Hi and welcome to the second ever episode of No Meat Athlete Radio. I'm Matt Frazier here with Ben Ben Benuelas, and today we have our first guest and a pretty special one at that. In case you don't know him, Robert Cheek is a vegan bodybuilder, a former NCAA distance runner, an author, a speaker, and most recently he's been on the team at Forks

Over Knives, as I'm sure most of you have seen. So Robert, thanks so much for being here,

and how are you doing? I am excellent. I'm phenomenal. Thank you for having me.

Great, yeah, I'm really excited to have you. I know we've been trying to hook up something like this for a long time, ever since we talked on the website a couple, almost probably a year ago now. But since then, we have gotten to hang out quite a bit, actually, especially in the past few months. So I'm really excited that we finally got to make this happen, and I know that Ben is also.

Yeah, thanks so much.

I'm excited, too, and thanks for having me on the show, and I think we're going to have a fun time today.

Yeah, I do, too.

So what we wanted to talk about, and this was Ben and I both agreed on this one that what what is really cool about you and what

we always take away from any interactions with you is a sense of motivation and inspiration

like no other so that's kind of what we were wanted to steer the conversation towards today

so I guess to get us started can you just tell us a little bit about your story?

And, I mean, I know we've talked about this before, but so that everyone knows, like, how you got

into being a vegan bodybuilder, the reasons you do it, and just kind of what keeps you going.

Yeah, absolutely.

I grew up on a farm in Corvados, Oregon, and I was involved in raising animals like a lot

of people were in that kind of farming community, agriculture community that I was in.

And so I had a really deep connection with animals at an early age, and the same kind of connection

that you might have with a cat or a dog

I as a farm kid had you know with rabbits and chickens and cows that's just the

way it was and I was always the smallest kid in class you know with one of these

skinny scrawny kids I even remember I mean I distinctively remember that in

fourth grade being the smallest

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