Transcript of the No-Bullshit Vegan podcast, episode 30.

Karina: You're listening to the No-bullshit Vegan podcast, episode 30. With over two decades of experience in the fitness industry. Scott Shetler is here to talk about his vegan story, training his elite athlete clients and the books he's written to benefit animal welfare organizations. Oh, and also why Joe Rogan is completely out to lunch when it comes to his views on veganism.

 

Hey, welcome to the show. I'm your no-bullshit vegan fitness and nutrition and ass-kicking coach Karina Inkster. Our awesome guest for today is Scott Shetler. He has over 20 years of experience in the fitness industry and owns Extreme Performance Training Systems, which is an Atlanta based sport performance and fitness training centre. He's also the host of the Strength and Health podcast and co-author of the book Eat Plants, Lift Iron. He's competed in both powerlifting and kettlebell sport and he's a student of tai chi chuan, but what he considers his real accolades are the accomplishments of his athletes and clients. He works with many athletes who have won national titles and world championships among many other accomplishments. Scott's favorite meal when he's at home is a bowl of black beans, rice, avocado, spinach and salsa, and when he goes out he would choose vegan sushi, which happens to be one of my top three options as well. Hope you enjoy our interview.

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Hey Scott, welcome to the show.

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Scott: Well thank you. I appreciate you having me on.

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Karina: Well, I'm very excited and we actually don't know each other. We have not connected until like literally three minutes ago so I'm getting to know you along with our listeners, which is kind of cool. So they've got all the basics, but what I'm interested in at least to start is your veganism story. How and when you decided to go fully plant-based.

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Scott: So I've been in the I've been in the health and fitness industry for a little over 20 years now and I've always been into animals, you know, my wife and I have rescued and adopted all our pets and we have quite a few. When I first got into the fitness industry, veganism and even vegetarianism really wasn't talked about a whole lot. I mean, you had some people that did it. There was an old-time bodybuilder who was a vegetarian. There were a couple other people that you kind of came across that you'd hear toying with the idea, but the notion was always kind of quickly shut down. It was always, well, you need protein and it needs to be complete protein and animal sources are the best sources of that sort of protein and all that.

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So you just kind of you just kind of went with it. You didn't really question it because there wasn't a lot of people that were doing the vegan or vegetarian thing in the fitness industry. I remember for me, it all started in 2007 or 2008, my wife and I were on vacation, we were at the beach and we're having dinner. I remember I had this plate of just disgusting barbecue ribs and steak, crab legs and just all this, this meat and animal, and I was just chowing down and she had this almost judgmental look on her face and she said have you ever thought about where your food comes from? Of course, my knee jerk reaction was to be offended immediately, you know, who are you to insinuate that I'm a hypocrite for loving animals and eating them. But that planted the seed in my head and that was always in the back of my mind because that was the first time I really put a face on my food, so to speak. I did start feeling hypocritical and over the years, it just kind of dug at me and dug at me until I finally decided to start thinking about making that transition. Honestly, this is kind of a little bit of a disturbing story for me, but I remember at the time we weren't using our garage for anything more than storage. We weren't parking our cars in it so very rarely did we have the garage doors open, usually about once a week so I can take the trash out, and I remember going out in the garage and I remember this awful smell and I didn't know if it was like trash somewhere, but there's just this horrible smell. One day, I moved a shelf and I saw this dead bunny on the floor and it just crushed me because I knew what had happened was I probably had the door open one day and he hopped in. I didn't know about it. I shut the door and then he starved to death and even though it was not intentional, it really crushed me. I decided right then and I said that I'm done, even though that wasn't a hunting story or anything like that. I said, you know, I'm done with it. I'm done eating meat. I've got to find a way to do this. That was when I finally made the decision.

 

Right then and there, I told my wife, I'm cutting out meat. I'm going vegetarian, I'm going to figure this out. Even back then, you know, this was April of 2010 when I decided to stop eating meat and it took me about another year and a half so it was December of 2012 when I finally went fully plant based. By that time I had gotten rid of all animal products. I was basically just doing whey protein. So at that point I was like, this is ridiculous. I can go with plant-based protein. I don’t need whey protein and I'm going to go totally plant-based. I'm going to go vegan. You know, we're going to do the best that we can. That's when I finally decided to draw that hard line. So, it took a little over a year and a half, transitioning from a vegetarian pescatarian diet, eventually to a vegan diet. I've been vegan ever since December of 2012. The motivations were definitely ethically based, but as I transitioned into a fully plant-based diet, I started doing my homework. I started doing my research.  I came across Dr. Esselstyn, Colin Campbell, Michael Greger and Dr. Neal Barnard, all the people that are out there putting out information. It was like a rabbit hole.  I just kept going down more and more.  I've definitely tried my best to stay with a mostly healthy plant-based diet. I do fall off the wagon quite a bit, because there are some amazing vegan desserts out there, but I do try to make it as healthy as possible, but my motivations were definitely for animal welfare. So that's my vegan story, how I got into it. Like I said, ever since December, 2012 I've been fully plant based.

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Karina: That is awesome. Not so awesome about the poor little bunny. Of course.

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Scott: Nah, it's just horrible.

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Karina: Man. Isn't it interesting though, how a lot of us need to have an experience like that in order to make that connection? That's just how it works these days. Nobody really considers what's on their plate until, Oh shit, it's a dead bunny. Maybe I should do something about this situation.

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Scott: The industry does such a good job at wrapping that meet up. It’s in a nice little plastic package in the grocery store in the refrigerator or freezer so until you're exposed to what happens in slaughterhouses, what's going on with factory farming, where it actually comes from you really compartmentalize it Until people have that traumatic awakening, sometimes that's what it takes. Everybody I've met who's vegan usually has some sort of similar story.

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Karina: Totally. I don't have a story that involves a dead animal, but it's kind of the same kind of thing. Like when you make that connection, it's like, well, what other choice do I have at that point? Also, you're not the only one who takes a while to make that full transition. It's a big change. It's a legit lifestyle thing. So, taking a year and a half, making sure that it's going to be a long-term thing that sticks, I think that's important.

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Scott: I think it's important too. You've got to do your homework. You've got to make sure that your nutrient bases are covered. I don't think it's as hard as people make it out to be, but if you don't know what you're doing. I think it's easy to let some important things go. Once you realize all the things that you might need to consider supplementing and to focus on getting a wide variety of foods in your diet, to cover all your nutrient bases, it's really not that hard, but it does take some adjustment and some getting used to. I went about it at slow. I know a lot of people who did it overnight and that's awesome, but I think anybody that's moving in that direction is awesome. If they decide, Hey, I'm just going to cut out meat for now or I'm going to cut out dairy for now, that's great. It's a step in the right direction and I'm as supportive as I can be. I'm always happy to help people. I'm always happy to share information. I think it's awesome and over the last few years, we're seeing more and more interest in plant-based foods. So, it's definitely a cool time for the vegan community right now.

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Karina: This is something I'm curious about when you mentioned people making any sort of movement toward a more plant-based diet, even if it's just starting with cutting out meat at first. Any sort of change in that direction is a positive one. I'm curious how or if that translates into your work with clients? You're the owner of a sport performance and fitness training centre. Do you discuss veganism with your clients? Are some of them vegan? What's the situation with people and athletes that you're working with?

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Scott: That's a great question. For me, what really started was as I started making the change, I made a pretty dramatic physical transformation after I went plant-based, keep in mind, this is also coming on the tail end of me hardcore into the sport of power lifting for a while where it was like, eat as much as you want of whatever you want. I was eating red meat three, four, five times a day, because bigger is better. Right? So I was carrying around 220 to 230 pounds of body weight I was bigger and stronger than I'd ever been, but my joints were also sore and inflamed and my head was always a nice shade of red or purple and I definitely wasn't healthy. When I decided to make the transition, I had stopped competing in powerlifting. I knew I wasn't going to go to the highest levels pro. I wasn't going to do the things necessary to get there. So I decided to try to make my health a priority. In just a matter of about four months, I had ended up dropping about 50 pounds. I got down to my lowest weight around 178. I was much leaner and my skin was clear. I looked younger. I definitely felt better and my joints felt better. So my clients saw this pretty dramatic health transition in such a short period of time. That was enough of a catalyst to get a lot of them asking me what I was doing.

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What I noticed was a lot of people were definitely open to trying it, but of course a lot of them had a lot of the similar reservations that I had. Anytime somebody would talk about a plant-based diet, of course the protein thing comes up and Oh, what about B12? Like it's so hard to get B12, it's like $8 bottle for three months. So it was cool because I had just gone through my little transition and alll of this stuff was fresh in my mind, what I did to make my changes. So I was sharing that information and I’ve got to say I was never that preachy vegan, like, Oh, you eat meat, you suck, and all that kind of stuff.

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It was more like they came to me after seeing what I was accomplishing. They were interested. That really opened up a nice dialogue because they were curious, they were asking questions and it was nice to see that light bulb go off for them. So, I do have some clients that are totally plant-based and ever I'll get contacted by people who are vegan looking for a trainer who's plant-based. That's one of the other benefits to it is that people are actively searching because they don't want to work with somebody who's like, Oh, you've got to eat meat. You've got to get “complete proteins” in your diet and all that stuff. So there are people who are out there actively searching for vegan trainers, which is kind of cool.

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But with my clients and athletes alone, I've definitely had people who have at least gone to a mostly plant-based diet or they're more open to it based on seeing the transition I made. So I think that's where it all stemmed from. And now, because I've been doing it for so long, I'm more known as a vegan strength trainer or vegan strength coach. I've worked with a pretty high-profile client who's plant-based as well and he coined the nickname for me which kind of stuck. He calls me the seafood strength. So I'm starting to get more noticed as that vegan strength trainer guy, which is kind of cool, because then it's already out there and it makes it a topic that's much more approachable for people.

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Karina: Totally. I think that's the way to go, honestly. I actually had someone email me the other day who is an aspiring trainer as someone who hasn't done the certification yet, but he's thinking about it and is also vegan. He was like, well, so how do you talk about veganism with your clients? How do you convert them? How do you bring it up as an option? And I said, dude, my whole business exists because people are Googling vegan coach or vegan nutrition help They're actively looking for this. There's no conversion involved whatsoever unless I'm working with someone who's making the transition and they just need help. But they've already made the decision to go there. So the point is you're actually getting people to think about veganism who may not have thought about veganism before, just by doing your thing, kicking ass, doing your own fitness and health and transformation. But also on the other hand, there are people who are actively looking for what you have to offer. They are Googling, I need to work with this person who has these things as priorities, and that never used to happen. That is hugely different from even five years ago.

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Scott: Totally. I've got a friend, I don't know if you know who Mike Mahler is, but he's a good friend of mine and he's been vegan for a long time. When he was doing it, you couldn't go to the store and get Beyond burgers and all these different plant-based milks and things like that. So he was doing it back when it was not easy to do. He was always kind of that outlier, and it was always like, well, Mike does it. Everybody was always like, well, it works for him or he makes it work and we kind of laughed about it.

I was actually just visiting him. We were out in Vegas and I hooked up with them for a day. We watched the UFC fight. Mike was one of my early on inspirations. He's super strong, he's got a great physique. He obviously makes it work and he puts out a ton of great information. So if anybody's listening if they go to Mike's website, they'll find all kinds of articles and he's got his podcast. There's so much great information that he's put out. I think finding somebody who,you can look to for inspiration it's really beneficial and helpful when you're making that change.

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Karina: Yeah, totally. When you know someone's going to be on the same page about things like supplements or nutrition or just fueling whatever sport you're training for.

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Scott: Or being  a strength athlete because you always heard, well, it works for the endurance athletes because we always had the triathletes, we always had endurance people that were vegans The minute you mentioned strength and it was always like, well, no, bodybuilder does it, no power lifter does it. That's changing. We're seeing more people in the strength and power sports, American football, mixed martial arts, things like that. So that's definitely changing, but early on, like I said, Mike was like the outlier, he was that freak that made it work. Now we're seeing more and more people doing that. So being able to point to these people like Patrick Baboumian and Barney du Plessis, who's a really high-level bodybuilder. There's some big-time people in these strength and power sports that are doing it now, which is great.

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Karina: Barney's wife, she's also really into bodybuilding. I think she's pro. They're both just absolutely phenomenal in their sport and they're both vegan of course. So in your work with your athletes are there still some myths that you have to bust for people when it comes to being vegan?

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Scott:  A lot of my favorite athletes to work with are mixed martial artists and Brazilian jiu jitsu athletes. A lot of them, they're fans of the Joe Rogan podcast. I love Joe. I love his show. I think he's, he's awesome, but when he starts talking about vegan nutrition, it's really kind of painful because he's very misinformed. When he had Kip and Keegan on there from Cowspiracy, they were talking about it and he was saying stuff like, well, it's not if you're looking to optimize your nutrition, if you're out looking to optimize your performance, you know, he start started on terms like that.

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They brought up like, well, what about Mac Danzig? He was a UFC fighter. He had a long career in the UFC. Joe’s response to that was, well, he never won a title. Well, he did win the ultimate fighter show, but he never held the UFC belt, but you know who else didn't? All the meat eaters so you can't blame the diet. You're talking about such a small percentage of athletes and mixed martial arts compete in the UFC and then an even smaller percentage are vegan. The numbers aren't there. What he proved is that you can compete at a really high level.

There's plenty of people who will never hold a UFC belt who aren't vegan I know people in the powerlifting community who eat just crap diets, like donuts and junk food, and they're champions. It's got nothing to do with the diet. What I'd say is he proves that you can train and compete at a high level. So a lot of these people that I work with, they kind of go to Joe Rogan for their nutrition advice, their training advice and their life advice, which I don't know if I'd go through a standup comedian for that, but he's awesome. I love his show, but I'm going to go to Dr. Michael Greger, Dr. Neal Barnard, Dr. Davis. Those are the people I'm going to go to when I want nutrition information.

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Karina: I hear you on that. I don't know if you know Daniel Austin? He's known as the Vegan Meat Head. He was on this show a while back and he was saying, we need more vegans in strength sports, which is something you were saying. It started with the endurance athletes, but it's still kind of at the point where we have something to prove almost, like if we're not winning those national titles, then it's clearly the diet that's preventing us from doing that. It's not, but that's the perception. It's almost like there's this extra, we have to be extra awesome at everything in order to prove that it works and that's not really the case.

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Scott: Yeah Daniel's a great guy. I actually met him at a powerlifting meet my first or second year on team Plant Built. I was the one that really pushed to get Daniel on the team. Daniel was on the team the last time they competed and I didn't go. I had a conflict I was able to attend. His band toured through Atlanta a while back and when he was here, he trained at my gym and we went out and grabbed some food. He's a cool dude and he's doing really well in powerlifting. It's really cool because he's really on a mission to show, Hey, I'm going to be really strong and I'm going to do really well in a powerlifting competition on a vegan diet.

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It's definitely showing that you don't need animal-based proteins to be strong, to build muscle to do well in a sport like powerlifting. Patrick, Baboumian did it and we've got bodybuilders that are doing it. There's a few people on Plant Built who are pro one at the IFBB level. Torre Washington's got 5 natural pro cards. My friend Erin Fergus she's got a pro card. She's actually just getting ready to compete soon and I think she's in the physique division. She's awesome. You just look at her Instagram feed and the progress that she's made over the years. She is jacked and total proof that you can build dense quality muscle and drug-free on a plant-based diet.

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Karina: Absolutely. She's done in all, if not most of her building on a vegan diet.

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Scott: Yeah. She went vegan when she started training for physique. So it was 100% plant based.

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Karina: Which is awesome. That's very cool. I actually didn't know you were on the Plant Built team, but now it's all coming together. It’s all making sense.

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Scott: I was on when they added power lifting in 2014. There was only six of us on the power lifting squad. In 2015 it got a little bit bigger. In 2013 it was bodybuilding and 2014 they added CrossFit and powerlifting. In 2015 they added kettlebell sport. I was actually going to head up that team and then I screwed up my shoulder so I just stuck with the deadlift. They added weight lifting the last time they did it. I think they're maybe trying to look at strongman and I've been kind of out of the loop because I've just been busy with all my other stuff. But it was a fun experience.

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There are a bunch of cool people, some lifelong friends that I made from that group. It's cool what they're doing, they're showing that you can do well in the strength and power sports. The thing that I like is they chose the naturally fit games, which also promotes drug free competition, which is pretty cool. Joe Rogan's been pretty vocal like, Oh, these vegan bodybuilders are on steroids or whatever. It's like, well, okay, I don't know if they are or not. I know the ones that I was on Plant Built are drug free, but you know, meat eaters use steroids too. Look at Mr. Olympia. The top 10 guys, they're all, they're all omnivores. They're all on drugs. It's not just vegans that need the steroids or you get people who say, Oh, well you must drink a lot of protein powder. Go to GNC, you go to Vitamin Shoppe. The majority of the protein powders on that wall are Casein, Whey, you know, it's not all plant-based protein powders up there. There's plenty of people consuming animal-based protein. That's the gym thing. It's not a vegan thing. It's so ridiculous when people try to try to disqualify the diet. It drives me crazy.

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Karina: Oh man, me too. You know, veganism is still at the point where some people who just don't know better look for every opportunity possible to disqualify it. But you know, that's why you and I both do what we do. I know for you that includes writing a book series called Plant-based Performance. So I would love to hear more about that.

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Scott: Absolutely. Like I mentioned earlier on, when I was first getting into looking into vegan and vegetarian nutrition, I was really involved in animal welfare. Both my wife and I had always adopted and rescued all of our animals and our pets and we were always doing what we could for the local animal welfare organizations. We would volunteer our time and help out where we could. We'd always donate money and things, but as we've gotten, a little bit more into our professional lives are both very busy and we don't have the free time that we had to go volunteer for these organizations. So we always try to donate monthly help these organizations out. I thought it's awesome to write that check every month, but I'd like to try to find a way to have a bigger impact.

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I had self-published some books in the health and fitness and strength training industry and I thought it'd be a cool project if I could put a book together. But since nobody knows who I am and they're not going to buy a book from this weirdo I thought, how cool would it be to reach out to other people in the vegan community? People who are on the health side, like dietitians, people who are on the fitness side, like trainers and athletes, those on the activist side who are just doing things to support animal welfare from the activist level. So I started going through my Facebook. I started going through social media websites and things like that, looking for people that might fit the bill and I just started sending out emails and Rich Roll, if you're listening to this, you never replied to my email, so let's fix that for the next one. I did get some really cool people that contacted me on the first go around. People like Julieanna Hever, Matt Frazier. Do you know who Bone Breaker, Barbell Big Bald Mike? He's had so many nicknames in the vegan community, but I contacted him and he was like, hell yeah, brother, I'm in. So he sent me an article and then he said, are you still looking for people? I said, absolutely. He said, you know, there’s a hip-hop artist up there in Atlanta who I met a while back. He may be interested, would you like an introduction? So he introduced me to Stic from the hip hop duo Dead Prez and Stic reached out to me and he said, man, I'd love to be part of the book. So he sent me an article, my friend Amy Duma, she was part of it. Mike Mahler was part of it. I just had all these cool people that were sending me these great articles and I used their articles as content for the first book. It was really cool because instead of just me writing the book, putting my thoughts into it, we had all these different people that were contributing everything from nutrition, lifestyle, health and fitness, sport performance.

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Mac Danzig was part of it. So we had all these cool people from different backgrounds that shared their stories. I thought, this is awesome because now if there's somebody out there who's on the fence about going plant-based, there are so many different sources of inspiration in this book that they can draw from and so much great info in it. What I decided to do was I wanted to donate 100% of the sales. I chose Mercy for Animals for the book to benefit. So I worked with the online publisher that I used and I talked to people at Mercy for Animals and I got all their information and I set them up as a revenue share where all the money after the printing cost just gets sent to them every quarter in a check.

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So I don't have to do anything with the book. People just go to the link. They're all print to order or they can download the ebook and then every quarter, money just gets sent to Mercy for Animals. I did a second book after the first one about a year or so after I had already been on team Plan Built. So I talked to some of the athletes on Plant Built at night and I got to know more people in the industry. The second book, which was Know your own Strength and the cover art was done by David Clower, who's a vegan down in Austin, Texas, who I met. Really cool guy. He donated an article and he did the cover artwork. So this one's a little bit beefier.

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I actually got somebody to edit this one and all the people that participate in a second book, I also asked them for their favorite recipe and a sample of their training plans. We put this bonus section in where people can look at what some of these people are eating and how they train. So there's even more info in that second one as well as their personal stories. So for that book, I decided to choose two organizations. 50% of the sales go to the Animal Legal Defense Fund and 50% go to a local rescue here in Atlanta, who my wife was on the Board of Directors for and we volunteered for in the past called Forgotten Animals Rescue. So 50% of those proceeds go to each of those. So 100% of all sales from these books goes to benefit animal welfare and it's something that just keeps on going. So as long as people are buying the books every quarter the publisher sends checks to those organizations. So this really cool, I'd like to probably do a third book sometime down the line when I’ve got some time to focus on it. That was why I put together the plant-based performance website. I've interviewed some of the people for the blog section on that website. I don't update it as much as I'd like to or probably should, but it's been a great reference for people who are wanting to go plant-based because there's so much variety in the people involved with that project. It was really cool. It was a lot of fun to do. I met a lot of cool people as result and everybody was incredibly kind with their time, giving the articles, dealing with me on the follow ups and then promoting the books once they were finished.

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Karina: Oh man, that is awesome. What a great collaborative effort. Hey, so where can we get our hands on these books?

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Scott: Yeah, so I mean if people go to my website and go to the store page, there are links to the hard copy books and as well as the ebook download version.

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Karina: Nice. So where can our listeners go to find more info on you and to connect with you?

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Scott: I've got two main websites that I operate. One is for my personal training business here in Atlanta. I've got a brick and mortar training center in the North Atlanta area. That website is https://www.eptsgym.com/. My business is Extreme Performance Training Systems. I've got a personal website, which is just http://www.scottshetler.com/ Both have links to my blogs and links to to my podcast that I just started doing. There's a brief documentary that I was in with a that hip hop artists Stic from Dead Prez who I trained. That was really cool project.

He was in this documentary called the Veg Effect and they followed around five people who veg at different levels. he had called me up and asked me if I wanted to be part of his little segment. So that was really cool. They got some shots of us training together, did a little interview with us, and allowed us to talk a little bit about the project that he and I did. So just a real quick a recap from the Plant-based Performance book that he helped out on. He followed that up after he sent me his article and he said, Hey man, I've got a goal I’m trying to accomplish. Would you like to meet and talk about working together? So he came up to the training center and long story short, he's always been kind of a skinny guy, he's a big distance runner but he's always been wanting to put on muscle and doing it on a whole food plant-based diet.

So we decided to document his progress.

 

We started working together. I laid out a strength training program. His wife took care of all his nutrition and his goal was to put on 20 pounds of muscle on a whole food plant-based diet. He didn't want to use protein powders, he didn't want to use supplements, he just wanted to use whole foods sources. He said, I want to put on 20 pounds. I want to do it in four months. Do you think it's possible? I said, absolutely. He ended up putting on 20 pounds in two and a half months. Then we turned around and we got him all leaned up after that and he maintained 14 pounds after we leaned him up. So he ended up being at a lower body fat percentage, went from 9.5% down to 7.5% percent body fat carrying 14 more pounds of mass which is awesome.

We had so much fun working together. He's such a cool dude and a good friend of mine. We decided to take our little our little experiment and turn it into a book because as we got deeper into it, it ended up being more than just the physical changes. He's a really artistic guy and he started looking at all the life lessons that were wrapped up in the piles of iron that he was lifting. We got into some really cool dialogue and we had a good time training together and we turned it into a book. It's called Eat Plants Lift Iron. He manages that on his site, which is https://rbgfitclub.com/. I've also got links on my website to that, but it's a really cool little book where the first third of the book is this personal narrative.

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For the second third of the book, his wife wrote the nutrition section, put in all the recipes that we used for gaining weight and leaning up and talks a lot about the important points of plant-based nutrition and protein and all that kind of stuff. The last third is the science behind the training that we did together as well as all his results that he made in his lifts, the indicator lists that we tracked in his body composition and all that. It's been selling really well. We got all kinds of great feedback from it. It was a really cool project. That's a great book for the people out there who are wondering if you can put on muscle put on size following a plant-based diet. He did it without the protein powders, he did it without the steroids and he kept his distance running and all these other things going on that usually make it hard to gain muscle mass. So if he can do it, the stereotypical hard gainer, anybody can build muscle on a plant-based diet. So that was a real fun project to do and like I said, there are links to it on my websites and in the books available at his website as well.

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Karina: That's fantastic. We're going to have links in our show notes too, so we'll have all of your social media and website links. It actually sounds like a pretty cool case study. Like here's one dudes in depth experience, so I think that's really cool.

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Scott: Yeah, we had his before and after results, all of his measurements. We tracked his squat bench, his deadlift, all those increases in his rep PR’s, his one rep max PR’s, his body mass, his body fat, everything. We tracked all of that. It's laid out there in the book so people can see the progress they made. It was really cool and a really fun experiment.

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Karina: Well, and it speaks to your coaching ability to kick ass like that. That's awesome.

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Scott: Yeah, definitely, and in him as a student. You can only point them in the right direction, but they have to do the work and he worked his butt off. The guy knows about hard work and his wife killed it in the kitchen and it was just a lot of fun working with those two. They're great people. I love that he uses this platform in the hip hop industry to really promote a plant-based lifestyle and just the positive message that he spread through his music is really cool.

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Karina: Totally. Well you're doing the same thing in the health and fitness world and the strength training world and athletic world. So I think that's a really good combination actually.

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Scott: It is. It's a lot of fun. Yeah.

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Karina: Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. It was great learning more about you and what you've shared with our listeners, like tips and if this one guy can do it, then you probably can too, even if you think you're a hard gainer. That's an important point.

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Scott: Well, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed talking with you and I appreciate the opportunity to come on the show. I hope your listeners have gotten something out of this and if anybody's got any questions about anything that we talked about, I try to get back to everybody who contacts me so they can reach out to me through my social media or my website. I'm always more than happy to share information. It's always a lot of fun helping people out and that's what I'm here for.

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Karina: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. It's been awesome.

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Scott: Oh, you're welcome.

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Karina: Scott, you are seriously the best. Thank you for taking the time to join me on the show. Head to our show notes at Nobullshitvegan.com/030 for links to connect with Scott and to get your hands on his awesome books. Thanks as always for listening and I'll catch you in the next episode.

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Thanks for listening to the no bullshit vegan podcast at Nobullshitvegan.com.