Ep. #391: How Jake Gained 20 Pounds of Muscle on My Bigger Leaner Stronger Program

Jake: I went from being a guy that was doing the workouts that were on bodybuilding. com and having no idea what a calorie was or what a carbohydrate really was or any of that stuff to being an informed individual. People come to me now all the time asking me for advice on how to lose weight or how to build muscle.

Mike: Hello. Welcome to the muscle life podcast. I’m your host, Michael Matthews. And in this episode, I interview Jake, who is a 32 year old dude who used my Bigger, Leaner, Stronger program. He read the book and then did the program to completely transform his physique. And I wanted to get him on the show to share his journey.

And in the interview, he talks about what he was up to before finding me in my work and how it was going and then how things started to change after he. Read the book and read articles and listened to podcasts and started implementing all the advice and the bigger picture looks like this. When he first found BLS about six years ago, he was somewhere around 15, 16 percent body fat and 155 pounds and he wasn’t brand new to weightlifting either.

He had been lifting for a while. For a bit. I don’t remember exactly how much because I’m recording this intro about a week after recording the interview, but he was not a complete newbie. And now he’s about 9 percent body fat at close to 170 pounds. And he has also gained a ton of strength. So that’s pretty impressive.

And a transformation like that, however, is not without its struggles. Jake ran into a number of roadblocks along the way that most of us can relate to, including issues with his workout. Planning and scheduling his meal, scheduling, dealing with hunger and cravings while cutting and dietary temptations and more.

And in this chat, Jake shares what has most helped him navigate these barriers skillfully and prevent them from derailing his progress. So if you like listening to motivational stories about how other people have changed their life, Bodies and lives. And if you like to also glean little tips and tricks that might help you in your own journey, this episode is for you.

This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead, I’m just going to quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically, my one on one coaching service. So the long story short here is this is the personal coaching service that I wish I had when I started in the gym many years ago.

Every diet and training program that we create for clients is 100 percent custom. We provide daily workout logs and do weekly accountability calls. Our clients get priority email service and discounts on supplements and the list goes on and on. Furthermore, my team and I have also worked with hundreds of people of all ages, circumstances, and needs and goals.

So no matter how tricky you might think your situation is, I promise you, we can figure out how to get you results. If I have piqued your interest and you want to learn more, then head on over to www. muscleforlife. com forward slash coaching and schedule your free consultation call. Now, I’ll tell you, there’s usually a wait list and new slots fill up very quickly.

So if you’re interested at all, don’t wait. Go schedule your call now. All righty. That is enough shameless plugging for now. At least let’s get to the show. Jake, thanks for taking the time to come on my podcast. 

Jake: Not a problem. Thanks for having me, man. 

Mike: Yeah. So as we were just talking about before we started here and as is normal with the podcast, These episodes is the ideas.

I just want to have an open ended kind of loosely structured conversation with you about where you were at, mostly fitness wise, obviously, before finding me in my work, what was working for you, what was not working for you? How did you find me and my stuff and how have things gone since? Then, and maybe if we want to start with appealing just snapshot of before and after, I actually didn’t even look.

So is this did you go through the coaching or is this just a straight, like bigger than you’re stronger? 

Jake: No, I never did the coaching. You guys actually didn’t start. I don’t think you started doing that until I was probably already maybe a couple of years into BLS. I feel like I started doing BLS in the spring of 2014, I believe it was.

Prior to that, the only experience I had my first experience with weights ever was my senior year of high school. I took a weightlifting course because it was required. And so like prior to that, I had no experience whatsoever. And we did lots of cleans, lots of flat benching and that sort of stuff, running the bleachers.

They basically trained us like we were football players. I didn’t touch a weight again until 2011. I joined the infamous planet fitness at the time. It seemed like a pretty good deal is 10 bucks a month or whatever, but they had, 

Mike: did they kick you out for deadlifting? 

Jake: I remember the alarm being on the wall.

And I always just thought that was a fixture, like something that was like, ha, like the lunk alarm. But I went on YouTube at some point and saw people setting them off at other locations. I was like, Oh wow. It actually does. It is a thing. I just thought it was like, 

Mike: yeah, it’s an interesting marketing concept.

When I first heard about it. It sounded silly to me that I didn’t know the whole concept. I think the price is probably one of the big driving points of why it’s been successful because it’s so cheap, but it’s interesting. I wonder how much all the other stuff has contributed. I guess it can be summarized what it’s supposed to be like a quote unquote judgment free type of zone or something, or are they like give out pizza and stuff?

Yeah. 

Jake: Yeah. I always think that. Thought that was the weirdest thing too. And I honestly, I thought it was just brilliant marketing. Like when the first time I heard about that, that maybe it’s once a month or something, they’ll bring in bagels or pizza or something. And I’m like, wow. So that’s how they keep them coming back.

I see. 

Mike: Yeah. That plus the cheap price I could see just from having worked with a lot of people I can understand, especially it seems women can be intimidated in particular in the beginning, getting into a gym and especially if they’re not in shape, but the same thing for guys, but probably more so than women, because, Probably just basic inherent psychological differences between men and women.

And then inevitably though, women realize once they get rolling that people don’t care. Even the guys are more into themselves than anybody else. And most of the people in the gym are there for the same reason. They’re there to just get better, to get into better shape. They’re not there to snicker about.

Everyone else and judge everyone else around them, but I can see from a psychological perspective, obviously how that marketing angle could be a lure, but I wonder if planet fitness would work if it were more expensive. You know what I mean? Like how much does all that other stuff really contribute? I don’t know.

Jake: I don’t yeah, I don’t think that it would be as much of a thing. Honestly, the price is definitely, I always thought it was their big selling point because that was why I joined and I just joined on my own and then I found out, I realized a bunch of guys that I was in school with at the time were also going there.

So like I would go and meet them there. And so this was 2011. So really for the first couple of years of, I was going to the gym for the first time in my life. I was in like my early twenties doing lots of cardio. I would start off by doing like maybe the fastest mile I could pull off and then maybe do 20 minutes of like elliptical cardio.

And then eventually I would convince myself to start doing machine work. If you were to ever walk into one of these places, you would see like how ridiculous the free weight section is. There’s like a flat bench. Dumbbells that go to like maybe 75 pounds a bunch of Smith machines, that sort of stuff, a very minimal set up when it comes to the weights 

Mike: like a hotel gym, 

Jake: basically.

Yeah. And with slightly more equipment. So I started doing like machine work, like the lap pull down station Oh, that makes sense. You sit on the thing and you pull the thing down. So I started making I made some newbie gains with really no idea what I was doing just lots of Like lat pull downs and doing like the row machine.

I put a little bit of size on like my arms and my shoulders and stuff, but otherwise just, I’m a very ectomorphic frame. I’m really. Not built like a weightlifter. My body fights me every step of the way. Like I’m really skinny. Other, if I were to quit lifting, I would just be a really skinny guy.

Mike: Yeah. Before you started lifting, what were your numbers like? How tall were you or are you? And what did you weigh? 

Jake: I’m somewhere between five 11 and six foot pretty average height. I. Probably weighed, I would say somewhere in like the one 50s, maybe even one 60. 

Mike: That was like me. I’m six one ish, whatever, probably the, I don’t think I grew since I was 18.

And when I started lifting, I was 155 pounds. To be fair, my weight has always been strangely low about 10 pounds. I’ve always been about 10 pounds lighter than people would probably guess me. But still, even if you give me half that and you say, all right, I was like a, six foot one ish dude, 160 pounds, not alarmingly skinny, but just a skinny dude, 

Jake: mhm. Yeah. So I grew up child of the eighties and the nineties, so grew up, watching like Schwarzenegger and Stallone movies and those types of things. And I always wanted growing up, I was just a skinny guy to the point where I even got made fun of, as a kid and I was just wanted like bigger arms and just all the things that most guys want.

I got into it just really out of Pure vanity purposes at first, and I did put a little bit of size on. I basically just toned up, I think is how I would describe it, somewhere in the one fifties still not a great diet, like not the worst diet, but not really good either. Like I drank beer on the weekends and stuff, but not a binge drink or anything like that, just calories are all over the place.

And I think probably what kept me somewhat lean was just, I’ve never been a big eater. And just only eating out of necessity. I did a lot of the same things I’ve heard you talk about. You go to the vitamin shop and you just, you buy the pre workout and you buy the protein powder and all this stuff that you think is going to change your life, 

Mike: the testosterone boosters and all that shit.

Jake: Yeah. Yeah. So it took a bunch of that crap. It’s all lackluster results kept at it and at the time and in 2012 I was actually a traveling nuclear contractor. So I was traveling around the country working in nuclear power for a few years. Whenever I got somewhere, I would join a gym if nothing else, just to stay active and to do stuff.

Because when I was in that industry, I was seeing the most obesity I’d ever seen anywhere. I saw some really fat out of shape people in that job. Yeah. From years, I think of just living on the road, living just not only sedentarily, but also just like with a really shit diet and a lot of these people are alcoholics and just, eating God knows what every day.

So it was during that point that I started doing more research, started trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. And then in the spring of 2014, after a few years of just bullshitting my way through it, I think I discovered you I think you had done an interview with Gregor Gallagher, one of those guys I saw it was like, and you came up on YouTube and I remember watching some of those.

And then I saw some of your own video. I think you had just started doing your podcast. So I started listening to some of your episodes early on. I saw BLS like on Amazon, it was like 12 bucks or something. I was like if nothing else is, it’s worth checking out. And right about that same time, I had the space at my house.

So I installed, I bought and installed a home gym. One of those, like the bench set that is adjustable with the squat rack thing on the back, I bought that. And like a barbell off of a guy on Craigslist got a few hundred pounds in weights. I read BLS like. I don’t know, probably in a week or two and started immediately just implementing the, not only the nutritional stuff, basically rewiring my brain as to how to lift, because it was completely alien to everything I’d done up to that point, 

Mike: yeah, we were probably in similar. It sounds like my story. It sounds like I’m telling my own story. 

Jake: Yeah. Yeah. Just so many other people, like less volume. More compound lifting. I had a little bit of experience doing deadlifts from years before. I’m working out with an old friend of mine.

He had taught me how to deadlift, but I was still not very comfortable with it. And the idea of it just terrified me, but really taking the time to teach myself how to deadlift and squat and how to do bench pressing, like real weight that was to me was intimidating because I was training at home.

I didn’t have a training partner or anything. I had to basically retrain myself on how to work out. So it was an interesting time, but within that time between, I’d say the spring of 2014 and about the next year, it was like I had just was reborn basically like I, my, my results took off 

Mike: your second round of newbie games almost.

Jake: Yeah, basically saw very fast results. Filled out in a big way. And the first year, I think I wasn’t even really doing a bulk. I was still just eating like at a maintenance level, trying to stay fairly lean. I lost, actually lost weight, leaned out while gaining some size. The following winter, I believe was when I did my first like real bulk cycle.

Cause I was actually still traveling, working on the road during that time. I had to get really creative with my meals. 

Mike: How did you make that work? What were some of the little tips you can share with people who travel? It’s a question I get fairly often. 

Jake: Yeah it was it depends. Like I, it was gross.

At one point I remember I was staying in some hotel rooms and I remembered I would go and buy like a George Foreman and you would just. You maybe cook like your chicken breast or whatever. Trying to do that stuff got exhausting. I quit doing this job a few years ago. In the last place that I stayed, what I did was I just stayed in a suite.

I found a cool like little old school hotel and suites type place that had a kitchenette. Just got a, asked for a pot and a pan. And I would just go to the store and just just cook my own meals. Make a, yeah, like meal prep, like a, or some version of that. Yeah. Yeah. Like maybe buy like rice and like the stuff to make vegetables or a salad or whatever.

And they just buy some lean proteins to last me for a handful of days. And then protein powder. 

Mike: Sometimes I’ll grab rotisserie chicken because then you don’t have to cook it. It’s already cooked. If you can just keep it cool. 

Jake: Yeah. I’ve done that too. And then do that. And then I don’t, I’m not a big fan of deli meats, but I’ve done that too.

And then stick to like that and like protein powder, try to keep carbs Easy as I can. I would buy like cliff bars or Quest bars just as something else to munch on. The last outage that I did was in Washington State, and it was actually, which it was funny, I was actually at a Gold’s Gym. They had a deadlift station and everything, and I actually had the guy come up, and this was like during my first bulk, so I was printing it.

I was in it pretty hard. And I had the manager actually come over and tell me I was deadlifting too loud. You’re like, what the fuck are you talking about? What do you have a platform 

Mike: for? 

Jake: Yeah. I was like, is that a goal? And it was like, come on, man. There’s one place and I’m not like some jabroni that’s like yelling out or anything like that.

I think I was just maybe slamming the place too hard was not the last gym. I was told I couldn’t deadlift in. 

Mike: I understand there’s a guy who deadlifts in my gym, who makes it a point to always end his sets by just dropping the weight at the top. Like he doesn’t even try to lower it down to maybe his knees.

That is a little bit unnecessary. I understand. I don’t care what gym it is. It’s just, yeah, it’s just annoying. Dude, come on. And this guy knows better. He’s actually pretty strong. What the fuck are you doing? 

Jake: Yeah, it’s pretty obnoxious and it’s those moments where you wish there was like a long alarm that would go off because it’d be hilarious to see.

So this was like spring of 2015, got out of that job. I fulfilled my contract with my company, decided it wasn’t for me, I wasn’t going to continue doing it. And about that time, I re enrolled in school. Went after I got my first degree in engineering, I’m doing that. So I started going after a second degree.

I wanted it to be in health and wellness. Cause that was what I was into with doing all this stuff. So I started going after a bachelor’s in health sciences. By the time I enrolled and I started taking these classes, I was just cruising through them because a lot of this information I had already.

I had already learned from reading all of your books and watching your Q and A’s. I was already a nerd cruising through PubMed and other like other websites that were open to the public. I was like reading up on research studies, all about nutrition and diet.

And the workouts and stuff. So within the span of a few years, I went from being a guy that was doing the workouts that were on bodybuilding. com and not having no idea what a calorie was or what a carbohydrate really was or any of that stuff to being an informed individual who people come to me now all the time asking me for advice or.

On how to lose weight or how to build muscle. And I always tell them unequivocally, I say you could sit down with me and listen to me ramble for two hours, or I could just tell you to buy this guy’s book. 

Mike: I hear that often where it’s good for both parties because you don’t have to then take your time.

Not, not that you wouldn’t mind, but We all have a lot of things that are pulling for our time. So you’d be like, honestly, this is it. Just read this. And then it asked me, let me know if you have any questions, but this is better for me in that I really just be explaining to you in my own words, what is in this book and then for you, it’s better because of course, inevitably they’re going to get, especially with the new third edition that’s coming out when we’re done here.

I’ll, if you want, I’ll send you a copy of it. It’s almost, it’s. Actually on Amazon, I think the paperback now is fully transitioned. So anybody buying on Amazon now, it still shows the second edition. We’re working with Amazon to get the cover updated and the look inside update and whatever, but they’re actually need to get the third edition and the digital will be out in the next month or so.

Anyways, that in particular, there’s just so much information in there. They’re going to learn a lot more reading the book than you would even explain to them, you know what I 

Jake: mean? Yeah, exactly. It really is all encompassing. I purchased the first and the second editions, and by this point I’ve given both away to just people that were looking to change their lives with workouts or whatever, or you saw what I was doing and had just a barrage of questions that I said, here, just Read this at your own pace, come to me if you have questions and I can likely help you out.

But I, I always tell people like this was my blueprint. This was what got me on the path to where I am now. I still have your copy of because at one point, at some point I started doing like beyond bigger, leaner, stronger as well. I started incorporating elements of powerlifting and higher volume sets and that sort of stuff.

Yeah. At this point, I’m all over the map with my training, but I still incorporate those same principles. I’m mostly still doing the kind of middle of the road volume, the four to six reps set. Yeah. Stuff is still the foundation of my lifting within doing compound lifts. 

Mike: Yeah, same. It’s been the same for me also because I am making some changes.

They’re minor changes, but I figured why not? Cause I felt like I could improve on like the 3. 0 programming versus the 2. 0. So I’ve been just running something very similar to that, but I’m also, I’m working currently on a second edition of beyond bigger, leaner, stronger, be tweaking the programming there as well.

So I’ll be changing my training soon. And if you’ll be good timing too, because I started Cycling my calories again, just so I can be in a surplus more often than not. It just makes a difference in your training, especially if I’m going to be like upping the volume and upping the intensity, just making it a bit more difficult than having the extra calories helps.

But if you look around, look at some of the other people I have in my podcast, look at how a guy like Eric Helms trains, for example, I know he likes a bit more of the higher rep stuff and a bit more higher volume. But if you listen to the principles that he still follows now is a. About as advanced as he’s going to get.

natural bodybuilder, like who competes, who I actually truly do believe is natural. I don’t think there’s any evidence of drug use in his case. And, or if you listen to even some of the more recent writings and ravings of Lyle, I guess him and some other guy got into something on volume Israel, I think him and Israel got into something on volume where I guess they agreed.

And then it diverged into probably quibbling over minor differences of opinion, but It’s just 10 to 20 hard sets per week per major muscle group. Like there you go. That’s it. And Lyle was ripping apart some new research from Schoenfeld actually that suggested that there’s just like a linear relationship between volume and muscle growth.

And so then 40 heavy sets per major muscle group per week would just be way better than 10 to 20. And Lyle. heavily disagrees. And I was listening to a interview where he was explaining why, but anyway, the point is Krieger also recommends 10 to 20 for intermediate 10 to 20 heavy sets per week. He says you can go a bit higher than that if you’re advanced and how much of a difference that’s going to make is probably negligible, honestly.

But you have heavy weightlifting, whether we’re talking 75 or 85 percent of one rep max, there’s a fundamental you start getting into the 20, 30 plus rep stuff. I don’t know. You can do it for fun, but you’re not gonna make much progress if you make that your emphasis. The compound exercises are key.

Of course isolation exercises are useful for multiple reasons, but as a natural weightlifter, we really should be focusing majority of our efforts on compound exercises. That doesn’t necessarily mean only the squat deadlift bench press, but there are many other compound exercises, 10 to 20 hard sets per major muscle group per week.

Double progression is still a great model. I still use it myself, even If you have some linear progression worked in, so like this is going to be something I’m working into the second edition of beyond bigger than you’re stronger. I’m going to stick to double progression where you and for everybody listening, if you’re not familiar with that, it’s what I recommend in bigger than you’re stronger and thinner than you’re stronger.

It’s that simple system where you’re working in a rep range. And when you hit the target rep, Whether it’s six or eight or 10 or whatever, for a certain number of sets, you add weight to the bar and you work with that new weight until you can hit the rep target and so forth. So that’s double progression because you’re progressing in your reps and then progressing in your weight.

So you can have double progression worked into a training block just like that. And then you can also have linear progression and it doesn’t have to be, I actually prefer, and this is what I’m going to be doing with beyond bigger, linear, stronger. I prefer. Using when you’re, when you have double progression like that, using the linear progression to add volume and volume in the way of just hard sets.

So for example, you might be starting your training block with let’s just say a press workout of nine heavy sets. Let’s just say that’s what it is. Nine or 10 heavy sets in your press workout. And then in the end of your training block and throughout you’re using double progression. So you’re trying to get stronger.

You’re trying to gain reps, add weight to the bar, even if it’s gaining two reps in a training block. and advanced weightlifter. Sometimes that’s all you get. By the end of that training block though, you might be doing an additional three. So let’s say it was nine, you started with, or it’s 10, you might be doing 12 or 13 hard sets in that workout at the end of the training block, deload, start over again.

There are the fundamentals really. And that’s all we need. Plus maybe a couple other peripheral things to achieve. 95 percent of our genetic potential really or all, or, as much as we’re ever going to achieve. So why make it more complicated than it needs to be? 

Jake: I’ve actually referenced that same, or if it’s not that exact same meta analysis by Schoenfeld, I’ve referenced one of his other ones in a paper that I wrote when I was in school, he’s been an authority on debunking the.

You have to do nothing but heavy lifting in order to gain size and strength. So I am familiar with his platform there. There’s always going to be new as you’re aware, there’s always going to be new research going on. There’s a new study supposedly debunking what we believe is true.

But like you were saying, it’s with progressive overload and what we know about sets and volumes and RPE and everything the foundation is there. 

Mike: And that frequency doesn’t matter that much. That’s well established at this point. Training a major muscle group twice a week is maybe a little bit better than once.

But if you’re hitting your volume, that’s going to be most of what matters. And then also, if you are doing a lot of compound weightlifting, that is probably going to be happening inevitably. You might be doing, let’s say you’re doing some regular benching early in the week. And then later in the week, you’re doing some close grip benching because you want to emphasize your triceps some more, your pecs just got trained twice that, that that’s not just tricep volume, 

Jake: yeah. And I’ve come to find this with my training in the last two years, especially I’ve noticed that you’re doing something similar to that. And I was just branching out on my own, not necessarily after a few years of doing like the, either the four or the five day split.

Of BLS. I started doing my own thing where I was switching things up. Like maybe today I’ll combine like shoulders and triceps and I’ll make that my push workout. And then later on in the week, I’ll add in like the training, the lateral deltoids or whatever. And and I 

Mike: that’s what I’m doing.

Jake: Yeah. And so like you, you find ways to just work your volume in there. And it also for me made it fun again rather than grueling through the same workout, weekend and week out for years, you can still even be doing the same exercises, but maybe you’re just switching them up a little bit and not feel like you’re killing yourself in the process.

Mike: Yeah, totally. That’s some of the changes that I made in the 3. 0 programming, the workouts are similar. But one, I’ve changed the names just to actually more accurately reflect. So instead of calling it a back day called a poll day, because there’s a perception that, Oh, it’s back. Oh, it’s just some body parts, split body parts, splits are trash.

And that’s not even true. Actually, body parts are not trash. You actually do quite well on a pure body part split. If it’s programmed properly. 

Jake: Oh yeah. I know I did. I can say anecdotally that they absolutely work. 

Mike: Yeah. And now we know a bit more why, honestly, because of the research that has come out in the last four to five years and the good analysis of that research and the practical implications of that research.

So I’ve renamed the workouts to more accurately reflect what they are, but then also redistributed some of the volume for some of the muscle groups combined things a little bit differently, just based on a lot of feedback that I’ve gotten from people over the years and my own experience. So I’m pretty happy with.

I feel it’s pretty optimal for somebody who is new to this style of training. It’s the best I can do for that person right now, basically. 

Jake: Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve had people try to do the workouts that I do and come to me saying they get quickly burned out or whatever. I say just switch things up. What works for me might not necessarily work for you.

And this kind of training can Burn the average person out, especially if you’re someone that already works a full time job, or you have a wife and kids and you just have lots of going on already. You can quickly tire yourself out. Yeah, I think that switching the workout, tweaking the volume here and there and adding things in.

It’s not only a way to keep things fun, but also a way to keep the ball rolling, keep progressing in some kind of way. 

Mike: Yeah. And where are you at now? Physique wise? Just for people wondering, so you started this journey in somewhere in the mid one fifties, I guess somewhere around what 14 percent body fat or so, give or take.

And then where are you at now? 

Jake: Yeah. So very ectomorphic biotype in the last handful of years, I’ve done two proper, like bulk and cut cycles. The first one I was bulking like what I mentioned earlier when I was still on the road traveling a lot. I was probably on some of those days, still more at a maintenance level.

My calories were still tapered to the lower end, like in a slight surplus on those days. Got back home. I remember that first cut, I went pretty hard on it. I was doing fasted training using, I think you would just come out with like forge. So I was like using Phoenix and forge trying to quickly burn the fat, which I did.

During that time, I was walking around in like the mid one seventies and I would cut and maybe get down to like around one seventy or like the high one sixties and then the following year I did a full, I went really hard on my bulk, not like in a the so called dirty bulk kind of way. I didn’t, I wasn’t eating like frozen pizzas for every meal or anything, but I was really going hard on like my carbohydrate intake eating probably.

3, 500 calories plus a day. That’s good. Standard. Yeah. But training, four to five days a week hitting, like I’ve got my highest numbers during that point. And then the following spring slash summer, I cut down again. Got back down to the one seventies and during this entire time, like this was several years where I was also doing like intermittent fasting most of the time.

And I was using like a workout app, tracking all my calories, really watching every little thing that I was doing. And these days I haven’t tracked a calorie or a macro nutrient and probably about two years now. And right now I’m walking around, around 165 and I’m probably the leanest and most muscular I’ve ever been.

And that’s just basically eating intuitively and just lifting about four days a week. Sometimes five, depending on my schedule. And I’m not tracking anything anymore. I still track my workouts. I use your app for every workout. I haven’t actually used like a calorie tracking app in a couple of years. 

Mike: And your body fat is it looks probably around 8 percent or so.

Thank you. 

Jake: I’d say it’s probably about seven, 8%. Yeah. I’ve got like abdominal veins, like lower abdominal veins that like I’ve never had otherwise. Like I used to have just like one that was there and if maybe I went too hard on a meal or something, it would go away. And a day or two later it would come back.

But now I’ve got like a whole bunch of them. And I was like, where did those come from? It was like this last year, I started just leaning out and people were like, what are you doing differently? I’m like, honestly, I. I cut the desserts at night. I don’t have the late night sweet tooth that I had for a while.

I’m like you and that I’m robotic and that I eat pretty much the same meal like every day. I think that tends to help and keep things simple. Yep. 

Mike: Yep. And so if you do that math, that’s pretty good. That’s like somewhere around 20 pounds of muscle gain and you came into it with weightlifting experience and you could have gained more, obviously, if you would have maybe had another bulk and cut cycle.

And I understand, like there’s a point where. You just, you’re happy with your physique and you just like staying lean. And I’ve been there for, I was surprised actually, I was looking back at my Instagram. I was like, holy shit, I’ve been maintaining for five years, I think four years.

Something that I’m curious about is, so I did that for a while. stayed around the same body fat is what you’re talking about, where you have some ab veins. And for me, I’m not a very vascular person to get like veins going up into the second set of abs. I need to be very lean. I need to be like photo shoot, ridiculous lean.

And that I’ve tried to maintain. It’s just not sustainable period. Like it’s just not. 

Jake: Yeah. And I think I tried that like my first year, like the first time I cut, I wanted to get down to that 6 percent and I quickly realized I was like, this is just not, I’m not going to be able to like, enjoy. Myself very much.

If I’m doing this, I’m, my sleep is going to suck. My lifts are probably not going to be that great. So I’m happy where I’m at now. I’m pretty happy with it. I’m not the most vascular guy either, but even when I creep up into the higher body fat percentages, like I still have bicep veins and I’ve always had really vascular forearms for some reason, even before I was lifting, people were like, what the fuck do you do to make your arms look like that?

I’m like, I don’t know. It’s just genetics, that’s funny. I would trade them for a set of cabs any day of the week. 

Mike: You’re speaking my language. But yeah, no, I’ve noticed though, I’ll be curious how it is for you. So I stayed pretty lean for quite some time. And I would say probably hovering around 8%.

Sometimes I’d go a little bit higher, but I’d say more often to go a little bit lower just because I’d be like, Oh, just. I’ll go to deficit for a month and lose a couple pounds of fat just cause it’ll look cool. So now this is the first time I mentioned earlier that I’m cycling my calories, which means that realistically week to week, I’m going to be in a small surplus.

It probably is not going to be enough to really notice that much in the way of fat gain, regardless of how long I do it. But this will be the first time. Cause like you for a while, I was eating intuitively. I tend to eat the same things. So I know More or less what I’m eating, like at any time, someone could ask me, how many calories are you eating every day?

And I could say, eh, it’s around here and then go do it in Excel and be within a couple of, at least within a hundred, 200 calories, like close enough, but this is the first time in a while that I’ve deliberately increased my calories to be in a surplus several days per week. And the reason why I actually did it is although I like being lean, you know how it is.

You get lean and you just want to stay that way. It’s just that there’s a psychological. Appeal to it. There just is. It is what it is, right? And then there’s also you could say, maybe it could be considered part of my job, although it’s not entirely necessary to be maybe as lean as I’ve generally been.

But I’ve noticed that. So it was just Very hard to make any real progress in my training, and I would make some time, it just, there would only be like little pockets where, I don’t know, everything would align, and I would actually be able to get that extra rep or two, and and it just, it’s just the RPE of it though, it just was always higher.

Like I just remember thinking back to have a bit higher body fat percentages, maybe 12, 13%. And which means that I was also eating quite a bit more food, like my average daily calorie intake at maybe 3000 calories and doing a bit of, I was a bit extra, I was a bit more active too. I was doing a little bit of extra cardio, but not by much.

Whereas to maintain that lower. Level of body fat. My intake is probably closer to 2700 and I was a little bit less active probably because I don’t know. Also life interjected itself. I had one kid and then I had two kids and then, businesses grow more stress there and more stress in other ways and more financial pressures.

And my sleep for the last couple of years has been not as good as it once was. Sometimes it’s been bad. Sometimes it’s been good. Sometimes it’s just been okay. So all of those factors combined to. Where I was just stuck in the gym. I still enjoyed my workouts cause I like working out, but I missed feeling like I could progress.

And the last couple of weeks I’ve been cycling my calories and it’s funny just how big of a difference it makes immediately. It’s such bullshit. Drugs are such bullshit in that you can go through all that and you have to, especially in our position, you have to do everything right in terms of if you’re going to stay natural in terms of nutrition, sleep.

Training programming, or you just take drugs and none of this shit matters. You just quote unquote, eyeball your macros. Depending on the drugs you’re taking, you just don’t need as much sleep period. And your training programming is just, you destroy yourself as much as you can because you can literally recover from anything and you look twice as good.

And then one day everything breaks and you die from one of many different things. Like your heart explodes or your body turns into cancer or something. So 

Jake: there is a, I’ve seen the long list of lifters that have died as a result of steroid use, like on T Nation. It is as mind blowing when you see that list of names.

This is shocking. I never thought Rich Piana would be, I always Thought he was natural . 

Mike: Yeah. That’s what, that’s to his credit, he never claimed to be natural, so at least there’s that. It would be hilarious if he did, but at least he was op At least he was open about it.

Jake: I loved how open and honest and also how hilarious he was about his drug use. But yeah, I’ve had people come to me thinking I was on drugs and not that I really even, I don’t think I really look like, I don’t really have the physique of a guy that would do steroids really. But people could be like, come on man, tell me the real secret.

I’m like, dude, I, my secret is I go at it with a monastic. Obsession and I hit it hard and that’s really all there is to it I work my ass off and I guess it shows I don’t know There are certainly people that look better, but I work hard for what i’ve got

Mike: Hey quickly before we carry on if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. If you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. 

Jake: I have to say that discovering like your work and it’s segwaying into, and even though it sounds cliche, turning it into a lifestyle, my work ethic was suddenly physicality.

And that really segwayed into everything else I was doing because while I was a student, I became, you were also the first person that introduced me to the Amazon’s KDP system. And just this past summer, I became a published author as a result. Oh, nice. What’s the book? It’s called Marooned, M A R O N E D.

It’s on Amazon. It’s like a crime noir thriller that I wrote over. I wrote it while I was a student. Actually, I was moonlighting as a writer at night. Like when I would get home from work and get done with my schoolwork, I was doing that in my free time. It started off just as this one thing.

Suddenly it’s like, all right, that’s 50 pages. Oh, or down now it’s a hundred pages. And now it’s like, all right, now I’ve just got this thing inside me and I need to get it out. So I put it out and published it. It’s still sales or like lackluster or whatever, but I think I’m going to take a course and that’s available online and learn how to better market myself.

I’m working on a second one now and create a website and all that stuff and try to see if I can turn it into if nothing else, just something aside from just a hobby that I enjoy doing, maybe I can make some kind of supplementary and come off of it. 

Mike: Yeah, that’s cool. I was, my original interest in writing was fiction and something I’ll do in my next life.

I don’t want to give it any time right now. I actually was working on a project a bit, but so I was waking up at five to work on it before I go to the gym and it was fine. I was making progress. And at that time I was going to the gym fairly early. So I had about an hour, maybe an hour and a half max to work on it.

And, I was chipping away, but one, it was to actually get it done. It was just going to the runway because I had such a small amount of time to give it. And that wasn’t, I think it was most days I wasn’t, I would usually not work anything else during that time. The runway was very long. And two, if I look, I, when I was looking at it, I was like, okay, so this really is just a hobby.

I do believe that if I apply myself to writing stories, I can eventually get there and do a good job and have some sort of success at it. I don’t know if it would be anything relative to maybe the success I’ve had as a health and fitness author, but that’s not even what it’d be about. Like you said, it’s more something I just enjoy doing.

So who cares one way or the other, but two, if I look at, okay, I have. A three to five year plan for all of my fitness stuff and some big milestones that I want to reach. It just made more sense to me to really focus on that because that time is still, that’s, I can get a lot of other stuff done in an extra hour and a half per day.

And so I put it on hold and I’ll pick it up though again, I think in the next three to five years. If I can hit some targets that I want to hit, I would then be okay with carving out maybe a bit more time, something closer to probably 15 or 20 hours a week to work on stuff like that, because that’s what it’s going to take if I’m going to go anywhere with it.

So that’s cool. You’re doing it though. I like that. 

Jake: Yeah. And the first one, it took me collectively like two years to get through it. I started it just as a scene that I started writing the opening scene. I was like just because it was an idea that I had, because I had written previous other little things here and there, and I’ve always enjoyed writing too.

And then I just stuck with it and it took me collectively two years to get through it because I was, it was simultaneously while I was in school and working a job and everything. So there were moments where I wouldn’t touch it for like maybe weeks or maybe even a couple of months at a time, because I literally had too much on my plate.

Already. So it took a while to get through it. But then once I started winding down on it, I finally just basically had a month or so of just long days of where I would include it with everything else that I had going on and I plowed through it and now that I’m done with school, I can dedicate a bit more time to this next one and also try to figure out the marketing side of things better, which is definitely not my specialty.

I’ve got a lot to learn there. 

Mike: Yeah, you want to get good at that because Amazon is a highly competitive any niche that you’re going to any genre you’re going to write in, if it has any sort of readership, it’s going to be very competitive. And for example, I pulled it up on Amazon, you should get a new cover done.

Cause the covers are okay, but people judge books by their cover and the better the cover is, the better it’s going to sell. And I’m not familiar with the genre. Like I don’t read that these types of books, but you want to make sure also that your cover is in line with genre expectations. So people can immediately, cause what you want is you want a person who reads the type of book that this is to see.

And also remember on the cover that most people are seeing it just as the thumbnail. Some people make the mistake. This is a mainstream legacy. Publishers make this mistake where they make a cover that looks great or looks good in a full size, but it looks like shit when you shrink it down to a thumbnail, or it’s just too much going on.

Sometimes you can’t even read the author’s name, or sometimes it’s just the design elements look really messy when they get crunched down into a thumbnail. So you have to think with the priority. Is having a cover that is striking as a thumbnail. Cause that’s how most people are going to see it. The immediate things you could do would be improve the cover, improve your description that you should use that you get a lot more space than that.

And you can look at some of the other I can send you after some people who do this shit really well. It’s not that it’s complicated. It’s just like literally just copy what these other people are doing. So you can improve the product description. And you should start using their advertising platform.

Jake: Yeah, I’ve used it a little bit, with lackluster results. There’s a guy named Mark Dawson, who at this point he offers a I think it’s called self publishing formula 101. Yeah. He’s, I think he’s pretty much become like a millionaire, but he’s written a ton of books at this point. I think I’m going to take his course and the cover.

I love that cover, but yeah, it’s actually commissioned an artist who I really admire to do that for me because he’s done like a lot of album covers that I like. So I had that like personally done for me, which was awesome, but. I’ve come to find that yet covers are, they really do make or break you.

Mike: Yeah. There are some crazy case studies out there of how big of a difference just changing a cover can make. It can literally double or triple sales. 

Jake: Yeah, there’s a lot going on with the going forward, but I think when I launched the next one, I’m going to go about it. Cause the first one, I think it was, I don’t know if what your experience was like when you launched BLS initially, but I just put it out into the world, not really expecting to make money on it or anything it did.

Okay. It made like a little bit of money here and there. But I, like I said, I mostly did it just cause I, out of enjoyment. But now that I’m like I want to keep going with this and I want to see. What kind of results I can really bring in with it when the next one launches, I’m going to go back and fix the what’s necessary with the first one, as well as the other ones going forward and see what the best way to go about putting them out is.

Mike: Yeah. And you should also study the art of storytelling and read a lot of books on writing fiction, how to tell good stories and how to write good fiction. So you have the more technical Stuff, which is how to even, for example, write good dialogue. And then there’s the more overarching of how to tell good stories.

There’s also that it’s not just a matter of writing stuff that you think is cool. You really have to treat it like training. It’s if you haven’t done that, you are in your newbie phase where you’re just doing bodybuilding workouts or, stuff you read in magazines and you think that’s cool.

And you’re seeing little changes in your body, but you really don’t have any idea what really makes this stuff work and how to really become one of the elites. You know what I mean? And it’s odd because I’ve listened to some of Dawson’s podcasts and I don’t know, paid attention to the self publishing space a bit.

And it seems like it’s. Fairly uncommon for writers to read much on like the art of writing and of storytelling. I’ve read probably, I don’t even know, maybe 40 books on it. 

Jake: I’ve read some that you’ve recommended, like The War of Art, for instance, was a good, was a really big one for me. Reading that was really inspiring.

I think I read that in the midst of it. And that was something that kind of helped me get over the hump. 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s a good book just for, I would say, not just for artists and creatives. Yeah. Just for living life. But no, I’m talking about books like Robert McKee’s story books about how to tell good stories.

And then you have specifically how to write good fiction. And there’s overlap there, but those are different things anyway. So there’s that as well. If you really want to get into it, you have to assume that if you haven’t really educated yourself, you’re probably not very good at it. Even if you have, I would apply this to myself as well.

When you start out at something, you’re not good. You might think you’re good, you’re not good. And that applies to anything. Don’t take that personally. If you play sports, you know that even if you think like you’re hot shit and you think you have a talent for it, and then you actually start playing more and you play with some kids who are actually good and you’re like, I’m fucking terrible.

And so it applies to fiction as well. So what you can do then is also improve your writing chops and your storytelling chops. And then because it’s self published, what’s cool is, and this is what I would do, and this is what I’ve done with BLS a number of times is you can always update it whenever you want.

You could change the story altogether. It doesn’t matter because it’s just simply uploading a new file. And there you go. And then people who actually have already read it previously would get a free update. You could work on it iteratively like that. In addition to working on another, working on a sequel.

Anyway, I’m just rambling at this point. 

Jake: Oh, it’s all right. It’s all interesting to me. I agree. It is quite something to know that you can do that, but I agree. I, people that have liked it or whatever asked me, they said how do you do this? And how do you, that’s why I don’t, I tend to just quote Henry Rollins.

And I say, I don’t have talent. I have tenacity. I just run at things and hope that something sticks. I just keep, I guess I would use using it as an example as well. You just work really hard and you put in the time and you get better. That’s really what it comes down to magic basically magic, 

Mike: basically, I’m just lucky.

That’s all. 

Jake: Yeah. That, and a bit of luck never hurt, also just a lot of really hard work. 

Mike: Yeah, no, I just find that kind of funny sometimes when I get that from some people, Oh you’re so lucky. No, not really. It’s hard to point to anything where I’d go, Oh, fuck. That was really lucky.

I could say maybe the timing of publishing BLS and that, but that was deliberate though. That was me looking at the marketplace and honestly wondering why has someone not written this book yet? This is a need that’s out there that’s not being fulfilled. Oh, I’ll do it. Is that luck though? I don’t know.

Jake: What I’ve always found interesting about your work and with BLS and everything is that I’m someone that really does not identify with today’s fitness space. I really don’t I’m not into the Instagram influencer thing. I don’t follow any, I don’t, I’m not into those people. I just see it all as faux pas.

I just don’t buy it. But so reading your material, I found interesting and different because for one, it’s a book. This is like a tangible thing that I have to hold in front of me and read. I’m not just like doing some like PDF. Workout that I bought for 20 bucks off some guy’s website or anything.

It brought forth something that I identify with and that I like reading and that it feels. You put together sketches and nutrition plans and all this stuff that it tying it all together, it seems like a lot, but really it isn’t. It just requires a different kind of dedication that I wasn’t used to, but yeah, I don’t really identify with with much with the fitness space these days.

So I always found your approach to the material refreshing, 

Mike: yeah, thanks. I’d say I self select for certain types of people and that’s just how it comes, what it comes down to. And I don’t go after, there are a lot of people who don’t really resonate with my approach, particularly on social media, because I don’t really care about getting attention or a lot of the influencer stuff is not, I just don’t want to.

Do it because I’d feel like it’s just not, it’s not interesting to me. It would be inauthentic and the potential of increased income from it is just not enough to make me want to override what is seems interesting and actually helpful. And what is in line with why I’m doing this. And so that’s why I just primarily use it to share a lot of my educational stuff.

And. It’s growing and it’s doing well, but is it ever going to do as well as the girl who just flashes her butthole? Every other picture? No, it’s not. I’ll never have as many. I won’t have as many followers and I won’t be, I wouldn’t be, not that only promote my own stuff, but I wouldn’t be able to earn as much through promotions.

I think that’s the first key to being a successful influencer is be a female and be shameless. 

Jake: Yeah. Or yeah, if you are a guy I’ve found, I guess just not owning a shirt. 

Mike: And that’s not enough though. Nah, guys, it’s not enough. It’s not enough. Just looking good as a guy is definitely not enough.

You can get something of a following, but you have to, you probably, if you’re going to, if you really want to if say you want to break the, the seven figure follower, it’s probably mostly about lifestyle. You want, you’re going to probably have to recruit. You’re going to have to be younger.

Because you have to go after the younger crowd because it’s probably the majority of users on, let’s say Instagram. I would assume that skews younger. And also the virality seems to be more among younger people. So you have to go after younger people, which means you probably have to be a bit younger yourself.

I’m 34. I’m too old. Yeah. I would need to be like 25, 26 looking good. Yes. It’d have to be physique would have to be. Good enough, but I think it’d be more about everything else. It’d be about how I live. So I’d have to have money, which means I’d have to be an inherit or trust fund kid, inherit money because no one at that age, very few people at that age make any real money.

Or if they did, if they do now, there are some cases where they started out with showing off shit that like people didn’t know that in the beginning they actually weren’t making much money because now they make their money as an influencer, but in the beginning they had nice things because. Of mommy and daddy, Oh, look at their apartment, quote, unquote.

Yeah. But who’s paying for it. Look at the Range Rover and the Lamborghini. Yeah. Who, Oh, those are daddy’s cars actually, or daddy’s paying for them. But then it’s like a fake it till you make it because that eventually so you work in that whole lifestyle, right? And then you bring in the hot girlfriends and the drama and the breakups and all that shit.

And eventually you have enough followers where you actually can make a lot of money now. So different paths. If I were doing that, I’ve said, I don’t understand why some of these people don’t get smarter about it. Everything should be scripted. Everything should be fake. That’s what I would do. If I was going to go all in if I was going to be one of these idiots that just show off shit and basically try to attract people who wish they were me, and that’s my whole thing is I’m such a narcissist.

I’m so amazing. Don’t you wish you had my life? Everything would be fake. I would treat it like a reality TV show. Take the Kardashians, right? Scripted, guaranteed the vast majority of I’ve seen it here and there. So I don’t know. It’s probably just the same shit over and over of who’s fucking who and who’s upset at who and who, what they’re buying.

And I’m sure there’s some simple formula when they boil it down where they’re like, cool, here’s what makes a successful season. It’s one part, this one part, this, we just rinse and repeat. We screw, we mix them around, whatever. That’s how I would treat it. I would look at my schedule as like a season.

Okay, what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen in this season? So I’m going to break up. Hey, okay girlfriend, we’re going to break up because of this. And then you’re going to be posting about it in this way. I like posting it this way. And then we’re going to make up and get back together.

You know what I mean? Okay. That’s a story arc. What’s going to be happening in my business. All right. It’s going to be this bullshit or whatever. What’s going to happen in my personal life. What kind of. Trinkets and knickknacks. Am I going to be buying and showing off? And from the people I’ve looked at, it doesn’t, I don’t see anybody where it’s obvious.

I’m like, Oh, this is smart that they’re actually doing this. It really does just seem to be random stupidity. So for 

Jake: It’s so repetitive too. It’s just the same thing, but that’s why 

Mike: that’s how else are you going to keep it new? Even if you are a dude who. Is a good looking guy and has money one way or the other and has nice things and you don’t really work that much and you just shred up and run around, you still tend to do the same shit.

You lose that novelty. It’s just lazy. You got to treat it like content. I like to write. I like to research and write and record stuff. So we plan it out and we make sure that we’re not just producing the same Type of thing or saying the same type of stuff over and over, I would treat the influencer life in the same way where I have to be coming up with constantly new things.

And a lot of those are just gonna be bullshit because that’s the easiest way to do it. 

Jake: Yeah, it’s just not a ball. I want to roll. It’s just, it seems sad at this point to me and I just wouldn’t want to do it. I almost feel bad for those that do. It just feels empty to me. 

Mike: Of course, there was a survey.

It was with teenagers. I heard about it. I don’t know, maybe six months ago, a year ago or so where the most common goal that these 14 to 17 year olds had was to be famous. The worst out of everything you could possibly want to strive for is just fame. 

Jake: It’s just, yeah, that’s unfortunately, it’s just the culture.

I guess it’s that life has become satire in this age that we’re living in. So it’s I don’t know. 

Mike: The correct term is clown world. We live in a clown world. 

Jake: We really do. And look at who’s running things. I’m not going to turn it into that discussion, it’s, I think it goes beyond, it’s 

Mike: come to this.

It’s a long time coming. It goes beyond Trump. And I actually like some of the things that he said and done dislike some of the things he said and done. And I would say the problem is so much deeper and so much more systemic than him. Who cares? 

Jake: Oh yeah, it really is. He’s, he merely is the product. 

Mike: I think it’d be hard to argue that he is more of a clown than like George Bush Jr.

For example, a dude was a literal clown. Like he was. So yeah no. It’s more just the political class in general. Anybody who thinks that, Oh, the problem is the other party within the, in our two party system is a fucking idiot. Actually, you have to be very ignorant. We’re very naive or just very stupid to believe that if one party just took over everything, we would have our utopia, our clown utopia.

No, the political class, we have a kakistocracy at this point. We are governed by the least qualified. And this is not, I’m not talking about Trump. Now I’m talking about. The political class in general, by the least qualified, the least skilled, the least intelligent people in our society. These are the ones that govern us people who on the whole, and this is not all of them.

There are definitely outstanding people in government in higher levels of government, but on the whole, many of these people could not cut it in the private sector. They literally could not keep. A job. They could not hold a job because they’re fucking stupid, incompetent, corrupt, and just broken, dysfunctional people.

And that’s where we’re at now. So it goes, the problems of the clown world, it’s not Trump’s fault at all. It’s really all of our fault. I think, in a way, we people of the West, we are getting the government. We are getting the culture. We’re getting the country. We’re getting the world that we live in.

Deserve. And the internet troll in me finds that amusing. We all like seeing people get their just desserts and we all get a kick from schadenfreude. And that’s what I see now in the West where with the imminent collapse of so many things that made the West exceptional, just have to laugh about it and be like, yeah, We’re getting what we fucking deserve.

Because, collectively, we fucking suck. That’s it. We used to not suck. Now we’re pretty shitty, on the whole. And we’re getting what we deserve, so Clown world, here we come. 

Jake: Yeah, I am inherently a pessimist. But yeah, I don’t know. You find ways to like I said, keep the ball rolling. 

Mike: I’m actually not, I’m not, I’m actually an optimistic person, but at the same time, I have a hard time.

Like you look at what’s going on and this has been a, I’ve been interested in this kind of stuff and I don’t know, I’ve been reading and listening, consuming this type of content for, I don’t know, 10 plus years now. If I weren’t doing health and fitness, I’d be doing culture and politics. I would like to believe otherwise.

I would love for people To be able to make a case like no, Mike, let me break this down for you. I see what you’re saying with all these things. If I were to like actually start listing, reading out my litany of things, they’d be like but have you considered this? Have you considered that?

And I’ve actually intentionally went and looked for that information. I’ve read some of these books that are like the more of the optimist view of the future and have been. Holy unconvinced of anything because they focus on things that are just irrelevant in the scheme of things. It’s like we have a huge fire raging over here and they’re saying, we’ll see that little ember over off in the periphery over there.

Oh, we’re going to be able to put that ember out very specific advances in medical science or in technology or things where it’s yeah, that’s cool. Cool. But what happens when our entire economy collapses? Who fucking cares? Or what happens when all of this devolves into just authoritarianism?

Who cares? So it’s not that I haven’t went in looked for, okay, what’s the counter argument here? Here’s my argument. What’s the counter argument. I just find it so unconvincing. And for me, it doesn’t, I don’t even find that. Depressing or it doesn’t discourage me from doing what I’m doing. I, for me, it’s just a matter of facing reality.

And that’s, as I see it, I hope I’m wrong. I honestly do hope I’m wrong. I’m just saying this is what I see and I’m not willing to pretend like I don’t see it. 

Jake: No, I agree. I absolutely agree. And if nothing else, it has been entertaining. 

Mike: The number one thing that I like about Trump. And when I first saw it, I was like, I love that is how disrespectful he is.

To the political class and in the debates when he was just straight ridiculing Jeb, that’s one of the first things I was like, I just like this guy and I don’t even care about his policies. I don’t care about his platform. I like this and I’m just going to grab some popcorn and watch. 

Jake: Yeah, it was entertaining and I’m not a supporter, but like I come from a family of supporters and we disagree on many things, but we’re all good.

I’m at a point now where and whether or not a lot of people think he won’t get reelected, he very possibly could, I have no idea. 

Mike: Statistically, he will, defeating an incumbent president is very hard and the left is in such disarray and that’s also going to turn into a clown show, which is going to be great.

It’ll just be fun to watch I hope, and also so you see Trump, right? He talks so much shit about all these other politicians and just the political class in general. Which is, I’m just like, yes, I just like that. I don’t care about anything else. I like that. And he also just shit all over the Republican party and just actually broke it from what it was, which is also hilarious, right?

It was just hilarious to watch. I think there’s a fair chance. We’re going to see that with the Democrats now, which will also be hilarious to watch. No one, no Republican is going to win the nomination over him. Who cares? That’s absolutely in the bag. Anyways, this is a very random discussion that I would have expected to have with Sal from Mind Pump.

This is the kind of stuff we talk about offline. And he’s I told him, I was like, why don’t you just come on my podcast and let’s just talk about this stuff. And he was like I don’t know, man. I don’t know 

Jake: if I’m ready for that. Ah, whatever, who cares? Yeah. At this point, it is I’m not really shaking in my boots anymore.

I’m just finding it all really entertaining and hilarious because it is just outrageous to watch. It’s a better experience for you. It hasn’t been boring. It has not been boring. You’re like 

Mike: this isn’t Nazi Germany, but it’s a clown show. 

Jake: Yeah. Everybody’s saying how much they hate the guy and everything.

I’m like, yeah, I don’t like him either, but you got to, I got to say he is entertaining. He’s crazy and hilarious. But I don’t know. We’ll see how it pans out. Yes, sir. The cynic in me has a small bit of optimist, but we’ll see how it pans out. 

Mike: Sure. Nothing is certain. I hope that somehow we, cause again, this goes beyond Trump.

I’m talking about the culture. I’m hoping somehow we. Come through this without a complete collapse. Like hopefully we find a way to come out better without having everything have to fall apart to do that. It’s not going to make you necessarily feel good, but you’ll be surprised maybe at the parallels.

Google will Durant fall of Rome and you’ll find it’s a portion of an audio book. It’s like an 11 minute video where he talks about how things were going at the end of the Roman empire before it really went to shit. And. The parallels are like striking, you would think he’s talking about today in every point, every point he makes you’re like, Oh yeah, Oh, yep, there he is.

Yep. Oh, yeah, we’re there. Yep. We’re there. We’re there. We’re there. So we’ll see. Maybe aliens will come save us. 

Jake: I think when I saw Elon Musk admit that he has become a feudalist, I think it was on Joe Rogan. I was like, Oh, All right. I 

Mike: didn’t, I didn’t watch I watched 20 or 30 minutes of it and found it boring.

So I just stopped. It was, 

Jake: It has its highlights. Maybe if you can go through and see if there’s somebody in the comments that tells you what time to click or whatever there, there are moments where you’re like, oh yeah, because it was very insightful. And then, I, he, since then I saw him on 60 minutes and he was, cause he’s caught a lot of shit for smoking weed and all that stuff on there.

And and I know he’s, the guy’s caught a lot of flag. Seeing how his optimism has shifted has had an effect on me. And I’m like it’s obviously had an effect on that guy. But then again, you see how the hours that he puts into everything that he does. And I think he’s just worn out.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. His that’s what Rogan kept on trying to get at and he didn’t have a good answer. And so I was like, all right, this is boring now, but he’s I don’t know, dude, this is what I do as if we’re going to get some self help advice from Elon Musk. We’re not, he’s gonna be like, I’m sorry, you’re not Elon Musk.

So don’t try this. That’s 

Jake: it. What was it they said? They said you it says on your Wikipedia, you’re a business magnate. He’s yeah, I need to change that to a business magnet. I’m a business magnet. 

Mike: So what did he say about feudalism? 

Jake: His general outlook on things was he, I think it was when he said he, when he was working within the administration, or maybe it was even before that, I think maybe he went to them saying we need to slow down the advancements on AI.

It’s progressing a little too quickly. And it’s, frankly, it’s scaring a person like me who knows the ins and outs of various industries. Basically, it was like the watching the intro to Terminator. Like he basically said they didn’t listen. They told me like, thank you. We appreciate you coming by.

That’ll be all now. And he said, they didn’t listen to me. And hearing him say that, and he had a frightened look on his face was like, wow. Did 

Mike: he 

Jake: have a proposed solution? What’s the, I think I’d have to go back and watch it. Cause I don’t want to put him in the pejorative. I don’t, but I feel like he did 

Mike: Like government should regulate it.

Should. Step into these companies and tell them what they can and can’t do. 

Jake: He doesn’t strike me as a guy that would come in with a problem and not offering a solution. So I’m sure that he did. And, but they told him, thank you, but no, thank you. We’re just fine with the way things are going.

Mike: So he was saying like, eh, if we just had a strong man that could just, Dictate this would be better for our species. 

Jake: Yeah. He was, I think the point that he was getting at was that things are just moving too quickly. And this is a guy that created Tesla and SpaceX and everything. And he was, even he was admitting things are moving too quickly in some industries.

Like automation is becoming a little too crazy. Artificial intelligence is becoming a little too crazy and we need to like, It’s pull the reins back a little bit on things. Oh, 

Mike: Yeah, I don’t even know how, because even if you say government step in and regulate it, that might work to some degree.

But at this point, things are so decentralized in terms of technology. I don’t even know if that’s possible. 

Jake: Even like the legal marijuana industry is like in California is not, it sounds great. At first, but they’re coming to find that it is, it is like a shit show in many ways because the government is basically trying to squeeze out the individual growers and making it like nearly impossible for them to continue making an income off of it.

So like some of these people are having to like, go back to growing weed, like in the black market. 

Mike: What’s that standard? That’s the throughout. That goes back to the turn of the century where you have people with a lot of money. By politicians and then use the apparatus of government to establish monopolies and cartels.

Yes, that’s how this works. There’s a period. 

Jake: Yeah, that’s the beauty of the constitution, is at least those guys were smart enough to see the corrupt ability of the human being and try to do something about it to at least put some Checks and balances in there to keep things from toppling over, but I’ll check out that room video.

In the meantime, 

Mike: Will Durant, if nothing else, you’ll appreciate his intelligence and his eloquence. He’s one of my favorite writers, favorite thinkers is he’s a historian. He’s dead now, but he he won, I want to say a Pulitzer with his wife for a 12 volume history of everything.

Basically that was his life’s work. And then that Then was broken down, not necessarily word for word, but he then spun off of all that research and all that work to create shorter books. The lessons of history or is a shorter book of his that I really is the story of philosophy where he did all this work to write this massive.

Multi volume work. And then after that was extracting and letting it percolate. All right. How would I summarize the history of philosophy in 150 pages? Or what are the biggest ideas that we have the most influential, the most impactful ideas that we’ve come up with? Within in our history, you had a book on that who were the biggest movers and shakers in history, the people who pushed us forward the most stuff like that.

Interesting dude. Very smart. Very well spoken and well written. Just one of those people. It’s just fun to read his stuff because you’re in the presence of this dude is special. Anyway let’s wrap up. We’ve been I don’t even, I don’t even know how we got here, but hopefully people, if people are still listening, hopefully they enjoyed it.

Jake: Yes. See what kind of comments this brings up. Yeah. Don’t flee me 

Mike: for the political stuff. I don’t care. It’s all 

Jake: the same thing. We can disagree all day long. It’s not a big deal. Just don’t throw a Molotov cocktail through my window or anything like that. It’s we’re still cool. I try to get down the road with people, no matter what their political or what their agenda is.

And we should all be on the same team. We’re all human beings. 

Mike: Yeah. I agree. I wish it would work like that. I don’t think it ever will, but I wish. No, 

Jake: but but yeah, I had fun, man. This has been great. Like I said, your your work has really informed my work ethic. I think I meant to say this earlier, but I went from sitting on my ass playing video games and stuff to Exercising and having an addiction to endorphins and now I’m writing books as a result.

Mike: That’s awesome. 

Jake: Yeah. 

Mike: All right, man. Thanks again for taking the time. I really appreciate it. 

Jake: Thank you, Mike. Appreciate it. 

Mike: Hey there. It is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick Review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

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