Episode 70

"I only had twenty percent to give." No. You were at one hundred. I'm at one hundred. We are always at one hundred percent capacity. So if you want more in your life, you cannot pile more on top. You have to let something go first.

The real reason you are stuck has nothing to do with how hard you work. It is the belief running underneath. The quiet story that you are not enough. That you are not worthy. That your worth lives in your bank account and in how other people see you. That story runs most men their entire lives.

Here is why letting go is so painful. Your identity is propped up by the very things keeping you stuck. The belief. The story. The person. Let it go, and the question becomes terrifying. Who am I without it?

In this solo episode Adam gets personal and raw, in the middle of letting something go in his own life right now, because he will not call a man into a fire he is not standing in himself. He goes at the wound that says you are not worthy until you check every box, and calls it what it is. A lie. You are worthy. No fine print. He talks about the power of plant medicine in the right setting as an accelerant for letting go. He talks about why most men live as performers, and what it costs to keep the mask on.

What if the worst thing that ever happened to you was the thing that set you free? You would not have chosen it. You could not have seen it coming. Then you come out the other side and realize it was a gift. Adam shares the phone call from a man he had not talked to in ten years who asked the question that flipped everything. How cool is it that you get to start over?

This one is about letting go. The story. The fear. The secret. The version of you that has to die so the next one can show up. So here is the invitation. Look at where you feel stuck, and ask yourself what you are really holding onto. Find one thing. Just one. Let it go.

The Burn Up Podcast is built for men who have lived something real or are living it right now. Every conversation pulls back the curtain on what it actually costs to build something, lose it, and come back stronger. No highlight reel. No performance. Just the truth.

Connect With Adam:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/adamnugent

Website: https://burnup.com

Substack: https://substack.com/@adamenugent

Episode 69

The formula for losing weight is not complicated. A caloric deficit, adequate protein, and consistent resistance training are the core ingredients, and anyone can find them with a quick Google or ChatGPT search. The fitness industry has no shortage of programs, coaches, and systems that will tell you exactly what to eat and exactly how to move.

Yet the obesity rate in America keeps climbing. Most people who lose the weight gain it back.

The formula is not the problem. What is underneath the formula is.

In this episode Adam gets into what the fitness industry is almost entirely missing. The emotional wound that sits underneath the weight. The reason most men turn to food is not hunger. It is pain. It is avoidance. It is a lifetime of using food to regulate emotions that never got addressed. Until you deal with that, every program, every plan, and every 75 Hard is a band-aid over something that needs real work.

He also gets personal. His rock bottom with food, the night the shame of what he had just done to himself hurt more than whatever he was trying to avoid, became the beginning of everything. He shares what he discovered working with men in his fitness program who could not even identify a healthy goal weight because they did not believe it was possible for them. Men who had so much emotional weight tied to their physical body that they could not even allow themselves to imagine what healthy looked like. He talks about the moment he broke down in a dressing room after losing a hundred pounds and finally fitting into regular clothes. He also gets into what preparing for his first physique competition has brought up in him that he thought he had already healed from.

This is not a fitness episode. It is an identity episode that happens to be about weight. If you have ever lost the weight and gained it back, you already know exactly what this episode is about.

The Burn Up Podcast is built for men who have lived something real or are living it right now. Every conversation pulls back the curtain on what it actually costs to build something, lose it, and come back stronger. No highlight reel. No performance. Just the truth.

Connect With Adam:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/adamnugent

Website: https://burnup.com

Substack: https://substack.com/@adamenugent

Episode 68

The Pentagon last week did not recognize the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) as a Christian religion. And the reaction from members, politicians, and leaders across Utah and beyond was immediate and intense.

We are Christian. We are Christian. We are Christian.

My first question was not about the Pentagon. It was about the reaction. Why does a government institution's opinion on your faith matter so much? If you truly believe what you believe, why does anyone else's opinion of it shake you this deeply? That question is the entire point of this episode.

Here is where the irony lives. Between 2010 and 2018 the church spent a reported $300 million on the "I'm a Mormon" campaign. Billboards. Buses. Documentaries. Members building personal profiles. The entire institution leaning into that identity with everything it had.

Then in 2018 prophet Russell Nelson stood at General Conference and declared that using the word Mormon is a major victory for Satan. He called it a divine revelation. A command from the Lord. The choir was renamed. The campaign was dismantled overnight. Hundreds of millions of dollars and years of brand building were wiped out because the entire strategy had shifted. The goal was to be seen and accepted across mainstream Christianity.

In 2026 the government said they are not Christian.

After all of that. After all the money and the rebrand and the revelation and the campaign. The people they were trying to impress still said no.

And this is not really a story about the Mormon church. This is a story about what happens when any person or institution changes who they are to gain approval from people who were never going to give it.

I was raised Mormon. Served a mission in Argentina. Lived this world for almost 40 years. My parents are still devout members. I am not here to attack the church. I am here to ask the questions most people in this conversation are avoiding, including the most important one. Why does their approval matter so much to you?

Your reaction says everything.

The Burn Up Podcast is built for men who have lived something real or are living it right now. Every conversation pulls back the curtain on what it actually costs to build something, lose it, and come back stronger. No highlight reel. No performance. Just the truth.

Connect With Adam:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/adamnugent

Website: https://burnup.com

Substack: https://substack.com/@adamenugent

Episode 67

Most men coming out of divorce do the same thing. They start dating immediately. They chase validation. They fill the void with women, with distraction, with anything that makes them feel seen for five minutes. And they wonder why they still feel empty six months later.

Aaron James Yager did something different. He went on a feminine fast.

No dating. No flirting. No chasing. Just himself. And what he found in that silence was not emptiness. It was the man he had lost somewhere along the way.

In this episode Aaron and Adam get into what it actually takes for a man to go from chaos to king. Not the surface level stuff. The real work. The feminine fast and why it is the most powerful thing a man can do after a relationship ends. The integrity cleanup list and why most men have no idea how far out of alignment they actually are. The difference between guilt and shame and why shame is the lowest frequency a man can carry. Why breathwork is the most underrated tool available to men right now. And why the void most men are trying to fill with external validation can only be filled from the inside.

Aaron also challenges every man listening to ask himself three questions. Am I in integrity with myself? Am I in integrity with the people around me? Am I in integrity with the world? If there is a no anywhere in that list that is where the work starts.

This is a conversation for the man who is done performing and ready to actually build something real.

ABOUT AARON JAMES YAGER Aaron James Yager is an entrepreneur and transformational leader known for helping people change at the level where real breakthroughs happen: the unconscious mind, the nervous system, and identity itself. He is the founder of Noble Kings Collective, a men's leadership movement, and a partner in purpose-driven ventures including Audhumla.com, a luxury wholistic skincare brand. Through a unique blend of performance coaching, breathwork, hypnotherapy, and deep emotional work, Aaron helps leaders, founders, and high performers break self-sabotage, heal old patterns, and step into more aligned power. His work is practical, deeply human, and designed to create transformation people do not just understand intellectually, but feel in their body and live in their life.

The Burn Up Podcast is built for men who have lived something real or are living it right now. Every conversation pulls back the curtain on what it actually costs to build something, lose it, and come back stronger. No highlight reel. No performance. Just the truth.

Connect With Adam:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/adamnugent

Website: https://burnup.com

Substack: https://substack.com/@adamenugent

Connect With Aaron James Yager:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/aaronjamesyager

9D Breathwork: https://9dbreathwork.com/facilitators/aaron-james-yager/

Episode 66

In 1937 Napoleon Hill spent 25 years studying the most successful men alive and wrote an entire chapter about this. He called it transmuting sexual energy. His conclusion was simple. The men who built the most, created the most, and led the most were the ones who knew how to channel this energy rather than leak it.

Most men are leaking it everywhere. And they do not even know where it is going.

In this episode Adam gets into what leaky sexual energy actually is. Not just the obvious stuff. Not just pornography and affairs. The woman at work who lights him up. The DM. The social media scroll loading up with OnlyFans models. The fantasy he feeds instead of his marriage. The business collaboration that both people know is something else. Every one of those is a leak. And every leak is a symptom of a void that is not being addressed.

Adam also gets personal in a way most men will not. He has participated in almost all of this himself. The leaks. The hiding. The shame cycle. The seasons of being completely out of alignment. He speaks from the inside of this, not from the outside looking in. And he talks about what it actually took to get to the other side of it and what changed when he did.

The stats are not comfortable. 78% of men consume pornography. 84% say nobody is helping them. 50% say nobody even knows. 75% of Christian men. 67% of pastors. These are not fringe numbers. That is the man sitting across from you at the conference table.

But the real problem is never the behavior. It is the secret. The hiding. The shame cycle that keeps men stuck and silent and leaking.

This episode ends with a challenge and a promise. The truth is going to hurt. It is worth it.

The Burn Up Podcast is built for men who have lived something real or are living it right now. Every conversation pulls back the curtain on what it actually costs to build something, lose it, and come back stronger. No highlight reel. No performance. Just the truth.

Connect With Adam:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/adamnugent

Website: https://burnup.com

Substack: https://substack.com/@adamenugent

Episode 65

Something interesting is happening right now. Jesus is everywhere. More than ever. Social media feeds full of scriptures. Cross tattoos. Public declarations of faith. Men who built entire brands around hustle and performance have suddenly pivoted to God and Jesus as their new message.

And yet the men closest to these same people will tell you a completely different story.

That gap is what this episode is about.

Most men are not lying on purpose when they say God is first. They genuinely believe it. They show up on Sunday. They check every box the institution asks them to check. But then they go home and disconnect from their wife. They hide things they will not say out loud. They perform one way for one group and show up completely differently everywhere else.

That is not putting God first. That is putting the performance first.

In this episode Adam gets into what it actually means to put God first. Not the Sunday version. The 3 am version. The version that shows up the same way at church, at the office, and when nobody is watching. He talks about why Jesus had no harsh words for sinners and reserved his sharpest language for the performers. Why integrity is not a religious concept but a personal one. And why the man who is hiding something small is more out of alignment than he realizes.

The question is not whether you believe in God. The question is whether your life proves it.

The Burn Up Podcast is built for men who have lived something real or are living it right now. Every conversation pulls back the curtain on what it actually costs to build something, lose it, and come back stronger. No highlight reel. No performance. Just the truth.

Connect With Adam:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/adamnugent

Website: https://burnup.com

Substack: https://substack.com/@adamenugent

Episode 64

He has almost died 11 times. Not metaphorically. Eleven times something should have ended him. And he is still here, 68 years old, in the best shape of his life, building something that helps other people survive their own version of impossible.3

Adam first met Bob over 10 years ago. In this episode, Bob walks through two of his eleven close calls, including a head-on collision in Wind River Canyon where he was ejected from the car, flew horizontally through the air, and stood up on the road while a highway patrolman said he had never seen anything like it in 26 years.

Bob now hosts, A Close Call with Death, a podcast where he interviews people who survived the unsurvivable. In this conversation, he shares what he has found runs through every single one of those people. No regrets. A gratitude for life that was not there before. And a deep desire to serve others that the experience created. Adam and Bob also go deep on what it takes to stay in the fight long enough for the miracle to arrive. Why surrender is sometimes the only move. How to stop living in resistance to what already happened. What earning a physical transformation actually takes. And why the people who have lost limbs consistently say they would not trade the experience for anything.

Bob is 68, has logged 1,600 Orange Theory workouts, and wakes up every day grateful he is alive. That gratitude is not accidental. This episode is about how you build it, and what it costs.

The best version of your life is waiting on the other side of what you are still avoiding.

• Follow Adam Nugent on Instagram for more motivational content and insights

• Follow Bob Howard's Podcast, A Close Call with Death, here.

• Learn about Adam Nugent's work and podcast at Burn Up Podcast.

For listeners seeking inspiration and a path to authenticity, dive into this episode of the Burn Up Podcast. Stay tuned for more enlightening conversations that explore personal growth, resilience, and finding your true self amid life's fires.

Episode 63

There is a story running in the background of everything you do. You did not write it. But you have been living it your entire life.

Adam was in his late thirties before anyone ever asked him if he felt worthy of love. He had no answer. That silence is where this episode begins.

In this episode, Adam goes alone into the one belief that sits underneath almost every ceiling a man hits, every marriage that goes cold, every addiction that takes hold. He talks about where the story of not enough comes from, how it gets passed down without anyone realizing it, and what it actually takes to rewrite it. He also talks about his 18-year-old son Kingston, who this week said out loud that he lacks self-worth and what that moment meant.

The formula is simple. The work is not. But Adam has done it, and he has watched men do it at 18 and at 50, and he will tell you exactly what it costs and what it returns.

The freedom you are searching for is in what you are avoiding.

The Burn Up Podcast is built for men who have lived something real or are living it right now. Every conversation pulls back the curtain on what it actually costs to build something, lose it, and come back stronger. No highlight reel. No performance. Just the truth.

CONNECT WITH ADAM:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/adamnugent Website: https://burnup.com Substack: https://substack.com/@adamenugent