Chris Duffin: The Mad Scientist of Strength | Lex Fridman Podcast #207

The following is a conversation with Chris Duffin, the mad scientist of strength. He's one of the strongest people in the world, but is also an engineer of some of the most innovative strength equipment I've ever seen. Check out his company, Kabuki Strength. He is the only person who squatted and deadlifted £1,000 for multiple reps and achieved many other amazing feats of strength. He has lived one hell of a life of hardship and triumph as he writes about in his book called the Eagle and the Dragon. Quick mention of our sponsors, Headspace, Magic Spoon, Sun Basket and Ladder. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I was always a fan of strength, both powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting, both as a fan and practitioner. Mostly I'm a fan of people who are willing to put in years of hard work towards finding out what the limits of their body is and then smashing past those limits. People like Chris Duffin or on the Olympic weightlifting side, people like Dmitry Klokov. That guy's great. This is why I love watching the Olympics. Both the heartbreaks and the triumphs, they all reveal the incredible heights that the human mind and the human body can reach. This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with with Chris Duffin. You've been a part of several incredible feats of strength. Which was the hardest or maybe one you're most proud of?

Definitely the one I'm most proud of is that journey for the grand goals. It was like a five year scope that I chased this. And so when you think about training, it took more than five years. Obviously by that point I'd been training for over 25 years. But it makes me, I mean there was three distinct things that I wanted to accomplish out of this. So it was really thought out. And this was kind of my exit from being a competitive lifter and basically saying, hey, I'm going to be, you know, an Instagram lifter, an exhibition lifter or whatever. I've done this for 16 years. I was number one in the world for like eight years straight. All time world records. And I'm like, I'm not going to do that anymore. What I want to do is just something deep down to me that is really important. And there's three things that were driving this and this is a five year journey that I went through to do this. I really wanted to showcase that you could do something that is well beyond the scope of what people think is humanly possible. So just this inspiration thing, this grand over the Top like if you set your mind to a single minded goal you can go so much further. And I didn't even say what the goal was up front because it was so far out there. I would have been laughed at. And that's, I think big goals should be kept pretty damn close to start with for that reason too. And then the second piece was to walk the walk to show like the principles of what I believed in around human movement. The ability to manage and control the spinal mechanics and the output that can have on the body. And so I wanted to take the two most basic movements that every able bodied person should be able to do. So fundamental movement patterns. The squat which is like in the developmental approach is around nine months as a baby from a developmental kinesiology standpoint. And a really basic pattern that every able bodied person should be able to master. The other one being the hip hinge, being able to pick something up off the ground. A deadlift. And I wanted to do those two, not just one because I wanted to show the principles that I wasn't built for one, I wasn't a specialist because of my lever links, torso links, all that. Any outliers because nobody had ever done a thousand pound squat. So this is it. And a thousand pound deadlift it was outside of the scope of what anybody's. There's like half a dozen people that have done one or the other but nobody's ever done both. And I wanted to do something unique. I wanted to do them, not only do it but do them for reps to leave literally no question out there and there's no competition for that. So it was this is what I'm going to go do. And to pull it off I had some past issues with my elbows and stuff that I couldn't work around so I had to wear straps which was another reason I couldn't do it in the competition setting. So the first year I worked up and I did a thousand and two pound deadlift we plates were weighed afterwards, it was a couple a little bit over and I did it for almost three reps and that still stands as a Guinness World record. Just the one rep does as the most weight ever. Sumo deadlifted. And one other person has deadlifted a thousand for reps at this point and that was Thor Bjornson from Game of Thrones. He's done a thousand for a double as well. So then the next four years and I did a bunch of feats of strength on the way but it was all about building that axial loading capacity, the strength that because now I'm moving the weight from my hands up to my shoulders. And so to do it for reps is like so much harder than a single, like 5 to 10 seconds versus 30 plus seconds. To be able to buffer and manage all that with that kind of load is just crazy.

So it's literally about the duration that your body is carrying the load.

Yeah, that's a big part of it. Yeah. Because you have to. You're using the resource of the diaphragm for stabilization, and so it's also responsible for respiration and all this other stuff. So even when you're not squatting, you've got to be handling those loads.

Just holding that weight is fascinating. It's fascinating that the human body can do that, can maintain that structure. Just everything working together, that the biology, the skeletal structure, the musculature on top of that can hold the weight. It's fascinating to watch.

Everything is very intentful about positioning and how you're creating pressure and all this sort of stuff, especially for me. So when I mentioned that half a dozen people have squatted it and half a dozen people have deadlifted it, you understand those people all weigh 380 to 440 pounds. I weighed 265 to 285, depending on the. Where I was between the two. So there's that as well. Right. So big, big difference. And over the course of that, I did a lot of other feats of strength that fit in that capacity, and we can skip over those. But that was hugely invested as far as, you know, what I put into being able to accomplish that because it's, it's over the top, which means the other stuff had to shift and I had to learn. So there's so many things that came into place to pull that off. And so, yeah, last March, two days before the world shut down, I did it. It was supposed to be at the largest equipment exhibition in the world down in San Diego as an event. And that got shut down a week beforehand, obviously. So we moved to let's do it in my gym and invite people. And that was on a Saturday and Thursday or Friday. They limited it to 25 people for gatherings. I did it on Saturday and then Monday everything shut down. So it was kind of surreal for timing wise. Right. And so if I hadn't done it, it'd be. Would have never got done, like, because I. I'd pushed to the limit, I couldn't come back and do it. It was at the total limitation of my capabilities. So I'm pretty. I'M pretty proud of it. And the last piece was every one of these feats along the way, I collaborated with a charity that I believed in and those, a lot of those tied to my life story, which we probably will get into. So it was threefold. So that inspiration piece, inspiration, motivation, walking the walk and showing like just these methodologies that a guy that had to learn to walk again can do something like this with no back pain. There is a way. And the third one is to provide awareness and recognition around a lot of key charities.

So your heart was in this journey, but also your mind, which is. You're like a scholar of strength, a scientist of strength, an engineer of strength. For reps dynamics, a thousand pounds squat and deadlift. Let's first talk through the actual day you did it. What does it take to lift that much for reps?

The day of is really easy. The, the lift itself, other than a few seconds, is really easy and not challenging. People always ask me, what was it like, how beat up were you after that in the deadlift? And the simple fact is it was easy. The work to get there was horrendous.

So, so even the psychology of the day, you weren't. There was not a fear, there was not a nervousness, there was not a doubt in your mind.

There were certainly doubts on that day from some training history. So there was some major breaks to my confidence in the couple months leading up where I had issues with passing out under the bar, so completely losing consciousness. And this was on weight less than a thousand pounds even. So that was like all this buildup in me going, what if, what if it. I think I have this resolved, but what if I get up there and I can't even do a rep? How embarrassing will this be that I've been talking about this and planning for this for so long, but outside of that, I knew I could do it. In fact, I wanted to do even more, even up to the. The second rep training is about, you know, working into a fatigue state. So you're building an amount of fatigue in your system and then when you let off of it, that's when you get a compensation and that's how you stairstep training. This is periodization, but leading into a big event, you're accumulating this massive amount of fatigue. And so I was performing at a level that I could do it. And so I knew I was going to be able to on meat because then you, then you give yourself that window to be able to recover and super compensate and be able to do a Little bit more. So like that first rep when I did it, strength wise, I went, I could do this for 5 reps. Like it went through my head. I'm like, I mean it was easy and it was fast and it felt like amazing. And I'm like, I'm going to crush this. And then set rep 2, the realization kicked in is like, oh, this is for reps with a thousand pounds on your back and you're fatiguing just like. And then the third one was every last thing I could muster to just finish. I mean I just barely got it done because it's. The strength is like there, but like that capacity to be able to manage all those resources for that amount of time because not just leg strength when we're talking about this stuff.

So what does it take to go from the, from I don't know what, like from 500 to a thousand. That feels like a journey that's like exponential.

It's, it is, it gets exponentially harder. It does in the early 2000s. Like I said, I started lift in 1988, but my first meet in the early 2000s, my, my max deadlift was 523 and my first squat was 550. So.

A heck of a journey. That is a journey for people that like to lift. What should they understand about the difference between doing 500 and a thousand in terms of the actual lift that you were experiencing that day? In terms of the mechanics, in terms of all the things you have to be like the neurological adaptation you mentioned, the breathing, the core strength techniques, like little tricks, psychological tricks, anything that kind of stands out to you, the level.

Of intent and the opportunity for error are at a different level. So just the minutest changes of position by quarter inch, half inch can be make or break at that level. So these things, everything gets amplified. So the ability to start with having the pelvis just in the right orientation to the diaphragm before we start initiating what we call the, the eccentric loading of the abdominal cavity to create this intra abdominal pressure of working against this outward expansion, working against the outer sheath of abdominal thoracolumbar musculature obliques, causing the co contraction at the pelvic floor. All this stuff and how you cue that because you can't think about all this stuff, you need to break it down and distill and practice to like. It's one simple cue that we now lock down and control this torso stability. Because this is what these fundamental movements are about, is being able to control our spinal mechanics and then now be able to maintain that while articulating the joints around that through a range of motion and then using the main power drivers. So in this instance, both instances, it's the, you know, the hip complex to generate that power and transfer it from how we're rooted and connected to the floor through to the distal end, you know, which would be the barbell on the shoulder. You know, there's a couple key concepts. So one is that what we just talked through is how to actually maintain that stability. So if you have either the diaphragm, so which is connected at the rib cage, so out of alignment in any position, it needs to be in alignment with the pelvic floor, the pelvis, so those two in opposition. So this is simple engineering here, because what we're going to do is eccentrically load this. We're going to use the diaphragm just like you would in a diaphragm pump, where it's going to press down on all the tissue in there. So we're not using breath. So our breath was actually a lot of times a default pattern when people do that, because they'll bring it into their chest and raise their rib cage. So what we want to do is just initiate the diaphragm. Air can be used as well over the top at the final to create just a little bit more downward pressure. But if we have out of alignment there, we have a pressure leak where it's going to be push out the front or the rear if you're either inflection or extension, all right? And then that causes this co contraction and all this pressure of the organs essentially against outward, against all those tissue for the co contraction, as well as surrounding the spine to be able to stabilize that. And then it puts all the muscles on both sides, sides of the body in what we call the best length tension relationship. So if you think about a curl and we reach our arm out at the extended length, our bicep is not as strong. And all the way in the curl position, it's not as strong. There's somewhere in here that's this control of both. And so when you're sitting there arched or bent over, we have muscles that are past either one of those ranges, so they've got a lot of tension, which then will create relaxation on the other side. Right. So we want to have Archer, and all of that needs to be working. And now the next important thing is the foot. So it's actually this connection to the ground and how we're actually using the foot and ankle complex to grab and Grip this connection to the ground and elicit an effect. And because of this, and then the everything between will naturally kind of do what it needs to do. So people like to focus on it, knee, knee position or how far out their hips are or all this other stuff which is outputs of this. So if we control the torso and the knee, the only thing that can happen from that point is for the squat to happen. All right. So this allows us to use this massive, you know, the hip complex for all the muscles around that that are built to drive through hipaa extension to complete the squat. I did actually miss one thing in there. So this torso people often miss. The lat is a spinal stabilizer as well. So that's key in controlling function at the, the TL junction, which is just above the, the lumbar spine. So kind of right opposite where your sternum is. And you'll see people kind of roll over sometimes like in an Olympic squat or something like that, where they lose position. And that's often because they're close grip because you can't engage the lats very well that way. And they're pushing up in the bar. But, but you want to be able to drive and pull the bar to your center. And that's going to create and use the lats now to drive and connect the shoulder into this. We're kind of compressing and tightening all this stuff towards that center to create that entire torso stability. That's why I was using torso stability, not just core stability in my conversation earlier.

Torso stability. Okay, so there's all these modules of the body then connected to the grounding with like your feet on the ground. Everything you're speaking to. How do you work each of those modules? Is this. Over time you kind of develop the feel that ultimately boils down to this one simple cue that you mentioned. Or do you. Can you like literally study each particular module in yourself and see how it affects the lift?

So the best way, and I big believe it's because I hate just like people, people getting out and just doing just movement stuff and not actually adding load. Because we only adapt when there's load. Maybe we can get some, you know, some proprioception or awareness of position and other stuff, doing some, some corrective patterns and other stuff. But this is basic physiology, is that there must be an imposed demand for us to have adaptation. And this is mental, this is emotional, this is all these areas. But. And people miss that. So I prefer to be able to look at a person and this is our methodology and do the assessment in any basic loaded movement. So with developing an eye for that, you can actually see and go, okay, we've got a fault pattern right here in the foot. And use a cue or a set of cues. Doesn't really matter until we find the one that works and bring that. And now we know we want to simplify this stuff. I just walk through that sounds really complicated. And it. It is if we try to break down and distill it all. But, like, let's just find the basic stuff that gets us in the range, start working, and then find the next. As we add load now, we find where's our next area that we're starting to fault at? And then go there again next. So this is what we do, what we teach in our educational platform. So we are the only. I believe everybody wants to do a lot of these, like, assessments, you know, on a bench, on a table body. And it's like, no, let's go squat, let's go deadlift. If you do strongman. And it's a yoke. Carry, let's go carry. Cause these are basic human fundamentals. It's not powerlifting. Like, this is how we function. This is why we. We work with 29 of the 30 Major League Baseball teams and 90% of all professional sports out there in North America. Sorry. Although we do some work with Tour de France and other stuff as well. And North America. I do mean hockey, too. But these principles, like, you know, if. If the Dodgers won't bring us in, they're not learning how to power lift. You know, we're gonna. Obviously, we'll probably be. Do we do a little bit more shoulder focus than hip focus Athletes or their coaches? We're usually working with coaches, not the athletes.

And so you help them and then the same thing on yourself. To understand the role that these differing muscle groups have.

Yes.

On the holistic.

Yeah. So it's all about getting the joints in the appropriate position so that we can. That we can manage load so that we're not putting undue stress on the joint. We're getting the proper length tension. We're getting these basic fundamental things with the body. And so the. The largest global impact that you will have is through spinal mechanics. I can't look at a shoulder if I'm not managing this because it's your spine. So for those that are just listening, like I'm arching and then. And then flexing, that's going to affect shoulder extension, flexion, all these sorts of things. So it could even affect things down. What's looking at Dorsiflexion issues on the foot, like. And then that's why I go to the foot next, because it has the second largest global impact. And then from there now I'm going to look at the big energy drivers, which is the hip complex, shoulder complex. And then we can start looking at kind of the peripheral things. But usually that's some sort of output of the other, but the knees, the elbows, the things like that. So it's all about getting the stack which affects neurology. So let's talk in engineering terms. You get in a car, modern car today, and a lot of them will have this traction control button in there, and there's a big misconception that, you know, I'm, I'm out and it's. It's snowy or here in Austin, only rainy. Well, it probably doesn't rain much, but you're going around a corner, start slipping, it's like, oh, it's going to send the powers from the wheels that are slipping to the ones that are gripping and keep me from crashing and dying a fiery death. Well, that's not how it works. It's the exact same. We've got, we've got the. We've got the tires, which are our foot, you know, the connection to the ground, right. We've got the power driver, which is, you know, the, the engine, the transmission delivering, you know, the power through it. And we've got the stability, our suspension. And then we have the neurology. And what the neurology is doing, it's sensing that we don't have good stability or a loss of connection somewhere. And so I need to save you from crashing and hurting yourself. And so it goes to the engine and says, let's retard the timing, let's reduce the shift patterns and we're just reducing the power output. And that's straight how the human body works. So when I do this stuff, it's actually affecting that. I mean, I can take somebody and do some minute changes with the neck position at the thoracic outlet, okay. And immediately see an enhancement in power output. And I can measure it. We measure this stuff with velocity devices and see like a 10% boom jump. And so if you think about that, what about all your training through the years where you actually had additional capacity but you weren't using it because your traction control was on? Now you figure this out stuff, and now you start stacking it. Now you can see so much greater. So it's not just injury prevention. This is performance and additive performance over time. This is huge. And people don't really think about this stuff, but we can turn that stuff off, which is actually going to also, again, make us, make us safer. But what we want to do is the performance tuned race car. Do they have a traction control button? No. They got some amazing tires to grip the ground. A performance tuned suspension. And that driver is going to put what, his foot to the metal? He's going to put it to the floor. Okay. That's a performance vehicle. That's what we want to be.

I want to continue on that line, but first I have to ask, like, how did it feel to accomplish the grand goal?

Oh, my God.

Okay. When you just stand back. Oh, my thousand pounds for reps. What'd it feel like?

Anybody can go watch the video online.

12Th film, by the way, got me all, like, excited.

Oh, well, the, the movie's not. So we actually have the final footage of that. The good footage not posted yet. So it's literally just an Instagram video or a phone video right now. The only one.

Yeah. It's on your YouTube channel. But it's dramatic.

Yes, it is. Yeah. Came out just timed to the music perfectly too, which is. I listened to some odd music, which there's some reason behind that.

Okay.

But I liked it, though. It was great. It does work.

Full length footage.

There's a documentary that's. It's got a little slowed because of COVID Because it's also a backstory of the Eagle and the Dragon, my book about why I do kind of the things that I've done in my life. Or that's what I'm assuming the director is working on. I don't really have the control of the movie. Right.

But, but, okay.

But the video is incredible.

How did it feel?

How did it feel? I started crying. It was overwhelming to have worked so intensely and so long and hard at something that pushed every ounce of me to the limit. That. And, and I did it. I'm so, I'm getting a little emotional. I did exactly what I said I was gonna do.

Yeah.

Like, and it was, it was overpowering. I mean, I was just crying uncontrollably. Just with a mixture of. I, I, I don't know what. The mixture of emotions is hard to explain because it was the completion of something. It was a new phase of my. It was.

I, I mean, there's so many things here. So one, you set an impossible goal and you accomplished it. One, two is like, on the broader humanity aspect. Like, how many humans in this world accomplish perfection in a particular direction required to do this. So, like, you're basically representing like one little, like, like little glimmer of excellence of the human spirit.

There's always more. So understand this. This is a basic, fundamental. You can always do better. There is no such thing as perfection. You could always. There is always more. So anytime you reach something, any amazing workout or accomplishment in life, could you have put more into it? Could even. Yes, but here's the thing. I left on my terms. I said, this is it. I'm going to work towards. I've been training for 30 years. I'm going to do this thing that is unlike. I couldn't even say that I was going to do it years before I'm going to do it and then I'm done. I didn't leave from an injury. I wasn't forced, I wasn't. I left on. I did exactly what I said. I went to a level that I, I left on my terms. And that's unique because that's usually not the case. Usually you kind of either taper out or it doesn't matter. I'm talking like anything in life in general, right? Like you taper out, you fail, you hurt. Like you, you lose a job, like something, you know, you roll into retirement.

Like you accomplished something truly great and you walked away. In your own terms, is there a sadness completing something like that? Because it's, it's in one perspective the greatest thing you'll ever do. And like, when you accomplish such a great height, in some sense, you have to face your mortality at that point.

So. Good question. But it is certainly not the greatest thing that I'll ever do. It's the greatest physical.

There's always more.

The greatest physical, yes, but that was an expression of some of my values and the way that I want to live. It was a way of expressing it. So understanding that is hugely fundamental because we do see so many athletes get to the end of a career and then they fall into a depressive state and struggle with drugs, alcohol, depression, so on, because they lost how they identified themselves and trying to figure out where to turn, what to do. But a big central component of their identity is lost. So I knew that this was one way to express that. And my grand goals have shifted. They're shifted to other outlets that allow me to express that, like my companies, Kabuki Strength. I'm going to change the face of fitness as well as all the way through with its integration with clinical medicine and telemedicine medicine. And, you know, I got another five years before even people See what I'm working on five years in right now. Because I had to invent equipment, I have to develop methodologies that we're talking. I had to do this stuff. That ground layer wasn't done to create a cohesive ecosystem of training methodology tied to the tools that we're using today, to the environment, tied to the clinical practice assessment, tied to the. The interaction between all those and how that actually needs to be reframed because so much of this is broken. Okay, so. So. But there is sadness. I won't deny that. And the sadness comes in the singularity of focus that I had at that time. The being in the process, not necessarily do it, but, like, having being in this place that the rest of the world kind of fell away from me in those final phases. To have something so intense, to have a team around me so focused on supporting. And, like, it took me a couple months after that squat, I finally one day I woke up and I was like, oh, welcome back to the world. Like, I was in such a mental fog. Like, I was. It took me a while to climb out of that. But that. That space, that level of intensity and drive and. And living and being in that space, I. I do miss that. But I also. I can't continue that. I couldn't continue. Like, there's a point of, like, you push it so hard. The level to try to go from there is not acceptable for what you. The impacts that'll have on your life or how you want to live. And it was taking away those final. Like, I had to do extreme things and live in an extreme way to get there.

You're just a genius in this whole space of strength and health and almost like biology, that this strength feat is just one representation of that. But this particular strength, it required that kind of singular focus, which I think.

I don't know.

There's something beautiful about that singular focus. There is often only truly perfected athletics. I see it with the greatest Olympic athletes as well. The kind of singular focus required there is incredible. It's somehow some of the most beautiful things that humans can do.

And it's not just that thing. So that's the thing. It's like, oh, that must be it. When we say singularity of focus, it's not like, here's it. Because it. It covers a vast array of stuff. Like, I was working with people, you know, all. Well, yeah, all around North America. I wouldn't say anybody around the globe, but professionals coming in, working on different aspects of rehab and. And recovery and, like, I mean, I'M tapping all sorts of stuff in so many platforms from nutrition to drugs to again like you know, various Chinese medicine, you know, as far as you know.

But also the humans in your life just love and, and positivity and just inspiration, all those kinds of aspects. I mean you probably would have done much more if you went outside North America and talked to some Russians. Just between you and I, some Russians possibly like they give you some, I don't know those. There's some incredible strength athletes in Eastern Europe.

Absolutely. I've got the best one coming in September to get fixed. So.

What do you mean by fixed?

So I'm not sure what his particular issues are but he has held the all time world record repeatedly for a long time and he hasn't competed for some time and he just reached out saying he would like to come and have me take a look and see if I can get him fixed because he needs to return.

Okay. So it's more injury centric versus like form and fundamental centric combination of everything.

Everybody always wants to focus on the output. How do you, how do you give me the fix for that? But it ties right back into all those other things. Right. So. But yeah, the eastern, the Eastern bloc continued to be a dominant force in regards to athletics and strength athletics. Without a doubt. Some of my big rivals in my competitive days were. That's who it was.

Rivalry brings out the best in us. Can you tell me the story of your childhood?

Definitely outside the scope of the norm. Well today maybe not 150 or 200 years ago, but my parents highly intelligent, you know, people coming out of the Bay Area. My mom was, you know, going to school to be a chemical engineer. She was a top, top student athlete, graduated of her school. My father was a member of mensa, my stepfather was just a genius but not able to really function in society. But my mom was, you know, she had some demons and some other stuff and just she just said one day she's like I just don't want to be part of society. She still isn't lives out in the desert but has her minds but she wanted to figure out a way to make a life outside of that. And so that's where we ended up is up in the mountains in Northern California. And a lot of that was you know, them trying to get into successfully growing marijuana which back in that, you know, wasn't legal back then. Highly illegal. And in fact those areas were, some of the areas where I lived were quite dangerous. So there's a documentary, Murder Mountain that came out recently. If you watch that, you'll tie into my book just the understanding of the stuff that I was talking about dealing with serial killers, human trafficking, police corruption, murderers. Like just how real that stuff is if it doesn't capture you from the book. Okay.

The book, by the way, is the Eagle and the Dragon.

Yep. Thank you.

Yeah, it's a great.

I'm a terrible salesperson, like I told you so.

But a good. It's a good title. I don't know if you came up with it, but I did.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we'll talk about that.

Anyway, we're living by a stream, you know, off a meadow. There's no roads into where you have to hike in. And we've got beams lashed into the trees up above us because that's where our bedding is, because there's rattlesnake dens all around. And six years old, I'm being taught how to capture and handle live rattlesnakes because that's what I need to do to be safe. And you can imagine six years old sitting there with a live rattlesnake in your hand, grabbing it, you know, by the side of the head, controlling so it can't. Can't bite you and it's just wrapping itself around your arm and you're staring like its only intent is right then is to kill you. Like that's it, right? You want to take a bath. It's filling up the jug in the stream and setting it out on the rocks during, during the sun. So you dump it over your head. And, you know, not all the living was that way, you know, good part was similar to that tent living, living in a 16 foot trailer with a family of six, which is not much bigger than the space that we're sitting here. So we're talking hard winters with feet of snow on the ground, nowhere to go. I'm living in the back of the pickup truck and just a standard sleeping bag that we get from the Salvation army, not the blow zero. So I'm not sleeping well. There's living in homes that were maybe condemned. There's no doors even on them, no electricity or running water or one or the other or both and sometimes a little bit better. By the time we got to high school, we had a mobile home. So my stepfather had won a disability payment because he had a broken arm that whole time from a accident a long time ago and finally got an award and got a down payment on this mobile home that didn't have again, doors on the inside. It did have running water did have electricity, didn't have a kitchen. The windows would crank close and open but they wouldn't close all the way. So the trim them in with plastic to be able to try to protect from the elements. That was my environment. Like learning how to forage for mushrooms. I mean there were summers I would send my parents would be out. They were in the drug trade earlier. We got taken by the police and put into foster care for a while which ties into some of the stories with human trafficking. And honestly it's in my book but it's really hard for me to talk about that stuff and obviously not all that's in the book so. But they got us back. We moved to Oregon and they stayed out of the drug trade from that time to ensure that they didn't lose us again. But quickly we kind of fell back into the same thing. So at that point it was learning about geology and starting to do mining and firewood cutting. But mostly the mining because Pat's broken arm chainsaw made a little tough.

If you remember just the sequence of moments, are you haunted by the darker moments of your childhood? Do you remember moments of simple joy.

And happiness outside of the living around dangerous people and the interactions that came from that? We were a family. Like we were a cohesive unit battling against the world together. We spent all our time together, work, play. I was there, I was helping raise my siblings or I was working with them and you know, it was a constant. Like I said, we were very physically active. So you know, I had that in my upbringing. Plug for my shoe company, barefoot B E A R I ran around the wilderness in bare feet all the time, you know. But it was. I had a lot of great moments and I'm thankful for a lot of that childhood once we take out the trauma and the other stuff associated with it. Right. And so the connection that I have with my sisters is, is. Is huge. That goes a bit further to. Because I am kind of like a. A little bit of a father figure because I was at home raising them. And then later I took custody of them while I was going to school because the environment at home deteriorated further. Their stepfather, like I said, was he wasn't capable of managing life. And my mom had a mental breakdown and took off to Montana and he desce into madness even worse actually took my, my 13 year old sister and kicked her out in the middle of winter. Couple feet of snow on the ground because he thought she stole his favorite cereal bowl type. So that's when I took in and I was going to College, putting myself through college, and I started taking custody of my sisters and raising them. So anyway, we're still like very, very tight family. It took. There was a few years later in life like that. The connection with my mother was kind of broken. I didn't speak to her for years because of her basically abandoning my sisters and me having to come in. But that. We've worked through that as best we can.

So you. Anger on your part.

It wasn't. There might have been some anger.

Did you always love her?

Yes, and I still do. And I'm so. She's taught me basically everything I know about strength and perseverance and living life on your terms and being able to create that. And so much of what I am is from that. Right. We've all had to learn to be okay with the way she is because she is just blunt. But, you know, she's the one that figured out that the human trafficking situation and got. Got the DA involved and got all the. She's the one that. I've learned a lot from her.

And did you inherit some of the demons?

Oh, most certainly. And I. It's something I've continued like in my father's side has been really tough on that because some of it is just based genetic as well. So my. My stepfather made, I think six or seven attempts on his life during his lifetime. One of those in front of me, his mother blew her head off with a shotgun. Her brother jumped out a window in la. Their father did something similar. And I don't know how far back it goes because there is no family except for me and my. My children.

You spoke about going through depression yourself.

Yeah.

Can you talk about some of the darker moments of that? Have you ever, like many in your family, have you ever considered suicide?

Yes, I have. Yes, I have.

You've achieved a lot of exceptional things in your life. Can you talk about those early days of depression and how you overcame it?

Yeah. So the things that I did that people give me accolades for are the things that I did selfishly to save myself. The things like taking custody of my sisters, being the person that everybody around, you know, the. The important people relied on, the fact that I had to step to the plate and be present and be that person, because if I failed, they failed. They would be like the people that I grew up with that are dead or in prison or on drugs. And they're either way to. To one of those. Right. That's where everybody ended, and I wasn't gonna let that happen.

What about saving yourself?

And so that's how. In those early days, that's how I did it. Not saying it's the best approach, but it was survivor mentality. It was, I can't selfishly do that because I have them to take care of, right? And then that continued where I would keep putting myself in these leadership roles or other things and just always being this person that was at the center, at the hub, that forced me to be there. And so it's only in the more recent, you know, last decade or so that I have had to really learn how to come and start confronting some of those demons. And you think, man, why is a guy so successful? Like, I mean, and we haven't talked about all the stuff that I've done, but, like, I've seen a lot of success in both business, leadership, athletics, academics, entrepreneurship, all these sorts of things, right? But if it wasn't for, you know, having kids and the same being in the position, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for. And that's just, that's the reality of it. And I'm learning to come and manage those as best I can, learning to meditate into those things and really feel what the driver is so I can get to those, those root understanding and having some guidance doing so. Like, if you've got mental health issues, this isn't something that you need to tackle on your own. Like, having a professional that can help guide you on that introspective journey is, Is something like, it's not like, hey, I'm big, tough guy, I can handle everything.

You know, that's fascinating that you saved yourself. That's quite powerful to save yourself by having others depend on you. And so you can't fail. You can't fuck it up. And that's a reason to keep moving forward. But on the flip side, that's not addressing the darkness.

It's not. And it probably not a sustainable strategy either, right? So I, I recognize these things.

I don't know. And perhaps it is sustainable. Perhaps that. I mean, there, there's something beautiful about giving yourself basically in service of others and thereby creating purpose. And then like, it's almost like fake it till you make it and then you make it eventually.

That is purpose, though.

That is purpose.

That is purpose. I mean, you have to. To me, life is about taking your cup and how you choose to pour it out, how you choose to give. What is your purpose? What is that connection with everybody around you? This is. That's. That's the intent. That's the life. That's. That's what life is about. How are you going to help those around you? How are you going to help the world? You know, your purpose is, is right here figuring out what this is and then how to do that. But at the same time, you can't let that run dry. So you have to make sure, right, that you're filling. That's the other side, right? That's the other side, yeah.

We'll return to your engineering degree, which you're obviously scientifically engineering minded, which is fascinating. Your book is titled the Eagle and the Dragon. What do the eagle and the dragon symbolize?

They're pretty big symbols for me. In fact, that covers my entire body as a tattoo. So the first one I had done at around 19 years old. And so this is, or started at 19. It's an eagle that covers my entire front, you know, my stomach, ribcage, and one that was on my back that covered most of my back. And there's chained at the. Well at the claw, I guess, and the chain wraps down around and attaches to. To my ankle and there's a shackle there. And so this was something that I had done at that age because it was, to me, it was a representation of your potential, your strengths, your abilities, that you can fly to whatever height that you want in this world. The only thing holding you back at the end of the day is yourself. And this was. I hadn't necessarily accomplished a whole lot at that time. I mean, I was valedictorian for high school, small high school. Does that even count as a state level wrestler? This was my belief.

And you sense that there was a potential in you. And the only thing that could stop you from realizing that potential was yourself.

That's right.

That's a heck of a tattoo to get, by the way, at 19.

But yeah, that's 40 hours went into that thing.

It shows you got some guts and.

Then the next tattoo. So I only have two I had done in 2015, 2016, when I. So at this point in my life, so I had done that. I had flown to whatever heights, right. So I had. I had proven to myself and maybe done what I thought I needed to do to show the world that this poor kid from the sticks, this kid growing up in the mountains with nothing, could achieve the American dream. I was a corporate executive sought after that I'd come in, I'd fix companies, I'd turn around and prep them for sale. I'd take a company and grow it from a regional to a national to a global presence. I did this in the automotive manufacturing, aerospace manufacturing, high tech, heavy industry. And I had a house with a white picket fence. I was a successful athlete with all time world records. I owned a gym on the side where I coached people and had a comfortable marriage that everything was hunky dory with no arguments at home. And I walked away from all of it. I left everything behind except for my kids. I wanted to chase what I was meant to do and chase what I was capable of doing. I wanted to become a better version of myself, but very intentfully. And that's what I did. I sold, I had multiple homes, sold my homes. I cashed in all my retirement that I'd earned for 20, nearly 20 years. And I lost all that. I leveraged myself millions of dollars of personal debt so that if I failed, there was no way out even going back to that old career that I did. Well, I'd be living in an apartment the rest of my life, paying it off. People question, people questioned me at the time because I had a comfortable, easy marriage and I chose to ask for a divorce. And I ended up living in an apartment for a couple years with no income, selling off every last thing that I had except for my two vehicles that I built and with my, with my kids. And I started my businesses to help people live a better quality of life, to get them out of pain, to help them live better through strength. To realize that stress demand those things. They don't have to be the thing that if you look back, made you had the bad back, made you have the bad Ds, but they do the opposite. They get you out of pain. And then I started working my book to, to, to hit on those other things, the mental, the emotional, maybe even spiritual. I don't touch on that one too much in there, but it's all the same that things that happen.