 Right. And welcome to the show, man. Hey, thanks, man. Awesome. So you got our attention a while ago because there was a clip from one of our podcasts where we were talking about, I think it was me was talking about the deadlift and how great of a work exercise it was developed the back and then some numb nuts. He's actually a pretty popular kid on Tiktok. Yeah, he's popular for the wrong reasons. We'll put it that way. Yeah. And so and he was like trying to talk about and you know, I've heard this argument before about mechanics of the lats, started back exercise, blah, blah, blah. And he's trying to take down the video. And and then you did like a takedown of what he said. Deadlift is a exceptional exercise and it does build a lot of muscle. OK, you ask anybody who's not really. Yes, with the deadlift has been training people for a long time. Training age is not indicative of knowledge. The absolute is that we'll say a barbell row is better for this or a pull up is better for that. But overall, and this is one of the things that we have to consider when we look at exercises, what's their carryover to other exercises? And what does that mean? Cross over neural and strength adaptation does not matter for a person. It absolutely does allow you to handle the load that a deadlift load is relevant. We cannot use load to quantify mechanical tension. It is absolutely relevant to the amount of tension that that creates in the isometric stimulus is inferior to isonic interactions where you're moving through a large range of motion. Not the point to get it with a pull up. What place is that kind of demand on your body? Nothing, literally anything else. Nothing, nothing. We're supposed to hear a chain as well as a deadlift does. Here's what the argument not. Can if you were to talk about. So it got our attention and we're like, OK, this is cool. And the way you explain yourself was very intelligent, but also easy to understand, which is it's hard to find that combination in our space. So we went through your stuff. You know, who is this guy? And we found that you do a really good job. And one thing we're trying to do on the show, we've done this since we started, but trying to do more of it even now is highlight good coaches and trainers in our space. So people have more good people to follow because there's not a lot out there. The fitness space is pretty it's pretty wild, as you already know. So that's why we have you on the show, man. So well, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for the. So tell us a little bit about yourself, your history. You've been a trainer for over a decade. I hear you're saying your videos coming up on 10 years. OK, how did you start and what got you in the like social media space? Yeah, so rewind back to high school. I worked on a farm, my whole childhood and teenage years. And I was always the weakest one on the farm. I was the run of the litter. And so I was like, I need to throw bales of hay faster than these guys. So I got into strength training in my senior year of high school, got into powerlifting. And what I found is I was getting into powerlifting. I really enjoyed teaching other people how to do it as well. I was a really big passion of mine. And like through my whole high school, you know, I taught people how to swim, how to snowboard, you know, how to do all these different things. And I really enjoyed watching other people accomplish things. So all through, you know, going through college, I got to intern with some of the strength coaches at the universities. And then I went on to compete in powerlifting from there. And then I found a really stupid sport called Strongman. And I say it's stupid because it's literally who can pick up the most awkward object for the most amount of weight, for most amount of reps, the fastest amount of time without blowing your back out. So I got into that, fell in love with it. And where I was living at the time, some of the world's strongest competitors lived in that area as well. So I was really lucky to like be their pupil and got to train with them and work with them. And so from there, I got more into strength training, worked with more big names, mentored, mentored with some of like the really big names in the strength world. And here we are. What made you go to the social media route? That's how you make money. April is not 45 like you. That's why. Unfortunately, in this day and age, you have to be on social media to make a name for yourself. But yeah, frankly, like, honestly, I don't really like social media that much, but I do it because I have to. Were you on it as a kid in high school? Unfortunately, yeah. Yeah, I mean, honestly, I love I love listening to somebody's journey because we are a bunch of old, funny dotties that didn't exist when we were in high school. Sure. What was what was your journey of using social media originally, probably as a way to hang out, talk to people and so by that and then the transition into utilizing it as a tool to build a business. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, when it when, you know, Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, all those kind of came out. I was still really young. And so what I ended up doing is just using that to just post. I got this new PR. I just did this on my squat. And then I noticed people started commenting like, hey, you can squat, can you teach me how to squat? Or like, and so I started using it as a space to like debunk some of the big fitness things. And then it just kind of grew from there. And then I learned that while I have my personal training business here on the side, I can also use social media to reach a much greater audience at the same time, an international audience. So was that not the intent right out the gates? Were you just sharing to share? And then you realized I was just sharing to share just teaching because I love teaching. And then all of a sudden I figured out, oh, social media, I can use this to make money off of this and actually have before online coaching was a thing. I could use it as an online coaching tool. Now, I don't know this, but it seems obvious to us that you've coached in person a lot more or first. Is that OK? 100% I was in the trenches and I think anybody who wants to be a successful coach, you have to be in person. You have to explain that. Why I'm talking about that a lot. You will learn invaluable lessons from working one on one with an individual, both tactile cues, lessons. You will see the reactions in someone's face when they get it. You can't learn that from going from a textbook to just speaking on camera and just doing things online. Everybody wants to be an online coach because it's easy, right? But you have to earn your right to do that. You have to work in the trenches and you have to learn those lessons along the way of how can I make this work for someone? Before you can have the, dare I say, authority to move into the online world. So yeah, cues, just just cues, for example, which is just one piece of this, like queuing and exercise. I couldn't imagine learning how to queue properly virtually. You had to learn how to queue properly, right? I learned that in person because when you're working with someone, you queue one way, you queue a different way. And then you see, oh, this is what works. This is what gets the person kind of moving in this direction, saying it this way or noticing a particular movement pattern and saying it this way. But if I did that online, there's no way I would have figured that out. I would have said stuff like, oh, pull your shoulders down rather than, you know, pull your chest up to the bar, for example. Right, yeah, 100 percent. Like I need to see more lumbar extension. Yeah. Yeah, what does that mean? Nobody knows. Point your butt hole up to the sky. There we go. Yeah, we got it, right? So you don't learn that from a textbook. You learn that from working one-on-one with thousands of people in person all built so differently. That's how you figure that out. And you have to, I don't know, man, there's so many invaluable lessons that come from one-on-one. And honestly, like now, so with my business, like I only do online right now, I'm considering just renting out a spot at a local CrossFit box just so I can hone those skills because I can tell I'm kind of getting a little rusty on my, on my coaching and my cues. So I want to go back to the one-on-one so I can continue to improve. I've kept one client just because of that. Just to keep me grounded and remind, and I, crazy, would have 20-something years been doing this. It still provides me content for on here because, you know, she comes up with something and she's been training forever. And there's, and I'm like, oh, man, I forget. Like, you know, we talk on this damn podcast all the time. I forget how, how simple a little cue or tip like that could change her movement pattern or even like her habits around in gym, nutrition, all the above, like, no, it's wild. What a difference that makes. What's up, everybody? Today's giveaway maps 15 minutes. This is a muscle building strength building program. Only takes 15 to 20 minutes a day. Every single day, 15 to 20 minutes, and you get phenomenal results. Program, again, you can win it. Here's how you can win it. Leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it here on YouTube. This helps us with the algorithm. Also subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If we think you're the winner, we'll let you know in the comment section. Also, we put together a time crunch maps program bundle. This includes maps 15 minutes, maps anywhere, maps prime and the ebook for performance all together in one bundle, discounted over $200 off. That's happening only this month. If you're interested or you just want to learn more, click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, here comes the show. Did you start at a big box gym? What kind of gym did you start off at? Yeah, so I hopped from gym to gym. My first ones were like just a big franchise, one of their in-house trainers. Didn't like that. And that was when I came like exposed to kind of the structure of these big box gyms and how they make money. And I was like, I don't like this. Talk about that. From an ethical standpoint, it doesn't make sense. So one of the one of the biggest issues that I saw in more so like the big box personal training community is they want you to train in a specific manner, in a specific model. No matter how outdated that model might be, they still want you to follow the specific model. And then they try to sell these packages of, you know, six month one year packages, several thousands of dollars that you only meet with your trainer once a week. That didn't really make sense to me. And I didn't really like that. And so I learned, I was like, OK, I don't this doesn't really align with my ethics. You can make a lot of money doing it, but I didn't like that. So I left, did things more independently. And again, I had a great opportunity to do this independently, but I was able to do so in a way where I could do it with the models that I knew worked. Training three or four times a week with a person and doing something that was fair and again, ethical. And then, you know, then I got into the whole group fitness franchises and I saw all the crazy things that they do there that don't really make sense or are unethical or, you know, we could talk about more about that. But I saw a lot of things on the back end of fitness that I'm like, OK, this is everything that everybody does that is wrong. How about we take this a different approach and do this in a actual helpful manner in an ethical manner? Yeah, yeah. So what what what prompted you to see or how long did it take you, I would say, to see some of the faults in, I guess, the industry and how it both sells fitness, teaches fitness, talks about nutrition, because it took me, I mean, in all honesty, it took me five years to start to get good. It took me 10 years to be good, just to really be good at what I did. So it sounds like you're going to like training or like marketing. I mean, just how to really see like, oh, these are the lies. This doesn't work. This works. This is how I should communicate things. It took me a while to figure that out. Like as an early trainer, we get clients and I just hammer them. Oh, you want to get sweat, you know, when you want to sweat and get sore and take all these supplements. And because that's what we think works. That's right. So how long did it take you to kind of figure that out? Sounds like you got there pretty quick. So I've all I've been really lucky that I always approach everything in my life with a sign, with the scientific approach. So in the scientific method, when you have a claim or hypothesis or anything, you first saw you first seek out to disprove it. And if you have a hard time disproving it, chances are you're in the right direction. If it's really easy to disprove it, then you know what is wrong. A lot of people go about the other way. They go into something, take their hypothesis, their claim. They try to confirm it. Anybody can do that. Right. So I just I've always had that habit of any kind of claim. All right, I'm going to go out and try to disprove this. If I have a hard time, it's wrong. If I have a hard time disproving it, it might be right. If it's easy, then it's wrong. So with everything in the fitness industry, you can kind of approach it that way. OK, so creatine HCl is better than monohydrate. OK, let's find out. Let's try to put that to the test. Let's challenge it. And then you find, oh, wait, it's not. OK, so it's a scam, right? So that's just kind of how I approached everything from a really early age. And you drive your parents nuts? Dude, yeah. Mom, why is the sky blue? It just is. Why, though? So that's really early on, I would say, just like I was skeptical of everything. And luckily, because I was so skeptical, I could figure out a lot of the faults and a lot of the misinformation in the fitness industry. Now, science will get you far, but then there's the behavioral aspect of working with people, right, especially with nutrition. Like, you know, we could communicate like what works, what doesn't work and till we're blue in the face. But getting someone to understand and follow through and develop a good relationship with nutrition, like that's a whole another ball game. Right. How did you figure that part out? Or what did that process look like for you? Yeah, so there's a model that I run both my coaching and like how I work with my coaches with in that we use this model of concept literature application. OK, so we have the general concept of what generally works. We kind of know this through empirical evidence for the past 100 years of this space. Can we take the science and find us to confirm it? But then most important, the bottom chunk, which is application. OK, how can we apply everything that we're learning? Because there's new sports and there's new sports and conditioning studies always coming out every single week, right? But how can we apply that? And that's where a lot of people miss it. And that's where we, you know, a lot of things that we talk about may not quite coincide with the studies, but it works in the real world application. So I think there is room for anecdotes, especially in our field to answer your question. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense because to give an example of that, this sounds silly to say now, but because we've been doing this for so long, strength training was when we started never considered a form of exercise for longevity. Definitely not considered a form of exercise for fat loss. It was not a fat loss form of exercise. It was all about cardio, cardio, cardio. Right. And we have the big strength names with the big fat burly guys, right? And there was no there were no real science on it. Anyway, nobody was studying strength training for longevity. It was all about performance and how strong you could get. Yet in the, you know, whatever in the trenches, for lack of a better term, we saw, you know, people who worked in our gyms who just did cardio. And then we saw people who did strength training and we saw the arc of results and consistency and how it was able to be maintainable. And we know as trainers, we're like, actually, this form of exercise is pretty damn good for fat loss, but there was nothing backing it up. So it was all anecdote up at that point. Right. What are some of the biggest misconceptions? Then when you get clients coming in and, you know, they they want fat loss or they want to gain muscle, like what were some things you had to kind of like reeducate them on? OK, there's a lot. So probably the biggest one that I have the greatest hurdle with is I get people who I've got back problems. I got knees problems. OK, we're going to make you dead. Look, we're going to make you squat. That freaks them out because they think that they're some kind of porcelain doll and they can't put any kind of pressure on them or they're going to shatter. But I have yet to have a client come to me who said they have a back issue and I've had wide range of back issues and haven't I haven't had a single client go through within four weeks, completely eliminate their back pain with the deadlift. So there's a little bit of like, you got to trust me on this here. But I do my best to educate you along the way. So. Yeah, how do you feel about this? Like because we've seen this really weird cycle when we started, we would manage these 30,000, 40,000 square foot gyms and they would have one squat rack and the squat rack would have dust on it. Right. And forget deadlifting. Nobody. I mean, I would deadlift and members would stop me. I'm the manager of the gym. They would stop me, but you can hurt your back and what is it? What are you doing? Right? Then we saw it become popular through CrossFit. I think CrossFit did a really good job popularizing those. Now it seems to be trendy to shit on those exercises. Like, you know, you don't need to squat. Right. You don't need to deadlift. There's better exercise or whatever. How do you feel about those things? I mean, especially as a power lifter, I get where they're coming from. Like the intention is there. But again, the application is horribly wrong. And we see it's prominent in TikTok where they say, you don't need to bench press. You don't need to squat. You don't need to deadlift. Right. I get where they're coming from, but you have to remember the audience that they're speaking to are young kids, underdeveloped kids. I have yet to and I put this challenge out on TikTok and I have, I'm still waiting on a response. Like, TikTok, if you're listening, like I'm still waiting for you here. Find me one exercise that not only improves neuromuscular efficiency, trains the entire body at one time is infinitely scalable and is economical, whereas we can use a minimal number of sets and volume and training frequency to grow the entire body all at once. That isn't the barbell deadlift. Yeah, I'm waiting. Good luck. I'm waiting like so I'm willing to hear it out. And so far, no one's found anything. So again, I get where they're coming from. And like, as you get more advanced, yes, the the these larger barbell movements may not have their time and place for you, but you're not there yet. OK, you're still over here. Let's focus on these on these simpler exercises. But I think the reason why TikTok doesn't like talking about that is because these create these content creators have to reinvent the wheel to stay relevant to get their views. It's not just that. It's also that you made a point earlier about how easy it is to confirm our own bias. And I remember being the reason why I have such a problem with that message is I remember being a teenage boy and I didn't want to squat and deadlift because it was hard. Nobody does. It was hard. And so I would glom on to any coach or trainer that would say, oh, you don't need to do that. Sure. And so that's the problem that I have with that message is is not. We're not talking about the six year old lady who's got all these conditions and issues that I need to address before I barbell deadlift with her. Like I'm not worried about her. I'm worried about the 17 year old, 19 year old, 20 year old young boy that's getting into lifting and is going, oh, I don't need to squat and deadlift because my favorite influencer tells me this way. When it's like, dude, that is the single best thing that you could probably do for your body and where you're currently at in your journey. And I wish that somebody would hammer that home to me. And I didn't wait until my mid 20s before it became a staple in my program. Yeah. I mean, could you imagine how much further physically you could be if you had the time, if you put in the time to dedicate to those larger lists? I wish I wish the same thing for myself, too. Like I look at the clients that I work with and they have them. We have a very, very basic, simple programming with those barbell lists and they're growing like weeds. Like, man, jealous. So no, it's it's I mean, I'm the first program was maps and a ball based off those lifts and people are, oh, my God, I've never experienced gains like this before. But this is after they look at it and go, this doesn't look like anything fancy. Like, well, yeah, yeah, it's not. But follow it. Yeah, it's like the the whole workout that is on our our TikTok that is really popular right now. It's it's labeled the sticky note workout plan because you can fit it all on a sticky note. I've looked at it. It's it's just a related. But it's legit. It's it's legit. But it's better than 99% of the workouts that are online. I appreciate that. I can't I can't claim it as mine. This is what I've gathered from like the last 10 years of doing this. But it's it's simple and it's effective and it all fits on a little sticky note. And you can write that out for months and see incredible progress. Totally. So do you think that because I, you know, I remember when I really started to learn exercise programming because programming there's simplicity to it, but then there's also some complexity to it. OK, because it's not just, yeah, you know, people think programming is like fancy exercises. Exercises are part of it. There's reps and sets and rest periods and how they all work together in the week and how the weeks work together in the months and all that stuff. And I remember when I first started learning about it, I realized that the best strength training, at least the most scientifically backed strength training programming came from the strength sports that where people actually had to lift more weight, powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting, in particular. Whereas bodybuilding, there's definitely science in bodybuilding, but bodybuilding so subjective that the best bodybuilder who wins isn't necessarily the one who's following the best programming. But with like powerlifting and weightlifting, the programming matters so much more. And you know this, you talk to a bodybuilder, you talk to a powerlifter, the bodybuilders focus much more on diet and the gear that are on. Powerlifters and weightlifters, you know, they're like super crazy about their workout programming. 100%. You started as a powerlifter. Do you think that that gave you a huge advantage over other trainers in that realm? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, because of how analytical and how specific you have to be with your programming, because like you said, the number one goal is, can I add weight to this barbell at the end of this mezzocycle? And yeah, it gave me a huge advantage. And in fact, right now I've transitioned more into like a little season of bodybuilding. I wanna kind of chase this vein and see how far I can go with it. And because I have a programming background, this is way more comprehensive, way more like I'm able to see more progress at this because of that programming background. Yeah. So totally agree with that. Yeah, no, 100%. I learned a lot. That was my advantage in bodybuilding. I saw that real quickly. When I got into the space, I found how many coaches and trainers just did not have that background at all. It was all around diet and burn as much as you possibly could and get shredded and what drugs could you take and the programming piece. I mean, when I was competing, there was no, none of my peers were even deadlifting or squatting at all. I mean, I think it's prevalent today that they believe that it's going to widen your waist and so they don't want, you know, that's not a... Being fat winds up. Right. So I thought that was hilarious. And I remember, and I worked out in a gym here that's probably one of the more popular gyms for competitors. And I remember seeing all their programming what they're doing like, oh man, this is going to be a huge advantage to me. And I really attribute that to one of the main reasons why I scaled up to the professional level so fast is because when I looked at my peers, I was like, oh my God, dude, these guys don't know as much as I would expected them to know based off of the way their bodies work. So you've gone further in bodybuilding than I have. I've only done one show. So let me ask you, do you think your foundation of strength gave you the upper hand both from a physical standpoint and like a training standpoint when it came to competition? My strength, not so much. My knowledge around nutrition and exercise did. Because in that space, as you've, if you haven't found out, you will, the, what I found quickly, and I've told this on the show many a times so our audience is probably tired of hearing it from me. But when I first walked into it, I was really excited. Like I thought at this point, I'm already been 10 years plus in the fitness industry. Now I'm gonna get into the competing side. I had no knowledge of it whatsoever. So I go in and I'm actually really excited. I'm like, man, I'm gonna get to learn. I'm gonna meet a lot of like, if these are the 1% of the 1%ers, like the best bodies in the world I'm gonna get to get on stage with, I can't wait to pick their brain and find out like, and what I found was not what I was expecting at all was a lot of them and not to take credit from them at all. I mean, they have this unbelievable discipline, the ability to starve their body for an extended period of time and take zero days off and be incredibly meticulous about counting and tracking that they were good at and like listening to what their coach told them. But the science to support a lot of what they were doing was just, it wasn't there. A lot of it was terrible. And it gave me this huge advantage of like, oh wow. Like there were so many guys that couldn't figure out why every time they would cut for a show then do this massive dirty bulk why they had such a hard time getting as lean following the same principles as they did the previous one. And it's because they would allow themselves to put on so much excess body fat in the soft season. They'd show up to stage and every show it seemed like if they weren't creating adding more and more volume or more and more cardio or dieting even harder, they couldn't achieve the same look. Where for me, every show, I was improving. And I was like, I was eating more, having to do less. Like it was just, and that was just because I was, I was, I had a much more scientific approach to my programming than I saw my peers. And that was all the way to the professional level. Most of these guys have coaches and teams that put them on radical extreme diets and just train them like crazy and they get shredded. And some of them have, I don't think I have a genetic advantage. I definitely have a swimmers body. So I wasn't built for bodybuilding, but I had the advantage of nutrition and exercise programming on everybody. And that was what really, and I didn't have, I didn't play the political game either. I didn't hire a coach, I didn't have a team that's kind of, it's tough to do that when you're by yourself. Like that tends to help you out a lot if you're with a big name coach or a big team that everybody knows. As far as like making, like winning, it helped really. Oh yeah. Well it's judged. So the way the shows are set up. I've done one show and I had a coach, but he was a smaller name. It wasn't part of like a team. Yeah, so the teams are what, teams and big name coaches are where it's at because those guys sponsor a lot of these shows. And so they're the money behind a lot of these shows. And so, and they're rubbing elbows with the coaches like, hey, these are my five competitors. So if it was you and another guy, and here's the thing with it, like no one could ever prove this, but you just know it if you've been in it long enough. It comes down to you and another guy, you have a small name coach nobody really knows about and this person's working with, you know, drop a big name bodybuilding coach, right? So yeah, Haani Ramri, right, right. So the big name Mike Haani, who's got a ton of money behind all these things. And they know that he's there, his guy, and it comes down to the two of you, and you guys are close enough. Like you're not gonna be, they're not gonna, They're not gonna give a last place first place. Yeah, they're not gonna give the last place. Like the guy's gonna have to be like competitive, but there's been many times where you see the guy who has, I mean, it happened in my very first show, my very first show, the crowd was like booing because I didn't even place the top five. And it was obvious how much more shredded I was than everybody else, but nobody knew who I was. Yeah, you were way too shredded. And I've never seen this. And it would happen to me. So I get, the audience is booing when they see I'm like in sixth place in the morning, in the morning call outs. And it costs so much ruckus. And I had a buddy who was working the back with people. So he came and told me, he's like, Hey, they moved you all the way up to third. And he's like, I was like, what? I'm like, from sixth to third, that big of a jump like that. He's like, yeah, no, like they got, because of the response from the crowd, everybody booing and making a big deal about it. Cause it was so obvious that I should have placed first, but they're like, oh, we gotta put this guy, we can't give him first, but we'll put him at third and make him come back for another show. And it's just how they do. That's how they run the whole thing, dude. It's crazy. On today's episode of Mind Pump, we're gonna talk about the conspiracies of the body of the world. It's extremely, it's extremely political. That's wild, man. I had no, I had no idea, but that's crazy because like, you couldn't do that with a power lead to come. It's numbers. Like who hit the most weight? That's right. You can't manipulate that. That's why, like again, I think that's why some of the best workout programming comes out of those strength sports because you either lift more or you don't. It has, you know, it's not subjective at all. It's objective. And if you lift more people are like, okay, well he did 50 pounds more than last time. What is his workout like? What is he doing? Especially if you're in weight classes, you know? It's like you didn't gain a lot of weight, but you got way stronger. What the heck is this guy doing? How have these powerlifting programming helped you train everyday average people? I'm sure you're training people and they're not like, I want a power lift. Like I want to get leaner. Yeah, so honestly, I love training the general population way more than I did helping strongman and powerlifting competitors way more. I think because of the sense of accomplishment is so much greater. Like I can now help this 60 year old grandma get off the toilet without a walker versus well I added 10 pounds to your squat. Like it's so much cooler. But it definitely paid a huge advantage because I figured out early on strength is, I believe, strength is the most important physical attribute that you can improve. We say that exact line both times. Everything improves when you can work on strength. It's not a two-way road though. It's a one-way road. So I was able to use a lot of those simplistic training principles of the barbell and use those with my general population clients and they were able to make incredible progress. Regardless, if you're trying to, it changes a little bit when you want to compete. You're trying to maximize your one rep max. That's when the programming changes. But for just generalized force production and just generalized strength training, it's actually pretty, pretty similar. So, but it played a huge role. Why explain how strength is the most important physical attribute? Yeah, so I'm gonna use CrossFit for an example here. So CrossFit teaches the 10, what do they call it? The 10 physical, it's like the 10 physical attributes, right? So if we have that list of 10, so there's like cardio respiratory fitness, agility, mobility, power. If we take a look at strength, which the definition of strength is the ability to produce force upon an external resistance. How much, how hard can you push on something? Your ability to maximize your force production improves mobility, improves cardio respiratory fitness and improves your, I should rather say, it improves your capacity to improve those other characteristics. So I use this example all the time. If we have two bio identical runners and one squats 50 pounds, any other person who squats 300 pounds, who can run harder? Who can run faster? Well, the person who squats 300 pounds. I would hope, right? So in the sense, you can use it kind of like, it's very simplistic logic with anything when it comes to strength training. So that's why I believe it's the most important physical attribute because it potentiates our ability to improve any other physical attribute that we wanna work on. Yeah, that's a fact. It's the only one that carries over to every other person. Every single one. And like I said, it's a one-way road. I can't go do hot yoga and expect to add 20 more pounds to my squat. I can't go do a spinning class and expect to be able to lift my lawnmower into the back of my truck easier. It's a one-way road. Explain how it contributes to mobility because this is still a myth that lingers in the general population, which is that you get stronger, you build more muscle, you're gonna be tighter, you're not gonna be as mobile. You're not so mobile. Right, right. So explain how strength contributes to mobility. So we have to remember that a lot of people think that, a lot of people think this because who do we think of? What's the person that we think of who think is like really super, super strong? A 300-pound power lifter, a 300-pound strongman. They have to like hold their breath and brace to bend over to tie their shoe. That's who we think of who's really strong, but that's not strength. That's a power lifter. That's a specific athlete in a specific sport. So when we're talking about mobility, that's the ability to essentially control your position in an end range of motion under a load. So if I'm taking your squat, for example, most people have mobility issues in the squat, if I can load that squat and progressively improve your depth through that, I've improved your mobility. So I think that's the biggest application is through practice and application and through programming, your mobility improves. It doesn't tighten up and lock you down. Yeah, I remember as an early trainer, just to piggyback off this, as an early trainer, I had a client hire me. This was probably two or three years into my career who had hypermobility. It was what she was diagnosed with, right? Which basically means- She can like bend her elbow the other direction. Yeah, like just super loose and lax. And the reality was, and you'd think, and I thought as an early trainer, flexibility is what gives you mobility. While she was the most unstable person I'd ever trained, she could injure herself so easily because she was hyper flexible, but she had no strength to support it. Kind of like in the example, I use like a baby. You take a baby and you can fold them all over the place, but try and stand them up or put something on them and then they end up hurting themselves. Real world flexibility is your ability to move through a range of motion with control and strength. You need access to that. Yes. Yeah, and that's the difference too. It's like it's passive or it's active, control. So like there's a misconception between stretching and mobility and mobility really is that strength and access to those ranges of motion. Like one of the biggest things that I always get harped on is like, because we don't have a super rigorous mobility routine in our programming. We have mobility when it is needed. We have generalized just kind of helping with blood flow and just keeping the air. I feel like just kind of generalized flexibility for spending a few minutes helps with joint health. But that's, in my opinion, I think it's where it ends. And I always get harped on like, well, like I can do the full splits. Okay. And like where in real life do you find yourself having to do... How do you get out of that? Yeah. So you can do a full splits, but so what? Like I can safely pick up a log and not blow my back out. So real world application here, you know? Yeah, we, our minds were blown years ago when we learned mobility from a friend of ours who, that he would put you in positions, but the goal was to connect to new ranges of motion through tension and isometrics and the carryover from that was like mind blowing. And that's when all of us were like, okay, this is totally different. This is not what I thought when people said mobility training, which I would think of like yoga or something like that before. It was about connecting to new ranges of motion. That's cool. So yeah, it made a huge difference. What are some other things that you find yourself just shaking your head at when you, you know, hear people in our space talking, you can go either diet or exercise wise. Man, there's so many. I should have put together a list because there's a lot. Yeah. I mean, you guys probably know about this one. You hear this one all the time about restricting a specific macronutrient weight loss, you know, low carb or low fat, low proteins actually on the table right now because protein causes cancer apparently. Yeah, M-Tor. That's what they point to. Yeah. M-Tor. Yeah, do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, we can. I've read the book or the book that kind of popularized it. And I read through it and I saw the studies, but the thing that I learned from school was like interpreting studies and, you know, how they came to those conclusions. I was really lucky to figure that out because going through those and reading those studies, I was like, that's not what those studies say, though. That's what you want those studies to say. Yeah, no, I mean, the way I've broken it down is that first of all, anything can fuel cancer growth, cancer cells. M-Tor is a signaler of growth. In the presence of cancer, M-Tor could tell cancer to grow. In a healthy body, M-Tor is phenomenal. It tells your muscles to grow. It's reparative. It makes you stronger and makes you feel better. By the way, estrogen, testosterone, insulin, growth hormone, thyroid, all of these are normal hormones we have in the body, but in the presence of specific cancers can fuel cancer growth. So what they're trying to do is trying to connect protein to cancer because protein activates M-Tor, but it doesn't, that's not how it works. In a pro-cancer environment or in a cancer environment, anything can fuel. It's an overly simplistic approach to the very complex biochemistry of the body. And that's where a lot of these diets kind of mess up on, especially the whole obesity insulin theory. It's coming back with a vengeance right now on TikTok. So the whole insulin thing makes you, insulin makes you fat. If insulin, that makes you fat. Right, so that came back with a vengeance, but again, it's an oversimplification of how complex your body works. Like, you're not going to manipulate one variable and expect your entire physiology to change. You know, the reason why I don't like that one is the same thing with the squat. When I think of really bad information that does so much more harm than good for people, I think of the young men that are told not to squat. Then I think of this messaging around high protein being cancer or drives cancer, because in my experience, I would say north of 90% of almost every client's normal general population, not competitors, not like any athletes, like normal people, when I assess their diet, under consume protein. It's probably one of the most under consumed macronutrients and then you have this messaging, fear mongering people around what it potentially can do in regards to cancer. It's such a terrible message because that was already a challenge for me as a coach to get my clients to eat more. Then they hear bullshit like that and then they're gonna run away from it even more. So it's such a dangerous message. Yeah, it's a dangerous message. And there's a lot of them out there and I actually encourage, I'm gonna sound a little dogmatic saying this, but when we have clients come on, we encourage them to what I do, put the blinders on. Because you're gonna hear us tell you to do something and you're gonna go on Instagram and someone's gonna say the exact opposite of what we tell you to do and that's gonna freak you out. So we tell them, trust us on this, uninstall Instagram, uninstall TikTok just for a few months and then you can put it back. Even unfollow us, like unfollow us for a little bit and just like put your head down and do the work and then you can re-download it. For that exact reason, there's just so much conflicting information out there and it's kind of, it's disheartening and it's disappointing so. Where does the business acumen come from? What's been your journey like in entrepreneurship and I mean, were you into it when you were young? Tell me a little bit about that. Well, my dad knew I was gonna be an entrepreneur from a very young age, so. That sounds like a funny story. Yeah, well, I wanted to make money and I was 11 years old and I was too young to get a job. So I started mowing lawns just in my neighborhood. So I printed out little things, put them on the doors in my neighborhood and got a few calls and I started mowing lawns like 50 bucks a month or something like that. And I was like, oh, all right, cool. So like I went even further and put them on like neighboring neighborhoods and I learned a very important thing that if you can do the more volume of little papers I can put on doors, the more calls I'll get, the more people I'll be able to convert into lawn mowing clients. So this grew and it grew to like, I did this every single year, it grew to where I was making like 1,000 bucks a month as like a 12 year old, 13 year old kid. Wow, it was awesome. And I was like, okay, so I never wanna work for someone ever again. I wanna work for myself. So that's where it all started. And from then on it's always been like, okay, how can I fix this problem and how can I make money off of it? So as conceded, does that make sense? So tell me what the model looks like right now for you because you said something before we got on air that I thought was really interesting. You said you don't take clients any younger than 28. 28 years old, yeah. So explain that. Yeah, well, our coaching is expensive because you get one-on-one direction, communication, check-ins, we evaluate your lifts, we evaluate your form and we, so you are as close to a one-on-one coach as you can possibly, you're as close to a face-to-face coach as you can possibly get, that costs money. And so let's just face the fact, if you're under 28 years old, you're probably still trying to figure out your professional life, probably still don't have like a set job, but probably not gonna have a constructive conversation to talk about coaching it. But that doesn't mean that you don't have help because I pride myself on the amount of free information that I post on my Instagram, my TikTok, but most importantly, my Discord. We have about 2,000 members on my Discord and my free information is better than your paid trainer's information. So you're not lost, you're not a lost hope, wait until you're a little bit older, but take advantage of all the free stuff that we give. You can have a successful transformation with just the free stuff that we have. And there's so many people who share their, they're both foreign afters on my Instagram just from my free stuff. And I post that all the time and then I make a joke of like my free stuff is better than your trainer stuff. When did you start coaching that way online like that? I started like five or six years ago. We've gone full online about two and a half years ago. And you said you have coaches under you? Yes. You have a team. How many people? I've got three coaches and I've got one that is currently onboarding right now that we're training up to speed. Awesome. So yeah. Yeah. And you commented earlier that you might want to train sometimes in person just to kind of keep your finger on the pulse or whatever. Talk about what it feels like to get rusty because you're not seeing people, because we noticed this during the podcast, we're talking on air and we're not talking with clients and then we did a live event which is not a profitable thing for us at all if anything it loses us money. But we did it and afterwards we felt so grounded and reinvigorated like, okay, we got to do those for us more than anything. I'm so glad you said that because I'm looking to do a workshop in Idaho for that exact reason. I'm not going to make any money off of it but I want to do it for me. But sorry, you asked. Yeah. Why you had mentioned you want to train some people in person to do that? Yeah. Well, because I'm rusty and as the face of the business and as the person who should be leading the industry I hope to lead the industry I need to be able to stay on top of my stuff. Even though I have a few clients here and there and I have a team of coaches who are fantastic and all my stuff is pre-recorded so you can go re-watch that stuff I still feel like I have an obligation to stay up to par on these things. So I've even considered just coaching one-on-one for free again, more so for me than anything. As an entrepreneur, what's your Achilles heel? Where you suck at? Time management is a big one. So that's one of the reasons why I've hired a productivity coach to help me get that under control. I suck at time management. So I'll either procrastinate something to the very last second and get it all done or I will end up working 12 hour days. There's no balance. So that's, you know, due to my own ADHD I can't. I feel like that's an entrepreneur trait. It's gotta be. I think it is and it's a common thing that people who have an entrepreneurial mindset also have ADHD so I think they go hand in hand. So yeah. What has been some of the greatest challenge of scaling for me? Because it's one thing and I remember in my 20s starting to figure out like I definitely was an entrepreneur. I was really good at making money for myself but then I always kind of hit the ceiling and it was around a certain dollar amount of scaling beyond that. It's really difficult. Are you there? Like are you finding that? Like those type of challenges? Like what are some of the biggest challenges that you currently have right now within the business? I've broken my current system about five or six times and every single roadblock has been the result of not having systems or not having a big enough team. So I started with one coach to help me and then we quickly maxed that out and that's another thing too is I've learned really early on I have to have a cap on how many clients both I and my coaches take. We can't take an indefinite number of clients because the quality of coaching will go down the higher the number goes up, right? So if we want to scale our income we need to have more people on hand to help more that's been like the biggest roadblock is now my mindset has changed from okay how much more things can I do to make more money? It's now who can I hire that's better at this than me to help me with this than me trying to figure it out on my own? What would the ultimate vision for the business for you? What would it look like for you? Would you still be coaching a lot or would you rather be like the puppet master on everything like how do you see yourself? It's a good question. I thought I had an idea of what I wanted it to be and as it grows it continues to change. I think what I want for it at this current point in time in 2023 is I would just like it to be again just leading the industry in strength training and body composition changes for the average individual and kind of just debunking the bullshit that's out there. That's where we see it now and where I see myself in it is again coaching more so to stay honed in on my craft but more so on the business side of things helping other coaches improve so they can be the best coaches they can be. You have like a favorite part and least favorite part about what you have to do to make it all go right now. I mean, behind the content creation all the probably the bookkeeping and stuff that you have to do managing other people like what do you love and what do you not like to do out of all that? Well, all the things that I don't like to do I've hired other people to do it for me now so luckily. But yeah, bookkeeping sucked, managing messages and managing sales calls that was kind of a burnout. What I love doing, what I really love doing is teaching and so content creation for me is second nature I love doing that. Yeah. Is that what drives the most leads to the business right now? Like so take me through the process of sales calls capturing leads, conversion and then how does that work? The funnel's pretty simple. I make really good content. I give a lot of really good free information. People think, wow, if this free stuff is so good I wonder what coaching looks like. So we have all the free stuff here they inquire about coaching, they fill out an application they get on a sales call and then if they qualify on the sales call because we don't just take anybody we have to make sure that we like you and we think that we can actually help you once we determine that, then you're client. So that's a really simple model. Have you had any situations where you've turned someone down and they get pissed or like what's that look like? All the time, all the time. My favorite one I screen shot of this was we ask a series of questions and there's an application that you have to fill out before they can get on a call and the guy got mad and he canceled the application he said, man, I've applied for jobs or I've asked them to give me money that is easier than applying for your coaching. So I'm like, look, man, it has to be fruitful for both of us. So yeah, we do have to say no to a lot of people because it's just not going to be productive for either one of us at this time. And is the 28 thing, is that kind of like a general role? But it's like, if you had somebody who's 26 who was very successful or is it just, you just straight up you're not old enough. So it's economic for sure. It's the money's a big one. And like we just have, we've looked at the data of how many people we've had contacts with and it's like the percentage is so slim if you being under 28 and being able to afford our coaching but also it's where you are in life. Like I just don't have a passion for training young 20 year olds anymore. Like I care more about the dad who's facing diabetes and is worried about not being able to show up to his daughter's wedding. I'm more passionate about those dudes. If you're early 20s, like again, just hop on the discord, man. Like you can find all of our stuff there. I know I find it a very interesting strategy and really smart. Something I probably wouldn't have thought about until you just mentioned it. Because one of the drawbacks of being popular on TikTok or Instagram is the amount of young people that you get that are just looking for free stuff that can't afford any of your potential products that you have. And I would imagine that if you open it up for everyone, you'd probably be bombarded on sales calls that led to nothing. So by making that cutoff probably increases the conversion rate significantly and doesn't waste your time or your coaches. And so very interesting strategy. Is that how that came to be? Is that you started going like, dude, we're wasting our time with this kid? Well, it was, yeah. So TikTok was the worst thing that ever happened to me because we all of a sudden got an infinite number of leads. And I learned really early on, we have to put these major disqualifiers on. Otherwise my sales guy is gonna be pissed because he's not making sales. And my coach is gonna be pissed because they're not working with people that they can help. So that's all. You know what this reminds me of, Justin? You remember, you might be too young for this, if you don't know if you're, do you remember when Groupon hit? Oh, yeah. Oh my God, yeah. So Groupon hit and became- Did you offer your personal training sessions? I know, hell no. I was smart enough to see that. I was one of the few, though. I did one boot camp with Groupon. Yeah, a lot of it. I destroyed it. Yeah. I saw a lot of coaches and trainers doing that. And to me, I saw the writing. I didn't wanna devalue my coaching and training. And I was like, you know, even if it gets me a thousand leads and I get 10 new clients from it, I now have offered up a service that I believe is far more valuable than that. So I kinda saw the writing on the wall. But that's what it kinda reminds me of. Like you get just, yeah, you get a ton of leads, but now you get all of these people that are, you know, want stuff for free, aren't willing to pay. And it's like, you know, they would've had it. That's totally interesting parallel. I wanted to go even further in TikTok specifically without saying like a complete dinosaur. But I mean, we started out like primarily on Instagram. According to TikTok, I'm a dinosaur. Really? I'm old for TikTok, yeah. I'm a boomer on TikTok. Yeah, we were all boomers at this point in their eyes. But yeah, like, cause one of the biggest things that we found with Instagram was just like, companies like Shreds that had found all these athletes and they were kind of pushing and peddling supplements and they were doctoring photos and you know, putting out just this crazy, just archaic information. Is that sort of a repeated model now on TikTok that hasn't been sort of addressed? Or what are you seeing, I guess, specifically from the influencers that are real popular in that platform? TikTok's actually kind of interesting. This is something that I haven't seen before cause on Instagram, yeah, you did have companies like Shreds who they got called out for doctoring their photos and that was actually quite a clown show. But it's interesting, what I'm seeing now is you have the leaders on TikTok who their only content is two things. It's debunking other creators. It's literally they have their smug little face on the corner of the thing and they're like, react. Stupidest thing, I hate that, it's annoying. Get your face off, just make a reason. I loved, okay, so again, why are in the show? Cause it was like, I had that same idea cause that guy with his like smug comments to this out, like, you know, his little, no, wrong, trying to add his little biomechanic turns. Yeah, right, and you countered him. I'm like, ah, he did it for me. Yeah, oh, okay, so that dude. So, and this is common. He's not the only one that does this, but their only content is two things. It's stitching other people and it's, it's regurgitating, terribly done studies and then trying to build workouts and dieting tips off of those studies that's never been done before. And I think it's because of the nature of the platform and it's actually quite a clown show when they get caught with their pants down when they do it the wrong way. So I don't know if you guys saw this, but last year, a study came out that basically said overhead tricep exercises are pretty much worthless for developing the triceps. Every single fitness creator who uses studies as their content started making content as, this is why I'll never do overhead exercise, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like just sitting here just patiently waiting, and two weeks later, two weeks, I can't make this up. Another study came out, overhead tricep exercises are the best exercise. It loads it in a stretch position. Yeah, and I was like, this is beautiful. And then all of a sudden, everyone just went quiet. Nobody talked about it ever again, but I saw it happen and I was like, this is hilarious. So, that's funny. I love that. That's example of these, I mean, this is just, I think, I don't know if it's just, it's everywhere. Not just TikTok where, you know, news jacking, right? You try and hop on like a new study and stuff like that and you double down on something like that and you fuck yourself, so. I think it's hilarious. I think it's hilarious. What makes fitness so challenging for, I guess, coaches and trainers with integrity is, it's so easily sold visually. So, look at me, I'm ripped. That's the credibility. Like I look good or whatever, but it's so terribly, it's so ineffective unless it's kind of long form. Like, you're a trainer. You've coached people for a long time. You're not gonna effectively coach or train someone with one TikTok clip or one caption under Instagram. When you work with people, it's like conversations over time and over time they start to kind of figure things out and apply things. So, that's what makes it so damn tough. So, the people with the most poll, this is what frustrates the hell out of us, the people who get, like reach the most people are really good at the visual stuff, but their information is not just worthless. Oftentimes it's detrimental. It's misleading. Yes. And it's misleading, but also it's also out of context because a lot of things that I've seen, their points may be true, but it's so grossly out of context. And you know the average layman will take that information and treat it as gospel. And that's what I see is so dangerous. And that's kind of where I found myself on TikTok is kind of laying the groundwork of like, yeah, okay, sure. But what about this here? Like this is your foundation. Can we focus on this again? But unfortunately that doesn't. Yeah, like the whole morphology argument for squats. Well, everybody's hip, some hip joints look like this. And therefore the, okay, like that's like, I've trained so many people. And you know how many times I've had to be like, well, it looks like we can't squat because you're morphology. Never, it's never happened to me before. So, you know, they'll take something that's got some truth in it, but then they'll communicate it in a way and then the average person will read, will hear it, read it and then just confuse the shit out of people. And it's super, super frustrating. This is why we chose podcasting, by the way, because it's long form. Right, you can actually get your point across. Yeah, and it's a conversation. Like I can talk about, because you know how many times I've talked about fat loss on the show? You know, how many episodes are we at now, Doug? It's like, you know, thousands of times, but that's how many times you have to talk about it before it actually works. It doesn't work the way fitness is used. So is that what you use Discord for primarily? Is the long form your ideas? Exactly it, yeah. So we use TikTok as, you know, getting eyeballs and it's a necessary evil to get people to see me. And then we use Discord more so as here is the, here's the actual conversation of how to get strong, why we use these exercises, here's how the programming works. And so we're able to kind of gravitate people over there and they actually learn from over there. So are you like, are you doing like almost like a podcast format in there? Is that what you're doing? Talking to the camera for a half hour, hour about topics? Yeah, so we're currently working on like modules. So modules of, you know, the basics of training, the basics of nutrition and then building those out. So they're like five, 10 minute long video segments with worksheets and homework items that you have to do. And then what I'll do every week is I'll do a live Q and A with my Discord. And that's all free? Nice. All free. Oh wow, that's phenomenal. I'm telling you man, my free shit is better than most trainers stuff. Well, I mean, we went through your stuff. You got good stuff. Well, you're also touching on, I mean, that was the strategy that built this was when we first, I mean, we knew nothing about podcasting. None of us were media, we are boomers. We didn't, none of us had Instagram, Facebook, none of that shit, but we saw the opportunity to provide more free valuable information than what people were putting behind paid walls. You have these e-books that were being sold that were trash, you had just terrible information everywhere and overpriced coaching for people that didn't know what they were doing. And we were like, man, we have all this experience. Let's just, let's just give away all this information and just see if we can first build a network of people. And then we'll talk about if we have a business or not. Did you know, did you notice though, that as you did that, the more people you helped, the more money you made? Of course. Yeah. A direct result. Yeah, that's exactly it. I think so many people go about it the other way. Like they have to create their secret little system that they discovered and, you know, like sign up for this webinar and they'll sell you into my $2,000 thing at the end of the webinar for my secret thing. Whereas... Patented exercise. Yeah, right. I discovered the secret system, seven stage shredded system. No, dude, you didn't discover anything. You know, the story that I share about when we first started to monetize, it was after a year of doing the podcast, we'd already put out 200 something episodes. And we had already, Sal had created Maps Anabolic before we all even got together. So we had a product to sell online ready to go. And we didn't do it for over a year. And when we finally did it, it was after we were getting people that were just trying to give us money. Like it literally got to that point where we had helped so many people for free that people were like, wait, can I buy something from you? Can I do a Patreon? Can I donate? And when we started to see that, okay, it's time, it's time for us to do this. And then when we launched it, I would say 50% of the people actually bought and said, I'm not gonna use it. I don't care. Like I'm literally doing it purely out of support because you've given me so much free content. And so I share that with other content creators that that should be your mindset. It's just I can you first prove that you have enough free valuable content that you can grow a community of people. And then you can talk about what type of business that you wanna build around that. Problem with that though, is it takes knowledge and time. And that's what a lot of people don't have. Yeah, well, so here's the big challenge that we see, Braden. And this is why we have you on the show is that we're trying to, and I see you do the same thing, okay? We're trying to sell the right information better than the other guy can sell the wrong information. Now that sounds, if someone hears that they think, well, yeah, of course you could sell the right information easier. No, no, no, no, not in fitness. No. Cause that guy is telling you you could take this pill and lose 30 pounds in 30 days. And I'm telling you it's gonna take you a year. It's gonna take lifestyle change. It's gonna take behavioral modifications and it's gonna suck and it's gonna be hard. And there's gonna be ups and downs. How the hell am I gonna sell that over what they're selling, which sounds like, again, take a pill. Right, magic. So what's your strategy with that? Cause that's who you're competing against. You're not, you're competing against people selling easy, take this supplement, do this secret thing, look how awesome I look, look at my butt, whatever. And you're like, no, it takes hard work. This is the right information. I think I have to give credit where credit is due. And I think people are becoming wiser now. I think people are starting to wise up that it's not a pill. It's not the TV product that you buy and then you throw under your bed after a few months of using it. And what I do is I've kind of mixed a little bit of the strategies that people used to kind of catch the eyeballs and then I've thrown my own twist into it of knowledge. I throw up the snapshot of me at, you know, 8% body fat to get you to look and then we give you the information, okay? And it's so cringy when I do it, I hate doing it because it's so annoying, but I have to because that's the only way I can get you to watch. But as soon as I can get you to watch and then I can feed you the good stuff, that's when I see it's actually beneficial. So. It's the exact same model we use. That's what we do. We use my transformation into bodybuilding. I built the first original 10,000 people paying attention to us off of my way I looked. Knowing that I had to get your attention, you know. Hot as hell. Who's that bear rug kicker? Really good. Oh my God. You know what's funny though, that I'll never forget that journey of doing that, how frustrating it was. It was a necessary evil, but the attention that you get for that versus like your knowledge is different. Sure. Like it was a rough road to start off. And I remember seeing that I had 10,000 people paying attention to us and seeing how little that converted into business and revenue initially was rough. But to your point, it was enough to get people to pay attention. And then if I could get a percentage of you to come over and listen to the three of us talk in long form, you might go, hmm, these guys know a few things about working out. Here's one thing I'll tell you that has worked well for us in the past is predicting what is about to come through the space and what's about to get popular and dismantling it before it gets popular. Now this isn't like an immediate, like we're gonna grow from it. But when you do this enough times, it really, you end up looking like a wizard. Now the truth is we're not wizards, it's just obvious to anybody who knows what's going on. You can see all cyclical. Like your overhead extension example. Yes, or like fasting, okay? When fasting became a big thing, all of us are like, oh, just wait, the fasting supplements are gonna come. Like fasting. And it's gonna be the next diet. We were trainers, it was called, you're not eating, right? Now they call it something else. And so we would do episodes that say, fasting will make you fat. Does fasting make you fat? No, but can it? Yeah, maybe through some dysfunctional relationships with food, type of deal. But calling it out and saying, hey, guess what? This is what the industry's about to do with fasting. And here's why it's a terrible idea for a diet. And here's why you shouldn't do it for weight loss. And here's why it actually existed throughout all the history. And calling it out before it happens has been a really effective strategy for us. So just something that I think you probably do really well too. Yeah, I don't know if you notice it, because you guys are pretty young on TikTok right now, right? You started what, like a few months ago maybe? I mean, to be honest, nobody in here even knows what goes in our TikToks, so we've put our clips on there. Oh, okay, so you guys aren't aware of the animosity that happens to you guys on TikTok? Oh, dude, thank God, literally. That's actually, I am aware enough to know that I don't go on there because of that. Well, come on, exactly. We had already been doing this for a while. We thought we had proved that we're like one of the authorities in the space until we started TikTok, and I went- Not to the 16-year-old. Oh, fuck these guys. And so, literally, I looked at it one day, went through like how many negative shit comments we had on it, and I'm like, I can't go on this. You gotta take a little antidepressant after you look at it. Yeah, so I can't imagine someone in your spot or someone who has built and actually been in the trenches of TikTok, because I don't, I mean, we used to think YouTube was terrible, remember when we used to think YouTube was vicious? YouTube was pretty vicious to us when we first started, but nothing like TikTok is. I'm telling you, if I didn't have my Stoic philosophy to help me, I would be jumping off a bridge right now. I'd be taking a bath with a toaster, so yeah, so bringing your point up, like fasting makes you fat. What TikTok creators will do is they'll stitch that. Just that. They'll stitch it, and then they'll like, this guy's an idiot, this is wrong, this is what he is. And it's like, mm, I actually said that. I actually said that, but unfortunately, because that one little segment supported something and made you look like an authority. No context. No context at all. The one that you guys, they like, I got like 20 tags on one of your TikToks words, like you said, you use light weights to build muscle. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. People blew it. Yeah, I'm like, shh, guys, come on. I specifically don't stitch things because I'm not gonna feed into this, like, anyway. Yeah, context completely missing. This is like political game. So politicians do with each other. 100%. I mean, there's, if you can handle the negativity, there is some tremendous value, because to your point, that was one of the viral clips that was done of us on TikTok. And it does get a lot of eyeballs. And if it gets, let's say it gets 100,000 views or whatever like that, and we get 50,000 shit butts that are making negative comments, but I get 1,000 people that now listen to the show because they're curious about what we say. I mean, and if you actually listen to that whole conversation, you hear us completely explain the entire thing and you go, oh, shit, okay, that makes a lot of sense. And then if you actually go take that information and apply it to your own workout, it'll blow your fucking mind. So we know that, okay, it's a necessary evil, but the hardest part is actually dealing with the negativity. I can't imagine being a young, and thank God, I'm, you know, I'm into my 40s. Yeah, we're secure enough for the fuck's sure. But man, that would be- You're secure to last about these parents. Yeah, I remember how I was in my teens and twenties, I was very insecure young man. I can only imagine what the young audience has to deal with with this talk. It is, you know, you have people who say, oh, cyber bullying is not a real thing, dude, man, I've been on that side and I've seen it. And again, like I'm more secure than a 16-year-old, but as a formative child, man, that stuff is toxic. It is, it's okay. So you're about to be a father. Yeah, okay. Congratulations. Very, very exciting, all of us in here are, I was the one who thought he was not going to be for a very long time. So I'm a late father. Oh really, you too. Dude, yeah, when we weren't trying is when we had him. Oh, they're kidding. Wow. Did you not want to be a dad or were you not ready? No, no, no, it's not that. So we tried for like a year and nothing came of it. And so we just kind of like, eh, whatever, whatever happens happens, we kind of gave up. And like my wife stopped, like she would get disappointed every time it wouldn't happen. And so she kind of just like gave up. And like the minute that we stopped caring and I kind of accepted that I wouldn't be a dad. It was when she got pregnant. So it's anybody who's struggling with fertility, stop caring, you know. That's such a good point because especially on the wife side because if she's stressing about it like that, like I really, so we had the same story. So for a year we were trying, we said, well, it doesn't seem like it's going to happen. She had like this, this sis removed that we had, that she had on her that they didn't know that was on her for like nine years. And then like the next time. And we had already kind of like, oh, chocked it up. We're probably going to be the couple who doesn't have kids and we are okay with that. We enjoyed each other so much. And so then it eventually happened. But point of bringing that up. And this will definitely be on your mind 24 seven, if it's not already is raising this child in this time of TikTok and social media. And so what are some of the things that, and are you as a father already thinking about, you know, how you want to introduce this young infant into this digital world? It's interesting because you asked that question because I don't know how much we need to stay on fitness. But we don't, we don't have anywhere we want. So my wife and I came from a very religious families. Yes. Can you do a video on you stepping away from that? Yes, yeah. And in the specific religion that we were in, our entire identities and our entire futures and how we're supposed to raise families was constructed around that religion. So abolishing that kind of left us with this big gaping hole of how do we raise a child? And so we've had to have a lot of conversations and moments of meditating and studying of how are we supposed to raise a kid with these concepts of morals without a deity or without this concept of like a God? Like how do we, how do we do that? And so it's been, it's been on my mind and I don't, I don't have an answer yet. I hope I can come up. Ooh, what a very, okay. This is a really cool topic because, man, we just went to a, are you familiar with Jordan Peterson? Absolutely. Okay, so we just went to one of them. He's my second father, I swear. Okay, so okay, so you'll really appreciate this. So this was, check this out. Now you only got to hear this on his, this was a live thing that he did and he asked this question and he was asked if you could go, if you were raising a kid today, what would like an infant starting over, what would you go about and what would you do different? You wanna know what he said? Take my kids to church on Sundays. Wow. But his reasoning behind that I thought was brilliant. And it actually- Yeah, I've heard his reasonings behind this. Because it hits exactly what you're saying right now. Is, you know, kind of the whole, you know, throw the baby out with a bathwater type of mentality. It's just like, okay, we've agreed that we don't agree with a lot of what this religion wants us to adopt. And so we're done with it. But man, were there some really solid things that were come from that for raising a child and a family? And what are you gonna replace it with? And then what are you gonna replace that with? And so he went on this little tangent about, you know, these parents that, you know, like, I'm not gonna like indoctrinate my child with religion, you know, every Sunday and make them do that. And then he goes, okay, well then, what are you replacing it with on Sunday morning? And you know, and be honest about that. Like, let's be honest, if you're not doing that, are you doing something that is laying some sort of structure and moral fabric for them? Or are you just like watching Sunday morning cartoons or doing nothing at all? And so there is some value to that structure. And so how do you potentially do that? So it's a- And I don't have an answer yet, but I can't deny that religion has served as a heuristic to create good people, just like how diets serve as the heuristic to lose weight. That's all it is, is a heuristic. They all work on the same mechanism, caloric deficit. So I recognize that with religion that they work to create good people. They do their best to create good people. And so, again, I don't have an answer yet. And I hope I can come up with an answer. So- What's interesting is with human behavior is if you don't lay something down for your kids, that's then someone else will or something else will. I agree. That's the crazy thing. You know, that's something I wish I understood because I have two sets of kids. I have two kids from my first marriage and then two younger ones. And I became much more spiritual or religious with my second ones. And with my first ones, I wasn't. And what it did is it left an open door for other ideas and things to come in. And now that's something that I have to deal with and work through. So I think a lot of people are like, yeah, you know, they'll figure it out and they'll see what there's like. Listen, there's a lot of poisonous ideas, especially today. Yeah. And the irony coming from you too, and I don't know if you know this or not, but he was a staunch atheist before. So you have, we all have different backgrounds with all that too. So I grew up in a very structured and strict religious home with a lot of hypocrisy. And it was just, for me, I got into my- I'm sure that's even worse too. Yeah, so then I get, so I went the opposite direction. When I get into my 20s, and I'm like, I want nothing to do with that. Like I started to meet people that were outside of the religion that I thought were better people. So then why do I want to go down that same path? And so I went the opposite direction for probably a decade before I found myself coming back. But I came back in a different way. Like I don't go to church every Sunday or anything like that. But I do value some of the morals and values that come from what I learned as a child. And I have found as an adult that the years that I strayed away and was so like, ah, fuck it. I don't want nothing to do with it. How much headache and drama and shit that I had in my life. And the closer I actually live my life to some of the principles that are found in there, I find that I have a much more healthier, happier, fruitful life. And so I'm in this area of my life of like, okay, how do I take a lot of that and then foster that within my child and not allow my, because man, if I would have had my kid in the 20s, in my 20s, he would have gotten me in those areas where we're like, no, we ain't doing all that. That's not the way direction we're going. And so I think that would be a mistake. And then you have Sal, who again was, you know, atheist and then has come around different, Justin's similar, Doug is similar to me as far as like we were raised that way. But as fathers, it's really changed the way I look at it. I didn't look at it the same. When it was just me and I'm like, I've already gone through all that. I've already got the information and knowledge from it. So I feel, but then when you have another human being that you're taking care of and then thinking like, hmm, I may remove all of those things from his life, what am I going to replace it with to make sure? And then do I have the capacity and bandwidth to actually be disciplined enough to do that? Because as you will find out, entrepreneurship and raising a child. When you mentioned time management. Yeah. And you had told us earlier. Right. And so, you know, and of course, you know, someone like you will rise to the occasion and figure it out. But then there's those things like that that, you know, are important to you, but maybe on the back of your mind of, you know, oh, I should do that. I need to do that. And those tend to be the things that you probably, oh, disregard or I'll get around to it or whatever, which I think now it would probably be a mistake going. Then this is speaking from my personal journey. But I find that it's a really interesting conversation because I don't think that I have the full answer for you either. But I do think it's worth pondering and really thinking about because it sounds like you are thinking a lot. And that's the thing is I'm not dogmatically attached to any method or any, because I'm willing to accept I don't know. And I'm hoping to have some kind of an answer and I'm hoping to, because I wanna raise my child to be a leader among men. And that's what this generation, this world needs. And how do I do that without the structure that I was raised with? Because I see how terrible and toxic the structure was to me and how terrible it is to other people. So how do I do that? And I wanna raise him with morals. I want him to also be raised with finding his own answers to questions. I don't wanna give him the answers to questions. So yeah. Did you come from a big family? Big family, five kids. Oh wow. What are you? Yes, you said? Oldest. Oh, you're the oldest. I'm the oldest, yeah. No, he said he was the runt. Oh, the run of the litter in the farming community. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So are they all the big kid, big bunch of big siblings or what? Everybody? Yeah, they're all grown up. I got one who, I think he's 17 years old now. So he's the last one at home. So my parents will be empty nesters here pretty soon. So this is what that, so what'd you do on the farm? I mean, this is like legit farm work. We, yeah, so it was more crop. It wasn't any kind of like the animal stuff. So we did hay, we did straw, potatoes, corn, watermelon, beans, green beans. I'll tell you this right now. If you ever have the opportunity to have, you gotta do this right at the right time. So when the sun is barely coming over the horizon, have a green bean right off the stock. That's the sweetest, most delicious green bean you're ever having. Something about when the sun rises, the sugars extract into, from the stock into the green bean. Super tangent, but like that just reminded me like those are the best green beans I've ever had in my life. Oh, that's great. So I imagine you got your work ethic for learning. Yes. That on a farm. I'm so grateful that I was able to work on a farm because yeah, and I want, again, I'm gonna have my kids work on farms because there are again invaluable lessons that come from learning and get dirty and get hurt and fall off the back of a truck going five miles an hour. So there's less that you can learn. Dude, paying us like one day, like if it's harvest day, whatever it is where you start at like your, was it four or five a.m. And then work all the way to. Yeah, we had to get as much done because this in Utah so it gets hot. So we had to get as much done before the sun was in the, like at noon as possible. So we ended up, some days we had to get up at like three in the morning. Some of our hardest days were where we would have to gather up the bales of hay. And we didn't have balers that could do it for us. So we, you know, we had five or six kids out there grabbing them by the ropes, throwing up on the truck bed. And, you know, some big kids could do it like one swoop and I'm over here like. You're so good at cleaning. Yeah, right. So, and then also dealing with hay allergies on top of that. I wasn't very friendly, but that was there. They were rough days, man, but I learned a lot from this. And I wouldn't trade them for anything. What do you, how do you feel about the, what feels like, cause we've talked about this on the show. It feels like all of a sudden fitness, well nutrition, but fitness now is becoming politicized where nutrition, I've never seen this before. Now I know nutrition is one of those things that you could say, what do they say? Don't talk about religion or politics. Nutrition sometimes can be like that. People can be real weird about nutrition. But I mean, it's been politicized in the sense that all of a sudden, if you eat a particular way, you're a bad person, you're killing the earth, you're whatever, or toxic, you're toxically masculine. And now I've seen it with gyms and with fitness. It makes men toxic. You're fat phobic if you're fit. You're fat phobic. How do you feel about all this? I don't really care. Yeah. I'm sorry. That's a great attitude. I'm sorry. I've got other things to worry about. Like I'm too busy helping people and making money. I don't have time to worry about this other stuff. Okay. Well, that's a smart way to approach it. Yeah. For sure. Sorry, it wasn't made for good content. Yeah. No, it is a great attitude around it. And honestly, it's such bullshit that it doesn't even probably warrant your attention. I mean, I think that's a really good attitude about it. And instead of getting all scared that it's going to shift, it's just like, ah, it's clickbait bullshit. Yeah, I just don't die. I've seen this happen so much for like the last 10 years of like, you know, vegan, you have, if you're vegan, then you're doing it because you don't want animals to die. And like, but then like if you're carnivore, you're actually helping the planet by eating more animals. It's like, I don't, I don't really care. I'll just, I'll focus on something else for now. Things actually matter. I don't know. Do you, do you take your clients through different types of diets and what does it kind of look like when you onboard somebody nutritionally? Like how does that coaching work? So again, down to the qualification process, we kind of weed out a lot of the people who wouldn't fit into the specific generalized mold that we have for our coaching. So I don't work with people who are vegan. I don't know how to help you. I don't work with people who can't eat red meat. Again, I don't know how to help you. So a lot of the dieting principles that we use actually stem from the vertical diet. I worked with Stan for a long time and- Oh, I didn't know you worked with him. Yeah. I mean Stan, yeah, he's a good guy. Yeah, he's on a couple of my podcasts and met him a few times and he's awesome dude. Yeah. Super cool. Yeah, very nice guy. So I mean, if we want to talk about like religious dogmatism and diets, I think the vertical diet is the only real diet out there that serves my purpose and what we're trying to do with our clients. So we follow that general framework while still allowing for, it's more not completely attached to the vertical diet. As you know, it's rather strict on what you can and can't eat. We follow a more like 80, 20 approach. But depending on how literate the person is when it comes to nutrition and tracking calories, those kinds of things, it'll be on a sliding scale of how either dialed in and strict or how flexible they'll be. So does that answer your- Yeah, so when you, so like taking me through, I'm a client, I fill out the onboarding thing. I'm not a vegan, I'm open to like your coaching and training. Sure. How does, okay, how do you land on this is what you're going to eat? This is the calories. Is there a process that you go through? Do you ride out? Does every coach ride out a custom diet for that person or is there some sort of, let me see what you do first? Like what is the process look like? Yeah, so when most people come into my program, they've already applied the dieting principles I want them to apply for my free stuff. Oh, okay. Yeah, so again, it kind of sets us up for success so that we can just hit the ground running, we can get to work. So what we do is we first, we use a calorie calculator one time for the entire lifetime of that client to figure out their maintenance. That's it. And then we have them eat at maintenance and we call this the prime phase because what I'm looking to do is prime you for a successful fat loss transformation. You have to prove to me that you can handle a caloric deficit before we actually get you into a caloric deficit. So you need to prove to me that you can stick to your meal plan. You can eat the foods that I want you to eat. You can stay consistent as many days out of the week as you possibly can before we can pull the food down. Cause if you can't stick to it when the food is high, you're not going to stick to it when the food low. So we start there. And then once they've actually proven to us that they can handle this, a lot of them actually end up losing weight when they do that for some reason, which is cool. If you can get them to eat more calories and they lose weight, you look like a wizard. Doesn't always happen, but it's really cool when it does. So we have them eat at maintenance. They don't really lose weight. They maintain it as expected. And then we drop them into kind of a calorie deficit. So we pull calories from primarily fats and carbohydrates. We keep protein kind of at the same number throughout the entire diet. And then what we do is kind of an undulating model of dieting. So we only get them to lose about 10% of body weight at a time. So because from what I've seen both anecdotally and empirically, past 10%, we start to see some negative things happen, both physiologically and mentally. So we lose 10%. We go into a little bit of a diet break depending on how long the dieting phase was. We'll determine how long the break is. We'll bring calories back to maintenance, lose another 10%. And so it's that kind of undulating model of maintenance 10%, maintenance 10%. And then once the job is done, we've only done half the job, losing the weights only half the job. The next thing that we do is kind of a reverse diet approach. I don't really call it a reverse diet because it's not that progressive model of slowly adding back calories. I just want to get back to maintenance as quickly as I can. And then from there, we teach you how to take what you've learned and apply it to real life without having to stick to a meal plan for the rest of your life. So that we... Two to eating type of deal. Yeah, so we've dieted you down and we've dieted you out and I never want to see you ever again. So... That's a great approach. Cool, yeah. Yeah, how's this success rate with that? It's pretty good. If you follow it. If you follow it, that's the problem is a lot of people don't have patience. Well, yeah, so we have a lot of people who don't have the patience to finish the job, but then we also don't have people of patience that they lose the weight and then they think they're done. But it's like, hey, hang on, man. I know you're excited. I know you're ready to go, but we're not done yet. We still need to get you back up to maintenance and show you how to maintain this and most importantly, get you off the meal plan because I don't want you on the meal plan for the rest of your life. But I can't. Nobody's gonna be on a meal plan unless you're an orthorexic. Well, unless you're like us. My fitness pal is our best friend, right? So I don't want you to have to do that. You had mentioned I won't work with a vegan or somebody who can't eat red meat. What are some other easy disqualifiers when people go through? If your gym is purple. That's a horse that doesn't have a barbell. Yeah, that's in the marketing. If your gym is purple, please don't apply. Doesn't really say that? It says that, yeah. No, it doesn't. Pull up my application right now. Shut up, that's hilarious. It says, do you have access to a barbell? Hint, if your gym is purple, please log out. Like it's- Oh my God. That smells horrible. That's a disqualifier, man. You have to have access to a barbell or rack on a bench. I respect that. Oh my God. I love that. I love that. Well, good deal, man. This has been a lot of fun, brother. Yeah, I'm glad we had you on the show. Good luck with everything you're doing. We hope this episode brings you a lot more people. Yeah, that's fun. Yeah, we'll continue to support that. Yeah, we'll stay in contact because, you know, again, our goal is to work with a lot of good people and hopefully we can drown out all the shitty stuff that's out there. And for the audience, I think that right after this, I believe that you're shooting with our guy to do a bunch of clips so you guys will be on Mind Pump TV so you get a chance to see some of- Some fitness stuff. Yeah, some fitness stuff from you. Yeah, it'll be cool. Thanks for coming on, man. Yeah, I appreciate you guys. Thank you. Today we're gonna teach you everything you need to know to build a strong, well-developed chest. When I think of weak points and areas that I struggled with developing for a really long time, chest was up there with the- Yeah, it was for me. It was for me for sure. I got more caught up in the weight I could lift versus how I was developing my body. I think it's one of the most challenging muscles to develop for most people because the form and technique.