This week’s conversation is with Chris Duffin, a world-record holding powerlifter who is commonly known as the “Mad Scientist of Strength”.

Chris is arguably one of the strongest pound-for-pound humans in the world – he is the only person to squat and deadlift over 1,000 pounds for reps, has a Guinness World Record for the sumo deadlift, and was ranked the number one powerlifter in the world for eight years straight.

However, Chris’ strength extends far beyond the physical domain – in his best-selling memoir The Eagle and The Dragon , Chris tells the unfiltered version of his unconventional and harrowing journey from a boy born in chaos to the self-made man he is today.

And that’s what this conversation is all about – how true strength is about so much more than lifting heavy weights. Chris shares how struggle propelled him forward, how he responds to adversity, what it means to be there for others, and how the human spirit can be either shackled by circumstance or freed from it.

“You can fly to whatever heights that you want to in the world. The only thing truly holding you back, at the end of the day, is yourself.”

In This Episode:

Why is he called “The Mad Scientist of Strength?”

I bring these kinds of crazy ideas to the world. At first blush, people are like, “Where is that coming from?” But then all of a sudden, start testing, using the concepts and people will start connecting the dots of how kind of these diverse thought processes and tools really change the experience for essentially the biomechanics, the improvement of methodology, this alignment of all things to allow us to be able to cultivate a level of physical resilience in a manner that is going to reduce our ability to get injured, live a better quality of life. It’s kind of my background. I’m a very kind of crazy dynamic person, a big mix of ADHD, life experiences, all sorts of stuff, but I put things to use. I’m like I mix this clinical practice with lifting heavy things and to a lot of people, it doesn’t make sense.

The Eagle and the Dragon – his two tattoos, and the name of his book

There are two massive tattoos on my body and they really represent the two phases or two books in one that it is. The first one is the eagle and I’ve got this giant eagle that’s tattooed. It’s across my stomach, my obliques. This whole midsection in there was a large eagle on my back as well. I had these done at 20 years old. There’s a chain around that ankle of each one of those. If you follow that chain, it wraps all the way down my body to my ankle. To me, it was a representation. It’ll make more sense when I dive into the life story piece of it, but it was a representation to me that you can climb to whatever heights, you can fly to whatever heights that you want in the world. The only thing truly holding you back at the end of the day is yourself. We see motivational quotes and things like that that may represent something similar, but it was truly a deep thing for me around being able to find your strengths, discover your value and how you contribute to the world… The ouroboros for me, a lot of times it represents infinity, the continual renewal of life. But for me, it was this thinking down that line, this thought process of purposeful reinvention. No longer the just discovery piece, but the deciding specifically who you are, what you want to be in this world based on what you value and becoming that person, this purposeful reinvention and that continual nature of that process.

Learning by doing

I operate myself in a very visual medium. My background’s engineering, but I’m not great at sitting down at a computer and designing. I’ve got to go create these things that are bigger than life that represent that. Maybe it’s that bigger than life thing, but to me, it’s expressing it, not just to myself, but the world around me, but not like shouting it at the top of the lungs or even really distinctly telling people what it is. I’m not running around telling people what my personal goals and objectives are. I think actually, some of that stuff, you should keep very close to your chest, but I still represent those things out there. I’m a really big believer in walking the walk. I’m called the mad scientist because it’s like, it’s a mixture of science, but actually, the learning by the doing.

Making real progress

My life is all about that. It is about seeing things that are so far out there, so big that people would think they’re astronomically impossible, but creating that alignment in your life where you know exactly what you want to be and where you’re going, and just being able to put one foot forward every day. We see so many people that just don’t move that direction. They either don’t understand their personal value system and how to express that in the world, or get caught up in the chaos of the stress, the life, all these sorts of things, and start running around with their hair on fire with checklists, knocking stuff, “I’m getting stuff done. I feel good. I’m accomplishing stuff.” 10 years passes and you’ve accomplished a million things, but they’re literally nothing that has moved you forward to being closer to that way that you want to be.

Moving out into the mountains

My mother particularly had some… Whatever they were in her life, I kind of talk about them a bit in the book, but some drivers for her to really want to try to form a life outside of what we call the norms of society. She was going to school to be a chemical engineer raising me. At this point, she’s like, “This just is not… I don’t deal well with authority. I don’t actually interact well with society.” And so, she moved, at the time, myself and then came my brother and then my three sisters into the mountains in Northern California. And so, this started out living in a kind of a commune style home up in the woods. We’re outside. It’s like there’s no roads in, no electricity. The water is finding this spring and getting it tapped. She dug a fire pit on the side of the mountain so she could make an oven. That was the start of it.

Living “outside of the norm”

I’m six years old and we’ve got beams strapped up into the trees. I’m being taught by my stepfather how to capture and handle live rattlesnakes, because there’s rattlesnake dens all around and I’m out playing. I have to learn this stuff for my own safety or maybe there’s some other things beyond that, I don’t know. That was, at the time, it seems normal. Later years reflecting back, it’s like, “Oh wow, that’s pretty crazy. There’s a murderer living a mile away, we find out later. My parents actually turned him in, but it was an interesting process. Then, I think, there was just, it got very dicey, because a lot of people want to romanticize this life of living outside of the norm and not realizing that maybe the other people that are out there are not there for altruistic reasons. Maybe they’re hiding from something. I bring that up because at the time, my parents were in the drug trade. That’s why we were where we were.

When Child Protective Services stepped in

My entire upbringing, this family that size was living on less than $5,000 a year. We had nothing. I remember there was a winter watching my parents just shrivel into nothing. We’re eating bags… we had a 50-pound bag of rice and a 50-pound bag of beans. Then, one day I go to, I’m like, “Mom, what are these? Why does this rice have a little black head on it?” Well, they got invested with weevils and we had to throw it out. That was the environment. I mean, half the time, by the time I graduated high school, half the time had been either homeless or living in homes with no running water, no electricity or either. And so, in California, we ended up getting taken by the police and then put into Child Protective Services for a year before our parents got us back.

Not letting trauma define you

This stuff is to me, it’s a story. It’s a great story to articulate the message, how I’m not downplaying any trauma or things that have happened to people, but at the same time, understanding these are things that you don’t have control of and they’re not what define you. You’re defined by your actions and responses to those things. Even if it’s been significantly horrible, there’s no reason why let it be that, why let that be the defining thing and that you can still use and leverage what you can from that to become more resilient, to withstand maybe the things that you don’t anticipate that are coming next.

The importance of embracing challenge

The interesting thing to note is just like going into the gym though, you can get soft if you don’t have those things in your life. If you don’t have those and you take it, you’re living life on the beach, enjoying Mai Tais with no stress or whatever, something 10, 20 years down the line, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a war hero or things that you were in the past, if you don’t have some level of being able to step into an uncomfortable zone, to be able to live in this area where you’ve got this little bit of anxiety, fear, but also excitement kind of in your life on things, and it doesn’t have to be things that are going to be traumatic, but if you don’t stay in the practice of that, you may have something that overwhelms you.

Building resilience

This is why I relate a lot of this stuff to the training aspect of it, because these messages get mixed like this hustle and grind mentality with life. I absolutely believe we need to find these opportunities. It may be a difficult conversation with your partner taking on a challenging project at work, raising your hand when it’s like, “Man, I hope Joe over there or Susan over there gets it.” Instead of going, “You know what? I don’t know if I can handle that. I think I’m going to take that on.” I can’t promise you, every one of those is going to turn out great, but the mentality of doing that is going to lead to, because where I’m at in life, I wouldn’t be able to do the things that I could do if I just had all the motivation and drive and looked at some motivational posters and got all amped up. Doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t be able to pull it off because I wouldn’t have the stamina, the resilience, the commitment to stick to it over time, knowing that even when I fail or that it’s just the first step in, I discovered that’s not it right now, I’m going to come around with a different approach, different way, give it more time, learn some more, that I have the confidence and know that I can get that done. That’s the long haul.

His three steps to work through challenge/stress/struggle

Because when you’re in it, it is hard. It’s overwhelming sometimes when everything in life and actually, I’m in one of those right now. There’s a lot of stuff going on from a business and family perspective. It’s a three step process for me. Those steps involve just acknowledging that, acknowledging the fact that I am here, I’m in one of those moments, I’m overwhelmed. Stress is piling on me. I’m going to be responding in a certain manner. That’s step one is just being honest with yourself that, okay, I’m here. The second step is to celebrate that fact, to take a step back and go, “This is my glory moment. This is the time, when I come over this next month, next year is going to be the thing I brag about. Maybe to a family member, it may just be to myself to know I freaking did it. I overcame that. I got there.” Then, the last thing is the adaptation. Now, use that, push through that, but use that now as your lever for that next thing that’s going to come at you. Maybe it’s self-imposed, maybe it’s something that came out of left field that you didn’t anticipate. That’s what it’s all preparation for.

His response to getting bullied in school

It was a numb response. I mean, that was my life. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. I didn’t really take it. I mean, it was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t like, oh my God, where I went home, it was just the general, I guess, mode of my life for the most part. Then, when I started getting involved in sports and building my self-esteem and realizing I could have control over that aspect. Then, it got to the point of like, well, hey, nobody’s making fun of me anymore because I’m the strongest guy in the school. I mean, clearly, let’s look at what I accomplished in my life post that. It’s pretty easy to see that I chose the things that go, hey, everything. Again, my personal things going on in my head that people look down upon me for whatever it was, ‘I’m going to outperform you. I’m going to outperform you physically. I’m going to outperform you mentally. I’m going to outperform you in business. You put anything out there and I’m going to be the best.’

Frontloading confidence

I don’t think I realized that till I was like in my 30s probably that I was like, oh, this is probably why I am such an overachiever in so many areas. I don’t remember ever consciously making that choice. I just wanted to be the best. Like I said, I was lacking this self-confidence on the social side, but I had so many physical experiences of overcoming my environment from digging a trench, to hanging tarps, to all this stuff to live that I knew that I was capable of overcoming stuff. That was early on. I had a tremendous amount of confidence in my ability to overcome things that I could truly get there.

How he was able to change his family’s legacy

I was in survivor mode, so it wasn’t just me and myself. I was dealing it in the environment that I was. I was the one that was responsible for helping take care and raise my sisters. I didn’t realize how much so until I left home and I quit contacting home because I’d call and I’d have to give money and so on. It was like a year and a half I didn’t and things just completely fell apart. My sisters ended up out on the streets. I honestly wasn’t doing that well. I wasn’t handling it. I was on a path towards, I was partying and drinking nonstop and I ended up starting to take custody of my sisters. I did so before, well, my senior year, I didn’t really have much classes anyway. I was just working on my senior project. I was working full time, but I bought a house, took custody of the oldest of my three, started working on getting custody of the second one. Was it for them? Maybe it was also for me, but it put me back in this situation of, I couldn’t fail. I couldn’t let the concerns or the problems or the depression or all those things affect me because I had to be there. I had to be present.

Translating his life story into a book

Very purposely, it doesn’t dive into the depths of horror stories that I could tell you because it’s not a book about, oh, me and what I’ve been through. I use my story as a framework to help people guide them on this process of introspection, this ability to look inwards, be able to peel back those layers to truly understand the meaning for yourself, and hopefully in that, provide some inspiration that you can move the needle. It’s about that process of moving that direction and the liberating sensation it is to discover if all I can control is my actions and responses and the work that I do, I can create success because whether I get the output of a six-figure salary or whatever these people define as success. It doesn’t matter. You can’t necessarily control all those things in life, but you can control your actions and responses.

Bucket list vs. setting goals

Bucket lists are shit in my opinion. Sorry, I don’t know if this is a clean podcast, but it comes down to that chasing your hair on fire stuff, feeling like you’re accomplishing things, because goals are an expression. They’re a way to express the values and the way of being that you want to live. My thousand-pound squat, my thousand-pound deadlift people today ask me, “Oh, what’s your next big grand goal? What are you lifting next?” I’m like, “Well, I’m working on changing the face of fitness all the way through its integration with clinical care.” “Well yeah, but what about your next grand…” I’m like, “That is even bigger. What do you mean?” These are just different ways. If I wanted to be an NFL star and had my knee taken out on some random Sunday, is my life over? You’ve worked in the sporting environment just as I have and how many people out a college or out of pro sports, when they hit their retirement, have trouble finding themselves and they fall into drugs or depression. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it’s pretty common because they’re identifying themselves to that thing instead of understanding what it was about that and how that was an expression and how you can shift that into other areas.

Hitting a reflection point in his career

I was a power lifter and I’d been ranked number one in the world for, I think, seven years straight at this point in time in either the squat, the deadlift or the total. I had a white picket fence around my house. I had a gym on the side where I was doing that training. I had two children. I had my hobbies in the shop, which is building engineer things, so building vehicles from the ground up, suspension design, steering design, all sorts of chassis, fabrication, just stuff, equipment for my jam because I’m very particular. Things have to be a certain way if I’m going to achieve success that I want to. That obviously makes sense for my businesses and where that started coming from, and I’m sitting there and I’m like, why do I feel so mind-numbingly unhappy? Also, I can’t sustain this. My kids, they’re young, but they’re getting older and they’re going to be involved in sports and other stuff and something has to give. Is it my hobbies? Is it my lifting? What is it? And so, I’m like, what is it about my life that’s making me unhappy. And so, in this reflection, I was like, well, maybe it’s a career change. I’m like, well, I think at this point, I know why I really like what I do. It’s not airplane parts or whatever it is that the company’s making. It’s the leadership aspect, the being able to inspire people to drive change.

Finding love

I walked away from these big things. I walked away from my marriage because it was a nice, comfortable… It always been a nice, comfortable partnership, friendship, but I wanted to have passion. Passion is being able to have passion about everything that I had in my life. I thought I was just going to be a single father, but lo and behold, when you put who you are out in the world and just become a magnet to draw those same values and stuff too, an amazing woman ended up finding me. At 40 years old, I discovered love for the first time in my life that, oh, that shit in books and movies is actually real? Oh, we can have and create like a shared vision for our future and life together?