So I'm hanging out with drug dealers, almost died in 7th grade from an overdose on cocaine and speed. Wow, it's in the 7th grade. 7th grade, yeah.  And I remember he was saying, hey, you need to have Aaron on the show because this story is crazy. This dude's changing lives. We're getting people in shape. And, you know, I think Andy's now becoming very known for the health side of things, right? Like he's getting on people like, hey, if you don't have a six pack, you can't work for me, right? And so how did all that come about? Me linking up with Andy? Yeah. Well, a speaker named Rene Rodriguez and I connected back in Louisiana and he saw my story or he heard me tell my story in it. He's like, you have a great story. Let me help you tell it better. Oh, by the way, get me in shape. So that's where the relationship started with Rene and then he introduced me to Andy and Brad at one of these events here in Vegas. And Andy and I just hit it off the next week. I drove out to Scottsdale. We sat down and talked. I spent about two days there and just got to know each other. And we have so much in common. It's scary. I mean, the dude literally is my brother. Yeah. And it was just like a no-brainer because for me, everything that I want to do in life is about purpose. Hollywood is cool and fun and, you know, you can get the highlight reel from it. At the end of the day, when you go home, it's a very empty feeling because, you know, I'm a marine and everything I do is really geared around providing some value and doing something with my life that I can help people because I think a lot of the knowledge I have is very important to share with everyone, especially in this day and age. So I moved out there and we're building it out. Yeah. So speaking of story, you know, Rene said you had a crazy story. And now that you mentioned Hollywood, I remember Andy saying that as well, he used to train all these Hollywood celebrities and everything. So tell me a little bit about your background.  I was bullied tremendously. And my family started going through divorce when I was in sixth grade. It really affected me in a crazy way. I got depressed. And in seventh grade, I started fighting back. And when you fight back, I think you're inevitably going to fall into the wrong crowd. So I'm hanging out with drug dealers, almost died in seventh grade from an overdose on cocaine and speed. Wow, it's in seventh grade. Seventh grade, yeah. Wow. Yeah. And so I kind of just navigated through the rest of my childhood years, trying to stay out of trouble, sometimes good, sometimes bad. And about my sophomore, junior year of high school, I realized I don't have anything lined up. What am I going to do with the life that I currently have because I've squandered so many opportunities? So this one buddy of mine who was a linebacker on the football team, the varsity football team, I saw him go into the Marine Corps into boot camp. And when he came back, I didn't even recognize him. I mean, he changed so much. And that was the spark where I was like, I want that. I want what he did. I want people to see me like that. And I went to the Marine Corps of Parris Island, South Carolina. So how many years did you do that? I did seven and a half years active duty.  So with contract work, does that mean like you're out and now you're working in the private sector? Yeah, essentially I'm on DOD contracts. So there were two that I was over there working on primarily. It was all classified stuff.  It was Blackwater Dine Corps or something like that. But actually my last duty in the Marine Corps, I did personal security for General Pace, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And I was thinking about the longevity of a technology career because his executive assistant at the time was like, hey, we're fielding an identity management program downrange and we're looking for solid people and I think you'd be a great team leader. So I was like, I'm in. And I went downrange, did the first two years on base access, which was 10 tier 1 sites, 5 tier 2 sites and 3 DNA labs. So ultimately it's all biometric based. In order for someone to access our base, you've got to be enrolled biometrically. And you'll be given a smart card.  And every day there's a revocation list that's updated because we've got forensics team who are out across the theater of operations collecting forensic data, pulling latent fingerprints off of bombs and things like that. So if you were one of those, you're still, you're going to hit if someone got your fingerprint. So that was the premise of that. I'm going to tell you the best way to get a hold of me. Shoot me a text message right now,<PHONE_NUMBER>.<PHONE_NUMBER>. I'll help you with whatever you need.  Let's get back to the video. Two years later I went on to do some different work where I was dealing directly with the Iraqi government. I was the liaison between the US government and the government of Iraq and helping them stand up their own biometric and forensics capability. What does that even mean? What exactly did you do? Were you protecting the base?  Yeah, for me it was more about leadership and management. I had all the techs, the technicians, the latent print examiners, the tactical teams going out on the raids and things. So we were always outside the wire.  But at the end of the day we're just trying to catch as many bad people as we can and build the database of known bad guys because at the time fingerprints are something that no one really ever thought about that you could use as a tool in trying to capture people. We would be inserted with tactical teams going on raids. We'd fly around and have high level meetings with the top officials in the government of Iraq and just helping them map out something similar to what we have here in the states. The FBI has a database. The DOD has a database. And they wanted the same thing. That way they could really try to create some type of structure and organization in their own ministries. So like if you're in Iraq and you want to become a police officer, there's a process that you'd have to go through, fingerprint, background check and all that stuff which they didn't have at the time. Anyone? Yeah, you look good. Your cop. Yeah, or it's all about money. Yeah, you want to be a cop? Here you go. Yeah, that's crazy. So I mean, you spent a lot of time in the Middle East. What do you think about just what's going on today with Israel and all that? I think it's disgusting, honestly. I really feel that as America being a powerhouse in the world, when America's weak, the world is weak. And this is an example of what happens when America has a weak leader. And I could go into crazy detail about it, but I don't want to get political about things, you know what I mean? But for someone who has served and someone who has sacrificed to look at the state of our country right now, it's infuriating. Because it's like, alright, well why did everyone do what they did, sacrificing in the name of freedom to have this nonsense happen right now which is completely preventable? Like a strong leader in the White House, this would not have happened that I know. Yeah, I have talked to a lot of SEALs and people who are active and out. They all say the same thing like, hey, well technically we're supposed to be non-partisan or whatever. And he's like, but I'm leaving and it's not worth it anymore, which is what we're doing.  We're fat now. The physical fitness standards in the military are decreasing. You can't even say yes sir, no sir. I mean it's like we're living in a world that doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand how we're expected to have the same impact from a force perspective when we're becoming weak in the area that we should be the strongest. Like the military is the nation's defenders. First and foremost, and if we can't even do that, we're not in a good place. No, no, those guys need to be your strongest, you know, and I don't want to say ruthless, but just like, yeah, these guys will do whatever it takes to protect. So you end up doing that for over 10 years and then what? So in 09, there was a big transition where we were handing everything back over to the Iraqis to take control. And what was happening was it was becoming a more dangerous place to be work-wise because there was less support, less resources, and things like that. So I remember talking to a colonel who was in charge of Marine Forces North, which is the Marine Corps Component Command for U.S. Northcom, and they're just based out of New Orleans, Louisiana. So we had talks for a while. It wasn't guaranteed, but he's like, I could really use you over here to help stand up this new cell that we're building out, this emergency management, in transit security, you know, cell. So I was like, I'm in. Took a leap of faith, left Iraq, went to New Orleans, and the job opportunity fell through because the funding was cut. So this crazy transition plan I had, which would put me in the civilian world for the first time as an adult, just completely backfired in my face. And I remember just trying to find work. And the problem is, no one can really understand how to read a veteran's resume. So it just kept falling on deaf ears. You're like, you have no idea what the things I've done. Yeah, they don't understand the language and the verbiage and things like that. So I ended up, long story short, I ended up losing everything I had. I was now living in my car. I filed for bankruptcy.  Like I couldn't find purpose. And it was in that moment where I really had to dig deep and figure out, all right, well, I could do the coward thing and it can end my life, or I can do something meaningful. So instead of going back overseas or pulling the trigger on myself, I decided to get certified as a personal trainer because everyone was like, dude, do fitness, you love fitness, everyone knows you for fitness. So I did it. And then within, you know, a few months, I met Zac Efron doing a movie called The Lucky One, which was about a Marine Iraq veteran. And we just hit it off and that was my entrance into film and TV. So were you responsible for when he was all super jacked at Baywatch and stuff? So from Lucky One all the way up until Baywatch, that was our time gap working together. When you're getting into the higher echelon of transformations in Hollywood, for me, I don't have enough trust in them to be doing things on that level where you're dealing with hormones and things. So it just wasn't something where I continued on with that journey. Yeah. Yeah, he got so big.  And I'm like, bro, there's way more than chicken and rice going in your body. I don't know what you're talking about. But I guess, you know, for PR reasons, they got to say whatever they got to say. Well, to, you know, in their defense in the Hollywood actor defense, you know, sometimes I feel like there's a need for some type of performance enhancing supplements or drugs, whatever you want to call them, because if you're coming from a movie where you've got to be fat, out of shape, looking like dog and then all of a sudden your next movie, you've got to be this superhero. Yeah, it's like you can't get changed that fast. You can't and depending on scheduling, you know, whatever you have lined up down the road, they might, there might be a three or four month block here. It's like, yeah, I can fit that movie and find the right trainer. I mean, there's, it's pretty extreme these days with how much fitness is coming into the forefront of film and TV.  But for them to make that kind of transformation in such a short period of time, I don't care what drugs are on. You have to be so disciplined. That's the thing right there. People think about the drugs and they're like, it's a cop out. You're fake, but. No, dude. It just allows you to work harder. Yeah. I recently got on peptides and testosterone and it's like, I've seen the difference. I'm like, OK, but by no means do I have the discipline that these guys, I could, if you told me, hey, dude, you're about to go star in this movie. They're going to pay you 10 million bucks. You just got to get super. I'd be like, yeah, all right. Yeah. Get rid of everything in my, my pantry. I'm going hard. And I'll be like, I'm going to get Aaron and we're going hard. Like I have no problem doing it. But I do know the level of commitment those guys. I mean, how often was Zach working out? Oh, every day. Yeah. I mean, and it's all blocked too, right? It's like you're just one component of their day. Yeah. There's stunt training. There's physical fitness. There's, you know, acting, coaching. Then you got blocking and depending on the nature, maybe you're speaking another language. You got to have an accent. Then you got your dialect coach. That's crazy. Yeah. Do the, do the studios like provide all that for them or they got to figure it out? No, they'll, everything will be mapped out. Like when they come in, when they sign on to a production, they'll figure out, all right, what is, what does he need? Obviously when, when, when you're auditioning for a character, they're going to try and find the person who, one, fits the director's look the best, like whatever the director has in his mind, but two, who's going to be the most qualified for it? So it's like they're not going to, you could have two people that look exactly the same, but they're always going to go more towards the one who maybe can have that already has a little bit of an accent or someone who just leans more in that direction. Yeah. I just saw the, well does a guy like Zac Efron even have to like audition anymore? Not really. They're just like, hey, we want you. What's it going to cost? When, when you're at that level, they've, they've seen your body of work. They know what you can do. Yeah. So yeah, you, you pretty much have bypassed the whole audition process by then. I saw recently, they finally ended the strike. Yeah. So it's like these guys are finally going to get back to work now. Yeah. It's kind of crazy for six months. Like these actors and writers just couldn't work. It's really crazy. And honestly, man, it's all about money and greed. Yeah. Like Hollywood is just about the most superficial place that you can possibly be. Yeah. Is it really the way that, you know, people talk about with like just all the evil stuff behind the scenes and just the craziness? Yeah. Yeah. I have crazy stories of, and I could completely, you know, punk people out and have headlines all over the place. That's just not me. And I don't want to be known to be that guy. Yeah. But I've been propositioned so many times by men and women at the highest level. That's crazy. It's, it's really disgusting. And, and it's, it's one of those things where you see a lot of these actors who are very big names and they end up killing themselves and overdosing and alcoholics. And I feel like a lot of that has to do with how they got to where they were, because I've been in a position where I could be on the A-list right now, but I would have had to have sold my soul. Yeah. This lady wanted to marry me. She had a check cut for me. I was traveling all over the place doing work for this production company. And when it all came together, it was like, you okay with marriage? I'm like, what? Okay. That just, I mean, it's, it's, it's comical. It's nonsensical. Yeah. Yeah. It's sad, but it seems a lot of that stuff has come into light now.  Right. It's like, man, right now, we're just going to go do this on YouTube. And it's like these YouTubers have more fame than a lot of these A-list celebrities.  Yeah. You see a lot of these celebrities now getting on commercials for soap and doing these collaborations with these YouTube influencers and these social media influencers and stuff. So it just shows the power of where influencers are these days compared to what Hollywood was. Although Hollywood still does have control of, you know, being people who our youth look up to. Right. That's the part I have a hard time with because what that represents is not, I don't think is the healthiest thing for our kids to look up to. Yeah. So is that why you ended up leaving Hollywood? Yeah. Partially.  And right then I was like, I never want to be in this position again. I never want to have to rely on this industry again because when everything was shut down, you learned a lot about who was really in your corner, who was there for you, who were your true friends. And there was a lot of bad stuff that happened and what I kept seeing was a lot of these names who I knew and I had respect for come out talking in a way that I can no longer respect them. And I think there was a lot of people's true colors came out during 2020, you know, through 2021. And that's when I was like, I'm going to take everything that I've done. I'm going to launch my own fitness business and I'm going to start this new journey myself. So 2022, I mean, I pretty much buried myself in my office and just really got deep into building an online fitness coaching business. I took my knowledge of transforming people from a like a bodybuilding perspective. And then ironically, I started to have people with autoimmune issues come to me for help. So it made me go down some different rabbit holes and understand the human biology more. So I learned so much about health and longevity and I just combined the two worlds, which is what makes our programming so effective and why I can do these transformations in such a short amount of time given that the people we're working with are disciplined and committed enough to follow the process. So you start this online business and you're living here in Vegas at the time and how different was that transition having to learn how to like become a marketer? Because you already knew how to be a coach. That was it. That part's easy. Yeah, it was a lot. I actually had to get like a fitness coach who's, you know... Which one?  You know Vince Del Monte? Yep. So I got with Vince. I was doing his thing for a while. I saw him actually at Dragon's Lair. That's where he met. He was like, hey dude, what's up man? And he actually had all of his students there. They were there for like, it was some fitness like expo thing. So there was like a hundred of them in the Dragon's Lair. Oh wow. Yeah, I mean he's a great dude. He's got a solid mindset for helping people change their perspective on how to scale and just help people step out of their comfort zone a little bit in terms of getting in front of the camera and really leveraging social media because that's what it's about.  Exactly. Hey guys, what's going on? It's Andy. A lot of you leave comments telling me that you need help. Do me a favor and tell you the best way to get a hold of me. Shoot me a text message right now<PHONE_NUMBER><PHONE_NUMBER> I'll help you with whatever you need.  Let's get back to the video. I mean you have to learn how to market. That's what you didn't know yet. That was the biggest thing for me because I'm not a social media guy. I'm still trying to do everything it takes to get into the social media world.  There's a lot of little nuances that make a massive difference when you're an online coach because it's such a saturated space. Yeah. But yeah, it turned out great.  You can be on meds for 10 or 15 years. Within 90 days, most of the clients, almost all of them will be off. Why do you think that is? They weren't healthy and meds were just kind of like a bandaid to the problem. They weren't addressing the root cause. Yeah. It's like a botanist or an arborist. If you have a plant or a tree or something that's got leaves that are dying or bark that's dying or something's going wrong with it, you don't just snip it off and move on. You go into the root. In the soil, you find out what the root cause of the problem is and then you address that and then everything else flourishes. But for some reason, we all know why. We don't do that as human beings. We just get put on medicine for the symptom, but we're not trying to really understand the root cause of it. So diagnosed with things we don't really have, put on medications we don't really need. Once you get on one medication, you're going to be on two, then three, and who knows, your quality of life starts to really take a hit. So for me, the health and longevity space is really important because it's telling people the right way to eat which is counter-intuitive to what society will tell you to eat. I say eat red meat. Red meat's a superfood. Whole eggs, Greek yogurt, mixed berries, fruit, salmon, chicken, quality foods rather than eating stuff out of wrappers. If you look at the ingredients and you can't pronounce something or you don't know what it is, it's probably not good to eat. But I take everyone through a two-week detox just through food and then we get into fasting and different health and longevity protocols with hot and cold therapy and breathing oxygen. There's methylation issues and hypoxia and like high-home assisting. There's so many little things that make a massive difference that if you just eat the right foods and take some very basic, simple supplements, it clears right up. And then obviously movement is medicine. Move as much as you can. Right.  Today I'm like, you know, I don't feel 100%, but I'm good enough to be here, right? And I work out this morning, you know, I woke up early and I was like, hey, like dude, my body feels terrible, but I know if I just move and like, even if I'm not lifting a bunch of weight, just moving around, like that's going to make me feel way better than just laying in bed all day. So I agree with that for sure. Yeah. And you know, challenging yourself, I think we're in this state right now where everyone's pursuing comfort and we want everything to feel good. We want everything to taste good. And there's no stimulus for growth in that. So when you put yourself in these challenging positions of getting into a cold bath or getting into a hot sauna or, you know, going against the grain of wanting to eat the normal garbage of sugar and things that, you know, you've got that receptor on your tongue to give you that dopamine hit that gets you addicted. It's like, if you put some food to your mouth, think about it if it's going to serve you or if it's going to make things worse. You know what I mean? It's going to serve or steal from you. Yeah, is it actually fuel or is it like entertainment really? Right. And I don't know if Rene talked about it when he was on this podcast, but Rene had, because he's such a great speaker, when I got him into fasting, I think it was his third or fourth fast. It was like this aha light bulb moment. Yeah. And he explains it so beautifully of just how much our day to day revolves around food. I mean, we go open the fridge and aimlessly walk around looking for things to eat when we're not even hungry. Yeah. So it's being able to have that type of impact on someone like that, that he can share it out. I talk about creating an army of soldiers for health because we need it now more than ever. And that's the purpose of everything I'm doing right now. It's the big reason why I left Hollywood and aligned with Andy with what he's doing because health is the foundation of everything no matter what your profession is, what your gender is, like it transcends everything.  I tell people all the time, like, look, if you're out of shape and everything, like you're just not going to beat me. Like it is what it is. How can you have the mental clarity or the physical stamina or the confidence to go out there and like health helps all three of those things, right? And yeah, I think a lot of people just, they look for other answers, right? They're like, ah, but, you know, that would be a lot of work to go work out and start waking up earlier and eat right and stuff. There's got to be another way. And so they look for like the next hack. I was like, dude, there's no hack. It's just hard work. Yeah. And we get people who come into our program who have program hopped for years. Yeah, exactly. And it's like they're always... It's not my fault. Yeah, right, exactly. And they're always, they're trying to find the most simple thing, but fitness is something you can't buy. You know what I mean? Like you can buy a program, but you still have to put in the work. Yeah. No one can do it for you. Even if you're, you know, I've talked to a lot of guys now who are like, oh yeah, I'm a testosterone and I'm like, really? They're like, I can't tell. Right. Because it's like, dude, it ain't going to do anything if you don't put any work into it. Yeah. Right? It's just going to enhance what you already do. That skewed mindset of just thinking that if you get on something like that, it's going to be the end all be all. Yeah.   I mean, just the accumulation of inflammation and water retention. Yeah. If you're doing anything to mess around with your endocrine system, your hormones, you've got to be dialed in. Yeah. You have to. Mm-hmm. So what's your take on fasting? I know you mentioned it a few times. Like what do you put people through? Yeah. I love fasting. I call fasting the fountain of youth. Yeah. I love it too. Because it's so good for, one, a gut reset. Like your body needs to reset sometimes and it's the best way to do it. If you're eating food all day long, all the energy you have is going towards digesting.  Then you eat, then you're digesting food. And it's the whole day, every day, that's what your body's going through. So I say, you know, it's a good chance to take all that digesting away and then all of a sudden the body has all this energy freely to use now. And what's it going to do is it's going to go through and find all the issues and the problem areas and try to fix itself. It's going to eat itself. It's going to get rid of the old cells.  Like let's just say you have dead cells or suboptimal cells in your body that need repair or replace. It's like that's when that whole process of autophagy can come through and get rid of all those and leave room for the new cells and then you feel better. You know, you've got the IGF-1 increase. You've got nutrient partitioning. You've got increased nutrient absorption. There's so many great benefits to fasting.  Do you do intermittent fasting or do you do long fast? What do you do? I just like to have them do a 24-hour fast once a week. And some of my clients have a good hack where they'll do it from noon to noon. So it's like you're still... They're not really missing a day of eating. Yeah, you're still eating on both days. You've got that big gap of time where you're sleeping. Yep. But it's at the beginning, everyone's kind of unsure about it because they have these preconceived notions about... They're going to die. Yeah, yeah.   Yep.  And if your body's really toxic, maybe when you get into the first couple of fasts, you're going to feel some nausea or things like that because your body's releasing some of this trash. Yeah. But on the other side, electrolytes are very important that I think a lot of people miss. So getting electrolytes in during your fast is a really important thing. I started fasting every quarter for three to five days. So I would do like an ultra long fast. Yeah. And I have tried the once a week too. I like them both. And I like it for spiritual reasons. I like it for health reasons. And everyone should fast. I mean, everyone is looking for the next diet. Like what's the keto diet, the Atkins diet? Like you want to know the number one way to lose weight? Don't eat. That's the number one way to lose weight. You have no calories going in. You will lose weight. It's just math. Yeah. It's a really true thing. And the longer fast too, I mean, depending on the level of, let's just say metabolic dysfunction you have, some longer fast might actually be better. But to your point also with the spiritual part of it, I know a lot of people who do these three, five, seven day fasts for the spiritual part. Yeah. And you just, you get into a different realm or a different way of thinking and understanding things because your brain is so much more clear. Yeah.  That glymphatic system is actually being cleansed to where you can think more clearly. You're more focused. Yeah. Yeah. And I agree. You know, I've been researching a lot lately in the last like year and a half about toxicity and, you know, peptides and testosterone and your gut and all these things we're talking about because, you know, I'm getting older now. I'm in my mid 30s and my son, you know, he's got special needs. And so we've taken him to different functional doctors and things over the years. And they've all said the same thing.  He's got toxicity. And then like I had a guy recently tell me about like how for COVID, like they're finding venoms in all of these patients who have COVID. And it's like, how did like 19 different venoms get in their body? It's crazy. And then. That's interesting. Yeah. And so there's like, and then I was watching this documentary about how there's all these drugs that use venom to treat some kind of thing, right? They're using snake venom and shellfish venom and all this. I'm like, what the heck is going on here? Like, I don't know. I ain't a doctor. But when you start seeing like the pesticides, like you said and all this stuff, it's like, yeah, there's a lot of toxicity in our body. And you know, some people recommend my son do like, I think it's called I own biome. So we're going to try out that and Gary Breck actually recommended he do stem cells. And so we did stem cells. And that actually was a huge improvement energy wise and like everything for him. So yeah, I'm like heavy into all this stuff. I don't take anything at face value anymore. Yeah, our food system here is incredibly poisonous. I mean, when I first got into Hollywood, before I really knew much about how bad our food was, I remember a lot of my international clients coming in from Italy or Spain or things like that and they just talk about how much they hated eating our food because of the way it made them feel. They could feel the difference. Yeah. Just because of how loaded with pesticides it was or the whole enriched fortified thing with folic acid and all these really strange things that you don't ever really think about where now people are actually thinking about it more but it's like I can eat a pizza here and I'll feel like sh** afterwards. I'll go over to Italy, eat the same pizza and feel fine, probably lose weight. You know? Yeah. I actually do remember one of the functional doctors talking about folic acid.  It has no purpose yet. We put it in all this food. Yeah. If it's fortified or enriched, throw it out. Yeah.  So, yeah, I agree. So what do you recommend then to your clients? What are they eating? Are you putting them on macro diets? How's that? So the way I do my nutrition programs initially up front are I lay it out almost like you're going to get on stage to compete. You see the percentages of macros, meal totals, daily totals, percentages. And the reason why I do that is because I really want my clients to understand the structure of a meal. What does a meal really look like? What does the right portion size for me actually look like? Because if I can put it in a way where you consistently are measuring your food, then it's going to start to become second nature of what your portion sizes should look like because that's a big problem we have here in America is we eat for like three people.  But it's like that's the way you should be eating because calories can add up quick depending on how much fat you have in it and what additives are in it. So I like to do that type of programming, but through the best quality foods. And then getting deeper into it, I have a substitution food menu that I end up sending on as an addition after the first two weeks of detox that really help you stay within the realm of methylated foods. Because methylation is really one of the biggest issues that we have across the board is when it comes to us eating foods and thinking it's good, but we're not absorbing the nutrients and things like that. And that's based on certain nutrients that we're so deficient in that affects methylation. What is methylation for those who don't know? It's your body's ability to absorb nutrients. Let's just say I use Gary Brekka's term because it makes the most sense. You can't put crude oil into your gas tank. It's got to be refined and converted into gasoline for you to use it.  And when you have a methylation issue, there's a break in the chain there that it prevents your body from being able to break that down so it can absorb those nutrients. Okay, got it. So with that, for me anyways, I'll use myself. I was about 180 pounds for 12 years and for the first time ever, I've decided I'm a bulk up and so in about 90 days, I went from 180 to 195 and I'm loosely tracking my macros, but I'm definitely eating way more. I used to eat maybe 2,000 calories a day for maintenance and now I'm eating like 2,800 to 3,000 a day just trying to put on size and everything. You feel better eating that increase of calories? Not really, no. No? No, I don't like to eat. Okay. Yeah, and for me, I used to always eat very low carb diet so I would just eat meat and veggies and a dinner would probably be the only time I ate carbs and that was just kind of how I did maintenance and now I'm eating a lot of carbs and I shouldn't say I don't like it, I don't mind it, now I'm used to it and I'm eating so much food but now I'm used to it. Yeah, and that's one of the things that a lot of people really don't know is that they're under eating. It's like they're trying to put weight on, they're trying to get body recomposition and it's not working because you're not eating enough. I mean, I have women who are eating 2,000 calorie nutrition programs and end up being over 2,000 calories and for most people they think 2,000 calories is the limit, like I can't eat over 2,000 calories, that's crazy. Yeah. But it's really not a lot of food especially when you're active and you're moving and you're training and you have to have all this energy. Nutrition dictates everything. People ask me about what supplements do I take? How do I train? I'm like why don't you ask the more important question of what am I eating? The food is more important. The food is always more important, yeah. Yeah, I agree. So with food, if somebody was trying to gain weight I guess everyone's going to be different though, like so for me would you recommend kind of that diet I'm on? Yeah, yeah, I mean I like to say if you're trying to put weight on and obviously there's some variances that come into it depending on the, you know, if I look at your body and I'm like well, you know, based on a questionnaire looking at you I can tell I think carbs would fit you better. Protein's always going to be the foundation of every meal. That's your muscle recovery, muscle building, muscle everything. And then you got your energy source which is either carbs or fats. You always want to have them all set. If carbs are high, fats are low. If fats are high, carbs are low. Can't be both high. Can't be both high. And you know some people I find, most people actually when they're trying to put weight on I find carbohydrates being a better option so I'll bring fats down, maybe even bring protein down a little bit.  But again, like you said, everyone is different based on their lifestyle. I have a really extensive questionnaire that I ask my clients that when they fill that out it gives me a good snapshot so I can build the nutrition program out that will best suit them.  Like how's that work? So when I came over to the Elliott group what I did was I sat down with my team, my coaches and we, they're super smart guys. And I took my brain and connected it with their brain and we just sat down for a couple months and we just started building out these new programs. And we have a goal-based program which is like 597 bucks for 90 days which when you come out into that it's not customized, but it's been created by me. So it's like I've been doing this for so long that I know what works. When a person comes on and they're like I want to do this 597 90-day catalyst program. They fill out some information on there and based on that we know where to put them at. And then we have a customized program that's 5,000 for 90 days and that's where we actually sit down on the Zoom call with you and really get to know you and build your lifestyle and what's going to work for you. And then that's where we build it off of that and then we have weekly calls. Accountability. Yeah, accountability, funny enough man, is like everyone needs it. And that's probably the biggest reason I hear when people come on to our program or just programs in general is I need the accountability. I get it, but at the same time like do you not have enough discipline to just be able to hold yourself accountable to being in better shape? People now. But again it goes back to the fact that we're just so addicted to food and we're so challenged by doing things that are difficult. For me it's like I love doing the hard stuff. I love doing the stuff that makes me suffer and creates pain. Like when I go into the gym I'm trying to kill myself. Like I literally want to go in there and cause as much damage on myself as I possibly can because it's a mental aspect too of growing and knowing I can push myself this hard and then I can see what it did to my body too. And at the end of the day I think what we do when we're going out talking at these seminars and things we're really trying to wake people up and you know it's like no one wants to go on this journey with you but I do. And I believe in you so much that if you just take that leap of faith spend the 90 days with me I guarantee you'll come out of it where your life will be changed forever. All I need is 90 days of commitment from someone to help them recreate their belief system and know that what they want is actually within reach. Yeah and $5.95 is nothing for that. Nothing. Nothing. So tell me about Andy's transformation because Andy in the last whatever six months since you started work with him has undergone his own transformation. You know he was already in shape before that right? Like he didn't technically need you yet he's now at a whole another level. Yeah and funny enough the transformation that we've done has been done pretty much traveling every single week. Yeah. Which is extremely difficult. Oh for sure. Anyone who travels you know it's like you don't know where your gym is getting foods hard. All that yeah. Sleep. Sleep. But for him you know he he loves fitness. He's kind of got that meat head mindset. Yeah. He could go in there and just spend. I think sales guys are naturally meat heads. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. It's like that's my we talked the same language and just to know you have someone who's willing to be pushed to their limit no matter how hard it hurts or how bad or painful it is who will have the discipline to eat the meals that are prepped and so that the biggest shift for Andy honestly was really two things. That's one the importance of food. It's like he always knew the importance of food but he didn't really he never had anyone really map it out in the way I do. And there's been a lot of these lightball moments for him when it comes to food where it's like I travel with him so much and I see him I'm like don't like don't pick it up man like I'm watching you. Yeah. And but also in the gym really changing the training style and when you walk into a gym typically you see people mindlessly moving weight. They'll be the same like they'll be the same people in there right now who were in there three years ago doing the same thing and look exactly the same because there's no intention behind what they're doing. Yeah. So I get into the type of training where I say I refer to what I do is explaining the anatomy of a rep and it's time under tension controlled. So when you're so focused on every rep of every set and you create that mind muscle connection it's hard to go back to training any other way because you don't feel the contraction in the muscle the way you do otherwise right. So if you have let's say a bicep curl if you have the concentric right this is usually the explosive part and then you get to the top and you contract and then you focus on the negative and the negative is where people miss yeah so much of the exercise. So just by doing that one rep you have three things to think about. Yeah.  You could be detoxed you could be clean inside go out and have a shitty day of eating you know maybe you had burgers and pasta and all kinds of nonsense but again the next day I guarantee you will probably feel somewhat of a difference in the way your muscles feel in the contraction. You know I was reading a book this was many years ago called Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss and I remember he pulled that study somebody did it a long time ago Time Under Tension and he was basically like look this is the best way to work out you know five seconds up five seconds down he was like if you just did one set of that it would be more powerful than doing you know your three sets of just you know mindlessly doing it but then like at the same time growing up as an athlete we hear the opposite right they're like hey you got to have fast twitch we got to work on your explosiveness and your speed and everything and so I was always like huh you know I don't know well that's where you have different styles of training athletics are going to be a lot different we're not bodybuilders it's all about power and movement and speed that type of training is going to be completely different than someone who's trying to really have body recomposition who's a bodybuilder style of training that's trying to shape and sculpt and things that's where the Time Under Tension is so is so valuable basically that's going to get you huge but the stuff I've been doing is going to keep me lean and explosive what would you say I should do because like I still like in pursuing golf and trying to be great at it I don't think I'll have the flexibility and the agility if I just get all huge well that's the thing right so I say I like to do met con stuff as much as possible so there can be a different variety of training I mean honestly you could probably get away with doing three really solid hypertrophy days a week what is that hypertrophy let's just say legs push pull hitting your whole body in three sessions got it and then maybe add in some some type of agility training that will help keep you limber and loose whether it's golf or football or sprinting or whatever the case may be so that way you're staying optimal with flexibility and deep tissue work stretching if you really create a program based around the goal you could create the right program that would make you a savage golf player I like that I'm gonna have to just get freaking what do you think I should weigh I'm 1.95 right now I'm definitely not a super lean I definitely have a lot of fat to lose but I'm kind of bulking right now do you believe that you have to bulk first and then cut or no you think it just all happens simultaneously I think if you just do everything right that body recomposition just really kind of happens and I'm an old school guy we're so deep into technology and science and stuff now which I think is great because it really gives you some solid evidence that you can pull from but for me I'm like I'm an old school looking in the mirror see how your clothes fit yeah beating the log book in the gym writing with pen and pencil or maybe today on a program using a nap yep I think that's really in my opinion the best marker because everybody is so different your body's not like mine we're all doing something different but yeah we'll talk after man maybe I can I'm just open to all new ideas that's the thing man is I love hearing these different perspectives especially on health because I talk a lot about business and I get business guys in and we talk business and I'm always open to new business ideas too I'm like oh you're marketing that way oh you're running your sales team that way oh you're creating an offer or product that way interesting and then the health side is just so like I want to say unknown because everyone has so many theories on it right everybody's a strong believer in like one method and then you know they just they're opposites right somebody's like dude carnivore it's the best and then somebody's like no you gotta be a vegan and I'm like dude there's no way the vegan's right there's just no way well you know I think in this day and age where we are right now too everyone's trying to figure out how to capitalize on something so it's like everyone's taking the basics or the foundation of something and really trying to put a spin on it where they can kind of create their own little niche and what happens in doing that is you complicate everything so much that you have we create the problem that exists right now where it's like if you're trying to start like let's just say you're trying to start your health journey and you go online and you're just trying to read you'll read one thing that says do this and then the next article will say not to do everything you just read I know that's what I'm saying and that's why most people give up they're like well I don't even know what to do I don't know what's true they don't know who to look for because they see online coaches now as they're just trying to get my money so it's a really precarious place that we're in because really at the end of the day nothing's gonna beat the foundational stuff nothing's gonna be resistance training free weights, nothing and it's very basic and it's very basic with the food and it's very basic with the supplements yeah and if you stay within that realm of keeping things simple and basic that's really all you need but simple and basic is boring and people will need more than the basics to keep themselves interested in things like that and that's why I'm like well you really have to embrace what you're trying to do find a good playlist, find some good music find some things that gives you perspective to what you're trying to do that way the mundane, the boring aspect of what fitness really is because it's the repetition of doing things day in and day out that over time give you the ultimate results and most people just don't have the patience, they want it now and that's when you have the program hopping and it's like yeah I just did this program and it sucked and it didn't work and I'm like how long did you do it for and they're like well I almost did 3 weeks man I didn't lose 20 pounds in 3 weeks, I don't know what happened yeah so you mentioned supplements and we've kind of already talked a lot about it for me I'll just give you my background when I was playing all I really did was pre-workout you know like I didn't have any supplements really beyond that I would take like creatine here there and then once I got done playing and actually I didn't, I still didn't even do anything really for a long time, it was just like pre-workout, protein powder now in the last 3 months I've gone down this journey of testosterone and hormones and peptides and all this stuff and it's definitely crazy like you said you better be dialed in because it'll like it can mess you up if you just start taking all this stuff so like when people come in what are you really prescribing them supplement wise we we like to keep everything as basic as possible at least in the short term up front because most of the time it takes you to detox all the garbage out of your body before you can really understand where you are and one of the very important things that we like to recommend highly recommend is to get blood work done because blood work will tell you so much about what's happening internally and when you don't have that reference point of blood work and let's just say you spend 2, 4, 6 weeks dumping everything you have into a program and you don't see any results, it's discouraging and it could have been as something as simple as you know maybe there's some thyroid supplementation or maybe your testosterone was bottomed out there's a lot of little things that could have been you know addressed at the beginning therefore these next 4, 6 weeks would have been much more beneficial but a lot of things some of the basic things that we like to recommend are magnesium magnesium is something that most people are deficient in there's so many different physiological functions that magnesium is involved in specifically with sleep at night I've been taking ZMA for a long time I forgot that you take ZMA yeah it's one of those things where like 4, 600 milligrams of magnesium glycinate with your last meal before you go to bed a lot of times people who have issue with sleeping something as simple as that can just solve it all vitamin D3 is a hugely important one because we don't get enough sun these days not getting enough from food there's an importance of supplementing with that and then I like to really recommend electrolytes to people because it's again we're so depleted we're not drinking much water it's like some people just have this phobia to drink in plain water which you don't have to drink plain water but if you can drink something maybe it has a little bit of flavor some electrolytes you're better hydrated your body can use utilize that hydration aspect much more efficiently without feeling like you've got to drink 2 gallons a day yeah I'm going to buy some electrolytes because I drink a lot of water but right now since I'm not feeling great I'm just trying to like pound water and it's just flesh everything out of my system you ever heard of element they're like I have my clients use those when they're fasting they're higher in sodium so when you first drink them you can taste the sodium in there interesting sodium per packet but some great flavors in there some weird flavors like chocolate chocolate water I don't know about that one I thought the same thing but when I tried it it was surprisingly good well you know what I drink chocolate protein powder so I can't imagine it's worse it's like that without the sweetness to it which might sound weird but I promise it's good alright you just buying one Amazon alright I'll try some of those okay so D3 so like when I was I never got tested I never got a blood test until last year that was my first time doing it at the time my testosterone was like 300 and they're like you know that's at the bottom end of range but it's not low I was like okay so what do I do yeah and I was like it's weird because I felt fine you know I slept well obviously I was lifting heavy weights and you know performing every day like I didn't feel like it was low and then I did research and I'm like alright well let's try and enhance it so I got on all these like just Amazon supplements because I didn't want to do anything crazy yet and so I did like boron what else did I do ashawaganda pregnenolone did you do tribulus no I did tart cherry yep what else did I do actually vitamin K and D I think it's vitamin K and D they come together vitamin K2 helps the D absorption yeah and then maybe like two other ones so yeah I started doing that stuff and that raised it from like 300 to 500 yeah simple stuff less than 100 bucks a month of supplements and then the doc was like yeah I mean that's pretty much it like that's gonna be what it is doing that and so I was like yeah that sucks and then he's like you could try TRT and I was like well I don't really want to do that and he's like well let's just try you on clomid first and so I tried clomid for a couple of months and it was whatever like I didn't really feel any different my testosterone went to 800 but it wasn't like I really didn't feel any different and then finally I was like alright let's just do it you know I'm just gonna give in and do this and so I did it and I've not been tested since yet but I'm really curious to see what it is because that I did feels like whoa this is different you got on it when you were sitting at 800 yeah yes you're probably like I don't know how much you're doing but I'd say if you were at 800 you'd get an 1100, 1200 there we go that's on the upper end right there but all the simple depending on the toxicity of your body a lot of times just losing body fat let's just say losing 5% body fat I mean you can raise your testosterone 200 points possibly yeah what's crazy is doing this for the first time I've actually gained weight and lost body fat and then a new thing that's never happened so that right there is body recomposition at its finest so that's been new for me and I definitely think these two things are correlated but like the last two months I've been just like a hawk in the business like revamping everything and like very clear and like I don't want to say aggressive but I'm much more maybe motivated to just crush and I'm like hey this is what we're doing no longer are we going to accept these week standards and now that I'm thinking about it I'm like yeah that makes sense higher testosterone would definitely do that yeah and sometimes too there's the thought of depending on your age like if you get on TRT like in your 40s I think it's probably one of those things where more than likely it'll be a lifelong thing yeah so if your testosterone is just on the bottom end then you can actually go through some different protocols to get on a cycle get off, stimulate your own body's production back up where TRT can be a temporary thing so it's there's some different ways to approach it depending on your lifestyle and what your ultimate goal is you know this is what I told somebody on the podcast because they were like yeah I heard that too and I said logically I started to think about it and that was why I never did it for a long time and I started to think about it logically and I said what am I on the rest of my life anyway I was like well I got to eat 200 grams of protein every day I got to work out I got to drink a lot of water I got to eat the right macros I got to still eat all the supplements and everything I'm doing anyways is something that I'm on anyways like are you doing one shot a week are you micro dosing? I'm doing two a week like 50 so it's like one I don't even know yeah one milliliter one c one c a week but it's split one of the interesting things that a lot of people don't know about is that you can do like let's say .3 every third day and it actually helps with estrogen regulation too it's more injections but you can actually do it in a much smaller needle subcutaneously instead of intramuscular and your blood plasma levels just kind of stay more more level yeah you know what's funny is the first time I did it I had like that massive needle and I did it in my arm dude hurt so bad my arm was sore for like a week I was like there's got to be a better way to do this and they're like dude you could do it in your butt and so like that was better and then somebody told me that they were like hey you know you could like have a way smaller needle if you just do it this way I was like thank you for telling me that because dude that normal needle is scary dude and plus too the more you do that the more scar tissue you're going to end up having so tell me about that just think about if you're basically puncturing the skin going through the muscle with a needle injecting a volume of fluid and if you keep doing it in the same spot over time unless you're constantly getting some deep tissue work or scraping, grasping things are going to break those adhesions up you'll end up getting scar tissue there and a lot of times that can end up being a knot you'll have like a lump so you want to try and avoid all that so like sub-q micro dosing you can do in your love handles I do it I do it like right next to my belly button if you have enough to go right there that's so easy to do so you do it in your love handle yeah love handle I don't really have much body fat yeah I got on TRT back in 2018 and I didn't realize how bad I was so I've been living in a chronic state of stress for years I can only imagine with your career yeah so I joined in literally from the time I was 18 joining the Marine Corps right out of high school I've just literally lived in this crazy state of stress for until now but I remember 2018 I felt like my body was just going in the wrong direction I wasn't sleeping my appetite was garbage so I did blood work and my test was like 120 but you still looked huge still looked huge but I knew I could tell something was not right like getting out of the bed in the morning you're just tired and then just getting on that it was like someone breathe new life back into me so let's talk about that for a sec I think you gotta have high testosterone to build all this muscle mass and to have this physique and you're over here saying well no actually my testosterone was really low and I was still big I just felt terrible so I was carrying a little more water weight than I normally do my endurance in the gym wasn't like it normally is but when you still have intensity and intentional training and you're still eating right you're still gonna trend in the right direction but it's not optimal yeah cause you're doing all the right things you know it's not like you just let yourself go cause when you hear about people with 100 T it's like well yeah they look like it they don't take care of themselves at all that wasn't the case so you're just saying that stress and probably age were the what did it how old are you? 44 yeah it's uh that's something that most people don't even correlate testosterone to metabolic dysfunction stress but when your cortisol are constantly in this elevated state it affects everything in your body when I came back from uh from Iraq in 09 I was going through a lot of mental stuff cause I didn't really know how to integrate into society because the conversations were just the ungratefulness and the selfishness that people have I was having a really hard time like is this really the way it is um and I I was trying to seek out some different modalities for post-traumatic stress with no success the only thing that helped me was uh was cannabis and I would do that before I would go to bed at night because it was the only way I could get to sleep so literally I've been on this journey of trying to navigate through this PTSD stuff and then November of last year I actually uh linked up with a doctor her name is Shauna Springer she wrote a book called Warrior but she is in the Stella Ganglian block forefront she's one of the main the main faces for that treatment I don't know what that is so on each side of your neck here each side of your C4 you've got a nerve bundle the Stella Ganglian block is they go into this block of nerves with a needle and they inject some anesthetic at the top part and then they go into the bottom part and uh I remember laying on the table she went into the top part and uh or the doctor did and the way I describe it is you know if something's vacuum sealed where it's like super tight and compact you cut it open and you can just you just see that sensation went across my entire body wow and there was this involuntary response of uh of just I mean I started crying but that was where the whole thing changed for me I started thinking more clearly the way to the world was off my shoulders and that was kind of the beginning of the new journey I was on and it was at that point I'm like I need to I need to talk I need to get out there and speak and I met Renee not too long after that wow but that's just part of uh chronic state of stress you know when you're in that state you're stuck in sympathetic in a sympathetic state which you know your cortisol, adrenaline, everything's just pumping you're you know anxiety but to go back in parasympathetic it's like you can just breathe you can lay there, you can sleep you can just feel like you have control again um so it was a huge huge moment for me that's crazy you know I had Gabrielle Lyon on and she's great and she's actually speaking at WealthCon so anybody who's uh thinking about coming to WealthCon she's going to give a great speech WealthCon.org if you want to attend um but basically she was like look the answer to you know longevity and feeling good is muscle it always has been put on muscle and you'll be good and we talked about it in a podcast and she was like isn't it weird that testosterone and steroids and these things get a bad rep yet anything to lose weight is like good and you know like these weight loss things and like these sleeping pills and Xanax and whatever right like they're like oh no those are good like you know let's give those out but anything that builds muscle like what's better a Xanax or a steroid they're not even close than a Xanax yet here we are it's the name steroid that has that stigma to it that just automatically makes people feel like oh you're cheating you're bad you're doing the wrong thing how dare you get out there and honestly I had that stigma too that's why I never did it because I grew up in pro sports and so it was illegal and I was like dude anybody who does that loser and finally I just had a realization one day I'm like I'm not even playing any sports anymore like I'm a YouTuber you know like nobody's drug testing me right now like what am I doing I was like alright let's try it out so and I'm like yeah and somebody also said too they were like hey think about the pros versus the cons like is there a con to everything yeah for sure there's definitely you know pros and cons to everything but like if you look at the benefits of doing this versus not doing it the benefits outweigh any kind of side effects yeah yeah we're in an age right now where the food just continually keeps like it just gets worse we're continually being fed the wrong things to do so at some point like you've got to have a moment conversation with yourself about your health and pulling it together finding someone or some place or some community to go to to allow you to start going in the right direction and that's really what we're trying to create in this program is a community too like it's not just you're out there we give you a program and you're just out there by yourself like we communicate with everyone about everything that's going on the more a client commits to the program the more we're going to be involved and be committed with them if someone comes on the program and they don't track metrics they don't log anything we don't know what they're actually doing so yeah and I'll say too I'm talking about like all these you're talking about this gland thing and I'm talking about all these peptides and stuff but at the end of the day regardless of your budget if you have a gym membership and you just eat healthy you're good like you're going to be real good these other things are just enhancements to good behaviors and have it so if you don't have that first the stuff doesn't do anything you know when you're eating something wrong yeah you know when you're opening up a wrapper when you're ordering some I had my In-N-Out Burger yesterday well I mean it was animal style with fries I mean I'm going to get one before I leave your extra there we go at least I got my protein in it but you know it was within my macros so I kind of look at it and I'm like hey is it the best thing I could be eating am I hitting my macros yes yeah well again though it's like alright well what is your definition of life some people can take it to the extreme yeah liver king yeah I've had him on the show that's on the extreme side of things he's like I just want dead animal or yeah I just want raw animals, liver not cooking nothing I mean when you're going to sleep on boards and eat raw testicles like that's a whole other level so it's like alright well I think you really have to define life what it means to you and how far you're willing to go maybe you don't care about the deodorants you're putting on or the toothpaste you're brushing your teeth with maybe you just want to focus on hey you know what I'm just going to eat clean food yeah anything within the realm of you having oversight and are aware and conscious of what you're putting in your body the better off you're going to be it's when you don't care and you're just eating anything and you have no idea where you're at yeah so again back so your question like how did I come over with Andy and what we're doing like this is really I say this isn't even about me this is about me being in a place right now where I can live the most purposeful life and Hollywood I thought was going to be my end all be all but it was really just a chapter that has allowed me to showcase my abilities to the world to show people that if I can do it they can do it anyone can really do it because I try and break it down where you don't have to be a celebrity to you know to have these type of results and there has to be some ownership of your life and your health we've got here's real estate for you our bodies we've got one house to live in for our whole lives you can't short sell it but you foreclose your dad yeah exactly but it's like there's no escaping this house that you're in so it's better that you take control of it and take care of it now before it's too late because when it's too late your kidneys fail your heart fail like something happens then you're going to look back and wish all the simple things that were there and available to you to do you're going to just constantly obsess about should of should of should of now is the perfect time like literally right now whoever's listening to this right now I'm talking to you you need to take control of your life because it's in your hands if you have a family if you have a business there's people counting on you and you can't let them down I like to think of my body in my house it's like a beach house it's not super massive like it's not a mansion but you know it's like sleek good view that's what I'm going for there we go the wealthy way is all about just being great in all aspects of life business, health, family faith everything right and I tell people all the time like look if your personal life is lacking your relationships are bad how do you think that affects your business you're dealing with drama with your wife we already talked about health that's a no brainer you're not going to have an optimal marriage if you're not healthy a lot of guys can't get it up you better start taking your health seriously you know you think about faith there's a lot of people spiritually dead because they neglect that part and everybody just runs towards business I had a friend tell me I was getting divorced this morning and I was like heartbroken and he's like dude I just didn't put the time that was required and I just see that time and time again and everything so that's why I created the wealthy way that's why I bring guys on to talk about health that's why I bring pastors on that's why I bring relationship people on so I bring my wife on and we just talk about relationships obviously money is important too but I don't know that as crazy as this sounds to say I think if people could actually eat in a way that is just very basic and meaningful there would be so many there would be much less problems across the world and the reason I say that it's a ridiculous way of framing this because it's such a simple weird way of revolving around food but when you're eating your mind is not clear the brain doesn't function the way it should because of inflammation when you have so much inflammation in your body in general people are just bitter across the board they're resentful, they're jealous when they see people like us succeeding and thriving there's this organic hate that they have how dare you do that you should be down here with the rest of us and I see this like day to day, week to week through people when you talk to them or when you read comments and you're like I wonder what's going on in this person's life to make them so hateful over saying something people are just always projecting themselves onto you that's how it goes but again I really think it has a lot to do with the way they're taking care of their health they just feel that way mentally, physically, everything last question I have I've got a crazy thing I heard the other day and I'm debating whether or not I'm going to try it I'm going to bring this guy on the podcast because he has some wild theories about this way to get your health better I'll tell you after you tell me what's like the craziest thing you've heard about maybe health or some supplement or some like thing that nobody's doing and you've thought about trying it or you believe in it you got anything like that? I mean the craziest thing to me would be something along the lines of like doing what the liver king does yeah that's a crazy one something that I've seen and heard about from a couple people which doesn't even make any sense is like drinking your own piss dude that's what I was, yep that was mine I've heard that too everything about that sounds wrong like where, how can there be any potential health benefit in that when it's an excretory okay so I talked to this guy for about an hour about drinking your own pee and I was like dude you're coming on the podcast because I have to, we have to unpack this so guys you got to subscribe if you want to see that episode but he brought up a lot of good points that I never thought about like I said I'm open to anything so he was like alright dude this is how he framed it, it was so funny he was like we were talking about my son because I was like hey you know we did stem cells, it was great he's like what if I told you you could get stem cells but it wasn't going to cost you like 15 grand I was like how he's like alright well just hear me out and then he just like goes down this like rabbit hole of like explaining all these things and then it inevitably goes to hey you got stem cells in your urine and they're 100% unique to you and like urine is just full of them and if you actually let your and sit for weeks the stem cells like multiply and so you could have more stem cells in just this thing of urine than what we pay 10 grand plus 4 and he started to talk about it he was like look urine has been around for a long time and he's a Christian guy so he goes Ryan you're Christian let's talk about the biblical side of how God created humans he was like do you know what a baby does in the womb and I was like what do you mean they just are in the womb he's like the baby has like the tube in its mouth do you know what it's drinking its own urine and I actually do remember that my wife told me that that a baby for 9 months just drinks its own urine over and over again and what's in it is all these stem cells and nutrients that's helping the baby to pull up right I was like okay that's one thing he goes think about like these other things you know that you hear about urine fixing he's like what do you do when you get like what do they tell you to do when you get a jellyfish sting you pee on it because urine is an anti-venom I was like okay and then I remember playing baseball that they would tell us a lot of the Latin players would tell us that hey like if you have blisters or anything you pee on your hands and that's how you get rid of blisters and heal them and I was like you know what I've actually heard this in many different scenarios but I've never thought about it and then I was like dude don't tell me the next thing you're gonna say is like I should go eat my own crap like what what's next and he was like funny you say that and I was like oh boy where's this going and he talked about like these experiments they did on wraps where you know you had like this skinny rat and they took the fecal matter of both and swapped them into like they injected them into the rats and instantly the fat rat became skinny and the skinny rat became fat and the reason is like its cells just changed automatically like because you inserted the cells of the two different ones it automatically changed and uh I was just like dude alright so are you saying that like my son should just drink his own urine like what are we saying here he's like look you can he's like my kids do and he's like and they've they've had seizures and other things and they don't have them anymore and I was like really and this guy's like a very big document like he does documentaries and stuff like where he interviews doctors and all this and he's the one who actually told me about the covid thing where there's all these venoms in covid it's like where did these venoms come from they're not even so it just goes back to it China pretty much just made this virus synthetically and one of the ways you poison people is literally by giving them poison um so long story short I'm like alright dude I'll make a decision you're gonna come on the podcast and I'm gonna commit whether or not I believe this and so he's gonna come so you've heard it too I actually saw a video of this guy on instagram not too long ago probably my friend and I couldn't I'm like how does because to me like I'm not I'm not a scientist I don't like I've never even researched into drinking or eating but yeah I'll for sure watch the episode yeah I'm interested I'm like bro like come down so he's coming in like two weeks and we're gonna dive deep and whether or not and I told him like dude you know what and I'll give it like I don't even know I'll just try it and then people are gonna judge me and it's gonna be fine and then I'm just gonna be that youtuber who drinks his own piss that's what's gonna happen I mean I don't know how you can stomach it honestly especially the longer it sits well what he said was you would just drink it like right right then and there you wouldn't like just keep he's like you could and it would formulate more stem cells but he's like we just do it daily from the source and that's a daily thing he does yeah and I don't know we'll see I'm gonna I guess what I'll say is I'm open to it I'm open to whatever could get results because you know what's interesting too even going to the COVID thing like I just don't believe anything the FDA says anymore just because it's so corrupt and just everything is so backwards with how they treat people and like everyone knows that by now but you know I just remember Trump was getting in trouble for talking about whatever that thing was that he was saying hey this is like gonna help people and they're like no dude that's rat poison and like ivermectin or something like that and then like sure enough like a couple years later like yeah that stuff actually was good you guys should have been doing that and it's like dude you know Pfizer and these guys making a hundred billion dollars and it's it's freaking shameful man yeah like our like our entire way of living was completely altered by this nonsense yeah it's I have a hard time with this whole thing today yeah well you know I have heard that drinking your own urine prevents COVID so we'll see interesting I don't know I made that up but I'm spreading I'm spreading they'll have the fact checkers on this yeah I'm spreading fake news hey if anyone has heard that in the comments let me know if you if you have heard what I'm talking about or if I'm just crazy but dude hey I appreciate you coming by man we'll link to your guys' programs down below love what you're doing helping people it's amazing man so um just inspired by everything you and Andy are doing for everyone man I appreciate it we're just getting started well guys if you like this episode make sure you're subscribed and we'll see you on the next one peace if anyone wants to go to another level make sure you like the video comment below so I know who you are set your notifications and then subscribe to the channel we got daily sales training videos dropping I'll see you soon


Okay, so I'm Nicola, and I'm going to talk today about some work I've done as part of my PhD on the effects of volcanism on tropical variability with Matt England, Alex St. Gupta and Shane McGregor. Okay, so as we saw on the first day, volcanic eruptions are known to influence climate, and studies have shown with observations that surface air temperature cools over the time scale of about one to three years after a large tropical volcanic eruption and then tends to recover over the next six to seven years. And this figure illustrates exactly what happens.  And what's really important is the sulfur dioxide, which turns into sulfate aerosols and acts to reflect and scatter solar radiation particles and act to cool the surface of the earth. Many studies have previously investigated a link between the Pacific Ocean variability, particularly looking at El Nino and the Southern Oscillation. Some studies have found that there's an El Nino that occurs after a large tropical eruption, and this tends to be hypothesized to be due to what's known as a dynamical thermostat. So if you think about the tropical Pacific Ocean, the Western Pacific, if you have a volcanic eruption, the Western Pacific tends to cool, whereas the East and Pacific cools, but is also influenced by upwelling waters. So it cools less than the West and Pacific. So when you have more cooling in the West and less cooling in the East, you get something that looks more El Nino-like. However, there is, I'll mention that there is a lot of debate around this dynamical thermostat hypothesis. Other studies have found that you get an El Nino followed by a La Nina. Some have found that you get an El Nino only in a Pinatubo-sized eruption or larger, and a whole bunch of studies have found that there's no real statistical significant response. So it seems to be a bit of an open question as to what's really going on here. While we're interested in this, among other reasons, is that influences on the Pacific Ocean might influence the sea surface temperatures. So if you have an El Nino-like state of the ocean, it tends to be warmer or a La Nina tends to be cooler. OK, so the motivation for this study came from the first section of my PhD work, and in these figures, you can see four different large eruptions that have occurred since the 1800s. And what I've shown here is the composite from 31 different Seymour 5 models of 10-year trends in surface air temperature around the volcanic eruption. So as you'd expect, there tends to be cooling after a volcanic eruption. And this has some structure. The first sort of thing that the first thing that really jumps out at you is that Pinatubo in the bottom right here really doesn't look quite the same as the other eruptions. And we think this is just because Pinatubo occurs in 1991. The climate's warmer than in the 1800s, so you get less cooling because it's already warmer or the same amount of cooling but on a already warmer base state. You can see in these plots that the trend in surface air temperature has a whole bunch of structure, as you might expect. The land tends to cool more than the oceans. But what we're really interested in is this response in the Pacific Ocean that it's difficult to see, but is highly stippled. So the models really agree in this region. And it looks really La Nina-like. So we wanted to know what was going on. OK, so to look at this, we used a whole bunch of Seymour 5 models. I have 33 different models and 122 different ensemble members. And we looked at both ENSO and the Indian Ocean Dipole because many studies have shown that they've been linked. So these panels show the EOFs for the Indian Ocean Dipole and the El Nino-Southern Oscillation calculated using both sea surface temperature and sea surface height. And the reason we've used sea surface height is because the sea surface temperature EOFs can be affected by the volcanic cooling, whereas the sea surface height EOFs tend to give you a more dynamic response about what's going on in the ocean. So the top left shows the positive mode of the Indian Ocean Dipole, which is characterized by warming in the Western Indian Ocean, which you can see here, cooling over the Indonesian region. And that corresponds with an increase in sea surface height over the Western Indian Ocean and a decrease over the Indonesian region. The bottom panel show the positive phase of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation or the El Nino. And you can see a characteristic El Nino with this warming in the East and Pacific. And you can see that the EOFs for the sea surface height tend to show an increase in sea surface height in the East and Pacific and a decrease in the Western Pacific. OK, so in this study, we looked at five volcanoes and they're the five large tropical volcanoes that occurred in the historical period. I mean, you can see them in the right hand panel. These plots show the year in relation to the eruption peak on the X-axis with the volcanoes composited around the eruption peak. And that's shown in the solid vertical line and the average eruption start times in the dash vertical line. I mean, if you look at the left panel, these are the surface air temperature anomalies around the eruption composited over all of the cement five models and the red lines, the multi-model multi-volcano composite. And these anomalies are in relation to the five years before the eruption peak. And that was just done because the eruptions occur in different warm states of the climate. So it's to put them on a similar baseline. You can see here that after the eruption start, you tend to get a cooling in surface air temperature as you'd expect, and that occurs over about a two-year time scale, which agrees well with observations. And then you have a recovery over a longer time scale of those surface air temperatures. This plot here shows Enso. And again, I'll just reiterate, the solid vertical line is the eruption peak and the dash vertical line is the average eruption start time. And here the horizontal black lines show the 95% significant level just for the multi-volcano multi-model mean composite, which is the red line. And so what you can see here is if you look at the left panel in the blue, centered around about two and a half years after the eruption, you have a really significant La Nina-like pattern. And that's what was showing up in the plots that motivated this study. However, what we found is that the volcanic cooling tends to project on this mode and enhance that La Nina-like signal. And if you look at the sea surface height variable on the right, you actually see something quite different. You see about straight after the eruption, you tend to have an El Nino-like response. And you don't really see that La Nina signal the same way. If you move on and look at the Indian Ocean Dipole, you can see it's less affected by the volcanic cooling. So the sea surface temperature and the sea surface height plots tend to agree. And you can see a positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole that's significant in the shaded red regions after the eruption. And so these results are much more easily seen in Hovmola plots. And the first one here shows sea surface temperature. And so you can see the Indian Ocean on the left of the figure, the Pacific Ocean on the right. And the sea surface temperatures have again been normalized in relation to the five years before the eruption. And again, this is the multi-model, multi-volcano mean. So five years before the eruption starts down here and five years after the eruption up here. So you can see when you look at sea surface temperatures that around the eruption peak, the band of five north to five south tends to cool. But what's really interesting is what happens after this. So you can see that the Indian Ocean is cooling and the Western Pacific is cooling, but the Eastern Pacific isn't cooling nearly as much as the Western Pacific. And this is what looks like the El Nino lack response. So we hesitate to call it an El Nino because there's not warming in the Eastern Pacific and cooling in the Western Pacific, but cooling and less cooling. And you can see that this pattern flips a bit later. And this is the sort of El Nino type pattern that we saw earlier. If you move on to look at the sea surface height variable, you can really see what's happening in the Indian Ocean as well as the Pacific. You can see right after the eruption, you get an increase in sea surface height in the Western Indian, a decrease in the Eastern Indian and the Western Pacific and an increase in the Eastern Pacific. And this really looks a lot like a positive Indian Ocean dipole event corresponding with an El Nino like event. And then you can see a weaker, I guess, change in this phase towards the drop in sea surface height in the East and an increase in the West, which looks more landing your like. So if you were having and so type anomalies, you'd expect to see some sort of zonal wind changes in the Pacific region. And so this figure here shows the same plot, but for the zonal wind. And keep in mind that the winds in the Pacific go from East to West. So the red color isn't actually an increase in the winds. It's a decrease in the winds and a blue color is an increase in the winds. And you can see after the eruption or around the after the eruption peak, you get this decrease in the winds in the Pacific. And that corresponds with what you'd expect if you have an El Nino like pattern. And then you can see you get an increase in the winds shown in the blue around when you see these more landing your like anomalies. Okay, so if we look at the probability of these events happening, what we actually find is a change in the probability of getting IOD and El Nino type events after an eruption. And so at the 95% significant level, you get about a 20 to 25% increase in the probability of getting a positive IOD in the six to 18 months after an eruption. And that corresponds with a 30% chance of an El Nino like pattern occurring. And that's seen just in the sea surface height field because it's really damped out in the sea surface temperature field by that volcanic cooling. And we do see about a 50% chance of an increase in the La Nina, but this is again enhanced by the volcanic cooling, but it explains what we were seeing in the motivation plots at the beginning, that when you composite decadal trends around a volcano, you tend to get a La Nina like pattern in the Pacific. Okay, so if you've zoned out till now, I'm gonna illustrate what we found using pictures.  And what you tend to get is that volcanic cooling that occurs on the globe. You could hypothesize that due to the dynamical thermostat that I talked about before or other people have hypothesized other mechanisms, you get what looks like. A positive Indian Ocean Dipole event corresponding with an El Nino like event that isn't warming in the East and Pacific and cooling in the West and Pacific, but cooling in the West and Pacific and less cooling in the East and Pacific. And many studies have shown that a pattern like this tends to lead to a La Nina type pattern occurring on these sort of time scales that we see the La Nina occurring after. And this is interesting because when you look at 10 year trend plots around an eruption, you tend to get sort of persistent cooling and a La Nina like pattern in the Pacific Ocean. Okay, so to summarize, what have we found? We found that large tropical eruptions consistently result in cooling in the CMF5 models. Large tropical eruptions tend to cause an increase in the probability of the following sequence of events, which are a positive IOD and an El Nino like event occurring in the Austral Spring or Summer after the eruption. I'm an El La Nina type event occurring in the third Austral Summer after the eruption that's really enhanced by this volcanic cooling signal. And we find this interesting because it might lead to increased persistence of cooling due to the La Nina state of the ocean. Thanks.