of focus on my health now.

And I'm realizing you can't really attack everything at once.

Like, hey, I want to fix this, this, this, this.

Well, you can only take so many vitamins and do so many things a week.

So, like,

take it to the crowd here.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So, right now, it's, I'm trying to fix my gut, which is something that had gotten beat up for a while.

You know, bodybuilders

eat constantly.

I have SIBO, mold, leaky gut, some heavy metals, and all this stuff kind of affecting

my gut.

Hell yeah.

are you doing the antibiotic or are you trying to do the natural rot uh

combination of both so i'm using minocycline but minocyclins are quite a high dose now it's like 200 milligrams a day uh a lot of herbal antivirals some peptides uh i'm using ll37 ss31 uh bpc

uh plus i was using oral bpc for a while

yeah it's it's interesting because if you're doing the antibiotic thing you can't do the rebuild the gut thing at the same time probiotic yeah, so you it's bro, it's nightmare.

Yeah, it's so hard.

I don't even know what the words are.

I didn't do it.

Like the kill, restore, re-inoculate, rebuild, like all this.

Like you have to go through these phases of like kill everything.

No, I've been

the guy helping me wanted me to

build a little bit of like resilience in my gut first and then kill and then rebuild just so the kill wasn't so like tough on my body.

So when I get back from this, I start the antibiotics.

Yeah.

yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fun talk.

Yeah, no, I get it.

Um,

you mentioned TRT.

Is that

I don't know how it works with the suppression of sort of natural stuff.

It's just easier and simpler than trying to completely go off and survive and see if it comes back online naturally with a ton of gentle supplementation.

It's just easier to sit at a low dose, like therapeutic dose of replacement.

Is that kind of the philosophy that you've come to?

I still haven't really fully decided what my goals are in that in the future, but I do

know or have at least seen anecdotally through others that if you drop it too hard after being so high for so long, then it's really bad on your body and your mind.

You know, people go through some intense, people go through depression from natural low tests versus like having insane to just dropping it down.

So getting your body used to slowly decreasing over time is a lot better for your body to not have that like big shock of change.

So, but yeah, it's difficult.

And, you know, I'd like people to be aware of the fact that putting an exogenous hormone in your body stops your body's natural production of it.

It means you may have to take it for the rest of your life.

It's a reality, you know?

So kind of going through if I'm even going to try to go that route or not right now.

Well, dude, people say that testosterone decreases sperm count and you just continue to pump kids out.

You win some, you lose some, you know?

Well, I'm glad that the table's so long so that I don't get pregnant from being over here.

I won't come close.

But yeah, dude, pregnant again.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

We're excited.

Very excited.

Have you ever seen it?

So will it be two under two?

It'll be two under two, 20 months apart.

That's fucking go, dude.

Yeah.

I don't know why everyone knows that saying.

It feels scary.

They're like, they look at you.

I'm pretty sure Courtney put a story out saying she said it.

Oh, God.

Like, anyone with advice for two under two.

Yeah.

Moms will look at us or her and be like, two under two?

Oh, good luck.

You you know, which I hate.

I hate that kind of mindset of parenting.

I think it's huge and awesome.

It's mostly two under two.

Congratulations.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

Like, even like men with girls, like, oh, you have a girl?

Good luck from their teenagers.

It's like, fuck that.

It's mean, if you're a good dad and you raise your kids right, like, it's beautiful.

We're excited.

Dude, it's so exciting.

It's so cool.

I think, you know, the main thing I took away from our conversation last year

was how much more

stability and confidence you were given by

your identity being distributed, you know, on the blockchain.

It's like a decentralized network of stuff.

Yeah.

You know, I'm the best in the world at this thing.

I'm also the most important person in the world in

this world.

And I've also got this business thing.

I'm pretty important there too.

And people care about me.

And I get to contribute.

And hooray.

That's lovely.

And I've got some friends and they seem to like me as well.

And I like cars.

And I have a couple of hobbies.

And oh wow his I asked Tim Ferriss about this the start of last year

I was like how do you because he's got a tendency toward a low mood he's a sensitive guy

like how do you hedge your

how do you uh stop yourself from being at the mercy of a good New York Times bestseller am I podcast number one in the world oh my god I've fallen back

again and he said about uh hedging your identity distributing where you take your self-worth from in that way.

And yeah, the

fact that you've just got this amazing journey that you're on personally

and

it gives you the confidence, I think,

even if you're,

even if it's just cope to say,

I wouldn't have mattered if I'd won.

It gives you the confidence to at least be able to think it as opposed to someone that goes, I can say this and not even, I even know that that wouldn't be true.

Like it just sounds like the thing I'm supposed to say.

But yeah, you know.

even when you're increasing like the amount of most important people in your life, more kids, your wife, people, then you have more people who love you.

And like,

I was reading his book and it was one line that wasn't even meant to stand out, but it was like, if for 10, if for one minute you could see yourself the way your child sees you, you would never be the same.

Like you are like the biggest special hero, God strength.

Like just everything you do is just wow to them, you know, like pure love and awe that no matter what you do, if I lost an Olympia, if I told them when she was older, I lost Olympia, whatever, like, there's no change in that.

It's like, they don't care, you know, my wife doesn't care.

And having more people, like, hedging that too, having more people in your life who don't care, win or lose on things does make you able to go through losses and it not affect you the same and still make the right decisions in life regardless of outcomes.

So I think it's just the best thing ever.

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it's an interesting one with

girl dads especially that you are the first man that she's going to love and

the imprinting

it does seem like dads are very important i don't know why i had anna machin on who wrote life of dad and she's doing her new book is actually going to be about dads again for the second time she um

I think it's her first kid.

She had a complicated birth and

like really complicated, and then

mum and kid were rushed out of the hospital room, and you know, all the priorities on them.

And dad was just

left sort of wondering whether the love of his life and his newborn kid was okay.

And no one came in to explain anything, to check on him.

And, you know, there's talk of the trauma that women go through in childbirth and them needing to kind of postpone depression, all of this stuff.

Absolutely.

Like, she's done the legwork, right?

But there is a world in which looking at dads, they're not, they are surplus to requirements, at least in part.

Like they're not breastfeeding.

They're not getting, like, the baby wants mom, at least for the first bit.

But then there's kind of this,

you sort of get tagged in after a few years' time.

And then, oh, okay, now it's sort of, it's your turn to step up.

And it seems like that's really important.

So I feel like that, what you're saying about like, I've been thinking a lot about that and like I said people being like oh good luck with the girl and being a dad and where's your purpose and having a baby now infant you're right your job is really just supporting mom and making sure she's still like okay and feels like a priority especially when she was pregnant woman oh my god so exciting now it's baby oh my god so exciting mom

you know like see you later baby's so cute so like

understanding as like a man like Maybe you're not always in the spotlight, but you always have a very important role.

And

it's not as important in the beginning when the kids are young.

Cause yes, men are

not always men.

However, we like to define these things.

Come on.

Everyone can have their own roles, whatever.

By tradition, I would like to be the provider, logical, rational thinker of the family.

Not always just the support, but wanting to be both.

But if you just are stepped away when they're young, and then all of a sudden they're like a little girl and you don't really know them, you haven't built a bond or connection when they were an infant before they could talk.

A lot of dads I've read feel awkward with their children, especially daughters.

They're like, I don't know how to hang out with them alone.

Like, want to go play sports?

They're like, no, let's just sit and play tea and talk.

You know,

unless you keep that going from a very young age, there might be a moment where it feels awkward.

And, you know, it is very important to be in their life as a dad.

And I feel like not enough people talk about how important the role is for a man in a daughter's life.

Of course, it's important.

We talk about daddy issues, but we don't talk about how important it is to avoid that.

You talk about what it is when it goes wrong, but it's not how you do, but things to get it right.

Yeah, it's like I am

absolutely like working going to take so much pride in wanting my daughter to talk to me and come to me with things like i don't want to teach her about sex and i don't want to know about it but i'd much rather her come and talk to me about things than be afraid to i'd rather her to be safe enough to come to me to talk about boyfriends rather than well dad's gonna get mad if i even talk to a boy so don't hide it from me i don't feel comfortable i don't feel you know i want her to be like dad i'm talking to this guy blah blah and i want to be able to talk through it with her you know not feel like i want to be able to warn her off him immediately and all of that for the rest of time I would like to, but no, the goal would be more so to be able to hear her and feel safe to talk to me.

So then she can, I can work my way into

now she feels safe with me.

And then my opinions are more structured.

I'm still dad.

I'm still her hero.

So if she feels safe to talk to me, then I have the opportunity to really give, well, here's what I think about it.

And is it much more likely that she'll listen to me if she feels safe first and heard and validated and then understands what my opinions and boundaries are.

What have you learned about child rearing and strategies?

We had a conversation in a gym and some clip from that about

cry it out, but not cry it out, healthy, whatever it's called, attachment parenting, went beyond fucking viral.

I never thought that we would trend on mummy talk.

But

I think

people have very strong opinions about how to raise kids.

And when you hear something that sounds a little bit more

gentle, maternal, grounded,

That seems to resonate.

But strategies, you guys did a lot of reading beforehand.

You made sure that there were no toxins in

the blanket and stuff.

I know you went through all of that.

What did you learn about

good and bad ways, at least so far, for child rearing?

I mean, it's such a multifaceted question.

I feel like it comes down to like that idea.

You think you're reading these books and trying to prepare and and you're getting the non-flame retirement like non-toxic this and then all of a sudden you're just like drowning and it's like opening a book and reading how to swim as you're taking a boat into the middle of the ocean

and looking up and being like and diving in you know it's like you you just learn by doing you just learn by doing you got to figure out and you're right people have so many opinions and their own things so there's no right way of doing things

That I remember that thing going off about the all the mom.

It was like this combo of women being like, hell yeah, go guys.

And who are these fucking two

telling us how to

tell you to parents?

Dude, I had mums and daughters of mums come up to me in the gym.

I'm like, you think it's going to be,

my son is a huge fan of your channel or whatever.

It's like, I saw you talking about gentle parenting and crying out isn't going to.

Yeah.

I've ended up in a corner of the internet I did not think existed.

Yeah.

And it's, and it's valid.

And I understand it after going through at least the baby's part of the baby stage.

I mean, how much taller now?

What do you mean you understand?

Like, you have no idea what you're getting into.

You know, and people who are going through a hard time and everyone has their own experiences, it's hard to have someone else who hasn't gone through it talk about it.

Like, fair.

And I still can't because she's still just a toddler.

But, you know,

we did just that.

We, we didn't let her cry it out.

We gave her the love and support.

Courtney was always there for her when I wasn't around.

Like, she, we gave her what she needed in terms of.

understanding when she was uncomfortable or sad or scared.

You know, you start to learn what their cries are like and what they mean.

And we comfort her for that.

And now we're at a stage where we're just learning boundaries.

You know, we're, we're not punishing her because she does something bad, but she's starting to learn, oh, if I have a tantrum and freak out, then you're going to give me back the X you took away from me, you know?

So instead of like punishing her or putting her away or in a corner or timeout or whatever, we're just like withholding our boundaries firmly.

Like if it's time for us to take away and not do X anymore, well, then we're not giving it back if you have a tantrum.

But I'm also not going to like reject your emotion right now.

We can't talk to her, but it's like, hey, we hold her.

Like, shh, it's okay.

We comfort her through it.

Like, you're not going to get it, but I still love you.

My boundaries are here to protect you because I know what's best for you.

I'm not going to isolate you because of your emotion.

Your emotions are okay.

It's okay that you're angry, but also I'm not going to give it back to you.

And I love you regardless of how you feel.

And it's more right now, it's more about being able to show her with body language and like comforting through that.

So

you figure it out as you go.

You know, there's so much to it, but our our deep philosophy is her wanting to feel safe and secure with her,

her feeling that her emotions are valid, even if her behaviors are not.

Teaching her it's okay to feel like this, but you might not get what you want.

Have you considered that pivoting into

a fathering influencer might be the next

maternal gym sharkwire

raw supplements for kids?

Maternal gym sharkwire?

Maternal, yeah, dad bod.

Yeah, dad bodies.

You could do a dad bod release.

Clem, get on that.

Thank you.

Working on it.

It's very important.

Okay.

Thank you.

No, they're, they're, I've shared a few things recently, and I do want to speak my mind more because I feel like I do these podcasts and I do, and people take from it.

I like speaking about my experience about stuff I've done that is for me and trying to specify that because I don't know what other people are going through.

And I also don't know what I'm doing right now.

And I don't know what the fuck I'm doing.

So at least I can be like, we did this and it didn't work and we did this and it did work.

But I do just think it's important to

advocate as someone who is incredibly happy and fulfilled in large part because of their marriage and their family.

You know, in a world where some people are afraid to get in relationships in the trust or kids are bad or I want to bring them into the world of like being like, okay, fair.

If you want to live that life valid, do what's best for you.

But I'm someone who at least is absolutely fulfilled and loving life right now.

And this is how I'm going about it.

And it's pouring into my relationship, that being a priority.

And then it's...

being a father and my daughter being second priority to my wife.

And then it's whatever else I need for myself.

I'm mixed in it and all the things along that.

The conversation that we had last year, a couple of weeks before the Olympia in Florida, kind of felt to me personally

a little bit like a glitch in the matrix because

people at home get affected, hopefully, positively by the messages that they take away from these conversations.

But fuck me, like being here firsthand and watching it unfold is a

unique place to be.

And

I used this analogy that when I have different decisions to make, sometimes it feels like I've got Hormosy on one shoulder and you on the other.

And Alex is saying, stop being such a pussy, just work harder.

And you're saying, you should probably listen to your emotions more.

And

that...

That chat that we had last year, I think, was really formative for me because I'd been in this sort of Hormosey energy for a long time, which was good.

And that was what I needed.

And

really made a lot of progress and changes in the right direction.

But

just seeing how

somebody that I think is wired

in terms of nervous system and emotions in not too dissimilar of a way

had sort of cut through

so much of the

bullshit that people try people end up getting distracted by.

What are the different directions I should go down to try and find fulfillment?

And you just said, hey, I just found a woman that I love that makes me feel safe.

And we decided to build a family.

Shocking, I know.

What a revolutionary philosophy.

But it really,

it took a long time.

It's like still now kind of there's echoes of that.

But for months afterward, I was thinking, holy fuck, like that's, that speaks to me on so many different levels.

This thing that sort of is shouting out to me, you're right.

People are scared of getting into relationships.

There's lots and lots of stories online.

I talk about dating dynamics a ton on the show and lots of them are not good.

But

how rare is it that you hear somebody that says what you or Courtney do?

Like that is, you know, I stand up for this is something that made me really, really fucking happy.

And I had options to be happy from other things as well.

This isn't me doing it from a place of

need.

Right.

That, oh, my relationship's the most important thing in the world.

Dude, you had nothing else going on.

That's fair.

You had nothing else going on, like it's the only thing going on in your world.

Um, and I think that's a

really good,

a really good role model, and it certainly fucking flipped my world upside down.

So, thanks for that.

Yeah, that's what I do.

Uh, how was the official wedding?

I think you must have delayed due to all manner of other stuff going on.

Do you think

even though marriage has been for a while, official ceremony, is that important?

Like,

to us, it was.

To us, it was.

And I didn't.

I mean, we had been married technically legally.

But like you said, yeah, we were having kids, bouncing around.

Life is crazy.

Win Olympias and it was hard to ever plan it out efficiently.

And I knew it was very important to her.

And as a man, you're kind of like, yeah, whatever.

And I have to pay how much for this?

Italy or Spain or whatever.

The typical.

And luckily we got to the point where we had eight people at our wedding because it was we just want our close ones around and keep it super simple.

But it really wasn't until like coming into it, I was like, this is important, celebrate our love, really like implant this as like

a thing.

And it was more of a

reminder, a deep reminder of how valuable we are to each other.

And the day as a whole was just like, you know, you lead up to it.

It was a little bit chaotic.

We're traveling with a baby, yada, yada.

But then in the morning, we wake up, Bradley's sleeping in.

We're in this beautiful resort.

I walk out and I have my vows I had roughly written on my phone, and we decided to handwrite them.

And so I go in this beautiful garden with my coffee and fountains, and I'm sitting there and I'm writing down with my hand, which I'd never do, our vows.

And I'm sitting there, I have like tears coming up.

I'm like changing them.

I'm like thinking of like how deeply important she is to my life and how much we've been through together.

How crazy it is that we've lasted even this long.

And now we've promising to go forever together continuously.

And this just agreement that no matter what life does, does, no matter what comes at you, even if you go through a phase where you hate each other, you're still not going to give up.

You're going to always come back to that center together, no matter what.

And I think just that agreement to that, I think it's just so beautiful.

And having that day to reflect and remember what you've been through, why you love each other so much, it's like it was incredible.

And then I didn't see her.

And then when you do the surprise, the first reveal after all the writing, and she comes out in her wedding dress looking so beautiful.

Did you hold it together at the altar?

I didn't sob, but I was crying.

I had tears coming down my eyes.

We'd actually do a private reveal.

Yeah, you do a first, it's called a first look.

First look.

First look.

First look.

I've got to check with the women in the room.

How many weddings have I been to?

Maybe I've been to five weddings or something since I've been in America.

This may be...

indicative of the sort of men that I'm friends with.

So I'm going to caveat that this might not be for all men.

But every wedding I've been to since I've lived in America,

every single groom has cried and it's always been at the same point even if they've done a first look and it's not when they're doing the vows they've held it together when they've done the vows it's when the wife is walking up fiance

is walking down the aisle toward them and i've really tried to think you sat at a wedding sort of observing this thing unfold it kind of happens in slow motion a little bit at least that bit does to me

and I'm watching this guy,

and he's like

swallowing, swallowing a little bit, and his sort of tears are streaming down.

He knows that there's 100 or 200 or 300 people that are watching,

and he's still trying to hold it together, and he's got all of this concern about being embarrassed.

I've been thinking about what it is

that causes men to cry when they see their wife at the end of the aisle, arm in arm with father, maybe.

I think one of them, maybe,

is that it's the

sense of being chosen

that

of all of the options in all of the world,

a lot of the time

guys might feel

on the outside or alone or broken.

There's a big uncertainty about whether or not somebody's going to choose me.

Am I okay?

Am I enough?

Is someone going to actually love me for me?

I think women's value to the world is

they arrive in the world with value, whereas men tend to need to sort of build it up at least a little bit more.

Men are more disposable in that regard, sort of evolutionarily.

You've got twice as many

mothers as you do fathers ancestrally.

It's like 40% of women, 40% of men reproduced, 80% of women reproduced.

So even just like the lottery of, I'm one of the 40%,

it's going well.

But yeah, a guy stood at the end of the aisle crying, I think, is because

someone shows him and he's watching this

very slow walk, depending on how heavy the dress is.

Very slow walk come toward him.

And

yeah, it's beautiful.

But every single time that there's been a wedding, it's been the guy that's cried and not the girl.

I'm sure that she's cried it before and the dad and all the rest of the stuff.

But yeah, that's, I don't know.

It's an interesting thing I've observed.

I think men too, we just take way less time to allow ourselves to feel emotion back to our

typical conversation.

We're always like thinking, progressing, fixing this, that, that.

Women have are much more attuned with actually allowing themselves to feel emotion.

And so how many times do you stop and truly like you have your bows written as this day is you're prepping for it.

There's no distraction.

You're in this moment.

You're staring at your wife.

Took all day to look as beautiful as she could.

You're thinking of your whole relationship.

And then you have this moment like we bicker about this, that, this, that, and those are just all washed away.

And you just remember that, like,

you and this woman have this connection that you're agreeing to be together forever.

That no matter what happens, it's like endless.

And she accepts you for all that you are, regardless of she knows who you are too.

She's seen you at your worst, at your best.

All this shit that you lie to everybody about.

I don't do that.

I would never act like that.

I would never do it.

She's seen all of it.

She knows all of it.

And yet she's choosing to come and be with you forever.

You know, men don't take enough time to think about these things.

So in that moment, there's just, they probably don't even know what's coming up.

And I don't, didn't fully myself when I was crying.

I cried the first look, the vows, and watching the vows.

So there was multiple moments up.

So maybe I need to think about it too.

But I don't think we give ourselves enough time to really reflect and think about how special that is and how important that is to our life.

Well, I think the,

what you're suggesting is that.

women would have maybe processed and alchemized and done like little ups and downs like oh that's a thing.

Oh, that's interesting.

Oh, that's a thing.

Oh, that's interesting.

Whereas you've gone like, nothing, nothing, nothing.

Holy fuck.

Like, you get catapulted to the moon.

Yeah.

Um,

yeah.

I think another thing,

one consideration is being the groom at a wedding is a little bit like being the first fighter in the ring.

That once you've done, you've done your walkout

and now you're just stood there nervously shadow boxing.

And then you've got to wait for the, the other, your opponent or your other half to come down the aisle.

So you're just sort of sat watching.

You're like, you don't, you can't move around or pace.

There's no blowing off of energy.

You're just sort of sat watching this thing unfold.

And you're like, oh, God, the emotions are coming.

Let them out.

Yeah.

What about,

I guess, one of the challenges that, at least it seems,

you

had in part during Olympia prep,

but would have been hidden by the pull toward the final goal, would have been thinking and overthinking and asking questions and

getting caught up in thought, which I think a lot of people can resonate with.

When you can no longer hide those fleeting thoughts and those emotions in the

the pull, the momentum, the drive toward this end goal,

how much more difficult has it been to not

overthink and

not get lost in thought and not deal with self-doubt and self-esteem and stuff like that?

Has that been a challenge?

I think to a fault, I've busied myself with even more

things

with the amount I have going on in my life right now.

And it's hard too as a, like I say, I'm very busy and I'm busy, but I kind of like overstretched that.

Hopefully no one at work was watching this because I spend my mornings slow with my family and my nights low with my family.

So in between, I only have X amount of time to work out and do everything I need for work.

And I travel a lot.

So I try and prioritize as much time as I can of not like

being

busy, essentially.

But those moments are still very like present with your family, but that's not going inward and reflecting and what you're going through.

There's no down time or alone time ever in a day anymore.

And I'm learning to...

I'm going to need to restructure and find that and create a schedule now for doing nothing.

But But that's in conflict with I want to be a good dad, right?

It's finding a balance, you know, and understanding, well, will it make me a better dad to do this?

Will it make me a better husband to be able to work through these things so that I can be even more present and show up as more of myself in more moments, you know, and balancing all that out is just part of the difficulties of life, but it becomes a challenge, you know, and for Courtney, even more than me, it's you get no time off as a mom, you know, it's, it's not a job.

Especially when your child's young and they constantly need to be doing something, you know, it's like they can't go play on them by their own, really.

They're too young for that still.

So I think that's still been a challenge for me.

And even just having enough time to speak with Courtney alone, you know, is without distraction.

Without, hey, we start talking, the baby starts crying or wants to not be here or throwing food or something.

It's like constantly kind of interrupted.

And for me, a huge thing that helped me to process stuff was being able to communicate with her about it.

And just to be able to talk about it and let her see me and work through things like that.

And we've had less time to do that.

So again, the kind of sprint when you first have a children is kind of like chaos.

And then you come out of it and you're like,

okay, we still need to figure out how to have a lone time.

We still need to figure out how to have a lone time together as a couple and prioritize this.

And sometimes it's not possible.

So you are getting through the best you can without it.

But when you get to a point where you can, you need it.

So I think.

I haven't had more time to sit and reflect and thoughts.

If anything, I haven't had enough.

And I have never been someone who doesn't do well when I have too much time to sit and think.

If anything, I usually helps me to think and work through things.

So I'm trying to carve out more time for that.

And, you know, that's part of the reason why I've been a little bit more like,

I think, anxious recently and on edge and just like rolling through and bouncing because I haven't had time to sit back and reflect enough.

Even when we've done podcasts in the past, I know I've been like, okay,

let me like do some time like

journaling.

Fucking if I were to write a, I do this.

I used to do this thing way more where I

like

I would write a chapter of a book about something I'm going through that would never get published anymore.

Just like a biography of myself and just write through something and think about it.

And that would allow me to talk about things a lot better.

I'm like, okay, I'm going to do a podcast.

Like, start reflecting more, go inward.

What are you going to talk about?

What are you feeling recently?

This was coming up.

I was like, okay, I'm going to do that.

Last night I'm lying in bed.

Like, I didn't do it once.

I'm tired.

I'm going to bed.

You know, like, it just, it's part of life how it changes.

And

even within that, it's just finding the moments that you can, you know, and again, like, my relationship is such a big thing.

Courtney literally sent me a text actually last night that almost like put me in tears because I was like going to bed like hard anxious.

And it was like, she just sent something saying, I see you essentially.

And I was like,

I don't need to be fucking reflecting and doing this.

I just need to slow down and like understand it's okay as it is.

So beautiful, man.

I mean, this is my favorite conversation that we've had of all three.

So, you know, maybe, maybe actually writing was

hurting it.

Yeah.

Performance detractor.

Yeah.

You know, when you think about

what's been hidden in some of the fog of chaos over the last year,

what do you think will be the emotions that maybe you weren't letting yourself feel?

Is there anything that you,

when you spend a little bit of time hearing those quieter voices in the back of your mind,

what are the things that have come up that you've probably been a little bit too afraid or too distracted to be able to hear?

Sure, there's a lot but one thing i know i have a pretty like

on and off of a pretty self-deprecating voice inside my head in many ways like i'll beat myself up and then i won't let myself feel beat up like well your life's so good you shouldn't be stressed out like this is hard but like i'm so grateful for this is i shouldn't i shouldn't feel like that so i won't even let myself feel that

shame at your own self-criticism exactly yeah so i guess having empathy for myself within those thoughts and being conscious enough of them to seize them and change them and grow through them rather than just constantly subconsciously beating myself up and saying you're not good enough and you're not allowed, not only that, but you're not allowed to feel not good enough.

But even mundane things of like expressing emotion like gratitude or like complimenting people and stuff sometimes feels hard when you're unaware of it, you know, in a culture where it's like.

You just kind of go inward as a man.

You don't really like go to a bro, a guy, like a friend and be like,

Wow, you said this to me.

I really appreciated when you helped me with that.

Like, you mean so much to me.

Thank you for being in my life.

You know, like those little things like that is even a vulnerable thing that you're like withholding.

Cause like I said earlier, it's like high risk, low reward.

It's unsafe, you know, from whatever it was in your childhood where emotions started to feel unsafe.

Well, you build this idea of, I can't remember who explained it, of the idea when you're young, you either choose to be authentic or accepted.

You usually have to pick between one of the two.

And you will always choose to be accepted because, as a baby, subconscious, of course, but as a baby, if you're not accepted by your parents or whatever, you get kicked at, you die.

Or as a child, even because you can't survive on your own.

So you'll sacrifice authenticity to be accepted by your parents.

If they're feeling like, oh, well, if I'm angry,

they put me in a corner.

Or if I do this, then they're mad at me.

So I'm going to avoid doing the things that upset them, which is my authentic self and what I'm feeling in order to be accepted.

And then that carves out how you live your life forever.

And then you slowly need to peel those layers back over time to get back to your authentic self and even figuring out what that is.

Which is even harder when you have public persona and momentum and bravado and expectation and attachment, sense of identity, all tied up in this thing that's outside, out there, performance.

I must be that.

Yeah.

The greater the self-image, the harder it is to break.

Beauty of

social media influencing in this world too well it's a curse of success as well right that

again

wildly unpopular opinion that nobody wants to hear but

if your self-image is one that isn't sought after and all that admirable or admired might be admirable but but not admired it's significantly easier for you to be flexible with it.

But as soon as you start to get some positive reinforcement from the world,

like you have something to lose.

The person that came number two last year and is going to be number one this year, oh my God, look at the trajectory.

But if you're the champion that fell off and it's the same thing with your identity, it's much harder to let something go when it's proving to you that it is a place that you can actually get, finally, the world.

gives me at least a little bit of validation, gives me at least a little bit of blood.

It's way harder when there's actually something to lose there.

Which is so interesting because I imagine you can agree or relate to this.

I feel like a lot of people have sacrificed authenticity, and not to the point of like these people are fake and they suck.

Like, we're all just struggling to do the best we can.

But there's like the theme of so many people I talk to where even if someone's a dick, you're like, at least they're being themselves.

It's just, I'm just glad they're being authentic because they're an asshole or they're saying some crazy ass shit.

We're like, at least they're being honest.

There's this like weird appreciation recently amongst people I speak to where someone could be the type of personality that is annoying or you don't want to be around, but if you know it's like they're being authentic or they're not doing it to get something out of anybody wanted to prove something, there's that's just the type of respect that comes

at least they're being honest, you know, it's like a justification for things now, because at least that's better than being fake.

So true.

It's so true.

I uh

I wonder why, I mean, maybe it's always been the case, or maybe it's more tuned up now that

the curation of everybody's lives online means

no one feels real,

and

there's already a ton of

justifications for why you should hide your true self, and people do it, and they don't want to show this bit of them, and they're scared.

I mean, it's a good example of that.

It doesn't take much to make me tear up.

I think I've cried on the show.

The Y'll Yulby episode 980 or something.

I think I've cried on the show maybe twice,

maybe two or three times.

And there's tons, tons of times where there's been something that I could have let myself feel.

And I've decided to like,

swerve around it, or laugh it off, or just not fully embrace that thing.

And that's one tiny little part

over and over and over and over again.

This sense of expectation

who am i supposed to be

is is it okay to be that like what are people gonna think maybe they'll laugh at me

it's a

a challenge that only gets sort of deeper i think

because

the more attuned you are to your emotions the

like richer your experience of them.

It's like just I'm sad.

I'm angry.

I'm anxious.

I'm depressed, whatever.

It's like I'm feeling something that's really, really rich and wide.

And that's your thing of you can't feel the good without feeling the bad.

Yeah, it's a it's so interesting because I feel like people would look at me and be like, oh, you're great at that.

And like my career and a lot of it, my relationship, a lot of things started from the first video I put on YouTube of me crying.

But even myself.

Even your marriage.

My marriage, yeah.

Even myself as a man, like, yes, I did that.

But there's, and I've cried other times.

I've cried on stage giving a speech and all these things, but it's like, I have to have gone through something extremely difficult.

And then it's okay that I cried.

I just did something incredible.

And now I'm on stage.

And there's this like extremely masculine show of success.

And now it's okay to cry.

And then in the moments in between, I've done the same thing where I've started to cry in public or something.

It's just you fight it.

You fight it.

And it's like, well, then I don't want to become the guy who just cries all the time.

You know, there's like, as a man, it's like there's a balance of how much you're allowed to cry until you're the guy who cries too much.

And it's just a challenge, I feel like, to be able to authentically let that stuff out and to feel all those emotions as they come up.

And I'm talking about it more than anyone.

And it's because I speak about it because it's a struggle of something I work on.

Did I ever show you the man points essay I wrote about you?

A nine-point essay.

Man points.

Oh, man points.

Men need to accumulate sufficient man points before they can open up about their feelings.

It feels like men have to earn the right to talk about their emotions.

Chris Bumstead can talk about crying and fear and insecurities, but only because he's the greatest bodybuilder of his era and a six-time champion.

Only men who have achieved some degree of success in typical masculine pursuits like status, resources, attractiveness, muscularity and strength can open up about emotions with credibility.

Once they've accumulated sufficient man points, some unspoken video game level unlock happens where emotions are finally allowed.

But opening up before having the requisite man points is interpreted as feeble and weak.

The The world still has many aches around men showing their emotions, but far fewer if it comes from a place of prestige, the one of poverty.

And even the guy who has all of the bits of prestige to permit him to do it feels like he needs to accumulate little credits within that.

Oh, I did something really hard and now I'm okay to be emotional.

It's a tough one.

It's a tough one.

And I.

But again.

A place where I don't feel like that, that home with my wife.

You know, there's no like holding back of tears there because that's the place where I'm safe.

And we talk about, like, oh, like on stage or on social media or on a podcast or on YouTube.

That's like, that's not real life.

That shouldn't even exist.

You know, it's not, a lot of it isn't really serving people.

Your real life is with the people who know you and see you.

And that's where it's important to have relationships with people who you can be safe with.

And that's when it's hard when you don't even have that, in my opinion.

There's not anywhere on the planet.

If you don't even have anyone, which I feel like

I hope most people, some people don't, of course.

I think some people people do.

And are you?

I think it's an increasing number of people who don't.

Yeah.

I think it is.

And I think it's something increased that's increasingly needed and decreasingly had.

Yeah.

I think there's a calm of

people

being so afraid to earn it, too.

Like to do the things to build the relationship, to keep up and to check in with and to let them cry with you to then build a strong enough, safe enough relationship.

Allow them to be a burden so you can be a burden.

Exactly.

Don't keep score about who was a burden.

Yeah.

It doesn't need need to be even.

Yeah.

It's crazy.

Dude, I love you.

I

appreciate very much the impact that you've had on me and everybody else as well.

So

I look forward to seeing what comes next.

And

yeah, I really, really hope that you don't stop talking about the stuff that you do because I think you've got more now to actually add to the world than you did when you were on stage.

Well, I appreciate that and hoping to discover that myself.

And life does is changing very fast.

So

I hope so.

And some of my greatest moments I've had with people are talking about my podcast with you and what I've shared here.

So I appreciate the opportunity to do this for a third time and

hopefully have a fourth.

I'd love to.

Chris Bum said, ladies and gentlemen.

I get asked all the time for book suggestions.

People want to get into reading fiction or non-fiction or real-life stories.

And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read.

These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found, and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.

And it's completely free, and you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com/slash books.

That's chriswillx.com/slash books.