Productivity tips from the ADHD brains

24,083 words · 22 chapters

CHAPTER 01

Introduction and ADHD Context

CHAPTER 02

Life Lessons and Bathroom Breaks

so luke it's always good to have you on i oh i i really like about these episodes is that i have absolutely no idea where they're gonna go and and i said i said before i said before coming on air that us starting with a lot of nofap last time was was a really really good way to start the show and i think this has got to be a theme whenever you come on the show we've got to start with something so i was like right i'll go and do some research i'll find i'll find something interesting that has been said by luke on something some buyer that he's done something we haven't spoke about and there's a great one about life lessons on the muscle nerds website never trust the part right cool and one of them i thought was really interesting he says never pass up a chance to go to the bathroom now i totally agree with you i think every guy listening to this will totally agree with you but why do you think never passing up a chance to go to the bathroom is a solid life lesson. Yeah. Well, and just to give you some background on those life lessons, it's some, some old guy gave them to me like 20 years ago. I think I was, I think it was back when I was still selling fitness equipment, full-time and training part-time and, um, just some old Texan guy bought some equipment from me and he said you know I you know son I going to give you the best piece of advice you gonna get as you get older never pass up a boner never trust a part never check pass up the chance to go to the bathroom and i went that's a pretty that's some pretty solid advice that's pretty solid right but look the bathroom thing too that actually that bit me it's bitten me in the ass a couple of times especially when i'm in europe you know how it is in london like they're in the bathrooms like Like if you're in the middle of a park and you got to pee or poo, you're screwed. Like, and these days, like most of the places you go in and around London, you have to pay. So if you, and who carries like, who carries coins anymore? So you finally, you see a bathroom, you're like, yes, you walk up and you're like, I have no coins. I can't actually get into the fucking bathroom. But yeah, so for me, if I have the urge, even slightly, I'm going to the bathroom because you never know when you're going to have an issue, like maybe you got to get in the car and go somewhere and then you got, you're going to poop your pants or pee your pants or whatever, you know? So I always highly recommend you just go, you don't hold it. And my wife will hold that shit in until she's busted. So she'll just hold it in and then knock it out. And she laughs at me because I go to the bathroom so many times a day, but you know, I I'd rather just, I'd rather take care of it and not have to worry about being in a bad situation, you know? So

CHAPTER 03

The Amsterdam Truffle Story

I got to give you another story. Did I ever tell you the story about when I was in Amsterdam? No, this is a great, great place to have a good story. This is a good story. So I was in Amsterdam. And one of the reasons why I love to hold our European seminars in Amsterdam is because the obvious thing you can truffles, right? I can legally go get hallucinogen contained property containing truffles. I can eat them and I can have a good time. So I had just given a seminar and so I was totally done. And I went, I'm going to go to the smart shop. I'm going to buy a box of truffles and I'm going to go see Avengers Endgame when it first came out. And it came out on that Tuesday. And I'm like, I get to see it before any of my friends get to see it. And I get to see it while I'm tripping. This is fantastic. So I go to the theater and it's a Tuesday afternoon. It's like there's nobody in there. It's like me and a couple of the weirdos. I bought a bottle of wine. You could buy a bottle of wine there. I sat down and ate like half a box of truffles and completely forgot that I'd taken them. And then when the movie came on, I didn't even catch the first hour and a half because I was too busy going, whoa, because everything looks so cool. I was like, whoa, why do I feel so weird? And I went, oh, yeah, I took shrooms. Holy shit. And I was so surprised because I'm like, I bought them not having any expectations because the first time I'd ever done them. And I'm like, surely they're legal here. They can't be, they're not going to be that. They're not going to be as powerful as shrooms. And I was, I was fucking wrong. Like I got to one point where I was, I wanted to get some more wine and my wine bottle was on the floor. And I was like, Oh, I don't know if I can even get to it. It's so far away. But that's the first, that's the first half of the story. So towards the end, you know, how long those movies are, we get to a point where I've been holding in this P no one told me that, those truffles are also a diuretic. No one told me this. So I'm holding his PNP and I'm at the point where I'm like, okay, I'm going to pee my pants. I jumped up, but I was so disoriented. I didn't know where the, where the doorway was to get out of the theater to go find the bathroom. So I went through the first door I could, and I found myself in the stairwell like behind the screen. And I'm looking around going, okay, this is not how I got in here. So I was like running down the stairs, couldn't find it. And I busted out of this door into the lobby. And the guy working there looks at me and he's like, what the fuck? I'm like bathroom. He's like, fuck over there. I'm like, cool. I want to take care of that. And, uh, still at this time, I still don't realize that it's the, that this the truffles making me have to pee so bad. So after the movie, I go to the pub next door and I'm like, all right, I'm going to have a beer and I'll just eat the rest of these truffles. Fuck it. Cause I've got this, I've got like a 45 minute walk through what's the big park of Boulder park or the big park in the middle of Amsterdam. I can this nice walk to my hotel and it's really nice sunny day. so I ate them I'm walking through the park I get halfway through the park and realize I gotta pee again like crap and it's coming on real fast and real strong and I'm looking around there's no bathrooms I'm like there's no I'm gonna pee myself this is this is not cool and because it's a sunny day everyone's at the park every and all the kids and you know everybody's having a good time and it's like okay I've got to do something about this so I see this kind of grove of trees where it's like you can't really see into them. I'm like, okay, I'll go and I'll put my backpack down and I'll squat down and I'll pretend like I'm going through my backpack, but I'll pull my wiener at the side of my, at the side of my shorts and I'll just have a quick pee. So I'm in the middle of this. I don't realize that I'm kind of on a incline. So the pee starts coming back towards my feet and I got flip on And then I hear the lady and her kids behind me and I freak out I like I going to be that guy The American guy that ends up in the in the jail for indecent exposure So I ended up falling and I just pissed all over myself So I might as well, I just peed my pants anyways because it just ended up all over me anyways. And then, uh, yeah, then I got up and kind of shook myself off and went back to my hotel room. So yeah, highly recommend always knowing where a bathroom is. and that's a long way to come back to that i love it yeah especially if you're taking things that act as a diuretic and i actually had an app on my phone at one point it was called something like where's the bathrooms so you could open the app and it would tell you where the bathrooms are if they were free if you had to pay for them so that's been quite handy when i'm traveling yeah i i tell you what i don't i don't have i don't have a story and in those sort of substances that is anywhere near as entertaining as that i always i always remember and there's this there's ocean park here in hong kong which is this uh um sort of theme park and it was a little bit away from where we were and i was sitting going wow i didn't realize it was that close and we were just sitting there you know looking at clouds and all this kind of thing and then you know five six hours later come back and go why is it so far away now like this whole island had moved like so much close to me like i almost thought it was like could i swim it if i give it a go could i swim it and then the moment when i wrote that i decided not to swim it was that moment where i think i spoke to you about this on the last show when we're talking about posture and performance and we're talking about stress and how stress affects you know how you know hypertonic a muscle is and i just did this and all of a sudden i was like there's a hole in my side there's a hole in the side of me and it just goes for the first time i hadn't got hypertonic pecs and for the first time my pec moved as it should and i can actually feel like my armpit rather than being like locked in all the time i was like yeah maybe i shouldn't swim in yeah going back to the bathroom thing though i i i generally think that is there is there's no place more peaceful people talk about happy places to go out beach in harley i'm like when i'm when i'm stressed when i'm back to back with like loads of clients loads of work there's nothing better than that five to ten minutes where i can just sit and then no one's around no one can disturb you and i you know there was a reason why I'm on like level three and a half thousand on Candy Crush because there's no Wi-Fi in the bathroom at work but I need to do something just to shut my brain off and it's definitely that's why I think our life advice is good if you want creativity if you want inspiration I get it more in a bathroom than any other place on the planet I'm just I'm just surprised five to ten minutes man I'll be in there easy 15 to 30 minutes I'll sit down I'll pull up my squatty potty and I'll just chill. And that's when I could that's when I start posting the memes. Everyone, everyone that follows you on social media now is just gonna think about that anytime they see your memes now. Yeah, yeah. And I'm quite like that whenever, if you see like five or six memes in a row, I'm taking a shit. That's, that's what's happening. It's probably exactly the same for me. Like, literally client touch points, any client listen this know when I send you a WhatsApp message, like how's your diet going today? You know what's happening? That's an easy time to get check-ins done. Absolutely. Yeah. Maybe not be a loon video, so that'll be a very different experience. No, no. It's good acoustics. What can I say? Why is it echoing? Where are you? Don't worry about it. What was that? Nothing. Nothing. So moving on. Go on. Quickly, quickly. That's the second reason why I say never pass that chance up. It also goes back to that never trust a fart thing because and you'll you'll realize it's the older you get like i would say probably one out of 20 farts ends up being the wrong one to trust and that happens to me at least once a month at least once a month you know and it's never bad it's never like oh god it's kind of like okay i gotta go wipe that out so you know and that'll happen you know the whole gets loose g age i guess yeah and then well and nothing ruins the moment even if it's not that bad if there's a moment where you're going to need to be need confidence that's where it's going to happen you know it's going to happen when you do your first seminar after coping in two years you know i bet that happened on your first one you get up there you're ready to go ready to rock boom literally the worst the worst is when nothing actually it's just kind of wet and then you're standing there you're like and you just feel it and your cheeks are sliding around and there's no real solidity but it's wet you're like i hope that didn't i hope that's not made a wet spot on back of my pants christ i hope today's the day where i go through incline hypers with the guys yeah and it's not it's not like you can reach back there to feel if it's wet because if you do you're going to accidentally push it into the wetness so you just got to trust that it's not there and try to make your way to the bathroom and take care of it i i tell you what i remember i remember vividly the the before the first time you came on the show and you went i just don I don want to talk about lease mode I done it a thousand times And I was like I said right I going to make my mission Anytime I have Luke on this show I going to think of topics outside the box And initially that was like okay let talk posture Let's talk brain stuff. Let's talk what we're talking about today. But it's now just transformed into something completely different in its entirety, right? You know, I think your show with Nick Daniel with the crazy dumb shit was pretty close for this. But we've had no fat. We've had wet farts. I've had the beauties of toilets and magic mushrooms within the first 10 minutes of both of our shows, which is which is either people are going to be raving fans of us for life or they've turned this off right now. You never know what's going to come out of my mouth. So you might as well stick around. And the beauty of this as well, I know with people that follow me and from how well our last episode is, I still think you're number three of all time that a lot of people are going to listen to this one. and this is brilliant when they start with this topic but

CHAPTER 04

Personal Experiences with ADHD Diagnosis

moving on to sort of like the top we had going off on something that's a little bit different what we talked about um yeah so i thought it'd be good to have something that's we'll have a story or two that's a little bit personal to both of us and relevant to me right now um and i think has a carrier relevant with other people that that don't have this issue and that's talking about adhd um this is something i was you know very recently diagnosed with in typical ADHD fashion, I never booked the appointment to go and check. So I expected it for years and years and years and after losing three leather jackets and multiple pairs of rugby boots and never been able to do anything other than right at the last minute, like my online check ins on a Monday still finish at 1-2am because I always think it's our last point. So like, with yourself, you've you've done a fair amount in your career, you know, running running Polycom group to running muscle online programs, the in person events, having a gym there's a lot of stuff that you managed to do despite being very open about having adhd what is it that you think allows you to get so much done before we talk about what actually adhd is

CHAPTER 05

ADHD Benefits: Memory and Hyperfocus

you know i think part of it is um there are some benefits to having it um part of that is at least for me memory um you just you have a tendency to have this crazy ability to remember things actively recall things and learn things very quickly. And, uh, and my wife, uh, she said it before, like, um, I'll open up a textbook, read one, one or two lines and immediately start using it on stuff. And she's like, how do you do that? How do you, how do you grab a concept so quickly? And so, well, part of it's probably the ADD. The second is you get ADD allows you to be really obsessive about very specific narrow topics. So my career just happens to be the one that I fell into. And so you end up with such a wide base of knowledge that it's easy to lay other concepts on top of that repeatedly. See, I think that's probably part of it because I'm the same thing, man. Mine is so severe that it's like out of sight, out of mind. So it can be really detrimental on personal relationships because I can just completely forget that I'm friends with people. Like I don't call people. I don't call my mom. I don't talk to my mom hardly ever. Like if, if you're not right here right now, I, I don't even think about it. Like, because it's so, you get so narrow minded. And so like your vision becomes so like looking through a straw type stuff. So if it's here and now I can take care of it. If I don't take care of it now, I'll probably forget. So you have to come up with strategies and work strategies too. Like for me, I have to have some type of chaos going on. So I have to, when I do work, I have to have like, like really repetitive electronic music going, um, which I don't even like that much anymore. It's shit I liked in my twenties, but now I don't really like it. But if I can hear that, it keeps me like in a steady rhythm. But if I get that rhythm broken, it takes an hour, two hours for me to get back on track. Um, so yeah, so there's, there's inherent pros. to it. Um, but there are a lot of cons. Like you tend to be, you tend to have bad addictions, like being a workaholic, you know, working way too much. You start, you get, um, you get a lot of, um, things sound like a good idea and you're like, you get really hyped up about something and you never finished a project. So I've got like all these projects in my garage that I haven't finished yet because I started woodworking stuff and I'm like, I'll get to it later. Cause it's in the garage. I don't see it. It's not in front of me. Um, yeah. So yeah, it can be quite chaotic like this is about the time where my medication starts wearing off so i get fairly well manic in the evening so i wake up super manic and just a bit weird and then zoe would be like did you take your medicine yet i'm like i'm gonna take it in a minute she's like please go take your medicine fucking drive me nuts and then you're pretty good for about 10 12 hours and then it runs out at night just like you're crazy again

CHAPTER 06

Client Management and Communication Systems

CHAPTER 07

ADHD Classifications and Emotional Impact

before we sort of go into some of the strategies you use to stay productive, because one thing I noticed about your routine there is it seems so deep focused and now i appreciate that people with adhd can go into the moments of hyper focus and then they necessarily you know go through but they can't focus at all this seems very routine very regimented which is almost like you're in a little bit of control of it but before we go into that i want to double back a little bit for people that don't know a little bit about adhd and the mechanism behind it like in your go as deep or surface layer as you want because i know you can go both you know what you know is the definition of add adhd you know is there a difference what struggles do you have because i think it's something that is very misunderstood and people just think it is laziness or procrastination or unmotivated and yeah well the thing is too it's it's the terminology and the classification changed over the years there's now i believe eight different types of add and adhd and depending on what your symptoms are, they'll classify you in one of these. And it goes kind of from a level of load at like really like severe, which mine is at the more severe range. And it can go from just, you know, a lot of people will say, well, I'm just, I'm not organized. I'm not, and I'm forgetful and blah, blah, blah. It's, if you take that stuff, like most people that are like, I can't pay attention. Oh, I'd rather get on social media. Now take that times a million and that's what you got. So, um, it's not as simple as just saying, well, I'm dropped the ball here. I can't get organized. It is like, it is a, it's a, can be very crippling, like crippling. Um, and it can lead to a lot of, a lot of depression type qualities and that type of feelings of failure and stuff like that. Um, now with the one, the type that I have, it's kind of a, like a ADD. So you've got the attention deficit disorder, but I also have a hyperactivity thing. So I can swing massively from, you know, being almost, I don't want to say it's kind of like almost like bipolar, but it's not classified as bipolar. You just go through these really low lows and really high highs, except that I get, I'm more on the manic side than anything. So if I haven't taken my Vyvanse, I'm pretty scatterbrained and crazy. And I don't think before shit falls out of my mouth. So people always hear me on podcasts and they're like, oh shit, he says some crazy shit. if I wasn't on my medication you should see what I say at that point because I say some we've had plenty of conversations off air about about the trouble I've got myself into over the last few years but this exact sort of stuff right and so I can totally like empathize with that sort of like impulse control maybe not to the same degree but I get that ability of like I need to say this if I don't say it to you I'm going to say it to someone and like that's a really difficult emotionally because you know you're going to crack eventually yeah and the impulse control is really hard that's the hard one um

CHAPTER 08

Medication Experiences: Vyvanse vs. Ritalin

and that's why a lot of the medications uh smooth that out um and like if you do like genetic tests i've done genetic testing for for everything so i've got like this issue where i don't make dopamine like normal people i don't transport it like normal people and my receptors don't work so one of the problems of that is it makes you crazy prone for addictive stuff, exercise, food, drugs, you know, work, whatever. So it's like, you're always kind of chasing a dopamine high because you don't actually produce it correctly. So that's why I, even, even the level of advanced, I'm on the, I'm on the highest level you can take at least in Australia. They won't let you have more than that. Now there are some people in America that are, are, you know, being more progressive and trying out much higher levels. There's no way they would ever do that here. Uh, not, not for at least the next 20 years. So I, I supplement with, I got to take shit tons of caffeine. You know, I do like the nicotine mini lozenges. Like, so I have to actually overstimulate myself for to calm myself down. So when and that's kind of the thing that most of the drugs that you'll see, most of them are like amphetamine based. So they're amphetamine based because they smooth you out with the dopamine. So for me, like if you don't have ADD and you took my medication, you'd feel like you were on speed. when I take it, it actually calms me down. Like I've taken a Valium, um, which is a really weird thing to think about, but that's what it does. Um, even like in my party days, um, when we would do, you know, cocaine and sniff a little cocaine, or maybe do a line of meth, I would always be calm. And I didn know why everybody was so hyped up I like why is it This is cool I actually feel normal What going on And I never understood that but I never I also that was before I started getting into like looking at pharmacokinetics and looking all that. And I didn't realize that that's what the Ritalin was doing for me. And that was what the Adderall and that's what the Concerta was doing. And I could not ever stand those drugs. I took them as a necessity to get through school and all that. But I think that those drugs, they're most of them are they're dirty to me they're just they're too they're too potent they're too fast so especially like ritalin and adderall um when i would take that just for context just for context here i'm on a long acting rhythm i've got a short acting i for which was given to me for the days where you you working really hard into night to keep you going yeah i've never taken it i've tried not to um but yeah so just for just for context yeah and say like the like looking at um looking at like ritalin and and adderall when i when i first got on they didn't have long acting most of them were just very short acting you know like three four five hours the only thing i didn't like too is it fucked my sleep up and it fucked up my appetite like i couldn't eat um then they brought concerto which is like a time released ritalin it's like in a little plastic capsule looking thing with a hole on it so that it's kind of, it kind of just leeches out of the capsule over time. And that was okay. But I, it always gave me this weird, dirty, acidic-y feeling. And when I got on Vyvanse, that was a moneymaker. I could take Vyvanse and be totally normal. The Ritalin and the Concert and the Adderall always made me a zombie. So when I would take it, I would have no personality. I would just sit there and just like, I wouldn't talk. You know, I didn't like the way it made me feel. the vivance never had any of those problems so yeah so you can take one of those i'll take one at like six seven in the morning and i'm pretty good until you know five five or six at night um so that's always been the been the one for me it's interesting you mentioned about like taking like stimulants whether that's medications or recreational stuff and and feeling calm like i remember the first day that i took um took ritalin and it was a weird thing because i was i was waiting for myself to be really amped up and hyper i was ready to be really over the top and it was i felt more present it was weird like i was doing my sessions and i was like there in the room with my client i was getting more sessions enjoying my work more because i wasn't thinking about all the things i still need to do like like that feeling of being behind and feeling like oh what do i have to do first i can't be present on what i'm doing because i'm thinking about all those other things all of the time and i remember coming home and list your podcast was um of all people it was diarist with pierce morgan right so i've never i've never had so much focused listening to pierce morgan in my whole entire life but i was just so present in it i was like is this what it should be like all the time i wasn't even aware of that yeah that i think that the way the way i try to explain it to people is that you know when you're not on the medication there's a lot of noise and when you take it it cuts all the noise down like this always this crazy amount of background noise and a lot of times it's like somebody's changing the channel on a tv and they won't stop changing it and it's like just just put it on one channel but it just keeps changing and changing and changing and changing and then when when you take your medication it's like the tv stops on the greatest movie you've ever seen and you can concentrate on it so that's a that's a brilliant into now. Yeah, you know, because I say that I always remember the times like, you know, I sit there and I was watching a beginner 12 week GBC program. And you know, you know, from where we used to work, how could I must be writing 12 week GBC programs, because that's all you ever write. I like so I said, it is a good method, though. I still use it very regularly to this day. But I'm sitting there with this problem. I've written a million of these. I know exactly what I'm doing. If you sat there and tap on the shoulder after what you're gonna write for this client, I go, Yeah, I'll do this, this, this and this. And I sat there I go, the one of the best edges from a YouTube channel called how to ADHD. And it's like, you've got a bridge like an Indiana Jones Temple of Doom style rickety wooden bridge. And you you know, the destination, you know how to get there. And you take the slats out. So you've just got these gaps. And I'm sitting there with this program, I know how to write, but I can't do it. I'm just stuck. I was like, why? This is the moment why I start thinking there's more to this i'm not just lazy or bored so i was like i know how to do this why am i so stuck yeah and that was a bit where my brain was like okay i need to look into this 100

CHAPTER 09

Health Crisis and Returning to Medication

i'll tell you what happened um i was off of it for a long time and i was just struggling i didn't realize why you know i just like you know i thought i had everything under control and i didn't um and then when i was in right right when covid hit i was in texas giving a five-day seminar. And Zoe called me. She goes, look, I've got to change your flight. You got to come home and

CHAPTER 10

Childhood Diagnosis and School Discipline

when was it when was it you were diagnosed were you diagnosed as an adult or as a child no as a kid yeah so like is this something that you're like your parents suspected or was this something do you do you actually remember getting diagnosed um i can't remember what age it was but it was you know just a lot of like disruptive behavior inability to concentrate and i just kind of cruised through school just just just being smart you know just being smart not having to do you know what school wasn't that hard um and i guess that was part of the ad too but i was constantly getting in trouble i think when i was in high school we did uh so we still got spankings in high school when i was there like we were the last class to get paddled and i think i got paddled like 200 and something paddlings in one year which um if you got paddled a certain number of times you got to sign the paddle so i got a couple of signatures on the paddle did anyone try to get paddled more for that reason just as like i want to be able to sign it i don't think so i said i certainly didn't i said because it was not fun um because we had a pretty big uh uh principal at our school and he could swing that thing. And there were actually three different paddles. She had the, the guy's paddle, the girl's paddle, which like was like plywood, but it was nothing. And then he had the bad kids paddle, which is like hitting somebody with a goddamn Oak tree. Um, yeah. So I never got hit with a bad paddle. I just got hit with a normal paddle, but, um, yeah. So then I think, you know, cause I was kind of on and off, um, when I was a kid, I didn't like the way Ritalin made me feel, so I wouldn't take it So I just stopped And then I got into college and got on back on it like in my early 20s And then you know here the thing like you said you told me earlier like you know I forgot to find out what the results were when I went to testing and all that. That's the same thing. I ran out of medication, forgot to refill it, and then just went back on this ADD path of just driving off the road into the fucking end of the fucking bush, you know, and never got back on it like i

CHAPTER 11

Adult Diagnosis and Mental Clarity

i remember i remember vividly um you know like having i actually went to the doctor for something else like i was like well you know i went in and i was i was nervous about something i was like so i i was you know i'd last minute appointment to go to the doctor i was worried about something else i'd had about four or five coffees by that point in the day just like stimulating myself i was like i was like i still do to a degree but certainly more on the stages to keep me focused in that stage and i go in and i sit down to the doctors and i my my blood pressure was through the roof probably because of nerves white coat syndrome caffeinated right you know and i you know i've done enough of your course to check my blood pressure fairly regularly to know that i'm i'm i'm not i'm not about to have a heart attack and keel over so i'm getting in you've got five or six nurses around me testing my blood pressure guys he's really through the roof like no no i've tested like they're like here's the last three four mornings of readings i'm all right like go in went in immediately found out what i was worrying about was fine i was like while I'm here, like, you know, let, can I ask about this? Cause I've been worried about this for a while. Started going through the little questionnaire and then it was like, yeah, you're off the charts. I'm going to prescribe you this. And like, boom. And then I go away and like one, like within one day, I'm just like, oh, okay. This is, it was, it was such a, it was such an incredible feeling because it was like getting diagnosed as an adult. It's like this weight off your mind. All the times where you felt like, why, why did I say that or why am I so incapable of doing that or feel like I'm lazy or feeling like I'm a failure and I sat there I felt like I'm a relatively smart kid I've done all right for myself why can't I live anywhere near my potential and it's just like I have an answer which is such a lovely feeling because it was just like I'm not dumb I'm not lazy I'm not you know I don't lack willpower you know or motivation whatever buzzword you want to put with it and it was such a weight off my shoulders yes it's free it's a feeling of freedom it's it's like finally now i understand you know why i've had all these issues right so you know um yeah it can be it can be a really a really freeing experience and for me like i've never had to worry too much about it because i got diagnosed early, and I know I've always had it, but, you know, getting back on it, getting back on it, what was it, February 2020, that's shown me, like, I, you know, it's been, like, okay, this is why, you know, the last, like, 10 years have been kind of chaotic, up and down, and this probably should never have gotten off my meds. So, one of the things you mentioned at the start this like doubling back was that like there's many benefits i think well well we can double back to that whenever you want um but like what like one of the things you said there's many benefits of having adhd and i i totally agree with you i think one of them is creativity but you have to find solutions outside the box of stuff because stuff don't work i've tried every to-do list every system everything to make my life easier in the book we have probably tried more productivity hacks than anyone else on the planet so there is going to be people listening to this that some may be able to relate with our stories some may just procrastinate at times and be a little bit bored first off like why in a broader spectrum do you think people generally procrastinate and from all the stuff that you've tried through all your years what are the best productivity lessons you have personally learned so like why do people procrastinate in general i think well i think it's it's just because they just, they're doing things they just don't want to do. Right. That's usually like, imagine not been in this situation before where you're in a job, you just absolutely hate. So you just find shit to do because you're just not having much fun with the things you're doing for work. Now for, for us being ADD, that's ridiculous. I fucking love the work. I love to program. I love to get online. I love talking to my clients. So if I don't do that, it's not because I don't want to do it. It's because I'm having an episode or whatever, you know, or I'm stressed out and it's making my symptoms a lot worse. Because I actually, you know, I can't think of anything more awesome than sitting here and running cool-ass training programs and seeing my clients put on like 50 kilos in a back squat in a couple of months. You know, I can't think of anything more fucking cool than that. And that creativity, creativity is a big one too, because I think that's one of the benefits as as well is that you can see these abstract things that most people wouldn put the two and two together right Like if you think one of the things that you learned in program design is the backload of structural balance. And you look at that and it's like, it defies everything we're told not to do in a workout. But when you put it together, it fucking works like a fucking champion. But only somebody that had that ability to be creative and think outside the box, only someone like that would be able to put that together because someone they couldn't think like that would never say well let's put this with this that's a good idea they'd go no this and this does not go together and then we would be like well why not let's try it and see what happens but you know so i think there's that that benefit as far as an interesting note from that when you when i remember you you put a video going through that i was like this makes so much sense like yeah actually in a way it makes more sense than the generic stuff that we you you originally told because it's like like it's two sides of a pivot like it why why is no one thought like that before yeah because they're told they can't do things and they're just so they just blindly believe it without saying well this actually kind of makes sense the way this works let's try and see what happens and i remember on the front of that video i tell you guys like this is going to look so stupid and you're going to think i'm absolutely insane but i'm telling you this works and everybody tried and like holy shit that works really fast um i just don't talk about it in public because people call me a fucking moron because they're doing everything that they're told not to do but whatever anyone wants to learn more about that our last podcast i'll uh put in the show notes description below if you want to listen to sound like a moron but he's right that's it a moron but but somehow it works who knows um as far as productivity um there's a couple of things number one i'm really bad at saying yes when i should say no so somebody's like hey can you do do this? I'm like, yes. Can you do this? Yes. Can you do this? Yes. And then it's like, okay, I've got too many yes things I can't actually do. And the problem is a lot of people want things done now. And it's like, okay, but your yes thing isn't something that's crucial that needs to be done now. But then if I don't do it right, then you forget. So then you piss people off and you upset people and all that. And they don't understand because they don't understand what's going on in your head. So I would say number one is just learn that it's okay to say no to people. and it's okay to tell people, you know, I can do that, but I can't do it right now, but I'm going to need you to contact me maybe in two weeks and then maybe I'll be able to do it. So that's one thing I've had to do is like, say, I can't do it now, but I can do it. I can probably do it in a couple of weeks. And then I don't get back to them and they get mad. So I always, I put ownership in that, in their court and I say, look, but you're going to need to contact me, contact me like next friday and we'll see what's going on right because then they can't get mad because they accept the responsibility of contacting me so then that takes my ownership away from it um the second thing is get things done immediately when you wake up and i can't i try not to do any appointments in the morning if i can help it i try to push there are sometimes i have to do things first thing like mentorships or consults or whatever like at seven in the morning because they're on the other side of the world and they can't do it any other time. But if I can avoid that, I try to block out that morning so that I can sit at my computer and just get in a good rhythm for six to eight hours and get it done. Then if I can get all my tasks that I need to get done that day, then I free up the rest of the time to just, if I get distracted, it's cool because I already got that shit done. But I have to do it in the morning when I get my, take my meds take my coffee put my nicotine in put my headphones on music and just start going at it i think that i think that's an interesting one and i another thing i i remember you reading your website that owning a business one advice you give to yourself my risk can go off in a tangent but is that that freedom line every business coach talks about these days is a myth but i do think where that line does is relevant is the ability to go i'm going to block that work in the morning because sometimes when me still doing a lot of one-to-one coaching is that my mornings end up blocked out with client work and so that is the time where i would be so much better at doing some of the stuff that now is pushed to later in the day into the evening and things like that so i i 100 get that point i want to have a quieter morning i get so much more done all the time yeah yeah

CHAPTER 12

Nicotine and Tyrosine for Focus

you've mentioned nicotine a few times what is the impact nicotine has on you or in general that you think nicotine is useful? It's just another stimulant. Just another stimulant that helps massively. There's some positive effects of memory as well and motivation. So those things are always good. I just kind of abuse it. I take way more than I should, but it does help keep things kind of level and stable. I think if I were able to acquire a larger dose of I-Vans, I probably wouldn need it But since that not an option it still it still you know what can I add to this to make it more effective And that what I found works for me So everybody going to have to find a different combination of things going to work for them. And that works. And occasionally a bit of tyrosine, like what I'll, what I'll look at as well. If you remember back to like foundations, um, or foundation seminar, which you've been at, um, we talk about like melanin and tyrosine and so how tyrosine is making your dopamine norepinephrine epinephrine it's also making thyroid it's also making melanin if i notice that my skin tone is dropped i'll i'll add in some tyrosine because i know that if i'm not making melanin it's being used for something else and it's most likely being used for some of the stress chemicals that that's really interesting because that's something i've not i've not looked at i mean do you ever like what's your thoughts on using something like choline because i'm assuming that's heavy stimulant medication i don't know as much about your medication so you know correct me if i'm wrong we this will deplete a lot of things initially choline b vitamins things like this are these important things to supplement as well to offset the heavy stimulant you could i haven't tried it i haven't tried it i feel you know a couple eggs a day and some choline foods might be all right i i probably would investigate that i need to think about it maybe like um um i probably i probably wouldn't take if i took choline what would i take i wouldn't take alpha gpc because it's just it's too expensive you need you just need such a high high amount of it and usually the amounts that you need make you pretty nauseous uh if if you take it and then work out you get over that but if you take it and you're just sitting here working you're probably going to get bubble guts and get quite nauseous um i'd probably look at like lecithin like taking a couple tablespoons of less less less than granules or maybe like choline by tartrate or what is it choline is that right like cooling bedtime uh fuck i haven't looked into choline so long i can't remember but i would probably take a i'd probably take a fairly inexpensive form of choline yeah you just don't you don't it's not something that's really that beneficial to take a really high dollar one unless it's for like sports performance take take 2400 milligrams before you go and lift heavy it's going to have a really good effect but i i don't see it as having that great of an effect by itself for this but i could be wrong i'd have to look into it

CHAPTER 13

Managing Side Effects of Medication

is there any consideration that you would advise for somebody this is more personal question i suppose for someone is taking adhd medication is there anything like when it comes to nutrition lifestyle things that we need to be more aware of when you're taking things like this i'm assuming it will have effects on blood pressure and various things on a blood panel as well yeah number one is like uh in in make sure you investigate all the different types of medications because they're not for everybody. Um, you know, that's like the fast acting stuff and the more direct amphetamines never worked that well for me. So the, the, the, uh, by Vance is bonded to, um, uh, lysine. So it tends that it cleaves off very slowly. So it's very smooth. So if you are taking medication and you find you lose your appetite, if, if, I mean, if you're dieting, that's a good thing, but if you're not, that's a bad thing. Um, cause you'll just forget to eat and you won't eat. And let's say you're trying to put on muscle, you're trying to put on size that you'll find that you're eating like 1200 calories a day when you're trying to eat 24, 2400, right? Um, if it's affecting your sleep. So in talk, work with your doctor to find the right medication and don't just take their word for it. So if you're what I would probably do, if I had to start over, let's say they put me on Ritalin because that's super common. I would, I would try that. And then maybe in a couple months say, Hey, can I try something else? maybe move to something else like Adderall or Concerta, you know, try something time release and then say, well, that, that worked. Okay. But can I try by Vance? And there's a couple of other new ones. Can I try that and kind of try all the different ones to see which one feels best because they all do very similar things, but some are faster, some are slower, some it works slightly differently. You really want to investigate and find the right one because you don't want to be taking one. that's now having all these negative effects that would be easily solved by switching to something else. And if you don't talk to your doctor about that, they won't think to switch you. They'll think everything's fine. Um, it's in, it's because it's not a measurable, it's not an objectively measurable thing. Like if you go to the doctor and you have hypertension, maybe they give you a calcium channel blocker, maybe to give you a bat and a, maybe they just give you calcium channel blocker. You go back in and it's kind of help, but it's not, it's not getting the blood pressure down to good levels. Maybe they put you on an ACE inhibitor. Then like okay those two worked really well but maybe you're getting some swelling in your feet okay maybe they put you on a diuretic as well okay there now they found the right combination for you so but the thing is the difference between that problem and add is that there's no blood test for add there's no way of objectively they have to use subjective markers of do i feel good or not so you have to be vocal with your doctor and and ask them if it's okay to kind of do a a merry-go-round of different things to see which one works for you. That's what's really

CHAPTER 14

Nutrition and Supplements for Brain Health

for somebody again we're making this a little bit obviously this is adhd focus but in general for someone who wants to you know have better memory have better focus have better attention you know is there things from a nutrition perspective that you would recommend that people might oversight whether it's the the obvious generic stuff or whether it's something that people don't think about from a nutrition supplementation and a lifestyle perspective yeah from i mean from a nutrition thing i would say more um more plants i don't want to say veganism but but people don't eat enough plant matter so especially things like um like berries like berries that have a lot of antioxidants and a lot of chemicals that improve memory but we don't no one really knows how they do that they kind of have an idea they're starting to, but you know, that type of thing, um, for most people that don't have ADHD, don't, don't get, watch your stimulant intake because for those types of people, it's going to actually make things worse because it's going to make them almost have like ADD types of symptoms. They're all jacked up. Um, whereas it's like, okay, you're normal, but now you've taken so much coffee that now you're acting like you're ADD. So maybe if you improve your sleep and, and maybe have a reasonable amount of coffee maybe throw some theanine and with that they smooth some things out you'll probably be concentrating better you're probably not procrastinate you probably get more done um that's what that's this type of stuff i would look at i like uh is a thing is a precursor to the gaba because i can actually cross the blood bank about it right is that the mentality well well no what i would use it for is to um to block uh to block like adenosine receptors. Um, well, what am I looking at? It's, you're going to make me pull this out. I have a good picture of this, but basically we're going to say the not, cause I can't think of us. It's again, it's late in the day and my medication wearing off. But, um, if you want to look at like the non-sciencey, um, reason why you would use the ending with coffee is it, it's smooths out the negative effects from coffee. So if you have coffee, you still get the, the focused energy but you don't get the erratic you know jacked up feeling from it right so yeah yeah and i like uh sun theanine is uh is the tried and true one that i've always used so if you see sun theanine on the bottle then that's pretty good so like if you're having a couple cups of coffee maybe throw in 100 milligrams of that and see if that smooths it out quite a bit that that's interesting that's something certainly i look at me what do you see often like i mean I'm assuming you've worked with people that have ADD, ADHD, and I know you work with people who have massive caffeine addictions because that's 90% of the personal training industry and I know how many coaches you train. You know, like, whether it's stimulant medication or stimulants in general, like, do you see this having a big impact on HRV? This is something, again, a relatively personal question when I know that, you know, I even, like, improved my nutrition, improved my conditioning over the course of the last year. resting heart rates in a low place blood pressure in a really good spot my hrv is always relatively on the low end of where things should be you know like this could be completely unrelated but when i start thinking of like a heavy use of stimulants also now finding out potentially having you know now having adhd i'm starting is there a link here between you know have you taken hrv lately since you started a medication uh not consistently i haven't used this thing quite enough i never charged it would be really interesting because there's a lot of people i've talked to that the minute they got in there on their meds that their hrv actually got better interesting yeah i the only time the only time i took i remembered this being charged and took it was after a massive team social where alcohol obviously crashed my metrics anyway so it ended up being exactly the same um but that that'll be that'll be interesting to look at actually it would be yeah it'd be interesting for you to track that and just see if it's significantly better than what you're tracking was before you started the medication and maybe different between medications if i like if i've got a month of ritalin see how that affects it then go on to something else see what happens there that could be a very very interesting thing one of the big things too is when you when you get on the medication obviously it's a stimulant so uh you're going to probably see a small increase in heart rate you're probably going to also see a small increase in blood pressure so i'm big on people with add getting your your lifts and your mess done like get your low intensity and moderate intensity cardio done and that will allow you to become stress resilient so that you it won't have that effect like i still even on medication i still have sub 120 over 80 um blood pressure and my heart resting heart rate still like 48 to 52 even on the even on the medication but when you first get on it you gonna see blood pressure is gonna jump up a tick and it shouldn jump up massively but you're probably gonna see it jump up a little and the heart rate but after a couple two to three weeks it should normalize um but then if you if you like i did this stupidly i ran out of my medication forgot to go to back to the doctor and i went for like two weeks without it and i saw when I got back on it, I had this crazy, you know, increase in blood pressure again and heart rate. It was really super weird, but then it just leveled out and you got normal. But I think if you get really aerobically fit, um, that will prevent or hopefully be a prophylactic of preventing those increases. Um, and, and, um, I mean, aerobic training has such a profound impact as well on brain derived nootrophic factor and, um, and, and the concentration and linking neural networks. So people who aren't doing any aerobic activity, um, and haven't for a long time, I would suggest doing a couple of blocks of that, like daily aerobics, 30, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, something like that. It's real easy stuff, not just walking because that's not really going to do you need, you need the huffy puffy stuff. So just building up to say a 70% R.E. Max, kind of sustaining that just for a couple of months. And you'll see a massive decrease in blood pressure and heart rate. And you'll find that everything's a lot more smooth. You'll concentrate much better. You also sleep a lot better as well. And the good thing about that, that's something that's probably an impact of anyone. ADHD, you know it. Like how many people, and you alluded to it early on in terms of people, heavy use of caffeine intake. It's like, you know, are you getting those symptoms artificially because you're always heavily caffeinated? you're always on low sleep now i'm i'm really intrigued at seeing what um when i go back to the uk in the end of june and i'm there for six weeks and that's what i plump here at the time and i'm gonna like switch decaf cut my caffeine intake right down i'm not doing one-to-one sessions so i can spend more time sleeping i'm like i'm really intrigued to see what happens to my metrics keep my medication up but like see what happens around that and see how much better sort of a lot of those things get because i i know i can burn the candle at both ends yeah and one thing too like going back to that kind of doing the aerobic things i posted this a while back but there's been quite a few studies looking at like uh aerobic activity and memory and what they did was they would do aerobic activity and study and they found that memory retention was much higher if you were doing aerobic training and then like kind of uh contrast training that with a study session so it actually it works not just for the adb people for normal people as well okay that's that that that's that's really interesting especially you know as i said this is going to be my my my pet project for six weeks not only see where my metrics at but almost like see how much study i can get done i've already started booking as many consoles i can get done from people in the uk and missed in-person education i've not done any in two years because there's there's nothing here in hong kong but you know so i'm making making up for lost time i'm going to see tom hibbert go and see michael gould and see i'll travel and see nick if i can engage in a good rant every now and again um but uh yeah like yeah really really really interesting stuff for this i mean

CHAPTER 15

Breathwork and Stress Resilience

do you believe in like is there anything you do in terms of like we spoke about this last time in terms of posture stuff but like mindfulness breath work the breath work's the big hype thing at the moment and i know when we spoke about from a posture standpoint we spoke about like well it's like trying to pitch in the ocean make it yellow it has a massive impact but can you control that in that short period of time when it comes to memory focus like this the other side of stuff like out of the gym stuff is this something you utilize with yourself or clients do you feel it's useful um i should i should do it and i know i should do it the problem is i go through spurts it's boring as fuck. So it's not to me, it's not like, it's not, I don't know the way to say like sexy enough for me to stick with. So the compliancy for myself is really poor. And I find the compliancy for that stuff with your clients are really poor as well. Like your clients don't mind going in and doing four or five hours of training a week, but you try to get them to do 10 or 15 minutes of mindful breathing and like headspace. You just, there was, I had such a low compliancy rate for it that I just got rid of it so I'll tell them to do it but I don't program it anymore because I know they're not going to do it anyways some people will like the more hippie foo-foo holistic type of you know clients will but most of my clients are like high level athletes and coaches and they just won't do it so I just stopped um what about ice ice therapy like cold showers things like this because you mentioned stress resilience earlier on yeah And it's just something that another thing that can potentially artificially create that. So do you think this is useful to throw in every now and again for various things Yeah possibly possibly I think cold showers if your water gets cold enough is practical If you do like you know I do like the Wim Hof breathing because you kind of get in that that real massive sympathetic state and you don feel the cold or you can train yourself not to feel it I think that a really good idea again it's a compliance issue like i used to do that but um the only problem was i would feel so bad when i got out of the shower because of the shrinkage because i'm not i'm not well endowed anyway so then it looked like i had a fucking any like a little outie belly button so i just it made me so feel bad so i was like oh god you know it looked like a turtle poking its head out of a shell oh i wish i wish i could say i couldn't relate i really really do um but i remember like going into like i did i did one of those events a guy called uh brian lauer i've had on the show talking about like breath work and ice stuff and he does these events in hong kong he learned from whim and he did something you do like you learn about whim half and all the methods and then you do a number of them and then you get into a big ice ice bucket you know and yeah and i like i i remember people you know doing breath holds and getting a minute tops then going to like seven minutes after the breathing drills and i i couldn't believe how comfortable i felt i remember i was feeling so nervous and scared about the prostrates of getting into an ice bath and it was so comfortable in a way by the time i got in there for the second time yeah yeah let's say i'm not yet i do want to do one of those i haven't done it yet i still have time but um

CHAPTER 16

Wim Hof Method and DMT Breathing

i remember this one zoe and i first got together so it was years and years and years ago i was big into the Wim Hof stuff and I was really doing it and I did a hard out for months. Um, and it just, it kind of stopped being a priority for me just because I had so much else to do. It was hard for me to just, just like, it was hard for me to prioritize time for it, but it was really weird. You know, when you're doing the, you're doing hyperventilation breathing and you get these big breath holes, especially when you start learning how to, you know, how you try to pull it into your head and you get that really weird thing i shit you not i was doing in the shower one time and i wasn't i wasn't having a fap or anything but i swear to god i had an orgasm from it i actually i i can't explain it but i got to this point where i was like and it was the weirdest thing and that's the audio for the show when i put the audio clip out that that exact noise but man that that actually made me want to do it a lot more but then i was traveling and i got too busy so i just forgot i think i'll have it tonight before i go to bed there's one of the methods that that was in the windhoff event was it was a dmt breathing and yeah that's what it is yeah i never got that from it which is a massive shame that would have been amazing but like you know i i there's that channel 4 show recently that about people doing all the windhoff stuff and there's definitely something more more people have experienced things closer to sort of dmt from from this breath which i think is incredible and looking at women himself with like beating off infections and illnesses and things like this which it's wild necessarily initially basically just reinforces a lot of your work in terms of like this is like at quick succession the impact controlling stress and becoming resilient to stress hasn't yeah like what you can teach someone over 12 weeks is what he's teaching people you know in these very short intense breath works is like it's it's it's a shame that because here's here's that here's the the impulse control getting me cancelled it's it's a shame it's it's a shame that big pharmaceutical companies will never allow his stuff to become mainstream enough to actually see what effects it can actually have well you know i the thing is you can't it's so out in left field is will it ever become mainstream or just stay in pockets of people who are into that type of stuff that's the thing is we have a hard enough time getting people to exercise and eat right even though they know they should. And then you get a guy like Wim Hof who, you know, he's got this aura about him and all the people that follow him. It's kind of almost like this guru-ish type of thing. And he's like, I'm not your guru, but anytime somebody's at a top level like that, they're going to have people like fanboys and fangirls. And it just kind of puts some people off and it just attracts a certain type of person. Right. So I don't, I don't think it would become mainstream just for the fact that the general public wouldn't accept it as mainstream. If they don't even accept fucking walking an hour a day or even lifting weights and eating vegetables, they won't even do that. So they're probably not gonna sit around and do hyperventilation breathing. And if anybody's never done it, they don't understand like there is a certain level of fear you go through when you're doing it. And there's a certain weirdness you feel and you have to overcome that in order to get to the next level of that breathing. And so I was teaching myself how to do this, just reading his stuff and like I did an online course of his and all this. And I think this is before he was doing seminars. And I remember a couple of times I was laying on the ground going, I'm going to die. I don know why I feel like this I going to die And a lot of people are so anxious they couldn get through that And Eugene Teo his brother was at one of my seminars and he came over to hang out at the Airbnb we're at. And I was teaching, I had been showing people how to do my interpretation of Wim Hof breathing, which is what I learned from his seminars and his online course material. And I remember Eugene's brother got like really deep into it and started freaking out. And it was like, Oh, I don't know. I'm feeling my legs. I can't feel my legs. And I was like, Holy shit. And I started freaking out. I'm like, Oh God, did I do something bad? And it's just a lot of people when they get to that level where they actually feel it, you feel so weird that you think something's wrong, even though nothing's actually wrong. You're actually, it's probably a good thing you're going to that level but that level of um of hyperventilation is going to stimulate the sympathetic nervous system which is going to make you feel ramped up and a bit crazy and a bit weird do you see that that's because in i get in theory that the aim is if you ramp up like almost artificially in a way sympathetic nervous system you become more resilient to it you learn how to calm down you know to control your breathing through it do you feel it does have a big carryover if people are consistent with it into stress of day-to-day life do you like if you have work meeting or something happens at work or life do you think doing this will make you better at dealing with this yeah i think so i feel so and i feel that way with most of the training you do like if we go lift weights that's sympathetic if you you know if you go run sprints that's sympathetic that's why we you know we counter that stuff with the easy stuff like the mobility flexibility um if you're into the breathing stuff that type of something out of meditation, you know, low, slow cardiovascular work and that type of thing. I think both sides of that are really important because if you can drive yourself in a really like a naturally high sympathetic state, then whatever you're feeling right now, when you're normal, doesn't seem like it's that bad. And then you can use the parasympathetic stuff to kind of pull all that back over to the right. So you can equalize both of those sides of the autonomic nervous system. So I think they're both important to train. I think it's good that you bring that up, because a lot of the stuff that we spoke about, especially for a issue, but generally focus in general, is people go to stimulants, whether it's a medication given to your doctor by stimulus, or it's a, you know, a caffeine addiction, that, you know, a lot of this is like the stuff around this, the mindfulness, the breath, what the nutrition stuff, supplementation stuff you mentioned, it's almost just like, pulling us back into the middle to a degree, you You know, obviously you're going to need to be more stimulated than other people, but every medication you take that helps the biggest problem, there's always going to be an issue and a result of ramping up your nervous system regularly to allow you to focus, right? Yeah, people have to understand you don't get anything for free. So if you're doing something, there's always a trade-off. So if you think about if you think about just what we do with like even like physique training, like, cool, I want to get abs, but I'm gonna have to go through this level of suffering to get there. So that's the trade off. Like, I'm going to have to do a lot of hard work. I'm going to have to say no to a lot of things if I want to build a gnarly physique. That's the trade off. And then the more gnarly the physique, the more health consequences, the more negative repercussions that you have to deal with that you have to then you have to crawl through. It's like you got to crawl through glass while you're naked, you know, that type of thing if you want to get there. But that's why so many people can't actually get to that level because they can't get through the pain of the work and the feeling that they're going to feel to get there. So, you know, it's all a yin and yang thing. It's an on and off. It's a good and evil. There's always an opposite reaction to what you're going to do. So I often say this and I don't know if this is going to make sense. sometimes I'll say this analogy and people like, I have no idea what you're talking about, but you know, I read a lot of fantasy and I watch a lot of, um, you know, I watch a lot of like fantasy stuff. I watch a lot of Harry Potter and I watch like all that shit. And, uh, it's my favorite genre. And if you think about, if you ever watched movies with like, like witchcraft, right. They always talk about this and they say this in the books too. Like there's always a trade-off. You always have to give something up to get the spell done. And that's why things like necromancers frowned upon in these books because you're going to raise somebody from the dead somebody else has to die so that's kind of the thing with this too if you're using you know stimulants it's a double-edged sword that can go really well but just understand you take that too far there's going to be a massive negative repercussion to that so you're going to fuck your sleep up you're going to fuck your nervous system up you might fuck your gut up you know it might actually you might over stimulate to the point where you're scatterbrained and and it might have the effect that you're trying to resolve with not having energy. Now you went to a dose that kind of gave you the perception of less fatigue, but then you took it too far and

CHAPTER 17

Outsourcing and Business Automation

you mentioned a couple things earlier on you mentioned obviously the impact that Zoe has in terms of keeping on point and and you know bringing you back in um and you mentioned being able to I can't do this now and say no to stuff I mean what's what's your take in terms of productivity, memory on outsourcing stuff? How much do you do that in your business? Oh, that was so hard for me to do when we first started because I was such a control freak. I was very picky about how I wanted things done. I'm very fussy. And I had a lot of hard, I had a really hard time giving control to people, especially when I started, when I started employing other coaches. And then I was like, okay, I'm going to give you these clients and there's a certain way I want things done. And it was hard, right? But anything that is below your pay grade, anything that you don't have to actually do, pay someone else to do it. Because especially at where I am in my company, it doesn't make sense for me to do some of these tasks that somebody else could easily do. Like I need to be doing what I have expertise in that no one else of my company could do. So if I'm doing this little niddly shit, like that's taking away time that I should be using my skills and I should take, let one of my other employees or outsource a PA, like a virtual PA or something like that, let them do it. So we do, we have a virtual PA that she's the one that takes care of our website, but she also takes care of some of the other things. It's like, Hey, I need a spreadsheet for this. I don't want to sit around and try to read a book and try to figure out how to make this fucking spreadsheet. That's going to say it's five hours i could have been programming or i could have been writing content or i could have been creating new new new education so um because again too if if you say yes to too many things especially things that you don't actually need to do then all the important stuff is going to get pushed to the side and then that's going to cause more stress and more anxiety it's not pushed even it's not pushed to the side you don't do it the quality that you're that you're you know and i can imagine like for someone like you who is that you have a certain way of doing things you have a reputation in this industry of having very very high quality education high quality courses i don't think the quality that you're known for would be possible if you were having to do all the back end stuff for the website all the editing all the filming all the admin all the outreach all the marketing all yourself it's that ability to be able to focus on that one thing and you went through your routine and how focused it was, but how much do you think that's because you've streamlined your day to the things that you're good at and you enjoy, and that's why you can stay the course? Yeah. And that has to be what's done, especially if you get really busy. We're super busy. So there's only so many hours in a day. There's only so many hours you can actually work in a day. I don't have a problem working 12 hours, 16 hours, but you still got to sleep and you still gotta poop and i still gotta train you know and i still gotta go to the grocery store and get food i can't live on uber eats you know so you you have to you have to mitigate your time by leveraging other people that can do have the capacity to do the things that you don't need to do and also can probably do them better because they can take the time like here's the thing like in you know and i've been criticized for this before like if you look at like my slides in my education they're nothing fancy like i'm you want good information or do you you want to get taught how to do things right you want fancy fucking slides so there are other people who make fancier slides they have fancier videos and all that but fuck it i'm all about the information and if i was sitting in there really trying to make my slides look really really good i wouldn't be able to i wouldn't be able to research and develop and do all the other things right so that's my next i was telling Zoe yesterday, I'm like, I really want to get someone that's good at, um, at putting slides together and building templates and making really nice. So we can polish it off because we do, you will get criticized for that because people will focus on the stupidest shit. Um, so now we've got to take care of that. So I have to find somebody who can like be the creative director kind of thing And you know a virtual PA or whoever who can now say okay I really I really good at PowerPoint I really good at Microsoft whatever the fuck they use or Canva and can put these pretty slides together Like Matt Peacock if you look at his slides he got these amazing slides but he really good at that shit Like he could do that stuff really fast. If I tried to make slides like Matt does, it would take me all day to do one fucking slide. Exactly. I always think that thing is like, if I had all day, if I didn't have anything to do, I can get really good at it. It's like, I could probably get to a point where it takes me five minutes make that slide but i don't have the five hours to learn how to make it in five minutes 100 yeah and you know what if i did them like i would be on one slide for eight hours because it would never look as good as i wanted to so i would just rather say hey you make the slides here's the information here's here's my dodgy ass slides go make it look pretty yeah i've got so i've got so many canva templates and i and i i think it's it that's such a you know thing that resonates to me and i think the big one of the best investments i ever made in my business as a huge plug for him uh it's a guy from a guy called paul spencer from a company called ato solutions and he does all the automations um like if you ever need the automation onboarding emails you know trailer boards client management stuff i will send you his details he's phenomenal but he's now got this thing where like from especially from someone with an adhd brain and being able to remember stuff someone signs up if you sign up with me today you'd automatically get your welcome email you would then fill in your onboarding form that would make you a card on trello that means then that's that will give you a template meal plan that i go and adjust for the foods you like and if i want to change the calories because you know you're different from what i normally do i make that that's all done for me it's all in one place in the card and then based on my check-ins if you go how compliant you've been this week anyone that says one gets moved to red everyone that says five gets moved to green everyone in the middle gets moved to amber and i get different reminders to check in with people like the people on red i check in with more people on green i can probably wait till next check-in and like that is done without me having to do a single thing because the amount of times i'm missing attachment forget somebody or just something like that is hands down it's not cheap but it's the best investment i've ever made because it allows me to not as you mentioned earlier feel like i'm sort of like juggling commitments because either i'm trying to do too much stuff or i've got behind on one thing because i'm trying to do it all myself yeah yeah you have to man you got to if you want to go if you want to do it right you gotta you gotta have somebody that can do it right so you gotta pay for that one thing i something you said you said so people who are compliant move to green and people who aren't compliant move to red and other people get moved to what orange amber like a traffic light system did you what did you say did you say umbra amber oh amber i heard you say umbra and i was like that's a color i don't No, what the fuck is Umbra? Hammer, okay, got it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like 100% the best investment because it just means that a little bit of my brain power now can come back to focus on me. And I like the fact that you've mentioned a VA because you mentioned that three or four times now and I'm on the cusp of getting a VA. I think the fact that you've mentioned it so much means I think this is worth the investment. Yeah, like one of the things we did that I really like, and this is a Zoe idea, is we automated our onboarding process. So used to, you would have a Dropbox account And you would have all your files, all that stuff. And you go in there and you fill out your questionnaire. But then now I have to go in to Dropbox, go on your thing, pull your thing, download it, go through it. So now you're sent a web portal where type that in. And I get a nice email that just pops right on my thing. It's all your shit on it. So anything you can automate, anything you can streamline, anything you can funnel is what you want to do. because if you continue to get busier and busier, you have to have those systems in place. When we started most of them, we didn't, we just got really busy. Like day one had no system set in place and it's taken us this long. You know, we're talking six and a half years now, almost seven years to get our systems a point where it's actually getting fairly well manageable because we need these systems to go through. Cause you can't scale up. If you don't have your systems in place and try to scale, and scale up and you scale up too much and you don't have systems in place, then you're going to piss off a lot of people, which happens because you didn't have proper systems in place. And we didn't know when we first started. We were just like, okay, we can figure this out. And we quickly figured out like, no, you can't. You can't be reactive. You have to be proactive. So we've had to now go back and try to redo all that stuff and keep improving the systems and keep putting more systems so that every single thing is automated. It's a double-edged sword as well, right? because you don't sometimes you don't know how far your systems go and where the gaps in your systems are until you push against them and break them. And then you're like, oh, OK, next time I need to do this. So I for the moment, I'm revamping. I'm going to be soon revamping my check in forms because to have a bit more like logic gaps. So what I find is that people could be finishing off the dieting phase It the same check in It not as urgent anymore because it not the strict deadline Those people start to drop off the compliance for check Or I got a lot of people in Serbia I've become quite well-known in Serbia somehow. And because a lot of their English isn't good, I'll be like, what are your wins this week? And they just reply, yes. Fantastic. Brilliant. So having multiple choice to go, okay, here's a few ideas, but if there's other and you want to say something nice and personal, be my guest but also have logic jumps so like depending on where which phase you're in what you're doing the checking can be a completely different check-in depending on what questions you ask which is a complete mindfuck in terms of how i'm actually going to put this together but i've got this clear idea in my head i just need to go okay what are the actual questions going to be and i you know i think that was going to have a massive impact and allow me to kind of give better feedback know where people's problems are allow people to communicate better because able to learn how to verbalize it like going back to our point earlier on that communication um but these are these are things i love doing i like having more time to go right one of the things i like finding out what i can outsource like i like trying to go what makes my clients better now who do i pay to sort this out but you know

CHAPTER 18

Scaling a Fitness Business

part of the problem with a lot of coaches is they refuse to pay to do this they just they try to handle everything and it's like dude if you want to scale a big big business you're going to have to spend a lot of money and you're just going to you're just going to have to you're just going to have to accept that you may pay two thousand dollars worth of various subscriptions and automated things that's just part of it like you're gonna have to do it because you're not gonna be able to be successful and scale up unless you're doing like you you got accounting software you got a client database system you got mail systems you got canva you got all this that you have to and that it adds up really quickly like we looked at our subscriptions and i was like holy shits how much we pay and i was like what can we get rid of and so he's like none of them like we need all this to make make the wheels turn i was like cool that's a lot of money well like you go okay i know i need a mail template i know we need a client management system and then i go then there's this website called zapier i'm like what does that do well that that links all these things together well i didn't know that existed okay that's more expensive than i thought you know like having like onboarding forms you know you got type form definitely the most professional looking but you pay a premium for type form but it allows me even if it doesn't make an immediate impact on my business that level of quality that level of service that level of mental clarity will allow me down the line to make more money in the same way yeah paying you for program design course might not make me an immediate return on my investment but being better on my service having a better overall product quality in three four or five years is going to make yeah much wealthier and look the the coaches that if any coaches listen to this man they got to understand like this the our industry is overly saturated and it's getting very highly competitive so you better start thinking about next five or ten years and getting this stuff done and understand you're going to pay a lot of money to be successful or you're going to drop out in a couple of years because you're not going to be able to keep up with everybody else. Yeah. And a lot of the things I'm thinking about now are exactly that. I am thinking like, well, I remember back in the day, like I think, you know, you'd already been a couple of years in and started becoming well-known in the industry. And it was just when we started to get the Phil Leaney, Jamie Alderton, Mark Coles, Phil Graham, all rising together sort of thing. And I remember some of the stuff they're doing now. And I'm starting to look at it like going, this is, you're just waiting for the next crop of people to do that. like muscle mentors did it for a while and they sort of all fell with all their separate ways and disbanded they're waiting for the next group of people to do that and i'm like what am i do now to niche down more to get better to upskill now to be not the guy in a month's time but to be potentially be one of the industry leaders in three four five years time yeah this is what i I need to start thinking about now and I can't waste time on Canva templates or like mail software or iMovie if I need to do that because I'm losing out to somebody who wakes up every morning takes ADHD medication and sits studying for four hours right yeah you can do that yeah like I didn't have to I didn't have to worry about any of the stuff we're dealing with now because I've been in the history so long and I built the name based on good work and merit and didn't have to worry about social media and all this other stuff. But so now for the younger guys coming in, you got to worry about all that stuff because you're going to have to leverage that to become well-known and then also prove that you know your shit. So like I kind of got lucky in that regard that I'm kind of a dinosaur of the industry. And I ended up working for the right people, doing mentors for the right people and then and then becoming well but it a completely different world now And even I having to learn all this stuff because if you wanna keep driving things you gotta know how Instagram works and TikTok and all that other bullshit. So you can't know all of it. Like you can't know your shit with the science and also with training and then also like learn all these other systems. So it's better, but you're better off paying somebody. We've got a videographer that comes in once a month and we just knock out like 15 videos. There's our social media for the month. He does all the editing, the filming, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, you got to have all these people on your team and just build that out because it's not going to get less crazy. It's just going to get more crazy in our industry. It's just going to get more technical. It's going to get more saturated. And so if you want to be the fat that rises or cream that rises at the top, you got to take care of all this shit. There's just no other way you're going to do it.

CHAPTER 19

Industry Evolution and Networking Culture

Do you think we're past the point of saturation now where there is true platforms anymore? on like Polycom Group for all the pros and cons that it's given you in over your career you know you rose at a time where there was respected platforms and like okay this person Polycom Group okay he's gonna be good like you you can see the remnants of of of people that came out of the Polycom Group mold that became big names at the time early days UP was very much the same that's not so much anymore, but like, do you think we're now at this point where, is there ever going to be a company again that will allow trainers to create a name for themselves by proxy? Or is it just so many now that you are literally, it's down to what you do? Look, I don't think it's the companies that are holding it back. I think it's the coaches, it's the students, man. I mean, you know, the culture that we promote, and then you go on the forums and like hardly anybody posts anything. Before I got on with Pollock and Group, there were forums. And at that point, I was just a student and I was super active on those forums, all the time helping people. That's how I became well-known. It had nothing to do with Pollock and Group. Pollock and Group accelerated me, but I was on for years. I was on the Pollock and Group forums before we were on Facebook. They had a PHP server and Charles was on there and I would get on there. That's how Charles noticed me. And then I went to more courses and more courses and Charles remembered me from the forum and then said, hey, do you want to come work for me? The problem is that they're not active. The students aren't proactive enough about networking and about talking to each other. They're all having private DM conversations, but that's not how you get well known. You get well known by being helpful and talking to people in an open forum, not by hiding yourself away and trying to be a lone wolf. But that's what they do nowadays. You don't see the culture anymore whereas um before it was pollock group not pollock psi when it was pollock and strength institute when they actually had true culture now they don't they have no culture it's all gone it was all gone when i when i started working with pollock group it was gone charles was gone andre was gone ryan finley was gone like that's it it was gone we never got that back and that's what i want to do with muscle nerds but it takes two to tango students have to be more proactive about being invested in the company and invested in each other as a community and build that build that culture up um i think the last company that did that was crossfit and then now that they've gotten so commercialized they've kind of lost that too this this could be another argument in itself for that need to outsource right because we're now pulled in more directions than ever before and i think the more people outsource the more time they can spend like i the more our time outsource i know when i you know get a vm and then take away some of the things that are on my plate i'll be more active in everything and i can imagine there are people out there that that that don't maybe reach out as much as me and really do sit in the shadows of probably even more whether they are actually busy or whether they're busy being busy you know just now i i'll say this i don't think it's too busy because i see i see them posting on other people's personal pages like having long conversations on other people's personal pages but not having enough conversations in the open forum when they've got you got 500 other coaches to talk to they they would choose to just spend one-on-one time with people um instead of and a lot of guys like when i when i came in we we understood that none of us knew like you're not gonna you're not gonna be in a you're not gonna be in a room with charles pollock when i think you know more than he has right or or andre benoit or clark flynn so you just you just realized i'm a moron but if i want to learn i've got to i've got to be okay with being a moron and ask questions and have conversations people these days they don't want anybody to think they're dumb they don't want any people to think that they are just ignorant and don't know as much as other people and they're they're too chicken to say something and learn and that's that's

CHAPTER 20

Room 101: Fitness Industry Pet Peeves

so like just finishing off i said i wanted to sort of like finish off with something a little bit different a little bit um a little bit fun and you'd be kind of segued onto it because podcasts always do this i never know how they always come full circle but you started to go into things that grind your gears in the fitness industry and i did a podcast with brett who's one of one of was one of your mentees um yeah yeah and i was on his podcast we did an episode called room 101 so did you know that you can share the show room 101 in the UK. So Room 101 was a book, I can't remember whose book, was it George Orwell? But it was a book, it might have been George Orwell 1984 that was in, where there was Room 101 was this room where all the things that you wanted to go to hell went. And there was a TV show with Paul Merton in the UK, and it ended up becoming Frank Skinner, where people came on and things that they didn't like, they ground their gears, you know, they present it, and this is why I think this should go into Room 101, why I think Westlife should go into Room 101, or why I think lack of spatial awareness in Hong Kong. There's another cancellation one. Well, I want to go into Room 101. So I wanted to end with something a little bit fun. One thing from the fitness industry that you would send to Room 101, and one thing just generally out of left field you send to Room 101 and why? So many things in the industry right now. I think, man, how do you approach that? So one of the things is I wish everyone's elitist attitude about what they do would get thrown in room 101. Like, stop thinking that you've got everything figured out and that everybody's stupid and stop calling everybody stupid and stop saying that, you know, different methods and techniques are stupid and just see the value in it. And it's just it's a bit ridiculous. Like, there's a lot of stuff I don't agree with. Like a lot of the, the, the really pedantic biomechanics that people are putting into exercising. Um, I, I wouldn't throw that in room 101, but I'd say it's probably got less importance than just going in and finding positions that don't hurt and getting really fucking strong and doing that. But, you know, there's a lot of things that are irritating for sure. Um, like people don't want to work hard anymore. they they don't want to put weight on the bar and actually get stronger they don't want to put in the hard work they're finding ways of how do i work how do i do less hard work and try to get the same shit out of it and they don't understand it's not how it works the body is not going to become resilient unless you put it through some trauma and put the brain through some fear um yeah that's probably what probably all the bickering and fighting and everybody acting like they their way is the best way i love that from certainly elitist thing From the perspective of just like, most of the shit we argue about, we all argue about the little differences. And people forget the fact that 90 of it the fucking same You know we sit there going vegan the best or carnival the best or low But yeah they all work because you put someone in a calorie deficit now certain things might be better for certain populations etc etc but you you arguing about a method to do exactly the same thing and the one that the ones that are really annoying me when i see coaches are so caught up in this in this dogma like this person lost got shredded by you know three and a half thousand calories of carnivore diet no caloric deficit i'm like but they were though weren't they you know regardless when you didn't be a carnivore yeah like doesn't matter it's like they that and they act like the nutrition is an isolated like it lives in a vacuum like it's okay well what's their what's their need every day what how much exercise do they do like you know it is a lot of man i tell you what like

CHAPTER 21

Social Media Misinterpretation and Dogma

what really ground my gear last night is i woke up this morning and Zoe had posted that reverse, like that reverse step down lunge into a Russian step up. And a guy repost, didn't tag us in it, but just posted on his page. He goes, oh, people will do anything to not have to deadlift or squat. And we, so the people misunderstanding and not asking for context, that's one of the problems with social media is you only have like 2,200 characters, plus including spaces you don't have that much room to tell the whole story if he had actually read the the the copy he would have seen that we said it was one exercise we use not all of them and he posted that and and it's like bro like we never said that that's all we would do like what the fuck is wrong with you but some of that shit like the misinterpretation and not asking for for more clarification like you could have gotten on our thread and asked what we meant by that and Do we like to squat in bed? Which we would have clearly said, yes, we love to squat in bed. But instead, you decided to post that without any context in your interpretation and then misinterpret it. That's the kind of shit I can't stand. And you see that a lot on the social media. This would definitely go in room 101, where somebody has a very dogmatic view on how they think things should be done. So then they cherry pick a video or they cherry pick a post, and then they tear it apart on their social media. and it's like how how is that constructive like how is that constructive and moving the industry is that moving the industry forward or backwards this fucking moving is backwards um we need more open conversations open forums and and and good healthy debate not a bunch of not a bunch of egotistical bickering bullshit which is what you see in the industry that's i think this we see worldwide with social media now isn't that that's that debate is sort of a lost art like because the extreme views whether whether it's i sometimes ask myself the question are people becoming more extreme in their views generally in the sense of like people it's either you're with us or against this mentality we see this in covid conspiracies and to training to everything else or is it that the fact that what you tend to see on social media is the polar icing ends of the spectrum because everyone wants to see someone rant about something but no one wants to say yeah yeah you could do it a million ways and it doesn't really matter. Like, like that's, well, I mean, it's, it's human nature. It's that dopamine hit. We all love extreme things So like if You know I our social media probably be really good if I went and did what I did at the very start like seven years ago when I was just ranting about shit and everybody loved it But now I've kind of calmed down. I've gotten older. I'm like, that's not constructive. That's not the image I want to promote. I want to promote that whole thing. Like, hey, there's a lot of tools you could use. Let's figure out which one's the best for right now. And I'm just kind of out of that. If I'm going to debate with somebody, I want it to be a healthy debate where there's no ad hominem attacks. There's no name calling. There's, you know, but most of the people, you know, it's financially beneficial to get myopic and then be very extreme in what you're doing because that's what sells. That's what people want. But the problem is that sometimes people get so deep in that bullshit that they can't break their marketing like that. But then they actually start believing it. And then when you try to, when they say, let's debate, you're like, okay, they just talk in circles, talk in circles. So it doesn't matter how much, how many facts and how logical your, your argument is. They're never going to change their opinion because they're now so deep in the shit that they can't pull themselves out. So there's not even any point of having, having those talks because you're never going to change their idea, their opinion about it. What about, what about a silly one out of the fitness industry? ask them in that one thing that you would like if you could like get rid of what would what would it be so anything that springs to mind fuck man right now the the overinflated house prices in queensland good god we can't even buy a house when we moved into our house this house was worth now this is australian numbers so i don't want anybody to hear this and be like oh my god that's an expensive house because it's not for where we live in australia where everything's fucking expensive i think it was like 800 850 000 how much the going price was we've lived in this house a couple of years it's now been valued at like 1.25 in only a couple of years we're like oh because we wanted to buy it and now we're like well looks like we're moving so i would love i would love for them to build some fucking houses uh because everybody during covid a lot of people from melbourne and new south wales moved up here because they wanted to get they wanted to get away from those draconian fucking lockdown walls like what you're dealing with right now in hong kong um so they all moved up here so there's no housing so everything is like 20 to 40 percent more expensive than it was even a year ago we're feeling that we're sort of looking at like well where we go and we're probably saying as i said you off air we're looking at moving back to the uk within a year probably like next june july time it's like less everything changes and obviously every the price of everything in the uk has gone up at the moment if you've seen the uk news but we'd love to live somewhere near London, but it's just unbelievable the prices of if you want to live anywhere close to London, anywhere commutable. It's like, they're absolutely not. Well, let's just move to Serbia where your fan base is. Well, yeah. It's very tempting. There's clearly a fitness market, right? Because Mr. Schaller did one recently there. I was like, okay, there's more fitness enthusiasts there. And to be fair, I've listened to some of the doctors and PT advice there about health and and nutrition, tell you what, throw some ads towards Serbia way. There is no clue on nutrition in that part of the world. Yeah it really isn like you would clean up with a nutrition course for Yeah it weird It weird to me because I always said this about the Serbian guys I know that are PTs They tend to be the most logical sane smartest brains I ever met in the industry almost to the point of too much. All my Serbian friends, they're on their shit. They know other shit so it's really weird i think you'd have a problem though because i think that's one of the hardest languages in the world to learn yeah like i've got one guy that literally i i i no joke get write your check-ins put it into google translate and send it everyone else is pretty good english i need to do that but like yeah was one i'm literally google translating every bit of information like i don't know how well it's coming across i hope it's coming across all right he's dropping so i'll take that um but i don't know um

CHAPTER 22

Closing and Contact Information

so i obviously i know i know this is the point in time where you know you're you're winding down medication's wearing off and you you need to as you mentioned on your website go and pester zoe for the next four or five hours so um anyone who doesn't know who you are where they can find you um both from a meme account because they are gold um and for my business account where can people find luke yeah meme account luke lehman l-e-a-m-a-n just type that in the instagram you like like really nice memes and muscle nerds underscore health for muscle nerd stuff don't go to my personal account and ask me fucking health shit and you want that go to muscle nerds so it's muscle nerds underscore health um and then yeah email info at muscle nerds.net if anybody wants to talk about um coaching and mentorships or courses or anything like that and then obviously muscle nerds.net is the um is the uh website yeah i can absolutely vouch for every course i've pretty much done every course i think the only one i haven't done is uh it's not about not always about the food one that's the only one i've not done um and i'm still waiting for a day where i can come and do the the in-person part of the program design which i felt was robbed for me but generally even without completing that bit because of world restrictions some of the best investments i've ever made so much of the way i think about my business my practice some of the things i've come up with has been inspired by what you guys have taught me so in this coaches and this like don't wait any longer go invest in these guys sir um hopefully well hopefully hopefully in the next six to eight months my pr status for australia will come through and i can actually leave the country and then we'll well the first seminar answer down um i will come as long as we can go and watch a marvel movie afterwards because that you know only if you're only if you're eating truffles oh man i i i love i love a chocolate truffle these are my favorite things yeah yeah Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we can't say no more. Nothing dodgy whatsoever. Nothing, nothing at all. Yeah, and then, yeah, when that happens, let us know. We will expense the trip across to Hong Kong for you guys to do one as well at Argent. But thank you. Always been a pleasure. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you again. Yes, sir. We'll see you.

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# Productivity tips from the ADHD brains

**Channel:** Simon Kingsley Dutton - Self Made Podcast
**Published:** 2024-05-14
**Source:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=9jTl-r-1ZQs

One thing I really love about chatting to Luke Lehman is you never ever know what is going to come out of his mouth. Welcome to another episode of the Self Made Podcast and as I just said today I welcome back Luke Lehman. Luke is a generally unique character and a very popular one still sitting in the top five episodes of the Self Made Podcast history and today we talk about something a little bit different but when I get guests on, especially repeat guests, I like to start to learn a little bit about them and build up a bit of a trend or a theme to the episodes that they have. We had Brett on last week and we spoke a little bit ranty and just kind of like put the world to rights with luke there's a little bit of that but what's interesting about luke is he always has a fantastic story to tell and on our last episode go back and watch it cheap plug we start the episode talking about nofap and on this episode we talk about never missing a bathroom break and why it's a really important thing and surprisingly both had very different opinions why never ever miss a bathroom break for him it was down to stories of taking magic mushrooms missing the loo and never ever ever wanting that situation again for me it was the time I get work done in silence. This sets the tone for an episode that is full of stories and it's incredibly interesting but the topic of the day is a little bit different from what Luke normally talks about. I remember vividly the first time he came on the show he was like I don't want to talk about the stuff I always talk about I want to talk about something different and that's where he went into the posture versus performance debate. This time I went into something that's deeply personal to both him and myself. Recently I was diagnosed with ADHD, something that really put a lot of answers in my head for some of the ways I've been and some of the things that happened in my life. And I want to go on a path to learn a little bit more about the condition, how I can master my productivity, what can I do from a medication standpoint. And Luke was the first guy I went to speak to. Having been diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, I probably tried every medication under the books and found many ways from nutrition, performance training, supplementation and medication, ways of managing his condition and allowing him to be one of the most productive human beings I've ever known. In this episode, we learn about what ADHD is, the struggles that both him and myself have faced over the years, and some of the tips that we have done to sort of work around them, the systems that we have created. But this isn't just for people with ADHD. Productivity and procrastination is something that sort of is prevalent in almost every walk of life and almost every business, every endeavor, every diet, there's always this element. Being productive, managing your time, having systems in place is key to any success that we have in life. And this episode is for you if you feel you want to get more done. So without further ado, because this has been a long intro, I will leave you with myself and Luke Lehman. If you enjoy the show, please share on social media tagging myself and luke lehman and if you want to support the show please leave a review on itunes or spotify or wherever you get your podcasts from or if you really want to support the show and help us give more content back to you go to the buy me a coffee link at the bottom of the show notes and donate what you can for us to allow us to do give you more free content but as i said i'll leave you with myself and luke lehman so luke it's always good to have you on i oh i i really like about these episodes is that i have absolutely no idea where they're gonna go and and i said i said before i said before coming on air that us starting with a lot of nofap last time was was a really really good way to start the show and i think this has got to be a theme whenever you come on the show we've got to start with something so i was like right i'll go and do some research i'll find i'll find something interesting that has been said by luke on something some buyer that he's done something we haven't spoke about and there's a great one about life lessons on the muscle nerds website never trust the part right cool and one of them i thought was really interesting he says never pass up a chance to go to the bathroom now i totally agree with you i think every guy listening to this will totally agree with you but why do you think never passing up a chance to go to the bathroom is a solid life lesson. Yeah. Well, and just to give you some background on those life lessons, it's some, some old guy gave them to me like 20 years ago. I think I was, I think it was back when I was still selling fitness equipment, full-time and training part-time and, um, just some old Texan guy bought some equipment from me and he said you know I you know son I going to give you the best piece of advice you gonna get as you get older never pass up a boner never trust a part never check pass up the chance to go to the bathroom and i went that's a pretty that's some pretty solid advice that's pretty solid right but look the bathroom thing too that actually that bit me it's bitten me in the ass a couple of times especially when i'm in europe you know how it is in london like they're in the bathrooms like Like if you're in the middle of a park and you got to pee or poo, you're screwed. Like, and these days, like most of the places you go in and around London, you have to pay. So if you, and who carries like, who carries coins anymore? So you finally, you see a bathroom, you're like, yes, you walk up and you're like, I have no coins. I can't actually get into the fucking bathroom. But yeah, so for me, if I have the urge, even slightly, I'm going to the bathroom because you never know when you're going to have an issue, like maybe you got to get in the car and go somewhere and then you got, you're going to poop your pants or pee your pants or whatever, you know? So I always highly recommend you just go, you don't hold it. And my wife will hold that shit in until she's busted. So she'll just hold it in and then knock it out. And she laughs at me because I go to the bathroom so many times a day, but you know, I I'd rather just, I'd rather take care of it and not have to worry about being in a bad situation, you know? So I got to give you another story. Did I ever tell you the story about when I was in Amsterdam? No, this is a great, great place to have a good story. This is a good story. So I was in Amsterdam. And one of the reasons why I love to hold our European seminars in Amsterdam is because the obvious thing you can truffles, right? I can legally go get hallucinogen contained property containing truffles. I can eat them and I can have a good time. So I had just given a seminar and so I was totally done. And I went, I'm going to go to the smart shop. I'm going to buy a box of truffles and I'm going to go see Avengers Endgame when it first came out. And it came out on that Tuesday. And I'm like, I get to see it before any of my friends get to see it. And I get to see it while I'm tripping. This is fantastic. So I go to the theater and it's a Tuesday afternoon. It's like there's nobody in there. It's like me and a couple of the weirdos. I bought a bottle of wine. You could buy a bottle of wine there. I sat down and ate like half a box of truffles and completely forgot that I'd taken them. And then when the movie came on, I didn't even catch the first hour and a half because I was too busy going, whoa, because everything looks so cool. I was like, whoa, why do I feel so weird? And I went, oh, yeah, I took shrooms. Holy shit. And I was so surprised because I'm like, I bought them not having any expectations because the first time I'd ever done them. And I'm like, surely they're legal here. They can't be, they're not going to be that. They're not going to be as powerful as shrooms. And I was, I was fucking wrong. Like I got to one point where I was, I wanted to get some more wine and my wine bottle was on the floor. And I was like, Oh, I don't know if I can even get to it. It's so far away. But that's the first, that's the first half of the story. So towards the end, you know, how long those movies are, we get to a point where I've been holding in this P no one told me that, those truffles are also a diuretic. No one told me this. So I'm holding his PNP and I'm at the point where I'm like, okay, I'm going to pee my pants. I jumped up, but I was so disoriented. I didn't know where the, where the doorway was to get out of the theater to go find the bathroom. So I went through the first door I could, and I found myself in the stairwell like behind the screen. And I'm looking around going, okay, this is not how I got in here. So I was like running down the stairs, couldn't find it. And I busted out of this door into the lobby. And the guy working there looks at me and he's like, what the fuck? I'm like bathroom. He's like, fuck over there. I'm like, cool. I want to take care of that. And, uh, still at this time, I still don't realize that it's the, that this the truffles making me have to pee so bad. So after the movie, I go to the pub next door and I'm like, all right, I'm going to have a beer and I'll just eat the rest of these truffles. Fuck it. Cause I've got this, I've got like a 45 minute walk through what's the big park of Boulder park or the big park in the middle of Amsterdam. I can this nice walk to my hotel and it's really nice sunny day. so I ate them I'm walking through the park I get halfway through the park and realize I gotta pee again like crap and it's coming on real fast and real strong and I'm looking around there's no bathrooms I'm like there's no I'm gonna pee myself this is this is not cool and because it's a sunny day everyone's at the park every and all the kids and you know everybody's having a good time and it's like okay I've got to do something about this so I see this kind of grove of trees where it's like you can't really see into them. I'm like, okay, I'll go and I'll put my backpack down and I'll squat down and I'll pretend like I'm going through my backpack, but I'll pull my wiener at the side of my, at the side of my shorts and I'll just have a quick pee. So I'm in the middle of this. I don't realize that I'm kind of on a incline. So the pee starts coming back towards my feet and I got flip on And then I hear the lady and her kids behind me and I freak out I like I going to be that guy The American guy that ends up in the in the jail for indecent exposure So I ended up falling and I just pissed all over myself So I might as well, I just peed my pants anyways because it just ended up all over me anyways. And then, uh, yeah, then I got up and kind of shook myself off and went back to my hotel room. So yeah, highly recommend always knowing where a bathroom is. and that's a long way to come back to that i love it yeah especially if you're taking things that act as a diuretic and i actually had an app on my phone at one point it was called something like where's the bathrooms so you could open the app and it would tell you where the bathrooms are if they were free if you had to pay for them so that's been quite handy when i'm traveling yeah i i tell you what i don't i don't have i don't have a story and in those sort of substances that is anywhere near as entertaining as that i always i always remember and there's this there's ocean park here in hong kong which is this uh um sort of theme park and it was a little bit away from where we were and i was sitting going wow i didn't realize it was that close and we were just sitting there you know looking at clouds and all this kind of thing and then you know five six hours later come back and go why is it so far away now like this whole island had moved like so much close to me like i almost thought it was like could i swim it if i give it a go could i swim it and then the moment when i wrote that i decided not to swim it was that moment where i think i spoke to you about this on the last show when we're talking about posture and performance and we're talking about stress and how stress affects you know how you know hypertonic a muscle is and i just did this and all of a sudden i was like there's a hole in my side there's a hole in the side of me and it just goes for the first time i hadn't got hypertonic pecs and for the first time my pec moved as it should and i can actually feel like my armpit rather than being like locked in all the time i was like yeah maybe i shouldn't swim in yeah going back to the bathroom thing though i i i generally think that is there is there's no place more peaceful people talk about happy places to go out beach in harley i'm like when i'm when i'm stressed when i'm back to back with like loads of clients loads of work there's nothing better than that five to ten minutes where i can just sit and then no one's around no one can disturb you and i you know there was a reason why I'm on like level three and a half thousand on Candy Crush because there's no Wi-Fi in the bathroom at work but I need to do something just to shut my brain off and it's definitely that's why I think our life advice is good if you want creativity if you want inspiration I get it more in a bathroom than any other place on the planet I'm just I'm just surprised five to ten minutes man I'll be in there easy 15 to 30 minutes I'll sit down I'll pull up my squatty potty and I'll just chill. And that's when I could that's when I start posting the memes. Everyone, everyone that follows you on social media now is just gonna think about that anytime they see your memes now. Yeah, yeah. And I'm quite like that whenever, if you see like five or six memes in a row, I'm taking a shit. That's, that's what's happening. It's probably exactly the same for me. Like, literally client touch points, any client listen this know when I send you a WhatsApp message, like how's your diet going today? You know what's happening? That's an easy time to get check-ins done. Absolutely. Yeah. Maybe not be a loon video, so that'll be a very different experience. No, no. It's good acoustics. What can I say? Why is it echoing? Where are you? Don't worry about it. What was that? Nothing. Nothing. So moving on. Go on. Quickly, quickly. That's the second reason why I say never pass that chance up. It also goes back to that never trust a fart thing because and you'll you'll realize it's the older you get like i would say probably one out of 20 farts ends up being the wrong one to trust and that happens to me at least once a month at least once a month you know and it's never bad it's never like oh god it's kind of like okay i gotta go wipe that out so you know and that'll happen you know the whole gets loose g age i guess yeah and then well and nothing ruins the moment even if it's not that bad if there's a moment where you're going to need to be need confidence that's where it's going to happen you know it's going to happen when you do your first seminar after coping in two years you know i bet that happened on your first one you get up there you're ready to go ready to rock boom literally the worst the worst is when nothing actually it's just kind of wet and then you're standing there you're like and you just feel it and your cheeks are sliding around and there's no real solidity but it's wet you're like i hope that didn't i hope that's not made a wet spot on back of my pants christ i hope today's the day where i go through incline hypers with the guys yeah and it's not it's not like you can reach back there to feel if it's wet because if you do you're going to accidentally push it into the wetness so you just got to trust that it's not there and try to make your way to the bathroom and take care of it i i tell you what i remember i remember vividly the the before the first time you came on the show and you went i just don I don want to talk about lease mode I done it a thousand times And I was like I said right I going to make my mission Anytime I have Luke on this show I going to think of topics outside the box And initially that was like okay let talk posture Let's talk brain stuff. Let's talk what we're talking about today. But it's now just transformed into something completely different in its entirety, right? You know, I think your show with Nick Daniel with the crazy dumb shit was pretty close for this. But we've had no fat. We've had wet farts. I've had the beauties of toilets and magic mushrooms within the first 10 minutes of both of our shows, which is which is either people are going to be raving fans of us for life or they've turned this off right now. You never know what's going to come out of my mouth. So you might as well stick around. And the beauty of this as well, I know with people that follow me and from how well our last episode is, I still think you're number three of all time that a lot of people are going to listen to this one. and this is brilliant when they start with this topic but moving on to sort of like the top we had going off on something that's a little bit different what we talked about um yeah so i thought it'd be good to have something that's we'll have a story or two that's a little bit personal to both of us and relevant to me right now um and i think has a carrier relevant with other people that that don't have this issue and that's talking about adhd um this is something i was you know very recently diagnosed with in typical ADHD fashion, I never booked the appointment to go and check. So I expected it for years and years and years and after losing three leather jackets and multiple pairs of rugby boots and never been able to do anything other than right at the last minute, like my online check ins on a Monday still finish at 1-2am because I always think it's our last point. So like, with yourself, you've you've done a fair amount in your career, you know, running running Polycom group to running muscle online programs, the in person events, having a gym there's a lot of stuff that you managed to do despite being very open about having adhd what is it that you think allows you to get so much done before we talk about what actually adhd is you know i think part of it is um there are some benefits to having it um part of that is at least for me memory um you just you have a tendency to have this crazy ability to remember things actively recall things and learn things very quickly. And, uh, and my wife, uh, she said it before, like, um, I'll open up a textbook, read one, one or two lines and immediately start using it on stuff. And she's like, how do you do that? How do you, how do you grab a concept so quickly? And so, well, part of it's probably the ADD. The second is you get ADD allows you to be really obsessive about very specific narrow topics. So my career just happens to be the one that I fell into. And so you end up with such a wide base of knowledge that it's easy to lay other concepts on top of that repeatedly. See, I think that's probably part of it because I'm the same thing, man. Mine is so severe that it's like out of sight, out of mind. So it can be really detrimental on personal relationships because I can just completely forget that I'm friends with people. Like I don't call people. I don't call my mom. I don't talk to my mom hardly ever. Like if, if you're not right here right now, I, I don't even think about it. Like, because it's so, you get so narrow minded. And so like your vision becomes so like looking through a straw type stuff. So if it's here and now I can take care of it. If I don't take care of it now, I'll probably forget. So you have to come up with strategies and work strategies too. Like for me, I have to have some type of chaos going on. So I have to, when I do work, I have to have like, like really repetitive electronic music going, um, which I don't even like that much anymore. It's shit I liked in my twenties, but now I don't really like it. But if I can hear that, it keeps me like in a steady rhythm. But if I get that rhythm broken, it takes an hour, two hours for me to get back on track. Um, so yeah, so there's, there's inherent pros. to it. Um, but there are a lot of cons. Like you tend to be, you tend to have bad addictions, like being a workaholic, you know, working way too much. You start, you get, um, you get a lot of, um, things sound like a good idea and you're like, you get really hyped up about something and you never finished a project. So I've got like all these projects in my garage that I haven't finished yet because I started woodworking stuff and I'm like, I'll get to it later. Cause it's in the garage. I don't see it. It's not in front of me. Um, yeah. So yeah, it can be quite chaotic like this is about the time where my medication starts wearing off so i get fairly well manic in the evening so i wake up super manic and just a bit weird and then zoe would be like did you take your medicine yet i'm like i'm gonna take it in a minute she's like please go take your medicine fucking drive me nuts and then you're pretty good for about 10 12 hours and then it runs out at night just like you're crazy again

I think there's so much to unpack in that. And I think this is going to be a really interesting episode personally for me, because it's going to be all these light bulb moments as I'm, you know, still learning, even though I've suspected for a while and done my research and, but I'm still learning about it in so many ways. And like, interesting you bring up the personal relationships in terms of like remembering to be friends with people. I was like, I see this all the time. And like Ellie will call up, you know, our parents like three, four times a week. They'll have regular contact with their friends. and i'm sitting there going man i haven't spoke to my best mate in six six months i'm sitting there like it's weird moment now like you know planning a wedding and i had to you know call our best best mates and i had that moment going do they still even consider me a good mate like like i don't speak to them i still do but i just i you know you don't and i find this how do you find this for client work because i often find like like with touch points particularly with touch points for clients like check-ins they're in the diary they're regimented they're good i get that programming all that all the actual stuff main stuff is fine but those little little things through the week i could quite easily it's not because i don't care but it's just like i'm quite sure we haven't messaged me so oh monday checking day i'll you know message yeah yeah my my big one is i don't do weekly check-ins anymore um i finally just don't work with what i do i would rather talk to clients every day so that's what i like about the system to use because when they finish a workout, I get pinged. I can open up the workout. I can watch the videos. I can take screenshots to show them where they're at a position, what I need them to change. Um, so yeah, so I try to touch base with them often, you know, multiple times a week, if not every day. Now that the only problem is if you have clients that I've had clients that don't log in any workouts and you'll see, I'll forget that I even train you because you're not, I don't think you're doing your workout. So I'm not going to waste my time. And then all of a sudden, three weeks later, you'll see all of their workouts get uploaded. It's like, bro, like I can't do that. Like I need it. How hard is it for you to do a set? You got two minutes of rest. How hard is it for you to go in there and go? I did a hundred kilos by 12, you know? So I, I can only work with people who will put their data in when their workouts, you know, I don't, I'll work with other people, but I don't want them to get angry if they think, Oh, you forgot it. You forgot about me. Or you're not fucking contacting me. Look, bro, you got to contact me. Like we've talked about this. I was really clear when we first started, you need to put your videos in. I need something to look at so I can actually coach you. I need you to put your pictures in, fill out your chronometer. I need to fill your data. And I won't forget about you. As long as you put your data in there, I will always take care of you. The minute you start fucking around on that, number one, I forget I'm even training you. Number two, I get bored. Like it's not fun for me to train you anymore because I'm not actually training you. Like I don't just give people programs. If I did that, I would just, I would just go on our website and I would just load shit tons of programs. You just buy one off. I don't do that because that's not what I do. Even on, I am considering doing it for people who don't want coaching and just want to do programs. But if you're going to train one-on-one with me, like I need people to actually be interactive and answer back when I ask you a question and, and write your information the workouts because like what's the fucking point what's the point of paying the money if you're not actually going to do the thing and i don't care if you're fucking up with your diet fucking up everywhere else what i do care about is you're not communicating with me because then i can't help you and i'll forget about you yeah a hundred percent and one of the things i've i've made um big changes in in terms of we know how i onboard people is i i'm very very like OTT in a way about like okay this is how the onboarding process worked we're going to get on a call and we're going to go through all this and one of the expectations I always have is like you have to communicate with me yeah if I you go I like I don't want you to hide from your diet like if you're struggling tell me because I'd rather sort this now then I had a client once I was like he was like not losing any weight not losing any weight well haven't got any data to work from so could you get me something no because then you eventually get food diaries i'm like okay cool but this doesn't add up right you're like a 130 kilo man you're saying you're eating 1400 calories which is a thousand calories and what i've given you and you're not losing weight okay just just i call bullshit and then over time i was like can you send some food pictures can you send the food nothing nothing nothing eight weeks down the line he has a thousand calories worth of sauce holy shit yeah right and like like immediately that i could have solved that six weeks ago yeah you know and i like those little things like i would much rather you know plug for your nutrition course when that video of me with that big fluffy beard opens the course like i would rather someone say i had 800 grams of protein like that guy did and what are you in this case people haven watched the video if not go and follow muscle nurse you see it eventually um they be like he weighed the plate with the chicken on it and went that was 800 grams that must mean 800 grams of protein and you know i didn't see him polishing off china picking out his tooth but you know the like i would rather you emit those mistakes to me then you just keep quiet and then as i said i will quite easily forget if you if you don't work with me yeah 100 100 100 especially for me especially on the especially with the training because that's where i actually have the contact because it when i so every morning i have to get up i get up i do my coffee i take my valvance and then i immediately get on the computer and i'll sit there for like i'll sit there for like fucking eight hours because i'm getting this workflow while my medication is working and then i might get up and i might do my workout. Then I get back on the computer for another three or four hours. Right. But, um, but the first thing I do is go in and see who's done the workout. So I'll go in and I'll start going down the list, coaching saying good job or bad job or whatever. And then I'll immediately go into their chronometer and I'll look at what they're doing in their diet. And if I have anything that I need to address with them, I'll address it then. So it's a pretty good, it's a pretty good procedure of open client. Look at the program, look at chronometer, where's their weight going you know what are they logged are they hitting the macros the hidden calories what types of foods they're eating what do i need to address this or not um and that's basically like my the first like four hours of my day is getting that done and then the next four or five hours is programming and then planning for their future phases and all that um and then you know the workout and then i come back and i've got people all over the world so it's like i hit i get everybody when I was asleep, I'll knock them out in the morning. So like everyone in, it's usually everybody in America. And then later on in the day, now I can get all the Australians and I can get the people at the end of the day, it's all the people from like England and Europe and all that. And so it's this kind of constant revolving cycle of hitting people in every different time zone. But yeah, if they don't put the information in, it's not going to ping me. I'm not going to, I'm going to have no idea. So I've got that strategy. And also with the software we use, it'll alert me when they're seven days out from needing a new program. So I can stack them up and I'll start working time zone to time zone. Like who's first, who's going to wake up first, get all their shit in, move to the next time zone, next time zone. That's what I do if I'm behind, which I have been, I've been chasing my tail for the last few months because we had two coaches resign. So I absorbed 40 new clients when I was only really working like five or six at the time. So I've had to redo my strategies in order to get everybody where they need to be. Now, the next strategy, and I find this works really well for ADD, is you just got to plan ahead. The more stuff you can plan ahead for, then as you're coaching, you don't have to freak out when you need to write a new program. So very difficult if you have employees that quit and you take their coaches or their clients because you know what's going on with everybody, but you don't know the level that you need to train them. And I wasn't left with any notes. So I had to go back. Some of these clients, two or three four-year clients. So I had to go back and handwrite every single phase they've done and then try to figure out what the plan was and what the periodization model was and where they're going. And then, so it's taken like three months to get where I'm pretty well caught up and even. So now the next step is to start planning out the next 12 months. That way I've got a skeleton of where they're going. And then I can just go ahead and start creating all the templates and creating all the modifications I want. And that way you're always, you know, three, four, five, six months ahead. That's when everything gets really smooth. But if you, you know, people with ADD don't have great organizational skills. So you have to use technology to do that. You have to. So that is because if you don't, what ends up happening is if you don't stay on top of it, we tend to, we tend to fall prey to analysis paralysis worse than other people. So the minute you start with the minute you start dropping balls, you just freeze. So it's kind of like you look at that stress response of fight, flight, freeze a facade, you end up freezing. And then you're like, you you don't know what the fuck to do because you can't figure out what's the most important thing to knock out first. So then you just start trying to knock out the easiest stuff really fast. You can get like 10 or 12 things done really quick. And then you start trying to eat away at the big stuff. So all planning is so important, organization is so important, but it's also so difficult for people with ADD because they don't have that organizational capacity to do it. Um it one reason why um I think you know like like Zoe my wife is um is really good at organization So if I ever get to the point where I freaking out she really good at saying okay what do we need to take care of first and kind of laying that out for me So it always good to have someone who can help you strategize when the shit hits the fan. Yeah. I mean, that is very, very much the story of my life. Like as soon as I feel a little bit behind and stuff, I find it so hard to get back in, back engaged. Now, before we sort of go into some of the strategies you use to stay productive, because one thing I noticed about your routine there is it seems so deep focused and now i appreciate that people with adhd can go into the moments of hyper focus and then they necessarily you know go through but they can't focus at all this seems very routine very regimented which is almost like you're in a little bit of control of it but before we go into that i want to double back a little bit for people that don't know a little bit about adhd and the mechanism behind it like in your go as deep or surface layer as you want because i know you can go both you know what you know is the definition of add adhd you know is there a difference what struggles do you have because i think it's something that is very misunderstood and people just think it is laziness or procrastination or unmotivated and yeah well the thing is too it's it's the terminology and the classification changed over the years there's now i believe eight different types of add and adhd and depending on what your symptoms are, they'll classify you in one of these. And it goes kind of from a level of load at like really like severe, which mine is at the more severe range. And it can go from just, you know, a lot of people will say, well, I'm just, I'm not organized. I'm not, and I'm forgetful and blah, blah, blah. It's, if you take that stuff, like most people that are like, I can't pay attention. Oh, I'd rather get on social media. Now take that times a million and that's what you got. So, um, it's not as simple as just saying, well, I'm dropped the ball here. I can't get organized. It is like, it is a, it's a, can be very crippling, like crippling. Um, and it can lead to a lot of, a lot of depression type qualities and that type of feelings of failure and stuff like that. Um, now with the one, the type that I have, it's kind of a, like a ADD. So you've got the attention deficit disorder, but I also have a hyperactivity thing. So I can swing massively from, you know, being almost, I don't want to say it's kind of like almost like bipolar, but it's not classified as bipolar. You just go through these really low lows and really high highs, except that I get, I'm more on the manic side than anything. So if I haven't taken my Vyvanse, I'm pretty scatterbrained and crazy. And I don't think before shit falls out of my mouth. So people always hear me on podcasts and they're like, oh shit, he says some crazy shit. if I wasn't on my medication you should see what I say at that point because I say some we've had plenty of conversations off air about about the trouble I've got myself into over the last few years but this exact sort of stuff right and so I can totally like empathize with that sort of like impulse control maybe not to the same degree but I get that ability of like I need to say this if I don't say it to you I'm going to say it to someone and like that's a really difficult emotionally because you know you're going to crack eventually yeah and the impulse control is really hard that's the hard one um and that's why a lot of the medications uh smooth that out um and like if you do like genetic tests i've done genetic testing for for everything so i've got like this issue where i don't make dopamine like normal people i don't transport it like normal people and my receptors don't work so one of the problems of that is it makes you crazy prone for addictive stuff, exercise, food, drugs, you know, work, whatever. So it's like, you're always kind of chasing a dopamine high because you don't actually produce it correctly. So that's why I, even, even the level of advanced, I'm on the, I'm on the highest level you can take at least in Australia. They won't let you have more than that. Now there are some people in America that are, are, you know, being more progressive and trying out much higher levels. There's no way they would ever do that here. Uh, not, not for at least the next 20 years. So I, I supplement with, I got to take shit tons of caffeine. You know, I do like the nicotine mini lozenges. Like, so I have to actually overstimulate myself for to calm myself down. So when and that's kind of the thing that most of the drugs that you'll see, most of them are like amphetamine based. So they're amphetamine based because they smooth you out with the dopamine. So for me, like if you don't have ADD and you took my medication, you'd feel like you were on speed. when I take it, it actually calms me down. Like I've taken a Valium, um, which is a really weird thing to think about, but that's what it does. Um, even like in my party days, um, when we would do, you know, cocaine and sniff a little cocaine, or maybe do a line of meth, I would always be calm. And I didn know why everybody was so hyped up I like why is it This is cool I actually feel normal What going on And I never understood that but I never I also that was before I started getting into like looking at pharmacokinetics and looking all that. And I didn't realize that that's what the Ritalin was doing for me. And that was what the Adderall and that's what the Concerta was doing. And I could not ever stand those drugs. I took them as a necessity to get through school and all that. But I think that those drugs, they're most of them are they're dirty to me they're just they're too they're too potent they're too fast so especially like ritalin and adderall um when i would take that just for context just for context here i'm on a long acting rhythm i've got a short acting i for which was given to me for the days where you you working really hard into night to keep you going yeah i've never taken it i've tried not to um but yeah so just for just for context yeah and say like the like looking at um looking at like ritalin and and adderall when i when i first got on they didn't have long acting most of them were just very short acting you know like three four five hours the only thing i didn't like too is it fucked my sleep up and it fucked up my appetite like i couldn't eat um then they brought concerto which is like a time released ritalin it's like in a little plastic capsule looking thing with a hole on it so that it's kind of, it kind of just leeches out of the capsule over time. And that was okay. But I, it always gave me this weird, dirty, acidic-y feeling. And when I got on Vyvanse, that was a moneymaker. I could take Vyvanse and be totally normal. The Ritalin and the Concert and the Adderall always made me a zombie. So when I would take it, I would have no personality. I would just sit there and just like, I wouldn't talk. You know, I didn't like the way it made me feel. the vivance never had any of those problems so yeah so you can take one of those i'll take one at like six seven in the morning and i'm pretty good until you know five five or six at night um so that's always been the been the one for me it's interesting you mentioned about like taking like stimulants whether that's medications or recreational stuff and and feeling calm like i remember the first day that i took um took ritalin and it was a weird thing because i was i was waiting for myself to be really amped up and hyper i was ready to be really over the top and it was i felt more present it was weird like i was doing my sessions and i was like there in the room with my client i was getting more sessions enjoying my work more because i wasn't thinking about all the things i still need to do like like that feeling of being behind and feeling like oh what do i have to do first i can't be present on what i'm doing because i'm thinking about all those other things all of the time and i remember coming home and list your podcast was um of all people it was diarist with pierce morgan right so i've never i've never had so much focused listening to pierce morgan in my whole entire life but i was just so present in it i was like is this what it should be like all the time i wasn't even aware of that yeah that i think that the way the way i try to explain it to people is that you know when you're not on the medication there's a lot of noise and when you take it it cuts all the noise down like this always this crazy amount of background noise and a lot of times it's like somebody's changing the channel on a tv and they won't stop changing it and it's like just just put it on one channel but it just keeps changing and changing and changing and changing and then when when you take your medication it's like the tv stops on the greatest movie you've ever seen and you can concentrate on it so that's a that's a brilliant into now. Yeah, you know, because I say that I always remember the times like, you know, I sit there and I was watching a beginner 12 week GBC program. And you know, you know, from where we used to work, how could I must be writing 12 week GBC programs, because that's all you ever write. I like so I said, it is a good method, though. I still use it very regularly to this day. But I'm sitting there with this problem. I've written a million of these. I know exactly what I'm doing. If you sat there and tap on the shoulder after what you're gonna write for this client, I go, Yeah, I'll do this, this, this and this. And I sat there I go, the one of the best edges from a YouTube channel called how to ADHD. And it's like, you've got a bridge like an Indiana Jones Temple of Doom style rickety wooden bridge. And you you know, the destination, you know how to get there. And you take the slats out. So you've just got these gaps. And I'm sitting there with this program, I know how to write, but I can't do it. I'm just stuck. I was like, why? This is the moment why I start thinking there's more to this i'm not just lazy or bored so i was like i know how to do this why am i so stuck yeah and that was a bit where my brain was like okay i need to look into this 100 i'll tell you what happened um i was off of it for a long time and i was just struggling i didn't realize why you know i just like you know i thought i had everything under control and i didn't um and then when i was in right right when covid hit i was in texas giving a five-day seminar. And Zoe called me. She goes, look, I've got to change your flight. You got to come home and

They're going to shut the borders down and you're going to get stuck in Texas. Okay. Which that calls me just an enormous amount of grief because I've never, ever canceled a seminar, especially right in the middle of it. Never canceled one. Oh, and I would, you know, I would be, you know, dying of colon cancer. I'd still give the seminar. I wouldn't give a shit. I ended up going to the emergency room that day or the next day because I had a panic attack and I was like freaking out. My heart rate was like 180 beats per minute. And I was like, oh, God, this is a heart attack or panic attack. And I knew what it was because I've had them before, but it's been a very long time. Go to the emergency room. They gave me a benzo. I calmed down. I'm like, OK, go back to fly back to Australia. I get here. You know, COVID's going down. Everything's shit in the bed. We had bought our gym five days before we started doing lockdown. So we're in lockdown and I didn't sleep. I was I was so anxious and so stressed out about it that and I started having a panic attack but it was one of these really mild ones that you don't feel panicky you just feel despair you don't know why and then i didn't sleep for like four days and i started hallucinating i started getting um i started getting like visual hallucinations or factory hallucinations started hearing things and i was like well that's not good um but i didn't want to i didn't i was like i probably need to go the doctor now but that's typically what happens when you don't sleep for like four days. And, um, uh, I was actually, I was actually getting quite scared, but I didn't want to call like a hospital or call anybody because I didn't want them to end up saying, well, now we're going to put you for three days. We're going to stick in this room and observe you. I didn't want to freak anybody out. So, um, I finally, I finally got to sleep. And then the next day I went to the doctor and I said, look, this is what's happening. I have panic attacks, blah, blah. So she prescribed me some diazepam to use, you know, uh, if I needed it. And, uh, she tried to put me on an antidepressant and I go, look, I'm not depressed. I'm not at all depressed. I'm like, there's something else wrong. Like I don't try to put me on Lexapro. And she went like straight to the highest dosage. And I went, I'm not taking that. Like I'll just take the diazepam. And then I started thinking about, I go, you know what, listen, you know, I'm supposed to be on ADD medication. I haven't taken it for a while. Cause I just felt like I had under control. I think if I just get back on my ADD medication, this will go away. And so she was like, well, I'm not really supposed to. I said, look, I can tell you the dosage I used to be on. I can tell you every, every drug I've been on the dosages, how long I took it, at what age I took it. You know, I don't want to have to get referred to a psychiatrist to get, you know, so she says, you know what, fuck it. If you already know, we'll just start you out on a, on a half dose. And I'm like, cool. Start taking it. Everything went away, like no more panic I was getting, um, I was getting arrhythmias and shit. And I was, uh, all that went away. The minute I got on my Vyvanse, my heart, I stopped skipping beats. I stopped feeling my heart popping because I would every like fourth beat I would hit a thump. And so I had to go get it like an echo. I went and got an ECG EKG, had to go to the cardiologist a couple of times. Cardiologist goes, I don't know why your doctor even sent you here. You're perfectly fine because everything's great because you're an athlete. You got an athlete, like you got an athlete type heart so it's gonna sound a little different than normal people and i went all right cool so i'm good he's like i'm good took my vivance nope i haven't had a single problem the last few years since i've been on the vivance last two years wow like when was it when was it you were diagnosed were you diagnosed as an adult or as a child no as a kid yeah so like is this something that you're like your parents suspected or was this something do you do you actually remember getting diagnosed um i can't remember what age it was but it was you know just a lot of like disruptive behavior inability to concentrate and i just kind of cruised through school just just just being smart you know just being smart not having to do you know what school wasn't that hard um and i guess that was part of the ad too but i was constantly getting in trouble i think when i was in high school we did uh so we still got spankings in high school when i was there like we were the last class to get paddled and i think i got paddled like 200 and something paddlings in one year which um if you got paddled a certain number of times you got to sign the paddle so i got a couple of signatures on the paddle did anyone try to get paddled more for that reason just as like i want to be able to sign it i don't think so i said i certainly didn't i said because it was not fun um because we had a pretty big uh uh principal at our school and he could swing that thing. And there were actually three different paddles. She had the, the guy's paddle, the girl's paddle, which like was like plywood, but it was nothing. And then he had the bad kids paddle, which is like hitting somebody with a goddamn Oak tree. Um, yeah. So I never got hit with a bad paddle. I just got hit with a normal paddle, but, um, yeah. So then I think, you know, cause I was kind of on and off, um, when I was a kid, I didn't like the way Ritalin made me feel, so I wouldn't take it So I just stopped And then I got into college and got on back on it like in my early 20s And then you know here the thing like you said you told me earlier like you know I forgot to find out what the results were when I went to testing and all that. That's the same thing. I ran out of medication, forgot to refill it, and then just went back on this ADD path of just driving off the road into the fucking end of the fucking bush, you know, and never got back on it like i i remember i remember vividly um you know like having i actually went to the doctor for something else like i was like well you know i went in and i was i was nervous about something i was like so i i was you know i'd last minute appointment to go to the doctor i was worried about something else i'd had about four or five coffees by that point in the day just like stimulating myself i was like i was like i still do to a degree but certainly more on the stages to keep me focused in that stage and i go in and i sit down to the doctors and i my my blood pressure was through the roof probably because of nerves white coat syndrome caffeinated right you know and i you know i've done enough of your course to check my blood pressure fairly regularly to know that i'm i'm i'm not i'm not about to have a heart attack and keel over so i'm getting in you've got five or six nurses around me testing my blood pressure guys he's really through the roof like no no i've tested like they're like here's the last three four mornings of readings i'm all right like go in went in immediately found out what i was worrying about was fine i was like while I'm here, like, you know, let, can I ask about this? Cause I've been worried about this for a while. Started going through the little questionnaire and then it was like, yeah, you're off the charts. I'm going to prescribe you this. And like, boom. And then I go away and like one, like within one day, I'm just like, oh, okay. This is, it was, it was such a, it was such an incredible feeling because it was like getting diagnosed as an adult. It's like this weight off your mind. All the times where you felt like, why, why did I say that or why am I so incapable of doing that or feel like I'm lazy or feeling like I'm a failure and I sat there I felt like I'm a relatively smart kid I've done all right for myself why can't I live anywhere near my potential and it's just like I have an answer which is such a lovely feeling because it was just like I'm not dumb I'm not lazy I'm not you know I don't lack willpower you know or motivation whatever buzzword you want to put with it and it was such a weight off my shoulders yes it's free it's a feeling of freedom it's it's like finally now i understand you know why i've had all these issues right so you know um yeah it can be it can be a really a really freeing experience and for me like i've never had to worry too much about it because i got diagnosed early, and I know I've always had it, but, you know, getting back on it, getting back on it, what was it, February 2020, that's shown me, like, I, you know, it's been, like, okay, this is why, you know, the last, like, 10 years have been kind of chaotic, up and down, and this probably should never have gotten off my meds. So, one of the things you mentioned at the start this like doubling back was that like there's many benefits i think well well we can double back to that whenever you want um but like what like one of the things you said there's many benefits of having adhd and i i totally agree with you i think one of them is creativity but you have to find solutions outside the box of stuff because stuff don't work i've tried every to-do list every system everything to make my life easier in the book we have probably tried more productivity hacks than anyone else on the planet so there is going to be people listening to this that some may be able to relate with our stories some may just procrastinate at times and be a little bit bored first off like why in a broader spectrum do you think people generally procrastinate and from all the stuff that you've tried through all your years what are the best productivity lessons you have personally learned so like why do people procrastinate in general i think well i think it's it's just because they just, they're doing things they just don't want to do. Right. That's usually like, imagine not been in this situation before where you're in a job, you just absolutely hate. So you just find shit to do because you're just not having much fun with the things you're doing for work. Now for, for us being ADD, that's ridiculous. I fucking love the work. I love to program. I love to get online. I love talking to my clients. So if I don't do that, it's not because I don't want to do it. It's because I'm having an episode or whatever, you know, or I'm stressed out and it's making my symptoms a lot worse. Because I actually, you know, I can't think of anything more awesome than sitting here and running cool-ass training programs and seeing my clients put on like 50 kilos in a back squat in a couple of months. You know, I can't think of anything more fucking cool than that. And that creativity, creativity is a big one too, because I think that's one of the benefits as as well is that you can see these abstract things that most people wouldn put the two and two together right Like if you think one of the things that you learned in program design is the backload of structural balance. And you look at that and it's like, it defies everything we're told not to do in a workout. But when you put it together, it fucking works like a fucking champion. But only somebody that had that ability to be creative and think outside the box, only someone like that would be able to put that together because someone they couldn't think like that would never say well let's put this with this that's a good idea they'd go no this and this does not go together and then we would be like well why not let's try it and see what happens but you know so i think there's that that benefit as far as an interesting note from that when you when i remember you you put a video going through that i was like this makes so much sense like yeah actually in a way it makes more sense than the generic stuff that we you you originally told because it's like like it's two sides of a pivot like it why why is no one thought like that before yeah because they're told they can't do things and they're just so they just blindly believe it without saying well this actually kind of makes sense the way this works let's try and see what happens and i remember on the front of that video i tell you guys like this is going to look so stupid and you're going to think i'm absolutely insane but i'm telling you this works and everybody tried and like holy shit that works really fast um i just don't talk about it in public because people call me a fucking moron because they're doing everything that they're told not to do but whatever anyone wants to learn more about that our last podcast i'll uh put in the show notes description below if you want to listen to sound like a moron but he's right that's it a moron but but somehow it works who knows um as far as productivity um there's a couple of things number one i'm really bad at saying yes when i should say no so somebody's like hey can you do do this? I'm like, yes. Can you do this? Yes. Can you do this? Yes. And then it's like, okay, I've got too many yes things I can't actually do. And the problem is a lot of people want things done now. And it's like, okay, but your yes thing isn't something that's crucial that needs to be done now. But then if I don't do it right, then you forget. So then you piss people off and you upset people and all that. And they don't understand because they don't understand what's going on in your head. So I would say number one is just learn that it's okay to say no to people. and it's okay to tell people, you know, I can do that, but I can't do it right now, but I'm going to need you to contact me maybe in two weeks and then maybe I'll be able to do it. So that's one thing I've had to do is like, say, I can't do it now, but I can do it. I can probably do it in a couple of weeks. And then I don't get back to them and they get mad. So I always, I put ownership in that, in their court and I say, look, but you're going to need to contact me, contact me like next friday and we'll see what's going on right because then they can't get mad because they accept the responsibility of contacting me so then that takes my ownership away from it um the second thing is get things done immediately when you wake up and i can't i try not to do any appointments in the morning if i can help it i try to push there are sometimes i have to do things first thing like mentorships or consults or whatever like at seven in the morning because they're on the other side of the world and they can't do it any other time. But if I can avoid that, I try to block out that morning so that I can sit at my computer and just get in a good rhythm for six to eight hours and get it done. Then if I can get all my tasks that I need to get done that day, then I free up the rest of the time to just, if I get distracted, it's cool because I already got that shit done. But I have to do it in the morning when I get my, take my meds take my coffee put my nicotine in put my headphones on music and just start going at it i think that i think that's an interesting one and i another thing i i remember you reading your website that owning a business one advice you give to yourself my risk can go off in a tangent but is that that freedom line every business coach talks about these days is a myth but i do think where that line does is relevant is the ability to go i'm going to block that work in the morning because sometimes when me still doing a lot of one-to-one coaching is that my mornings end up blocked out with client work and so that is the time where i would be so much better at doing some of the stuff that now is pushed to later in the day into the evening and things like that so i i 100 get that point i want to have a quieter morning i get so much more done all the time yeah yeah you've mentioned nicotine a few times what is the impact nicotine has on you or in general that you think nicotine is useful? It's just another stimulant. Just another stimulant that helps massively. There's some positive effects of memory as well and motivation. So those things are always good. I just kind of abuse it. I take way more than I should, but it does help keep things kind of level and stable. I think if I were able to acquire a larger dose of I-Vans, I probably wouldn need it But since that not an option it still it still you know what can I add to this to make it more effective And that what I found works for me So everybody going to have to find a different combination of things going to work for them. And that works. And occasionally a bit of tyrosine, like what I'll, what I'll look at as well. If you remember back to like foundations, um, or foundation seminar, which you've been at, um, we talk about like melanin and tyrosine and so how tyrosine is making your dopamine norepinephrine epinephrine it's also making thyroid it's also making melanin if i notice that my skin tone is dropped i'll i'll add in some tyrosine because i know that if i'm not making melanin it's being used for something else and it's most likely being used for some of the stress chemicals that that's really interesting because that's something i've not i've not looked at i mean do you ever like what's your thoughts on using something like choline because i'm assuming that's heavy stimulant medication i don't know as much about your medication so you know correct me if i'm wrong we this will deplete a lot of things initially choline b vitamins things like this are these important things to supplement as well to offset the heavy stimulant you could i haven't tried it i haven't tried it i feel you know a couple eggs a day and some choline foods might be all right i i probably would investigate that i need to think about it maybe like um um i probably i probably wouldn't take if i took choline what would i take i wouldn't take alpha gpc because it's just it's too expensive you need you just need such a high high amount of it and usually the amounts that you need make you pretty nauseous uh if if you take it and then work out you get over that but if you take it and you're just sitting here working you're probably going to get bubble guts and get quite nauseous um i'd probably look at like lecithin like taking a couple tablespoons of less less less than granules or maybe like choline by tartrate or what is it choline is that right like cooling bedtime uh fuck i haven't looked into choline so long i can't remember but i would probably take a i'd probably take a fairly inexpensive form of choline yeah you just don't you don't it's not something that's really that beneficial to take a really high dollar one unless it's for like sports performance take take 2400 milligrams before you go and lift heavy it's going to have a really good effect but i i don't see it as having that great of an effect by itself for this but i could be wrong i'd have to look into it is there any consideration that you would advise for somebody this is more personal question i suppose for someone is taking adhd medication is there anything like when it comes to nutrition lifestyle things that we need to be more aware of when you're taking things like this i'm assuming it will have effects on blood pressure and various things on a blood panel as well yeah number one is like uh in in make sure you investigate all the different types of medications because they're not for everybody. Um, you know, that's like the fast acting stuff and the more direct amphetamines never worked that well for me. So the, the, the, uh, by Vance is bonded to, um, uh, lysine. So it tends that it cleaves off very slowly. So it's very smooth. So if you are taking medication and you find you lose your appetite, if, if, I mean, if you're dieting, that's a good thing, but if you're not, that's a bad thing. Um, cause you'll just forget to eat and you won't eat. And let's say you're trying to put on muscle, you're trying to put on size that you'll find that you're eating like 1200 calories a day when you're trying to eat 24, 2400, right? Um, if it's affecting your sleep. So in talk, work with your doctor to find the right medication and don't just take their word for it. So if you're what I would probably do, if I had to start over, let's say they put me on Ritalin because that's super common. I would, I would try that. And then maybe in a couple months say, Hey, can I try something else? maybe move to something else like Adderall or Concerta, you know, try something time release and then say, well, that, that worked. Okay. But can I try by Vance? And there's a couple of other new ones. Can I try that and kind of try all the different ones to see which one feels best because they all do very similar things, but some are faster, some are slower, some it works slightly differently. You really want to investigate and find the right one because you don't want to be taking one. that's now having all these negative effects that would be easily solved by switching to something else. And if you don't talk to your doctor about that, they won't think to switch you. They'll think everything's fine. Um, it's in, it's because it's not a measurable, it's not an objectively measurable thing. Like if you go to the doctor and you have hypertension, maybe they give you a calcium channel blocker, maybe to give you a bat and a, maybe they just give you calcium channel blocker. You go back in and it's kind of help, but it's not, it's not getting the blood pressure down to good levels. Maybe they put you on an ACE inhibitor. Then like okay those two worked really well but maybe you're getting some swelling in your feet okay maybe they put you on a diuretic as well okay there now they found the right combination for you so but the thing is the difference between that problem and add is that there's no blood test for add there's no way of objectively they have to use subjective markers of do i feel good or not so you have to be vocal with your doctor and and ask them if it's okay to kind of do a a merry-go-round of different things to see which one works for you. That's what's really

advice actually really timely advice as well so thank you very much for that because i'm literally coming to the end of my first uh month's dose of of ritalin yeah it'll be really really useful to sort of play around with things i mean for somebody again we're making this a little bit obviously this is adhd focus but in general for someone who wants to you know have better memory have better focus have better attention you know is there things from a nutrition perspective that you would recommend that people might oversight whether it's the the obvious generic stuff or whether it's something that people don't think about from a nutrition supplementation and a lifestyle perspective yeah from i mean from a nutrition thing i would say more um more plants i don't want to say veganism but but people don't eat enough plant matter so especially things like um like berries like berries that have a lot of antioxidants and a lot of chemicals that improve memory but we don't no one really knows how they do that they kind of have an idea they're starting to, but you know, that type of thing, um, for most people that don't have ADHD, don't, don't get, watch your stimulant intake because for those types of people, it's going to actually make things worse because it's going to make them almost have like ADD types of symptoms. They're all jacked up. Um, whereas it's like, okay, you're normal, but now you've taken so much coffee that now you're acting like you're ADD. So maybe if you improve your sleep and, and maybe have a reasonable amount of coffee maybe throw some theanine and with that they smooth some things out you'll probably be concentrating better you're probably not procrastinate you probably get more done um that's what that's this type of stuff i would look at i like uh is a thing is a precursor to the gaba because i can actually cross the blood bank about it right is that the mentality well well no what i would use it for is to um to block uh to block like adenosine receptors. Um, well, what am I looking at? It's, you're going to make me pull this out. I have a good picture of this, but basically we're going to say the not, cause I can't think of us. It's again, it's late in the day and my medication wearing off. But, um, if you want to look at like the non-sciencey, um, reason why you would use the ending with coffee is it, it's smooths out the negative effects from coffee. So if you have coffee, you still get the, the focused energy but you don't get the erratic you know jacked up feeling from it right so yeah yeah and i like uh sun theanine is uh is the tried and true one that i've always used so if you see sun theanine on the bottle then that's pretty good so like if you're having a couple cups of coffee maybe throw in 100 milligrams of that and see if that smooths it out quite a bit that that's interesting that's something certainly i look at me what do you see often like i mean I'm assuming you've worked with people that have ADD, ADHD, and I know you work with people who have massive caffeine addictions because that's 90% of the personal training industry and I know how many coaches you train. You know, like, whether it's stimulant medication or stimulants in general, like, do you see this having a big impact on HRV? This is something, again, a relatively personal question when I know that, you know, I even, like, improved my nutrition, improved my conditioning over the course of the last year. resting heart rates in a low place blood pressure in a really good spot my hrv is always relatively on the low end of where things should be you know like this could be completely unrelated but when i start thinking of like a heavy use of stimulants also now finding out potentially having you know now having adhd i'm starting is there a link here between you know have you taken hrv lately since you started a medication uh not consistently i haven't used this thing quite enough i never charged it would be really interesting because there's a lot of people i've talked to that the minute they got in there on their meds that their hrv actually got better interesting yeah i the only time the only time i took i remembered this being charged and took it was after a massive team social where alcohol obviously crashed my metrics anyway so it ended up being exactly the same um but that that'll be that'll be interesting to look at actually it would be yeah it'd be interesting for you to track that and just see if it's significantly better than what you're tracking was before you started the medication and maybe different between medications if i like if i've got a month of ritalin see how that affects it then go on to something else see what happens there that could be a very very interesting thing one of the big things too is when you when you get on the medication obviously it's a stimulant so uh you're going to probably see a small increase in heart rate you're probably going to also see a small increase in blood pressure so i'm big on people with add getting your your lifts and your mess done like get your low intensity and moderate intensity cardio done and that will allow you to become stress resilient so that you it won't have that effect like i still even on medication i still have sub 120 over 80 um blood pressure and my heart resting heart rate still like 48 to 52 even on the even on the medication but when you first get on it you gonna see blood pressure is gonna jump up a tick and it shouldn jump up massively but you're probably gonna see it jump up a little and the heart rate but after a couple two to three weeks it should normalize um but then if you if you like i did this stupidly i ran out of my medication forgot to go to back to the doctor and i went for like two weeks without it and i saw when I got back on it, I had this crazy, you know, increase in blood pressure again and heart rate. It was really super weird, but then it just leveled out and you got normal. But I think if you get really aerobically fit, um, that will prevent or hopefully be a prophylactic of preventing those increases. Um, and, and, um, I mean, aerobic training has such a profound impact as well on brain derived nootrophic factor and, um, and, and the concentration and linking neural networks. So people who aren't doing any aerobic activity, um, and haven't for a long time, I would suggest doing a couple of blocks of that, like daily aerobics, 30, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, something like that. It's real easy stuff, not just walking because that's not really going to do you need, you need the huffy puffy stuff. So just building up to say a 70% R.E. Max, kind of sustaining that just for a couple of months. And you'll see a massive decrease in blood pressure and heart rate. And you'll find that everything's a lot more smooth. You'll concentrate much better. You also sleep a lot better as well. And the good thing about that, that's something that's probably an impact of anyone. ADHD, you know it. Like how many people, and you alluded to it early on in terms of people, heavy use of caffeine intake. It's like, you know, are you getting those symptoms artificially because you're always heavily caffeinated? you're always on low sleep now i'm i'm really intrigued at seeing what um when i go back to the uk in the end of june and i'm there for six weeks and that's what i plump here at the time and i'm gonna like switch decaf cut my caffeine intake right down i'm not doing one-to-one sessions so i can spend more time sleeping i'm like i'm really intrigued to see what happens to my metrics keep my medication up but like see what happens around that and see how much better sort of a lot of those things get because i i know i can burn the candle at both ends yeah and one thing too like going back to that kind of doing the aerobic things i posted this a while back but there's been quite a few studies looking at like uh aerobic activity and memory and what they did was they would do aerobic activity and study and they found that memory retention was much higher if you were doing aerobic training and then like kind of uh contrast training that with a study session so it actually it works not just for the adb people for normal people as well okay that's that that that's that's really interesting especially you know as i said this is going to be my my my pet project for six weeks not only see where my metrics at but almost like see how much study i can get done i've already started booking as many consoles i can get done from people in the uk and missed in-person education i've not done any in two years because there's there's nothing here in hong kong but you know so i'm making making up for lost time i'm going to see tom hibbert go and see michael gould and see i'll travel and see nick if i can engage in a good rant every now and again um but uh yeah like yeah really really really interesting stuff for this i mean do you believe in like is there anything you do in terms of like we spoke about this last time in terms of posture stuff but like mindfulness breath work the breath work's the big hype thing at the moment and i know when we spoke about from a posture standpoint we spoke about like well it's like trying to pitch in the ocean make it yellow it has a massive impact but can you control that in that short period of time when it comes to memory focus like this the other side of stuff like out of the gym stuff is this something you utilize with yourself or clients do you feel it's useful um i should i should do it and i know i should do it the problem is i go through spurts it's boring as fuck. So it's not to me, it's not like, it's not, I don't know the way to say like sexy enough for me to stick with. So the compliancy for myself is really poor. And I find the compliancy for that stuff with your clients are really poor as well. Like your clients don't mind going in and doing four or five hours of training a week, but you try to get them to do 10 or 15 minutes of mindful breathing and like headspace. You just, there was, I had such a low compliancy rate for it that I just got rid of it so I'll tell them to do it but I don't program it anymore because I know they're not going to do it anyways some people will like the more hippie foo-foo holistic type of you know clients will but most of my clients are like high level athletes and coaches and they just won't do it so I just stopped um what about ice ice therapy like cold showers things like this because you mentioned stress resilience earlier on yeah And it's just something that another thing that can potentially artificially create that. So do you think this is useful to throw in every now and again for various things Yeah possibly possibly I think cold showers if your water gets cold enough is practical If you do like you know I do like the Wim Hof breathing because you kind of get in that that real massive sympathetic state and you don feel the cold or you can train yourself not to feel it I think that a really good idea again it's a compliance issue like i used to do that but um the only problem was i would feel so bad when i got out of the shower because of the shrinkage because i'm not i'm not well endowed anyway so then it looked like i had a fucking any like a little outie belly button so i just it made me so feel bad so i was like oh god you know it looked like a turtle poking its head out of a shell oh i wish i wish i could say i couldn't relate i really really do um but i remember like going into like i did i did one of those events a guy called uh brian lauer i've had on the show talking about like breath work and ice stuff and he does these events in hong kong he learned from whim and he did something you do like you learn about whim half and all the methods and then you do a number of them and then you get into a big ice ice bucket you know and yeah and i like i i remember people you know doing breath holds and getting a minute tops then going to like seven minutes after the breathing drills and i i couldn't believe how comfortable i felt i remember i was feeling so nervous and scared about the prostrates of getting into an ice bath and it was so comfortable in a way by the time i got in there for the second time yeah yeah let's say i'm not yet i do want to do one of those i haven't done it yet i still have time but um i remember this one zoe and i first got together so it was years and years and years ago i was big into the Wim Hof stuff and I was really doing it and I did a hard out for months. Um, and it just, it kind of stopped being a priority for me just because I had so much else to do. It was hard for me to just, just like, it was hard for me to prioritize time for it, but it was really weird. You know, when you're doing the, you're doing hyperventilation breathing and you get these big breath holes, especially when you start learning how to, you know, how you try to pull it into your head and you get that really weird thing i shit you not i was doing in the shower one time and i wasn't i wasn't having a fap or anything but i swear to god i had an orgasm from it i actually i i can't explain it but i got to this point where i was like and it was the weirdest thing and that's the audio for the show when i put the audio clip out that that exact noise but man that that actually made me want to do it a lot more but then i was traveling and i got too busy so i just forgot i think i'll have it tonight before i go to bed there's one of the methods that that was in the windhoff event was it was a dmt breathing and yeah that's what it is yeah i never got that from it which is a massive shame that would have been amazing but like you know i i there's that channel 4 show recently that about people doing all the windhoff stuff and there's definitely something more more people have experienced things closer to sort of dmt from from this breath which i think is incredible and looking at women himself with like beating off infections and illnesses and things like this which it's wild necessarily initially basically just reinforces a lot of your work in terms of like this is like at quick succession the impact controlling stress and becoming resilient to stress hasn't yeah like what you can teach someone over 12 weeks is what he's teaching people you know in these very short intense breath works is like it's it's it's a shame that because here's here's that here's the the impulse control getting me cancelled it's it's a shame it's it's a shame that big pharmaceutical companies will never allow his stuff to become mainstream enough to actually see what effects it can actually have well you know i the thing is you can't it's so out in left field is will it ever become mainstream or just stay in pockets of people who are into that type of stuff that's the thing is we have a hard enough time getting people to exercise and eat right even though they know they should. And then you get a guy like Wim Hof who, you know, he's got this aura about him and all the people that follow him. It's kind of almost like this guru-ish type of thing. And he's like, I'm not your guru, but anytime somebody's at a top level like that, they're going to have people like fanboys and fangirls. And it just kind of puts some people off and it just attracts a certain type of person. Right. So I don't, I don't think it would become mainstream just for the fact that the general public wouldn't accept it as mainstream. If they don't even accept fucking walking an hour a day or even lifting weights and eating vegetables, they won't even do that. So they're probably not gonna sit around and do hyperventilation breathing. And if anybody's never done it, they don't understand like there is a certain level of fear you go through when you're doing it. And there's a certain weirdness you feel and you have to overcome that in order to get to the next level of that breathing. And so I was teaching myself how to do this, just reading his stuff and like I did an online course of his and all this. And I think this is before he was doing seminars. And I remember a couple of times I was laying on the ground going, I'm going to die. I don know why I feel like this I going to die And a lot of people are so anxious they couldn get through that And Eugene Teo his brother was at one of my seminars and he came over to hang out at the Airbnb we're at. And I was teaching, I had been showing people how to do my interpretation of Wim Hof breathing, which is what I learned from his seminars and his online course material. And I remember Eugene's brother got like really deep into it and started freaking out. And it was like, Oh, I don't know. I'm feeling my legs. I can't feel my legs. And I was like, Holy shit. And I started freaking out. I'm like, Oh God, did I do something bad? And it's just a lot of people when they get to that level where they actually feel it, you feel so weird that you think something's wrong, even though nothing's actually wrong. You're actually, it's probably a good thing you're going to that level but that level of um of hyperventilation is going to stimulate the sympathetic nervous system which is going to make you feel ramped up and a bit crazy and a bit weird do you see that that's because in i get in theory that the aim is if you ramp up like almost artificially in a way sympathetic nervous system you become more resilient to it you learn how to calm down you know to control your breathing through it do you feel it does have a big carryover if people are consistent with it into stress of day-to-day life do you like if you have work meeting or something happens at work or life do you think doing this will make you better at dealing with this yeah i think so i feel so and i feel that way with most of the training you do like if we go lift weights that's sympathetic if you you know if you go run sprints that's sympathetic that's why we you know we counter that stuff with the easy stuff like the mobility flexibility um if you're into the breathing stuff that type of something out of meditation, you know, low, slow cardiovascular work and that type of thing. I think both sides of that are really important because if you can drive yourself in a really like a naturally high sympathetic state, then whatever you're feeling right now, when you're normal, doesn't seem like it's that bad. And then you can use the parasympathetic stuff to kind of pull all that back over to the right. So you can equalize both of those sides of the autonomic nervous system. So I think they're both important to train. I think it's good that you bring that up, because a lot of the stuff that we spoke about, especially for a issue, but generally focus in general, is people go to stimulants, whether it's a medication given to your doctor by stimulus, or it's a, you know, a caffeine addiction, that, you know, a lot of this is like the stuff around this, the mindfulness, the breath, what the nutrition stuff, supplementation stuff you mentioned, it's almost just like, pulling us back into the middle to a degree, you You know, obviously you're going to need to be more stimulated than other people, but every medication you take that helps the biggest problem, there's always going to be an issue and a result of ramping up your nervous system regularly to allow you to focus, right? Yeah, people have to understand you don't get anything for free. So if you're doing something, there's always a trade-off. So if you think about if you think about just what we do with like even like physique training, like, cool, I want to get abs, but I'm gonna have to go through this level of suffering to get there. So that's the trade off. Like, I'm going to have to do a lot of hard work. I'm going to have to say no to a lot of things if I want to build a gnarly physique. That's the trade off. And then the more gnarly the physique, the more health consequences, the more negative repercussions that you have to deal with that you have to then you have to crawl through. It's like you got to crawl through glass while you're naked, you know, that type of thing if you want to get there. But that's why so many people can't actually get to that level because they can't get through the pain of the work and the feeling that they're going to feel to get there. So, you know, it's all a yin and yang thing. It's an on and off. It's a good and evil. There's always an opposite reaction to what you're going to do. So I often say this and I don't know if this is going to make sense. sometimes I'll say this analogy and people like, I have no idea what you're talking about, but you know, I read a lot of fantasy and I watch a lot of, um, you know, I watch a lot of like fantasy stuff. I watch a lot of Harry Potter and I watch like all that shit. And, uh, it's my favorite genre. And if you think about, if you ever watched movies with like, like witchcraft, right. They always talk about this and they say this in the books too. Like there's always a trade-off. You always have to give something up to get the spell done. And that's why things like necromancers frowned upon in these books because you're going to raise somebody from the dead somebody else has to die so that's kind of the thing with this too if you're using you know stimulants it's a double-edged sword that can go really well but just understand you take that too far there's going to be a massive negative repercussion to that so you're going to fuck your sleep up you're going to fuck your nervous system up you might fuck your gut up you know it might actually you might over stimulate to the point where you're scatterbrained and and it might have the effect that you're trying to resolve with not having energy. Now you went to a dose that kind of gave you the perception of less fatigue, but then you took it too far and

And now you're too ramped up and now you're really fucked and you got to wait for that to come back down. So my tolerance to, my tolerance to caffeine has gone down since, since starting taking the Ritalin, not from a caffeinated perspective, because I'm used to it. And I have my very unhealthy addiction to Coke zero, which doesn't, doesn't help this at all. But I, but from a gut perspective, I've worked out very quick. Cause at all, like two, three days in, I was like, Oh man, my guts are filling up. And it just, my usual caffeine intake. Now I've added a big stimulant on top of it. And that, that was something I noticed noticed very quickly um which is again reason why I'm quite looking forward to this six weeks at home when I can sort of like go okay let's pull back on all this other stuff and it's just like really focus on just this stuff and and see see see where that goes what's your you mentioned like you mentioned a couple things earlier on you mentioned obviously the impact that Zoe has in terms of keeping on point and and you know bringing you back in um and you mentioned being able to I can't do this now and say no to stuff I mean what's what's your take in terms of productivity, memory on outsourcing stuff? How much do you do that in your business? Oh, that was so hard for me to do when we first started because I was such a control freak. I was very picky about how I wanted things done. I'm very fussy. And I had a lot of hard, I had a really hard time giving control to people, especially when I started, when I started employing other coaches. And then I was like, okay, I'm going to give you these clients and there's a certain way I want things done. And it was hard, right? But anything that is below your pay grade, anything that you don't have to actually do, pay someone else to do it. Because especially at where I am in my company, it doesn't make sense for me to do some of these tasks that somebody else could easily do. Like I need to be doing what I have expertise in that no one else of my company could do. So if I'm doing this little niddly shit, like that's taking away time that I should be using my skills and I should take, let one of my other employees or outsource a PA, like a virtual PA or something like that, let them do it. So we do, we have a virtual PA that she's the one that takes care of our website, but she also takes care of some of the other things. It's like, Hey, I need a spreadsheet for this. I don't want to sit around and try to read a book and try to figure out how to make this fucking spreadsheet. That's going to say it's five hours i could have been programming or i could have been writing content or i could have been creating new new new education so um because again too if if you say yes to too many things especially things that you don't actually need to do then all the important stuff is going to get pushed to the side and then that's going to cause more stress and more anxiety it's not pushed even it's not pushed to the side you don't do it the quality that you're that you're you know and i can imagine like for someone like you who is that you have a certain way of doing things you have a reputation in this industry of having very very high quality education high quality courses i don't think the quality that you're known for would be possible if you were having to do all the back end stuff for the website all the editing all the filming all the admin all the outreach all the marketing all yourself it's that ability to be able to focus on that one thing and you went through your routine and how focused it was, but how much do you think that's because you've streamlined your day to the things that you're good at and you enjoy, and that's why you can stay the course? Yeah. And that has to be what's done, especially if you get really busy. We're super busy. So there's only so many hours in a day. There's only so many hours you can actually work in a day. I don't have a problem working 12 hours, 16 hours, but you still got to sleep and you still gotta poop and i still gotta train you know and i still gotta go to the grocery store and get food i can't live on uber eats you know so you you have to you have to mitigate your time by leveraging other people that can do have the capacity to do the things that you don't need to do and also can probably do them better because they can take the time like here's the thing like in you know and i've been criticized for this before like if you look at like my slides in my education they're nothing fancy like i'm you want good information or do you you want to get taught how to do things right you want fancy fucking slides so there are other people who make fancier slides they have fancier videos and all that but fuck it i'm all about the information and if i was sitting in there really trying to make my slides look really really good i wouldn't be able to i wouldn't be able to research and develop and do all the other things right so that's my next i was telling Zoe yesterday, I'm like, I really want to get someone that's good at, um, at putting slides together and building templates and making really nice. So we can polish it off because we do, you will get criticized for that because people will focus on the stupidest shit. Um, so now we've got to take care of that. So I have to find somebody who can like be the creative director kind of thing And you know a virtual PA or whoever who can now say okay I really I really good at PowerPoint I really good at Microsoft whatever the fuck they use or Canva and can put these pretty slides together Like Matt Peacock if you look at his slides he got these amazing slides but he really good at that shit Like he could do that stuff really fast. If I tried to make slides like Matt does, it would take me all day to do one fucking slide. Exactly. I always think that thing is like, if I had all day, if I didn't have anything to do, I can get really good at it. It's like, I could probably get to a point where it takes me five minutes make that slide but i don't have the five hours to learn how to make it in five minutes 100 yeah and you know what if i did them like i would be on one slide for eight hours because it would never look as good as i wanted to so i would just rather say hey you make the slides here's the information here's here's my dodgy ass slides go make it look pretty yeah i've got so i've got so many canva templates and i and i i think it's it that's such a you know thing that resonates to me and i think the big one of the best investments i ever made in my business as a huge plug for him uh it's a guy from a guy called paul spencer from a company called ato solutions and he does all the automations um like if you ever need the automation onboarding emails you know trailer boards client management stuff i will send you his details he's phenomenal but he's now got this thing where like from especially from someone with an adhd brain and being able to remember stuff someone signs up if you sign up with me today you'd automatically get your welcome email you would then fill in your onboarding form that would make you a card on trello that means then that's that will give you a template meal plan that i go and adjust for the foods you like and if i want to change the calories because you know you're different from what i normally do i make that that's all done for me it's all in one place in the card and then based on my check-ins if you go how compliant you've been this week anyone that says one gets moved to red everyone that says five gets moved to green everyone in the middle gets moved to amber and i get different reminders to check in with people like the people on red i check in with more people on green i can probably wait till next check-in and like that is done without me having to do a single thing because the amount of times i'm missing attachment forget somebody or just something like that is hands down it's not cheap but it's the best investment i've ever made because it allows me to not as you mentioned earlier feel like i'm sort of like juggling commitments because either i'm trying to do too much stuff or i've got behind on one thing because i'm trying to do it all myself yeah yeah you have to man you got to if you want to go if you want to do it right you gotta you gotta have somebody that can do it right so you gotta pay for that one thing i something you said you said so people who are compliant move to green and people who aren't compliant move to red and other people get moved to what orange amber like a traffic light system did you what did you say did you say umbra amber oh amber i heard you say umbra and i was like that's a color i don't No, what the fuck is Umbra? Hammer, okay, got it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like 100% the best investment because it just means that a little bit of my brain power now can come back to focus on me. And I like the fact that you've mentioned a VA because you mentioned that three or four times now and I'm on the cusp of getting a VA. I think the fact that you've mentioned it so much means I think this is worth the investment. Yeah, like one of the things we did that I really like, and this is a Zoe idea, is we automated our onboarding process. So used to, you would have a Dropbox account And you would have all your files, all that stuff. And you go in there and you fill out your questionnaire. But then now I have to go in to Dropbox, go on your thing, pull your thing, download it, go through it. So now you're sent a web portal where type that in. And I get a nice email that just pops right on my thing. It's all your shit on it. So anything you can automate, anything you can streamline, anything you can funnel is what you want to do. because if you continue to get busier and busier, you have to have those systems in place. When we started most of them, we didn't, we just got really busy. Like day one had no system set in place and it's taken us this long. You know, we're talking six and a half years now, almost seven years to get our systems a point where it's actually getting fairly well manageable because we need these systems to go through. Cause you can't scale up. If you don't have your systems in place and try to scale, and scale up and you scale up too much and you don't have systems in place, then you're going to piss off a lot of people, which happens because you didn't have proper systems in place. And we didn't know when we first started. We were just like, okay, we can figure this out. And we quickly figured out like, no, you can't. You can't be reactive. You have to be proactive. So we've had to now go back and try to redo all that stuff and keep improving the systems and keep putting more systems so that every single thing is automated. It's a double-edged sword as well, right? because you don't sometimes you don't know how far your systems go and where the gaps in your systems are until you push against them and break them. And then you're like, oh, OK, next time I need to do this. So I for the moment, I'm revamping. I'm going to be soon revamping my check in forms because to have a bit more like logic gaps. So what I find is that people could be finishing off the dieting phase It the same check in It not as urgent anymore because it not the strict deadline Those people start to drop off the compliance for check Or I got a lot of people in Serbia I've become quite well-known in Serbia somehow. And because a lot of their English isn't good, I'll be like, what are your wins this week? And they just reply, yes. Fantastic. Brilliant. So having multiple choice to go, okay, here's a few ideas, but if there's other and you want to say something nice and personal, be my guest but also have logic jumps so like depending on where which phase you're in what you're doing the checking can be a completely different check-in depending on what questions you ask which is a complete mindfuck in terms of how i'm actually going to put this together but i've got this clear idea in my head i just need to go okay what are the actual questions going to be and i you know i think that was going to have a massive impact and allow me to kind of give better feedback know where people's problems are allow people to communicate better because able to learn how to verbalize it like going back to our point earlier on that communication um but these are these are things i love doing i like having more time to go right one of the things i like finding out what i can outsource like i like trying to go what makes my clients better now who do i pay to sort this out but you know part of the problem with a lot of coaches is they refuse to pay to do this they just they try to handle everything and it's like dude if you want to scale a big big business you're going to have to spend a lot of money and you're just going to you're just going to have to you're just going to have to accept that you may pay two thousand dollars worth of various subscriptions and automated things that's just part of it like you're gonna have to do it because you're not gonna be able to be successful and scale up unless you're doing like you you got accounting software you got a client database system you got mail systems you got canva you got all this that you have to and that it adds up really quickly like we looked at our subscriptions and i was like holy shits how much we pay and i was like what can we get rid of and so he's like none of them like we need all this to make make the wheels turn i was like cool that's a lot of money well like you go okay i know i need a mail template i know we need a client management system and then i go then there's this website called zapier i'm like what does that do well that that links all these things together well i didn't know that existed okay that's more expensive than i thought you know like having like onboarding forms you know you got type form definitely the most professional looking but you pay a premium for type form but it allows me even if it doesn't make an immediate impact on my business that level of quality that level of service that level of mental clarity will allow me down the line to make more money in the same way yeah paying you for program design course might not make me an immediate return on my investment but being better on my service having a better overall product quality in three four or five years is going to make yeah much wealthier and look the the coaches that if any coaches listen to this man they got to understand like this the our industry is overly saturated and it's getting very highly competitive so you better start thinking about next five or ten years and getting this stuff done and understand you're going to pay a lot of money to be successful or you're going to drop out in a couple of years because you're not going to be able to keep up with everybody else. Yeah. And a lot of the things I'm thinking about now are exactly that. I am thinking like, well, I remember back in the day, like I think, you know, you'd already been a couple of years in and started becoming well-known in the industry. And it was just when we started to get the Phil Leaney, Jamie Alderton, Mark Coles, Phil Graham, all rising together sort of thing. And I remember some of the stuff they're doing now. And I'm starting to look at it like going, this is, you're just waiting for the next crop of people to do that. like muscle mentors did it for a while and they sort of all fell with all their separate ways and disbanded they're waiting for the next group of people to do that and i'm like what am i do now to niche down more to get better to upskill now to be not the guy in a month's time but to be potentially be one of the industry leaders in three four five years time yeah this is what i I need to start thinking about now and I can't waste time on Canva templates or like mail software or iMovie if I need to do that because I'm losing out to somebody who wakes up every morning takes ADHD medication and sits studying for four hours right yeah you can do that yeah like I didn't have to I didn't have to worry about any of the stuff we're dealing with now because I've been in the history so long and I built the name based on good work and merit and didn't have to worry about social media and all this other stuff. But so now for the younger guys coming in, you got to worry about all that stuff because you're going to have to leverage that to become well-known and then also prove that you know your shit. So like I kind of got lucky in that regard that I'm kind of a dinosaur of the industry. And I ended up working for the right people, doing mentors for the right people and then and then becoming well but it a completely different world now And even I having to learn all this stuff because if you wanna keep driving things you gotta know how Instagram works and TikTok and all that other bullshit. So you can't know all of it. Like you can't know your shit with the science and also with training and then also like learn all these other systems. So it's better, but you're better off paying somebody. We've got a videographer that comes in once a month and we just knock out like 15 videos. There's our social media for the month. He does all the editing, the filming, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, you got to have all these people on your team and just build that out because it's not going to get less crazy. It's just going to get more crazy in our industry. It's just going to get more technical. It's going to get more saturated. And so if you want to be the fat that rises or cream that rises at the top, you got to take care of all this shit. There's just no other way you're going to do it. Do you think we're past the point of saturation now where there is true platforms anymore? on like Polycom Group for all the pros and cons that it's given you in over your career you know you rose at a time where there was respected platforms and like okay this person Polycom Group okay he's gonna be good like you you can see the remnants of of of people that came out of the Polycom Group mold that became big names at the time early days UP was very much the same that's not so much anymore, but like, do you think we're now at this point where, is there ever going to be a company again that will allow trainers to create a name for themselves by proxy? Or is it just so many now that you are literally, it's down to what you do? Look, I don't think it's the companies that are holding it back. I think it's the coaches, it's the students, man. I mean, you know, the culture that we promote, and then you go on the forums and like hardly anybody posts anything. Before I got on with Pollock and Group, there were forums. And at that point, I was just a student and I was super active on those forums, all the time helping people. That's how I became well-known. It had nothing to do with Pollock and Group. Pollock and Group accelerated me, but I was on for years. I was on the Pollock and Group forums before we were on Facebook. They had a PHP server and Charles was on there and I would get on there. That's how Charles noticed me. And then I went to more courses and more courses and Charles remembered me from the forum and then said, hey, do you want to come work for me? The problem is that they're not active. The students aren't proactive enough about networking and about talking to each other. They're all having private DM conversations, but that's not how you get well known. You get well known by being helpful and talking to people in an open forum, not by hiding yourself away and trying to be a lone wolf. But that's what they do nowadays. You don't see the culture anymore whereas um before it was pollock group not pollock psi when it was pollock and strength institute when they actually had true culture now they don't they have no culture it's all gone it was all gone when i when i started working with pollock group it was gone charles was gone andre was gone ryan finley was gone like that's it it was gone we never got that back and that's what i want to do with muscle nerds but it takes two to tango students have to be more proactive about being invested in the company and invested in each other as a community and build that build that culture up um i think the last company that did that was crossfit and then now that they've gotten so commercialized they've kind of lost that too this this could be another argument in itself for that need to outsource right because we're now pulled in more directions than ever before and i think the more people outsource the more time they can spend like i the more our time outsource i know when i you know get a vm and then take away some of the things that are on my plate i'll be more active in everything and i can imagine there are people out there that that that don't maybe reach out as much as me and really do sit in the shadows of probably even more whether they are actually busy or whether they're busy being busy you know just now i i'll say this i don't think it's too busy because i see i see them posting on other people's personal pages like having long conversations on other people's personal pages but not having enough conversations in the open forum when they've got you got 500 other coaches to talk to they they would choose to just spend one-on-one time with people um instead of and a lot of guys like when i when i came in we we understood that none of us knew like you're not gonna you're not gonna be in a you're not gonna be in a room with charles pollock when i think you know more than he has right or or andre benoit or clark flynn so you just you just realized i'm a moron but if i want to learn i've got to i've got to be okay with being a moron and ask questions and have conversations people these days they don't want anybody to think they're dumb they don't want any people to think that they are just ignorant and don't know as much as other people and they're they're too chicken to say something and learn and that's that's

they're up like be more active be proactive talk more ask questions answer questions get interactive work as a group because then you get well known stop stop private message each other's these issues when you have all these other people with different experiences and different specialities that could actually help you and then everybody would know who the you are yeah yeah i i i i totally i totally agree with that um so like just finishing off i said i wanted to sort of like finish off with something a little bit different a little bit um a little bit fun and you'd be kind of segued onto it because podcasts always do this i never know how they always come full circle but you started to go into things that grind your gears in the fitness industry and i did a podcast with brett who's one of one of was one of your mentees um yeah yeah and i was on his podcast we did an episode called room 101 so did you know that you can share the show room 101 in the UK. So Room 101 was a book, I can't remember whose book, was it George Orwell? But it was a book, it might have been George Orwell 1984 that was in, where there was Room 101 was this room where all the things that you wanted to go to hell went. And there was a TV show with Paul Merton in the UK, and it ended up becoming Frank Skinner, where people came on and things that they didn't like, they ground their gears, you know, they present it, and this is why I think this should go into Room 101, why I think Westlife should go into Room 101, or why I think lack of spatial awareness in Hong Kong. There's another cancellation one. Well, I want to go into Room 101. So I wanted to end with something a little bit fun. One thing from the fitness industry that you would send to Room 101, and one thing just generally out of left field you send to Room 101 and why? So many things in the industry right now. I think, man, how do you approach that? So one of the things is I wish everyone's elitist attitude about what they do would get thrown in room 101. Like, stop thinking that you've got everything figured out and that everybody's stupid and stop calling everybody stupid and stop saying that, you know, different methods and techniques are stupid and just see the value in it. And it's just it's a bit ridiculous. Like, there's a lot of stuff I don't agree with. Like a lot of the, the, the really pedantic biomechanics that people are putting into exercising. Um, I, I wouldn't throw that in room 101, but I'd say it's probably got less importance than just going in and finding positions that don't hurt and getting really fucking strong and doing that. But, you know, there's a lot of things that are irritating for sure. Um, like people don't want to work hard anymore. they they don't want to put weight on the bar and actually get stronger they don't want to put in the hard work they're finding ways of how do i work how do i do less hard work and try to get the same shit out of it and they don't understand it's not how it works the body is not going to become resilient unless you put it through some trauma and put the brain through some fear um yeah that's probably what probably all the bickering and fighting and everybody acting like they their way is the best way i love that from certainly elitist thing From the perspective of just like, most of the shit we argue about, we all argue about the little differences. And people forget the fact that 90 of it the fucking same You know we sit there going vegan the best or carnival the best or low But yeah they all work because you put someone in a calorie deficit now certain things might be better for certain populations etc etc but you you arguing about a method to do exactly the same thing and the one that the ones that are really annoying me when i see coaches are so caught up in this in this dogma like this person lost got shredded by you know three and a half thousand calories of carnivore diet no caloric deficit i'm like but they were though weren't they you know regardless when you didn't be a carnivore yeah like doesn't matter it's like they that and they act like the nutrition is an isolated like it lives in a vacuum like it's okay well what's their what's their need every day what how much exercise do they do like you know it is a lot of man i tell you what like what really ground my gear last night is i woke up this morning and Zoe had posted that reverse, like that reverse step down lunge into a Russian step up. And a guy repost, didn't tag us in it, but just posted on his page. He goes, oh, people will do anything to not have to deadlift or squat. And we, so the people misunderstanding and not asking for context, that's one of the problems with social media is you only have like 2,200 characters, plus including spaces you don't have that much room to tell the whole story if he had actually read the the the copy he would have seen that we said it was one exercise we use not all of them and he posted that and and it's like bro like we never said that that's all we would do like what the fuck is wrong with you but some of that shit like the misinterpretation and not asking for for more clarification like you could have gotten on our thread and asked what we meant by that and Do we like to squat in bed? Which we would have clearly said, yes, we love to squat in bed. But instead, you decided to post that without any context in your interpretation and then misinterpret it. That's the kind of shit I can't stand. And you see that a lot on the social media. This would definitely go in room 101, where somebody has a very dogmatic view on how they think things should be done. So then they cherry pick a video or they cherry pick a post, and then they tear it apart on their social media. and it's like how how is that constructive like how is that constructive and moving the industry is that moving the industry forward or backwards this fucking moving is backwards um we need more open conversations open forums and and and good healthy debate not a bunch of not a bunch of egotistical bickering bullshit which is what you see in the industry that's i think this we see worldwide with social media now isn't that that's that debate is sort of a lost art like because the extreme views whether whether it's i sometimes ask myself the question are people becoming more extreme in their views generally in the sense of like people it's either you're with us or against this mentality we see this in covid conspiracies and to training to everything else or is it that the fact that what you tend to see on social media is the polar icing ends of the spectrum because everyone wants to see someone rant about something but no one wants to say yeah yeah you could do it a million ways and it doesn't really matter. Like, like that's, well, I mean, it's, it's human nature. It's that dopamine hit. We all love extreme things So like if You know I our social media probably be really good if I went and did what I did at the very start like seven years ago when I was just ranting about shit and everybody loved it But now I've kind of calmed down. I've gotten older. I'm like, that's not constructive. That's not the image I want to promote. I want to promote that whole thing. Like, hey, there's a lot of tools you could use. Let's figure out which one's the best for right now. And I'm just kind of out of that. If I'm going to debate with somebody, I want it to be a healthy debate where there's no ad hominem attacks. There's no name calling. There's, you know, but most of the people, you know, it's financially beneficial to get myopic and then be very extreme in what you're doing because that's what sells. That's what people want. But the problem is that sometimes people get so deep in that bullshit that they can't break their marketing like that. But then they actually start believing it. And then when you try to, when they say, let's debate, you're like, okay, they just talk in circles, talk in circles. So it doesn't matter how much, how many facts and how logical your, your argument is. They're never going to change their opinion because they're now so deep in the shit that they can't pull themselves out. So there's not even any point of having, having those talks because you're never going to change their idea, their opinion about it. What about, what about a silly one out of the fitness industry? ask them in that one thing that you would like if you could like get rid of what would what would it be so anything that springs to mind fuck man right now the the overinflated house prices in queensland good god we can't even buy a house when we moved into our house this house was worth now this is australian numbers so i don't want anybody to hear this and be like oh my god that's an expensive house because it's not for where we live in australia where everything's fucking expensive i think it was like 800 850 000 how much the going price was we've lived in this house a couple of years it's now been valued at like 1.25 in only a couple of years we're like oh because we wanted to buy it and now we're like well looks like we're moving so i would love i would love for them to build some fucking houses uh because everybody during covid a lot of people from melbourne and new south wales moved up here because they wanted to get they wanted to get away from those draconian fucking lockdown walls like what you're dealing with right now in hong kong um so they all moved up here so there's no housing so everything is like 20 to 40 percent more expensive than it was even a year ago we're feeling that we're sort of looking at like well where we go and we're probably saying as i said you off air we're looking at moving back to the uk within a year probably like next june july time it's like less everything changes and obviously every the price of everything in the uk has gone up at the moment if you've seen the uk news but we'd love to live somewhere near London, but it's just unbelievable the prices of if you want to live anywhere close to London, anywhere commutable. It's like, they're absolutely not. Well, let's just move to Serbia where your fan base is. Well, yeah. It's very tempting. There's clearly a fitness market, right? Because Mr. Schaller did one recently there. I was like, okay, there's more fitness enthusiasts there. And to be fair, I've listened to some of the doctors and PT advice there about health and and nutrition, tell you what, throw some ads towards Serbia way. There is no clue on nutrition in that part of the world. Yeah it really isn like you would clean up with a nutrition course for Yeah it weird It weird to me because I always said this about the Serbian guys I know that are PTs They tend to be the most logical sane smartest brains I ever met in the industry almost to the point of too much. All my Serbian friends, they're on their shit. They know other shit so it's really weird i think you'd have a problem though because i think that's one of the hardest languages in the world to learn yeah like i've got one guy that literally i i i no joke get write your check-ins put it into google translate and send it everyone else is pretty good english i need to do that but like yeah was one i'm literally google translating every bit of information like i don't know how well it's coming across i hope it's coming across all right he's dropping so i'll take that um but i don't know um so i obviously i know i know this is the point in time where you know you're you're winding down medication's wearing off and you you need to as you mentioned on your website go and pester zoe for the next four or five hours so um anyone who doesn't know who you are where they can find you um both from a meme account because they are gold um and for my business account where can people find luke yeah meme account luke lehman l-e-a-m-a-n just type that in the instagram you like like really nice memes and muscle nerds underscore health for muscle nerd stuff don't go to my personal account and ask me fucking health shit and you want that go to muscle nerds so it's muscle nerds underscore health um and then yeah email info at muscle nerds.net if anybody wants to talk about um coaching and mentorships or courses or anything like that and then obviously muscle nerds.net is the um is the uh website yeah i can absolutely vouch for every course i've pretty much done every course i think the only one i haven't done is uh it's not about not always about the food one that's the only one i've not done um and i'm still waiting for a day where i can come and do the the in-person part of the program design which i felt was robbed for me but generally even without completing that bit because of world restrictions some of the best investments i've ever made so much of the way i think about my business my practice some of the things i've come up with has been inspired by what you guys have taught me so in this coaches and this like don't wait any longer go invest in these guys sir um hopefully well hopefully hopefully in the next six to eight months my pr status for australia will come through and i can actually leave the country and then we'll well the first seminar answer down um i will come as long as we can go and watch a marvel movie afterwards because that you know only if you're only if you're eating truffles oh man i i i love i love a chocolate truffle these are my favorite things yeah yeah Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we can't say no more. Nothing dodgy whatsoever. Nothing, nothing at all. Yeah, and then, yeah, when that happens, let us know. We will expense the trip across to Hong Kong for you guys to do one as well at Argent. But thank you. Always been a pleasure. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you again. Yes, sir. We'll see you.