Mike Dolce - Live Your Brand

Full transcript: Mike Dolce on London Real

7:27 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mike Dolce, the American author, trainer, nutritionist, strength and conditioning coach and motivational speaker. You are the three time world MMA trainer of the year, four time best selling author and founder of the Dolce diet. You work with top fighters like Ronda Rousey, Johnny Hendricks, BJ Penn, Carlos Condit, Vito Belfort, Chael Sonnen and have never had a fighter miss weight.

8:06 Mike Dolce, welcome back to London Real. Brian, thank you. So happy to be here once again. Dude, it’s awesome to have you here. You know, you look as good as the last time you were here, if not better. And it’s a different set.

8:18 Yeah, I love the set. It’s been two years and some change and how things how things change, right? Yeah. I remember the time we spent here and I think I remember I walked you back to the hotel and like you are, you know, you are an intense guy. You’re everything about your brand. You’re constantly thinking, innovating.

8:36 Yet you’re present and you’re talking about a message that like you really believe to your core. And I was just wondering what’s changed in the last couple of years in the world and Mike Dolce from your business to media to just everything. I have a baby now. Yeah. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you. What’s that like? I got mine’s coming in five weeks. Congratulations.

8:56 Boy, boy. Boy, good for you. Carries on. I have a little girl at home. Victoria is her name. Thank you.

9:03 Fourteen months now. So February was her birthday and it is the most amazing aspect of my life being a father, being a father to her. And having for me, having a little girl really brought out a part of me I didn’t know existed. And maybe it would have been the same with a boy just having another life depending on me so much, but truly has changed me for the better, regardless of the greater commitments and responsibility and lack of sleep and free time in a way. It’s just unreal. Unreal.

9:41 How does it change your message? Because like I said, you’ve always been an intense guy. I want to talk a little bit about your childhood and your days back in Jersey, all that good stuff. But when you have that new life in the world, for a lot of people, it makes them re-look at themselves and figure out why they’re doing what they’re doing or maybe they should go harder or go different. I don’t know how you would go harder from the last time I saw you, but how does it change the way you are as a person?

10:04 Definitely makes me want to go harder. I swing my feet over the bed earlier in the morning with more pop in my step than before because I have even greater purpose now. I have another mouth to feed. I have another road to pave for her to kind of follow behind. I have to do that by leading by example. I’m aware that everything I do, every word I say, every outlook that I project, she’s going to see and it’s going to shape who she is.

10:34 So it really makes me very mindful of who I am and my actions, my words, my inner dialogue, my approach to life, the way I treat people, everything now. I’m more keenly aware of who I am through her eyes. So I think it’s made me better everywhere, but it’s also exposed my flaws, things that I hadn’t known about myself or seen about myself, which is a gift in itself. So it really has allowed me to push myself, push my own boundaries to try and be better. None of us will ever be perfect for sure.

11:12 But I have even more reason to strive for that in every aspect of life. So it’s not just as a dad, not just as a person, not just as a businessman or a husband, any aspect, every aspect of life. To be really a better citizen of the planet, I think maybe that’s a good kind of a general term. Yeah, definitely. I want to talk about the Dolce Diet, the business you built, Brandi, your wife, is interlinked in that business.

11:36 You know, podcast co-host, you guys are an amazing team together. Incredible. But most people see you as the guy that walks on stage with that UFC athlete. They are cutting weight and trying to be in the best shape possible and yet lightest possible on that day when they jump on the scale. You have done that standing next to Quentin Ranbé Jackson, Chaela Son, and Ronda Rousey, Carlos Condit recently. All the greats.

12:01 For people that don’t understand, what’s that experience like when you go on stage with them? I mean, you’ve obviously spent weeks with them at that point. Why are you the best at what you do when it comes to that? What makes you different? I’d say that there’s a few things that differentiate the Dolce Diet from every other brand.

12:19 I can’t say it’s the most important because there’s equal importance here, but one of the most important aspects is the evidence-based science that we use to replicate these results. A lot of people don’t realize because they see me as the face of the brand and sometimes I speak in a very general manner. I use kind of layperson speak in a way, not because I’m better or worse than anybody, because it’s a way that taught me to communicate effectively with anybody.

12:53 So anybody hearing my message will understand my message. And I think what that had done, that had diminished the perception of some people of what we actually do. There’s not a lot of science behind the Dolce Diet. That cannot be said because everything we do is science-based. And every time we work with an athlete, we institute the scientific method.

13:15 And every athlete that we work with allows us to take that from hypothesis through conclusion all the way to our next athlete. So every weekend, every Friday, way, and Saturday night of competition, that becomes our own scientific study, scientific method in practice. And then we move on to the next one. So I have journals and notebooks of every athlete I’ve ever worked with going back to the early 2000s. 2004, Team Quest.

13:43 Head strength coach of Team Quest. Right. It was up in Portland, Oregon. You, I think, drove out there from Jersey. Back then it was Randy Kocher. Was Chale Sonnen maybe in the house?

13:53 Chale was just a baby at that time. Right. And I’m amazed that they could invest, I don’t know what the investment was, in a nutrition coach at that point. I mean, that was kind of forward thinking. Well, at that point, I wasn’t hired as a nutrition coach. I was hired as a strength coach. I didn’t even see myself as a nutrition expert.

14:11 I was a strength coach. I was a performance coach, you could say. To me, the nutrition was just kind of an add-on. And I was unaware that nobody looked at nutrition the way that we did. Nobody was using that earth grow nutrient approach to nutrition back in those days.

14:28 It was much more bodybuilding nutrition practiced by most athletes. They were all focused on the pills, the powders, the potions, which is where that tagline came from. And just dumping a bunch of protein into their mouth after training session and then just eating less bad food as they got closer to competition. Even the guys at Team Quest at that time was the number one team in the world. Randy had the UFC world title. Dan Henderson had the pride world title.

14:54 Matt Linlin was one of the top fighters, pound for pound on the planet. Silver medal from, I forget what year, the Greco-Roman wrestling. Olympics. This was pre The Ultimate Fighter. Chris Leib and Annette Quarry hadn’t even been on the show yet when I was hired to be a part.

15:10 And being there, and this kind of goes back to the first question about what differentiates us, is the science. Everything with Adultery Diet is based upon longevity science. I had found in my own practice, going as an amateur wrestler to a competitive powerlifter, I had always focused on sports performance because that’s all the information that was out there. How to perform better, how to get stronger, how to get leaner. Sports performance and that was very much supplement derived. Well that’s because those that controlled the major points of education back in those days, and this is pre-internet, of course this is where everything really came from magazines and from TV shows, well that’s all just marketing dollars.

15:48 Who’s buying the ads? Well we’re going to do the protein article that really supports the $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 page ad material that this company XYZ put into the magazine. So I had followed that like most others had and then I had a tipping point in my own life that I went to the doctor and I realized I’m big, I’m strong, I just had broken my own personal records in the gym, squat bench deadlift. I was 282 pounds, thought I was just the man, strong as anybody really. At that point I had sleep apnea, I had high blood pressure, I had high cholesterol, I was just physically a mess.

16:36 My doctor said to me after pulling my blood work, she said Mike, you have the blood work of a 55 year old man, I was 25 or 26 at that point. My head spun, how could that be? I’m buying all the right supplements, I’m doing all the things that I’m supposed to be doing, I so blindly followed the other experts in the field and I just took it for granted. The exercise, the training demand, all that was on point and that’s why I was able to excel and do well and work. I opened my business in 1997, I was already coaching elite athletes for quite a long time before that with great levels of success.

17:11 So again, nutrition was so off, so that’s when I switched and became so focused on longevity based nutrition because I was scared for my health. My father had suffered a massive stroke when I was 8 years old and I had watched that happen, I had watched him die. Massive stroke, heart attack, game over and he looked great. Big chest veins in his bicep, he had abs, but his diet was so poor and my mind was just again, twisted, spun. Focused on longevity science, took a good 2 years of really investigating and vetting out all of the information that I could in those days and started incorporating it into the lives of my athletes.

17:52 I was a paid strength coach to work with and then I was fixing their diets as a byproduct, just as an add on, never even charged anybody for that. When I got to Team Quest, I saw how bad everybody was eating and I started changing all their eating programs. Here’s the workouts, I need you to eat this stuff, they started eating that stuff, which there was no Dolce diet at that point. That’s where the term Dolce diet was coined at Team Quest because everybody started to change and they started talking about that Dolce diet, I’m doing that Dolce diet and that’s kind of how it really took off.

18:26 Of course, we trademarked that because I saw the mass appeal. It’s funny to me, a lot of people watch this, have their own businesses and they’re very entrepreneurial and then when they look at your branding and your diet, they’re thinking that this was a grand plan of yours 15 years ago. It’s funny how you do something that you loved and you believed in and then someone called it something and it stuck and then you took the ball and ran with it. I didn’t want to be in the nutrition world.

18:52 You were a fighter still. I was fighting as a way to pay bills and I was fighting because I enjoyed the competition, but I didn’t want to be a professional fighter. I didn’t want to be a world champion. I wanted to be an elite coach. When I went to Team Quest, my goals were to be a world-class trainer at a world-class facility of world-class athletes.

19:14 It was never to be a world-class fighter or competitor, but I made $14,000 my first year as the head strength coach of Team Quest, the world’s greatest athletes on the planet. I wasn’t getting paid to do that essentially and that’s a whole other story. I was working for them for free, 40 of the world’s greatest athletes I was training every day for free, but from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. I got paid to clean the toilet to mop the mat. I would open the gym.

19:40 I got minimum wage, $8 an hour before taxes, $32 a day before taxes, and I would work until 9 o’clock at night and I would work with the world’s greatest athletes. I would run them through workouts and I would train a little bit on my own because I had been training previously. I had, as I said, a wrestling background, a jiu-jitsu background. I started with Henzo in the late 90s, early 2000s. People don’t realize, my lineage goes so far back, they just see me on TV a couple times like, oh, who’s that idiot? I could do that too.

20:10 I’ve been a paid elite coach since 1997. My business has been open and profitable since 1997. People don’t get that. They just want to make their own t-shirt now, try and get associated with an athlete they cook a few meals for and say, oh, I can do what Dolce does. Nobody can do what I’ve done. Nobody can do what I do. Nobody has done what I’ve done because I’m the only one that’s done this.

20:34 Now, I don’t say that with ego. I say it out of fact. I am the first one to have ever done this. And I will say that I’m the best. My company is the best because the level of education of those on my team, it’s a team of registered dietitians and exercise physiologist and certified strength and conditioning specialists that sit in my office that vet the programs that we create based upon the experience of myself going back to 1990 as the captain of my high school wrestling team, freshman year varsity captain.

21:03 So for four years, I was running the strength and conditioning programs and weight cuts of athletes at 13 years old. It’s what I’ve always been doing. People don’t see that. They don’t get that. Right. So many people go with the overnight success and there’s always 10, 15 years behind that. Absolutely. There’s no overnight.

21:19 You were training with Henso back when he was on 8th Avenue and 37th Street above the methadone clinic. Absolutely. Back then. Okay. I trained there. I trained there in 2002. I think. Yeah.

21:27 We got the fancy gyms. I didn’t know you were doing jujitsu back then. You knew John Danner was probably back then. John Danner was one of the first when I first went to Henso’s. I did. I would do one private a month with John Danner just to help expedite my process because you know you could go out there. You could get your ass kicked and kick ass.

21:45 But John would kind of clean up some technique and I had a little bit of money because I was a municipal tax assessor at that point. I was making a six figure income which we spoke about on the last show. I had some money in my pocket but I would work until 6 p.m. I would take a two hour train ride and I would do the night class at Henso’s three times a week. And then I’d pay John once a month to kind of give me a little bit of extra time because I couldn’t get enough mat time.

22:08 And then I’d take the two hour train ride all the way home. So I’d get home you know 12 1 o’clock in the morning and I’d wake up at 6 to go back to the office to be a tax assessor. Right. And so people that don’t know we’re talking about Henso Gracie which is one of the Gracie lineage of the creators of Brazilian jujitsu also known as Gracie jujitsu. But back in the late 90s it was not fashionable by any means. And he had a couple I think his first two black belts were Matt Sarah and John Danner something like that.

22:34 And he had this old place that was on like 37th and 8th between 8th and 9th Avenue in New York City. It was like literally above a methadone clinic. Literally. And one of my old buddies in New York he got his purple belt from John and he took me there to train in 2002 after I moved to London. I went back and he’s like we’re going to do a private session with John. And John is known around the world as really almost like kind of legendary status to be one of the guys because he’s a real thinking man guy.

22:57 I think he’s got a philosophy degree. And he’s really known as a proper thinker and now Henso is in a newer gym and now it’s quite the place to train in Manhattan. He’s got amazing athletes but you were there back in the day. I was back in the super early days. All right. So let me continue with your story. You went out to request you’re training these guys but you’re really cleaning toilets making the money. I think it’s great for people to hear that you’re doing that anyways.

23:20 And you dropped the six figure income in Jersey to go pursue your dreams. I still find that a story that really is never told about you. Yeah. It’s funny how selective the stories that come out about me are. You know it’s all if it’s not drama that nobody wants to talk about it.

23:34 So I was working as a municipal tax assessor in New Jersey. I was the youngest sitting assessor in the state at that time. I was in charge of a city called Long Branch which is on the Atlantic Ocean. It’s one of the most affluent cities in the state. Bruce Springsteen and John Bon Jovi. I mean we’re talking about massive taxpayers were there and I was in charge of the valuation of real property.

23:59 So I was in charge of you know to 2.2 2.6 billion dollars in real estate assets as a kid in my early 20s. Very strong math and science background. It was rather easy for me. I passed my CTA certified tax assessor test on the first try without studying and had a 17 percent pass rate. So there was guys in the industry that were in the industry for a decade or so they would take it two and three times before finally cracking the code.

24:25 And I was able to do well. Again it’s kind of not bragging. It might sound like it is. But sciences and mathematics came very very easily to me. I was you know honors in school and you know in the math and the sciences again without studying or even trying to do that. It just suited me.

24:43 So that information that mathematical logical scientific brain is why I believe we have the success that we have with the Dolce diet and with our athletes and the fact that no athlete has ever missed weight while following our programs. Even the worst ones even the Johnny Hendrickses of the world who admit to not following our program until I come in and force him to do so. I was always able to get my athletes on weight through scientific means. You don’t just luck into that. You don’t magic hocus pocus into that. It’s all science based.

25:15 Let me address that. What is bro science. You know bro science is more and what’s interesting bro science is a term. It’s a slang term essentially that people use. And I didn’t even know the term until recently. You know last couple of years and people kind of like try to associate that with myself or my brand.

25:33 Now there’s there’s actually legitimacy to bro science because it’s it’s comes more from the bodybuilding world. You look at the Mr. Olympia stage. Most of those guys up there are bro scientists. Right. They figured it out themselves. They figured it out themselves. They figured out what works and they kind of pulled all the information from whatever sources some legitimate sources.

25:52 Some legitimate some not. And they figured it out and they went up there and they achieved very low single digit percentage of body fat while having massive amounts of muscle. Now do they use performance enhancing drugs. Most of them certainly do. But there’s a science in itself to that. I mean that comes from the medical field pharmaceutical world.

26:10 There’s a science to that. There’s a chemistry. There’s biology. There’s all these things that go into that not supporting or bashing the bodybuilding side. But they’re pretty damn intelligent with what they’re able to do because they do something that’s so niche and it’s so far removed from what any other human being can actually do with legitimate science PhD credentials or not.

26:32 These guys can do it. I know PhDs. There’s PhDs that tried to break in our industry. You know there’s a master’s of science and and registered registered dietitians and all these great certificates where individuals would sit in school for four six eight years to get their degrees. And they would try and break into the field bashing me the whole way and they would fall flat on their face because they couldn’t produce results.

26:54 Now one of the biggest pieces of our business is we’re able to replicate results. We can replicate results regardless of the individual regardless of the age regardless of gender. Geography, middle of Brazil, Portland, Pacific Northwest, doesn’t matter. Our results are always the same. They’re always perfect.

27:17 I was thinking of both sides. Dorian Yates, six time minister at Olympia was sitting in this chair about six months ago and he was talking about how a guy in Birmingham, which is pretty much the center of England with all of his resources were probably some bodybuilding magazines. The rest of it he had no access to the Venice Beach crowd to anything going out in Los Angeles. Whatever that science was out there. And for six years he managed to push himself to get the right sleep, to get the right nutrition, to get the right training, to be on the top of the game.

27:46 The best built man in the world according to that micro niche for six years in a row. So that’s probably a great example of some whatever you want to call it. Application science. I don’t know what that is. He would be, I’m not saying this, but by the term of pro science, he would be the king because he wasn’t working with a team of scientists.

28:07 I don’t believe he has a degree in sciences. I don’t even know if he has a degree at all, but he’s one of the greatest bodybuilders of all time. What he was able to do, what he was able to accomplish. I remember, was it 96 or so when he completely changed his already elite level physique. I was a kid at that time, relatively speaking, I was younger compared to I am now, going back 20 plus years.

28:32 And I remember that change that Dorian had made. I was kind of a fan of bodybuilding while Lee Haney was still reigning. Then Dorian came in and took a second to Lee, then Dorian took the throne from him and kind of moved on. And he was able to completely overhaul his own physique in a sport that the level of perfection or the level of improvement is so small. These guys can put on four pounds in a year of lean muscle. That’s massive at that level.

28:58 That’s like a sprinter in the hundred being able to take a full second off their time. It’s almost unheard of. Dorian was able to do that based upon, I don’t want to use the term bro science, but less than what some would consider the true science. Right. He says he still has books with every single workout written when he was that. You guys would get along really well.

29:22 He has everything written down. He talks about his discipline, his sleep habits, how he could never go see a movie, how he would never go out to dinner. We had to have his sleep about trudging through the snow in the middle of winter, thinking about the guys on Venice Beach out in their swim trunks and then trudging through the snow for two and a half hours just to open up the gym to get that leg workout in that he knew he needed for the competition six months down the road.

29:47 You hear him talk about it and he gets hairs in the back of my neck to stand up because I think he’s got similar discipline in the scientific mind like you do. When people talk about bro science, well that’s a way I feel for the unaccomplished to try and tear down those that have made accomplishments. What we do, not only do I have a team of what would classically be considered professional scientists with their degrees, a lot of what they’ve learned in school, I have to deprogram from that.

30:17 I remember our head dietician when she first started working with us, I was teaching her how to build a peaking program for a weight class oriented athlete. And as I’m going through, she said, well, that’s not going to work because our athlete wasn’t going in the caloric deficit. She’s like, well, you can’t lose weight unless you take in less calories than you consume. And I laugh, I said, where did you learn that? She’s like, well, in school, I said, have you ever tried it?

30:42 She’s like, well, no. Well, this is what I’ve been doing for the last 15 years and each time is actually better and each time I can feed my athletes more. Now, what we’re doing right now in my office with my athletes, they’re not even aware of in university yet. I like to say we’re actually riding the cresting wave and the school system, they’re still kind of paddling around waiting for a wave to come and take us, take them to the beach to find us, to find the work that we’ve done.

31:11 Remember, I work with the world’s greatest athletes every weekend. Those performances are the first time they’ve ever performed like that. I did a few seminars for the military with Rich Franklin and people asked, well, how do you guys cut weight? Rich talked about the way he cut weight, calorie deficit, increased work, expenditure, really tracks his macros. I’m like, oh, Mike, what do you do with your calories and macros?

31:35 What are you talking about? We don’t track calories. We don’t track macros. We use a completely different method. Rich did a lot of kind of the supplements and I would take a scoop of this and a scoop of that.

31:46 We’re like, we don’t do any of that stuff. We actually, we focus on completely fulfilling the energy needs of our clients, of our athletes without spilling over, but we really fuel them for the work product that they will need in order to perform. And as a byproduct of that, they’re able to change their lean mass composition. At the very end, the dehydration of the ringing out the water, that becomes just simply balancing the electrolytes. Where this past week I was with Manning and Berrien who fought on the UFC Tampa card.

32:15 And our method of cutting weight was just hanging out in the hot tub, in the sunshine. You always make it look easy. It’s easy. And it’s cool because Dan unfortunately got pulled off the card, but Dan Henderson comes out and I was Dan’s employee in the early days. So now Dan’s here, different phases of life.

32:31 He’s here hanging out, drinking a beer in the hot tub, kind of hanging out, cutting weight with us, having a good time. All the other athletes are freaking killing themselves in the workout room with plastics and hoodies and just working out and kind of collapsing in the workout rooms. There’s no sewing on premises. Other athletes are complaining because their diet coaches, their nutrition guru is locking them in bathrooms with hair dryers on at full last to keep the heat on in their bathrooms while putting them in tubs of scalding water so hot that they can’t even get in.

33:03 It takes them two, three, five minutes to just get into the water. They don’t understand how easy it actually is to cut weight professionally in a healthy manner and that they’re actually doing harm to their client by using these archaic methods. That’s the bro science. What we do, we’re so far evolved from that. We’re so far evolved, people don’t understand.

33:27 Therefore, they say that can’t work. And the simplicity of what we do is so simple. People say, well, there’s no way. There’s got to be something else you guys are doing. But if you hear my athletes talk for the last decade or you follow us along, it’d be cool to have you guys come and follow us along one day.

33:43 Actually, I would like to really document it. To see all ideas, I like to say, kind of build this bubble of positivity around the athlete. Yeah, it’s funny because you talk about how academia, they’ve learned all this knowledge and then they’re saying, okay, that teaches us this. And yet you are literally in a laboratory every week that everyone has to watch. And for people that don’t even know what this whole weight-ketting thing is all about, these fighters fight at prescribed weights.

34:09 145 pounds, 155 pounds, 170, 205, et cetera. And they have to make that weight 24 hours typically before they fight. And then they have to fight the next day. And I want to ask you about what the caliber of an athlete is for a UFC fighter. But for people that don’t know, it’s probably one of the most typical 15-minute of your life, fighting three or five rounds in the UFC.

34:31 It’s incredible. And so not only do you have to have them cut weight, but then they have to perform at the highest level 24 hours later. And you do this year in, year out, year in, year out. So you are actually collecting the data on the ground floor and adjusting as necessary. Absolutely.

34:47 And so you are kind of really at the front. I’m completely at the forefront with the best of you. As I said earlier, I have journals on every athlete, their entire training camp, every ingredient that they’ve consumed, every ounce of water that they’ve drank, every trip to the bathroom, every bowel movement. I mean, sometimes the color and texture consistency of their bowel movements. Too much information.

35:15 Some people might say, watching this right now, but not for us. Because that tells us a lot about the athlete. I know what their stress levels are. I know what their sense of humor is. I speak with their spouses, their teammates, significant other.

35:27 And I understand more about how they’re sleeping at night, not talking to the athlete. What’s their sense of humor like? Are they joking around? What’s your interpersonal relationship like? I get that information because those are data points for us to track also.

35:39 And that allows us to really look into the future and determine, do we have to change their caloric load? Do we have to change the timing and consistency of their meals? Do we have to play with the periodization table of their training camp? Do we need to give them time off? Do we need to put more time in?

35:55 Wake up heart rates, post-training heart rates, what they weigh before training session, what they weigh after, how much water they’re actually losing, what they’re respirating through night. There’s a lot of science here. There’s so much science here. And the knuckleheads in the world, they don’t even understand that these are parts of it. They just think it comes down to calories in versus calories out.

36:15 That’s the least of it. That’s the least of it. They don’t get that. And I laugh in a way because I know, well, shit, job security, they don’t even understand what they’re doing. They can’t build this spaceship because they don’t even understand how it can fly.

36:31 But at the same time, I feel bad for the athletes and the clients that they work with because they’re degrading the athlete’s health. They’re taking years off the career. Johnny Hendricks is a great example. We worked with him, helped him win a world title, helped make him millions of dollars. And then he reached the point in his career that he decided, well, I should say we decided, he decided that he didn’t have the discipline to follow a program such as ours, which is truly a lifestyle change.

36:55 He wanted more of an inexpensive quick fix. So he brought somebody in that was not certified, had no credentials, self-proclaimed nutrition expert, put Johnny on a severe caloric, a calorie restricted diet. Johnny was able to make weight rather easily as far as what his total body weight was, but it totally took him out of his game, made him extremely weak. And he went out and lost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars by getting knocked out in the first round.

37:27 Where with us, Johnny was able to go 10 rounds versus Robbie Lawler, one of the hardest hitters in the world. And he got knocked out in three minutes by Stephen Thompson, who’s not really a hard hitter. No, Stephen’s a great fighter. And that shows the difference in what we did. Johnny was tweeting his actual meal plan, and we did a complete micro-macronutrient breakdown, calorie breakdown.

37:49 Johnny was eating 1,100 calories a day as a 190-pound man three weeks before competition. Our athletes are eating closer to 3,000 calories a day that far from competition, while having similar body weights, improved lean mass composition, and completely fulfilling their micronutrient content, which, I mean, he was completely devoid of micronutrients. I wasn’t in the camp, so I’m going off the data that he was putting into the world. So I see that, and this goes to my point.

38:18 Job security, but at the same time, I feel horrible, because Johnny’s a sweet guy, he’s a good person. And he lost millions of dollars from his family and his little babies at home because he was listening to one of the knuckleheads out there that were just selling him wolf tickets to try and get business, to promote their own brand, not caring about Johnny’s brand, Johnny’s life, Johnny’s career, Johnny’s longevity. So that’s kind of why I’m speaking here, and we put the content out that we do.

38:44 We don’t want it to be a secret. We want everybody to have this access. And maybe deep down, Johnny wanted to cheat a bit on his diet. Maybe deep down didn’t want Dolce to make him do the things he didn’t want to do and wanted it a little bit easier to get there. So cut some corners and paid for it, maybe, in the end.

38:59 There’s also a lot of soft science, too. I remember you, I think, were maybe training Tiago Alves, and I think you might have been down in Florida or something, and I think it might have come up where he was just like, Hey, maybe we can go out to this club one night, and I’m not going to drink, but I’m just going to go to this club. Why don’t we go there on Saturday? It’ll be a great way to kind of let off steam. And I think you said something to him, to the effect of, so let me ask you, Tiago, are any current world champions going to be at the club that night? Current?

39:26 I think this is what you said. I might be paraphrased. You have a great memory. And he was like, well, what do you mean? And I’m like, would any of those guys be in the night, say two or three weeks before the club?

39:34 No, probably not. Why not? Because they’re going to leave a family that night. They’re going to have to come home and deal with the wife the next day. They’re going to maybe have slept not very well.

39:42 Maybe they would have a Diet Coke that night. Maybe they would be tempted to have a beer that night. And so in the Dolce world, we don’t play that game, right? No. We don’t allow variables.

39:56 We try to eliminate as many variables as possible because we are looking to replicate results, known results. We have an equation. We know this equation. Two plus two will always equal four. Two plus two a, we don’t know, might.

40:13 Two plus, you know, two b, we don’t know what’s going to happen at that point. We don’t want to change that. Now, we can always improve. We can find more efficient ways to replicate results through known variables. And it goes through our scientific method of what we’ve done with that athlete, what science has said, but we’ve tested, and what other athletes have done up until that point.

40:35 So we are always tweaking and evolving what we do. But going and standing in the club, you’re going to be standing on those legs that you trained on and you did hill sprints and treadmill runs and kicked-eye pads. They need to recover. That’s no. So already we’re sliding backwards.

40:50 Just that concept right there. You should be in bed at 10 o’clock at night on a Friday, Saturday night period, the end, allowing your body to naturally wake when the sun comes up with your circadian rhythm, allowing proper, deeper restful sleep. So we have greater growth hormone production. We’re having more recuperation, more replication of tissue. Our bodies actually, we’re working with our hormonal cascade by following these concepts that we try and instill on the athlete.

41:20 We can’t really enforce. I can just make suggestions. And with Tiago, he’s such a great guy. Yeah, OK, Coach. And not like, OK, F you.

41:29 He’s like, yeah, you’re right. You’re right. And that’s why he’s kept me around. I’m going in my sixth year right now with Tiago. And Tiago Alves, great story.

41:37 The UFC trouble trial when it came to the scale, Tiago Alves, who missed weight twice, got in trouble for using a band diuretic, not with us, prior to us, refused to cut eight ounces of water, which is less water that would actually fit in this cup, instead of losing that little bit of water. He instead agreed to give up $12,000 of his purse because he physically couldn’t lose that much water that you or I could lose in about five minutes of skipping rope. He was so physically drained.

42:07 That same Tiago Alves, who missed weight versus Matt Hughes, I think he came in at 176 pounds for that fight, is now under my guidance, me being a part of his greater team and his discipline and work ethic, he’s now dropping to 155 pounds. That’s what we’re doing this year. We perfected Tiago Alves to such a degree that he’s been on weight at 171 pounds the night before weigh-ins, eating a full dinner, eating breakfast the day of, and not cutting a single ounce of fluid on weigh-in day over the last three fights, two years, during his comeback to the point now that he’s walking around in the high 170, low 180s, and he’s now in a physical condition that he can make 155 pounds, all through the scientific method, all through the results, all through these principles that he really did take these on board, these principles on board.

42:59 Let me ask you a question. Case study. We found out yesterday Conor McGregor is not fighting the UFC 200. Who knows what happened? Pulled out, he’s going to retire, Dana says we’re moving on, whatever.

43:10 Let’s say that tomorrow you got the call from Conor McGregor and he said, I actually cut a deal with Dana, I’m going to defend my 45 pound belt, I’m up here in Iceland with Gunny right now, I’m at 175, probably at 180. UFC 200 I think is in July, right? He was about three months. Mike, I want you. You got three months, what do you do?

43:33 I set up a three day meeting with Conor first. I’ve been around him quite a few times, I know Jon Cavanaugh rather well, I like those guys, they’re good guys. I set up three days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday essentially with the athlete, convenient time, where I live with them, I shadow them, I spare bedroom in their house, sleep on the couch if I have to, I’m a little old to do that, but I still do such things. And we breathe the same air and I see if we can get along as men, as humans.

43:59 Forget coach athlete relationship, can we get along? Do I like you? Can I fully commit to you? Can I invest my life, my passion, my emotion completely in you? And do you have the moral and ethics that I need to truly get behind and stand shoulder to shoulder through thick and thin, no matter what happens, win or lose, I’m going to be there because I love you.

44:23 That’s how I am, I’m at that level with my athlete. I respect you so much, I will go through it, I will leave my family, my beautiful daughter, I will commit to doing that only to a select few human beings that are worthy as men and women. And I don’t care about their accolades or how much money they have or what part of the card they’re on at this point. Can I help this human improve their life, achieve their goals? Do I respect this human enough to give up that time and give up the attention of the other 7 billion humans on the planet whose life I’m trying to change also?

44:55 So we spend that time together, but also it allows me to understand will this athlete now respect and listen to me as a coach? Will we have that relationship that I can truly help them? Because there’s athletes out there that wanted to hire me just to say, hey, I’m working with Dolce and offer me big checks to do so. You won’t listen to me. I know for a fact, which is one of the reasons why I left Hendrix after that second Robbie fight.

45:19 You’re not going to listen to me, you know what, I’m out, kind of have fun. A guy like Connor, I believe he is that type of athlete because he’s a winner and he’s a good guy. I met him initially when he fought in Boston, I think Max Holloway. He was the nicest, most respectful, he called me coach and sir. In those days, he’s not that much younger than me.

45:41 I mean, coach and sir, and when I see him today, multi-millionaire completely different, calls me coach and sir still. That type of respect. So an athlete like Connor is a rare type of person to do what he’s done. But again, we spend those three days together or so, we make sure we fit and I breathe there, I live their life, I get in their car, I drive with them back and forth to the gym. You know, I look at their refrigerator, their pantry, their stove.

46:04 I see how worn their cooking implements are. You know, I can tell their favorite spatula, I can start to analyze and break down where I can help. I troubleshoot their life. I can help with those things, kind of the sights, the sounds, the noises, the music that they listen to, it allows me to get in their head a little bit, understand their process so I can improve their process. All the athletes, all the people we work with, I don’t force my style onto them.

46:30 What I do is I come in and I help kind of fill in the cracks that they have and institute the principles that we know, the universal principles of self-improvement. Whatever part of their life, it just so happens he’s a professional fighter, we help those areas, but I believe through our influence, we’re able to help them in other areas of life also because your home life with your family has an impact on your performance in the octagon. Your financial state has an impact of your performance on the octagon.

47:02 Your self-dialogue, the music you listen to, the TV shows that you watch all have an impact whether you realize it or not. So I kind of analyze that and I start to, depending on the athlete, use different means to introduce those suggestions and that becomes kind of the psychological side of how I interact. Each athlete is different, but it allows me to better understand how I can do that. Some athletes you kind of have to lead to water, other athletes you just have to push.

47:30 That’s heavy stuff, that’s big stuff, that’s not just about nutrition, that’s not about workouts, that’s big picture, isn’t it? That’s, yeah, and your first question is like, why are we different or why are we, you know, kind of, you know, regarded the way we are, it’s because of that. It’s not because of the protein-carb fat ratio, it’s not because of that, it’s not about the food, it’s everything else, that’s truly what matters. Now, Connor’s been walking around now 170 plus now for a couple months.

48:01 To get him down to that 45, it was always a little bit of a tricky cut for him because he’s a tall guy. Anything you would do there specifically or anything extra you have to think about, is that a big cut for you? No, that’s easy for us. It’s easy. Mike’s talking about 20-25% of someone’s body weight and that’s easy for us.

48:18 That’s easy for us. They have to perform at the highest level of any human will perform in this world 24 hours later. I guarantee if Connor followed our program, he would probably eat twice the calories he’d ever eaten during a training camp. He would be eating real food. Making weight would be extremely easy.

48:34 He wouldn’t have to resort to those nasty methods that he’s used in the past that I’m aware of. He would rehydrate at a much more efficient rate and he would have much better, more consistent performances. Everything about the process with us is consistent. We know exactly what they’re going to weigh on what day, how it’s going to be all the way through. I know exactly how much weight they’ll lose each minute of our process.

48:56 Most of what we do is very soft manipulation. We don’t do the hard manipulation. I’m an advocate. We’ve proven it hundreds of times now. It’s about feeding the athlete.

49:07 We feed our athletes into the scale. We don’t pull the food away. We actually push more food into the body. The athlete is able to lose weight. What we do is we change ratios and we manipulate the electrolytes through natural means to allow them to lose the weight.

49:19 We just allow the body to get hot enough to sweat in a low state of stress or a zero state of stress and anxiety because people don’t understand the hormonal component to getting into a scalding hot bathtub with some idiot holding a fucking blow dryer to make that hot room, tiny hot room even hotter. There’s no escape. The athlete’s anxiety, their cortisol shoots through the roof. They freak out. They stop sweating or they sweat at a much slower rate.

49:48 Therefore, they have to continually repeat this terrible process. Henan Baral has mentioned, guys in the industry know that those poor kids were taking in excess of eight 20 to 30 minute hot baths consecutively and then they would put themselves in plastics and sweat suits and wrap themselves in towels or in blankets in between. That’s torture. If anyone’s been in that, you’re in a prison, a freaking prison. You’re killing your athlete.

50:18 You’re diminishing their performance without a doubt. Will they make weight? Yeah, they’ll probably make weight. Will they perform at 100% of their ability? Absolutely not.

50:27 Will they perform good enough to win? Possibly depending on how bad the other guy messed up. And that’s really, that’s what happens. We eliminate all those silly variables. We focus on the science that we know works, the experience that we have, the results that we’ve been able to replicate for decades now again, it’s very easy.

50:47 And I think I understand the psychological side a lot better than many and me coming up as a wrestler. I remember as a kid, early teens, our coach screaming at us, locking us in the sauna after a hard workout because that’s the way to do it, wearing plastics and sauna suits, packed into a sauna so tight shoulder to shoulder that I remember seeing one of the guys pass out but we were packed in so tight he couldn’t drop to the floor. So he’s standing crushed, passed out and then, you know, everyone’s making fun of him and he would kind of pop up and wake up again and find his legs.

51:17 So I went through those experiences also. You know, plastic bags, garbage, hefty bags, packed in suits. In my early days, you’re shaking your head, you know. Yeah, I did that too, you know, I was 17 and in high school wrestling because that’s what they told us to do. Rum and trash bags on until it drips the sweat.

51:31 And a lot of fighters talk about two fights. It’s the fight that week to cut weight and then a fight 24 hours later basically for their life. And that’s intense. And then when you see people doing that these days, you must shake your head. So it hurts.

51:46 It truly hurts my soul. It hurts my heart to see that because I know how bad they’re hurting. And it angers me because I see the idiot standing behind them telling them to do that, that this person is trusting to look out for them. That person does it. That person’s promoting their brand, their concept, trying to get their face into the camera.

52:08 That person doesn’t have the experience or credentials to help this person because if they did, they wouldn’t be doing it like that. And I’ll point to a guy like Carlos Condit. Carlos Condit, one of the most conditioned athletes in the planet, former WEC welterweight world champion, former UFC interim welterweight champion. What many feel Carlos should have beaten Robbie Lawler in their last title fight. Went five rounds with Robbie and got the better of Robbie in many ways.

52:34 Robbie walked away with the champ. Awesome, good for him. But at the same time, Carlos brought us in for that fight and we had to do everything perfectly. He cut two pounds the day of weigh-ins. He ate a full eight-ounce wild-caught salmon dinner, a full cup of white rice, a bunch of veggies the night before weigh-ins while being completely hydrated.

52:55 The first time he’s ever done that in career, he said it was the easiest weight cut of his entire life. And he was on Joe Rogan’s show, and Joe was like, how? And Carlos was like, I don’t even know. Like, because you started way early, it was a whole process. A whole process.

53:10 Carlos is a bad ass. Easily one of the greatest fighters of all time. Easily. And makes me proud because he’s known to have been one of the most conditioned. And we actually took his game to a whole other level through what we do, and it made me very proud to see a guy like Carlos so impressed to say that this was the easiest weight cut he’s ever had in his career.

53:33 It’s the best he’s ever felt. It’s the most food he’s ever eaten leading up to this at the latest stage of his career where he’s the biggest. He’s been physically. As we age, we get older, we put on weight. Same thing with him. It’s not like he was a 17-year-old kid.

53:45 He’s a 30-something year old man towards the end of his career, having the easiest weight cut of his life. Yeah. Let me ask you about another one of the fighters that you work with, Ronda Rousey. Yeah. When we were here two and a half years ago, I think we just maybe started working with her.

53:59 Yeah. And you told me that on the show afterwards, you said, She’s easily the most dedicated and most hardworking fighter I’ve ever dealt with. Yeah. And I think at the time I was saying, we mean female fighter, and you said, no, Brian. And this is before I think the whole world had seen the Rousey phenomenon.

54:14 Yes, we knew she was up and coming, but no one had seen what she was going to do. And you worked with her early on. She always had great things to say about the Dolce diet and working with her. What’s that experience been like the last couple of years with her and then take me through, you know, what happened in Australia? And I know you’ve just recently come out with a brainstorming session with all the members of her staff, you know, talking about world domination and the next step for Ronda.

54:37 Tell me about your journey with her. Ronda Rousey is one of those once in a lifetime athletes that we as fans see, let alone it means an individual gets to work with. There will not be another Ronda Rousey. She was the first, she was and is the best female fighter on the planet. People debate it, but it’s because of a bias.

55:04 You look at the facts, what she’s done. She went 12 and 0. She created the UFC female division. She ran through the division. Excuse me, ran through the division.

55:15 She beat every number one contender on her path. She beat Kat Zingano. She beat Alexis Davis. She beat Sarah McMahon with the silver medal in the Olympic freestyle, Olympic freestyle wrestling silver medal. Ronda finished her in the first round, finished Kat, who was undefeated at the time in the first round.

55:32 Beat Nisha Tate, former strike force champion, current UFC champion, beat her twice. Ronda’s body of work is unparalleled. No one has done that. Nobody will have that type of run. That’s what Ronda has had.

55:44 And that goes back to her work ethic. Ronda is up at 5 a.m. and she’s in the pool swimming laps. It’s time to lock into the meal plan. Ronda eats exactly what she’s supposed to eat and doesn’t deviate.

55:56 Not one minute sooner, not one minute later, not one ounce more, not one ounce less. Exactly. She goes to the gym and she trains and gets yelled at to get out of the gym. Coaches have to kick her out of the gym because she’ll keep going. She’ll want to stay, she’ll want to do more, she’ll want to work.

56:12 That’s what allowed Ronda to be such a massive success. And what happened in Australia, Ronda’s also a human. And Holly Holm was extremely prepared to fight Ronda. Ronda had fought, this was her third world title fight on three different continents in eight months’ time. People don’t understand that.

56:34 She had three world title defenses. No other champion than UFC ever had done that. Ronda had done that on three different continents. No UFC champion had ever done that. A lot of pressure, a lot of demands.

56:47 Now Ronda was in Australia and in Brazil and in Vegas. She has to be awake between five and six o’clock in the morning so hair and makeup can get to her room, put her in a chair for an hour and a half to get her ready to go. And then seven o’clock, seven thirty, wore in a car driving anywhere between thirty minutes to three hours to another part of town to start doing interviews and media and television and radio batteries and meet and greets and all these other things.

57:14 And then she’s getting back to the hotel anywhere between four and six o’clock at night where then she has to get her training in. All the time I’m doing my thing trying to keep her fed fueled and as calm as I can with her team around her to get her ready for the most important performance of her life while her opponent is typically doing a couple interviews a couple days out of the week. Ronda certainly carries the load. Holly Holm was well prepared, absolutely.

57:44 Ronda was well prepared but not as available to prepare as Holly was. I think that might be the right state. Yeah and some emotional things going on the scenes. Mom in the press talking about, you know, Taverian. That doesn’t help in this situation.

58:05 It’s just you must see it with your athletes all the time. It’s like you put this pressure, this pressure, this pressure, this pressure. It all adds up. What you said, it’s financial or emotional or with your family, with your diet, with your injuries, with press. It all adds up.

58:19 And at some point it might snap or they might pull it off and no one will ever know. Absolutely. That day, okay, she goes in there, very tough fight, really hard to watch that KO. As she said earlier, she was not really there from that first punch in that first round. How do you watch something like that?

58:38 What happens after that fight? That’s the part of your job that’s not in your job description. Yeah. As I said earlier about what I would do with Connor or an athlete like Connor, my process to work with an athlete. When I work with an athlete, I’m all in.

58:54 I’m 100% emotionally connected to that human. I go through the process, the high and the low. I’m on the roller coaster, locked in with them. We’re doing it together and seeing being there, Cadeside for that fight and going through that. My feelings and emotions had absolutely nothing to do with sport or profession or career.

59:19 It was my friend got hurt. Everything else, nothing else matters. Just that clarity of, she’s hurt. How can I help? I can’t help.

59:32 What can I do? I can internalize the pain. I equate it to the death of someone in your family, which sounds to some like, oh, that’s a lot. But that’s the feeling that there was this great, massive loss, this emotional pain that I felt, those around her felt, and that she herself has expressed in different ways that she had felt. You feel this loss because there’s so much tied up into these fights.

1:00:03 Her entire life is tied up into the fight, her career, the performance, the training camp, the MMA career, her judo career, her childhood, all of that. Her movie career. Her movie career. It’s all tied into this one moment. It’s all on that string.

1:00:23 They’re not just independent moments in someone’s life. It’s all tied together, and you feel the enormity of that. I know I certainly did. So backstage, the UFC does an amazing job with their medical attention, gets her cleaned up, ready to go. We go to the hospital with her.

1:00:40 I won’t talk deeply or disclose any personal or private information, but as a team, we were all there while she was getting checked out. Thankfully, she was cleared. She did not have a concussion. She had the mouth injury, certainly the sore jaw from the kick, some laceration and such. But it was really more of the emotional side.

1:01:02 Once you knew physically she was okay, not concussed, which I’ve been in this game a long time, and I’ve seen some serious brain injuries with athletes I’m friends with now that have long since retired. I see the after effects and what that looks like ten years later and such. She didn’t have any of those signs. Hopefully none of those pop up. So again, it becomes more of the emotional side.

1:01:27 To see that, and then you all start thinking about, we could have done this and we could have done that, and I should have said this, and you start going back just like any other loss in life. I shouldn’t have gotten the car at that time on that day. If my phone didn’t ring, then I wouldn’t have, or this thing wouldn’t happen. Again, it’s the human condition. We all kind of go through that.

1:01:48 So I think we all, in all the coaches, all the team, her family, of course, was there very close to her. And then the team was kind of supporting and surrounding the family, kind of build those barriers of protection. It was difficult, and it was difficult for weeks afterwards to really digest that, because it’s not just the athlete took a loss as much as Rhonda put in to the fight. The loss was, as much as she put in, that magnified what was felt in that loss.

1:02:21 Now we know through perspective, it really is. It’s just one chapter in the story. That will actually build her towards something much greater. And I continue to say, her last loss was in the Olympics, when she battled back and she earned a bronze medal. And she went undefeated all the way until November 14, 2015.

1:02:47 She went a long time undefeated as a result of that one loss, which propelled this level of greatness. So this loss here, I think, is just another mile marker that will propel her again to even higher levels of greatness that I can’t even comprehend right now. Because I know her as a person. I know what her mind is like. I know how big her heart is.

1:03:08 And it’ll be fun to sit back and watch my friend go through that and kind of come into her own. It’s been great to watch her. She was on The Ellen Show. She talked about the depression, maybe some suicidal thoughts. She was on Saturday Night Live. I was just so excited that they asked her. So excited she said yes.

1:03:27 I mean, I wasn’t surprised she said yes. The Ronda that I think I would know would just welcome a challenge like that. But that’s a big step to make. It’s a big step for anyone to go up there, let alone Ronda with the history. And now you had a meeting recently with all the trainers there. You guys are talking about what’s next. So what is next?

1:03:47 What’s next from our perspective is world domination. It’s a great data point for us to look back and see what could have done better. What went wrong? Where was it? What could have been better? How do we ensure that those mistakes don’t happen from coaching perspectives?

1:04:04 Each one of us across the board, there’s improvements that we can make the athlete. What can she do better? What can we all do as a team to learn from it, to fix it, and then to evolve and become so much better as a result of it? So we had that meeting. There is certainly no date set for when she will come back.

1:04:25 She’ll know when and she’ll tell us when the right time is and that will help assist in that process. Because she is the boss. It’s her life. It’s her career. We’re here to support her and provide her with the best intelligence that we can from our skill sets but also as counselors in her career and life to help bring her to that.

1:04:48 So the meeting was great. It was definitely high energy. Very positive outlook. The loss, I believe, has brought the coaches even closer together that we have a very unified perspective on what we want to do for her. And I think you get to a point where you have an athlete that’s so dominant, it almost becomes a foregone conclusion.

1:05:12 Like the fans, Rhonda will win. She always does. She always finds a way. She’s so dominant. And I think that has allowed us as coaches to step up our game, to not sit back and allow the athlete, but put that pressure on the athlete to just be perfect.

1:05:32 And now forces the coaches to be perfect to allow the athlete to elevate her. So it was a great meeting. What would you rather see? Her and Misha or her and Holly? You know, Misha just beat Holly and Misha has the title so her versus Misha makes sense.

1:05:51 I think with the perspective that we have and she has right now, nobody beats Rhonda. I think Rhonda goes 10 years without being beaten. I think Rhonda goes on and she retires undefeated from this point forward. I don’t think she’ll go 10 years for sure. I don’t think she should.

1:06:08 I know she doesn’t have to because she already has so many opportunities that she’s well set in life. So her coming back is because she’s a competitor. That’s the only way. She’s not coming back for money. She’s coming back because she’s a competitor.

1:06:22 And who the right opponent is, to me the right opponent is the easiest opponent. I’m a coach. There’s no ego. You have to go back and beat the person that beat you once upon a time if it’s not a Hollywood movie. You go back and you beat the person who has what you want. She wants the title. I believe. I can’t speak for her.

1:06:43 It only makes sense to go back and avenge the loss to Holly without a title. It doesn’t mean that much for her to go back and take the title and then allow Holly to earn her way back to the title. That’s the more compelling fight. I think that’s the bigger fight. That’s the bigger draw for sure.

1:06:59 But as a coach, I’d love to see her fight the 25th ranked girl in the division. Go out there, snap her arm off in 30 seconds. It doesn’t sound very competitive to me, but I understand the business. The lower risk makes sense from a professional standpoint. This is the hurt business.

1:07:15 I don’t want to see my athletes get hurt. I want to see them get out of there as fast as possible. Let’s talk about the business. Let’s talk about the UFC. You live in the Fight Capital in Las Vegas.

1:07:24 You’ve known Dana White, the Fertitta brothers for years. You’ve seen the UFC evolve over the last 10 years. What do you see that I might not see? You live in that town. You see the behind the scenes.

1:07:36 You work with those athletes. And where are we going in the next 10 years? It’s interesting. I moved intentionally in 2010 to Las Vegas because it is the Fight Capital of the world. Because the UFC’s ZUFA headquarters are based in Las Vegas because half of the Fight Cards are in Las Vegas.

1:07:54 That’s where I have to be in order to excel and do the things that I’ve done thus far in my career. But it also allowed me the ability to get to know Dana and Lorenzo and the other individuals in the UFC that have built the UFC. They have provided a platform for which someone like myself can build a business and build a brand. They’ve given me the opportunity to work with athletes that compete inside their organization. I think they don’t get the credit that they deserve for building that, for creating those opportunities, for every other promoter, promotion out there, for every media, for every journalist.

1:08:41 For any entity that turns a dollar inside this industry, they have to give credit back to what Dana and the Fertittas have done to build this industry force. It almost didn’t happen, right? It’s a funny story that Dan Lambert actually had the option on the UFC. Dana and Lorenzo and Frank went to Dan who controlled it and said, Hey, we want to buy Dan Lambert who I’m friends with. He’s one of the best guys in the game.

1:09:15 Yeah, the fuck am I going to do it anyway? And gave it soul that transferred it over to them and allowed them. I always like to kind of throw that out there because Dan Lambert has a side note in that history without Dan Lambert being so open-minded and so cool and unego-centric. He could have turned… Who knows? Maybe Dan would have turned it into something spectacular also. We don’t know.

1:09:39 But Dan knew, he knew those guys and he knew that they would turn it into something that would allow him to grow his brand. And you see what Dan’s been able to do. He’s built one of the most profitable and renowned fight teams in the world with franchises, all American top team franchises all over the world. And world champion, Robbie Lawler now, reigning world champion out of his gym, Dan’s done quite a bit for the sport. So to see what Dana and the Fertittas have done for the growth, and I remember the very, very early days when they were just a handful of employees.

1:10:09 You know, I’ve been going to UFCs. I’ve been working in the industry since the early 2000s back when it was still no holes barred. Before the unified rules came in and it became mixed martial arts, I was working in the industry before Dana and the Fertittas even bought the UFC, before Zuffa. So again, to those people out there, my history inside MMA predates MMA and predates Zuffa even. Once they came in and injected their money and their business acumen, they really were able to turn this thing on and take a massive loss.

1:10:42 I think there were 40 million dollars in the hole before they were able to start turning it around and start making a profit. And that’s once that was 2005 or so when the ultimate fighter hit the air and Forest Griffin and Chris Lieb and Nate Quarry and all those guys cost check. That’s that came out just after I started working at Team Quest. So without the Fertittas and Dana having the vision to get the ultimate fighter on the air, I might not be sitting in this chair talking to you. I might be the best known coach in CrossFit right now.

1:11:14 You know, who knows how that would have went. So, you know, I always tip my hat to them and I never begrudge them for what they’ve done to operate their business. And I would never second guess the decisions that they’ve made because they turned a 40 million dollar loss into a multi-billion dollar company in a very short period of time. In the world of business, a very short period of time they’ve been able to do. And they’ve made many of my friends millionaires as a result of that.

1:11:44 And many of my friends and peers have been able to buy homes and provide for their families and send their kids to college because of what the platform they provided. I never also, I don’t discount the work, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the sacrifice that my athletes go through. Any athlete goes through to earn their way into the platform that they’ve built. And I would love to see my athletes and all athletes make more money. And I believe the athletes deserve a lot more money for what they do.

1:12:18 But also, I remember the days when the athletes were getting $2,000 to show and $2,000 to win. Now they’re making 10 in 10, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but you’re talking about a 60K a year income. They went from poverty to middle class and that’s just the entry level guys and girls that haven’t really earned their bones yet. So I can kind of see it. I understand the finances also.

1:12:47 And that’s kind of where the UFC brain trust, they’re usually in the crosshairs when it comes to finance, that they should be sharing some nonprofits. And I’m not going to talk on either way because I can see both sides very well. But I know the opportunity, they’ve afforded this opportunity for so many people. And that’s what I’m most grateful for. Talk to me about performance enhancing drugs.

1:13:12 We’ve got new tests in the last year or so with USADA. I would love to get just a general thought on performance enhancing drugs. It’s so easy to come in here, start pointing the finger at this person, at that person. You know, in bodybuilding, as Dorian Yates said when he was here, he said people look at bodybuilding because it’s the most obvious version of people using performance enhancing drugs. But we know that Lance Armstrong, when he’s weighing in at 60KG, he’s also using them.

1:13:39 And we know that there are in so many sports, whether it’s CrossFit or I don’t even know NFL or basketball, I don’t know. You see it on the front lines. There’s new testing involved. But as Dorian would say, in any sport where performance is measured and people are pushing the limits, things are going to be used. And you’ve worked with athletes in the past that, of course, then subsequently have tested positive.

1:14:03 What’s your view on this whole crazy issue that is performance- enhancing drugs? Performance-enhancing drugs work. Let’s not pretend that they don’t. The damn things work extremely well, which is why so many athletes are willing to risk their careers by taking them because of what those very same little black pillows can do for their careers. And you look at Lance Armstrong, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and I heard Lance Armstrong was able to generate billions of dollars for his sponsors and outside investors and such, whether that’s true or not.

1:14:42 We know Lance became a multi-millionaire many times over while using performance-enhancing drugs. We also know and can say with utmost certainty that the vast majority of those on the bikes behind Lance were also on performance-enhancing drugs. That everybody in that line knew that Lance was on, and very few, and I shouldn’t say everybody, that the majority knew, and the majority most likely were taking things similar to what Lance was taking so they could catch up.

1:15:16 Because they’re not riding a bike at 10,000 feet elevation for days on end, killing themselves to lose or to not make money. They’re not doing it just for the fun and for the hell of it. Professional cyclists, just like any professional athlete. You look at the Olympics, how many Olympians have tested positive? Even, I forget, the cross-country, I don’t know the exact sports, the Olympic sport, kind of cross-country skiing with…

1:15:45 Yeah, biathlon. … biathlon. They tested for something. And one of them recently tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

1:15:53 That’s not a contact sport. One would say there’s very little athleticism that goes into that, I understand, because I’m a coach, I work with athletes, I understand the athletic demand, positive. You look at Marion Jones, let’s say, the attractive field athlete, positive. You look inside the NFL, the NBA, the MLB, you look at all those major sports, you’re going to find positive drug tests everywhere. And what’s funny and what I respect about the UFC, but it is frustrating in a way, the UFC has the best drug testing program in all of professional sports, including the Olympics.

1:16:32 They have an independent body coming in, testing the athletes, blood tests, urine tests, randomly, by surprise, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, which is why you see so many drug failures in the UFC right now. Lyona Mashida was just pulled from the recent card. Another young man, Russian kid, Khabib Nurmukhmedov’s training partner, trained at AKA, pulled from the card, two athletes pulled from the very same UFC card because of their surprise drug tests.

1:17:06 That’s amazing. That shows a lot of intent on the part of the UFC brain trust to clean up their sport, that they’re losing, I mean, Mashida vs. Dan Henderson, that was a co-main event. That’s a marquee fight. How many people tuned out possibly because of that?

1:17:25 That cost the UFC money, and it cost the UFC money to bring in USADA. USADA is doing an absolutely amazing job running these tests, which is why we see so many failures. But I don’t believe, yes, there is a massive drug problem in all of professional sports. I don’t believe it is disproportionate in the UFC or MMA. What is disproportionate is the protocols the other sports agencies are using to test their athletes because of the players’ union and because of back channeling and gentlemen’s agreements of the times and the types of tests that the other NFL, NBA, MLB, tennis, golf, all those other athletes are not subjected to the same strict criteria that the UFC athletes are.

1:18:12 So, when I said earlier, it’s frustrating because I’m involved in the sport of mixed martial arts. And I see our athletes failing drug tests, and it makes our sport look like it’s a dirtier sport. But our sport is no dirtier than any of the applauded professional sports, including the Olympics, which I’ll throw them at the professional level because most of them make high-level sponsorships and such, although they’re not paid for the actual games itself.

1:18:40 Some Euro countries, they get paid, but there’s a whole other issue that goes into that. So, I think that’s really what I come down to the drug testing. The UFC by far has the best drug testing protocol in the world in any sport. Every other sport should catch up, but they won’t catch up because Major League Baseball cannot deal with two players getting taken off the field right before the Yankees play the Red Sox because USADA showed up at their house three days before the game and found high levels of XYZ drug in their system.

1:19:11 Not going to happen, would never happen, cause those organizations too much money, players uniformly intact, handshake deal, you guys are going to get tested for these substances on these specific dates during these times of year, guys, nobody’s going to come test you. That’s what all the other sports leagues are like. UFC, it’s not like that. Can you tell if an athlete’s using performance-hand-seeing drugs by looking at them? I believe I can tell with high levels of certainty that an athlete is on certain types of performance enhancers, but there are drugs out there that I don’t even know. I don’t even know exists.

1:19:41 Now, I did it on my podcast, I did an interview with an elite coach that works with CrossFit athletes and whatnot, and we were talking about the drug testing problem, and he said, here’s the thing, there’s 300 known performance-enhancing drugs. Only 200 or so of these drugs can actually be tested for and are being tested for by WADA, World Anti-Doping Agency protocols. So what are you talking about? Well, there’s another 100 drugs out there that improve performance as well or even better than some of the known drugs.

1:20:16 We all know about steroids, we all know about growth hormone, we kind of know about those drugs. He said, there’s a whole list of drugs out there that most people don’t even know exist. Most doctors don’t even know exist. He said, but people, he helps athletes meet drug tests. He said, but people like me know about, and they’re completely in their system when the tester shows up, and they’ll never get popped. He said, right now, because they’re not testing for it, he said, now, six months down the road, 12 months down the road, that list constantly changes, but the drug testers are always a few steps behind the drug cheats.

1:20:50 So there’s this, so… But they’re saving samples now too, so they can test you retroactively. Which is awesome. Now, what happens down the road if six, ten years down the road, super world champion, millionaire athlete gets busted, well, they’re still a millionaire. They’re not going to give them money back. Do they care?

1:21:10 I don’t think they care, because now they’re retired, they’re invested, they’re IRA, they’re 401K, they’re real estate portfolio, kids are done through school. They don’t care, especially when they say, well, everybody, the majority of people, I fought, we’re doing it too. So you see that that issue is there. But can I tell, I can tell with, I believe, a high level of certainty that some athletes are on certain drugs, the more known drugs that we all know about, but there’s drugs right now, the new one that the kid on the Russian car, or the Russian kid got busted for, was the same drug Sharapova got busted for earlier in the year, never heard of that thing in my life.

1:21:52 And allegedly, it costs $5 a month if you’re living over in Russia. It’s just like, I spoke with a Russian wrestler at that same fight car, and he’s like, oh yeah, everybody takes that. It’s normal. Like, yeah, it works for your heart, it does something for the heart, but everybody knows the performance answering benefits. He’s like, yeah, the kids take that thing.

1:22:09 Like, it’s creatine. Cultural change. And it took USADA up until the last year or so to even figure it out and put it on the ban list. So that’s like one of the hundred. But there will be a new drug now that gets put into its place.

1:22:23 So it’s this crazy system. And I think to close out all these statements, I would love to see every professional sport agency use the UFC’s drug testing program. USADA should be brought in, and they should be able to test anybody at any time, regardless of season, their players’ union, or contracts, and arbitration, and all that stuff. You want a clean sport, you bring in that team to do it. Blood, urine, hair tests, open book.

1:22:54 And you will see, I think the world would be shocked at how many athletes actually fell. Crossfitters, NFLers, NBAers, Major League Baseball, everything. What about drugs like medafinil, provigil, these kind of narcolepsy drugs that get people highly alert, that give them to Navy SEALs, helicopter pilots. These are the kind of drugs that people don’t necessarily talk about because we always associate the steroid growth hormone. But are there people like that in the UFC using those drugs and you’re like, we’re not even talking about these cognitive enhancers?

1:23:21 I’m sure there are. I’ve taken medafinil one time as a narcolepsy drug because I was traveling on different continents. I was really bad jet lag. And my doctor was like, hey, let me write you a script, you know, kind of keep you… I was a hard time adjusting. And it was generic. And I took it.

1:23:39 Me personally, I didn’t feel the limitless, what you hear about, oh my God. And I know guys that work in the financial industry. I know attorneys that take it and freaking love it. I was like, oh, took it. Didn’t do anything. It was like I had drank too much coffee and I drank a lot of coffee anyway.

1:23:57 I drank way too much coffee. And then a few hours later when I came down, I had one of the worst headaches I’ve had in my entire life. And I’m not a drug guy. And I’m rather in tune with my body. And I was like, my body is telling me right now that this is not good for me.

1:24:14 I can stay awake for a full day if I’m in Australia and I can’t get on the time zone. I’ll just stay up for a full day and I’ll fall asleep at six o’clock at night. And I’ll wake up at 6 a.m., kind of my philosophy. And I was able to kind of exchange and do that. Are other individuals or athletes taking that? I’m sure. Do I know of any taking drugs like that? No.

1:24:32 I think it’s more geared towards the known performance enhancers. So a lot of the athletes, probably 80%, 90% outside of the couple millionaires, I think, they don’t really have access. Not just in MMA, in all sports. If you don’t have enough money, disposable income in your pocket, you can’t hire the doctor or the team of doctors. You can’t get in those doors to have those conversations, to get those type of…

1:25:00 It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Yeah, it is fascinating. You need that certain amount of money to have access to the doctors. And I remember hearing some testimonial of one of the doctors that was with a Major League Baseball player. And the timing that he had to put him on, you almost needed a couple full-time doctors just to time your illegal drug use.

1:25:17 Not to mention the researching and everything else. It’s a full-time job. It has to be a full team. So here’s a criticism I have of USADA. When they came in, they banned intravenous rehydration, IV solution. They banned that.

1:25:30 Which really cramps up your style in a big way. Well, it cramps up the rehydration of athletes that need it. Now, our athletes, thankfully, don’t need it nearly to the level that most of the other athletes, because of the slow burn, I call it, the slow methodical way that we make weight. We don’t go to those extreme measures as protocol. Now, sometimes athletes sure know this fight. Something goes wrong.

1:25:55 There’s an issue, and then more extreme measures have to be taken, or they can’t respond well. Or the athlete, and I know some athletes, that have stage fright performance anxiety. Once they have their fate, they have easy weight cut, and one athlete, I don’t want to say names and throw athletes onto the bus, one athlete that I know is a well-known athlete. Easy weight cut doesn’t cut a lot of weight. Once he weighs in and has that adrenaline dump of the face off, he can’t get his stomach to settle. He gets the runs.

1:26:25 He kind of eats dry heaves and vomits. He can’t really hold water down. He can’t hold food down very well. An athlete like that should have the ability under medical supervision to use IV solution to rehydrate. Medically supervised, doctor administered, they should have that ability to do so and not risk being taken off the card.

1:26:49 Because if you need a doctor to put an IV in, most of the commissions, because of liability, they’re going to take you off the card now, because that’s the new thing to do, which is ridiculous. I don’t know who sat in the room to come up with these rules. But the USADA came in, they banned IVs, not because it has anything to do with the weight cut. They banned it because IV solution evidently can be used to mask certain types of performance enhancing drugs.

1:27:15 I get it. After doing a little more research, with the types of procedures being used that can mask performance enhancing drugs, you have to have a pretty sophisticated program. You have to have a, I don’t want to say have to have a team of doctors, but you have to have people that know what they’re doing to have your levels in a certain range that you can pump some extra fluid in your veins and it could wash away that drug or metabolite or whatever that’s kind of hiding in your system for these short windows of time.

1:27:48 So the level of sophistication is much higher, so the point of entry to do that is so much higher. The average UFC athlete, the vast majority of UFC athletes, they don’t have the income to have a team like that. Now is it possible? It’s absolutely possible. But I guarantee you the athletes with the money to have that, have another way. Of course they do.

1:28:13 So you’re still fighting this thing. You still think it’s not reasonable. I’m speaking honestly about it and on USADA’s own website, they published peer reviewed scientific information that talks about oral rehydration versus IV rehydration. And on their own website, they say oral is just as good as IV up until about 5% of total dehydration. Once you get to about 7% dehydration, studies show that IV is actually better than oral.

1:28:42 Let’s put that into real world terms. Chris Weidman fights at 185 pounds. If Chris Weidman cuts from 200 pounds to 185, he’s outside of that 7% range. He should have IV rehydration. Chris Weidman, the former UFC world champion, walks around in the high 2 teens to low 2 twenties.

1:29:05 So by USADA’s scientific information, they’re saying an athlete like Weidman should be using IV. Now nobody in the sport would ever say a 200 pound athlete fighting at 185 is cutting a lot of weight. That’s not a lot of weight at all. Cutting 30 pounds maybe would sound like a lot, but a 215 pound athlete who gets to fight weak at 200 pounds, squeezes out some water for a few minutes temporarily, I call it the check mark effect, drop it, bring it right back on, 14, 15 pound weight cut.

1:29:42 Well he’s a prime candidate by USADA’s words by their report. Now he’s banned from it. So they’re knowingly allowing athletes to compete in a compromised condition and they’re not allowing the athletes to have medical supervision to come in and rehydrate them properly. So to be continued this discussion, I hope. Yeah, which I’m the only one that’s talking about.

1:30:05 Pat Milletich talks about it quite a bit. A few people talk about it, but nobody really, there’s no stories on it. Nobody actually ever did the research. Now my team for six months did the research on IV vs. oral rehydration in combat athletes and guess what?

1:30:20 You know how many studies there are? Zero. They’ve never actually dehydrated somebody and hit him in the head. Therefore, when they say, oh it’s the same thing, it’s the same thing, it’s the same thing, you can’t say that definitively because it’s never truly been studied. So what’s happening right now is the first time.

1:30:36 We’ll be studying five years from now the athletes who are competing during this era to see if that hypothesis was right. And to me, for the health and safety of the athlete, that’s not fair. That should have been vetted well in advance. There should be a medical board that actually comes up with this determination and it shouldn’t have been swept under the carpet, under the guise of weight cutting because it wasn’t brought in as a result of weight cutting.

1:30:58 It was brought in for anti-PEDs, which is awesome. But the guys and girls are still getting kicked in the head over here. Is that good for that part of it too? And nobody has a definitive answer, so I’ll keep talking about it until somebody comes out and says, yep, here’s the study, here’s what it shows, and then it’s high fives to everybody. And that’s what athletes are saying.

1:31:19 Because you’re the scientist, Mike Dolce. You are. The Dolce diet. Yes. A lot of people watching right now are like, okay, I’m not a fighter.

1:31:26 I don’t need to cut weight. So how does the Dolce diet apply to me? Your classic line, no pills, no powders, no potions. I still think about a lot of what you say. Earth-grown nutrients, it’s such a great phrase.

1:31:39 It tells you so much about what you should be eating. I remember a lot of things that you told me to stay away. Including corn has been on your bad list for a long time. Absolutely. Not to mention just the high fructose corn syrup, but just corn in so many ways.

1:31:50 Can you break down for people listening, watching some of the basic tenets of the Dolce diet? Because most of your clients are not athletes. No. So the Dolce diet is a longevity-based approach to sports performance and physique enhancement. Immediate performance and body composition change as a result of focusing on longevity nutrition.

1:32:13 When you focus on long-term results, the short-term decisions become very easy. Very simple. If we have long-term goals and action steps down the road that we’re not accountable to, then we kind of flow back and forth. But if I know I want to be 120 years old because the science out there supports that humans can be 120 years old, what do I need to do today? Well, I need to be eating a diet that is based upon earth-grown nutrients.

1:32:38 I need to be resting completely. I need to minimize my levels of stress. I need to be exercising vigorously at times, mediated with daily general activity, active recovery, we can call it. There’s certain tenets, universal principles, as I like to say, that are supported by longevity science. So we just adopted the longevity principles to our short-term decisions.

1:33:03 So the basic principles of the Dolce diet now stand is we eat earth-grown nutrients that is real food supplied from the planet. In its natural form, I have to say organic because they actually differentiate organic food from conventionally raised food, which is genetically modified, chemically enhanced, overly processed. So earth-grown nutrients, real food from its natural state, wild state, as close to the point of consumption as possible with zero interaction from men and corporations, if at all possible, and in season.

1:33:43 And that’s I want it fresh, I want it ripe, I want it ready, I want to live that complete life cycle of all the food products that are available to me. I’m not only eating spinach every single day, I’m eating spinach, I’m eating broccoli, I’m eating kale, I’m eating chard, I’m eating asparagus and Brussels sprouts. And the list just gets so wide, I’m eating them seasonally as their freshest and as their, you know, they have their highest possible nutrient quality because that allows me to now maximize my nutrient intake at a micro nutrient level with the lowest possible caloric load.

1:34:22 So I don’t need to eat 5,000 calories just to get enough iron or magnesium in my system, I can eat 2,200 calories to completely maximize my micro nutrient needs. And once we have our micro nutrient needs maximized, well that appetite goes away. I’m not constantly craving food, I’m not always hungry. I don’t have that nasty bloated, you know, compromised digestive system feeling anymore because my body is functioning properly at a cellular level. And I look at the body as a biological organism with just trillions of cells interacting going through these life cycles.

1:34:59 I want to provide as much of the proper building blocks as possible for these cells to, you know, bore other cells, to give life to other cells. And I want healthier cells to constantly continue that replication process. To me that can only be done with the highest quality of nutrition, the best possible methodology when it comes to rest, deep sleep, stress management, most people don’t pay attention to it. And again, daily activity, exercise, these are, I mean, nobody will refute these.

1:35:32 What’s funny is we’ll get PhDs, we’ll get people that are in the know and they start pushing, I call it the Pop-Tart Diet. Only focus on your macronutrition, you’ll be fine. You can have a Pop-Tart, you can eat ice cream, you can do all those things. Sure you can do those things and you can have short-term results, but long-term those results don’t meet, they’re not aligned. We know that earth or nutrients are the same nutrients that have sustained all of life on this planet since the dawn of time.

1:36:00 And it always makes me laugh when I hear people argue against that because once they argue against that, they’re pushing another angle, they’re selling something. I don’t make any money on spinach. Me saying this to the world allows the world to never buy one of my products by these principles. My principles allow you to never buy anything from me and that’s absolutely fine. Maybe you’ll donate one day.

1:36:24 Donate to my non-profit. Earth-grown nutrients is real food. Number two is we eat every two to four hours based upon our activity level. What did we just do? Are we recovering? What are we about to do? Are we fueling?

1:36:38 So we look at our consumption of earth-grown nutrients in those two to four hour windows. Am I repairing, recuperating from this active intense expout of exercise? Or have I been sitting casually in a chair burning cognitive energy, primarily glucose, having this meaningful conversation with Brian Rose? Am I going to be walking a half hour to the train station or riding a bike back to my hotel? Or is a cab going to be sitting outside and I’m going to put my tail in the car and I’m going to be looking at, you know, photos of food on Instagram until I get dropped off? Different caloric need expenditure.

1:37:18 I’m fueling myself based upon that every two to four hours. The next level is we eat until we’re satisfied, not until we’re full. This allows the body to self-regulate total caloric consumption, which goes back to earlier in the interview. I’m talking about we don’t count calories. We based upon what did we just do? What are we about to do?

1:37:38 Do we have the right nutrients, ingredients to recover or to prepare? And then I’m eating until I’m satisfied because the body will self-regulate if our micronutrition has been met. I’m not going to overeat. How do you know if you’re overeating or not? If I can push myself away from the table and if I can go for a 30, 60 minute jog and feel fine, I’m not going to hit my personal best. I’m not even trying to, but I can be functional. I can be active.

1:38:02 Well, I haven’t overeaten. If I need to unbutton my pants and lay down on the couch for a little while and allow this food to make its way through my body, I’ve completely screwed up. Not only did I screw up that meal, I probably screwed up the next few days of physique enhancement or performance or shaved time off that end of life stage. Who knows what I’ve done, what damage I’ve done in that point. So we eat real food, earth, or nutrients every two to four hours until we’re satisfied, not until we’re full.

1:38:37 Number four is hydration. I used to lump hydration into earth grow nutrients because I lumped it into the same, but I needed to break that out to instruct and to help educate because people don’t pay attention. They’ll go and drink a Gatorade or a sports drink or some sort of protein, whatever, and think that that’s some sort of beverage or they’ll kind of juice and smoothie instead of drinking pure water, purified water. And there’s different versions of, I say, pure water, purified water, uncontaminated water.

1:39:11 It’s very important. People forget of how integral water and hydration is to the human body. And there’s, you know, three and we could say four primary aspects of survival. The first and most important is oxygen. Right?

1:39:29 The second and most overlooked is water. People forget. They can go, they say two minutes without oxygen, two days without water, two weeks without food. Most people jump from here. I want to give the finger to here.

1:39:45 They completely forget this number two most essential element of survival is water consumption. It’s not soda consumption. It’s not Gatorade consumption. It’s water consumption. And then we go food and I always put number four as love, as interpersonal relationships.

1:40:02 And that’s a necessity when it comes to survival. And I do like to add that into my talking points also. Those four pieces right there. Life is good. Now I talk about water.

1:40:11 Now me personally, I drink two gallons of water a day on most days. The average human I believe through our science, although the medical community will probably disagree and registered dieticians will probably disagree because their heads are so deep into their textbooks. They don’t understand these concepts that me drinking a gallon of water a day, which is approximately eight pounds of water a day, which is what? Sixteen eight ounce glasses of water per day. If I only drink four pounds of water a day, a half a gallon of water per day, which is what the American system recommends, the average healthy adult should be consuming. I’m severely dehydrated.

1:40:51 And I’ve done run these tests on myself. Of course, I’m my urine is neon yellow nearly all day long and brown, not neon yellow. It’s kind of bright into dark brown. You can see how dehydrated my lips get extremely dry. I get headaches dehydrated. This is me not exercising.

1:41:09 If I do exercise, I typically lose three to four pounds an hour during mild to vigorous exercise. So I can lose that an hour of working, of working out. Now me talking right now is through respiration. Moisture, water. I’m dehydrating myself while I’m sleeping and snoring for eight hours a night.

1:41:31 I’m dehydrating myself. My armpits right now, my crotch area behind my knees. There’s I could feel we all can feel those little droplets of water that I’m losing. I live in Las Vegas, Death Valley. The atmosphere itself is pulling moisture out of my skin.

1:41:47 It’s obvious we know this. So me drinking a gallon of water a day keeps me optimally hydrated. When I exercise, I drink a minimum of two pints, 32 ounces of water for every hour that I exercise just to break even. I want to be super hydrated. So you super hydrate. Super hydrate. And I feel amazing.

1:42:12 Okay. Exercise. Yes. What is a Dolce diet exercise regimen look like for the week? I know that’s a very general question. Yeah.

1:42:19 Answer it anyways. Typically what we’re really focused on is full body exercise three days a week, every other day. Now that can be pure body weight exercise. It can be meathead resistance. It can be some sort of yoga, Pilates.

1:42:34 There’s different ways to train your entire body, but I want to train every muscle group vigorously every other day. In between those days, I’m looking more for active recovery, walking, swimming, hiking, cycling, frisbee, soccer, basketball, having fun. Every single day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, my entire life, I am exercising. I am moving my body intentionally in all sorts of different methods, all sorts of different modules, all sorts of different protocols. But I am having those small bouts of very intense, vigorous, full body compound, multi-joint movement exercise modules during that time also. I personally like at this stage going on walks.

1:43:19 I used to like running. I used to run up to 10 miles a day. Don’t like that as much anymore because I’m heavier now. Last year I went through this muscle building phase for a new book that we’re writing. I don’t like to be heavy anymore.

1:43:30 I like to be leaner. I like to be lighter. So this year I’m going to bring my weight back down. And that’s really where I tried all the different various, the bro split, as they call it, which is a traditional body building. You train, you know, basically each muscle group one day a week. You have your chest day, your arm day, your back day, all that stuff.

1:43:45 That works if you’re drug enhanced. For natural training athletes, it’s full body every other day due to muscle protein synthesis. Now, typically when you stimulate a muscle through exercise, through resistance training, your body’s ability to repair that muscle, muscle protein synthesis goes up for maybe 12 to 24 hours and then kind of it crashes maybe as high as 36 hours. But really within two days, within 48 hours, you completely go back to normal. Well, guess what?

1:44:12 My chest isn’t getting any bigger. I’m not getting any stronger. My legs aren’t getting any stronger. So if I’m training out every other day, I’m maximizing that muscle protein synthesis. I’m actually making gains at a much faster rate, much more efficiently, but I don’t have the ability to train high volume.

1:44:28 So it’s short. I’m doing one all out set of squats. I’m doing a few sets of 75 to 90% of a pull motion. I’m doing usually break the program down one full set of 20 rep squats, which I absolutely love now. Four sets of five repetitions on an overhead press or a flat bench press of some motion.

1:44:50 You can do a push up with chains or weights on your back. Then I’m going to do four sets of five with some sort of pulling motion. That’s either a deadlift or a pull like a row. Then I’m going to do ancillary work, which is going to be maybe it’s going to be body weight dips and then it’s going to be underhand chin ups. I might finish with a little, you know, mirror muscle, which maybe I do a couple incline dumbbell curls, but that’s typically, you know, a couple sets of 12 repetitions. Simple just to put some blood in there and I’m out the door.

1:45:19 Probably takes 30 to 45 minutes. That workout gets stronger every single time I walk in the gym. Getting better shave every time I walk in the gym. But the next day, completely down active recovery. I’m going for a walk and putting my little girl in the carriage and I’m going 45 minutes to an hour all around the neighborhood listening to London Real.

1:45:38 On my iPad, you know, I thought that’s my life. That’s what I do. I feel amazing as a result of that. And then now through kind of diet, I’m starting to wave my body weight back down. So I went from 224. Now I’m 212 stabilizing at 212. I’ll bring myself down to about 202 where I should be looking pretty good.

1:45:57 Let’s talk about your body weight. You posted two pictures on Instagram. One was I think your UFC fit body, which was like 185. Yeah. And you were training like a madman there. It’s that picture that’s the thumbnail from the original London Real episode.

1:46:12 And I remember you told me like how hard you were training, not to mention just filming that was very hard because you were going really intense for filming that whole video series. Six hours a day. That’s crazy. And then I think you had another picture from 2014 where you were up to 205. You put on more mass.

1:46:28 And now you’re at the cycle where you went up to 228, which is heavy for you. What’s going on with this whole cycle? What kind of feedback do you get from people? Yeah. So they all know Mike’s gotten big. It’s every was like, you know, you put on weight and I’m getting leaner now. It’s all for me. It’s all creating content.

1:46:45 You know, when I did UFC fit, I had to live it. Everything I do, I have, I have to live it. I have to do it first. If I don’t do it first, how can I tell you it works because I don’t know. And if I don’t do it myself, how can I guide you or corner you through the process? Where if I haven’t had those cravings, if I haven’t had that, that, that feeling like Dorian Yake spoke about how, you know, his levels of body fat.

1:47:05 So his levels of body fat were so low, the bottom of his feet were hurt would hurt. In UFC fit, I would have to wear, you know, gel orthotics because I was so lean. The bottom of my feet were hurting because I didn’t have that additional body fat as an insulator, as a buffer. I laughed when Dorian had said it because I didn’t know. I thought it was something jumping all the time. But now I was such low levels of body fat at that point that and jumping all the time too. It kind of exacerbated it.

1:47:28 So Dorian UFC fit, I trained primarily with those all body weight, very rarely, maybe once every 10 days or so would I get a weight workout. And it was typically one exercise. It was usually a pull. It was usually a deadlift or a penalty row, which is like a deadlift barbell row variation, something that really heavy, you know, three to five repetitions just to have that power and explosion. But it was all body weight centric because I had to look that part. I had to be really lean on camera, lean. It’s not good to be that lean.

1:47:58 Yeah, because on the camera, the video camera puts weight on you, right? That the still camera actually that takes it off or keeps you flat. So you have to be even crazy lean to look half lean. Yeah. And then you’re supposed to be this fitness expert. And I got other guys like Tony Horton running around, you know, looking super sure, whoever else, other fitness pros out there who look great.

1:48:20 For their photo shoots, but they don’t look like that year round. That’s the expectation. It’s impossible to have that low level body fat year round. So UFC fit, that’s what I was doing. And then after that, I was able to build myself back up to the next photo. I forget.

1:48:35 I know the photo because there’s so many of I’ve taken myself. I’m much bigger. I’m much full. I think I’m right around that low 200 pound range at about 8% body fat or so. And then from there, I kind of moved forward to this this bulking phase.

1:48:48 It’s I call it the squats and steak program. Like how to how to add 200 pounds to your squat and 20 pounds of mass to your body in 12 weeks time. That’s kind of the general concept. And I tried a bunch of different ways to do that. Started out with the bodybuilding bro split felt great hit a plateau immediately after like the first three weeks plateaued.

1:49:10 No gains, no strength, started regressing, throw that out, kind of deload, maintain myself. And then I hit it next. I went through a couple of different known programs. And then finally, I fell on what works best. And it’s the most simple. It’s the most basic.

1:49:27 And it’s the ones that they were doing back in the 1930s or so. And again, in the 60s, just full body every other day, primarily came from what they called squats and steak or squats and squats and milk of years ago. But I’m not going to tell you to drink a gallon of milk a day. I’m going to tell you to get, you know, six to eight ounces of a wild caught meat or wild caught salmon. You know, kind of steak is just part of the title. So I was able to get my weight up to, you know, the mid two twenties carrying the higher level of body fat for me.

1:49:55 I was up at, I think, like 13, let’s say 14 percent body fat at that weight. And now it’s slowly bringing my body fat down and trying to maintain as much of that muscle as possible. So I can really finish the book and see how much muscle lean muscle was able to put on my body during that 12 month period. And primarily, most of it came during that. The 12 by 20 program, which I outlined here just before. So that’s what I’m doing with me because I got what else am I going to do? Always experiment.

1:50:25 I got to experiment. I got to do it. I’ve done it all. Like physically, you know, I’ve been 282 pound power lifter. You know, I’ve been 170 pound mixed martial arts fighter. I’ve been this UFC fit dude. You know, I’ve kind of never a bodybuilder.

1:50:39 It’s just I don’t have the genetics. I don’t have the shape and I don’t have the desire that just doesn’t appeal to me. I was always on the strength train with bodybuilders a lot, but I was always on the strength and power kind of the functional performance side of that, which suited my personality. So we’ll see kind of July or so. That’s my target date. We’ll see come July. Hopefully I’m back down because I want to be back on the 8 percent body fat by July.

1:51:01 And my goal was to at least kept an additional six pounds of lean muscle during that period of time. OK, that’s that’s cool. I want to read that book. The Dolce diet. You said you never spent a dollar on marketing to build the Dolce diet. Just tell me a little bit more about that.

1:51:17 And where is the Dolce diet now, say to a couple of years ago? Is it the business you wanted to be? I’m sure it isn’t. But you know, you’ve obviously accomplished some things with the Dolce diet with the books, with the programs. I’m guessing it’s probably a fairly successful business.

1:51:31 Where are you at now and how’d you build it? So we had never spent a dollar in marketing to build the brand because we didn’t have the dollar. I said in 2005, I made fourteen thousand dollars the entire year as the Dolce diet. I made more money the first two weeks of 2015 in my paycheck working in as a municipal tax assessor than I did for the subsequent 50 weeks working double the hours as the full time head strength coach of the most important fight team in the world.

1:52:04 That was 2005 right? 14 grand. Remember I made 14 grand that year as the Dolce diet. There’s no money for marketing. So now we started a coach certification program. There’s lots of things that we’ve grown since then. Similar to yourself, what you’ve done with London Real but in a different way in our own little area.

1:52:24 What we try and do in our certification program is we try and teach other coaches, other fitness professionals how to, number one, educate them on nutrition science and dietetics. That’s our entry level. That’s step one. Once we did that a few times, we realized we’re giving them this great education that they can rely on our team of registered dietitians to now legally prescribe meal plans for clients that our dietitians write for them. We have a rev share in that but they don’t know how to actually get clients. They don’t know how to build a brand. They don’t now know how to integrate their social media.

1:52:58 They don’t have a web presence. They don’t know how to do any of the business side. They don’t know how to consult with a client. They don’t know how to create leads or close sales. They don’t know any of that. So then we created our content, our cert program and our email system, our trainers network to go back and show what I feel is the best way to do that.

1:53:20 The R system is the R system. The first R is research. Research is the most important thing. That’s the practical experience. I would take the education and learn as much information as I can. Being book smart. I would go through that and apply it to myself and my athletes or clients.

1:53:45 That doesn’t work and that doesn’t work but that really works and we’ll keep that and why did that work and just dig in. So that’s the research. The research never stops. I just went and got certified USAPL. It’s USA Powerlifting which is the number one drug free powerlifting organization. It has IOC affiliation. I just went and got certified in their system.

1:54:06 I’ve been powerlifting since I was 17 years old just as education because it was whatever. So I’m always in that research phase. I’m always trying to learn something, learn more, continue on. The next part becomes results. I have the research. I have the education. I have the knowledge but can I actually produce results?

1:54:28 Can I get myself to that level of body fat or hit that number on the barbell or run to there in this period of time? Can I improve those data points? Research then results and then the next one is replication. Okay I did it. I got myself down. Can I do that again? Can I do that to Brian? Can I do that to Brandy? Can I do that to Rhonda? To Tiago? To Carlos? To Vitor? To Rampage? To all these? Can I do that?

1:54:54 So I can get the results. Can I replicate those results? Once I can replicate the results then my reputation starts to grow because everyone’s like, then this is what happened to me. Dolce is the guy. All 40 athletes in team quest all of a sudden start looking amazing. I kind of didn’t get credit for it at all. They got credit. It was Light Force, Natural Greens or whatever was being sold and promoted. Whatever sponsor at that time.

1:55:22 I was just kind of, because I was a strength coach at that time. But now we’re replicating results. Our reputation begins to grow. The reputation begins to grow. Then everybody wants to hire you and guess what happens? Now my resume grows.

1:55:33 All of a sudden I’ve worked with over 250 UFC athletes. I work with multiple world champions and Olympic medalists and NFL and NBA and Hollywood stars because I was knowledgeable enough through my research to create results that I could replicate that grew my reputation to the level of the world. I became such an in demand entity that other people wanted to have those same results. With the resume growing then finally come the rewards. Then I’m actually able to have a sustainable business because of going through this system.

1:56:06 Most people put rewards first. They want to get paid. I’m going to charge this. They don’t have the research and they can’t replicate any of the results. Maybe they had one result but they can’t replicate results because what they did was they put rewards first.

1:56:20 They didn’t get the results because it only works on steroids using guys or it only works on people with enough money to hire a private chef or whatever. There’s different things out there. So those are’s. That’s my essential system. That’s how the Dolce diet grew because of the results that I was able to produce. What we did was so different from what everybody else was. It was so simple and the simplicity of it made it so successful.

1:56:46 The point of entry was very low. Everybody can eat real food every 2-4 hours until they’re satisfied, drink a lot of water and do it every meal every day. That’s the simplicity of it. I am a motivator, a guy, a leader, a corner, a friend, a brother, a disciplinarian, a teammate. I play all those roles individually with the athletes.

1:57:11 I was never looking for accolades. I just wanted you to be successful. I wasn’t looking for money. I made 14 grand that year. I wasn’t charging anybody.

1:57:23 Some guys started throwing me a 20 because they could see how hard I was riding a bike literally to the gym at 5.30 in the morning. My wife had the car and I had to get to the gym. We only had one car. We lived in a one bedroom apartment and we had a plastic table from Walmart, a picnic table, backyard table. The cheapest one that they had. That was our kitchen table for the first 6 months.

1:57:49 You teach these guys and girls to do the same thing you did. That’s part of your certified journey. That is part of the certification. A lot of that comes through. I do a talk. It’s kind of a motivational talk. This is what I did.

1:58:04 People think, I’m going to be Dolce Diet certified and all of a sudden I’m going to have all these clients because I’m the Dolce. No, you’re not. How are you going to get your clients? Can you produce results? We’ve given you the education. You have the ability to work with our team of dietitians and learn.

1:58:19 But it took me, I mean, I had my business in 97. Nobody really heard about me until 2010. Are you willing to grind for 13 years and change thousands of people’s lives before you can really start to monetize to a level that will change your life and change the life of everyone you know and care about? Most people are going to go on bar 10. And is that going to mean the bulk of your business or will that be a big part of your business in the future?

1:58:44 The certification program has grown to become a very successful funnel inside of our larger system. And what that’s enabling us to do now, it’s a good price point for people to come. It’s a 3-day weekend. We’ve held 2 in Australia. We’ve held 4 here in the United States. We’re going to have an online version of it, which is a 13-week program.

1:59:07 And it’s education intensive. It is a college level course condensed into 14 very intense hours over 13 days that has lots of the sales built into it. So we have to really streamline and repurpose some of the content, making the individual responsible for everything that’s in our very thick text. And every 3 months, they receive pop quizzes that we don’t charge them for to make sure that they’re on top of the content. That they can use our book. And we want them to use our book because we don’t just write a diet off the top of our head.

1:59:36 We use all the assets at our fingertips. We have multiple software programs that we use. We have all the databases. We have complete nutrition analyzers when we create these meal plans. How many trainers do you have?

1:59:52 Of our certified coaches, we have between 50 and 70 on the books right now. Depending on who has expired, we have 50. So July is 8th, 9th and 10th in Las Vegas is our next one. We had it capped at 50, which we’ve sold out. So we’ve got a bigger venue.

2:00:10 50 is the biggest one we’ve ever done. But now we have the protocol set to the degree that we can host larger audiences. Because we didn’t want to lose that personal touch and feel. We can do that now. My staff is bigger now. So we can be more hands-on and interactive.

2:00:23 I also want to make sure that we don’t get any knuckleheads coming through our system. Can you make money off selling books? Absolutely. You can? Okay.

2:00:32 I’ve made a lot of money selling books. And I don’t say that. To brag, I say that as a fact that our books are self-published. I was approached by two of the largest book publishers in the country when the Dolce Diet started to take off in 2010 to 2011. They wanted to do the Dolce Diet. And I sat down.

2:00:52 And they both flew to Las Vegas, which showed their intent to meet with myself and my wife. And they both offered a $15,000 to a $25,000 upfront royalty. I said, I appreciate that. But we’re way off. I’m like, what are you talking about? That’s massive for a first time, unproven, authorized.

2:01:14 I appreciate that. But you flew here to sit and meet with me because you see that there’s a value, long-term value in what we do. And I know if I sign that piece of paper for that amount of money, which was a lot at that time, for sure, that you’re going to I’m going to be signing away rights in perpetuity also. And I know that the $25K that you’re going to pay me right now, you’re going to actually take off the back end of the very small percentage, the 7% to 11% industry standard, of what I’ll be making as the author, the creator of all this IP.

2:01:49 So let’s say I get 10% on a $15 book. I’ll get $1.50 per book. But I won’t get that $1.50 until I’ve paid back that $25K. So how many thousands of books do we have to sell for me to hit that mark? And then I have to trust you to really do all the marketing for it because I’m not going to be as excited to do all that marketing for you because I’m not going to be getting paid for my time.

2:02:14 So it rarely makes sense to take that deal, especially if you believe in your brand and you’re going to work into it long-term, which you knew you were. I believe in it. And you know your numbers. And Brandi. She does her master’s in communications. Brandi was a writer by trade.

2:02:27 We already had the perfect team. We didn’t know how. We had never done it before. But we walked out of there like, well, this is a pivotal moment. We just turned down two publishers for what we always wanted.

2:02:41 But we saw something bigger. So we moved on to sell publish. And within six days we became the number one seller on Barnes & Noble dot com, number one on Amazon, number one on Buy dot com. I mean, Living Lean just exploded. And that really put us on the map.

2:02:58 And we control everything. And the price point of our products are much higher than the average because we know the content that we have is life changing. The books that we have out there, you don’t need to buy anything else. If you buy Living Lean, you don’t need another book. I mean, then we have our cookbooks.

2:03:13 You want another 300 or so recipes that fit our philosophies. Well, we have these two. Three weeks of shreddings is not for everybody. Not everybody needs to get shredded, lose 20 pounds in three weeks. But if you do, you need it. And guess what? You can use it every time you ever have to do it.

2:03:26 So for that little bit of money, you don’t have to buy a paleo diet, Atkins diet, South Beach diet, blah, blah diet. You don’t have to do that anymore because we’re teaching the principles. We’re showing you how it’s done, how to implement it. There you go. We have tons of free content on our website and everywhere else that supports it.

2:03:39 We put at least at least a free recipe every day, multiple recipes, probably five recipes a week on our website. We just we put it out there. It’s a beautiful business model. Why keep training UFC fighters? That must take so much of your time. Like you said, you’re all you’re turning you’re 40 now.

2:03:54 Yeah. You tired of sleeping on sofas. Yeah. Why still do it? I do it because I can help people change their life. I can help people succeed. I can help people.

2:04:06 I can help eliminate some of the pain that some of these athletes go through. I can help elevate them. I know I have the skills and the passion. I have the ability to help some of these people change their life. But working with the athletes, I lose money. I don’t make money working with the athletes.

2:04:23 The athletes pay me. I’m one of the only coaches that actually gets paid to do what I do. Though other people are in my industry, they’re getting paid in tweets. They’re not respected enough to get paid for their time. My athletes respect me enough to pay me for the time and services. But I’m not making money on it.

2:04:39 I’m losing money when you look at the entirety of my business. You know, I get I get nice appearance fees. When I go out and I do a three hour seminar, you know, that’s probably what I’ll get paid for being gone with my family. From my family for an entire week of much more difficult work with an athlete. Just do a seminar weekend and I’m good. I don’t need to work with athletes anymore.

2:05:00 So it’s not for the money that I work with the athletes. It’s because I love my athletes. I love Rhonda. I love Tiago. Carlos, we worked together once, but I deeply respect him and his family.

2:05:11 And I’m building that relationship with him that takes time. Merced Bectic, Manny Gamburian, Mike Pyle. I mean, I these people, they can I would leave the key to my car and my house under my mat with my wife and my daughter there and me gone on another continent and they could just take the key and walk in. I love them and trust them that much. That’s why I work with them. That’s why I continue.

2:05:35 It’s it’s not financial for me. I make much more money volume wise on my online membership program on my couple seminars that I do on. The residuals from the books that constantly sell the passive income that just dumps into my account. That’s that’s where I make money. And that allows me to work with these world class athletes and people don’t understand that.

2:05:55 They don’t see that. And a lot of the athletes that I work with, I don’t even charge. Some athletes, they supposed to pay me and they don’t. I won’t name names. You’d be surprised at how many high six figure income and millionaires actually don’t pay their staff and their coaches when they’re supposed to.

2:06:11 But the athletes that I stick with and you’ll see the athletes that I work with are the ones that I was paying. Merced Bektik probably the lowest paid athlete on my my stable. Monday the check shows up. He fights on Friday. Monday there’s a postmark on the envelope that shows up Tuesday Wednesday in my mailbox.

2:06:27 That check comes. Tiago Alves I get a check before camp even starts. I’m paid up front. No problem. Ronda Rousey check just shows up in the mail. I don’t even invoice or ask for it.

2:06:38 That’s how it is with those athletes. But it’s not it’s not for the money. Absolutely. And Mike Dolce takes gets pot shots these days and he gets copycats these days. I’m feeling this and hearing this from you today constantly.

2:06:50 And it’s more in the last year or two as the industry has gotten bigger and as you’ve been around longer and people all want to do what you want to do. OK. They everyone. And I I only work with five to 10 UFC athletes. There’s 550 UFC athletes on the roster.

2:07:07 Every one of them needs a team like mine because it’s not just me. I’m just the face of it. I have a team of dieticians and coaches and exercise physiologists that work for me. I have a marketing manager. I have a COO. I have customer service. I have content editor.

2:07:23 I have designers. I have a whole team. I have a business. People understand the Dolce diet center in Las Vegas is a team of individuals. I have a 401k program. I pay the health care for all of my employees.

2:07:35 They completely they don’t contribute. I pay for all their health care. That’s the way I operate and run my business. People understand that. That certainly doesn’t come from the money that comes in from the athletes and those that want to be me.

2:07:49 Well they don’t realize that in most states it’s illegal for non registered dieticians to actually prescribe and write meal plans. It’s actually illegal. Johnny Hendricks Co go out and sue the gentleman that he had worked with and win civil and possibly criminal because he was working with someone who prescribed the meal plan for him that did not work that from what I understand made him sick. He wound up getting knocked out. He lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in income. There’s legal liability to that.

2:08:20 My team is we have the best team in the world when it comes to nutrition and dietetics, when it comes to strength and conditioning. There’s other great strength and conditioning teams out there. But when it comes to preparation especially for combat athletes or weight class dominant athletes or elite athletes in general, there’s no team better than mine and anyone can walk into my office and sit down with one of the members of my team and get these plans.

2:08:43 And that’s part of our business model. We have Walk-In Clientele. We have our My Diet program which is online. Skype directly with your personal dietician that you deal with that walks you that every day you communicate with for that eight week or 16 week program. So all these these kind of the pretenders in the industry they want to be what I am.

2:09:01 They want to stand next to the athletes that I have. They want to be in this position that I created. They were never in that they didn’t make the $14,000 in 2005 doing this. They weren’t you know working with Kurt Pellegrino and Dante Rivera in 2003 going into 2004 when they won the NHB Ring of Combat World title. They weren’t even involved in this sport for free.

2:09:27 I was working with those athletes all that long time ago and I’m still working with those same athletes at this elite level. They didn’t put the time in but they want the accolades without having done the work. And they don’t realize there’s more than enough room. Like I said I work with five of five hundred fifty five hundred forty five athletes that need credential qualified professionals. And right now I don’t see any in the industry that is doing what we do with the team that we have replicating the results that we have.

2:09:57 All the other guys that do this their athletes have missed weight in the short period of time that they’ve actually been visible and functioning. Their athletes have already missed weight multiple times. Some have been popped for drugs. None. None of my athletes have any of those issues.

2:10:11 Yeah I don’t think there’s any competition. There’s no. And it makes me mad. I got to say it makes me mad because they’ll come out they’ll make potshots in the media about me. And I can’t respond because I can’t give validity to these wannabes that are only mentioning my name to get headlines.

2:10:24 They won’t get headlines on their own. They only get headlines when they mention me. And that’s how they kind of weasel their way into the industry by talking about what we’re doing. You don’t hear me say anything negative. Have you ever heard me ever say anything negative.

2:10:36 This is maybe the most negative or open because this it’s you and this is respecting you in your show. So I’m speaking honestly the most I’ve ever spoken about it. But you won’t hear me say a name and I won’t say anything bad. We’re being positive. We’re working. We’re doing all this great stuff.

2:10:50 Go do great stuff. Shine on your own. Don’t come in. You know try and stand in our spotlight. Go make your own spotlight.

2:10:57 And that’s by the research and the results and the replication and the resume and the rewards. They’re trying to go straight to the resume and the reward. They haven’t done this work. And that’s where that’s why they’ll never be where we are and do what we do. Let me ask you about Mike Dolce the man. Oh when Dorian Yates was here.

2:11:17 Yeah I asked him did you celebrate after you won that fourth Mr. Olympia. What did you do to celebrate. And I bet you could probably guess what he did. I’ll tell you what he did. I probably didn’t party the way everybody else. Tell me.

2:11:35 He said he didn’t do anything because he was supposed to win. And he went home and he got back to training so he could win the next year because he competed with himself. All right. We were talking earlier your three time world’s MMA trainer of the year. And yet to you you probably enjoyed that for the night I’m guessing.

2:12:00 And the next day it’s like OK Mike what have you done for me lately. Am I calling your personality right. And where does that stuff come from. Yeah you know takes one to know one. It does. And it’s I’m not happy I’m not satisfied.

2:12:16 And it’s an amazing honor to have won a single world MMA trainer of the year to be nominated by your peers to be voted on by the fans. That’s very special. That’s a massive amount of respect to just win to just be nominated is awesome to win is amazing to have won the last three years in a row and the only three years the awards ever been offered. It’s very cool and that that’s the impact is not lost on me and I’m very appreciative and respectful. And I believe that reflects upon my team and the great work that we’ve done over the last decade or so or last five years in particular really since 2010 is when we really turn on the branding and the marketing of the Dolce diet.

2:13:02 Since that time we’ve captured the respect of the athletes of the industry insiders of the fans of the sport and they see the good work that we’ve done. But the awards my wife took the awards out of the box and put them on my desk because they sat in the boxes where they came in the garage because it’s I’ve it’s an I’ve it’s I don’t want to be disrespectful. But I don’t feel deserving because there’s so much more that I believe I could be doing and should be doing and I don’t in my mind feel or believe that I’m any different than any other coach or trainer out there.

2:13:47 And in a lot of ways I feel I’m less because there’s so much more that I need to know and there’s more athletes that I can definitely help and there’s no more programs and services I’m currently creating to help more people change their lives. And there was the the one guy that fell off her program and he didn’t hit the results that he should have hit and he’s living back in the way that he used to live before he reached out to us and I couldn’t help that individual and that that’s what bothers me. How do I how can I be better? I couldn’t motivate that guy to lose that weight that just had the little baby that wants to see her get married one day but he’s still 40 pounds overweight drinking beer on Friday and Saturday eating chicken legs.

2:14:23 I couldn’t find a way to really get in there. So that those things that type of mentality I think is what drives me. And you know we mentioned earlier I grew up in very humble circumstances. You know most people don’t know I lived in a home because my father you know had had his master stroke was taken out of the house at a stay at home mom had no job and she was working. She was cleaning houses and you know just trying to keep the lights on and the lights went off for quite a long time.

2:14:51 There were no heat. We had no electricity. We had no running water. I used to you know break in to the local rec center to take showers. I used to do my homework at night sitting on my front porch because the street light would give me just enough light to do my homework.

2:15:08 You know that’s how I grew up. I would go to bed hungry not that we wouldn’t have a meal because my mother would always find a way to feed us but it wasn’t what any other kid had had. I know that for sure and it was probably not what I could have and it should have been consuming certainly knowing what I know now. So to have that type of upbringing to see the worry about bills and to the fighting just to get enough money to eventually get the electricity turned on for a few weeks before it would get shut back off again.

2:15:44 I think that’s what drives me so much to be so hardworking and so passionate. Now to have what I have to own multiple properties and vehicles and investments and you know these all these things of monetary success that people will work their whole life for that probably won’t have a paid or paid off house or whatever their thing is. They might never get there. For me to have that at a relatively young age I doesn’t feel like it. I feel like my electricity is just about to get turned off.

2:16:20 And this is what drives me. I try now that I have my daughter and part of me speaking with you last year to come and do one of your events. We discussed this that you really challenged me to be concise in my points of what I was going to say and to go to that dark place and that’s the place I went to. And I realized holy shit that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing now. Like I know through writing Living Lean I’m working in health and fitness and nutrition and lifestyle management and longevity because I’m trying to save my father.

2:16:53 I’m again that eight year old boy that’s trying to save my father but I’m also trying to somehow save the eight year old boy from losing his father. That’s what motivates me so much in this health and fitness. I want to change all seven billion people on the planet. That’s what drives that and what drives me to work so hard and to build these businesses now and to continually innovate and grow is because I don’t want my life turned off. Is that healthy though? Is that a healthy way to live Mike?

2:17:26 You know that’s a great question and I don’t know that it is. I wish that it wasn’t but that’s me and I embrace that and I’m at terms with that and I make sure that I’m completely present in these moments. I’m completely present in my life because I know anything can happen in any moment. This could be it. This moment, this second, this could certainly be it and I want to make sure that at every moment I’m not regretful and extremely proud.

2:17:55 When I travel quite a bit doing what I do and my wife and family they share me with the world to do this and help but when I’m away from my family I miss them intensely and dearly and I just want to be home on my couch talking to my wife and holding my daughter and you know with my legs up on my dog and my silly cat kind of you know. I want to be that guy there constantly all the time but I know that I can’t because there’s I have more to give whether I don’t want the lights to turn off and I’m trying to save the eight year old and I’m save his father and all that chaos is going on but it makes me be so in the moment when I am home with me when I’m home I’m completely home. I’m home with my wife. I hear what she says. I want her to tell me every girl thing that you know women like to talk about and most guys are like oh my God I just want to go to the bar or the gym whatever I want.

2:18:50 I want to hear it and I appreciate I’m thankful and I want to be there with my daughter and I want to read you know dance to you know Mike Mouse Club and do the hot dog dance and all those other little things that you’ll be knowing you’ll know here pretty soon in those moments. I mean those are so special so I think that craziness that propels me also allows me to be so much more in the moment and appreciate those little things that I don’t think some people do. I’m not the guy that comes home. We don’t have TV in my house. I’m not the guy that comes home and turns on whatever TV and I stare at it for two to four hours while my wife’s in the kitchen cooking.

2:19:29 We’re cooking together. We’re shopping together like we’re always doing interacting and doing real things not that watching TV is bad per se but in me for my life it is because there’s these other things that can be done. I don’t know it does. And what does your wife Brandy make of the Mike Dolce the man obsessed with with you know fixing the father the eight year old healing the world and yet still being present. What’s her read. I think she loves me. She loves me. Yeah we’ve been together for 15 we’re going on 16 years now at 40. She drove out to the west coast with you.

2:20:09 Yeah it was a pretty big gamble. Yeah she supported me. We got married when four weeks of me getting the job offer proposed got married packed the truck drove cross country and she went from dating this very successful. I was 23 at the time was 23 making six figures. That’s crazy. It’s crazy. Only in Jersey. But it’s but again at that point I was still this guy trying to keep the lights on.

2:20:42 I was when I was making that I was working not just the municipal tax assessor I was buying and selling cars from a nonprofit Catholic organization I would buy cars at a good deal and I would go and flip them and I make a couple extra hundred to a couple thousand bucks a month. I would work Thursday Friday Saturday at bars as a bouncer in security making you know at that’s because I started when I was 17 making 50 bucks and I was making 500 bucks a night doing that I was working running my open my my training business in 1997 and I was running that successfully during that time. So I was always an entrepreneur even though I had a full-time gig there were so many other things that I was doing at that time. Brandi was with that guy left it all went to Portland Oregon in the middle of the rain to make zero money.

2:21:31 It’s a guy that was driving a brand new Ford Explorer XLT Eddie Bauer to end a Lincoln Continental young guy two cars in the driveway condo literally on the beach in New Jersey to riding a bike at five thirty in the morning to go clean toilets. This girl stayed with me during all that when I made 14 grand that entire year and we had a plastic picnic table as our dinner table. She stayed with me and those are some of the happiest times in our life when we talk about it.

2:21:58 We never felt poor or we never felt bad because we always saw we always saw the future which we still do. So she’s been with me in the very beginning and helped me build and support me as we do this and got to the point we are and we’re blessed now that all the work allows her to be completely at home and raise our family and run our household and she still works for the business. The content and the creation side so she still kind of oversees that arm of the staff and comes in for board meetings and whatnot. So she’s my road dog. She’s been there the entire time.

2:22:35 Well I spent time with you over the years and I know you on camera and off camera and I think you got it right honestly. And when you are here you are present and when I do need to talk to you or need you for something you’re there and you do great work and I spent a lot of time with some very strange A-type personalities that sit in that chair. Sure. But I don’t know man I think you got it figured out. So it’s a weird contrast and I haven’t always had it right too of being really hard on yourself and being really driven but also be willing to be present and to be grateful and acknowledge people. Those don’t always go hand in hand. It’s hard to walk that line. But when you can it can be very fulfilling, very rewarding.

2:23:16 Yeah and I think for us there’s a lot of trial and error. It’s a lot of failure. Guys like us and people like us we experience failure on a daily basis. Our great ideas that we’ve had just crash and burn right in front of us. Things that we think we can do they just don’t work out the way that we want them to and maybe relationships that we have aren’t quite as enriching as they could be. And you can let that kind of tear you down and create a negative perspective or those individuals that are successful.

2:23:53 They actually use that as learning moments and they try and find ways to become better as a result of that. And I think that’s what I’ve been able to do. I’ve gone through so much life experience that I’m always trying to be a better version of myself and I decided a while ago to be very selfish and define my success by those around me being successful. That’s how I become successful. So it’s not if I can make help you make double and triple your income. I’m going to be fucking excited about that. If I can help you achieve your physical physique goals if I can help you get all blood pressure medicine. If I can help you win a world title that means I’m the fucking man.

2:24:37 So that has helped me kind of use that energy that I have in a way that’s that’s pure and it is clean. So I know a lot of people that are very successful in life and they’re so self loathing. They’re not happy. They’re terrible to be around. They’ve kind of pushed everything else away from them because the only thing they have is whatever success in whatever form that they’ve chosen.

2:25:02 So I was able to see a while ago and I it was kind of part of me anyway. It made me feel better when everyone felt better. That’s what I’m going to do. They don’t teach you that in the American dream that it’s not really about you. It’s about all that positive you give away to everyone else and about all the inspiration. But when I got taught the American dream in San Diego California it was all it was all about me. But it doesn’t work.

2:25:26 So get rich get laid. You’ll be happy. As I said especially don’t work. No right. No. You mentioned success. I wanted to ask you you know before we finish off a few of your like success secrets like the Mike Dolce stuff you’ve learned over the years. Is there any one thing that you do in your daily routine and your morning routine in your week or a mindset change that really had a big step function increase in your success.

2:25:52 I see the Dolce diet one day as being the most influential and respected health and fitness brand in the world with that type of company the amount of people that we will be able to reach is exponential.

2:26:31 That’s what we’re trying to do. I already have enough money to be happy and to live. I’ve had investments. My family will be fine. We won’t be hungry. The electricity will always be on beyond.

2:26:42 But maybe I can only help you know 10,000 people a year and at a higher level I can help 10 million people a year but at a higher level we can help 100 million or a billion people a year. And that’s through things like you know our we just started a nonprofit organization called the Choo Foundation which is children eating well as the acronym and it’s dedicated to childhood obesity and diabetes and really eradicating those disease and conditions through education. And that’s completely funded by myself and by my family to put that information out there and start spreading the message and teaching parents kind of teaching into the families teaching parents how to feed their family and why and what the ramifications are if they don’t and the school systems really getting the education out there and making it cost efficient for lower earning families to do so that they’re not giving their kids.

2:27:44 High fructose juice boxes and some enriched wheat crackers and they’re sending them off to school or giving them a little snack or a bunch of cane sugar that they’re dumping down their throat and then expecting them to sit in class with their hands folded and pay attention. Yeah I’m really glad you’re doing that because it’s something that so needs to be addressed and if two out of three people are dying from reasons based on their choices what about the children? Childhood diabetes is the highest it’s ever been. Childhood obesity is the highest right now that it’s ever been. The most advanced civilization in the history of the world known world right now has the sickest children that we’ve ever had.

2:28:27 Two out of three adults will die of lifestyle related illness that number has increased exponentially of just about 15 last 10 to 20 years went from one out of two to now two out of three and in the next five years ten years that number will increase again the percentage will increase again. This is mind blowing with the advances that we have in technology and medical science and pharmaceuticals to see how sick people are which really shows you what’s truly happening. The pharmaceutical industry, the health and fitness industry, the medical industry has all made more money than they’ve ever had in the history of time yet the citizens the population are actually dying of lifestyle related diseases at faster rates than they ever have.

2:29:11 These don’t make sense you can really see where the profit centers are and you can see the misinformation being pushed down by everybody else that says well you know GMOs are the same thing as earth-grown foods and processed foods are absolutely fine to eat there’s no problem with that and sure kids can have candy and soda at two, three, four, five years old that’s not really a big deal. That’s all misinformation, disinformation and it’s apathy. So what we will do is we will help put the message out there and we’ll educate that the 25 to 45 year old parent essentially that’s our main target that have most of the kids will kind of target them first push down as we slowly start to build our resources and our team to really get those messages out there.

2:30:02 It’s exciting two things I don’t know she said there is that that one of your local buddies in Las Vegas Tony Shea of Zappos says that a company brand is a lagging indicator of the company culture and if you really think about that it probably makes sense. And so the way you treat your employees the way you talk about your ethos on the why of the diet ends up permeating out to your customers and they feel that and it might take a year or two years but it happens. When you see big corporations lose their culture it’s a few years later and the brand is gone as well. So that’s one thing I see the other thing I see during a final parallel to Dorian Yates is Dorian was here and Dorian has evolved in a massive way.

2:30:42 There’s a picture on the wall over there on my first interview with Dorian three years ago and there’s a picture on the wall over there where he looks like Ernest Hemingway and he’s got this deep dark tan and he said Brian he said one thing I’ve learned is he said we are all one. And he said I know that’s hard to say when there’s some wanker on the other side of the street doing all this crazy stuff he said but that guy is actually a part of you and that when you go and help someone else in this world it’s this collective thing and sometimes it’s going to take you 40 years or 50 years or 60 years. But ultimately a lot of us finally figure out that piece that we are all connected and even though it’s not obvious and it sure as hell isn’t obvious in the first world American dream.

2:31:26 But most of the smart people that have sat in this chair have figured that out and I think you figure that out in many ways subconsciously and I figured that out subconsciously sometimes I forget up here. But that’s where we all get our deep meaningful connection is really by helping others and the way you talk about how you want to see other people win. That’s something you figured out through reverse engineering and testing that that makes you feel good and I think it’s because we all are part of this one thing.

2:31:57 Absolutely I like that it makes perfect sense. Yeah and so I get to listen here every week and that’s one of the things we get to do. I think this show is really all about listening and so what happens is someone new comes in the show every week and everyone gets to listen to them. How often do we listen to people? Not that often and we end up figuring that wow Mike Dolce is a human just like me. He’s got trials tribulations pain success triumph and he does it all over again just like I do and I can learn a lot from him and probably a lot from all the other humans in the world.

2:32:29 And so this is a whole listening experience what we’re doing here. Absolutely. And it’s good to have you as a part of that listening experience and I’m going to finish on the way we finish every show Mike. I’m going to ask you a question I ask everyone I probably asked you last time and your answer might change that’s the beauty of it. Sure.

2:32:44 If you can make a phone call to that 20 year old Mike Dolce he’s in Jersey. He hasn’t got that job yet but he’s probably kicking ass in school. He’s probably a crazy high achiever in all aspects of his life. Friday night is probably still squat night the best night of the week. Thank you.

2:33:00 And give that young man a bit of advice from what the 40 year old knows now to the 20 year old and you can literally talk to that young man on the phone. What would you tell him. Tell us don’t be so hard on yourself. Enjoy. Enjoy the moments. Enjoy the journey. And don’t take everything so seriously. Don’t take everything to heart. Really kind of enjoy the process.

2:33:26 I know me now looking back I didn’t enjoy some of that was so hard on myself and I was so a type and so aggressive and I set such lofty goals and you know I would always learn from failure but it would hurt it would hurt so bad. You know we just keep me up at night and we get me out of bed early in the morning and you could argue that maybe that’s why I’ve had some sort of success. But at the same time from the emotional level be there’s things that I didn’t enjoy as much. I didn’t enjoy success. I still don’t think I enjoy success the way most people perceive success.

2:34:04 I don’t enjoy and I think that goes back. I’m not realizing this now talking to you. Great question. I don’t enjoy my own success. I enjoy our other people’s success and that’s such a weird thing to even kind of vet right now and understand.

2:34:18 And maybe that’s a good thing. Yeah. Maybe it is. Maybe you know two years or so or 20 years when I look back and I’m talking to the 40 year old man. You know enjoy your own success. Don’t be such an idiot out there. You know screw everybody else. I don’t think that’ll happen. But it’s actually really interesting concept. Yeah. Yeah. Don’t be so hard on yourself.

2:34:40 On that same note what’s the best advice you’ve ever received over the past 20 years. Pay cash for everything. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the Amen lesson from today’s. That’s for sure. That’s it.

2:34:51 Final question to that 20 year old that’s out there watching us right now listening to us that wants to grow up one day and be like Mike Dolce right. Like so many people do. What advice do you give him or her. Yeah. Live your brand. You are your brand. You have to live it. People will see right through. People will see right through me if I’m full of shit. They will see it. I have to live it. I have to be it every breath I take whether people are watching or not watching when I’m completely alone. I don’t break. I don’t change. I live it.

2:35:19 Down to my whole being in my core. There’s nothing fake about it. You know I’m saying it so I understand people are you know might see it differently but this is me talking and giving advice. You have to 100 percent be it or be something else that you truly want to be. And I think that’s why I left that job as a tax assessor because I wasn’t that I was a tax assessor from eight to four and then I would rip off my stupid suit and I would get on a train and I would take a two hour ride to go roll around on dirty mats on top of a methadone clinic with a bunch of immigrants that probably couldn’t pay their gym dues. That’s who I really was. And once I embrace that that guy that person those goals.

2:36:06 I became at peace with myself and with my my destination became very clear and it wasn’t financially derived. My goal wasn’t to be a rich whatever. My goal was to be a world class coach of world class athletes at a world class facility and I still have that paper. So we just had a guest on them Simon Sinek who’s got I think the second yeah. Yeah. Most watch Ted talk of all time and it’s called start with why. And so the problem is when I when a guest comes in the studio they get they infect our whole culture for weeks on end. So you know when the jocko comes here we’re extremely owning everything for a long time.

2:36:46 Awesome. When Simon’s here we’re like what’s our why. Start with why because everyone buys into a company and into a person because of their why not their what. You know Apple makes tablets a lot of companies and China make tablets. Why do we buy apples because of their why. And you just talked about your why. And that’s why I think people buy into the Dolce diet and to you because they’re not buying a cookbook. They’re not buying a recipe. They’re not buying even a training program. They’re buying your why your passion. It’s a part of you I think.

2:37:16 And I think that’s great advice for any business person or any human really. Absolutely. He’s to live it. You know. Yeah. There’s the only way you’ll be successful I believe. And the only way you’ll be happy with that type of success. The only way that you’ll be motivated. The only way that you want to work 60 80 hundred hour weeks and try and find more hours to continue working if you want to be successful in that field in that niche. You know you have to have the why. So I agree. Simon Sinek does a great job.

2:37:46 It works on a fan. I read his books love his work and I think that was pivotal. And I found that I had already be after I read the book I realized in the middle of the book that I was already operating from why. And it was like oh that’s justification because it sounds wrong to do what we do which is to not put profits first to put value in one of our our mission statement is to add more value to the lives of those we reach. Than the value we receive from those who reach out to us. And that’s you know in our office that people can see and read that every day. It’s it’s on every desk so they can see and understand when the phone rings. I’m here to deliver value your life whether I make a sale make a dollar doesn’t matter. I’m going to help change your life.

2:38:32 As a byproduct of that attitude it rolls back other businesses they’re all you know KPIs they all want that dollar. What did you get. How much time you’re on the phone. What did that equate to hourly rate. This is what you make. This is what you earned. You know what you’re not cutting a buddy out the door you’re gone. I put someone else in your seat to do that. That’s not the way we operate our office. But that is what that’s what propelled us to have whatever success that we do. Epic stuff.

2:38:57 Yeah our interview assignment will be out in a few weeks. It’s pretty goddamn epic as well. I can’t almost as long as this one. Mike I just want to finish by just acknowledging you. You know I’ve been following your career since you are one of the ultimate fighters right. Oh season seven. Seven. I think I saw you then. I’ve been following your career. Saw you on Rogan had the honor of talking to you a couple of years ago here. Epic episode. Like I said I walked you back to your hotel that night and I realized the man on camera is the man off camera. We had a live event last year.

2:39:27 I invited you to it. You said yes almost before I made the phone call. You’re just a solid amazing stand up guy. I love your brand. You and brandy are an incredible team together. So just wishing you all the success. There are no other Dolce’s. So you are the man. And I think people got a nice view on a little bit more of who you are tonight. So thanks for coming back. It’s an honor and a pleasure.

2:39:50 And you show is amazing what you contribute to all industries to my own self my own growth as a person as a professional has been amazing. So big thanks to you. Thanks to the audience of which I’m a part of your audience. I’m kind of a fan as much as the you know blessed to be able to sit in a seat and share and I think you know I’ve been more honest in this interview more openly honest and not pivoting or presenting or promoting like I kind of do in some other interviews because that’s out of respect to you and out of respect to the audience.

2:40:22 I know the information I’m able to give here is only best when it’s not diluted when it’s only clean and clear. So having this opportunity you won’t see this on any other interview. This is completely real. It’s a great Saturday man. I love it man. I appreciate it. All right. Awesome man. I’m going to wrap this up.

2:40:39 All right. Now I introduce you to my mentor the 50 billion dollar man Mr. Dan. Good morning. They all say the same thing. I wish I could have I fucking should have I have never met one mother fucking microsecond because you can’t all want everybody to love you.