https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Z6jRfYW-aCM
Hello everyone. I’m pleased to announce my new tour for 2024. Beginning in early February and running through June, Tammy and I and an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the U.S. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I’m going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I’ve been working on. My forthcoming book out November 2024, We Who Wrestle with God. I’m looking forward to this. I’m thrilled to be able to do it again and I’ll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye bye. All of a sudden I started breaking down crying and I didn’t even realize what was in me myself and I’m not wanting my wife to see me in this point of weakness because I feel maybe I would be judged and I’ve had a lot of men as I’ve spoken about this tell me I couldn’t tell my wife that she would judge me too much she would leave me if I broke down crying in front of her like that. She didn’t. She pulled me in closer and she was like told me every single time she’s like I know this is difficult I know there’s a lot of pressure on you right now. You can quit if you want. I will love you regardless but I believe in you to get through this and you will get through this if you choose to. Hello everyone. Today I’m speaking with five-time consecutive Mr. Olympia champion Chris Bumstead. And so what do we talk about? Well we talk about the utility of aiming at something high and pursuing it. The opportunity cost that comes along with that. The challenge of balancing that kind of single-minded and maybe necessary obsession with developing everything else that makes for a full life. We talk a lot about marriage and about how he’s integrated his relationship into his into his high-level professional pursuits. Chris’s wife is having a baby very soon. We talked a fair bit about parenthood. Talked about the role that his father played in his life. We talked about his the pleasure he takes in and has discovered in being a role model in sharing his disciplined journey towards a pinnacle with his followers. We talked about his practice of identifying the things that are impediments to his progress forward. His fears, his insecurities, his insufficiencies, his determination to face those things voluntarily. His ability to overcome those impediments as a consequence that was particularly relevant on the public speaking and social engagement front. The way that him and his wife have negotiated that within the confines of the relationship. His plans for the future that continues after his stellar athletic and public career comes to its particular close. So join us for that. So you made your debut on the professional stage in 2017. How old were you then? In 2017, I was 22 years old. 22. OK, so like I’m very ignorant about the domain of activity that you are engaged in. So I’m going to ask all sorts of stupid questions and to catch myself up. So what did it mean to what does it mean to debut professionally in the in the in the world of bodybuilding? And maybe you could also tell us about that world in general. I don’t understand its structure or or, you know, the hierarchies of competition, how you move up and all of that. Like what sort of world is that? Yeah, so it’s there’s a mainly just an amateur in a professional league and it changed a lot over the years where it used to be a much bigger deal. If you turn pro and you call it getting your pro card in bodybuilding. So you compete as an amateur usually in your city and in your state and then you’ll do a national level show. And that’s all of an amateur. And typically when you win a national level show, you’ll get your pro card. And then when you’re a pro, that puts you into a brand new division where you’re starting back from ground zero and you’re competing against usually older people have been in there a lot longer competing in the pro for years. And there’s multiple pro shows around the country and around the world all year. And each one of those shows qualifies you to compete at the Olympia and the Olympia is like the Super Bowl, just like the Olympia. The end all be all of bodybuilding. So that’s the goal that everybody is chasing at the end of the day. Okay, so Olympia is the pinnacle and you won five consecutive championships. And is that the right terminology even? Did you win a championship that you win? What’s the yeah, okay. Okay. I mean, you can call it whatever you want. But but yeah, so I had won five Olympias over the last five years. Exactly. Yeah. And are you the are you the current holder of the title? That’s correct. Yeah. The five previous years. Okay, good. Good. Good. Good. Just one. And has anybody else managed that for five years in a row? No. So it’s actually a pretty new division I’m in. So that’s another different tier that’s within bodybuilding. There’s open bodybuilding, which is there’s no weight limit. And those are like the people like Ronnie Coleman and the huge people that a lot of people know the big names of. And there’s no weight limit there. And I’m in a division called Classic Physique, which is meant to bring back more of like the Arnold days a little bit more aesthetic and not quite as big. So I have a weight cap that I have to match. So my division’s only been around since 2016. So there were two previous winners before me over the three years, but the division’s only been around for eight years and I’ve won five of those eight years. So no one’s really had a chance to beat that. Okay. Okay. So I was noticing. Yeah. With regard to weight, I was noticing I don’t know how accurate Wikipedia is, but it listed your weight. As 234, but in the offseason as 264. That’s pretty accurate. Yeah. Oh, okay. So what’s what’s the reason for the discrepancy there? So in bodybuilding, it’s all about like bulking and cutting. Mainly you spend a majority of your year trying to put on muscle and to do so, you need to put on a little bit more body fat, eat more food, train a little bit more intense, do less cardio. So your body’s growing. And then when you enter prep, which is like the big thing of bodybuilding, you enter like a 12 to 16 week prep, which is very strict dieting. And it’s the whole intention of that is stripping as much fat as possible while maintaining as much muscle as possible. And so that’s where the weight fluctuates. So you want to get to a healthy body fat, but a higher weight to put on some muscle. And then you chop that down. And that’s where the weight discrepancy comes in. So I’ll be 265 ish at my highest and I’ll come down to about 240 when I’m right on stage. OK, and that’s to make the most of your shape for the competition, I presume, to make you as cut as you can be for the purposes of the display. Is that the case? Exactly. Yeah, it’s like chiseling down a stone, down to all the excess stone, bringing it down to just the art of it. Right. Right. Right. And so when you’re in that 12 to 16 week period, what what do you do on the diet front? What do you have to do in order to lose that 30 pounds? And what does your diet regimen consist of? It typically consists of you start building up to a maximum amount of calories as you can throughout the year. So your metabolism is flying. And then when you start prep, you just slowly start bringing down the calories while increasing the amount of cardio you do. So let’s say my off season when I’m at my heaviest, I’m eating about 5500, 5000 calories and at my lowest at the end of my prep, I’ll be eating about 1500 calories. So it comes down quite a bit. And within that, you’re adding in cardio through to expending a little bit more calories doing that. And it’s just kind of changing the energy output versus input to make sure that you’re inputting less than you’re outputting. I see. So basically, it’s not so much if I if I have this correct, it’s not so much what you’re eating at that point. It’s how it’s how much you’re eating essentially assessed by by caloric intake. I mean, I’m curious about this because as you perhaps know, I have a almost entirely carnivorous diet and have for a long time. And I’ve been watching Sean Baker a lot on on especially on his Twitter feed doctor who’s been promoting the carnivore diet. It seems to be unbelievably useful for adding muscle mass, but also decreasing body fat content. So I was curious about, you know, the ratio of carbohydrates to proteins or if there’s anything additional that you’re doing apart from adjusting caloric intake per se. Yeah. Yeah. So typically, there’s like a set amount of protein people will eat and it stays around then. So I’ll eat about 300 grams of protein in a day. And as my calories come down, I’m normally pulling away my carbs and my fats and keeping my protein the same. So calories are coming down, but protein staying the same. So that ratio just changes. And that’s why bodybuilding is so much different than a lot of other sports, if you can call it that, because it’s not just about how you perform, but it’s about how you look. So typically in sports, it’s like what’s going to allow me to perform the best. Whereas in bodybuilding, it’s like, no, I’ve just got to look the best. And then I still have to go and perform in the gym as best as I can. So it’s kind of balancing those two to allow yourself to be in the gym, getting the best workouts and you can. But you also can’t be eating too much to perform at your best because then you’ll be holding on too much body fat. So it’s kind of an art of balancing all that. Right. Right. OK. So let’s go through the progression of your career from amateur to professional. And then I would like also to talk about the criteria by which you’re judged, exactly what it is that the judges are looking for. We can talk a little bit about the popularity of the sport as well. So you said when you were an amateur, there are local competitions. So what exactly are the structures of the competitions and how popular is this? So you started, I believe you started weightlifting when you were about 14. Is that correct? Yeah, it was right around then. Yeah. OK. And why did you start when you were 14 and what was the consequence of starting? I just started I started in the gym because I played a lot of sports and I was very athletic, but I wasn’t really good at the skill of the sports. So I played hockey, basketball, football, but it wasn’t great at dribbling or shooting, but I was really fast and strong. So I ended up kind of sticking to what I like. I knew I was good at strength, I was good in the gym. So I started doing that more and more and I just had a passion for that. I slowly built that. And as I started to as sports get progressively more competitive, I started to kind of get pushed out of that. But I noticed I had a lot of a lot of unique skills in the gym, if you will. So I started to excel very well in that above a lot of people. And of course, at a young age when you’re starting to get attention from girls and see some excess and put on some muscle and all that, you start to enjoy that a little bit more. Makes you like the training in the gym even more. So I put more and more focus into that. Started nailing my diet, my nutrition, training, everything like that. And then it was when I was in grade 12, my sister started dating a local bodybuilder and they’re actually married now. He’s my brother-in-law and he started coaching me into the true realm of bodybuilding. Because before that I was just training to be strong. I didn’t understand bodybuilding to how precise it really was. So he started teaching me the intricacies of that and he saw the potential in me. He’s like, you’re young, I was 18 years old, had a lot of muscle on me. He’s like, you should try doing a bodybuilding show. I’ll coach you. We’ll see how it goes. Have some fun with it. Why not? So I was like, sure, I’ll give it a shot. Okay, okay. So let’s walk into the practicalities of that because there will be lots of people who are watching and listening, who in principle would like to discipline themselves. In principle, they’d like to hit the gym and undergo some physical transformation to make themselves stronger and healthier and more attractive. And like I started weightlifting when I was about, let’s see, 21, 22, something like that. I was very, very thin and not very strong. And I packed on about 35 pounds of muscle in about two years. I had to eat like a mad dog to do that. And there’s a reason I’m telling you this. I mean, because it did a lot of things for me that I didn’t understand that weightlifting would do. Now, I used free weights. And one of the things I noticed apart from the fact that I packed on muscle and was stronger was that my posture improved a lot. I was starting to get hunched a little bit because I was sitting and writing a lot and it pulled my shoulders back up straight. And then it was really good for my coordination, especially my lower body. My legs got a lot more coordinated. And the other thing it did was produce, and I think this went along with the coordination and maybe that was from working all the little tendons and so forth that you do with free weights. It also made me a lot more physically like confident. And I think I don’t think that was nearly as much a consequence of the strength as it was a consequence of the increased coordination. OK, so back when you were 14, you were already athletic. You started but you started hitting the gym more thoroughly. What like what size were you? What height were you when you were 14? How were you built physically when you were when you were, you know, that young teenager? I don’t remember my exact size, but I was like a lean skinny kiddish. I was probably like just under six foot, maybe 180 pounds, 170 pounds or so. So I was never really small. And even when I graduated high school, I was about 220 pounds. So definitely notice some of the same things as yourself. I was definitely a bit of an anxious kid, quite an introvert and going in the gym by myself, playing some music, just enjoying that. It allowed me to like control the outcome of all that. And it was really fun for me. And obviously, like you said, you notice as well, it builds confidence in you, even just being good at something can build confidence in you. So obviously that was that was part of what I started to do. And like I said, you get a little attention from some muscle at a young age and that builds a little bit more confidence. And all these things started kind of trickling in my mind and like, oh, wow, I really like this. I should keep doing. But I do more of it. I’ll get more of these good feelings from it. Right. OK. So you so you were a pretty big kid. You were you’re already six feet tall. You’re you’re and you’re pretty built. I mean, 180 and six feet at 14. You so you had OK. So you had the natural physique for this. And then how did you start like had you been a disciplined kid up to then? How had you done in school? Like, were you someone who had regular and good habits? Were you a conscientious person to begin with? You know, I’m kind of wondering how you managed to develop the discipline to start working out in the gym and how regularly were you walk me through how you learn to do this and step by step so that people listening could figure out for themselves what they would do if they decided to go to the gym and also the obstacles. You know, when I went to the gym, I went at McGill. And like I said, I was very thin. I was about six feet tall, but about one hundred and thirty five pounds, like very, very thin and not very strong. And one of the obstacles to me of being in the gym was that it’s embarrassing even to some degree to recount because when I was there, people would come over and show me how to use the weights. And, you know, that that’s friendly, but it’s also very annoying. And I think I was bench pressing like seventy five pounds with some difficulty at that point. And so, you know, that’s not very much weight. And so one of the things you can imagine that when people are going to hit the gym, there’s there’s a couple of especially if they haven’t been athletic, there’s a couple of things that are going to be impediments. They’re going to be self conscious. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Plus, hypothetically, they look they lack discipline. Now, you had the advantages of being slightly, you know, somewhat on the larger side and also being athletic. But how did you develop the discipline and what impediments did you have to overcome as you were developing that discipline? Yeah. So, I mean, I heard a quote the other day that stuck with me because the thought of me this, it was you don’t start something because you’re passionate. You stick with it because you’re passionate. So I kind of just started it. I fell into it naturally. And like I said, as I started to see results and get a little bit more joy out of it, I started to become more passionate and put more effort into it. And every year since I was a child, I’ve become a little bit more consistent, a little bit more passionate, put a little bit more effort into it. So my discipline has continued to grow over time because I just stuck with something for a while and want to see how it went. And it just kind of tumble affected. But I definitely had some of the similar feelings. And I hear it from everybody about being a little anxious being in the gym. And it’s funny. It’s people will come help you to make you feel comfortable. But like you said, it can almost be demeaning, make you feel a little bit like, all right, you think I need your help? But when I was young, yeah, so my dad actually had one of those old sand weights. It was like a Weider bar with sand weights in the basement. And I remember setting up some boxes, filling them up with stuff and lying on it and trying to bench press on it because it’s hard to balance a bench press at first. Like you talked about the stability and all that. It’s difficult. So I was a young kid in my basement doing that with push ups and pull ups. And that’s really what got me into the whole weightlifting building muscle thing. And that was purely like I mentioned, just to get better at sports. I assumed if I was stronger, I would be better at sports. And then after that, I joined a gym at a young age over the summer program that gave kids a free membership over the summer. And I had to ask my parents to come sign me up because you had to be 16 and I was 14. So they had to come in and sign a waiver for that. And I wasn’t the most disciplined kid for sure. My parents definitely made me independent and to have some of the free reign that they gave me to be able to go out with friends and do stuff. I had to earn it. I had to have a job, finish my chores, do my homework and all that stuff. So my parents definitely raised me to have that kind of mindset. And I grew up in a town with some good kids. Luckily didn’t get stuck into anything bad. And we were all very all my friends were very passionate about sports and I wanted to excel. So I kept putting myself in the gym. And at a young age, I remember I didn’t have a car or any way to get there all the time. My parents would work late and I remember I would run even in the winter in Ottawa. It would be like a foot of snow on the ground and I’d be jogging to the gym. It was about a mile and a half, but still a decent little run in the snow. And I was just super dedicated from a young age because I loved it so much. And as I mentioned, sometimes just being in the gym with my music and that focus was just like a point of solitude for myself to enjoy. And there was a quiet gym, luckily. And I slowly learned over time that no one in the gym is looking at you or judging you. Everybody who’s everybody who’s been in there was a beginner at some point. So they’re not looking at you, making fun of you. They were you probably a year or two ago. And everyone’s just truly there to help out. And I’ve discovered that the fitness community in general is a very encouraging community because everybody has the same experience as you. They get in, they feel better, they get some confidence. They’re like, this is great. Like, I would love for other people to feel this too, you hope, if they’re nice enough. And that typically allows them to be very inclusive and want people to come and join and just be a part of it all. So I found it’s not a judgmental as people think when once you’re in it. Right. Well, that’s a really good. That’s a really good point, you know, because part of being self-conscious in the gym is and this is true for overweight people and for anybody who’s out of shape or for anybody who just doesn’t know what they’re doing, which is pretty much everybody when they go to the gym the first time, especially if they don’t have, as we pointed out, a history of athleticism. It’s very easy to think that these people who are throwing the weights around in there are judgmental. You know, it’s really a consequence of your own self-consciousness and proclivity to self-judgment. But, you know, the fact that those people are in there working on themselves does indicate very clearly through their actions that they believe that they still have work to do. And as you said, the probability that many of them who are in there or perhaps all of them to some degree were in the same boat as you at some point is very, very high. You know, and it was certainly the case that the people who were coming over to help me weren’t doing it in a judgmental way. You know, that was my problem. And there’s another thing to concentrate on there, too. You know, one of the things that one of my favorite thinkers, psychoanalyst Carl Jung, pointed out is very, very helpful to me to understand was that he said the precursor to the Redeemer is the fool. And what he meant by that was that if you’re going to master something, the first thing you have to do is admit to yourself that you’re not a master of it already, because then you wouldn’t have to do anything. So you have to allow yourself to be the fool. And, you know, one of the things I’ve noticed about people who are highly successful is that they will jump into new things that they don’t know anything about and be the fool. Be the person who doesn’t know anything. Be the person who’s low man on the totem pole. Start at the lowest rung and they won’t pretend to know more than they do know. They ask the stupid questions that are necessary. They humble themselves in accordance with their novice position. They like they accept that way. But they also do so in the understanding that if they’re honest with themselves, they can make the kind of incremental progress that you described. Because you said you got more and more disciplined as the years went by and that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you start at the bottom. What matters is that you’re so stupid and blind that you refuse to learn and that you stay there. Right. So it’s it’s trajectory that matters and not absolute position. And so that’s a useful thing for people to know. It’s like, of course, you feel like a bloody fool when you do something the first time. What the hell do you expect? Like you are a fool, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t you can’t move beyond that. Yeah, I know you touched on something great there when you’re expanding. If it’s something that makes you feel worried or anxious or you thinking other people are judging you, it’s probably actually a reflection of yourself, something that you need to grow on. And that’s something that I really noticed because I used to be super anxious in public speaking. And I remember you’ve done a lot of talks on fear immersion and stepping into it and the confidence that can build. And I didn’t really understand this whole mindset of all the confidence that would come from that. And I but I would always do podcasts or public speaking or I started to get some seminar events or being asked to come talk for my success as a bodybuilder. And every time I went there, I’d be Mr. Olympia walking into this thing terrified out of my mind, like hands shaking, stumbling my words. And I still feel like that sometimes, but I’ve gotten better. But I realized I took a step back after a few times. I’m like, all right, this is something I need to put myself into more to become better at it. And I started to actually plan my events to be more talking based, sign up for a few more requests to talk a little bit more in front of people. And it was terrifying at first. And I still embarrassed myself. Sometimes I still have memories standing on stage stuttering or my list comes out really bad and feeling embarrassed and getting off stage. But I also have a lot of memories now where I’ve killed the good talk and I’ve stepped off stage feeling so confident and over that realm of me becoming better at something I wasn’t good at. I noticed my confidence in all aspects of my life started to increase, not just in public speaking. So I think that being able to have that humility, like you said, look at yourself, be the fool and understand where you need to grow and put yourself into positions to grow is something that has helped me immensely and something I’ve taken from some of your words in the past, too. If you’re like most Americans, you’re struggling to make ends meet. Everything is more expensive these days. By the time you pay your bills, fill up your car and go grocery shopping, there’s almost nothing left. You’re using your credit card more than you’d like. And last I checked, the average credit card interest rate for Americans was 24%. That’s insane. How are you supposed to dig yourself out from all of that debt? If you own a home, I want you to call my friends at American Financing right now. Interest rates have finally dropped into the fives, which is the lowest they’ve been in a long time. So call American Financing to talk about their refinance options. They save their customers an average of 854 a month is like a 1 per month trial period at Shopify.com. Go to Shopify.com. Now to grow your business no matter what stage you’re at. That’s Shopify.com. Right, right. So you can see that, as you said, that your progression is being, you know, that you focused in a very disciplined manner on one thing. And to some degree that was something that served your own individual interests particularly well. But that as you’ve got better and better at that and become more successful at that, the relationship that you have with your wife is beckoning as extremely important, the potential relationship with your child, and also this pleasure that you see and take in modeling discipline for people and also mentoring them. So I just had a chat with Jocko Willink. And Jocko is quite the bloody monster and very disciplined man, you know, and he’s joked with me several times that, you know, if he’d taken a few wrong turns when he was a young man, he could have easily been a criminal type because he’s a tough son of a bitch. You know, one of the things that really changed Jocko, because we talked about this to some degree, was his experience in the military. And I think he was interested in the military to begin with, perhaps for some of the same reasons that you were interested in bodybuilding. You know, it was the personal self-development element of it. But what he learned as a leader in the military was that he had the opportunity to model appropriate conduct for other people and to help them develop. And he said he didn’t ever find anything that was more meaningful than that. Like that was even more exciting than excitement. That was more exciting than adventure. Certainly more exciting and worthwhile than anything, you know, kind of trouble making criminal adventure, which does have that adventurous element to it, you know. It’s like it’s why we like watching bad guys in movies, you know. At least they’re not sitting around doing nothing, you know. And so, but it certainly it’s been true in my life too, that I don’t think there is a deeper pleasure and a more sustainable pleasure once you’ve learned to walk up mountains, let’s say, with some degree of facility, then to see the positive effect that observing that has on other people and then also to foster that. And you certainly have a walloping opportunity to do that as a father. And then, you know, I want to talk about a couple of things. You also mentioned this is a particular conundrum that men have, I would say, even more than women. But to be extremely successful at something, you know, the top 1%, you said, and you’re actually above that in your particular discipline, you really have to be hyper-focused on it. Like the great scientists that I’ve known. I worked at Harvard for six years and the senior professors there, I was an assistant and associate, not a full professor. The full professors were guys who were at the pinnacle of their career and they were at the pinnacle of that type of career, period. Because Harvard would go around the world and find those, mostly men, and aggregate them together. And so then you might ask, well, what do you have to be like to be someone like that? And the answer is, well, being smart, that’s like pretty necessary. And that’s kind of a gift that’s given to you by fate and God. Like you can interfere with it, but if it’s not there naturally, you know, it’s a real impediment. It’s sort of like height, you know, if you don’t have it, there’s not a lot you can do to get it. But then insane dedication is the next thing. Like if you want to be the best of the best, you’re going to be working flat out like 16 hours a day, seven days a week, hopefully not exhausting yourself, because you’re in one hell of a competitive environment. And there’s real utility in that, especially for men, because if you get really good at one thing, there’s the cascading benefits that you pointed to, for example, when you found when you started to work out in the gym when you were 14, that you were getting more, you know, you get more attention from girls because of it. So, but the price you pay is that it’s harder to do many things at once. And you said you’ve come to realize that if you want to compete at the highest level, that that is, there’s opportunity cost there, you know, that’s going to make it more difficult for you to be, well, 100 percent committed to the other things that you have to do and want to do. It’s hard to get that balance right. And, you know, it’s probably the case. I don’t know this for sure, but it’s probably the case that as you move forward and you step back from this particular obsessive concern, that you’ll have the opportunity to grow, let’s say, in a more balanced way and to pull out of that a more comprehensively developed personality. You know, and that is something you, the advantage to doing that is that there’s no limit to it. You know, I don’t care how good you get at public speaking, for example, you can still get better. There’s no, and I don’t care how good you are as a father, there’s no limit to, because you could be a father to a lot of people as you found out, you know, when that kid gave you the note, not least when that kid gave you the note. So, you know, that’s definitely an exciting horizon of opportunities. What’s been your experience? You said that, you know, we talked a little bit about your fears today. We talked a little bit about how you overcome them and how also they were linked to things about yourself that you regarded as inadequacies. We talked a little bit about public displays of emotion around that or maybe admission of that. You said your observation has been that you doing that, like it’s like admitting to your weaknesses at the same time that you’re celebrating your successes, right? It’s that balance. You can imagine why that would be inviting for people, because they might look at your success and think, oh my God, there’s no way I could do anything like that. You know, you must be some sort of superhuman creature to manage that. But then when they hear, oh no, you know, you managed that despite the fact that you have an array of insufficiencies. That’s where the person that might be a place where the especially the younger guys, they can identify with you more clearly. So an honest admission of that kind of opens the door to them. They might be able to think, well, if he could do it under those conditions, I could do it under the conditions in my own life. That’s the advantage of that emotional honesty, maybe. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, you spoke at the beginning we’re talking about, and you always speak about speaking the truth. And I almost fell across this way of living by accident, because when I would be nervous, all I could think of to do was to speak the truth. And if I was on stage and I was nervous, something I would just start by saying, I’m up here and I’m really anxious right now. And people would be like, oh, like that relatability, he’s human. Like they start to see past that. And then I lighten up a little bit. There’s no more false falsehood I have to put on pretending like I’m not anxious or something. So that really helped me a lot. And yeah, it’s it’s been a process for sure. But it’s helped a lot. And like you said, a lot of people have viewed me. It’s funny. There’s the Internet term people call and they started calling me a dad in the fitness industry. And it was quite it’s quite ironic because I wanted to be a father so bad. And that’s when I really started to realize the responsibility that came in the position I’m in. And I mentioned the champion mentality and I use that as kind of a brainstorming topic. I continuously go back to and adjust what that definition means to me. And I grew up looking up to people like Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, all these high level athletes. But when you take a zoom out at their life, most of them don’t have long lasting, at least not happy relationships. They typically end partway through near the end of their career, which in my mind starts to look like these high level of success is requiring them to sacrifice their connection and relationship to be where they are. And I started to realize that’s not what I want. And the rule I have of champion mentality, it’s not about any rules to it. It’s just about how you do it. I can do it and I can make my own rules as long as I’m feeling like I’m winning. I’m progressing. I’m growing. Doesn’t matter about the medals or anything outside of that. It just matters the progress I’m making. And so I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my relationship or if I started to sacrifice my relationship, I would pull back from bodybuilding. I had a few more guidelines that I wasn’t willing to give up on. And seeing the responsibility I have to people looking up to me, I believe that younger kids looking up and chasing success long term are going to be happier while still focusing on connection and meaningful relationships without sacrificing those just to become successful. Because anyone can see it. If you’re at the top of the mountain alone, you’re alone. Right. Well, you know, the other thing too is that and I’m interested maybe in how you’ve managed this, you know, because we could say, well, your relationship is something that could interfere with your bodybuilding. Right. Because time is a zero sum game. But then we could say, well, no, no, not necessarily. Like if you got your relationship in order. Well, first of all, you wouldn’t be wasting time chasing other women and falling into whatever pitfalls and complexities might be associated with that. Plus, you could ally yourself with someone who was there for your support and who was along with you for the ride, you know, assuming that she could find a way that would also fulfill her own goals. So and that’s a better vision. Right. I mean, it’s certainly the case since I’ve hit the road in 2017. You know, my wife and I have negotiated and searched to find where she fits into that, not shoehorned in, you know, and not as a necessary accompaniment. Not not that at all, but in a way that would bolster the entire endeavor and also keep the relationship strong. So how long have you been with your with wife or fiance, fiance or wife at the moment? Wife. We’ve been together for five and a half years. How long have you been married? Less than a year. OK, OK. So you’re in your first year of marriage. What do you think that what do you think you’ve done right? And what has she done right that’s enabled you guys to develop this relationship, to to move towards marriage, to decide to have a baby while you’re pursuing this very, very specific and difficult goal? What have you both done right? Let’s start with her. What do you think she’s done right? She has definitely taken full responsibility for where she needs to come in. And the biggest thing that comes into my mind is we don’t leave any monsters under the bed. We don’t leave anything under touch or the dragon, as you’ve mentioned. We we do. We do not allow that. And at the beginning of our relationship, we’ve been through some hell. We’ve been through some chaos. We’ve been through some fights and we’ve been through some shit. But we’re at a point now where because we have processed all those, we fought through them, we pulled each other apart and then back together and we went through that dance. Now we understand each other so much and there’s nothing there’s nothing under the rug. Our carpets flat with all on the surface. We’ve committed to speaking the truth, speaking to how we feel and not allowing anything go between. And I mean, she’s done great at holding me very accountable. She she’s no pushover. I don’t get away with anything really. If I if I come in with a bit of an attitude or even talk about making me better the bodybuilder, too, if I’m a little snappy because I’m dieting or tired, she won’t have it. She won’t let it go. She’s like she holds me to a high standard. She knows what I’m capable of. And that holds myself to that standard where I know that she’s doing that because she loves me. She’s willing to call me out for my faults and make the best version of me because of how much she loves me and values our relationship. And I think that ability to communicate and to to work and battle through the problems rather than push them aside and move over and wait till there’s too many of them piling up to face. It’s allowed us to like I said, we’ve gone through some fire in the past, but now we’re in such a stable place where when I found that she was pregnant and we’re getting married, there’s no fear. There’s no what ifs. There’s no oh my God. There’s just pure excitement and absolute confidence and trust. Oh, that’s because we know we can get through it together. Anything. So I think that’s the greatest thing. Well, that pure excitement, the emergence of that pure excitement, you know, and that I think that’s particularly true when it when it emerges as the spirit of play that we were talking about before. You know, I mean, there isn’t anything more really that kids like boys and girls playing together than playing house successfully, you know, and that’s a game for kids. But if you do it right as an adult, it’s a game too. And you could imagine that if you got all the monsters out from underneath the rug and dispensed with them so they weren’t cluttering up your house that you could do something like entertain the possibility of having a family in nothing but in almost nothing but a spirit of excitement. So so I think, you know, the other thing I’ve noticed is that if you clear away all those lurking skeletons in the closet or dragons under the carpet, then that spirit of play can emerge. Right. And then that that’s when your relationship is optimized. What do you think? How did you guys go about jointly determining that you were going to face the issues, your own personal issues and the issues in your relationship instead of pretending they weren’t there? And how did you negotiate your commitment to the truth within your relationship? I think I think it was a bit of a bit of a dance. When we first met, she has had she had a much more difficult childhood than me and some stuff some stuff that she was processing still. And those were more on the surface. And I was the one looking back at my past with rose colored glasses thinking I had it all good and myself was a little bit deeper under the rug. And so as stuff started to come up, I think I think part of it comes from myself. I grew up in a family that wasn’t always great at communicating about things. And so when I was entering relationship, I wasn’t going to have the same thing. I was going to make sure everything was spoken about and brought to the surface and work through. And at first, she didn’t love that about me. It wasn’t always fun, but it allowed us to continuously grow stronger and build trust. And as I started to see the worst of her and she started to show me the worst of her and I started to show her the worst of me. And we realized we were still together and we weren’t running away from each other. We started to build a lot more trust. And it’s like, OK, I can show you my deepest, darkest self that no one else gets to see. And you still love me. Like, that’s powerful. And the same with me. That’s a good deal. I know for a fact that she’s allowed me to be all myself. She’s seen me at my weakest, at my worst and all these things. And she hasn’t run away. She’s pulled me in closer. And you talked a bit about relationships not sacrificing or taking away from success, but actually being able to add to it. And that’s where she’s really helped me because she has understood so much of it that she has pulled out all the realness in me. And as I’m trying to feel and process emotions, she would be able to see on my face if something was like off and she would ask me, are you OK? And I’d be like, I’m fine. I’m good. And I’m very good at hiding that. But she’s very good at seeing it now. And she would ask me 10 times, what’s going on? What’s going on? Pull it out. All of a sudden, I start breaking down crying and I didn’t even realize what was in me myself. And I’m not wanting my wife to see me in this point of weakness because I feel maybe I would be judged. And I’ve had a lot of men, as I’ve spoken about this, tell me I couldn’t tell my wife that she would judge me too much. She would leave me if I broke down crying in front of her like that. She didn’t. She pulled me in closer and she was like told me every single time. She’s like, I know this is difficult. I know there’s a lot of pressure on you right now. You can quit if you want. I will love you regardless. But I believe in you to get through this and you will get through this if you choose to. And she instilled that confidence in me. And it’s that dance we’ve had back and forth where it started with me pulling it a little bit of her. And then now that she’s in a much better place, she’s able to start pulling the things out of me. And we show each other the dark sides and we’ve pulled each other closer and closer over the years to now this point where we have this pure excitement bringing a child together, which is the ultimate form of connection and trust that you need. It’s the most beautiful thing. And it’s something that I’m very grateful to share because nothing’s more meaningful in life than getting to share these experiences and these moments I have with someone who loves you and sees you for all of who you are. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that was all good, Chris. I mean, I mean, I like that story a lot. It’s it has the ring of truth about it. I really like two things you said. The first was it’s so it’s so interesting, eh, because you said that when your relationship started, her issues, things, those would be problems that she brought to the situation that had remained unsolved to some degree. That’s what baggage is. It’s like impediments to people’s development that they haven’t been able to overcome or conceptualize properly. You said hers were more on the surface. Right. You played the role of the person who was willing to confront those. And you guys got through them and dispensed with them. And then things turned around, eh? So because once she got better at that, the things you said, the things that were about you that were perhaps not as evident on the surface, those started to emerge and could be dealt with. You know, and so so that’s cool. And I think it’s realistic. I don’t think it matters in a couple where you start delving into problems. You delve into the problems that make themselves manifest. If you do that honestly together, you’ll end up dealing with all of the problems. Right. It doesn’t matter whose they are. They’re going to they’re going to rise up and you’re going to be able to confront them. You know, and then you said that having done that successfully, partly because she is both a person and a person, and you’re going to be able to confront them. She is bonded to you in this vow. She isn’t going to run away when she sees the parts of you that aren’t everything you might hope they would be at that moment. And that means that you can what that actually means instead of making it worse. It means that you can actually admit to and confront your problems so that you have some possibility of solving them. Because, you know, it is humiliating in the in the true sense to notice that you had a problem you didn’t even know you had, you know, but it certainly gives you an opportunity. Then you know it’s there, man. And then you guys can take it on. And you concluded all that by saying that there isn’t anything better than having the opportunity to share your success with someone you love. And I actually think to some degree, if that’s not the fundamental benefit of marriage, it’s certainly one of the benefits. Like working through your problems jointly, that’s a major one. And whatever pleasure you get out of each other’s company, that’s a major one. But this this ability that a long term relationship has to allow you to it deepens your experiences, the fact that you have someone to share them with. It makes your own triumphs much more real and much more profound to have someone along for for the adventure. And then you also have the same opportunity in relationship to their successes. That’s a good deal. For sure. Yeah. And especially as I was talking about her pulling out those those fears and the things in me that I’m holding in and seeing all that and truly seeing all of me and everything that it takes to to become Mr. Olympia or to get through whatever I’m getting through and then be together at the end and to step off stage and go behind the curtains and to see her there looking me with tears in her eyes. Getting emotional now thinking about those moments and being able to embrace her and in that moment feel that this person you’re holding who you love has seen the entire journey with you. You don’t feel alone at all. There’s no like standing on stage being like you don’t know what I went through. No, you she’s seen and she felt everything I’ve been through and she was beside me the whole way. And therefore we are both able to feel this victory together. It’s hers as much as it is mine. So that’s as you mentioned, there’s there’s nothing more beautiful than that. Right. Right. Well, then yeah, well, that’s the most real part of the whole celebration because I mean you get the award and you get the public acclaim and you get the triumph. But if you’ve been honest with your wife and all of the problems that went along with that, all the obstacles that went along with that have been laid out and you overcame them jointly, then the true celebration in the deepest sense is actually the one with her because she knows the story better than anyone else. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Now that’s a good deal. That’s definitely a good deal. So when is when is when is your child going to be born? Baby girl is going to be born in April. In April. So you’ve got about three months. Oh, yeah. OK. OK. So your wife is pretty pregnant at the moment. She’s pregnant. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those last few months. I just I just watched my daughter go through that because she had a baby in mid-December. And so we were there for about about the month leading up to that. Yeah. And that those last couple of months of pregnancy, that’s quite the well, the whole thing is quite the trip. But the last few months in particular. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, too, as a as a man, your role at the beginning of the child, as you mentioned, that spirit of play doesn’t really come in until they’re a little bit older, which is easier for a man. What would you say is some good tips for me entering this right now, especially for that first phase? That’s a good question. Well, look, the deal when after my wife and I got married, I was about 28 or so and she’s a year older than me. She was ready to have a baby pretty much right away. And I still wasn’t firmly situated in my career, although my prospects were good. I wasn’t worried about it. And I wasn’t in a hurry, but she was more in a hurry. And I thought, well, I don’t want to stop her from doing something that she wants. So why am I resistant to this? So I went for a walk and I thought about it and I thought, OK, well, I have things to do to finish developing my career and I have to do them right now. I was finishing up my PhD. Like, I have to do that. There’s no way around that. And so nothing can interfere with that because that’s not going to be good for me or for my family. So that’s one possibility. And then I thought, well, also, I don’t know what the hell to do with an infant. Like, it’s not in my. And look, I’m relatively maternal man. I worked with little kids. I’ve worked in daycares like I like little kids. And so I would I’m more prone to take care of little kids than most men by temperament. But even so, like infants, I don’t know what the hell to do with an infant. So I thought, oh, maybe that’s the problem. I don’t have any problem with kids at all once they’re sort of ambulatory, like older than nine months, let’s say. And by the way, you can start playing with a baby very, very early. Like the play is very subtle. You know, I had taken my granddaughter, my son’s daughter, and put her on my knees standing up when she was about four months old. And I got her to play a head bonking game. You know, I’d bring her forward and bonk my head on hers. I go one, two, three, bonk, like really lightly, obviously. And then wait, because babies are slow. Their pace is slow. One, two, three, bonk. And then I did that like five, six times. So she knew the pattern. And then I went one, two, three and pulled her forward, but didn’t bonk her. And she laughed. And I thought, hey, kid, you got the game. You know, you established that little pattern and then deviate from it. That’s the game. It’s like peekaboo, too. You know, it’s like it’s a surprise. There’s a bit of surprise. So you can start playing with a baby very early. It’s very subtle to begin with. But I would say, so know that, know that, that you can start playing and interacting very early. So and that’s a good thing to have at the back of your mind. And that ability to play just gets more and more important as the baby gets older. But I would also say that your role is to take care of your wife while she takes care of the baby. So that means you’ve got to watch her because this is going to tire her out. Like it’s a it’s a full body experience for a woman. Right. I mean, first of all, she’s pregnant and that’s a hell of a thing, especially in the last month. Then she has to give birth. And, you know, I think that’s something men have no real comprehension of. And then she has to recover. And then that baby is like desperately vulnerable and requires everything the woman has to provide for the first absolutely for the first two months and pretty much absolutely for the first six months. So you’ve got to stand in the background and you’ve got to watch her and you’ve got to make sure that she doesn’t get overwhelmed because that’s when you need to be in there. You need to go in and say, look, you know, you need a rest. You need to have a nap. You all take care of the baby. I’ll watch. And so everything’s going fine and I’ll wake you up if it’s necessary. But you got to spell her off. And so you need to make that arrangement. And that’s the primary. You know, you think that’s how it looks to me is her primary responsibility is to take care of the baby and your primary responsibilities. Take care of her. And and then you have to understand that she’s going to be gone from you for like six months. And if you can engage in that wholeheartedly, you can get to know the baby and you can set the stage so that that baby is really well attached to the mother like firmly. And that’ll save you so goddamn much trouble for the rest of your life. You can hardly imagine it because that initial bonding, that’s what provides the scaffold of security, like the physical scaffold of security for that new person. And if that’s disrupted, it’s real trouble. So, you know, in six months, it’s not, you know, an instant, but. She’s going to come back. And then you’ll also have when my son was born, when Julian was born, my daughter, Michaela, was only a year and a half old. And that’s a bit of a tricky age gap because a year and a half old kid still needs her mother quite a lot. And then you have a new baby. And if you have a year and a half old kid and then a new baby, the year and a half old kid looks like a teenager. It’s like they’re not a baby anymore compared to a newborn. And so they can easily get kind of shunted aside and that can produce a lot of sibling rivalry and jealousy and bitterness and alienation on the part of the older child. So we taught her very early to take care of the new baby and to understand that if she established a relationship with him, you know, that would be. A benefit that she could derive from the new situation. She’d have three people to love instead of two. And that’s a good deal. The same applies here in relationship to your wife and the new child. It’s like you’re going to have to let your wife go for six months. But if you’re very careful with that, as I’m sure you will be, and you really take care of her, you know, she’ll come back to you and then you’ll have this other person, a daughter. You’ll never have anybody in your life who loves you as much as your daughter will. Like if you do that right and it’ll be the same if you have a son and that is a bloody good deal. I’ll tell you, man, I loved hanging around my when my kids were little. I would be with them than anyone else. They were fun, you know, and that’s it helps if you have the right disciplinary structure in relationship to your kids and you’ve worked that out with your wife. So I have a rule. It’s a very good rule. You know, don’t let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them. And if you discuss that with your wife and you make that rule, you know, you can note to each other that kid’s annoying us, that kid’s being annoying. And then you can work together and you think, OK, what’s annoying? How do we stop it? Because if he’s annoying you, he’s going to annoy everybody else. And if he’s annoying, no one like him. It’s not good for the kid. But if you can get that right, you’ll there’ll be nothing more enjoyable that you do in your whole life than spend time with your little kids because they really want to like you more than anything else. And that’s a great deal, man. For sure. Yeah, no, I’m definitely very excited for that, that relationship building. And like you were saying, and luckily in the past, we’ve had almost a little bit of experience with the flip where when I was I got better this year. But in the past, when I was a little bit more stressed out about entering a prep, we would communicate before getting into it in the past. We didn’t. But we started to communicate, be like, OK, I’m about to enter a really intense phase of my prep right now. So I just want you to know preemptively, I love you. You’re my number one priority. But right now I may not be able to show you that as much as possible. But I promise afterwards we will reconnect. We will do everything we can. And also in the process, I will do the best I can. So now that we’ve practiced that, you mentioned six months, it’s going to be pulled away. So we’ve already been communicating and we will more. And especially you giving this tip. I’ll go even talk to her again tonight and be like, I understand that you’re going to be stepped away for the six months and give her permission to be there for the baby. And also understand that afterwards we’ll reconnect and come back to each other. But rather than finding it out along the way, understanding it before it comes so that we’re able to prepare for it and not build any resentment that that might come. So the other thing that Tammy and I figured out at that time was because your wife is going to be very preoccupied with this new person. And to the degree that you want to be around your wife, that’s going to leave you on the outside. Like that’s going to happen. And that’s also a place where the kind of resentments that tear families apart can start to develop. Because you can be resentful about your wife because she isn’t there. And then you can be resentful of your daughter because she’s taking you away from your wife. And then you’ll deny all that because you’ll think, well, I’m not the sort of person that could be jealous of a baby. It’s like, oh, yes, you are. You definitely are. And so is everyone else. So these things have to be managed. And so one of the things we discovered, this was actually my wife’s suggestion that once say after that six month period where your wife has the wherewithal potentially to attend to you to some degree, let’s say, and to want to do that. We start. That’s when we started our practice of regular dates. You know, and we have done that for I don’t know how long, 35 years now. You know, like we make dates two to three times a week, and we’ve done that for that long. And that’s a really smart idea, because one of the things you’ll find is that you’re going to be way busier than you can possibly imagine once you have this baby. And even more so if you have more kids like it’s a real threshold transformation, right? Because now you have someone really vulnerable and you are responsible for them like it’s unlike anything you’ll have ever done. Now, you’re a disciplined guy. So, you know, you have taste of that sort of thing. But it’s still it’s it’s a watershed moment. And because you’re so busy now, it’s easy for your relationship with your wife to become secondary or even number 11 on a list of 10 priorities, you know, and that’s not good. And so my sense is that couples who are embarking on the process of having kids have to make a conscious commitment to placing each other first for some amount of time during the during the months, the weeks and months ahead. It can’t you can’t just wait around for it to happen because you don’t have the bandwidth. And so and this has been this is something we’ve got better and better at too. And I would say cumulatively, you know, over all the decades is that the dates we have just get better and better just like because of practice. But it goes so if you know, you know, you’re going to have to leave your wife to the baby for six months and then maybe she’ll be able to come back to you. And then but having a plan for that, you know, like to begin with, she’s still going to be pretty tired. It might be that, you know, you have someone take care of the baby while you’re at home and you guys have dinner together, something that simpler. You watch a movie together, you know, it’s going to kind of start out slow. But having a conscious plan for how you’re going to prioritize your relationship, given that you now have a baby to take care of, that’s going to save you a lot of misery and grief as well. Absolutely. Yeah, that preemptive planning is something I’ve been processing a lot, especially recently, because she’s also in pregnancy. Of course, they crave connection and they’re they’re building their home and almost nesting, I guess you could say. And I’ve been going through a large, very large growth phase of my business that I own here in Florida. And we’ve been traveling a lot for that. So I’ve been out of town a lot. And you were talking about part of your worries when you were having a child where you got to get your Ph.D., which is also good for your family long term so that you’re able to provide for them. And that’s partly what I’m processing and going through right now. That’s taking me away a little bit right now. But I understand long term, it’s it’s going to provide for my family. It’s what’s going to be best for them. But then let’s say over the last over the next three months in the first three months of the year, I’m home for about eight days, ten days and she’s home all the time. So I need to be a lot more conscientious when I come home with being planner like, OK, I’m only back for three days. We need to plan ahead that we’re going to do date nights every time I’m back because we need that time to connect. And that’s even that’s also great practice. Like you said, I might feel busy now, but when there’s a child in the mix of all that, it’s it’s going to be tenfold. So being able to preemptively plan ahead and actually build structure and routine where you’re planning those moments of connection rather than just waiting for them to naturally happen, which maybe when you’re young and you just it’s Friday night, let’s go out. We’re not tired. Let’s have fun. It used to happen naturally. But as life gets picked up, you need to be a lot more attentive to actually planning ahead and making sure. Yeah. Well, and you also got to learn with each other, you know, because there’s going to be imagine there’s an optimal balance between. Look, if you’re going to have Thanksgiving dinner, you don’t want to eat a pizza like at four in the afternoon, right? You want to be optimally hungry. And it’s a state of optimal deprivation. And so you also want to negotiate with that with your wife, you know, as as you progress through your marriage, it’s like, how much time do you have to spend with each other? But how much time do you have to spend apart or in a state of desire, right? To make all of that optimal, you know, and that’s that’s a very subtle thing to get right. You know, like my wife needs to be alone more than me. And she is a lot more fun to be around and a lot more interested in me if I leave her the hell alone more. And because I would likely choose, what would you say? I’m more cuddly. God, what a horrible thing to say and admit than she is, you know, and it’s easy to be put off by her somewhat prickly exterior. She’s very playful, but kind of rough, you know, and so she she’s kind of a prickly person. And it’s actually something I like about her. But, you know, we’ve had to be very attentive to find exactly that balance, you know, so that I’m not around her too much so that she can come to miss me. So that when we are together, that we’re both extremely happy about it, you know, and that’s something that this regular practice of planned togetherness, that can also foster that because you can learn that’s like, well, because you can watch yourselves like you’ll find out, well, when am I happy? When am I truly happiest to see her? Like under what conditions? And she has to figure that out with you too, you know, and that’s a good thing to discover. And and you can discover it if you if you make that effort. So well, you have a big year coming up with a new baby. And when is your next major competition? It’s in October this year. And so you start really ramping up for that win? Depends on how everything goes in the year, but maybe around July. Right. OK, OK. And you’re going to figure out how to do that with this new child in your life, too. That’s that’s the challenge that we’re going to be working on this year. Yeah, right, right, right. Well, you got a lot of good things sitting there in front of you. A lot of new mountains by the sounds of things. For sure. And so I’ve been lucky that I was talking about bodybuilding forever for me. So as I’m approaching what I feel like at the end of my career, these new mountains are forming in front of me. So it feels like everything’s kind of coming as it’s meant to be. And hopefully beautiful culmination of the journey was the beginning of a new one that is will to be discovering my new mountains and new forms of growth and new ways to find fulfillment. So I’m very excited. Right, right. Well, it’s very wise to be looking ahead to that. Already and not to be. It’s a really good thing to know. This is something you can learn as you get older and hypothetically wiser. Like, it’s not such a bad thing to to leave the party when it’s going strong, especially if you got something else exciting, you know, beckoning to you around the next corner. You know, and you can imagine athletes in particular, you know, they have their glory days for sure. And it’s very much dependent on youth and and the cutting edge that that youth gives you. And you have to know when you’re at the peak of your game and when the time to move on arrives. That is earlier in athletes lives generally than in other people’s lives. And having the wisdom to see that and to not only accept but welcome it. Know that that’s one thing you can do to make that transition. I wouldn’t even say easier, but to allow yourself to transition to something that could even be better. I mean, you’ve already had spectacular success, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve reached your peak. And that’s a good thing to know, too. For sure. Yeah. I’m glad you pulled back that word easier because as I’m coming more face to face with the transition and as you said, leaving the party while the party’s still fun, it’s feeling more challenging than I thought it would be. And as it should be, it shouldn’t it shouldn’t feel easy, especially because I’m not leaving something that has turned into something I resent. I’m leaving something I learned to actually enjoy more. But everything comes to an end. And like you said, sometimes that leaving something great behind will lead to something even greater. And I’m glad that I have my family in front of me to be that something much, much greater. Yeah, that’s a good deal. That’s a good deal. All right. So everybody watching and listening, I’m going to continue to talk to Chris on the next episode. I’m going to continue to talk to Chris on the Daily Wire Plus side of the platform. I think we’re going to talk to begin with about his father because he’s made some comments in this YouTube discussion about his admiration for his father and also his discovery or adoption even of the role of dad in the enterprise that he’s pursuing. And I’m going to delve into that a little bit further, as well as some other autobiographical details and anything that happens to come up that’s interesting as a consequence. So if you’d like to join us there, please do. You can consider throwing some support to Daily Wire Plus way, which I think isn’t such a bad idea, given that they’re staunch advocates for the kind of free speech and free inquiry that we all desperately need, especially now. So Chris, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. That was very engaging and a lot of fun. And I appreciate that. And also for your willingness to discuss so forthrightly the obstacles that you still see in front of you and that have caused you a certain amount of distress that you’re busily working to master and overcome. It’s very useful for people to hear about that sort of thing. And I think you do people a real service when you are willing to talk so straightly about such things as you’ve seen, you’ve seen the impact that that’s had on people. And to the Daily Wire Plus people, thank you. And for the film crew here in Toronto for facilitating this. Much appreciated. And to everyone watching and listening, your time and attention is always appreciated and not taken for granted. Ciao, Chris. Good to get to know you, man. Likewise. I appreciate the conversation. It’s been an honor and you’ve helped me as well just talking through things that helps me process and learn. So thank you for this conversation and the previous one sided conversations we’ve had listening to over the years. It’s an honor to be on this podcast with you. Thank you very much, sir.