Physical Perfection | @ChrisBumstead | EP 423

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

All of a sudden, I start breaking down crying and I didn't even realize what was in me myself, and I'm not wanting my wife to see me in this point of weakness because I feel maybe I would be judged. I've had a lot of men, as I've spoken about this, tell me I couldn't tell my wife that she would judge me too much; she would leave me if I broke down crying in front of her like that. She didn't; she pulled me in closer and she was like, told me every single time, she like, I know this is difficult. I know there's a lot of pressure on you right now. You can quit if you want. I will love you regardless, but I believe in you to get through this and you will get through this if you choose.

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Hello everyone. Today I'm speaking with five-time consecutive Mr. Olympia Champion Chris Bumstead. So, what do we talk about? Well, we talk about the utility of aiming at something high and pursuing it, the opportunity cost that comes along with that, the challenge of balancing that kind of single-minded and maybe necessary obsession with developing everything else that makes for a full life. We talk a lot about marriage and about how he's integrated his relationship into his high-level professional pursuits. Chris's wife is having a baby very soon. We talked a fair bit about parenthood, talked about the role that his father played in his life.

We talked about the pleasure he takes in and has discovered in being a role model in sharing his disciplined journey towards a pinnacle with his followers. We talked about his practice of identifying the things that are impediments to his progress forward, his fears, his insecurities, his insufficiency genes, his determination to face those things voluntarily, his ability to overcome those impediments as a consequence. That was particularly relevant on the public speaking and social engagement front, the way that him and his wife have negotiated that within the confines of the relationship and his plans for the future that continues after his stellar athletic and public career comes to its particular close.

So join us for that. So you made your debut on the professional stage in 2017. How old were you then?

In 2017, I was 22 years old.

22. Okay, so like, I'm very ignorant about the domain of activity that you are engaged in, so I'm going to ask all sorts of stupid questions to catch myself up. So what did it mean to, what does it mean to debut professionally in the world of bodybuilding? And maybe you could also tell us about that world in general. I don't understand its structure or you know, the hierarchies of competition, how you move up and all of that. Like what sort of world is that?

Yeah, so there's an, mainly just an amateur in a professional league. And it changed a lot over the years, where it used to be a much bigger deal if you turn pro and you call it getting your pro card in bodybuilding. So you compete as an amateur, usually in your city and then in your state, and then you'll do a national level show and that's all amateur. Typically, when you win a national level show, you'll get your pro card. And then when you're a pro, that puts you into a brand new division where you're starting back from ground zero and you're competing against usually older people who have been in there a lot longer competing in the pro for years.

There are multiple pro shows around the country and around the world all year, and each one of those shows qualifies you to compete at the Olympia, and the Olympia is like the Super Bowl, just like the Olympia—the end all be all of bodybuilding. So that's the goal that everybody is chasing at the end of the day.

Okay, so the Olympia is the Olympia, the pinnacle, and you won five consecutive championships. Is that the right terminology, even? Is it a championship that you win?

Yeah, okay. Okay, and that was the—you won—but yeah, so I had won five Olympias over the last five years.

Exactly, yeah, right. And are you the current holder of the title?

That's correct, yeah.

The five-pre, okay, good, good, good, good. Just one of—has anyone else managed that for five years in a row?

No, so it's actually a pretty new division I'm in. So that's another different tier that's within bodybuilding. There's open bodybuilding, which is there's no weight limit, and those are like the people like Ronnie Coleman and the huge people that a lot of people know, the big names of, and there's no weight limit there. And I'm in a division called Classic Physique, which is meant to bring back more of like the Arnold days, a little bit more aesthetic and not quite as big, so I have a weight cap that I have to match.

So my division's only been around since 2016, so there were two previous winners before me over three years, but the division's only been around for eight years, and I've won five of those eight years, so no one's really had a chance to beat that.

Okay, okay, so I was noticing, with regard to weight, I was noticing—I don't know how accurate Wikipedia is, but it listed your weight as 234, but in the off-season as 264.

That's pretty accurate, yeah.

Oh, okay. So what's the reason for the discrepancy there?

So in bodybuilding, it's all about like bulking and cutting mainly. You spend a majority of your year trying to put on muscle, and to do so, you need to put on a little bit more body fat, eat more food, train a little bit more intense, do less cardio, so your body's growing. And then when you enter prep, which is like the big thing of bodybuilding, you enter like a 12 to 16 week prep, which is very strict dieting, and its whole intention is stripping as much fat as possible while maintaining as much muscle as possible. And so that's where the weight fluctuates.

So you want to get to a healthy body fat but a higher weight to put on some muscle, and then you chop that down, and that's where the weight discrepancy comes in. So I'll be 265 at my highest, and I'll come down to about 240 when I'm right on stage.

Okay, and that's to make the most of your shape for the competition, I presume, to make you as cut as you can be for the purposes of the display. Is that the case?

Exactly, yeah. It's like chiseling down a stone, down to all the excess stone, bring it down to just the art of it.

Right. And so when you're in that 12 to 16 week period, what do you do on the diet front? What do you have to do in order to lose that 30 pounds? What does your diet regimen consist of?

It typically consists of—you start building up to a maximum amount of calories that you can throughout the year, so your metabolism is flying; and then when you start prep, you just slowly start bringing down the calories while increasing the amount of cardio you do. So let's say in my off-season when I'm at my heaviest, I'm eating about 5,500, 5,000 calories, and at my lowest at the end of my prep, I'll be eating about 1,500 calories, so it comes down quite a bit. And within that, you're adding in cardio, so you're expending a little bit more calories doing that, and it's just kind of changing the energy output versus input to make sure that you're inputting less than you're outputting.

I see, so it's basically—it's not so much, if I have this correct, it's not so much what you're eating at that point; it's how much you're eating, essentially assessed by caloric intake. I mean, I'm curious about this because, as you perhaps know, I have an almost entirely carnivorous diet and have for a long time, and I've been watching Sha Baker a lot based on his Twitter feed, Doctor Who's been promoting the carnivore diet, and it seems to be unbelievably useful for adding muscle mass but also decreasing body fat content. So I was curious about the ratio of carbohydrates to proteins, or if there's anything additional that you're doing apart from adjusting caloric intake per se?

Yeah, so typically there's like a set amount of protein people will eat, and it stays around then. So I'll eat about 300 grams of protein in a day, and as my calories come down, I'm normally pulling away my carbs and my fats and keeping my protein the same. So calories are coming down, but protein is staying the same, so that ratio just changes. And that's why bodybuilding is so much different than a lot of other sports, if you can call it that, because it's not just about how you perform, but it's about how you look.

So typically in sports, it's like what's going to allow me to perform the best? Whereas in bodybuilding, it's like, no, I've just got to look the best, and then I still have to go and perform in the gym as best as I can. So it's kind of balancing those two to allow yourself to be in the gym getting the best workouts you can, but you also can't be eating too much to perform at your best because then you'll be holding on to too much body fat, so it's kind of an art of balancing all that.

Right, right. Okay, so let’s go through the progression of your career from amateur to professional, and then I would like to also talk about the criteria by which you're judged, exactly what it is that the judges are looking for. We can talk a little bit about the popularity of the sport as well. So you said when you were an amateur, there are local comps. So what exactly are the structures of the competitions, and how popular is this?

So you started, I believe, you started weightlifting when you were about 14. Is that correct?

Yeah, it was right around then.

Okay, and why did you start when you were 14, and what was the consequence of starting?

I just started—started in the gym because I played a lot of sports and I was very athletic but I wasn't really good at the skill of the sports. So I played hockey, basketball, football, but I wasn't great at dribbling or shooting, but I was really fast and strong. So I ended up kind of sticking to what I like. You know, I knew I was good at strength, I was good in the gym, so I started doing that more and more, and I just had a passion for that.

I slowly built that, and as I started to—as sports get progressively more competitive, I started to kind of get pushed out of that, but I noticed I had a lot of unique skills in the gym, if you will. So I started to excel very well in that above a lot of people. And, of course, at a young age, when you're starting to get attention from girls and see some success and put on some muscle and all that, you start to enjoy that a little bit more, makes you like the training in the gym even more.

So I put more and more focus into that, started nailing my diet, my nutrition, training, everything like that. And then it was when I was in grade 12, my sister started dating a local bodybuilder, and they're actually married now. He's my brother-in-law, and he started coaching me into the true realm of bodybuilding because before that, I was just training to be strong; I didn't understand bodybuilding to how precise it really was.

So he started teaching me the intricacies of that, and he saw the potential in me. He's like, you're young; I've 18 years old had a lot of muscle on me. He's like, you should try doing a bodybuilding show; I'll coach you; we'll see how it goes; have some fun with it. Why not?

Oh yeah, so I was like sure, you know, I'll give it a shot.

Okay, okay, so let's walk into the practicalities of that because there will be lots of people who are watching and listening who in principle would like to discipline themselves. In principle, they'd like to hit the gym and, you know, undergo some physical transformation to make themselves stronger and healthier and more attractive. And I started weightlifting when I was about, let’s see, 21, 22, something like that. I was very, very, very thin and not very strong, and I packed on about 35 lbs of muscle in about 2 years. I had to eat like a mad dog to do that.

And there’s a reason I’m telling you this. I mean, one of because it did a lot of things for me that I didn't understand that weightlifting would do. Now, I used free weights and one of the things I noticed apart from the fact that I packed on muscle and was stronger was that my posture improved a lot. I was starting to get hunched a little bit because I was typing, sitting and writing a lot, and it pulled my shoulders back up straight. And then it was really good for my coordination, especially my lower body. My legs got a lot more coordinated, and the other thing it did was produce—and I think this went along with the coordination, and maybe that was from working all the little tendons and so forth that you do with free weights—it also made me a lot more physically confident.

And I think—I don't think that was nearly as much a consequence of the strength as it was a consequence of the increased coordination. Okay, so back when you were 14, you were already athletic; you started but you started hitting the gym more thoroughly. What size were you? What height were you when you were 14? How were you built physically when you were, you know, that young teenager?

I don't remember my exact size, but I was like a lean, skinny, kiddish. I was probably like just under six foot, maybe 180 lbs, 170 lbs or so. So I was never really small, and even when I graduated, I was about 220 lbs. So definitely, I noticed some of the same things as yourself. I was definitely a bit of an anxious kid, quiet and introverted; and going in the gym by myself playing some music, just enjoying that allowed me to like control the outcome of all that, and it was really fun for me.

And obviously, like you said, you noticed as well, it builds confidence in you; even just being good at something can build confidence in you. So obviously, that was part of what I started to do, and like I said, you get a little attention from having some muscle at a young age, and that builds a little bit more confidence. And all these things started kind of trickling in my mind, being like, oh wow, I really like this; I should keep doing it; if I do more of it, I'll get more of these good feelings from it.

Right, okay, so you are a pretty big kid; you’re already 6 feet tall; you’re pretty built. I mean, 180 and 6 feet at 14—so you had the natural physique for this. And then how did you start? Like, had you been a disciplined kid up to then? How had you done in school? Were you someone who had regular and good habits? Were you a conscientious person to begin with? You know, I'm kind of wondering how you managed to develop the discipline to start working out in the gym.

And how regularly were you? Walk me through how you learned to do this step-by-step, so that people listening could figure out for themselves what they would do if they decided to go to the gym. And also the obstacles: you know, when I went to the gym, I went at Miguel, and like I said, I was very thin. I was about 6 feet tall but about 135 lbs—like very, very thin and not very strong. And so one of the things you can imagine that when people are going to hit the gym, there are a couple of—especially if they haven't been athletic, there are a couple of things that are going to be impediments.

They’re going to be self-conscious; they don't know what the hell they're doing; plus they hypothetically lack discipline. Now, you had the advantages of being slightly, you know, somewhat on the larger side and also being athletic, but how did you develop the discipline, and what impediments did you have to overcome as you were developing that discipline?

Yeah, so I mean I heard a quote the other day that stuck with me because I thought of this: it was, you don't start something because you're passionate. You stick with it because you're passionate. So I kind of just started it. I fell into it naturally, and like I said, as I started to see results and get a little bit more joy out of it, I started to become more passionate and put more effort into it.

And every year since I was a child, I've become a little bit more consistent, a little bit more passionate, and put a little bit more effort into it. So my discipline has continued to grow over time because I just stuck with something for a while and wanted to see how it went, and it just kind of tumble-affected. But I definitely had some of the similar feelings, and I hear from everybody about being a little anxious being in the gym. And it's funny: people will come help you to make you feel comfortable, but like you said, it could almost be demeaning, make you feel a little bit like, "Alright, you think I need your help?"

But when I was young, right, great, yeah, so my dad actually had one of those old sand weights. It was like a weird bar with sand weights in the basement, and I remember setting up some boxes filling them up with stuff and lying on them and trying to bench press on it because it’s hard to balance a bench press at first like you talked about, the stability and all that; it's difficult.

So I was a young kid in my basement doing that with push-ups and pull-ups, and that's really what got me into the whole weightlifting building muscle thing. And that was purely, like I mentioned, just to get better at sports. I assumed if I was stronger I would be better at sports, and then after that, I joined a gym at a young age. There was a summer program that gave kids a free membership over the summer, and I had to ask my parents to come sign me up because you had to be 16 and I was 14, so they had to come in and sign a waiver for that, and I wasn’t the most disciplined kid for sure.

My parents definitely made me independent, and to have some of the free reign that they gave me to be able to go out with friends and do stuff, I had to earn it. I had to have a job, finish my chores, do my homework, and all that stuff. So my parents definitely raised me to have that kind of mindset, and I grew up in a town with some good kids. Luckily, I didn’t get stuck into anything bad, and we were all—very passionate about sports, and I wanted to excel, so I kept putting myself in the gym.

And at a young age, I remember I didn't have a car or any way to get there all the time; my parents would work late, and I remember I would run even in the winter in Ottawa. It would be like a foot of snow on the ground, and I’d be jogging to the gym—it was about a mile and a half—but still, a decent little run in the snow. I was just super dedicated from a young age because I loved it so much, and as I mentioned, sometimes, just being in the gym with my music and that focus was just like a point of solitude for myself to enjoy.

And there was a quiet gym, luckily, and I slowly learned over time that no one in the gym is looking at you or judging you. Everybody who’s been in there was a beginner at some point, so they’re not looking at you, making fun of you. They were you probably a year or two ago, and everyone’s just truly there to help out, and I’ve discovered that the fitness community in general is a very encouraging community because everybody has the same experience as you; they get in, they feel better, they get some confidence, they’re like this is great, and I would love for other people to feel this too, you hope if they’re nice enough, and that typically allows them to be very inclusive and want people to come and join and just be a part of it all.

So I found it's not a judgmental, people think once you're in it.

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

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

You know, and it was certainly the case that the people who were coming over to help me weren't doing it in a judgmental way—you know that was my problem. And there’s another thing to concentrate on there too. You know one of the things that one of my favorite thinkers, a psychoanalyst Carl Jung pointed out, was very, very helpful to me to understand was that he said the precursor to the redeemer is the fool, and what he meant by that was that if you're going to master something, the first thing you have to do is admit to yourself that you're not a master of it already, because then you wouldn't have to do anything.

So you have to allow yourself to be the fool, and you know one of the things I've noticed about people who are highly successful is that they will jump into new things that they don't know anything about and be the fool, be the person who doesn't know anything, be the person who's low man on the totem pole, start at the lowest rung, and they won't pretend to know more than they do know; they ask the stupid questions that are necessary, they humble themselves in accordance with their novice position, they like—they accept that weight and but they also do so in the understanding that if they're honest with themselves, they can make the kind of incremental progress that you described.

Right? Because you said you got more and more disciplined as the years went by and that it doesn't matter if you start at the bottom; what matters is that you're so stupid and blind that you refuse to learn and that you stay there, right?

So it's trajectory that matters and not absolute position, and so that's a useful thing for people to know. It's like of course you feel like a bloody fool when you do something the first time; what the hell do you expect? Like you are a fool, but that doesn't mean that you can't move beyond that.

Yeah, yeah, no, you touched on something great there when you're expanding. If it's something that makes you feel worried or anxious or you're thinking other people are judging you, it's probably actually reflection of yourself, something that you need to grow on.

And that's something that I really noticed because I used to be super anxious in public speaking. I remember you've done a lot of talks on fear immersion and stepping into and the confidence that can build, and I didn't really understand this whole mindset of all the confidence that would come from that.

But I would always do podcasts or public speaking, or I started to get in some seminar events or being asked to come talk from my success as a bodybuilder, and every time I went there, I'd be Mr. Olympia walking into this thing terrified out of my mind, like hand shaking, stumbling my words.

And I still feel like that sometimes, but I've gotten better; but I realized, I took a step back after a few times. I'm like, alright, this is something I need to put myself into more to become better at it.

And I started to actually plan my events to be more talking-based, sign up for a few more requests to talk a little bit more in front of people, and it was terrifying at first, and I still embarrass myself sometimes. I still have memories standing on stage, stuttering, or my lisp comes out really bad and feeling embarrassed and getting off stage.

But I also have a lot of memories now where I've killed the good talk and I've stepped off stage feeling so confident, and over that realm of me becoming better at something I wasn't good at, I noticed my confidence in all aspects of my life started to increase—not just in public speaking.

So I think that being able to have that humility, like you said, look at yourself, be the fool, and understand where you need to grow and put yourself into positions to grow is something that has helped me immensely, and something I've taken from some of your words in the past too. If you're like most Americans, you're struggling to make ends meet. Everything is more expensive these days; by the time you pay your bills, fill up your car, and go grocery shopping, there's almost nothing left.

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Yeah, well, let’s delve into that a little bit because we can imagine your situation. You know, like you're a big guy, and you're better built than anyone else in the world, arguably, and so people would assume, looking at you, it's the halo effect. Like, if you see someone who's attractive and who's in very good physical shape and who's strong, you're going to assume automatically that every other good thing that's confident goes along with that.

So that actually puts you in a kind of a double bind because not only do you have to get up and speak publicly, but people are going to assume a priority that, well, you've got this, like why the hell would someone like that be worried about it? And you are worried about it, and public speaking is something that does terrify people.

It's one of the most highly cited fears: public exposure, right? And fear of making a fool of yourself and being judged harshly by a lot of people and falling in status because of it, it's a major league fear. Now, but so, so you had reasons to be afraid. Now, you said that you had decided to voluntarily confront that regardless, and there's a real key lesson there.

Because one of the things that’s been extraordinarily well documented among psychologists—well, we’ll stick with psychologists who deal with anxiety—is that the universal pathway to overcoming anxiety is to voluntarily face what you’re afraid of in graduated doses. It has to be voluntary; it can't be accidental. You have to—you have—and that's partly a mindset issue.

And you know that mindset goes very, very deep. It's not just something that you think when you decide that you’re going to confront something voluntarily. You change. You probably change yourself all the way down past the cellular level. You change the way that genes code for proteins; you change the way your cells operate; you change the way the neurons communicate. Like everything about you changes.

And what you're doing, what you did, let’s say, with public speaking, is not only did you develop the skill set that was associated with public speaking, and we can go into that a bit more, but you simultaneously develop the part of you that is capable, at the physical and the psychological level, of confronting everything that’s frightening as such.

You know, it’s so cool because it means that you can—what you do with people in therapy when you do exposure therapy, which is essentially what you did, let’s say, when you decided to arrange for yourself more and more demanding speaking opportunities. Is that you don’t become less afraid, exactly; you become braver and braver and braver, and that’s different, right? Because you’re always going to be facing challenges that are beyond you to some degree.

There’s always a reason to be terrified into paralysis, but you can learn to be a more courageous person, and that’s not just an attitude. Like I said, it changes you at every single level of your being—all, like really all the way down to the molecular. There’s a lot of work done on this now in a field called epigenetics.

There’s even some possibility—this is, you know, more on the edge—but there is some possibility some of the changes that you can make behaviorally can change you so profoundly genetically that those changes can be transmitted to your children, let's say. So you know that’s really something that’s about as profound a change as you could possibly imagine.

So, let’s talk about your experience with your experiences with public speaking. So, you mentioned that there were—tell me exactly, if you would—what it is that you were afraid of to begin with. What were the thoughts that would go through your mind that were intimidating?

I mean definitely, as anyone can imagine, when you put yourself in front of a bunch of people, you're in a position to be judged—a very vulnerable spot. And I can't really pinpoint exactly where it came from, but I have some minor memories from a child in front of a class or something like that being super embarrassed and sweating. But I do think a lot of it comes from—I have a speech impediment.

I've had a lisp since I was young, and when I get nervous, it gets worse; and when I was younger, it was much worse, so I used to be teased for that a little bit, which made me, I'm sure, much more quiet and introverted and just not wanting to talk. So not wanting to talk around anyone, obviously, makes me much scared to talk around a large group of people.

So now standing on top of people, my mouth will get really dry. I'll start to be like, "My tongue will stick out of my mouth." I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm going to sound dumb. People are going to laugh at me and judge me," and it led to this kind of spiraling effect. And you really hit the nail on the head when you talked about the visual persona I give off when someone sees me or hears about my career or something; they already have an expectation of who I am.

And that's something that I've worked on a lot in the past couple of years of this differentiation with my therapist who helped me with this between what I would call “seum” versus Christopher, and the difference of what people expect me to be, what I think people expect of me and who I should be versus who I really am.

And allowing myself to be that person who is a little bit scared, anxious, has a lisp, can step on stage and kind of embarrass himself a little bit. So that's something I've worked on. In this public speaking, part of that process of working on all that, but overall I would—before getting up there, hands would be shaking, heart would be racing. I wouldn't even have concrete thoughts if these people are going to think this about me; it was just like nerves, kind of almost blacking out nerves. Just like, "Oh God, here we go, I got to do this."

And as you mentioned, voluntarily doing it is the whole secret to it. So when I started taking those nerves and those butterflies and that kind of feeling in my heart as a good sign, as a chance for growth, and changing my perception on, “Okay, me feeling this right now, if I step into this, this is giving myself an opportunity to grow and become something better.”

So, I try to enjoy that a little bit more. You know that this feeling of racing your heart of being fear scared—all these things—it's part of the human experience. And I think feeling anything is something great, better than feeling nothing at all. So I started to try and enjoy it and be excited for what would result out of it, and that’s kind of continuously helped.

And obviously, when you’re stepping on stage, if your goal is for people to like you, I've heard someone in the past say, I believe they said, then you're putting your self-worth on the line. You're giving your self-worth an issue to be judged versus if you step on stage and your only goal is to be yourself then it doesn't matter if they accept you or not because you can succeed just by being yourself.

And that kind of leads— that can lead to even more self-confidence, obviously. It's a better goal to just be who you are rather than have people like you. It leads to a lot more fulfilled happiness rather than a false sense of reality of people liking a false sense of yourself.

So that was a huge process of what I kind of stepped through in all that, and like you said, you don't get less scared; you get more brave. Even before getting on the podcast, I was a little bit nervous. I still get nervous now, and I just—I believe in myself more, I have more confidence from my track record in the history, and I'm more brave to step into it a little bit more.

Okay, so you covered a bunch of things there that I think are interesting and worth delving into. It's like, okay, what do you want when you step on stage? So let’s say, well, you want people to like you. It's like, well what the hell do you mean by that? First of all, it’s like what people—and does that mean that you’re going to present a false front so that they like that? Because that isn’t you.

So if they like that false front, you haven’t been humiliated. I mean you’ve definitely circumvented that, but it’s not like you got people to like you because they don’t know who you are, so that’s not a really good victory. Like, I mean, I understand why people might want to craft what they’re going to say so they don’t fail cataclysmically, but that’s also not how you ever succeed as a public speaker, you know?

Like, so when I go out on stage, I wouldn’t say I’m nervous about it anymore, but I’ve done it so much now, you know, and it certainly takes a very long time before you won’t be nervous at all. It’s not like I’m not pumped up and also excited. See, that’s another thing you said is that you want to get yourself into the frame of reference where you’re primarily grateful for the opportunity and you’re excited about it, like both of those.

So like when I’m going out on stage, my wife does this too. We always take a moment or two to remember how bloody unlikely it is that there are all these people gathered there to hear us talk and remember the fact that they’re actually there because they want to see success, not failure.

And so that allows you to step on stage not with a mindset of suspicion and paranoia and distrust of the audience, which is part of the fear of being judged, but the recognition that you’re among people who wish you well, which is certainly going to be the case for you in most places that you’re speaking, and anyone who isn’t there for that reason—they’re the sort of mean-spirited person you shouldn’t really care about.

You shouldn't really care about what they think anyways. And then with regards to what you're going to say, you know, if you're concentrating on how it is that people are reacting to you, then you're going to craft your words, as you pointed out, so they like you, but that's a false game. You know, you could just—and this works like a charm as far as I’m concerned—is you could just determine that you're going to say what you believe to be true.

It's way simpler! Like, you might get into trouble for it now and then because you're going to say things that maybe some of the audience doesn't want to hear, but this is where you have to decide what you're going to put your faith in. You know? And like when I'm on stage, when I'm talking to people—as far as I can manage— all I'm trying to do is to say what I believe to be true and try to make my thoughts clearer.

And the thing that's so fun about that is that if I'm trying to make my thoughts clearer to myself, I'm simultaneously doing the same thing for the audience. If I'm trying to track the truth as I speak and move forward, then they can come along with me, and then the whole thing works out.

Like it just strips all—it strips all the deception out of it, you know? And Chris, one of the things too that I used to tell my socially anxious clients or help them conceptualize is that if you go to a party and you’re nervous, you’re primarily concerned about whether or not you're at ease, like you’re concerned about your mental state.

But if you go to a party and you're focused on making other people comfortable and welcome, well first of all they'll be really bloody happy about you because you'll be attending to them, but the fact that you're attending to them stops that self-consciousness.

It's about the only thing I know that really works! You can't tell yourself just not to be self-conscious, and so when you're going now, like when you're going on stage or even when you're going on a podcast, let's say, what is it that you've learned to focus on? Because, hypothetically, you're not focusing on your sweaty hands; you're not focusing on your—you know, because you said most of your responses are physiological rather than thought-based in terms of what’s the manifestation of the fear.

What are you now focused on when you're trying to communicate?

I mean part of stepping on stage, at least as I kind of mentioned, I actually am focusing on that physical part. There was a quote from Tim Grover to Michael Jordan from when he was younger talking about instead of trying to fight the butterflies, just send them in the right direction. So when I start to feel the butterflies in my stomach getting a little nervous, it's like, alright, you know, this is because changing my frame of mind rather than fear.

I'm feeling these because I’ve worked really hard to be here. I’m very excited to be here, and I’m sure, you know anxiousness and excitement are almost the same thing. So if I can allow myself to believe how hard I’ve worked to be in this exact position, how long I’ve waited to be here, and of course I feel nervous and excited because this is really important to me.

So feel all these feelings right now because I compete once a year. So all my year is working toward that one day, and on that day, I want to feel everything I can rather than numb anything out and avoid it. So I’m like this is part of this experience that I’m going to remember feeling nervous.

And I've done this five times; I’ve won seven times; I’ve been on the stage now. I can step on the stage with experience and I can have these nerves, and the nerves are going to fade, and I’m going to be left out there purely being present, and joyful, feeling all of it.

And I’ve just had that experience to go through it, and a lot of it has come from doing it numerous times, the work I'm doing outside, believing in myself, and that kind of change of frame.

And I mean, the understanding that fear, anxiety, and excitement are so similar that you don’t need to focus on it being anxiety and bad; rather, it could be a good thing.

Yeah, well, okay, so when you confront something new, let’s say an opportunity on stage, especially if it’s a high stakes opportunity, what your body basically does is put itself in a position where you're more primed to do everything. They call that, the physiologist, psychophysiologist calls that heightened non-specific arousal, right?

And so that's really what you're referring to, and what your body is doing is saying, well, this is a complex situation. God only knows what you’re going to be called upon to do, so let's just crank everything up so that you can respond rapidly if that’s necessary.

And that can easily tilt into anxiety, or it can shade into excitement. It's much more likely to tilt into anxiety if you start to get afraid of those responses, right? So you've learned to reframe them, you know, as the kind of excitement that you described.

People fall into these feedback loops—this is what produces panic, by the way—where you're afraid; you see that you're afraid, or at least you interpret that emotional state, let's say, as fear, you get afraid of the fear, that makes the fear mount. Then you get more afraid of that because the fear has mounted more, and you just spiral, right?

And that can turn into a full-blown panic attack. And so, okay, so you've learned instead to attend to that and to—I would say interpret it in the best possible light, right? It’s a realistic light, but it’s the best possible light.

You also pointed to something else that everyone should know. See, here's one of the things that people do that tilts them very hard toward maintaining or increasing a phobia or even something like fear of public speaking. So as you’re approaching your debut on stage, let’s say, that tendency for arousal is going to increase, and it’s going to increase to a maximum generally right before the event begins.

Now I’m sure you’ve observed this: if you don’t run during that period, see if you run during that period, then you’ve learned that the event is terrifying. If you wait that out and you actually go ahead with the event, what you’ll find almost inevitably is that that high level of arousal will decrease once the event begins.

And then you can see you’ve learned, through practical experience, that if you just withstand the anxiety, it will decrease. Now, you made an allusion to the fact that even in the bodybuilding competitions where you’re not speaking—

Yeah, maybe you can differentiate that for us. I mean, you said to some degree that you were worried about being judged as a speaker, but then of course when you're on the stage, you're being judged on the basis of your physique and your performance.

And so it obviously isn't judgment per se that's causing you to be nervous; it's more—and that’s where you referred to some of the things that had happened in your childhood, for example, you know, proclivity for a lisp a bit and the fact that you had experienced some public humiliation.

It doesn't take much for a kid, by the way, especially when they're standing up in front of a class. One bad experience like that can color you for quite a long time. How do you differentiate between what you feel when you're on the stage, when you're being judged on the basis of your physique and your work, compared to being evaluated with regard to speaking?

How are those—how are those different for you?

I mean, when I was younger and I first started competing, I felt a lot more nerves. But I didn't do any public speaking events, so it's hard for me to compare that, I’m sure. I mean you can actually look back to my Olympia speech in 2019 when I won my first Olympia, and I like blurted some stuff out, didn’t know what to say.

I was like, oh, but I felt super confident while on stage. So when I started, there was a lot more experience I had in the bodybuilding aspect, a lot more experience of that compared to public speaking. So right now, I definitely still have nerves in both, but they're much less in bodybuilding and I'm much more able to change that frame of mind, like I mentioned, of being able to enjoy that excitement rather than be worried about it.

And it feels easier for me to perform physically and get on stage and do what I need to do rather than start to pull my thoughts together and speak and all that stuff. I’ll notice I’ll get a lot more tongue-twisted than I will mess up my posing on stage.

So definitely more difficult speaking, but as you said, that fear of judgment feeling on stage—I do get a little bit on both—but now the bodybuilding aspect has transferred a little bit more into pressure and expectation.

Because when I was younger, I felt it, but it was a little bit different because I was just new and nervous, but I was the underdog, and no one really cared. There was nothing expected of me, so I was just feeling a youthful nervousness, and then now when I get up there, sometimes it’s like, okay, people are actually here to see me now and expecting me to be the best in the world.

There is a standard that I have to withhold, and anything less than that—if I come second place, that’s bad now; whereas when I was younger, if I came second place, that’s amazing.

So any kind of movement backwards, it's just more pressure, so that's a different style of expectation and pressure I feel from being on stage versus the actual fear of failure when I'm speaking.

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Jordan?

Right, right. Well okay, so there’s a couple of things there. I mean the first is that, know your comfort on stage performing professionally was proportionate to, to some degree, to your degree of experience, and also to some degree proportionate to your success, right?

Because you could imagine that as you got more successful, you got more confident. But you know, you're pointing to something else that’s a little deeper than that too, which is you don't want to be juicing yourself into thinking that you’re ever going to get to a point where you have nothing on the line, and you’re just without fear.

That’s why it’s so much better to practice being brave than it is to assume that conquering fear means absence of fear. That isn’t what it means; it means getting better and better at being able to deal with fear, because you know one of the perverse things you're pointing to is, you know, someone seeing this from the outside might think, well you know, what the hell does Chris have to worry about? I mean, he's already hit the peak of his profession; of course he can go out on stage and be confident.

There’s nothing brave about that because he’s in a, an optimized position, but you know you're giving us a viewpoint from inside, which is, yeah, but the stakes have changed now. The situation's different, and the downside consequences are different than they were.

And so the—I’ve seen this often. One of the things I saw among professors was—and students was that they would falsify the way they presented themselves, what they said, what they wrote, because they weren’t in a secure position.

So an undergraduate would write a false paper for a professor because they had to get the grade, and then as a graduate student, they’d write—they wouldn’t say what they really meant in a seminar because they didn’t want to cause trouble with people who might write them letters of reference.

And then when they became junior professors, well they didn't have tenure yet, so they still couldn't say what they thought, and then the next rung of professorship, well that’s not all the way to the top, so there’s still something to sacrifice. And people would falsify themselves, you know?

And it was based, what they would tell themselves is once I get into a position of security, I’ll be comfortable with who I am and what I think and what I have to say. Then I’ll start speaking, but the, the lie about that is that you're never going to get yourself in a position where security makes you brave. That isn’t how life works.

Security doesn’t make you brave; what makes you brave is the decision that you're going to confront things that you're afraid of. And even, too, like the people I know that are radically successful—and obviously you’re one of them in your domain—it's not like they're now bereft of challenges.

Like in some ways, the challenges actually get bigger, you know, when you're playing a higher stakes game. So, and I'm saying this to let everybody know that you're never going to be in a situation, if you're especially if you're pushing yourself forward, where you're not confronting something that is a genuine threat and a genuine challenge, and you should—you can get yourself in a place where you’re actually happy about that, you know?

So why do you keep—let’s delve into that a little bit. You've won five championships, right? And so one of the questions that someone might ask is, well why continue? Like why do you continue to do this? What’s driving you forward still?

I mean, that’s a great question, and it’s one I’ve been honestly asking myself for the past couple of years, especially this year. There’s been times where the risk versus reward hasn’t felt like it’s all there for me, and you know now my wife is pregnant; I'm having a child, life’s changing; I'm getting older; there’s a lot of stuff coming into my life, and I’ve been asking myself that a lot.

And it’s definitely, it's not so much being a champion that I love. I have this thing called Champion mentality and I say how it’s not about the trophies or the medals around your neck; it's kind of more about the person I've become in this journey.

I’ve heard you speak a lot about how humans take value from the uphill climb. You know, it’s finding a new challenge, climbing that mountain—that’s where we find value and growth in ourselves. And I’ve almost become addicted or just fallen in love with the self-discovery and growth that I have discovered through bodybuilding by pushing my limits physically and mentally, by going through states of suffering overcoming these odds that hit me at the worst times and being able to see how far I can take a goal and how far I can push myself.

I’ve fallen in love with that growth that has come with that, and so that’s continuously what pushes me. And we spoke about the feelings I have on stage, and I think a lot of successful people—and myself—have gotten really good at things for our ability to compartmentalize and to suppress things and continue to work as things are going on.

But what I realized from a young age was that if I suppress things, compartmentalize, and push them to the side for too long without keeping them back up, I start to suppress everything. So the kind of thing I said at the end of this year was if you numb the bad, you numb the good. You start to numb your whole life and you start to feel less and be less present, and I didn’t want to be that person anymore.

So partway through my career, I was like, I’m winning, but what I feel is relief that it’s over at the end. I want to feel joy. I want to feel the fear and anxiety before and the joy afterwards—all of it—rather than nothing. So that was a huge transition that I've pushed through in the last few years, and it's pretty cool 'cause I’ve documented a lot of my preps. My friend Calvin here has been my videographer through everything, and you can see almost a shift in previous years of where I was a lot more stoic and hard-faced to being a little bit more light-hearted and laughing and joyful hanging out with people backstage before getting on stage because I’m really present and enjoying all that.

And that’s because when challenges come up in the middle of prep—which they always have, I tore my lat, I injured myself this year; I have an autoimmune disease as well which has affected me in the past—and having to overcome those things. If I allow myself to feel that fear and stress and sadness and let out my tears and cry with my girlfriend who’s supported me or my wife now and be able to move through that, then when I'm in a position of joy and success, I feel way more joy and success.

I’m able to embrace all that a lot more, so that’s part of the personal growth that I’ve discovered through bodybuilding. And obviously I’m only 28 years old; I know there’s so much more for me to discover. Part of me is almost worried if I step away from this mountain, am I going to have something challenging enough to continue to push myself enough to grow? And obviously I believe there is, especially fatherhood is going to be a whole new challenge that will teach me a whole new lessons.

Yep, yep, definitely. Yep. But honestly even a question I could ask you is, ‘cause you’ve mentioned it’s the uphill battle that brings value and when you reach the pinnacle of that mountain, what you want to see is another higher mountain in the distance for you to accomplish.

Yeah, but what do you do when the previous years have felt like Mount Everest and just a lot of suffering, a lot of difficulties, a lot of pain had to push through, a lot of joy as well. But you almost want to step back and be like, okay, do I need to find a higher mountain than this? A more difficult challenge to continue to grow and to find more value?

Or can I maybe find a more lateral mountain, a sideways movement rather than an upward movement? And I mean that’s a question where I…

Well, I think some of it—look, you could imagine that there are a variety of really quite qualitatively different mountains to climb. The height might not be so much the issue, although it’s one issue, as the diversity of the climber.

So imagine there’s two ways of making progress, right? You can go up a more and more difficult terrain, which you’ve already done with the Olympia contest; you went up a very difficult mountain, a very steep mountain all the way to the top. But then, you know, now you’re at the pinnacle. You could look around, you could see, oh, well there's all sorts of different places to climb.

Okay, and one way of becoming a better person is to do something very difficult and to attain a pinnacle, but another way to become a good person, like a fully-fledged person, is to take on a lot of different challenges. And you don't have to be like every single challenge you have to—that you're going to undertake doesn’t necessarily have to be another Mount Everest, right?

Because there’s something to be said for many different climbs. Now in your own life, you know, you mentioned two things that are right there in front of you: the first is that you’re going to be a father, okay? Well, that’s going to keep you busy! Like that’s a bottomless well, you know?

It’s an opportunity and a challenge, and there's no limit to how good you could become at that, right? There’s no limit to how good a mentor you could be to your son or your daughter; there’s no limit to how good a relationship you could establish with them if you made that a priority.

So, you know, that’s something right there that could easily occupy like a third of your life because it’s a big deal. And that area of opportunity will grow up even more if you have more kids, right? Because, well then there’s more challenges of that sort, and then you also have your marriage, right?

And that’s something—one of the things I discovered with my wife, and this has really become more tangible for us in the last few years, because both of us almost died, and not just a little bit—like brutally and over months and years it was very rough—and one of the consequences of that was like we were apart, really, because of our illnesses, various illnesses. We were apart for something approximating two to three years, depending on how you look at it, and we grew apart during that period as you do because that’s a long time.

But we’ve found new depths to our relationship that we didn’t know were achievable in the aftermath of that. And so I think there’s no end to the depth. There’s no end to the mountain that you can climb with your wife, and that’s even more true once you have kids together. So you've got that!

Now, you also said you’re working on your ability as a public communicator? Well that’s something that’s there for you because you’ve already got a huge following. You know, people are interested in you because you've mastered a particular discipline.

And so you have the opportunity to continue to do good on that front that would be proportionate to your developing ability to express yourself. And so, you know, we have this program online called Future Authoring; it’s at selfauthoring.com, and we try to help walk people through the problem we’re discussing with that program.

So this is how it works: we might as well walk through this a little bit; this is how it works generically: it’s like, okay, imagine yourself five years in the future, okay? Now here are the conditions: the condition is you have to imagine yourself as if you were trying to take care of yourself like you were someone you cared for. So you could imagine someone you care for, like your wife maybe, and you could think, okay, if I cared for myself like I cared for someone I love, what would I want for myself five years from the road?

What sort of person would I want to be? What sort of challenges would I be facing? What would I have around me? How would I like my life to be? But more importantly, what sort of character would I like to be? And then you have to ask yourself that, you know? And you'll get a vision, and some of it’ll be concentrating on the remediation of your flaws because maybe part of you will go, well, here are some of the things you do wrong that you know are wrong, and here’s ways you could sort that up and out and clean it up; you know, you could become a better public speaker, for example.

You could take note of the things you’re afraid of and that you’re avoiding and you could decide that you’re going to face those and fix them, so that’s—and then on the other side you’d say, well, you know, what are you interested and excited about that you could pursue?

And so you want to develop a vision, and it’s really—you do that in dialogue—honest dialogue with yourself. It’s like okay, I’m taking care of myself. What do I want? And then we broke it down in this process because if you ask someone what they want for their life, that’s a pretty hard question.

You know, it's so open-ended; it’s so large. But then you can differentiate it. You know, people used to come to me as a therapist or as a professor and they’d say, well I don’t know what to do with my life. You know, I’d say, well what do you want? They’d say, well I don’t know what I want; I don’t know what to do with my life. It’s okay, fair enough, if you don’t know what to do with your life, look at what other people do that works and maybe think about how you’re doing there.

So you could imagine this: what sort of people do you want to be surrounded by? You know, what sort of friends do you want, and what can you offer those people? How do you want your family to be functioning? Not be your wife and your kids, but also your extended family. You know, how could you repair those relationships or make them grow?

What educational opportunities could you pursue? You know, how are you going to take care of yourself mentally and physically? What occupation are you going to pursue, and how are you going to make that thrive? And what are you going to do with your life outside of your work?

And then more broadly speaking you might say too, how could you be of the broadest possible service to other people? Now each of those is a microvision, right? And that what that does is provides for you, because you pointed out something extremely important there; you know, you said you fell in love with the process of climbing mountains, right?

And that speaks also to your motivation to continue pursuing your bodybuilding, which is an extreme preoccupation, a difficult preoccupation. People might say, well why do you do it? And you know your answer so far has been, well you like climbing mountains.

And then you might say, well then the mark of your success isn’t going to be which mountain you climbed; the mark of your success is going to be how good you’ve become at climbing whatever mountain presents itself in front of you. And then the goal would be something like, what would you say—the eventual mastery of as many mountains as you could possibly manage.

So one of the things that kept me motivated as a professor has kept me motivated all my life—it's like I've asked how much can I do in the shortest possible time?

Like it’s such a fun game to play, and I pretty much take that question into everything I do. You know, it's like where could I see this going? And then the question of efficiency, well that’s partly because, well if you want to do ten things, you’re going to have to do them pretty efficiently because otherwise you won’t have the time.

But then you get in that challenge mindset, right? It’s like, okay, here’s an opportunity now—sorry I’m rambling a bit here, but I wanted to point out one other thing you pointed to that’s very, very important. You know, you said that as you’ve mastered the current discipline that you’re pursuing, you’re more and more able to do it playfully.

You know that you have more fun backstage, you know that you’re joking around more, and I would say that’s also—a really masterful mark of mastery, that’s the primary one—you’ve really mastered something if you can do it in a spirit of play.

And this is something to really know about the baby that you’re going to have. Like one of the things that kids love playing, and one of the things they can deliver to you as a benefit is to pull you into that play.

And there isn’t anything that they want more than that, and there isn’t anything that they need more than that, and men can really offer that to children now. It’s, you know, not so easy when they’re six months old and younger, but after that, man, the field of play is open and you can have an immensely productive relationship with your kids, an unbelievably enjoyable relationship if you introduce and focus on that spirit of play.

You are at a pinnacle in your career, and as you said, you’re not a—you’re not very old; you’ve got a lot of life ahead of you. Like what do you think—you talked about fatherhood in your marriage. What do you think is beckoning to you and also calling to your conscience, like where do you see your life progressing?

I know that's a complicated question.

Yeah, for sure. I mean I’ve always been pretty transparent that bodybuilding isn't forever for me. I'm grateful I got successful at a young age so I can retire at a young age. I always said I wouldn’t go past 30, so now that I'm approaching that age, I’m coming to that point where I’m like coming to the understanding that there isn’t going to be one mountain; there’s going to be many.

And also this past year, I had a lot of things on my plate and I spread myself a little bit too thin. I wasn't able to compete at the level I wanted to at the beginning of the year, and I read this book called "The One Thing," and it was talking about how if you want to be in the top 1% in something, you need to focus on that one thing.

And so I kind of realized I was spread; I was trying to be too good, wearing too many hats while still being Mr. Olympia. But it also showed me if I want to be the best father I can be, the best husband I can be, the best businessman, the best everything I can be, bodybuilding is going to take away from that, at least for parts of the year.

So if I want to be in the top 5% in a lot of these things, I can work really hard at that, but if bodybuilding is still me being the best in the world, at least it takes a lot out of me. Therefore, it's sacrificing from other things, and I started to notice that and that’s not what I wanted.

The biggest goal I’ve ever had in my life—and I’ve always said this—why I’m so excited right now was to be the best father I can be, and in turn also the best husband I can be because my biggest role model in my whole life was my father and the impact he had on me. I was always feel grateful for it, and being able to think of the impact I can have on another child is something that really excites me.

And backtracking a little bit, when you were asking me what motivates me to keep going, that’s one of the biggest things that keeps me going, is some of the stories I have heard from people who have followed my journey. You know, I’ve worked hard, like I’ve said on being my true self through it all by showing a lot of things, and honestly, I've been very grateful for everything you’ve put out because you have also been a great role model for men. You're very intelligent, well-spoken, all these things, but you can also be very vulnerable.

You’re not afraid to cry when something is very passionate about, and I've noticed myself—I’m a crier sometimes; I just start crying. I’ve expressed that; I've cried on stage after Olympias. I’ve cried on videos talking about stuff that scares me. I've talked about my lisp, which is the vulnerability. And since doing that more, I’ve had more and more kids come up to me and share those kind of same things with me.

And this past year at the Olympia, I had—I don’t know if he was 12 or 13 years old; he was a young boy—and he came up to me not able to speak too well, with tears in his eyes, just thanking me for all I had done for him and how I had helped him. And he handed me a note; he handed me a letter because he said he wouldn't be able to get all those words out.

And I thanked him, gave him a hug, took a picture and kind of went about, and then a few hours later, I was waiting, eating some food. It was the night before the Olympia, getting on stage the next day. I opened up his letter, and I started to read it, and he expressed how he had Tourette's, and he remembers hearing me talking about my lisp and how I was embarrassed about it and how I still have moments where I bring it back to my child feeling embarrassed but working through all that stuff.

And he talked about the impact that it had on him and how he’d been bullied and how sad he’d been the past, but how he’s building up all this courage that he pulls a lot from me. And it was a very nice heartfelt note. And I said backstage or back where I was at the time, just crying—like sobbing, just tears running down my face—it still makes me emotional when I think about it now!

Just feeling so grateful for the impact that the work I'm doing for myself and my family is also having on the community around me. And that story and that feeling alone filled me with so much energy to keep doing what I'm doing and like a belief that I'm on the right path.

So that really—that just felt right. I'm like, I'm where I need to be right now, and this is why I do it. This is why I'm putting myself out there at the same time of putting this much work into something.

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Right, right. So you can see that, as you said, your progression has been, you know, that you focused in a very disciplined manner on one thing, and to some degree that was something that served your own individual interests particularly well but that as you've got better and better at that and become more successful at that, the relationship with you have—you have with your wife is beckoning as extremely important; the potential relationship with your child, and also this pleasure that you see and take in modeling discipline for people and also mentoring them.

So I just had a chat with Jocko Willink, and Jocko is quite the bloody monster, a very disciplined man, you know? And he’s joked with me several times that, you know, if he’d taken a few wrong turns when he was a young man, he could have easily been a criminal type because he’s a tough son of a—you know, one of the things that really changed Jocko, because we talked about this to some degree, was his experience in the military.

And I think he was interested in the military to begin with perhaps for some of the same reasons that you were interested in bodybuilding, you know? It was the personal self-development element of it, but what he learned as a leader in the military was that he had the opportunity to model appropriate conduct for other people and to help them develop, and he said he didn’t ever find anything that was more meaningful than that.

Like that was even more exciting than excitement; that was more exciting than adventure, certainly more exciting and worthwhile than anything, you know, kind of troublemaking criminal adventure, which does have that adventurous element to it, you know?

And so, but the—it certainly—it’s been true in my life too that I don’t think there is a deeper pleasure and a more sustainable pleasure once you’ve learned to walk up mountains, let's say, with some degree of facility than to see the positive effect that observing that has on other people and then also to foster that.

And you certainly have a walloping opportunity to do that as a father. And then, you know, I want to talk about a couple of things. You also mentioned this is a particular conundrum that men have, I would say even more than women, but to be extremely successful at something, you know the top 1%, you said—and you’re actually above that in your particular discipline—you really have to be hyper-focused on it.

Like the great scientists that I’ve known. I worked at Harvard for six years, and the senior professors there—I was an assistant and associate, not a full professor— the full professors were guys who were at the pinnacle of their career, and they were at the pinnacle of that type of career period because Harvard would go around the world and find those, mostly men, and aggregate them together.

And so then you might ask, well what do you have to be like to be someone like that? And the answer is, well being smart—that’s pretty necessary and that’s kind of a gift that’s given to you by fate or God; like you can interfere with it, but if it’s not there naturally, you know, it’s a real impediment.

Um, it's sort of like height, you know? If you don't have it, there's not a lot you can do to get it. But then insane dedication is the next thing; like, if you want to be the best of the best, you’re going to be working flat out, like 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, hopefully not exhausting yourself because you're in one hell of a competitive environment.

And there’s real utility in that, especially for men, because if you get really good at one thing, there’s the cascading benefits that you pointed to, for example when you found, when you started to work out in the gym when you were 14, that you were getting more—you know, you get more attention from girls because of it.

So, but the price you pay is that it’s harder to do many things at once, and you said you’ve come to realize that if you want to compete at the highest level, that there’s opportunity cost there. You know, that’s going to make it more difficult for you to be, well 100% committed to the other things that you have to do and want to do.

It's hard to get that balance right, and you know it’s probably the case—I don’t know this for sure—but it’s probably the case that as you move forward and you step back from this particular obsessive concern that you’ll have the opportunity to grow, let’s say, in a more balanced way and to pull out of that a more comprehensively developed personality.

You know, and that is something you—the advantage to doing that is that there’s no limit to it. You know, I don’t care how good you get at public speaking, for example; you could still get better. There’s no—and I don’t care how good you are as a father; there’s no limit to, because you could be a father to a lot of people, as you found out, you know, when that kid gave you the note—not least when that kid gave you the note.

So you know, that’s definitely an exciting horizon of opportunities. What’s been your experience? You said that we talked a little bit about your fears today; we talked a little bit about how you overcome them, how also they were linked to things about yourself that you regarded as inadequacies.

We talked a little bit about public displays of emotion around that, or maybe admission of that—you said your observation has been that you doing that—like it's like admitting to your weaknesses at the same time that you’re celebrating your successes, right? It's that balance.

You can imagine why that would be inviting for people because they might look at your success and think, "Oh my God, there's no way I could do anything like that. You know, you must be some sort of superhuman creature to manage that