All right. Today's episode, we're going to talk about why maps training programs has been consistently ranked as the most effective training programs out there. I like that. I like that better. I like that better. It's much better. All right. So I guess we're going to talk about, I guess the kind of how it all started and what makes the maps programs what they are. Cause we have now, we've got tens of thousands of people who've followed the programs and there's a lot of, we talked about this early on, but we've been on air now almost eight years. We really haven't talked about kind of the deal. Well, I mean, how is this for you right now? You and Doug, right? To think about this, that literally right about 10 years ago, you and him, you were training him, you were working on writing this up. He was testing probably some of the philosophy around it and you were applying some of the things that you were coming up with to your clients at the time.  That's it's 10 year anniversary right now. It's been, it's yeah, man. It's pretty cool. It went by fast, huh, Doug? Too fast. It went by super fast. Does it feel like that long ago? Like both. It feels like a long time ago. You know, I feel like a lot when I see old videos and I go, yeah, it was a long time ago, but it also feels like it went by and like, it's like having a kid, like your kid grows up and you're like, oh my God, where'd the time go? It went by so fast. But so back then I had a wellness studio. So we did personal training and I had massage therapists, their acupuncturists, people that help with nutrition, a lot of stuff. And that's when Doug came in and Doug hired me as his trainer. And now leading up to that point, I had been training people for probably 12 years or so. So I'd been doing it for over a decade and I was always a student, you know, like you guys, right? A student of of a fitness, right? Learning about how things didn't, you know, people did things in the past and what works and what doesn't work. Anyhow, I started training Doug and Doug had a lot of experience with exercise. So he was by no means a beginner. He had been working out for a long time. He'd follow bodybuilding routines. And, you know, he was a bit of a student of the game as well. Came to me because he was referred to me by his chiropractor. And through training Doug, he saw like this really rapid transformation and how long into our, I guess, our relationship was it that you approached me? I wish I could remember the exact amount of time, but I would say within the first year, year and a half. Yeah. Oh, so you guys have been training for a while? For a while. Yeah. Yeah. So I basically, I took some time to see what was actually going to happen as far as the workouts are concerned. And I'm sure you were skeptical because of your experience of lifting over the last, what, two or previous two decades? Yes. So I, yeah. So I had experience working out, of course, I had a lot of frustrations working out over the years. And the philosophy that Sal was putting forth was certainly counter to a lot of the things I'd read in the muscle and fitness magazines. But again, my experience was such that I had tried all kinds of different things and I hadn't seen the success I wanted. And I was very open to a different approach or different philosophy because obviously, if what you're doing is not working, something's got to change. And so I just, you know, I stood back and just went through the workouts with Sal and saw the benefits. And little by little, I started thinking, well, you know, this is something that we should be sharing with other people because it's been game changing for me. Why shouldn't we get this out there? Because most of the information I'd been seeing had been really kind of counter to what Sal was putting out there. How many weeks did it were you into the program before you kind of had that epiphany and we're like, wow, this is different, but also it's super effective in comparison to what I've done before. Well, even during the first month, I started seeing some real changes. So I started out and I gained a lot of strength. I started putting on size and I go, OK, something something's working here. So now you're committed. I mean, I'm committed. And I'd paid for, I think, 10 sessions originally was your first package. And then he had another package, which was 40 sessions. So I nice bomb sale. So very nice. Yeah. So I pointed up the money for that, which was not, it was not cheap. Now he was expensive, but I figured, well, you know, once I'm into it, I want to get the benefits, so I'm going to go all in. And so I did that. And then I actually, I think I purchased that package at least once or twice after that as well. Yeah. But sometime, I think during that towards the end of that first package, the 40s package, I said, you know, I really want to do something with this guy. So be honest, all these years now we've been together, you pretty much control most of our money.  Yeah, pretty much. It's a little by little. Here's that first 10 back. All right, everybody, today's giveaways, Maps Anabolic. That was the first NAPS program and it's quite fitting. Today's episode, we talk about the fact that it's the 10-year anniversary of Maps. Also, stay tuned. We got some cool coming out. Not going to tell you much more. It's going to be a surprise. Anyway, if you want to win free access to Maps Anabolic, here's what you do. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we dropped this episode, subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications. If you do all of those things and we declare you the winner, we'll let you know in the comment section that you won. Also, we have a 50% off sale going on right now, three programs on sale. Maps, performance, Maps, aesthetic, and Maps hit all 50% off. If you're interested, just click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, here comes the show. I remember the first time I really had to convince. So Doug was like the perfect client. So you guys have done this. I'm sure you've experienced this. You have that one client that, you know, at first are skeptical, but then you show them and then they're like, OK, cool. Let's just like, I'll go along and follow, you know, what you say. And then it becomes a great relationship. They get great results. Yeah. So he was like the perfect client in that sense. And the first thing I had to convince Doug of was to only work out twice a week, you know, that in fact, when he hired me after when he was hiring me, he wanted to come four days a week. So him and I started talking. He already bought the training and he wanted to do like three or four days a week. And I said, no, no, no, we're going to do two days a week to start with. And he had to convince some of it.  That speaks to your integrity, too, because Justin would have sold him on the four times a week, you know, walked with him on the other two days or so. I truly found it hard to believe that twice a week was going to do the trick. I really did. But I looked at Sal, I looked at myself and I go, well, this guy might know something, you know, but I trusted the process and he got great. Obviously he got great results from it. But towards the God, towards probably that second or third package that you had done with me, Doug came to me and he says, you know, Sal, he goes, I have some internet marketing experience. He was an internet marketer. He was he sold insurance. But he says, I have some experience. If you ever want to put something together that you want it that we, you know, we can sell online, he goes, I'll do that with you. And I had nothing at that point. I didn't really have an idea of what to sell. I'd always thought about writing a book. But I thought, you know, what would that look like? You know, digitally or whatever. And so I took him what he said and it just kind of stayed in the back of my mind and I went home and it was probably. This is like 2012, 2011, 2013 around there. What time is this? Yeah, I'd say this was either at the end of 2012 or the beginning of 2013. OK. Yeah. Now, now consider it up into this point at this point. I had already just I had already learned a lot about training and had figured out that a lot of the stuff that I thought was effective wasn't.  And this was something that was of interest to me because I knew that anabolic steroids changed how the bodies responded to exercise. So I said, you know, back in the day before that even existed, they had to train the way that my clients train the way that I was training naturally. And there has to be if they train differently, then it's because they were natural. So let me see what they did. And when I look back, there were so many different things that they did that people didn't do anymore. So up until this point, I had kind of figured some of that stuff out. But anyway, he came up to me and said, hey, if you have an idea, I'd love to work with you on it. We could sell it online. And it was probably a week later and I went home that night, maybe a week later, I was up late reading and I would do this sometimes. Sometimes I'd stay up late and I'd read whatever you guys know, I'll get into something. I'll just start, you know, kind of going crazy on it. And I was reading the New England Journal of Medicine and there was a study that I've quoted many times on the podcast on it was a really interesting study. They took groups of men and they compared each group of men into each other on muscle building and the groups were broken up into natural with strength training, anabolic steroids with weight training, anabolic steroids, no weight training. So just sedentary and then just sedentary. So a sedentary, sedentary with steroids, steroids in training and then training naturally. And the results of that blew me away because I did not expect to see what I saw. Right? Because you obviously, you knew that the steroids and working out was going to be the biggest. Of course. Like I'm like, they're going to build the most unique study, by the way. Very interesting. Yeah. The one that blew me away because I would have thought second place would have been the natural lifting group. So the group that was natural lifting, they've got to build the second most amount of muscle, but it wasn't. It was the steroid group that didn't lift weights. Now it was a short study. I think it was, I don't know, I want to say 16 weeks. But in that 16 week period, the steroid group that didn't lift built a little bit more muscle than the natural group that lifted. And I thought, this is insane. The first thing I had was, wow, steroids are really powerful. Yeah. But then the what came to me after that. And I was literally up till three a.m. thinking about this. And this is when I started writing out the first maps program. As I said, you know, what's crazy about this isn't the fact that the steroid group that didn't lift built the most muscle, it's that my previous ideas of how we built muscle is not complete. So the thought process then was, in order to build muscle, you damage the muscle with exercise, the body heals and then adapts. Therefore, to that point, the thought process, I think for all of us at that point in our lives was like, OK, the more damage I do, the better off I'm going to be because then I have a louder muscle building signal, right? You're healing to whatever damage you do. Yeah, there was that. But there was also that I had completely ignored that there could potentially any other muscle building signals. It was damage and that was it. There's no other signals that send the body that the body receives that says build muscle. Well, in this study, clearly there was no damage. There was a hormonal signal, which was the steroids, right? They gave them testosterone. So I thought to myself, and this is why I was up till two or three a.m. that night, I thought, I wonder what other signals tell the body to build muscle that have nothing to do with damage? Yeah, like what other signaling systems tell the body to build muscle? So then I was on the internet going crazy and thinking of experience. My experiences with clients and family members, one that popped up immediately was. And again, I've talked about this before at least 100 times in the show is I had, you know, I have a lot of blue collar workers in my family. I have plumbers and, you know, tile setters, construction workers, male carriers and none of them work out. But they all had muscular body parts that correlated or corresponded to the activity that they did.  And the plumbers of my family, these muscular forms, you know?  But these people have been doing it for 20, 30 years. You know, they're all in the 50s and 60s. That damage stops. They're not like they're walking more or cranking on things that are harder. After the first couple of months, the body's adapted and that's it.  I mean, literally their calves look like like bodybuilder calves or like I have an uncle whose forearms were like this and he was a mechanic and I thought or plumber and I thought the damage stopped. What is telling these body parts to continue to grow?  So that was like one like clue that I had. Yes. So you basically had your slip in the shower flex capacitor moment. And it was like signals. Yeah. So I'm like some signals, something and all this different stuff. So I'm like, OK, there's damage. That's a real one.  Then there's the pump. The pump can actually induce muscle growth itself. So there's another one. So then I thought I'm going to create a program that utilizes all these different signaling systems and puts them together in a way to where the body's constantly getting a signal to build muscle because the challenge with damage is always recovery. You can only damage so much.  And so that's how literally the first map's program was created. And remember that the day after that, Doug comes in to train with me and I'm all tired because I was up all night and I'm like, I got something, dude. I said, I wrote up a program and we tested it, had clients test it and then. Yeah, how long after riding it, testing it with Doug, implementing it with other? Because this is about the same time when you and I start to start to talk to because you had already kind of tested it on clients. In fact, you guys started to create some of the promo stuff on it. Like, how long was that like applying it to the other the trainers starting to create the promo stuff on it? Months, it was probably, I would say, like a five or six month period because Doug was first and Doug had already been working out with me in a similar way. But then I had him apply things like trigger sessions and, you know, we did a little bit more phasing. And then I had a client, Jim, good friend of mine. He tested it. Then I had Homera, you know, her, she used to work for for both of us. I had all kinds of different friends test it, experienced beginner. And I had them report back, you know, tell me what you feel, what you notice. And everybody was, you know, reporting back like, wow, this is really crazy. Like I'm getting really good results. This is wild. And that's then Doug started putting together. Now, at the time, I didn't know and knew nothing of internet marketing sales. I had no idea you could put a program online, do all that stuff. And Doug's like, yeah, we're going to put you on video. You're going to talk to a camera. Do the whole thing. Yeah, I'm surprised you guys didn't go to the DVD route. That was kind of like, you know, almost in that era. There wasn't a lot of programs out in that era, too. It was like, you know, you had like the infomercials and you had a bit of Beachbody and maybe some like bodybuilder programs like I'd seen, but not a whole lot of like quality fitness programs. No, you know, when he tells this story, one of the things that, you know, I try and challenge myself to think like, man, I wonder if you would have sent me over when Doug sent over that when you sent over the promo video that Doug made, if that would have been hyping up like a, you know, a typical online type of program. Like in it, and it didn't have the philosophy. Like what was that? That was your guys's anabolic signaling program. You know which one I'm talking about, right? Yeah, it's like a 30 minute video. Yeah, the muscle switch. So you got to share a clip of that for this this podcast because when I, yeah, but when you sent it over to me, originally you just wanted my opinion on it. Like, hey, what do you think of this promo video? And what I, what I'm the exercise that I try and do with myself regarding this is, you know, would a mind pump have happened? Had it not aligned with what at the same time was happening in my life as far as programming? Because for most of my lifting career and training career teaching other people, I fell in the trap of creative workouts and, you know, like just hammering the clients and volume and intensity. And I was very much so like in that space for almost a decade. And I was on my way out of that. Like I had started to finally realize like this was not the answer. One, I had applied that same philosophy you did to Doug to myself, like reducing the amount of, and then saw I got bigger than I ever got. I thought, oh, this is wild. Like more doesn't always mean more results. And I was starting to train my clients in these full body routines and really simplify the programming. And so I was just coming into that, like really fresh into that for the last, like say six months of my training career. And when I saw that, that is what hit home for me was like, it was very counter to the trends. Yes, that's, this is not trendy. This is the opposite of what, and it's right in line with what took me my, you know, at this point, my entire career to figure out. And that's what made me pick the phone up and go, let's meet. Otherwise I would have just given you like, oh yeah, cool, bro. Yeah, I like it. You know, it's neat, but it- The video looks good. But it prompted me to like, hey, let's meet. We need to all get together and talk because I don't, there's nothing out there that I see that is presenting this message this way. And it took, and I'm in the space and it took me 10 years to get here. So imagine how many people that we could really help by putting this out there. Well, I thought the same thing. Well, my career too was like, even after I left 24 and kind of went and did things on my own, I was still kind of like experimenting with a lot of the trends in the fitness industry and like trying to train people with all this functional training and, you know, single arm, single leg stuff and all this nonsense. And then I made it to the gym where I was around really high level trainers and sports specific type trainers. And so it just really kind of brought things right back to the basics. Like here's what, you know, you've known this before, but you just rush your clients through all of this. And this is really the meat of what we need to focus on. And that had, that program had a lot of that in it in terms of like just focusing on how to build muscle. The beauty is in the simplicity of it.  And you gotta think to yourself like why, why that happened? It's not that those don't work, they do, but a lot of the information on how to build muscle and train with weights had been disseminated from the bodybuilding space. And bodybuilders for decades where first off bodybuilders are at that level have very little in common with the average person. They're just genetically, they're just very different. It's like being seven feet tall, they're just genetically gifted. So what does that mean? That means that when they send a muscle building signal to their body, the average person, that signal may last 24 to 48 hours. For these people, that signal lasts a week or two, okay? Because they're just, their body's primed to build muscle. Then on top of it, they're all pharmaceutical enhanced and that means they have this constant loud hormonal signal that's going on in their body all the time. And so they're the ones that are telling people how to work out. The problem is the average person is nothing in common with this person genetically and is informatically enhanced. And they're trying to follow these routines and they're not working. Now, if you go back at the turn of the century, early 1900s, late 1800s, these, I mean, you're talking about tremendous feats of strength from these strong men and strong women, right?  And if you look at their training, they all trained full body. They all trained three days a week. They all train in a similar way and people, it's funny.  So we look back, oh, they didn't know anything back then. No, no, no, they were wise. They did what worked. And by the way, the only way they made money back then was they didn't have social media. They couldn't promote themselves any other way than going and challenging other strong men on stage. This is how they made money.  Then you also look at the studies on strength sports, like Olympic weightlifting. Olympic weightlifting has more science put into it than bodybuilding does because it's been funded by countries. It's the Soviet Union for a long time. This is the way that they showed their power. And so you look at the science there and there's a lot of science there that didn't match what we were being told worked. So there's a lot of the information's there. And then the other thing is this is that, look, you guys are both really good trainers, really, really good trainers. What made you guys good?  Why isn't this working? Why am I not seeing results on my clients? Let me try this. Let me try that. So it's like all these different roads, they all go to the truth. That's why when you saw what I sent, Adam. You sift through it all to get the truth. Yeah, so that's why when you guys saw what I sent, it wasn't like new information. It was like, that's what I'm figuring out too. In my opinion, it was the money and the marketing that bastardized the fitness industry because can you imagine opening up a Flex Magazine 15, 20 years ago and seeing Ronnie Coleman or Arnold in the middle of it like that and their workout routine was as boring as Maps Anabolic? Like it would not sell anything. What sold was the tricep-bicep blaster workout with cluster sets and drop sets and pyramids and this unique exercise hanging upside down and that was what sold magazines. That's what grabbed attention.  It wouldn't be popular. It wouldn't be new. It wouldn't be unique. Which by the way is the same trap that all the trainers inside the gyms fell into. We fell in the same trap on selling our clients on buying more training from us. If I told my clients, hey, we need a squat, overhead press, bench press, deadlift, that's basically what we're gonna do for the next six months to a year or so and I'm gonna get you great results. I wouldn't be able to resign my clients. Instead, it was next week, I'm gonna show you something new you've never done before or wait till you feel this workout I got coming. And on the other side of that, you brought up the bodybuilding side.  And so the two of them, and again, money and marketing, what was cool in the money and the marketing side on that, like, oh man, seeing somebody jump and stabilize on one leg and jump through all these weird hoops and spin and twist and like balance on a stability ball with a squat bar on your back, like that stuff became so attractive to people and trainers and clients that it dominated the space. And we all fell for, we all fell right into it. I'm guilty of going down the same path in pursuit of filling my client book up instead of focusing on what was really giving my clients results. We all remember people doing tricep press downs while standing on dyna discs, you know? What are people doing? Yeah, everything was, you know, balancing and whatever. And that's when the functional, you know, when it got crazy in that way. And what happens, you end up ignoring what actually produces the best results. Instead, you're like entertaining your clients with what's new and what's different or reinforcing the terrible idea that the more sore you get, the more painful this is, the more you feel like you're gonna throw up, that means we're doing something good.   And then you train at the point where they feel like they're gonna throw up and it's cathartic, yeah, that's what I get. That's what I deserve.   Cause I need someone to whip me into shape. Yeah, yeah. Like, what? I won't train myself that hard if I just don't have the discipline. Yeah, dude. So, absolutely. Another thing that is that now, and it's funny too, cause we're talking, you know, this was over a decade ago. Now it's almost like this is silly to even say, but this wasn't silly back then. Just 10 years ago, it wasn't silly to say that all rep ranges build muscle. You got into debates and arguments with people. It was this rep range is the best. No, that rep range is the best. And I just looked at things and said, okay, look, power lifters are big and strong. If low rep ranges don't build muscle, why the hell do power lifters look the way they do? And then I said, high rep ranges build muscle too. I know bodybuilders that train in the 20 rep range. Again, marketing, it's too nuanced to say that. It's much easier on a sales funnel or an infomercial to say these reps are for this. These reps are for that. Or these reps are for this body type. It's so much easier to sell that idea than to say something as vague as, all rep ranges build muscle and lose body fat. Okay, well then which one am I supposed to use? You're trying to confuse the muscle. Then you can get away with all of them at once. Yeah, or how about this?  Olympic weight lifters practice these movements every day, the same movements every single day. How the heck can those both coincide? You got hyper frequent Olympic lifters who practice movements on a daily basis for hours, okay? Olympic weight lifters will train two or three times in a day doing, practicing snatches and cleans.  Like, could it be possible? And this is what would go through my head. Could it be possible that there's truth in both of them? And that if we understood that there's truth in both of them, could we use what's true in a way to where the average person could utilize the benefits of both? And the answer, of course, is yes. Yes, there is truth in both of them. And so this is what, you know, what I started to apply with clients with myself. And this is what you guys figured out on your own because like I said, look, you train people long enough you're gonna figure this out. It was funny because even in the world that I was sort of training out of, I was getting made fun of for doing bench press in squats because of all of the functional split stance movements. Like there was this whole movement on basically like Bulgarian squats, split squats or lunges. And that was like, you know, how you would basically load that as heavy as you could. And that was the best way to do that for athletes because of the fact that you're primarily on the field are gonna be in a split stance. And so this whole philosophy around it, which you can make an argument, but for me it was always, I wanna build and establish that fundamental strength. And I wanna, I can load it the most effective way with a barbell, I get strongest doing that. But then I also move out of that and do both. And so it's like, it's not one or the other, it's both. Well, the truth is that, you know, and it's funny because when we get like a trainer who's been a trainer for a really long time and they hear some of the maps philosophy or hear the way we talk about exercise, they're never impressed. Cause like, oh yeah, I know, that's obvious, know that. But nobody has been promoting, wasn't promoting that, at least not back then. Nobody applied it. 10 years ago, it's always been known, especially if you'd been a trainer for an extended period of time, you knew that this is the nuts and bolts of training, but nobody was applying it because it wasn't what sold.  And that wasn't what was best to keep clients coming. That's the truth. Now, the reality of that is that, yes it is, because if you stick to good programming, you get a greater percentage of people, way more results, you teach them the fundamentals that they can now carry on forever, and then eventually that comes back to you in referrals and the reputation that you have, but it's hard to see that when you're in it, right? When you're in the end of it, in it, and you got monthly goals, I gotta sell this much to make this much money. And what's a quick way to do that? Oh, a quick way to do that is just like what all the marketers have done, which is sell you on simple, quick ideas that speak to you so I can keep you coming back versus thinking what is probably really best for these clients? I look, now I obviously know you guys now, so I know the answer to this, but even before I knew you guys, I could have made this prediction that our careers all follow the same path. Initially, really good at getting clients, selling them training. They stick around for three to six months, you'll lose them and then you gotta get new clients and you're really good at getting new clients. But then what that eventually morphed into as you got good and did exactly what you said, Adam, is clients would stay with you for years.  You had the same clients, they stuck with you the whole time. But the first five years, you probably trained 100 people or more because of that idea that you had to show them different things and get them crazy sore and supers.  The reality is, no, you just need to be able to communicate it well, but train them in the most effective way as possible. They don't go anywhere. They stay with you forever and you end up becoming far more successful. Speaking of selling the program, that's where the big challenge was. Because when- It's not sexy. Well, when I wrote it out, so here's what I understood about myself because I was a huge consumer of fitness. I knew that I would buy something if the person explaining it to me did a good job selling it, but also had some kind of perceived authority. So if it was somebody who I was like, oh yeah, that person has got some authority and then they did a good job selling it, I would buy it. Regardless if it looked sexy or not, I would at least consider it. So I'm like, okay, I can explain it well. And that was the video I sent you, Adam, to review because I knew you had a really good background in fitness sales. So we sent you the sales video so you could give me some critique on it. But the other part was authority. That was where the challenge was. I remember Doug and I talked about that and we're like, well, how do we build authority? I'm like, well, the only way I know to build authority in the fitness space is to look more jacked than anybody else. I'm like, that's not gonna happen. I could get, like I got shredded, but I wasn't like, you put me up on Instagram or at the time in the magazines, no one's gonna look at me twice. I don't look like any of these people. So I said, maybe I'll write a book. Like, how am I gonna build this authority? And then we talked about maybe doing a podcast. I thought podcasting would be good because it was long form. Cause I don't wanna use my body to sell anything. I couldn't compete with the, you know, those people that were out there. Plus I don't wanna do it that way. I wanted to be able to talk and explain and build authority. And the fans wasn't created yet. Yeah, exactly. So that's when we got on the phone, Adam, we met and then it was like, oh yeah, we gotta do a podcast. Cause it's long form. And, you know, knowing what we know about fitness, it's unfortunately often sold in short form, which includes a picture and a before and after and a couple of taglines. But real fitness, long-term success, requires long form. How do I know this?  Sometimes years of training them. Well, to that point, you know, that had a lot to do obviously with our strategy of not actually selling the program when it was ready to sell. That's right. I mean, when the podcast had started and we were on episode one, the natural progression I think for somebody in the space would have been to promote the program that we had to sell. And we did it. We sought out to go prove to people that we could help them for free and change their lives and make an impact on them by giving them free advice and building that authority, building that trust, building that loyalty. And then we would be able to offer something up to sale, but we had it all along. But thank God we had the experience that we had to know that, to know the importance of we need to help these people.  Where's the secrets at? Where's the stuff that I didn't know that I'm supposed to do at? And so we had to first build that trust through the show. Think of it this way, right? If you look at different pastries, if I just looked at the ingredients of the different pastries, the ingredients will all look the same, eggs, flour, sugar, water, whatever. So that's what you see when you look at a good program versus a bad program, except sometimes bad programs have weird ingredients. Otherwise it's like, oh, that's basic. It's not that, it's how they're put together. That's where programming comes into play. The programming is how much of each, when of each, how to utilize each and how to put them in the right sequence. Like when you're making a dish, there's a time when you add the sugar and there's a perfect amount of sugar. You don't just throw it in the beginning, for example, you would throw it in at a particular time or when you would first do the garlic or whatever, right? So programming is what makes all those ingredients become a super effective program. So you can't look at a program, like I know these exercises, oh look, I understand rep ranges, you know, that's not what makes a program effective, what makes it effective. And by the way, I wanna be real clear, like there were a couple programs at the time that were really good and they had gained popularity through forums. At this time, the internet, the fitness space, forums were becoming a thing. And what I thought was cool about forums was that forums, you had regular people sharing information, there was no marketing, it was all just honesty. And so like starting strength, starting strength had nothing. They had no real marketing, no whatever, but it blew up because people were like, hey, this real basic sounding program is actually working. No, that was some of the best. You know, it was competing with Beachbody and bodybuilding.com at the time, which was really tough, which by the way, the success in those two companies was completely around the marketing side. They would create stuff and then have just a good looking body and attach it to this workout that they would offer just to get free traffic to their website so they can then pedal supplements to them. That was the model that they had done really well and Beachbody, same thing, marketed to a demographic or a person, attached a sexy body to it and it was all around the marketing and sales, not on the effectiveness of the program, which there's a reason why those were, one of them was what, a $500 million company, that went $4 billion is they were great at marketing, not so great as, which I get this all the time, right? When people ask, when they actually talked to my aunt and uncle last night, we were there, we got a chance to hang out with all you guys and asking origin story type of stuff. And they're like, did you imagine it would ever be like this big? And I said, you know, it's crazy and maybe it's a little bit of the narcissism in all of us, 100% we did, but the truth is this, it's not because I thought I was so great or I think that you guys were, what I knew was that there was companies out there like bodybuilding.com and Beachbody, which were massive companies that their main nuts and bolts of it was them showing and teaching these exercises and programs that were to be honest, subpar at best. And that- Some of them downright crappy. Yeah, a lot of them downright, I was trying to give them some respect because they, you know, there are some and bodybuilding.com, there were some. Like there was the Lane Norton's in there and stuff like that that were still producing.  And what we had to offer, I knew was incredibly, I think what I could have wrote in my 20s would have been better than a lot of that stuff. But we had finally come together at this point and realized was this was extremely valuable. And if we could just get to a fraction of those people, I knew that we would be able to help most all of them. You knew it was gonna work. Yeah. I think that's why it was easy to get behind it. And to your point about programming and how, you know, it's all about, you know, the structure of the sequencing, the thought behind the actual person experiencing the workout itself. We went through the actual training of it in terms of being with vast numbers of people taking them through that entire process. And this is where you see a disconnect with industries like producing actors to kind of like portray this stuff. There's just this massive disconnect from your everyday average consumer. And so to then take sort of that blueprint that was constructed in anabolic and then, you know, deconstruct it and be like, here's the elements of it and here's why this works. And then now apply a lot of the concepts of how, you know, I used to train clients, how you used to train clients, how we used to like prepare for a bodybuilding show, how we used to prepare for getting ready for the off season. Like all of these factors now made sense in terms of like how we can take that same elemental blueprint and then build upon it. Yeah. The irony of what you said about bodybuilding.com is the forums of bodybuilding.com are what got a lot of the truth out there. You talked about Lane Norton. That's how Lane became Lane. It was in the forums, the free forums of bodybuilding.com, starting strength blew up, which is a great, you know, basic program. It's better than 99% of the strength training programs out there were through the forums, five by five, so basic and so whatever came through the forums. And that's where you would read this kind of stuff. And this is where I would be like, oh, like old time strength training. You know, here's really the gist of it. The gist of it is this, and it's more complicated than this, but this is really kind of what it boils down to. If you're trying to build muscle and you want all of the benefits of building muscle, the faster metabolism, it's easier to get leaner, sculpt the body, look good or whatever. If you want to build muscle, the muscle building signal needs to be more consistent than the muscle breakdown signal. That's it, okay? My body needs to be told or want to build muscle more often than it breaks muscle down because you're never stable. Your body's never not doing anything. There's this false belief that you just maintain. No maintenance is when building and breaking down are balanced. If they're equal, then you don't, you build and you break down. You build and break down, you stay the same. If you want to build, then you have to build more than you break down. If you want to lose muscle and you need to break down more than you build. So once you understand this and you look at studies on muscle protein synthesis, which they can actually measure to a decent degree when your body's building muscles through the signal called muscle protein synthesis. And they can test, you do squats, let's test your muscle protein synthesis. It's elevated. How long does this stay elevated for? Oh wow, two to three days max, then it goes down. But wait a minute, the person's still sore. It doesn't matter if they're still sore. Muscle building signal's gone. In fact, two days after it's gone, it starts to go below baseline. This is why people work out, get sore, recover, quote unquote, go back to the gym, do the same thing, but never progress. Because they're breaking down as much as they're building. So the goal, the idea, the whole, if you really want to, boil it down to the most simple terms, the idea behind maps, the philosophy of maps is can we keep that muscle building signal elevated more often than the breakdown signal? That's all it is. Again, the problem was, I can send a muscle building signal through damaging muscle, but then recovery gets in the way. I can't just keep doing that. So now, it's up for two or three days, it's going down.  I can't because if I do that, recovery says no, sorry, we're not even gonna build, we're just gonna heal. We just gotta heal.  What happened? Your body just healed. Adaptation is different than healing. Adaptation is above healing. Healing, and then it's like I scratch my hand, my skin heals, and if I do it right, then I'll develop a slight callus. And over time, I develop a callus. That's the muscle building process. So the idea with MapCentabolic was, which was the first one, and with all the math programs is, can we get the signal to stay throughout the whole week, even though recovery's happening, even though all these other things are happening, and the answer to that is yes. You definitely can't, which is why people then, when we finally launched MapCentabolic, which was a year after we did Mind Pump, and the goal of Mind Pump was, like you said, Adam, was can we give people a lot of good information? Can we build authority? Will people believe us? And at that point, if that all works out, then we'll say here's a program that we have, because we had the program done. The program was done, it was ready to go, the digital part was set up, the videos were done. We did no other work. When we had it ready for a year, we don't launch it for a year, because we want to prove to our audience, A, that we have integrity, so we're not just trying to sell you something, and B, we know what we're talking about.  Because you actually didn't even use the term that stuck with me forever, and why I love that video so much, because it really hit home for me when I watched it. It's the scene where you guys show the bear trap, and you talk about- The muscle recovery trap. You say the muscle- Breakdown recovery trap.  How long have I got stuck in this exact situation? So focused on doing damage to see how much results I can get, yet never letting my body get enough recovery, adequate rest, adequate nutrition to actually build and adapt. I was so focused on the damage part, I wasn't focused on the adaptation process. That part of that clip I remember sticking to me so much. Do you remember if it was a term you came up with, and then you came up with the like the visual of it, or did you put together a term? Do you remember how that came together? So Sal came up with the term, I just put the visual behind it. Yeah, yeah. So- That was a powerful moment in that for me. So one thing that I learned as a trainer, and I know you guys did as well, is you could understand the idea and what works, but what makes you effective as a trainer, is you have to say it in a way, sometimes you have to say it 5,000 different times, in different ways, but at some point you say it in a way to where the client goes, oh, that makes so much sense.  And the person can hear you and be like, oh, you know, that kind of makes sense.  And clients would be like, huh? What's that? I'd be like, well, it's when you break down a muscle, you let it recover, you break it down again, you let it recover, you break it down again, but no actual muscle growth or changes happens. It's just break down, recover, break down, recover, and it's a trap. It's a hamster wheel. You're just running on the same hamster wheel. Once I was able to say it that way, it really resonated with clients. So when I told Doug that, Doug's like, oh yeah, perfect. And he came up with the picture of the, you know, the bear trap. Yeah, you know, even though I had, I had come to that conclusion and understood that, I had never heard it communicated that way. That one, I remember that one in the AMP story I always share that you shared first, that those two were things that I understood, but still had yet to put like eloquent words to how to explain it. Cause you're always looking as a trainer. You can read all the PubMed studies you want and apply all the science. And then the next level to being a good trainer first, obviously is to acquire that knowledge, but then how do you translate that to the average person so that they have that aha moment. And that to me, I'm always seeking that, right? Even to this day, I'm always looking for better ways to communicate the things that I've learned through my experience and reading. And I had come to that conclusion around how I should train cause I was training myself that way now, but like still getting that point across to a client. So they understood what they were doing. And I was like, oh man, that was a powerful way to communicate that. Tell me that didn't resonate with you as a kid when, you know, I would do the same thing. I'd go hammer my, whatever my legs. And then I, because it's like, I thought that recovery meant adaptation. That's what I thought. I thought recovery is the adaptation process. I'd hammer my legs and then I'd be so afraid to do anything else. Go lay in bed like this. Yeah. I'd sit on the couch and watch TV. He'd be like, oh, let them grow. Yep. And then, you know, you end up injuring yourself at some point for something else and you have to wear a brace or whatever. You lose muscle hollow fast. Like this doesn't make sense. Like just sitting there, that sends a signal to the body that shouldn't, not just not build muscle, that it should get rid of muscle. So what's going on here? And yes, I get sore and the soreness goes away, but then I go work out again and I'm not stronger. It's gotta be something else. And it's because adaptation happens somewhat separately. They tend to happen at the same time similarly, but they're different. And I learned this through even my own training.  And then you kind of figure out like, oh, this is, hmm. Yeah. Soreness is really not what I thought it was and recovery might not be necessarily, you know, part of this whole adaptation thing. So, and really, again, the key is what you do is you look at, and you guys do the same thing in all trainers, any coach or trainer who's been doing this for a long time. This is exactly what you do. So I know it'll resonate is you look at the problem, you look at the potential solutions and then you look at the roadblocks with that solution and you say to yourself, how can I move around those roadblocks? What are ways that I could either train or rep ranges or how can I utilize intensities that gets around this problem right here? And then eventually what happens is you end up building kind of this formula of ways to do so. And then of course, when you train people, it's very individualized. So some, it's a little different from person to person, but you end up with this kind of basic, you know, roadmap, if you will, where, okay, this is how it works. And so that's really the, you know, the whole idea. And now we're coming up on, this is the 10 year anniversary. And like I said, it came by real fast. I'm excited for the cake smash that Justin said he's gonna do in your face when you're not ready for it. So happy 10 year anniversary. That's with an actual cake delivery. Let's see what's going on. Oh no. Today we're gonna teach you everything you need to know to build a strong, well-developed chest. When I think of weak points and areas that I struggled with developing for a really long time, chest was up there with the- Yeah, it was for me, it was for me for sure. I got more caught up in the weight I could lift versus how I was developing my body. I think it's one of the most challenging muscles to develop for most people because the form and technique.


Hello, everyone. I'm Michael Reskis, and this is the Associated Press Davos Debate. Our topic might best be framed as, what keeps the world's leaders and its captains of industry awake at night? A World Economic Forum report says, conflict between states is the number one threat in 2015. The first time old fashioned war has been listed as the top global risk. So why don't we begin in Ukraine? Dr. Ursula van der Leyen is the first woman to serve as Defense Minister of Germany. Dr. van der Leyen, thank you for being here. NATO says that the rebels are preparing another offensive, and the truce seems barely a truce at all. What's the solution to the Ukrainian crisis? Well, the solution is certainly not a military one. But of course, we keep in mind that the Russian violation of international laws and the aggression towards the security architecture will not be forgotten. And I think this conflict is mostly a conflict about what type of instruments do we use when we have a conflict. Are they military ones? What we see is hybrid warfare in the Ukraine. Or what we answer, will we say we need an economic approach if there is a conflict? And want to sit down at the negotiation table and find a solution at the negotiation table. And this is what we see at the moment being that the economic sanctions, for example, driven by the West, have an impact on Russia. Of course, they have an impact on our economy, too. But they show how much our world is interlinked and what we think will be a way out is convince the other side that the destabilization of the Ukraine will not be accepted. The violation of the international law will not be accepted. But we have no interest in defeating Russia economically. But on the contrary, we do have or we share a common interest in other fields, like, for example, fighting terrorism. So on the long term, to have the perspective, if you return to the negotiation table and if we solve the question, what is our security architecture, we can build up again the economic path we have been on together in the former years and fight together, for example, terrorism, where we have a common interest to solve that. But will Russia understand these carrots of better economic conditions without the stick of the possibility of military action? As I said, there is no military solution to that conflict. And therefore, it's a fight of instruments. And I think the economic instrument is a quite sharp sword because Russia has a strong, has an economy that is very vulnerable, what demography is concerned, has an economy that should open up, that should build connections to the rest of the world, that should send out their young people to be educated, to come back with innovations, to bring forward the economy. And they did just the country by closing up. So the economy and, of course, the development of the old price does its own. What you see in Russia also is that the way they act has caused an enormous loss of confidence in potential investors. And all these are parts of a lesson to be learned that you cannot go out and be an aggressor with instruments of the last century just by land grab and annexation without any reaction that is felt by the country who does that. Mohammad Yavad Zarif is the foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Russia's been your ally, and Iran is itself a target of a very similar-sounding strategy of sanctions and economic squeeze. What's your view of how the West is dealing with Russia? Well, I think the policy of imposing sanctions has not produced positive results, almost nowhere. And I do not believe that they will produce positive results. They haven't produced positive results with regard to Iran. Unfortunately, our Russian neighbors can't call anybody allies. Iran is an independent country. But our Russian neighbors, who are our friends, too, have participated in the process of imposing sanctions on Iran, maybe without many other choices that they had. But in fact, those sanctions have backfired. If you look at the Iranian situation, if you compare it with the situation in Ukraine with which I'm not that familiar, but I'm familiar with our own situation, when sanctions were imposed on Iran, Iran had less than 200 centrifuges spinning. Today, Iran has 20,000 centrifuges spinning. And the purpose of those sanctions were not ostensibly to put pressure on the Iranian people but to stop the nuclear program. And they failed miserably. Had they talked to the Iranian people? Had they talked to the Iranian government? The chances of success should have been much higher. And I think now that they're talking, there is a much better chance of reaching a positive conclusion. So I think with Russia, it is important to deal with anxiety. It is important to deal with concerns, geopolitical concerns that are under rise. Unfortunately, the name of the topic of our discussion is geopolitics. And we are going back to the geopolitics of Cold War. And that is extremely dangerous. That is even more dangerous than interstate conflict because that is something that we thought we had put behind us some 25 years ago. And unfortunately, we're back at it again with the vehemence, probably not seen for the last 25 years. And I see a very serious danger in that. We're going to come back to that issue as well as to the nuclear talks. But before we do, Kaspar Rosted is the CEO of Heinkel, the German consumer products company. And you do business in Ukraine, in Russia, in Iran. And I can go on with a list of other places that there have been conflicts.  First of all, I think you need to be very clear on what you're getting yourself into. And if you want to go as a global company into a number of countries where high growth opportunity are, you have high volatility. That is the price forward upfront. So of course, we know what most of the times are we going into. And we, of course, review the situation on an ongoing basis. And we look upon it in three dimensions. Legal risk, reputation risk, and business risk. And we think that when we look upon these countries, the balance is still OK. But we are in there for the long term. You can't go in and out. And I think that's very clear as a business. When you look upon these countries, you know that you will have issues to deal with. We've been in Russia since 1991. It's a fourth Russian crisis. We have not changed our strategy. And if you don't have the long term view, I think you get very quickly disrupted of where you're going to go. But of course, you have to take the situation into consideration all the time. Eastern Europe is only one of the major trouble spots in the world. East Asia may well be one as well. Yoon Byung-Sae is the foreign minister of the Republic of Korea. And you've described the rivalries in East Asia as a Pandora's box. Could you elaborate a bit on that? Oh, yes. When I said that I had the whole world in mind, not just the Northeast Asia or East Asia. But East Asia today is quite different from 10 years of post-Cold War era. For the last 20 years, until recently, it was North Korea's nuclear threat. And it was North Korea's strategy provocations that were single most important challenges to the peace and security of Northeast Asia. But now what you're seeing is multiple challenges and multiple crises. All problems, new problems. All problems like history and territory. But now we have a new set of problems like maritime security, space security, and recently, cybersecurity as well. But at its heart, what you see is now just symptoms. At the heart of this problem is the conflict of interest of the countries of the new kind of regional order. Rising China, Russia looking to East Asia, Japan, are trying to uncheck itself from the post-Cold War, post-World War II order, and the masochistic view of history. And North Korea is now trying to assert itself as the kind of nuclear weapon state. And the US is now rebalanced to Asia. So this is kind of a return of geopolitics again, or a return of history. So what you see is kind of a complex set of new configurational forces, new balance of power in Northeast Asia. So do you agree with Minister Zareef that we're seeing a level of geopolitical tensions that we've not seen since the Cold War? Well, of course, we see these kind of tensions all over the world. But I think what you see in Northeast Asia is very much different from what I said because of this convergence of different interests at the same time. I want to come back to that. But before we do, I do want to bring our final panelist in Pham Bin Minh, his deputy prime minister, and minister of foreign affairs of Vietnam. You've also made some comments about the situation in the region. You describe China's activities in the waters off Vietnam. I guess what you'd call the EC, what some of us might think of as the South China Sea. You've called those activities illegal. Could you tell us how dangerous you think China's activities are? Yes. In our region, the territory disputes is on the rise now. Not only in EC, we call it EC, or South China Sea, also in East China Sea. And that is the problem for the region, but also for the world. Because peace and stability in this region, if we cannot maintain peace and stability in the region, it will affect the peace and stability in the world. Why? Because in the East Sea or South China Sea, this is a very important road for transportation of goods through East Asia and from East Asia to other parts of the world. So this road is very important. And anything happened in East Sea or South China Sea will affect the freedom of transportation or freedom of navigation. And now, I mentioned that in 2014, the parking of the oil rig of China not in the ocean, but in the continental shell or the exclusive economic zone of Vietnam. And it's the violations of the international law. So what happened here is that could affect stability in the region. So no survey of the important conflict spots in the world would be complete without a little word on the Middle East. Minister Zarif, one of the driving dynamics in the Middle East is the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, between Shia and Sunni. The world today is mourning the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. He was 90. Do you see the king's death as changing the Middle East's Shia-Sunni dynamic in any way or the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia? Well, let me, first of all, repeat our condolences to the people and government of Saudi Arabia on the demise of His Majesty the King of Saudi Arabia. I will be leaving. That was tonight to attend this funeral with sadness. Iran and Saudi Arabia are two important regional players. And in my view, we do not need to play a game of exclusion. Actually, we should not play a game of exclusion anywhere in the world. Exclusion is a paradigm, is an outdated paradigm that has led us to all these difficulties. But I want to emphasize that the problem in our region is not a Shia-Sunni problem, but a problem between extremists and more reasonable moderate forces in the region. Unfortunately, Daesh or ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra and other extremist groups who claim to be defending the Sunni population in Iraq and Syria have killed more Sunnis than they have killed Shias. And it is important to look at that problem. And since we are talking to a Western audience, I want to ask them for soul searching. A good number of these people, if not a majority, are coming from Western societies. And we need to ask what went wrong. These are second-third generation citizens of European societies who have turned to such barbaric extremism in our region. And it is important to ask the question, why did? How were they brought up?  They were not raised in non-democratic societies. They were raised in the West. But unfortunately, they are beheading people in Syria and Iraq. Beheading people they didn't know. And this is a very serious question that requires soul searching. So I'll come back to the issue that the problem in our region is not a rivalry between Shias and Sunnis. It's a problem of extremism. And extremism has its roots. It's roots in occupation. It's roots in depression. It's roots in disenfranchisement. And we need to deal with them if we want to avoid a very serious crisis in our region. Well, let's continue the conversation into the issue of terrorism. And I'm going to go to Dr. Wunderlein in a second.  What can be done to curb Islamic state if we, whatever view you see as the roots of this, what's the answer for stopping it? Well, there are several answers. I mean, there cannot be a single strategy or tactic to deal with. I mean, I hate the name Islamic state because it's neither a state nor Islamic. I'd rather call it Daesh so that people will not have that connotation, at least not in the Western world. We understand what Daesh stands for in Arabic and in Persian, but not in the Western world. Let's at least think. Let me do a quick translation, though, for the matter. Islamic state. Right. Thank you. But at least we avoid repeating that. Understood. That will create this hysteria in the West that Islam is about extremism and terrorism. It has nothing to do with Islam or with the states in our region. So what needs to be done is, first of all, stop supporting them. They continue to be supported, unfortunately. They continue to receive assistance. They continue to be pawns in a geo-strategic game of regional dominance. And that should stop. People should abandon this notion, this perception, in my view, this illusion, that they can even make short-term tactical gains through using Daesh as an instrument of pressure against other states. We need a very serious soul searching, as I said, in the West, so that we stop the recruitment, fertile ground for recruitment. And that comes from economic inequality, disenfranchisement, the feeling of deprivation that exists among some people in the outskirts of major European cities. And that is an important source, to drive their human recruitment source. And also to have a concerted effort to deal with them militarily, because this is a military problem. And it cannot be done by bombardment. It has to be, we need to empower the governments on the ground to deal with them, rather than simply trying to use aerial bombardment as a means of dealing with them. So we need a multifaceted, coherent strategy to deal with this menace. We shouldn't have allowed it to emerge. It emerged as an instrument of undermining states that were not to the liking of some other states. But be it as it may, we cannot go back and we cannot remake history. History has happened, and we need to try to resolve the problems in the future. And I believe that's the way to deal with it. Dr. van der Leyen, is the West responsible for breeding its own nightmare? Well, we share common interests in fighting the causes and the sources for that. I want to emphasize that there was a soil in Iraq on which ISIS or Daesh could grow. That was the soil of an exclusive government that excluded some groups. And therefore, it is good to see now that the al-Abadi government focuses a lot on an inclusive policy, Sunni, Shia, Kurds, and the other groups, which is the absolute right way because this is the goal for a peaceful life together. And yes, the second factor is that ISIS, with its way to go forward in an extremely brutal way, has the means of being undefeatable. This attracts a lot of young people, also foreign fighters, who have a lack of self-identity, who have a lack of purpose in life, and seem to be attracted by this so-called ideology. Therefore, at home, we have to go to the cause where there's the lack of perspective, where there's the lack of purpose. We have to dismantle this myth of being undefeatable, and this has to be done on the ground because ISIS is an aggressive force. It has to be fought and fought back. For example, on the ground, the Iraq army or the Peshmerga, who are doing that in a very, very courageous and brave way. And you're right with the third part. In the region itself, especially for the Sunni population, there needs to be, of course, a perspective of economic development, of jobs, of lowering the unemployment, of taking part in empowerment in the government itself. So we have homework to do at home in the Western and European parts, but the solution will be, at the moment itself, fight back ISIS on a military context. But knowing on the long-term, the solution will be in the political-inclusive way to go in that area and economic development. And there has to be a strong, strong interest of the players around, whether it be Turkey, whether it be your country, whether it be Saudi Arabia, just to fight this enemy there because this is a common sorrow we have, a common interest we have, and there we should work together. Please. Well, what is missing in our debate right now is the problem related to FTF, foreign terrorist fighters. Now, already 82 countries were affected by these FTF problems. My own country has now one pending case, if you don't know what the actual state of affairs is now. But we have adopted a very important resolution at the UN Security Council September last year. And as my colleague from Iran has said, we need a multi-faceted approach and strategy to combat this new phase of terrorism. Some people say that in the last 20 years, we talked about the non-state actors. Now, some people say that this, we are not talking about non-state state, whether you like it or not. So this is a problem we should tackle jointly and with a very urgency. Dr. Vendorlein, do you believe what happened in Paris a few weeks ago will happen again in Europe? We, it might happen. So there is no 100% security that it will not happen. We do our best to prevent it, but this is very, very difficult because each foreign fighter coming back is a potential aggressor inside. So we have to be very, very cautious and attentive. You've been to Afghanistan at least three times to visit German forces there. It's been 14 years since the attack on the World Trade Center that triggered that war in Afghanistan. Yet here we are still fighting terrorism. What was the point of that war? Oh, the point was at the beginning, of course, to fight the breeding cell of al-Qaeda. And we have been successful because al-Qaeda is no more the basis for this huge aggression. It has been years and years before. We've learned a lot in Afghanistan. Also, what the enabling of Afghan forces is to take care of their own security. We build up right now to put a lot of focus beside the military intervention to put a lot of focus on economic development and social development and capacity building in the government. So this is, even if it's a very, very hard way we've been through and a long way still to go, it is a good example to see that we always need this comprehensive approach and not only the military one. Sometimes the military is necessary, but on the long term we need this comprehensive approach of capacity building of the government and economic development. And the ISIS phenomenon shows that these extremist movements occur in regions where you have either an exclusive or excluding policy or you have failing states. Therefore, we should put on the long term a lot of emphasis to identify in vulnerable regions the strong states, the anchor states, and make sure that they get not weakened but that we reinforce them and we stabilize them. And this will be a task in this region, for example, to identify the stable anchors to make sure that they keep their influence and they stay stable. Whose job is that to identify? This is the world's community. I mean, if you see now this new alliance of more than 60 states fighting ISIS or Daesh, we have a common interest. So we see that besides the institutionalized alliances, we have new alliance with a common interest to defend our values and to fight this emergent threat. Mr. Rarsad, these struggles obviously are very disruptive to business. I think you lost a facility in Aleppo, in Syria. Does they have stable states that must appeal to you? No, I think that you have to put the situation into perspective. We are, as I said before, present in most of these countries and I was just trying to do some thinking back. I've been CEO for almost eight years in the company and we've lost more people through car accidents in the West than through war in the Middle East or Asia. We have lost more plants through burnings or electricity accidents than through bombings. So I think that is one way of looking upon it. And I was speaking to a senior leader a couple of years ago here in Davos and I was trying to get a better understanding of the situation in the Middle East and in the context of stability. And he said to me, Kasper, your definition of stability is very different to our definition of stability. And I think you need to understand that. So in that context, I actually believe that business can play a major role in countries where you have high volatility because we offer jobs, we have a good jobs, we create stability in society, but you only do that if you're there for the long term and you also don't pull out. So when things like this happen, and unfortunately we have a great experiencing in disaster situations, the first and foremost thing that we care about is our people because you can rebuild a plant, you can't really rebuild the people. And if you do that very, very consistently, you can actually build a lot of strong leaders and a lot of local support, even in countries where you have a high level of unrest. Mr. Zarif, let me ask one last question on terrorism. The bombing of a Jewish center in Argentina in the early 90s is back in the headlines. And the issue is this, the Argentine president has been accused by a prosecutor who then died under rather mysterious circumstances of trying to cover up the alleged involvement of Iran in masterminding that attack. Was Iran responsible in any way for that attack or involved in a trade deal that was part of a cover-up? Well, it's interesting. There was an unfortunate incident in Argentina in the 90s, if I remember early 90s. It's been rehashed and rehashed for domestic consumption. It's a domestic struggle inside Argentina, a domestic debate, and Iran has been unjustly brought into this. We had an agreement with the government of Argentina a few years ago. Nothing was secret about that agreement and that agreement involved. It was under the previous administration. I had no part in it, but the agreement with the Iranian government and the Argentine government involved. Certain steps that each side should have taken in order to resolve that issue. Of course, Iran always believed that it was accused unjustly of this, but we were prepared to cooperate with Argentina in order to resolve that issue, and that agreement was transparent. That agreement went to the parliament of Argentina for approval, and the parliament turned it down. So there's nothing conspiratorial about that. It's unfortunate that certain people tried to keep this alive in Argentina in order to make a political mileage out of it, and it had nothing to do with Iran. I believe it's mostly domestic Argentinian political debate or competition or whatever else, rivalry, whatever else you want to call it. It is unfortunate that several prosecutors who came to this were either accused of corruption or have committed suicide as the latest cases, and it is unfortunate that certain people tried to keep it alive in order to prevent Iran and Argentina from enjoying the relations they should enjoy. According to the Argentine president, the question of whether it's a suicide is still open, but we don't need to pursue that here. I'm not an expert about what happened in Argentina. I just read the press. Good luck to you. Let me move then to a couple of other very important geopolitical issues. Let's talk about nuclear proliferation for a minute, because that's obviously important, both on the Korean Peninsula and in the Middle East. Minister Zarif, I understand that you're going from this stage to meet with Secretary of State Kerry to continue your discussions. Are you headed for an agreement with the West on your nuclear program or a confrontation? Oh, we're certainly prepared to go for an agreement. I hope that we don't have a confrontation. Confrontation doesn't help anybody, but if it comes to the point that in order to defend our dignity, we need a confrontation, then we will not shy away from that, but I do not believe that is necessary. I do not believe that 10 years of confrontation has produced any positive result for anybody. As I told you, 10 years of sanctions have produced 18,000 or 19,800 centrifuges, exactly what they wanted to avert, and it has produced economic hardship on the Iranian people. So it's a classic example of a negative sum game, or a lose-lose game. There is a need to approach it from a different perspective. Now, we have, we set out last year when we agreed in Geneva, two goals. One is for Iran to have a peaceful nuclear energy program, and that is the right of Iran to have. And in fact, all in our analysis, I mean, there are always different narratives about why a crisis exists, and we need to listen to all the narratives. People believe that Iran pursued a less than transparent nuclear program, and we believe that we pursued a nuclear program because we were deprived of the means of trying to gain that peaceful technology from open market sources. Unfortunately, we couldn't even get fuel for a reactor that the United States built into Iran in the 1950s under the Atoms for Peace program, and we needed to go to Argentina of all places to get fuel for that in the 90s, and then we started to almost beg for that fuel after the fuel from Argentina ran out, and nobody provided it to Iran. So we had to make and manufacture the fuel ourselves. This is the problem of checking an egg. So the first goal that we set out for ourselves between Iran and the EU3 Plus 3, which includes, in fact, Russia and China, and not just the Western countries, was for Iran to have a peaceful program, and the second goal was to make sure that this program is exclusively peaceful, and all the constraints and sanctions on Iran will be lifted. Now we have come a long way, we have discussed many alternatives, and I believe if our European friends, and particularly if the United States, abandons the hope that they can have the cake and eat it too, as they say, that they can keep the sanction and at the same time have an agreement with Iran. That will never happen. I mean, sanctions for them were designed to serve a purpose. Now the purpose is at hand. We can, in fact, achieve an agreement that will provide the guarantees that Iran's nuclear program is, and forever will remain peaceful.  In fact, we believe nuclear weapons are detrimental to our security. And mind you, to the security of anybody. We do not believe that mutually assured destruction or mad is a recipe for good living. For anybody, I do not believe that nuclear weapons prevented the United States from falling victim to the tragedies of 9-11.   So it is important for all of us to abandon the illusion that nuclear weapons are the panacea for resolving all the security problems. And I believe the nuclear fire need to reach that conclusion too. Not just the non-nuclear weapon states, but we're very happy to be a non-nuclear weapon state and to remain a non-nuclear weapon state. And we're very happy to provide all the assurances that we do not want this deadly device. And the religious verdict in Iran is that these weapons are inhuman and are against our very fundamental principles. So this is where we stand and we have nothing to lose by reaching an agreement. And we are prepared for an agreement. And I believe we can have an agreement soon. There are those who do not want to see an agreement. There are those who believe conflict and tension would best serve their interests. I think they are badly mistaken, but unfortunately, there are a lot of them around and a lot of them have a lot of influence on US Congress and a lot of them are pushing US Congress to in fact derail the process and torpedo the process. And that is why yesterday the foreign ministers of Germany, France, UK, and the High Commissioner of the European Union wrote an op-ed, which I didn't like in the Washington Post, urging them not to go ahead with this. So this is where we stand. There are people who want to torpedo this. And I think everybody should stand against that. What will Iran's response be if the United States Congress does pass a piece of legislation setting up new sanctions? Well, I believe Iran doesn't have to respond to that. It's the international community. We have an agreement, and that agreement has the prospect of reaching a comprehensive agreement. And if somebody comes and torpedo it, I believe it should be isolated by the international community, whether it's US Congress or anybody else. And I believe now it's the time for the international community to stand firm against a process that will unravel an extremely important achievement. So a sanctions bill by the United States Congress will unravel the negotiations? Well, a sanctions bill by the US Congress will kill the joint plan of action that we adopted last year in Geneva. Now, the president of the United States has the power to veto it, but our parliament will have its counteraction. And in our constitution, the president doesn't have the power to veto a parliamentary decision. So it will be out of our hands. If the United States Congress were to adopt a legislation, our parliament will retaliate sort of. The president can veto theirs. I don't know what we can do. And that legislation, this retaliatory legislation would do what? I don't know. I mean, it's up to our parliamentarians. They have threatened publicly that if the US Congress were to adopt a legislation, they will adopt something requiring the government that if new sanctions were actually imposed on Iran, that we will increase our enrichment. Now we have stopped enriching 20%, which we needed for the Tehran reactor, which I said we were deprived of the fuel for. There are other requirements that Iran has for even higher grade enrichment and they are asking for that. So there are all sorts of possibilities and I do not want to entertain them because I believe there is a possibility, a very good probability of reaching an agreement and we should not waste that opportunity. And Secretary Kerry and I, along with other ministers, I visited Berlin and Paris and I have spoken to other friends over the phone and we are insisting on pursuing this. Let's turn to the Korean Peninsula. Are sanctions making the Korean Peninsula safer or more dangerous? Well, I come back to that question, but I'm one of those who are very eager to see a very good news out of this ongoing talks between Iran on the one hand and the P5 plus one because through that successful agreement, North Korea could have some lesson, very important lesson. But now we are using a two-track strategy against the North Korea. Sanctions from the United Nations and some like-minded countries. On the other, we are also pursuing kind of a negotiate settlement through six-party talks or some kind of some kind of mini-natural talks, territorial consultation as well. Now, I think to certain extent sanctions are working because now North Korea in a very dire strait, economic plight, many problems, shortage of foreign exchanges. So now they are now at the very difficult relations with China because of these nuclear problems. Now they are trying to reach out to Russia, but even Russia is very much principled about these nuclear issues. So they are very much isolated, but nevertheless North Korea is still continuing to sticking to their position of continuing this nuclear weapons development. The constitution said they are already nuclear weapons state. So if they are right, they are now the ninth de facto nuclear weapons state, but nobody in the internet community can allow that, tolerate that. So our objective is CVID, comprehensive, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of North Korea nuclear weapons. And for that, we are working very closely with all the important key players, US, China, Russia, Japan and EU and many others present here. So another thing we see on the Korean Peninsula is I guess what we could call the rise of war by other means. There have been many cyber attacks in the last few years, but the one now attributed to North Korea on the Sony Corporation got more attention than I think all the others put together. What is this telling us about both about North Korea and about the state of warfare in the world right now? Well, we have a sense of deja vu for many, many years. So they are linking everything to everything. Since 2009, we have gone through a series of cyber attacks on the banks, government institutions and many other companies. But now when I saw this attack on the Sony Pictures, now they are now trying to say that, well, unless they discontinue this kind of negative campaign against North Korea, they will hit White House, even they will hit Korea's Pretender House. So this is very much incredible argument because cyber attack, cyber space, it should be utilized for the common purpose. So now Korea as the previous chairman of the cyber conference, we are now trying to work very hard on how to adopt a new kind of norm to reconcile all the different interests of countries. Dr. Wenderlein, how much of your time as defense minister has taken up with this kind of warfare? Quite a bit because as we see we have, we do not, wherever we look at the crisis, it's not only the conventional types of warfare anymore, but the cyber dimension is getting stronger and stronger. So we have to be prepared for that as well in defense, as well as knowing what kind of attacks are the possible ones. And specifically we have to think in these terms that the attacks on other things, but military feels like banking system are way more difficult to predict the way they will hit. And therefore there is a lot of emphasis, even here at the WEF, we had a lot of talks about this topic, which will be certainly one of the major domains in the future. So the interconnectivity about the internet, globalized and the possibilities of cyber attacks are the warfare of the future or the conflicts, the potential conflicts of the future. So we have to invest a lot of knowledge and a lot of work to solve these problems, to get a set of rules, international ones to which the majority obeys too, and to define where the limits are and what the architecture of security is within the cyber topic that we wanna establish and that we wanna follow. Mr. Zarif? Well, we should not forget that North Koreans did not invent this. The United States started a cyber warfare against Iranian nuclear facilities some time ago, and it could have led to a catastrophe with huge environmental implications for ordinary citizens, trying to disrupt our nuclear facilities. So it is important to deal with cyber warfare. It is important to deal with this type of activity that can have irreversible consequences, particularly when it comes to catastrophic accidents as they called them, with Iran's nuclear industry. They did it with our heavy water reactor in the process of being built. They did it with our enrichment plan, and this is dangerous, not only unacceptable in terms of banking and other financial institutions or Sony Pictures, but it is dangerous when it comes to nuclear facilities. Let me move us to what, until perhaps this year, had been the dominant geopolitical issue for quite a number of years, which is the world economy. And let me start with both of our Asian representatives and ask you a question about China. China is now something like a third of the growth in the world economy in recent years, and yet now China's starting to slow down. Are we at a point where we have to worry about another recession brought on by the slowdown in Asia? Well, I'm not an economic expert, but nevertheless, we see a lot of reports on that, but when I talk with many Chinese colleagues, still they have very strong belief that their growth will continue despite certain ups and downs, so we should not underestimate the potential of continued growth. But nevertheless, we have to reinforce this kind of weakness in our Chinese economy. We need to cooperate in more the regional cooperation, economic cooperation in the form of, for example, the FTA AP or TPP or RCEP, even many bilateral FTAs. We have recently concluded a bilateral FTA with China, and many others are now doing that. So in that way, we could reinforce these weak links among the countries in the region. I'm not also an economist either. We think that with the China rise in economically, it can create opportunities for the countries, neighboring countries. For example, Vietnam. China is the biggest trade partners of Vietnam. Every year, we have the trade volume about 60 billion U.S. dollars. And surely, that the trade promotes the economy, the development of the economy of Vietnam. And if the slowdown of the economy of China, so it can affect the trade, for example, investment, so that is the way we see. Minister Zareef, let me just ask you about oil prices. Of course, to much of the world, this is good news. Is the collapse in oil prices good news or bad news? And if my friends are not economists, I'm a total illiterate in that field. There's a lot of humility here this morning. But the drop in oil prices, there is a question whether the entire spectrum of drop in oil prices is entirely economical, or whether they're political ingredients and what are the purposes of that, political dimension of the drop. But for Iran, according to Wall Street Journal, among the countries that will be harmed by the drop in oil prices, in terms of the percentage of their GNP, Iran is number 20. Of the 35 countries that will be harmed, Iran is number 20. Some of our friends who are driving the oil prices are number four and five. So they will be harmed much, much greater than Iran will. Now we have reduced our dependence on oil in our budget from something in the neighborhood of over 50% to something in the neighborhood of 30% now. This has been imposed on us by the drop in oil prices, which is somewhat good. And in terms of the area I'm an expert in, and that is our negotiations on the nuclear issue, it reduces the impact of sanctions on Iran, because now the oil prices are lower, the amount of, I mean, the impact of oil prices, and one of the most important areas of restrictions on Iran is the amount of oil we can sell. Since the oil prices are low, the impact on our economy is by far less than it was eight months ago or nine months ago. So the economic implications are that we are less interested in a deal and therefore less prepared to give concessions for a deal than we were a year ago because we have less to gain from a deal and it may have worked exactly in the opposite direction of the intended way. And there are people in Iran who believe we will gain by this, because they believe we will have to rely less on oil and more on internal taxation, on government austerity measures, on discipline, on economic discipline. This government, the current government in Iran was able to reduce inflation and improve growth rate in the country, not by any new revenues that we achieved throughout last year, because last year we didn't get anything new. All we got through these discussions and agreement was that there were no further sanctions on Iran. The previous sanctions are all still there, but we went from an economy that was in the red negative growth to an economy with 2% growth from 40% inflation to now 16% inflation, according to the latest statistics. So we can do that through discipline and the less we rely on oil, the more we are able to gain this and we call it resistance economy, so that we will be resistant to external factors that are there in order to impact our policies. A quick response from Dr. Wetterlein. This was very interesting. I said something provocative. Yeah, no, no, it was not provocative, but it was very interesting to hear that you talked quite a lot about the impact of the oil factor on the sanctions and what the sanction did to your country. And earlier you told us that sanctions didn't have any effect on your country. So this is contradictory, I think. No effect on policy. Oh, I think they had an effect on policy because I think the negotiations would never ever have been at the place where they are thanks God right now if we wouldn't have had the sanctions because obviously the sanctions had an impact on your country, which is the good part of it. Should I respond to that? Yes, of course. That's what the discussion is for. You see, if sanctions were the driving force of our negotiations, the negotiations provided us with the possibility of gaining over $7 billion in transactions. All Iran used in the last seven or eight month is less than a billion dollars. If sanctions were the driving force, we would have jumped on it and used all the $7 billion, we didn't. The reason our government is at the negotiating table is that we want to change the dynamics of our relations with the rest of the world, not that sanctions hurt people. It's clear. And we believe sanctions are unjust, sanctions deprive Iranian people of the possibility to buy medicine because your banks are not prepared to transfer money for them. No, no, no. I mean, legally they are, but reputation costs prevents them from doing that. I mean, this is clear. But the point is, you asked for this question, so I'm giving you an answer. Go ahead. The point is... But comes to an end sometimes. Yes, thank you. Sanctions did not bring the government to the negotiating table. If sanctions had brought this government to the negotiating table, now we would have moved away from the negotiating table. They didn't. We want to change the nature, the dynamics of our relations, and I think everybody will be better off if that happens. The one point with the sanctions are, and that was the beginning of our discussion, is what is better, to have a military intervention, the hybrid warfare we see in the Ukraine, or is it better to react with an economic answer? We think the economic answer is always the better one to a potential military aggression than a military reaction because this does not bring us anywhere. And the sanctions are all where only a vehicle to bring you at a table and us at a table to negotiate. For example, with Russia now, it's the agreement of Minsk that has to be fulfilled. That's the goal that we want to go to. And the sanctions, obviously, were at least... We never liked them. They are harmful to all of us, but they are the better instrument to bring people at a negotiation table than a war. And that's why sanctions sometimes are to be imposed. So are you not abandoning them even after we are at the negotiating table? I think it's very good if we come to an end, that's the goal. We have to have at the very end an agreement everybody sticks to. Same in Russia and Ukraine. We have the Minsk agreement. We want to see that it is fulfilled. In the Minsk agreement, we had the OSCE. We had Russia. We had the separatists. And we had the Ukrainian government at one table. They signed the agreement. So what we want to see now is that it is put in place. You know, that is the real truth behind an agreement or behind negotiation. So if we come to an end with the negotiations, this is good. We can come to an end with sanctions. But at first, the negotiations have to go to a good end. All right, I'm going to have to call it into this part of the conversation. Although if the two of you would like to stay after and continue, you're more than welcome. We're basically out of time and I just want to give each of you a brief opportunity to wrap up. We've talked about economics, obviously. We've talked about sanctions, about terrorism, some big issues we haven't talked about, like climate and jobs and environment. But I want each of you now, starting right here with Dr. Wenderlein, to tell us what you think the most serious threat is for 2015. Oh, my God. Somewhat briefly, though. Yeah. We have to understand that economic development and security are two sides of one coin. And if we keep that in mind, we will be successful in tackling the threats ahead of us. Well, as you know, Korea is a divided nation confronting North Korea within or across this DMZ. My nightmare scenario is that some day, we know we are trying to deter the possibility, but some day if North Korea turns out to be a master's, this nuclear weapons technology, and then translate this miscalculation into some kind of action, that could be a nightmare scenario. But working together with our friends, we are trying to prevent that from happening. Ben Ben Min. Yes. In our region, I see the security threat as territory disputes may happen in East Sea or South China Sea. So that could be a threat to the stability in the region. Mr. Serif. Well, I think two problems may emerge as new security challenges for 2015. One is the return to Cold War politics and to Cold War geopolitical rivalries. It's impossible to go back to the 90s or to the 80s, but we see ingredients of that, and those ingredients are detrimental to both regional and global security. And that, I think, is a very major problem. But more importantly, I believe extremism and the way to deal with extremism are our main challenges. Now, we've seen extremism in our region, in Europe, elsewhere, what it can do. But the way to deal with extremism by pushing people to further exclusion, pushing people to further periphery of international system is a very dangerous phenomenon, particularly when it comes to ostracizing an entire population in Europe and basically insulting the values and the sanctities of Islamic religion becoming a norm in certain European societies, which feed extremism, which feed this feeling of disenfranchisement. I think these are very serious challenges and threats that we're facing right now. And our final word from our business representative has progressed. As I answered in the terms of business risk, and I think a risk which is completely underestimated is the development within the EU and Europe. We've had six years of recession, which just launched probably the biggest financial package. There are very few structural reforms and the current crisis in Eastern Europe that we could have very, very severe impact on the Western European economy. And that was why I was interested when you started speaking about China. China grew 10-fold of EU last year, 10-fold. And I think that with the risk of going into the seventh year of recession, which is real because of lack of structural reforms in many countries, because of the impact of the Russian crisis, is something that would not only from a financial standpoint, but also from a social standpoint, will be difficult to bear in Europe. And I think that is somewhat estimated by many people. Well, thank you all very much, a very robust debate. We clearly could go on for another hour. And I'll say, if you'd like to, but we do have to call it end to this AP Davos debate. Thank you very much.


Well it's been a struggle so far for Bemidji girls basketball. They're three and six on the season but there's no place like home for the holidays. The Lumberjacks are two and one at home and tonight they tipped off their four team varsity invitational at Bemidji High School. Bemidji plays tonight and tomorrow. Tonight they host North St. Paul who is also struggling out of the gate. Over five minutes in, Katie Alto gets the feed. Left hand layup goes. Lumberjacks up ten. Two minutes later, Jack's looking to run. Macy Hildebrand takes it to the rim. All Bemidji right now they're up 15. How about some outside shooting? That's Macy Flatness, the freshman from 3 Point Land. Jack's cruising in this one. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.