Mark and Chris Bell: steroids, powerlifting, addiction, diet, training, helping others, documentaries, and living your best life

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top-performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. This week, I had two guests. This was a first. I've never interviewed two people simultaneously, which is not to say it's rocket science. I think a monkey can figure it out, and I'm at least as good as a monkey, so I was able to figure it out. But it did stress me out a little bit, because I was trying to figure out how do you keep two people engaged. But it seems like we did a pretty good job, and I think you'll enjoy this episode.
My guests were two guys who I just referred to as the Brothers Bell, but they're obviously known more commonly by their actual names, Mark Bell and Chris Bell. Some of you may recognize these guys, especially if you're interested in powerlifting, or if you've ever paid attention to some really interesting documentaries. In particular, Bigger, Stronger, Faster, which was sort of the breakout performance for Chris Bell. That is, I believe, a documentary that, if you look at all of its downloads on Netflix, would certainly put it in kind of the top 10 docs of the last decade. I could be wrong on that, but I feel like I remember reading that somewhere. Prescription Thugs was also a follow-up documentary. And there are a number of others, including one that is in the works at the time of this recording that we'll link to as well. His brother, Mark Bell, his younger brother, is an absolute legend in the world of powerlifting. And he owns a number of records, all of which are staggering, and we'll get into those during the episode. This was also a bit of a first for me in that it was the first time I interviewed people I didn't know personally. So obviously I'd communicated with Mark and Chris through email a bunch leading up to this, but I didn't have a rapport with them in the way that I've had with every person I've interviewed to date, which actually is a little harder. You have to pay a bit more attention when you're doing your homework. So I hope that doesn't come across as being strained. I don't think it did. I think we were definitely getting along well and having fun. The other thing that may or may not come across here is we were exhausted. We did this interview up at a place that Mark Bell was renting for the month up in Malibu. And so I went up there and they interviewed me for their documentary slash podcast. And it took about three hours and 15 minutes. We took about 45 minutes off to play patty cakes and grab ass and eat.
And then I proceeded to interview them for about two hours. So I think by the end of that two hours, we were all collectively exhausted. So that may or may not come across. Anyway, all those caveats aside, this was a super interesting podcast because what I really wanted to talk about was not just their stories and their lives, which I think are very interesting and touch on so many of these themes that I've become quite interested in. If you've seen either Bigger, Stronger, Faster, or Prescription Thugs, you'll know that their older brother, Mike, died. And they talk about that quite openly in this podcast. And it's actually quite touching and it's actually quite emotional. Chris gets kind of emotional at one point during this, and it's sort of palpable in the room as we're talking about it. They talk a lot about their parents, their upbringing. I obviously am completely fascinated as to what kind of upbringing could produce such remarkable human specimens. And they are remarkable human specimens. Let's make no mistake about that.
I also get into some of the details about their training and very fascinating to understand how relatively low volume their training was and yet how it produced such remarkable achievements.
So I guess I would say the following. If you've never heard of these guys and you're not that interested in power lifting or strength training, I still think you will find this interesting, though there may be some parts you want to fast forward through once we get into the technical details of some of their lifts.