 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, mind pump, with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Man, was this a little heavy, a little fun, a little bit of kind of all over the place. We touched some third rails. We had told some like really dark stories. Like we kind of went all over the place. I was kind of strapped my seatbelt in. We first met Courtney. Well, actually I'd seen Courtney before I met her. She had, there was a viral video going around Facebook of a very muscular female smashing a watermelon between her legs, and it went viral. And then, you know, that was it. And much later, maybe, I don't know, months later, Adam and I were doing a talk over at the LA Fit Expo. And one of our fans, one of our favorite fans, Iza, amazing, that's her name. She walks up to say hi to us and brings with her her friend, Courtney Olson. So Courtney walks up, and Iza's pretty buff too. So these two girls come up and they're built. And they're strong women. Instantly, Sal and I are intimidated. Yeah, right away I'm like, hey. You guys could beat us up. Normally I feel confident in that situation. I can back Sal up, but I'm in a boot, I'm on crutches. I am so disappointed we didn't have Sal arm wrestle. I know, what a missed opportunity. It'll happen, and it'll happen right now. Arm wrestling, yeah, that would have been great. I just want it, because she was strong. But anyway, they walk up and immediately you're like, oh, shit, these chicks are built, right? And then I recognized Iza. So we're like, hey, what's going on? She's like, let me introduce my friend Courtney. And at first we didn't recognize her, but she definitely stands out. She's got all this charisma, all this energy. And then she's like, oh, I'm the one that smashed the watermelon between my legs. And right away I'm like, that's you, I know exactly what. So we talked to her for like 10 minutes and she went controversy like out the gates. Like she's not afraid of saying whatever she's like. Yeah, she came in hot and it was great. Dude, so right away when she leaves, Adam and I are like, we need to get on the show because this girl is entertaining and we'll talk about whatever and this could be really good. And I'm glad we did, we had it on the show and she talked about her personal story. Dark, there's some dark moments in her story. I mean, she's very open. She does not hesitate saying exactly what happened to her or the stuff that she's gone through. She was addicted to meth at one point, alcoholic, found resistance training. She did the whole muscle worship thing. I mean, it's a very interesting episode for sure. Some shocking moments in this episode. And then we touched it and danced on some third rails and I went off a little bit. So I'm sure some of you guys will like that or some of you will hate that. We'll hate that. We'll see what happens. The controversy will love this. Yeah, so now you can find Courtney on Instagram. It's Courtney spelled with a K, K-O-R-T-N-E-Y, underscore Olson, O-L-S-O-N. She also has a YouTube channel, Courtney Olson. And her website is girl.com. How many hours is that? G-R-R-R-L.com. And then they have this event that they do in Vegas. It's like this empowerment event. I think it's April 28th and 29th and I believe you can get the information for it on that website that I had just said. Also, I do wanna mention this month, you get free access to our forum, our private forum, which is gold for enrolling in any of our bundles. Now bundles are multiple maps programs put together and discounted. And they're put together for specific goals. For example, we have a sexy athlete bundle which is like, it's about sculpting your body but also having functional athletic performance. And then we have a super bundle which is like a year of exercise programming. Any of our bundles, enroll in them this month and get free access to the forum. Or if you're just interested in enrolling in an individual program, you can look at like maps anabolic, which is for strength and size. Maps aesthetic, which is for sculpting the body or competing in bodybuilding your bikini. Maps performance, which is for athletes or for people who wanna have functional athletic performance. Maps anywhere if you wanna work out at home or without equipment or if you're on the go. Or maps prime and prime pro for correctional exercise. Or if you're a personal trainer, tremendous value in those programs for your clients. So you can check all of that out at mindpumpmedia.com. And go over to our YouTube, make sure to. We did a fun kind of little silly video. Oh yeah. So check it out. She did some interesting stuff on that. Yeah, man. We're trying to introduce all kinds of interesting things on YouTube. So just make sure you guys are subscribed if you're not already cause we're definitely adding some entertainment. We're adding more educational stuff and a lot of these interviews we continue now from bringing in interviews. We'll take it on to YouTube. Exactly. So without any further ado, here we are talking to Courtney Olson. The boys and I were super excited to have you down here. I mean, you got fucking incredible energy. I mean, I'm just, I'm attracted to other humans that have that too. Don't shave their armpits? That too. Yeah, that too. I saw the poster earlier for sure. That's not quite my gem, but I'm cool with it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, you know what I'm saying? I'm cool with it though. I dig it. Sal does. Yeah, he's kind of the hippie of the group. That's where pheromones accumulate, clowns. So you gotta have the... Anyway, so we met you at the... Was it the LA Fit Expo? Yeah. And one of our... Issa. Issa. One of our... Issa. Issa, I always do... I've been calling her Issa for a year. I know. Issa. Damn it. It's fucked up. Damn it. I am the worst at names. So we love her. She's been following us forever. I think that was our first time actually meeting her, maybe second time. She loves... She has got the gift of evangelism. She's like, you have got to go meet these guys. Oh, we love her. So she brings you over and right when you meet you and your energy is just... It's obviously contagious. And we're talking... My cold's contagious too, by the way. Oh my God, we're terrible. No, I'm just kidding. I got on antibiotics yesterday, so... And we're looking at you and I'm like, this is the girl that crushed the watermelon. Yeah, boy. In the video. I didn't put it together until afterwards. Yeah, yeah. I recognize her from somewhere and we're talking and then when you said it, I was like, ah, that's where I recognize you from. That's the one. Yeah, you're like really strong. I am and I'm not like... What do you mean? I was just... That's good luck. Is it a good luck? That is a good luck. Okay. Oh, they're just there. I just had to. They're not really comfortable. That's my alter ego shades. Is that it? Okay. So I'm really excited to dive into your story and I know you've got all kinds of stuff. So I don't know where we should start if we go back before your fitness journey or if that's part of it, how you got into fitness. But kind of take us off from when you first got into it or what led you, I should say, into fitness. Okay, so I'll give you the kind of semi-condensed version because I'm a little bit of an egomaniac and I love to hear myself talk. But I also know that... Welcome to the group. Yeah, and I'm in this chair and you gave me this cold brew nitro that just I'm jacked. So, you know, just that. Give me the wind up for it. Don't worry. We'll interrupt you. We have no problems. Yeah, please interrupt me if it's too long. I have a feeling it won't be boring, but... So the full backstory grew up. You guys know where Eureka is? Yes. Yeah, Eureka Tweeka. Well, technically Garberville. Way up there. Yeah, way up there. Grew up there out in the backwoods. You know, mom was an alcoholic. You know, who wasn't snorting Coke in the 80s, right? So I was born in 81. Grew up up there, product of divorce. Grew up hating my body, absolutely hating my legs. Could never fit in any of my cousin's clothes or my friends and I'd often stay over at their house because my parents would work out of town. And so I just always felt like uncomfortable in my skin. But as a product of divorce, or do any of you come from divorced families? Yes, my father committed suicide and my mom married into an abusive relationship and then divorced, so... Yes, okay. So a lot of us do and we don't realize how much of an impact that has on us as young people. So I didn't know that at the time, obviously. But as a result, do any of you have an alcoholic parent or grandma or anyone in the family? Yeah, so it affects a lot of people. I didn't realize the impact that all this shit would have in my life at the time. But as a result from all of this, by the time I got to junior high, I started counting calories. And then by the time I got to high school, went down the path of anorexia and bulimia. And then by the time my senior year of high school rolled around, I found methamphetamines. And I mean, I was the all-around top-notch perfect kid. I was going to Stanford on a full-ride scholarship. I was in a... What was it for? I was in a, I don't know. No, no, what would you full-ride scholarship for? No, I was just going to Stanford. Oh, wow. I just say that as part of the story. Okay, well, that's a cool part. Yeah, that's cool. I was going to Stanford on a full-ride scholarship because it sounds good. And I was in a Christian rock band. Me and Jesus Christ were tight, right? Yeah, so I was captain of the cheerleading team, started the first girls golf team and like nobody could figure it out. And then the associate student body president, but I found math and I kept doing it because I lost a bunch of weight. And so nine months down the road, one of my teachers finally figured it out and he said, why are you doing it? And I was like, we're talking about... And I said, because I was losing, I wanted to lose weight. So he put me in contact with this drug counselor and he sent me to a guy who was an ex-Golden Gloves fighter, this 72-year-old man named Bob Ross. And he said, right, I know I have the perfect guy. He's got a boxing class. He'll help you, you know, he'll sort you out and so on and so forth. So went to this guy's boxing class and he took a liking to me very much so, right? So he said, I'm going to make you my last prize fighter before I retire. I want to come over to my house, we'll order some equipment, we'll watch some tapes and so on and so forth. And I was three days clean and I was 17 and got to his house and when I got there, he had a cognac, a cypher full of cognac and not realizing at the time that alcohol, drugs, same thing, same difference. So took a drink, woke up and this man was inside of me. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I know a bit intense to start out a story but it's a big part of the story of how I got to where I was, right? So woke up, that was a bit shocking and got him off of me, got out of there and from that point moving forward, I just went down this extremely dark spiral path of, cause he never called me and was like, oh my God, please don't tell anybody or, you know, are you okay? Did you talk to anybody at this time? No, and I assumed it was my fault. I was like, I must have let him on. You know, I shouldn't have taken the drink, this, that and the other. So from that point, it was just like this really big downward spiral. I wound up at Sonoma State. So that's Sonoma State University and that's when my alcoholism started kicking off. So I was like showing up to call like all my classes instead of in my coffee cup, I'd have like a screwdriver. You know, like I just thought that's what you did at, you know, 19. And so I just pissed away all of those years, got through a couple of years of college, DUIs, like very angry individual because I didn't realize that I was like walking directly into my mom's footsteps because I didn't know anything about alcoholism. I didn't know that it's hereditary, it's learned behavior. You know, so I was like literally just walking into her footsteps and developing this dis-ease. And from there, got back on meth and it was just this horrific battle on and off until I got to, I was 27 and finally got clean and sober for one of the last times but then I got hooked on pain pills because I hurt my back because I somehow wound up in the muscle fetish world. Oh, so during this period of time you're still training, lifting? Yeah, so I started, so I got that, I've always been lifting. Like I've been obsessed with muscle and wanting to be buff since I was a little girl. Like my first memory of, you know, people say, oh would you ask Santa for Christmas? I was like a fucking weight bench. That's awesome. You know, like I am. Now, have you always trained naturally or were you enhanced in a lot? There was like a two week period where I took Anivar. That's it? That's it. So, because you have very, I mean, there's muscle building genes that are very rare and you have them where you look like you build muscle very well, you obviously work hard at it but you also look feminine and that's a very hard combination that you don't necessarily see a lot. It's either like really muscular and masculine or not. I've always been a big girl, that's the thing. So when I was on that for a few weeks, I freaked the fuck out because I broke out. And that's one thing that I've always had really clear skin and I broke out really bad but my shoulders went because I've always had massive legs and then my upper half was always quite smaller. And then the last show I did, which was the end of 2015, what's the estrogen blocker? Oh, Novodex? Yes, that stuff. I took that for the first time and I took Collin for the first time. And that jacked me up. That was not good. And I never, as far as competing, which one of you is the competitor? Yeah, so doing all of the cuts and all of that stuff, like even though I first four shows, I never weighed my food. I just wasn't like that proper. I just wanted to go out there and do my thing. So you're doing the muscle worship thing. Yes, so I was, okay. So I know I'm jumping around a little bit. I'm a bit jet lagged. Just got back from the Arnold. It's all right, we're gonna piece it all together. Yes, that's right. Like, did I tell you to strap your seatbelt on? I see only two of you have a helmet on. I got a helmet on. Okay, so they're right in that joke. So I got into lifting, like I always had weights in my room through school and stuff, you know, like through high school and everything and my dad and my brother had a garage gym growing up, you know, so I'd go out there. Do you remember Samantha Fox? Oh yeah. Yeah, right? So I think that's why I'm bisexual. I don't know. Because of her? Because of her. And they'd always have these like, you know, all the like 80s hot posters of the chicks out in the garage or whatever, it was random. I'd go out there and, you know, try and lift weights with him. Cause I wanted to be like my brother so much growing up. He was eight years older than me. I always tell people this, but I used to try and pee standing up. Because I wanted to be like him so much. My best friend did that too. She would pee right next to me as well. Get this nitro coffee out of here. So I always had been around, you know, wanting to build muscle and everything. I was the first, you know, I'm not the first. I was the only girl on like a, you know, a T-ball team with 70 boys. I had most of my friends growing up. I was a tomboy, you know, we were riding four wheelers and all this kind of stuff and monster truck. And so I've always been into strength or, you know, like being one of the boys. But as far as like, I didn't start properly training until I got to college. And that was kind of like, this was what I'm going to do to stay off meth. But I picked up alcohol. And then that was when back in the day, Winnie-Fedra, of course, was totally legal and twin-labbed. Was it twin-lab? Was that the brand? You know, Rip Force? Yeah, yeah. Some diet pill that, whoa. You know, I'd sort of be super hungover. And if Fedra is like chemically similar to methamphetamine, in fact, I think they make meth out of Fedra. Out of Fedra, yeah. I'm not a chemist. I know there's... That's the word on the street, I don't know. You've watched, what's that show? Breaking meth. Yes, thank you. I can't watch that. It's too much of a trigger for me. I'm like, oh, I can't do it. But, so yeah, that's when I started to training. I'd go into the gym. And so it was like a tricep pull down and then the leg machine. And I would go in there like every day and just train, train, train. And that is when I started my journey. But unfortunately, after a series of, you know, getting a DUI and near-death experiences and not really, I didn't realize I was an alcoholic. I just, I don't know. How did you realize it? At one point, did you realize this is a problem? I can't remember how I wound up in this woman's office, but it was at the university and she gave me a book and it was called Drinking a Love Story. And it was essentially this woman's autobiography about drinking and it kind of resonated a little bit. And I kind of started to figure out because I was so angry. Like I would shit on the hood of cop cars. And it would take- Wait a second. I wanna hear that story. Oh no. I wanna hear this story. I was so angry. Like, and that's when I got the KO tattoo. So if you look at a lot of my old videos that like this Prince tattoo is relatively new and chaos is underneath here. They're my initials. But it was like my alter ego because I thought I was gonna be like this big boxing champion and that was why I went down the path that I did and did all this methamphetamines and stuff so I could meet this boxing instructor who is gonna turn me into a world champion and then actually turn me into something else, right? So when I got to school it was like, I had the KO tattoo and it was like as soon as I drank it was just like, I'm KO bitch. Like I try and fight like a 90 year old woman with a walker. Oh wow. You know, I'm like, what you looking at bitch? Like Courtney, she's 90 with a walker. Calm down. Nobody's looking at you sideways. I was just nuts. So, you know, I fucked the police. And even though I was like, criminal justice was my area of focus. The irony. Yeah, so whenever, cause I'd been. That's how you got your scholarship. Yeah, exactly. And when I went off to school, I was like, yeah, I'm gonna go in the FBI and I wanna bust every drug addict out there and, you know, I'm gonna change the world and mentor all these young girls and stuff. So you just, you just a lot of anger. A lot of internal anger. A lot of internal anger. And so I took that out through drinking and not realizing that that's what I was doing. And I was talking about like drinking beer in the shower at like 10 o'clock in the morning and then I'd go train. You know, like I just didn't, I didn't know cause there's not enough education around it. Even though I'm, you boys remember dare. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like, what? Just say no. Just say no. Most ineffective campaign all the time. Exactly. You know, tell me to do no. Watch me motherfucker, you know. So it was really, it was a, it was a difficult time but that's when I started training. But again, I, after I got my second DUI, dropped out of school, moved back home to Eureka and then I started drinking and smoking meth. And that's when I just went off the rails. Like I turned into a bit of a, I had like a sawed off shotgun. About how old are you right here? Low rider, like I was 19, 20. Okay, you're still young. So it was the day after I turned 21, the legal drinking age, cause of course I had a fake ID that whole time. I was like, I need help. I'm supposed to be the first female president of the United States, which I'm sure we could all appreciate right now. And, and that's when I went to rehab. And that's when I learned about the dis-ease. I say dis-ease on purpose cause people hear the word disease. And at least I do. I think of like a crusty dick that's about to fall off, right? I don't necessarily think of that. Okay, so is it just me? But now I do. Okay, I'm sorry. I should put the aviators back on and hit the nitro. But it's, yeah, I just donned on me one day. I'm like, oh dis, opposite of ease. Dis-ease, you got a dis-ease. It says, cause there's so much stigma around mental health. Cause I know you guys talk about, you know, because it's mind and body and motherfucking soul. So as far as like the mental aspect of it, cause I find that most bodybuilders are, especially with women, have something they're running from, you know. Almost all of them. Yeah, it's rape, it's some kind of trauma. It's body image issues or whatever or all of the above. Yeah, so anyway. Did you figure out for yourself what it was that was at the root of your anger and self-destructive behavior? So before the rape, I know this is such a loaded word for a lot of people. And I'm just apologize for jumping around. Hope you have your seatbelt on. Stories are more fun that way. Okay, cool. So once I got into recovery, and like I said, it was a lot in and out a lot, right? So it took me a long time to actually stay clean and sober. So I have eight years without a drink and I'm coming up on eight years without a drug June 14th, but I, you know, would go in and out. And in 12 step recovery, you do a lot of work on yourself. You know, you got to sit down, you got to take your inventory, you got to look at, you know, what is your drivers? Why are you doing this? So on and so forth. So I had done a lot of work around that stuff and knew that my body image issue and like growing up and feeling like I hated my legs and I never fit in and it wasn't good enough. And obviously having an alcoholic mother and so on and so forth. But the real interesting thing is, is when I, I'm gonna jump forward and then I'll come back and finish up the rest of the story. But when I had moved to Australia, I was living on the Gold Coast and I met this guy named Tony Priddle who was a ex-NRL player. So he played for St. George. Do you guys follow rugby? Mm. I know that all blacks. Yeah, so that's rugby union. And then there's rugby league, which is more like an F, more like our NFL basically. It's like without pads on, it's ridiculous. Like, wow, this is crazy. No helmets anyways. And he got into mind work. And he's like, we did our first CrossFit session together and he's like, yeah, do you want to do a session? And I was like, yeah, let's do this. And so he, I don't, they call it subconscious psychology was the coin they termed. And you get in this meditative state and then basically you connect to your subconscious mind and you ask series of questions to find out what your number one limiting belief is. And we do the session and I find out, so we get into it and they say, what is your number one limiting belief? And I said, I am fat. And it's basically whatever comes out of your mouth is the truth. So when you're in this state, you're not really thinking of much because I have an extremely difficult time meditating. But this worked. I could show you later if you want to. So it was just cost you $500 and blow job. I'm joking. So I got in this meditative state and I came out, I am fat. And he said, okay, so how old were you when you had that thought? I said, I was seven. And he said, okay, tell me a little bit more about that. And I was waiting for the words to come out to say something about my mom, right? Cause as women and men have body image issues too, just as much as women, right? But we talk about it and you guys don't. And that's why you guys have a higher suicide rate. So one and so forth. So I knew I had seen a lot of psychologists and stuff while in therapy and trying to figure my shit out. And one psychologist said, you know, your mom growing up as an alcoholic must have said some mean things to you and you just need to cut that anchor off and move forward. And so I was waiting for those words to come out. And then all of a sudden I said pedophile. And I just sat there in this state. And I'm like, no words are coming in and no words are going out. Cause you know, the mind is constantly just self-talk. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, hmm, kind of like observing. And I'm like, what could that possibly mean? And then all of a sudden the words just started spewing out of my mouth. When I was seven years old, my best friend growing up, her older brother Gabe took me off into the woods and touched me in some inappropriate places. And it just came out. And I'd legit completely had forgotten about it. Buried it. Buried it. It was mind blowing. Like legitimately mind blowing. And what we worked out. So this subconscious psychology has a piece of spirituality, right? Because we are, we believe just souls having a human experience, yeah? Cause we often are so in the physical world that we don't often look at the metaphysical world. And so the other piece of it is asking your higher self, your soul, your spirit, whatever the fuck you want to call it, right? Your guide, what have you, your intuition, what the message was. And what we worked out was that was the first time I'd ever stopped, I stopped listening to my higher self. Cause my higher self, my intuition was like, no, don't go off into the woods with him. And as a result, I did and got violated. And it wasn't anything too terribly bad, right? Cause there's so much that goes on with that stuff. You know, you start looking about pedophilia and people talking about pizza gate. And you know, people are like, aw, conspiracy theories. Like we won't go there cause I'll fucking talk your ear off. But, you know, it was just, you know, touching still. It's not okay, but I'm just saying it's, some people hear that word and they lose their shit. But anyway, from that point moving forward, I created this image of myself needing to be ripped up and strong in order to be protected and feel worthy. Because. Like create a shell. Yeah. Cause if I don't see muscle, like right now I haven't worked out in a week. And to me, that's a really long time. Like generally speaking, I mean, I might miss a day. I don't have a couple of days. Doing something, even if it's like a seven minute workout or whatever, I'll do something. Fucking hundred air squats. I don't know if I'm on the road. Like I will move. But it's been over, it's been over a week. And, the fuck was I doing? What did the healing process from these things that you're uncovering with yourself, what did that look like? Cause you said eight years sober. How did you get to that? Cause I'm sure there's people listening right now and I get the sense from you that you feel like part of your calling is to help others. Well, you turned, at one point you turned your weakness into a strength. When did that happen? Because the image that I see and that I know now is this woman who's not afraid to get down in her thong and smash a watermelon and it shows any sort of stretch mark on herself. Doesn't, you know what I'm saying? Like where did you go from someone who had poor self-image to also making it a strength? I know, cause we got jumped around a bit, hey. So how the process went and it's still a journey. It never, and this is what I tell people like, you know, people that follow me on Instagram. I made a post a couple of weeks ago where I'm like, look, if you just started following me, just know, like, this is a daily thing. I haven't always been this way. I still will catch myself in the mirror sometimes and be like, fuck my ass is so flat. Or, you know, I'm, was developed, all right, was diagnosed with Graves disease a year ago and as a result like my skin is kind of like sagging a bit more and like just, I'm aging. And, you know, so those thoughts keep coming up, but this process is constantly, it's really becoming aware and just understanding of how programmed we are through advertising and media. So backing up to the muscle fetish story, okay. So I was, and this is kind of funny cause I was an internet sales manager for a car dealer group with eight dealerships. And I was on the internet and I was on Craigslist. I was looking for some side jobs. I was looking for some side jobs, okay. And I saw this ad and it was like muscular calf video shoot. Athletes in ballerina's need apply. And I was like, what the hell is this? This, certainly this must be some kind of porn or something, that's weird. So of course I went and took a picture of my calves. I wanted to find out and sure enough, this guy got back to me and he was like, yeah. So basically I just film you like flexing your calves and that's essentially it. And I was like in a hundred bucks. Oh yeah, that's easy. Yeah. I was like, yeah, okay. I could never do that job. Not because I can't do the job, but because my calves are small. Yeah. Of course, yeah. Everybody jabs at these guys. Yeah. Well, yeah. Get my leg programmed. It's 50% off code art off. That's a beautiful plug. Yeah. Thanks, shameless. Commission, please. Yeah. I'll split it with you. And So a hundred bucks. A hundred bucks, thank you. So you go, you shoot. And he, yeah. So this was my introduction into this quote unquote muscle fetish world, right? Cause at that point, like being in the gym, I've never seen, I never like I saw women bodybuilders on magazines and stuff, but I didn't like know a single thing about the rest of the world, right? I had no clue. Cause I grew up wanting to be a size zero. I wanted to be Kate Moss. I wanted to wear bongo jeans. Oh, bongo jeans. You know what I'm saying? I couldn't fit in with any of that. Yeah, vans. I wanted to match my vans to my bongo jeans like my friend. And I couldn't never do that. I had to wear, you know, leggings. Cause anyway. So So you do the calf shoe. Do the calf shoe. See that there is this whole entire world. Thank you for keeping me on track, by the way. I got you. This whole entire world of men out there who wanted to pay a lot of money for videos of random stuff. So arm wrestling dudes. That's how I got into arm wrestling. So my boyfriend at the time who I used to refer to as Bubba cause I would write a blog about all this stuff would be in most of my videos. So we'd arm wrestle and I'd be like, you little bitch, you know, like so they want to see like a woman. They want to see dominant. Dominant woman, but a strong, but an actually strong like, you know, Amazonian type figure, you know, there's all these different genres. So it was like arm wrestling. Wrestling, that's how I got into BJJ. And then like lift and carry. So guys that want to get picked up and carried around, I'm sure a lot of women who are listening to this are going to be like, that's why that Indian dude keeps asking me how much weight I can, like if I could bench press him or like they would want to get through, you know, like fireman carry or piggyback or, you know, doing calf raises with him sitting on the back or. So crazy. Well, you know what? I remember when I told you about my experience with this when I had never seen it until I got into bodybuilding. That's what I'm saying, right? When I got into bodybuilding, all of a sudden I started getting these inboxes and people were offering me 250 bucks and all I had to do was like flex my bicep a bunch of time. I was like, what? Smash an apple with your bicep. I almost did it. I tell the guys, if I need some money at the time, I would have done it. You know what I'm saying? Like flex my bicep a bunch of times. Like I can do that. What was the thing with Kai Grain and something about? Oh, he actually had sex with a grapefruit, I think in the video. I bet like that was probably some kind of Oh, I don't know, but it might have been some kind of request. Oh, I'm sure. There are, and I mean, I was just mind blown. I had a guy- So would you go and do this like, so they pay you and then you do things for them or would you film them and then sell the video? Make the videos. And it would go on this website, right? So it's called clips for sale, not clit clips. Thanks. Just want to clarify. Just want to clarify. Totally different. Appreciate that. Very different website. I just want to clarify. Everything, and you know how to get asked for like, like, you know, calf worship and then scissoring was another one. They want to see me choke my boyfriend out with my legs, crush things. And that's how I got into smashing watermelons which were my legs. Oh, shit. Some guy, so, you know, it paid me to make a video. And then, so I got paid to make the video and then put it on the store. Residual income. Okay, young people, just talking to you about residual income. Entrepreneurship. I love this. You don't need to go to university and then have a bunch of college girls. Monetize your skills. And then, right? So just keeping it real. You don't have to know what you need to do with the rest of your life right now at the age of 15. If you're 15 and listening to this, you might be too young. You might not be, you make the call. But anyway, I'm just saying, there's a lot of other things. The world is not exactly what you think it is. And I'm talking about like, I would get requests from rock stars like federal judges, pediatricians. Just any kind of college kids. So I'm starting. So you went kind of deep into this. I went deep, dawg. Wow. Deep. See now, this is very interesting. Were you like, I did it? Yes. And I'm the type of person where I'm like the fucking add to where I'd be like, why not? What's, what's see what this is all about? You're saying like, I wouldn't fuck a grape. Were you like a slave? No, no, no, no. And there's plenty of women in the industry that do. Like, you know, if you want me to sweat in my socks and send them to you, my dirty socks, yeah, no problem, fine. People pay for that. Yeah, dude. Okay, so check it out. Like, I always miss the spot of my armpit because my muscle, you know, right? So I always miss that one spot. But they want me to grow my, this one guy to grow my armpit hair out, wear a sports bra, sweat in it, and then send it off to the United Emirates. Shut the fuck up. He'd pay me $400. 400 bucks? Adam, relax. I know. This is a carp, okay. I think you just found a manager. I literally, two days ago, we had a conversation on here and we just found this article about somebody, Sal, you read this, about people. Fart fetish. Fart fetishes. People paying money. You can fart in your face. I'm like, that's crazy. I've been. That's a lot of money I've wasted. That's all these fucking lazy kids that can't get a job. Last week alone. Yeah, right, right. Get an Uber, fart on somebody's face, get his sweat in the fucking sweat. Make it happen. I'm losing money. Come on. Come on. Fucking jobless, come on. Anything that you can possibly think of. Theoretically, I'm a millionaire. Yeah. But the thing of it is, is what I started to realize, right? So here I am spending my entire life wanting to be a size zero to fit in those bongo genes to such a point that I would use drugs and alcohol and do anything, starve myself to realize that there are men out there and I never got a request from a woman. And obviously what I've worked out is you guys are all programmed to like different stuff, but you all don't talk about it with each other because you're afraid you're gonna get labeled or called gay by your friend or you fucking weirdo. Because it's not normal. It's not mainstream. Now if on the cover of Vanity Farrell, the sudden Kim Kardashian grew out her armpit hair and braided it, which there was some stupid trend where women were like. Coloring it. Yeah, for a minute. And it was all cool. And then that went away. But like, this was an ongoing thing. You know, then that would be seen as beautiful. So, but it's weird, right? And at first I was like, this is weird. And then after a while I was kind of like, why is it weird? And I started to question it. And I'm like, holy shit, the world is really not what it appears to be. Now, are you a celebrity in this world? Are you like one of the more well-known muscle worship? Yeah, well, I didn't spend very long in it. So, I was in there for, I don't know, like two years or something like that. What's a decent runtime? Yeah, I was, because I'm a bit of a ham on camera, you know? I like to ham it up. Play it up. Yeah, ham it up a bit. And, but I was really interested in- We're gonna make one of these videos with Justin today, just so you know. Yeah, yeah. I'm down. I want her to scissor you, bro. The eagle has landed. Carry him around the gym. Well, like when I did the- You have to check with the wife on that one. I did. No, I want to teach her. I want to teach her. Oh, wow. This would be a group effort. I'm such an entrepreneur. Like, this is like my five-year plan. This is the, the 10-year plan is a dog rescue and living off the grid. If the planet is around by then, but the five-year plan is like showing women how to do this stuff and like fire up your marriage and yeah, it's called bedroom boom. Anyway, I shouldn't reveal all that right now, but I'll teach her how. But yeah, so- So you're kind of a ham on the camera. People are loving you, getting shared a lot. But I was interested in what was driving these guys and I would ask and I would be like, where, how did this start? Like, where did this come from, you know? And just listening to the stories and, you know, you guys are wired differently. Men are wired to procreate. And if you were all interested in the same thing, there would be a bunch of Paris Hilton's walking around. You know? That would be nightmare. Yeah, I would, I don't know. He's our own, but that's not what I do. Right. Yeah, the thing is humans in general are very complex. We're very cognitive. Obviously we have a self-aware consciousness different than animals. Yes. And so what happens is when you take fundamental, fundamental behaviors or instincts, if you will, like food, sleep, sex, you know, whatever, when you take those fundamental instincts and you apply them towards these extremely complex, self-aware creatures, they look very differently. So like look at the culture surrounded around food. Like we obviously food is necessary. And it's so necessary in fact that we've created all these cultures around it. So we have different ways of preparing food and different flavors and different, and you have different disorders with food and different, you know, normal, you know, attitude sort of food. And the same thing is with sex. And one of the things that men are wired for is novelty. Novelties important because on a very basic biological scale, you know, men can impregnate how many women in a nine month period, right? A woman can only get pregnant once in nine months. So novelty becomes very important and that novelty can get expressed in many, many different ways. And obviously there's nothing like if nobody's getting hurt, who cares? Yeah, there's nothing wrong with it. But you're right, like there's a lot of differences between men in terms of what, you know, gets them off. And they call it a fetish because it's different than what is socially. It's not missionary position. Exactly, that's right. And my dad used to, I remember one time I met him in San Francisco and I like had cashed in and I dumped out a bunch of bills and he was like, what are you doing? What's going on? And I was like, no, you don't understand, dad. I get paid like to make these videos to, you know, pick these guys up and then like I write stories. And then he started reading my blog. I could imagine being a dad trying to piece that together. Cause that shit didn't exist back in his time. You know what I'm saying? No, I'm pretty sure it did. But it was like, they used to have like, to like write letters. Right, right, right. Yeah, and he was just, so then he was like reading my blog and he'd be like, yeah, did you get that guy? And I'm like, yeah, dad, I did. So, but yeah, it was just, it was very eye-opening experience for me, right? And at that stage, I really realized that the world is not what we think it is. And people see men in particular, you see beauty in many different things, many different things. You know, that's what I told, I was at the Arnold and did a impromptu watermelon smash in front of this booth with this DJ and you know, I got on the mic and I'm like, women, do you see the cellulite back here? Do you think this is gonna stop me from smashing this watermelon? You know, I'm the woman with the world's deadliest thighs and I'm like, when your man's hitting it from behind, do you think he's looking at your legs and thinking, ugh, I don't like that cellulite? Well, my erection's gone. No, he's not. He wants you, he wants your confidence. He wants your, you know, and I just went off because that's what it is. So it was really eye-opening for me. And anyway, long story short, I was out in Australia. Husband stepped on my foot in a coffee shop. I almost punched him in the face and from there it was kind of like, love at first sight a little bit. We got married after just four months. It was really, yeah, it's a thing. Oh, this is recent? Wow. One, two, I still count on my fingers. Again, kids, you don't need to be great at math or physics to be an MFCEO. I still count on my fingers. We just had our seven year anniversary. Oh, very cool. It was like 2010. Very cool. Yeah, I'll be right. So we got married after four months because I was like, yeah, well, I'll move out to Australia and then nobody can, my mom can't borrow money from me. Now how did you make the transition from the muscle worship to now your social media? You kind of grazed over too. Like did you do pretty well doing that? I mean, did you make a good living doing that? I did, but here's the problem. I just would make more money to spend more money because at the time I was still obsessed. So I was working on recovery, but I, so I got off of speed and drinking, but then I found pain pills. But that wasn't my problem. And my name was on the bottle. You know, I just watched Chris, what's his last name? You don't pick a shoulder faster. Yeah, Chris Bell's documentary. The pills one. Yeah. Every 19 seconds, someone's ODing on prescription drugs, right? A huge heroin epidemic, it's just a prescription. And that's what I had got hooked on. First it was just Vicodin or Norco. And then I was chewing up like 10 a day. And all this time I'm bodybuilding, right? And by my last show, I'd got hooked on Oxycontin. And that went from like 20 milligrams to 80 milligrams. And it was a nightmare. But so all that time I'm still looking for love on the outside, right? And even though guys are like emailing me every day and my muscle goddess, you know, I'm not worthy. And I'm starting to realize beauty is not, you know, what it appears to be, but I was still not figuring it out. What a unique lesson from that. Yeah, I was still looking like, and I'd feel for my abs and, you know, especially when it came to competing, because competing would be so unhealthy. I was chewing up food and spitting it out. You know, when I hear women say, yeah, I'm gonna do a show. I'm like, ee, ee, ee. It just. We've talked about that on the show. Like we say all the time, like, if you don't have a good relationship with your body and yourself and food, one of the worst things you could do is do a show. 100%, 100%. And I compliments, this is what I say to women. I'm like compliments are like lines of Coke. They don't last long. And that's why I did speed, because it was, you know. Less than longer. And Coke was way expensive. And I'm just kidding. For anybody caught them playing one or the other. The more you know. The more you know, they're all the same age. Yeah, a little rainbow comes out. So I'm like, you know, the compliments are like lines of Coke, they don't last long. And so I, you know, I would end up sitting in my closet full or crying into my hands, because I didn't have anything I felt like I could wear out of the house that fit. You know, I was just so obsessed with my body, I was obsessed with compulsive disorder. Like just, and so even though on the outside, you know, was still looking relatively well put together and I'm having all this, you know, making great cash, you know, bought my first house, two cars in the garage, you know, bolt carrier, like it was awesome, but it wasn't at a spiritual bottom. So it wasn't like I got to the point where I'd wrecked my car and, you know, we all have different rock bottoms. And so this final last one was a spiritual rock bottom. So I was just making more money to spend more money to tan, to, you know, do this and that and so on and so forth. So when I was out in Australia on vacation with my ex, met my husband, my now husband. And at any rate, by the time he and I were married, it was like towards the end of the year. And we're from the beginning, I was straight up with him and he was like, look, I have three roles. As long as you're safe, you're happy. I forgot the third role. Figures. Yeah, right, but because he didn't. And then the most important role. Yeah, the most important role, but because he didn't put any boundaries on me. Probably be truthful to you. That's what I would say. Just tell me the truth. Yeah, something along those lines. As long as you're safe, you're happy. I can't remember. Don't do math kids. He was okay, you know, he's like, I just want you to be happy. And maybe he had two roles. We'll just keep it at that. As long as you're safe and you're happy. And because of that, because my ex wasn't like, he was like, you can't, I don't want you to make out with girls and tell me certain things that I couldn't do. And as human beings are a natural instinct, or maybe it's just addict behavior and alcoholic behavior. I'm like, oh yeah? I think it's individual, right? Watch me. Right, so, but because he didn't put any restraints on me, it was just I wanted to be a better person. And so I finally realized like, okay, making these videos and stuff wasn't really what married women do. And I realized that I wanted to start empowering women because I've always wanted to mentor younger girls. But at this stage in the story, I was like, okay, I wanted to stop women in the street and be like, oh my God, you're calves. Did you know that you could make a video? Like you were just saying, right? You could make a video and get paid like a lot of money to put it online and blah, blah, blah. And I started a brand called Confidence by Courtney and it's Confidence with a K. Unfortunately, I got it tattooed on my back and it's like this horrible tramp stamp. And I started making YouTube videos and it just, they weren't good enough and I kind of let it go off to the side. But at the time then my partner got this job as the CEO of the rugby team. So we moved up. He was the assistant strength training coach for the under 20s, which is like the junior feeding team. And this reporter found out that my last name was different than his and did a little digging around on the internet and found my clip store. And because, so, but there was nothing on there. Like I didn't, you know, nothing topless. Like I had some topless photos on that you could find online. I did a few shoots when I was younger that, you know, whatever. In hindsight, you know, I can tell girls like, look, it might seem okay, cool at the time, but there comes a point where you might want to run for, you know, be a politician or whatever. So he, because my name was affiliated with this adult only website, the headline read CEO hires ex fetish porn star wife to train the under 20s. And this story went around the world. I had like fans in Denmark sending me pictures of the newspaper. And there I am flexing and you can't read anything but like porno star or, you know, I'm like, what the fuck is this? Like, are you serious? India, the UK, I'm like, this isn't news. This is not news. And it was during, and the crazy thing is is the day before the story broke I actually applied for a big brother, big sister because I had a void. Like I still, like it was great. I was doing a man's job and Australia is a very, you know, male dominated country. It's a boys country. And, you know, I was around the footy clubs and stuff and, but it's still like I was still missing something. I still wanted to share this information with young girls, like what is alcoholism and addiction? Don't take tits or don't take tits. Don't take tits in your mouth. Don't take them girls. Don't take pictures of your tits and send them to your dirt bag, older boyfriend to buy you a beer. And here's how to be assertive. All of the things that I felt we should have been taught in school not how to regurgitate facts. Like who's the 37th president of the United States of America to graduate junior high? I sure fucking don't remember. Do you? No. So I applied, boom, next day that story broke. In the whole month, like I was just drug through the dirt. Moms are like, you dirty slut. I don't want you to train my son. And cause the reporter went into me being, you know, an ex drug addict and a rape and like went into everything. But the way they frame the story, they pulled this picture off of my Facebook where I had on this little schoolgirl skirt cause they used to do photo shoots as well, right? And I just, I did. I looked at a little trampie. I was like, I've had my butt sticking out. It was like leaning on an engine. I made a put, I put the post on Instagram. Did you see it? I saw it, that was an Instagram post. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So they took that photo and they used that. And then like there was a few other ones. And the way that they had just placed it it was just like, had I come across it, you know, it'd been so easy to judge. You've been like, yeah, you dirty little slut. Oh, I bet you liked it, mm-hmm. And from there, went around the world. And then, and at the time, again, it didn't bother me that much because at the end of the day I'd done so much work with 12 step recovery, which we were talking about earlier that I know I'm a good person. You know, you could call me a sheep fucker. And I'd be like, okay, that's fine. I know I haven't fucked any sheep, whatever. You know, when I go to bed at night and I put my head on my pillow, I know that I'm a good person. And it wasn't until the big brother, big sister called me in January cause Australia takes the whole month off for Christmas. Right, they take the whole month off. And they called me and said, hey, we got your application. Sorry, we can't work with you. You know, good luck with everything that you're doing. But if a mentor can Google you and see what you've been up to, you know, I'm really sorry. And then I sat there and just aballed for like 10 minutes. Poor me, everybody's right, I'm worthless, my life's over. And then for whatever reason, I just had one of those burning bush moments, like that God shop where I was just like, you know what, fuck that. I'm gonna start my own program, ram by people who've been there and done that and not just talk the talk, but walk the walk. And I worked on this program for teenage girls for like the next nine months. And then I turned it into camp confidence. So the tattoo still had some relevance and with a K. And we did that for two and a half years and it was great. We had girls that were cutting themselves and eating disorders and- Can you help them out? That was amazing. Yeah, we had 62 girls come through and they would come, they have body image issues and we'd show them the basic things of fitness, self-defense, meditation, nutrition, teach them about the truth behind the media and advertising because what I learned when that story rolled out was who's controlling the media? There are literally six corporations worldwide who control every single media outlet, right? And how that got syndicated around the world blew my mind. And I really started to kind of go down the rabbit hole a little bit and try to figure out like, why are women? Because there was an all blacks player, as you said, watching Rugby Union or knowing of Rugby Union. He married a porn star the year before this whole thing went off and the whole country was high-fiving him. Well done, good job, son, slapping him on the ass. Way to go. But when my husband has a recovered, blah, blah, blah, that whole story, it was like I was the biggest whore and dirtbag on the face of the earth. So- How did he respond? Oh, he was brilliant. Just absolutely brilliant. He's like, I'm so proud of my wife. Like, you know, the club might have made a poor decision and I'll take responsibility for that, but Courtney has got a good soul. Like it was, again, took our relationship once again next level. So, yeah. So, again, got to the end of two and a half years with this camp confidence thing and one of my partners got pregnant. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, I just hit myself in the face. Right in the face, man. Goodness gracious. My watch caught right there. It was a smash up with those snipers. It's so stupid. Do you need mouth to mouth jokes? This is his first time. I'm sick. But again, I'm on antibiotics. Don't worry, I'm gonna need probiotics. But one of my partners got pregnant and so we had to put the camp down and then at that stage it was like, okay, well we took the vision and the mission of camp confidence, teaching the tools of self-love and which then rolled into sisterhood and put it into this clothing line which is now known as girl clothing. And for the past two and a half years, I've been absolutely killing myself to, you know. Did you ever feel there was a moment where you kind of felt like an imposter because this was something that was really hard for you to work through and then now all of a sudden you're telling everybody to be confident? Did you go through a transition? That's an absolute great question. And what was funny is I actually got my boobs down at one point, which you may have noticed. Don't recommend it by the way. A few ladies are thinking about getting a breast augmentation. I just, I don't know. I know some women really do enjoy their breasts but it's not been a good thing for me. I think I've got like my hands have started going numb and one of them- It's more common than people realize. Yeah, somebody mentioned hashtag implant illness and I just found like a lot of stuff out there on it. Maybe that's contributed to my autoimmune disease and you know, there's a lot of stuff that's a whole other topic. But yeah, The Daily Mail, another news outlet because they love to write about me out there for whatever reason. And we're like, yeah, confidence. Courtney Olson runs confidence camp for girls but defends her boob enlargement. And I was like front page news. I'm like, are you serious? Wow, they're coming after you. Yeah, they were coming after me. They wanted my ass. So I said, you know what? Look, teach their own. And at the time, you know, I shaved the sides of my head because I was competing a lot in jujitsu. And I tell you, when you're in your gi and guys don't see your legs and they start fighting dirty and I get them between my guard and it's like somebody wants to pull my hair. I'm like, fine, man, I'm gonna shave my hair. Now you try. So not having, you know, much hair and I'm almost flat, flat chested. Like I'm talking like that flat. And plus, you know, when you're obsessed because I was still, even though I was recovered off drugs and alcohol, I was still quite obsessed. Like I was doing CrossFit, Brazilian jujitsu and hot yoga all in one day. Five days a week, right? It was not. It's like a gauntlet. Yeah, yeah. So with the goal of your clothing company is to continue to promote those values of confidence or? It's teaching women self love. And the major contributing thing to this issue that we have is the media and advertising. Everything is fake. No one looks like, Cindy Crawford has been quoted saying, I wish I looked like the supermodel Cindy Crawford, right? So why do we have flaws? Why do we think they're flawed? There's no such thing as a flaw. Oh, I'm perfectly imperfect. Why are you imperfect? What's imperfect? You know, like everything is how it's meant to be right now, it is what it is. But it's imperfect because some fucking advertisers are trying to sell you some shit that you don't need. And like I said, I always had found that by making more money to spend more money, that money never gave me happiness. What gave me happiness was a being of service and having a purpose and doing something for somebody else. Meaning. Meaning. Yeah, so. Did you find that working towards this meaning and this purpose helped you with your own self? 100%, 100%. And the more authentic, because now that I've got a platform and I hate social media, because primarily because we're just so unaware of, you know, subconsciously, right? So I don't know how much you guys talk about the mind on the podcast and I'll be a fan. Quite a bit. It's in the title. Yeah, okay, that's what I was just, I didn't want to make assumptions, but, because I am, you know, knowing that. You avoid it. 95% of the time we're in our subconscious, right? Our pro, like we're all of our programming is all those programs and that we're in there on autopilot, not consciously aware. And we're just doing, scrolling and looking and all those beliefs that we're creating and those negative thoughts of, you know, like, oh, I don't look like that. I want that life. I want a baby. And you know the minute that lady put that baby down? Whee! Whee! And she's like, can I just get five fucking minutes of peace to myself to take a shit? God! But on her Instagram photo, it's just this lovely, cute picture of, you know, a wonderful life. And so we're always constantly comparing ourselves and looking at others and saying, oh, I wish I had that. We just talked about this on an episode. It's very natural to compare yourself to the people around you because that's just the way humans construct societies and stuff. And the problem is when you're scrolling through and looking at Instagram or social media is it gives your you and your brain the false assumption that that is your community. That's normal. Like I use the example of the NBA all the time. Like if you watch the NBA, you see all these guys that are six foot five or tall or seven foot tall. And if that's all you ever watched, you would assume that that's common. When in reality, a seven foot man is extremely rare. So you create this false belief of what it looks like in your community. And then you automatically, and this is again, this is human nature, compare yourself to that. And it leads you down a path of really not liking yourself. Well, I think it's a combination of a couple of things. I think that we're in this era now too with the Instagram thing and social media that we're consuming so much of that. And I give this analogy to the day in the podcast of imagine like back when we were kids or when the first felt insecurity set in, for me that was probably in the high school age when I felt really skinny and other boys look bigger and more muscular than me. So imagine I walk out my door one day and everybody I saw looked like the cover of fucking men's health. Like that would just totally just dwarf you and just push you down like make you feel like, oh my God, like everybody else looks amazing. I'm the only one that looks like this. That's what social media ends up doing for a lot of these people cause they follow all these people they wanna look like. Those people are fake as fuck putting all this bullshit up all the time that this is a perfect look. And now you can Photoshop abs onto yourself. Or all the filters, like even with the, I don't have Snapchat cause I am so angry at those filters. I saw you playing with the Insta Story one. Today is the first time I've ever dicked around with that. And I did on the, on Facebook too cause we launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise capital cause I don't wanna go to a venture capitalist. I don't want some man cause they're generally male dominated breathing down my back saying this is how you're gonna run your company. And- You want the autonomy to do it on your own? And let people feel like they have contributed to the growth of this. But yeah, those filters, they have such a horrible impact on our subconscious. And when I went to the doctor yesterday cause my poor grandmother, she's 88 and she was like, you're not coming over, you're just sick cause I hate taking antibiotics. And again, don't get me started on conspiracies. And I was there and I was explaining to him what it is that I do. And he's like, yeah, there's, there seems to be a lot of studies now that, you know, the social media is really having a big impact on young people's mental health. And I'm like, you fucking think? Hello. We just read statistics. So since 2010 to 2015, suicides among teens has jumped, I believe almost 30% in a five year period. That's a massive, massive jump. That is ridiculous. And here's the thing, like the root problem, I don't believe the root problem is social media. I think social media becomes another way to, look, here's the bottom line. The antidote to all these terrible things that we think and do to ourselves is really learning to care about ourselves, like we care about someone that we actually care about, like actually loving ourselves. And the way you treat yourself is a direct reflection of how much you hate or love yourself. And the more you hate yourself, the more you're gonna treat yourself like someone you hate. And if you really, let's say, imagine if you really hated a person, like you truly did not like them and you hated them and you were in total control of their entire lives, you would treat them like somebody you really, truly hated. You would feed them in particular ways or you would do things to them that weren't good for them or you would say things to them because they're truly a person that you really don't like. That's how we are, that's how people can be with themselves. And the reverse can be true if you truly care for yourself. And I think the problem is, and it's funny, I read the statistic where people who have pets and take the pet to the vet and the vet says, your pet needs to take this medication for this illness. The percentage of people that are consistent with the medications that they give their pets is far higher than the percentage of people who actually give themselves medications like they're supposed to. So we literally take care of our pets better than we take care of ourselves. And part of that is because we view the pets or our children or our friends as people we forgive and we're empathetic towards them. We love them and we care for them. We view ourselves as this person that deserves no empathy, deserves no forgiveness. How dare you think those things? How dare you do those things? You're not, you're a terrible person. And if you think of yourself that way, you're going to treat yourself that way. And it's on direct relation to how much you hate yourself and the more you hate yourself, the worse you're gonna treat yourself. And the reason why social media can be a tool to fuel that is because if you're thinking yourself, if you're a 14-year-old, 15-year-old kid and you're like, man, I was the same way. I was like, I'm really skinny. I'm really skinny. I'm not good enough to be like the other guys who are big and strong. And I already have that feeling. I'm already not liking myself. And then on top of that, I go on social media and that completely distorts reality to the point where now I relate to nobody. I can't relate to any of these people because I am so much skinnier and weaker and insufficient and not manly enough like all these guys are. I'm gonna hate myself even more and that spirals down. And social media can be, and it's just a powerful tool, like anything that's powerful. Like I'm sure you spread your message now through social media because it also can be used that way, right? Exactly. It's a love-hate relationship because obviously now I can get on there and reach women and they can hear the story and get it, but at the same time I hate it because it completely takes us out of the present moment. And that is all we have. And that's something again in 12 Step Recovery you learn. It's like, just for today. Okay, well, what that means is there's no such fucking thing as yesterday. The past doesn't exist, right? As you said, we're the only mammal that can go back and like- We conceptualize that even. Yeah, and we keep replaying the tape over and over and over or we future trip. There's no such thing as the fucking future. Yeah, great. It's great to have goals and to plan and to prepare and be driven and manifest and visualize and all this stuff, but we get so anxious and what if, what if, what if? And think of all these scenarios and we're never in the present. Like all we have is right now, right the second time is a man-made thing and that shit doesn't fucking exist. But what, again, social media does is it takes us out of the present moment and we're on there and then we're not present, especially with kids. And the impact this is having on, I just see a two-year-old on an iPad doing shit and I'm like, oh my God, this really like hurts my soul because, or you know, you see the parents are out and bless them, but you know, they're trying, their kids trying to get their attention and that they're at the mall or something and they're on Facebook scrolling around. It's like, uh-huh, yep, sure enough. Yeah, okay, okay, shut up, yeah, in a minute. And then the kids sitting there creating beliefs about themselves that they're not good enough. And like I said, from ages zero to seven, that's when we create all these beliefs. So in this example that I learned that really blew my mind, was that, okay, let's say, do any of you have a younger sibling? Yes, I have three. Okay, what's the age difference? It's four and then two years all the way down. So my youngest sibling is 30, 30. Okay, so, and we'll say the 34 or 38. Okay, 38. When you were, like I said, I'm really bad at math, kids. You could still be an MFCEO and count on your fingers. Screw it, we'll just say you were, I'm what's your youngest sibling's name? Catarina. Catarina, okay, Catarina's one in year five, all right. And Catarina is in her high chair and you're on the floor trying to learn how to tie your shoe, right? You're doing the rabbit run around the loop, pull the thing, trying to get your shoe tied and you can't do it. Was your mom around growing up? Yeah, both actually. Mom's in the kitchen cutting up an apple and Catarina is dicking around in her high chair and she's about to fall out face forward. And at the same time, you can't tie your shoe. Mom, come here, I need your help. And she looks up at you and she looks at Catarina and she's looks, hold on, I'll be right there, Sal. And she runs over to Catarina and grabs her and sits her down in her high chair and gets her situated. And what happens is, is you and your little five-year-old mind creates a belief that Catarina's better than me. Mom loves Catarina more than me because she got her attention first. And then the fucked up thing is, is that you don't realize that you've created this belief and that goes into your subconscious. And what's the truth? The truth is, is your mom was being a good parent and making sure that Catarina didn't fall face forward out of her high chair and die, right? And your mom doesn't know that you just created that belief. And so let's just say, do you and Catarina get along now? Yeah, yeah. Okay, because it'd be funny if you didn't, but for the sake of the story. She got all the attention, I hate her. Okay, there you go, there you go. So around Christmas time, you guys get together and you just wanna punch her in the face and you don't know why. So things like that, we don't realize, but imagine that times one million. And we were constantly just creating those types of beliefs that are awesome. Or imagine that with an actual bad parent, right? Yeah, right. And then the amount we hear no growing up as a kid, no, no, stop that, no, no. Like what is that doing? Our minds are so programmed. And you think about social media and like what Facebook is doing that's actually changing the chemistry in our brain and the dopamine to look for those likes. Like when you get on there and I'm like, and at least I have the awareness that I consider myself semi-woke, I suppose, even though I'm just learning about things like white privilege and shit like that. And here I thought I was some fucking woke guru. Like, whoa, no, I'm just joking. I've got every day's learning experience. But I think I'm aware of these things, but imagine someone that doesn't have that awareness. And I look and I'm like, oh, I only got like 2,500 likes on this picture. But when I, two years ago, I'd have like 200. When's it gonna be enough? When am I gonna get that blue tick? If you're waiting, I don't have a blue tick. I'm not a bad ass. If you're waiting for external change. Sounds like give me the blue dick, that's what I'm hearing on this. Give me the blue dick. Wrap it up, wrap it up. If you're waiting for, if you're reliant on external factors to validate you and to make you feel good about yourself, that is a path to hell. It is. It is 100% path to hell because it'll never be enough. You will always feel empty. There is no meaning or purpose behind it. And people need meaning and purpose. And like you found yours, right? You found your meaning, which is to help others through this process. And in doing so, it has filled you. And it has been your antidote. It has, but I still like- Doesn't mean you're cured or anything like that. That's absolutely right. But with meaning, you have now purpose and it's a totally different feeling. Then getting up and going to a nine to five job, absolutely. I want you to school me a little bit on the white privilege thing because this is something that I see. I see a lot of these privilege things popping up and I just, I don't really subscribe to a lot of them. So tell me what you're learning. Okay, and I did the same thing, right? So peep game. And can I just say this, you motherfucker, you got this song stuck in my head. I wish I was a little bit taller. I wish I was a little baller when you were talking about MBA. So now it's just, now there's the program. It's going off. That's a great song. I know. So, okay, here's the story. We have an online Facebook page, a private group for, we call them the girl army. We don't have customers. It's the girl army, it's the sisterhood, right? So the clothing line is all about creating a sisterhood. First, yes, we learn to love ourselves. And then once you stop seeing other women as your competition, then we see them as sisters and we start to work collectively because we believe that women are held back as a gender because of our own doing. So let's say you're a female. Adam and I'm like, nice ass bitch. Whereas, you know, now it's like, oh my God, you have a nice ass. Like, what do you do? Like, what do you squat? How do you do? And now all of a sudden we're friends. And she's like, oh my God, I just left the house thinking I had such an ugly ass. And, you know, great and positive energy. So by working together, it's changed the game. So we've got this online closed Facebook group. The first thing that happened, and this was about a year and a half ago, I had a shirt, we had two shirts. And my friend that did these two tattoos, she drew up these two different designs. One said, warrior girl. And it was a depiction of a woman with, she looked kind of like an Eskimo. It could be Native American, what have you. And then the other one was a said girl tribe. And she had a patron and she had feathers, but she was like a pirate. And somebody said in the closed group, and this was before we had the comment moderation thing turned on. And somebody said, oh, well, that shirt's like cultural appropriation. And that is a whole nother topic. And this is something I'm not comfortable really going into cause I don't feel confident in talking about it. Cause I'm still, I'm keeping an open mind to it. That's okay. We speculate on Mind Pump all day long. We have open conversations like that's why I asked you cause it's not something that I subscribe to. So I want to hear your opinion. So the privilege part though. So I saw and I got it and I explained the meaning of it in the drawing and all the rest of it. But the thing that happened was there were white women who were saying, well, if you don't like it, just scroll by it. If you don't like it, then don't buy that shirt. Basically like shut the fuck up. Whereas opposed to as opposed to saying, okay, well, why is that? Or I hear you when I acknowledge you, let's move on or help us understand. And the thing is that we can't have these conversations online. Communication is difficult enough as it is, right? Like 10% of a conversation actually has to come down to words and the rest of it is pitch, tone, body language, which none of that you get online. And that's again another reason why social media is so fucked up. Cause you can look at one thing and it means, you know. 10 different things. Exactly, exactly. And so we went through that and a bunch of women left and then some stayed and woke up to this huge massive fire and I'm like, oh God. And then Trump got elected. And with the group, we don't talk about politics. We don't talk about religion because these things divide us. And I'm like, we need to stay united. That is our number one thing. But when Trump got elected and then the women's march and I saw this one article in this woman. She was a, it was an Asian woman. And she said, if you weren't out of Black Lives Matter march and you were at the women's march, then you're not my sister and I do not stand with you. And I took that so personal. And I was like, this is bullshit. How are we gonna move forward? Like this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Like we've got to start working together. And I wrote this blog and I basically said, I don't see color, I see women. Why can't we just see each other as women and unite that way and let that be the one thing that unites us. And then I also said something along the lines. I've copped heat for saying, we say vag up as a design on some of our shirts instead of man up. Oh, vag up. Vag up. I like it. I don't think Betty White actually said this, but she said, oh, those things take a beating, right? So, and then there would be some women in the group that say- Betty White was so badass. She was. Such a badass. Oh, you shouldn't say that because then that alienates our trans sisters. And I'm like, oh fuck, you know? So we live in the United States of offended. Like I'm not trying to offend anybody, but at the same time, I'm like women, cause then people think we're, are you a feminist? And I said, well, I don't subscribe to that term because there are black women who, you know, say they don't subscribe to that word because there are forms of feminism that support feminists who didn't want black women to have the right to vote or there's turf feminists who don't believe transgender should be, they're not- This is why I don't subscribe to this bullshit. This is why I don't subscribe to this bullshit. It's just ways to fucking separate us in all these categories. Yes. And the separation thing was like, we are all one. But here's the thing about white privilege that I actually understood. Cause like I said, at first I took it very personal and I was like, privilege, what do you mean about privilege? You don't know about my life. Like I was raped, a group with an alcoholic mother, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And I, and I wrote this blog and I sent it to a customer of ours named Breanna. Cause when I started this company, it was all about having body diversity, right? And then I didn't think about color cause I'm a white person and she reached out to me and she's like, hey girl, where are all the black girls at? And I was like, oh, oh my, I didn't really think of that. My God. There's one black girl in my entire high school in Eureka, you know? And those things weren't, it didn't really dawn on me. But just as much as it affected me by not seeing a woman with legs my size being in the media and advertising, same thing goes for color, right? And so I said, okay, that's interesting. So I invited her out to do our next photo shoot with us moving forward. I sent her this blog and I said, hey, can you read this for me before I post it? And she was like, I hate to tell you, but no, so what you're asking me to do is to take off my skin and hang it up on the door before I walk out the door that doesn't work. And you're asking me to forget about my heritage and my past and so on and so forth. So I thought, okay, great. I didn't post it and I put that off to the side. And I'm like, clearly there's a conversation to be had here. And the topic had come up a few more times in the group and I'm realizing, great, we can't really have this conversation on here. And so this is in part why, and this is why I'm out here is that we've got our live event at the end of April. And one of the things we're doing is having, it's intersectional feminism is the term, having a panel on this. We have a transgender woman, Janae Crock is gonna come and speak. And then we're gonna have a talk on the topic and an open panel. And it's not just color or race, but or sexual identification, but also abilities, right? So privileges simply and how it resonated with me was this. If I get pulled over, right? Cause every time I get pulled over, and this is how I got Arnold to stop by the booth. Cause I was going over and I was talking to the sheriffs and the cops and making friends with them and everything. They're like, yeah, we'll get Arnold to come by, no problem. If I get pulled over, and I told you I was a criminal justice major. So I dropped some terms and I'd be like, I know how much discretion you have, right? Let me go. And I said, roll down the window, knock knock knock. Do you know why I pulled you over? Yeah, son, cause I'm packing guns. That's why. Okay, no problem, yeah, off you go. Just slow down, okay, drive safe. Now, if I'm a woman of color and I do that, yeah, cause I'm packing guns, son, get out of the car, get out of the car. You know, like it, that, you know, how that goes down may look very different. I come from a family of law enforcement. I was grown up to respect authorities, to a certain degree, you know? Except when you were shitting on there. Yes, except for when I was shitting on the car. I'm gonna love you guys. Absolutely, yeah, it's 100%. And that's the thing, right? Like I'm not a bad person. I forgot to mention that, alcoholics and addicts aren't bad people who need to get good, we are sick people who need to get well. Like I would steal your wallet, Sal, and then help you look for it. She's like, I know where your wallet is. It's in my pocket. It was a natural reaction for me to look for mine right there. I'm not that person, right? Let's find it together. Yes, yeah. She always knows what my stuff is. It's so weird. How do you know? How do you know, bitch? You know, here's my, I have to give my opinion on this because, what a lot of, here's what it all boils down to. There's a lot of power with being a victim, okay? Now let me clarify. Nobody wants to sit in a room and be like, I have all the best life, I had two parents who stayed married. Everybody's great. People start to talk about how shitty their lives are and it becomes a competition or what makes them a victim or why they're not privileged. And it becomes segmented and then more segmented and then more segmented. And now you have a black woman arguing with a gay black man and who is more privileged than the other. And oh, what about the, and the reality is this, at the end of the day, the smallest minority group is the individual at the end of the day, okay? It all boils down to the individual and what makes somebody's life up and their circumstances up? It's an endless list of things that could have happened, how you perceive things. It could be mental illness. It could be your life, how you grew up. It could be money. You could be rich. You could have all the great things but then you could have mental illness I mean, I could sit here and make a list and we'll be here for 15 hours and I still won't even be a 10th of the way down of all the possible things. And so the problem with labeling people by anything other than their character and their own individual actions results in, and that's a form of collectivism. Right, we're still putting people in boxes that way. It's terrible and it's a form of collectivism and what happens is you make a t-shirt with a girl that looks like a pirate or whatever and you get people going, that's cultural appropriation. What they're doing to you is they're giving, they're saying, I have power over you because I've declared this offensive. Like look, no, I'm sorry, okay, is it offensive to you? Maybe, what does that mean? That means if you wanna, you could do all the things that you have the freedoms and liberty to do which is boycott, you cannot buy it, you can cause a big stir which is what you did but it's when- How's that any different than you getting mad every time you see a lighter because a lighter is what lights meth and you have this history connected to that and then now you are offended when somebody decides they're gonna bust out a lighter. It's collectivism and collectivism is dangerous. Here's what collectivism is. Collectivism is women do this, men do this, black people do this, transgender people do this. I could take 10 people from the same category. I can get 10 women and say, okay, you guys are all women, therefore you guys are all exactly the same, right? Not even close, not even close. I could take 10 minorities. I could take 10 transgender people. Like everybody's so individual and so different and everybody's story is so different and everybody has different challenges and some people have more challenges than others but the only way to navigate through life is not to try to categorize people and try to put your power over them by declaring yourself more of a victim and them as an oppressor. The key really is look at each individual person and base your decisions on their character and what they did. I have, me, I have as much in common with, I have as much to do with slavery as a black person in America. Why? Because a black person born today has nothing to do with slavery and neither do I. Now we can go back to ancestors and maybe we can find people who did terrible things. I could go back in time and find ancestors of mine that were terrible people, that were horrible people but that's not me, I'm an individual and everybody's an individual and when we start to value each other as that, that's when we find unity because we're never all gonna be the same, that's crazy, that's crazy and you can't do, that is a very difficult and actually it's an impossible way for us to construct society or to get along. There's no way to do it but if we look at it, if I look at you and I'm like, you know what Courtney, you look like you've had a different life than me. We look very different. I know nothing about you other than your social media. I'm just gonna hang out with you and if you're cool to me, guess what, I'm gonna like you and that's just the bottom line. If you're not, then I'm not gonna like you. I don't really care about anything else. Yeah, it's frustrating because a lot of times I do feel like I have to walk on eggshells and I'm gonna upset somebody and like I told you, I forget when I came in, I'm a people pleaser, you know. You have to, you have a strong character and so what I would say to you is keep your character especially when it's getting challenged which is when you want people to hear your real message and when you have people saying like that's offensive, you're like, no, no, no, no, listen to my real message. Stand strong in your character because otherwise it's gonna get muddied and- Yeah, and they say you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. Yeah, and it's just terrible. And that's what I said. I'm like, look, it comes down to intent, right? Here was the intent of this shirt and that still wasn't good enough. I was like, I took it off sale. I did, I took that shirt off sale. Sure, you're meeting market pressures. That's not possible. And where we are now today, a year and a half later and putting on this event again, like the first event we put on last year it nearly put us out of business. We paid, do you ever been to Vegas and have you heard of the Artisan? The Artisan? Yeah, hotel. Well, apparently it's a swingers hotel. Oh, well there you go. That's why we haven't heard about it. Yeah, well. What if I said yes? Yeah. I'm like, oh, I love that place. And your wife's like, what? Well, we booked out that hotel and anyway, we didn't even, long story short, it nearly put us out of business and I'm like, why are we doing this event again? And the reason being is because the whole point of this brand is for unity. And at the end of the day, it is about listening to understand and not listening to be right because I wanted to, I wanted to be right but I realized the more if I'm just, if people feel like you're willing to listen then they, we all just wanna be understood and heard. So everybody, as long as we keep an open mind and are open to shit, then I feel like then we can start to take down some of these barriers. But I do, I agree with it on the cultural appropriation part. It's like, oh, well, you know, now when we're putting each other into boxes and categories and, but the privilege part is now making more sense to me though because, and with transgenders, right? Like they, I have a privilege because I just walked back there and it just went straight into the women's room. You know, if you're a transgender and you're like, fuck, which, you know, pro operation and I'm not up on these terms of cisgender and all these things. And that's, those are, to me, I'm like, am I being a bad leader? Cause I actually haven't had time to sit down and research this. No, we can't, we can't keep up with this bullshit. No, like I- You can't keep up with this bullshit, dude. No, like I said, if you treated people like individuals and you just looked at a person and said, here's an individual, I'm gonna treat them based off of their character and how they treat me, then we wouldn't have any issues. Now, are there more challenges sometimes for people? Fuck, you better believe it. That's the thing. Of course, that's legit. There's legit people who have, and sometimes it's a result of their circumstances that they can't control. And sometimes, many times, it's a result of circumstances they can't control. Who's more privileged? The white girl who got raped, the black girl who got beat, the transgender who didn't have a bathroom, we can't compare each other to that. Everybody's story's different. And you can, there's definitely somebody in that privileged category that didn't have it as bad as someone in another privileged or unprivileged category. Fuck all that. It's very difficult. Fuck all that. But here's the deal, like again, like if I see a transgender individual or I meet one and I view them as an individual, not as a part of, not as a homogenous part of a group or whatever, and I see them and I meet them and I introduce myself when we talk and I'm like, wow, this person's cool. That's it. Here's another analogy, because I love analogies. And this is just what I'll wrap up on because I know it's been a journey for me too and I've gone through the same exact thing. But for example, and I shouldn't put you on the spot, but I'm going to, are any of you alcoholics? No. Okay. So when people would say to me, why can't you just have one? Sure. You have, you're weak. It's willpower. You have weak willpower. And I'm like, you don't understand. Yeah, it literally don't. When I take a drink of alcohol, my chemistry is different. It causes a craving phenomenon and I have an allergy to it. And then it kicks off the obsession and the cycle starts and I won't stop until the wheels fall off. And I believed with every cell in my body that I was just going to have two drinks, I was going to be the designated driver. And I wound up shitting on the hood of a cop car. So, you know, until we're in that other person's shoes, I suppose, you know what I say? If you're not an alcoholic, you'll never understand what it's like. And that's why as alcoholics, we have this bond, all right? And I look at it now. I used to say, hi, my name's Courtney and I'm a recovered alcoholic. And I was angry about it. And now I'm like, hi, my name's Courtney. I'm a grateful, recovered alcoholic. Like I look at it as an amazing things because I have unconditional love. Because if you're an alcoholic, I get you. I understand you. You don't have to explain to me. I know what it's like. I totally get it. So, when I started to look at it that way and I thought, okay, maybe there's something more to it because I'm in the same boat as you. I was like, this labeling shit, blah, blah, blah. And I was the same exact way. So, but at this stage, and the reason why I'm putting on this event is I'm like, I wanna dive deeper into it. And is it a massive risk for our brand? Fuck, yeah. I commend your courage. Thank you, me too, thank you. Like I wanna hulk out of my shirt right now, but I need it. Yeah, no, I need it. That's it. I commend you for your courage because this is a, it's unfortunately a touchy subject nowadays. And it shouldn't, you know, it really shouldn't be, I blame politics because politicians spend a lot of money. Divide and conquer, man. They spend a lot of money on figuring out how they can corral people. No, that's exactly- And this is- I think we're feeding into it by separating all of ourselves with that. We're giving them what they want. They want to divide and conquer. That's exactly right, the 1%. And here's the thing. How condescending is it to look at someone and be like, oh, you're so underprivileged, poor you, like that's also an assumption. How condescending is it to tell a girl who puts out a fucking shirt and does everything she's doing that it's that way. That's been through probably fucking way more than that person's ever had. That's my point is like, I don't, you don't know each per, look it, Oprah. Oprah is one of my heroes, okay? She's one of the arguably one of the most successful, if not the most successful women of all time. If you know anything about her story, about how she came up and what she had to go through, it's insane. Now, if I was just walking around with this, belief system of victims and oppressors and privilege or whatever, and I didn't know who she was and I met her and I'd be like, oh, poor, female, black, individual, poor you, you're such a victim. She took those things and turned them into her fuel and became an incredible, and so my point is that, not that these things don't matter, of course they do, they're part of who we are, but it's a dangerous path to go down when you look at people as unprivileged, privileged, whatever and you base it on things that you don't have enough information to determine that. When I bring up depression, like I've written about depression before in certain words, you know, I say I'm like, look, there's nothing wrong with you. And again, my intent was, like I've been diagnosed with depression, I've been given Prozac and I didn't take it. I have a massive rant about that stuff and I was working on trying to explain, again, on Facebook, on my, I hate saying fan page, it's so ridiculous. On my page about how we are all just energy, you know, and that, you know, some of us absorb more than other people's energy and so on and so forth. And what I was saying is there's nothing wrong with you in a sense that it's okay to not be okay and that, you know, it does get better and but because I didn't word that word for word, then there was just people like, oh, I'm, you know, that really upsets me and then you're just like, oh man, and you just wanna, and you're like, fuck, it's not what I'm trying to say, you know? And so communication is so difficult. How tiring is that from knowing what you are trying to give back to everybody and knowing what you've been through? And it gets tiring, but at this point now, after two and a half years, and I was just talking to my grandmother about this last night, she's 88 and she's like, I'm like, Graham, man, we're due for a pull shift. Like I'm pretty sure the pull shift every 26,000 years right, so the north goes to south and south goes to north and then we go through an ice age and all this crazy shit happens and, you know, like I watched, have you seen Cow Spiracy? Oh no, I didn't see it. Did you mean the cows and the poop and the gas coming off that one? Yeah. I watched a little bit of that one. You mean the cows and the poop? Yeah. That's that one, isn't it? It's that one, the ice ages, everything. The methane gas being the problem, yeah. We're gonna choke ourselves out. Yeah, you know, but as far as like the environment was going on, I'm like, you know, or whether it's, you know, Trump in North Korea or what have you or Einstein, I said, brought up, you know, he said, I don't know what weapons are gonna be used in World War III, but I know that World War IV is gonna be fought with sticks and stones. You know, and I started thinking and I'm like, why am I killing myself? Because it's literally, as an entrepreneur, I have like $27 in my checking account. I've cashed out my 401k to sponsor Holly Home when we launched. I sold every possession in my house two months after launching to keep us afloat. Like I sold the roof off the Jeep. I sold my bras. Like, I mean, those drugs, you know, being a drug dealer came in handy. You know, I was like, hey, I'll make you a deal. You know, I was on Craigslist. Like, you know, I have, I don't go into too, too much detail because I don't want to deter people, but you have got to be so committed to what it is that you're doing. And I am because I truly have a belief that if women weren't so busy fearing that we looked are worse, that we could be putting our faculties towards, you know, much more important shit. And the world would be a much more harmonized place because we've got this female energy that is so stifled down that we need to bring up that nurture and caring, compassionate energy. And that's in men, in men too. It's also, it's an energy that exists in men too. Yes, yes. In a place where it's okay for you guys to cry and to talk about your feelings and not be called a little bitch and get back into your box. And, you know, like there's so much work to be done, but I'm like, I've sacked my marriage. Like I haven't, we haven't fucked in over a year. Like it's, you know, I have absolutely no libido. I'm just, I'm tired. Is that from stress or what? Absolutely. It's cash flow. It's absolute cash flow. Talk about, can we get into that a little bit? Because I think a lot of, I think more people go through that than you think. Yeah. And I remember it wasn't until I got into my 30s before I felt, and I took antibiotics when I was younger, fucked up, totally fucked up my hormone levels, got on HRT when I was 30. And even being on HRT, I started to notice, I had like no sex drive sometimes. And I was like, what the fuck does it make sense? I'm taking synthetic testosterone. And it wasn't until I realized dive deeper into the stress and how that started. So talk a little bit about that and what that is, what a challenge that probably is for your relationship. Yeah, it's always just because it's, especially as an entrepreneur, there's no off switch. So it's 11 o'clock at night in bed talking about it, six o'clock in the morning when you wake up your first thought. And you've got this facade that you're this mat. We are a global clothing line and we were told you're gonna need a million dollars in the bank when you launched. And we launched with like $10,000. And that grind, it's like, okay, well, it's great, but you gotta check yourself. And I have to check myself and be like, do I think I'm Jesus Christ? That needs to come and die on the cross. Because I'm pretty sure from the stories I've heard that dude's already done that. Like, do I really think that I'm this saint savior that's gonna like change the world? Or am I really here doing this without a passion? But like, where do you find the balance? And that's like always what the key to life in my experiences is finding balance. And being like, okay, it's all right to shut it off. But by not being able to shut it off in the amount of stress and it's all, again, all cash flow, that stress, it's just you're constantly in your head. And you can't think of anything else other than, okay, how am I gonna get this import duty paid? Oh my God, these hoodies got made fucking inside out. Or this customer, and this person needs this and that. And it's just this never ending thing when it's like just at the end of the day, it's like, you just wanna empower women and put media out that shows cellulites and dimples and all body types and change the game in that way. But you gotta do it first by doing this. And it's just, and so because you are constantly in your mind thinking about all these things, you can't get excited. You're just not. You're not present. You're not at bang, back to it. You're absolutely right. And then plus, especially when you work with, we work in close proximity and stuff. It's just, yeah, it doesn't help. And he does his own thing as well, but we're just constantly, it's the stress. And plus the drug use, I've had a big methamphetamines because when you methamphetamines causes arousal in the beginning and most often girls who have had some kind of sexual trauma act out afterwards. I was the biggest skank when I got to college. Let me tell you, oh man, I can't even count. Hundreds. I slept with one of my college professors. It was like a dinosaur studies class, but I wanted an A. And I was like, hey baby, come get some. I was just off my head. I was just acting out so hard. It was crazy. So from that to... You're trying to find it differently now, is that? Yeah, and have you, being in the bodybuilding world, heard of Melanitan? Melanitan? Yeah. No, no, no, tell me. Okay, this is the dangerous thing too when you talk about these kinds of things because then other people are like, ooh, let me get a pin out. You know Dave Asprey? Yes. Yeah, Medaphanyl? Yes. Yes, right? So then I read that and I'm like, ooh, what's that? And I started taking that. I got a lot of shit done though, but then I needed to put that shit down. But Melanitan, it's... I remember I saw this bodybuilder Lisa Cross and her and I did a photo shoot and she had the most beautiful tan and she's an English woman. And you know, most English women. Oh wait, is this the pills that you take that make you take tan? Yeah, I think it comes in a pill form. I'm not positive, but it's injectable. Oh, I do remember this. Yeah, I don't know a ton about it. If it was kind of what you do as an addict, you're like, yeah, let me jump right in. And you inject it and I'm not sure the components of it, but you tan, like you get really darker. Increases melanin, I think, in the skin. Yeah, there was some bodybuilder in Australia who had passed away, this young guy, and like he was taking so much of that along with everything else under the sun, like his organs were even orange. It was crazy, yeah. But the reason why I was taking it is because it increases your libido. Like I wanted to, I would have, yeah. I rubbed one out in the back of a cab. I was like, wow, whoa, whoa. Wow. But then it's, yeah. And then I started getting like white spots from it and I'm just like, okay, this can't be good for you. How long were you experimenting with that? About a year. Yeah, it was around the time. That was a big thing in the bodybuilding world for a second. I remember reading, I've never heard of it. It was not during my time before or after. This was in, when I read about it, I want to say it was. 2009. Yeah, probably right around the, right around the. So before, before I was competing. Yeah. Yeah, because I don't remember anybody talking about that. No, no. It was a thing for a second because you could just inject yourself. You know, the last thing that I heard that I thought was fucking crazy in the bodybuilding world is what's the one that. DNP? Yes, the one that's in dynamite. That is a fan burner that just made people. Yeah. Dymethyl. No, not that. No, DNP is this chemical that raises your body temperature and like literally cooks you. Oh. Literally cooks you from the inside. So yeah, it's really dangerous. It's super toxic. But you know how, you know, bodybuilders. Yes. Don't take anything that, you know. Yes, we will. Anything that works. It's crazy. It's crazy when you ask a lot of them too, that it, you know, if just to get to win, right? They want to win so bad or they want to get that physique so bad that if you were to ask them like, hey, you know if that could kill you in five or 10 years, oh yeah, they would still do it anyways. That's what trips me out. It trips me out that even knowing it's fucking. When you hate yourself, I mean, let's be honest, a big chunk of people who are motivated enough to dedicate themselves to hours of exercise a day and a super ridiculously strict diet regime, you know, that and that's many times motivated by this deep insecurity of self-hate. And so you don't really care about looking or you don't care about your health as much as you care about what you look like. So if it's like, oh, it's going to make me look better, fuck it. I want to get back to how challenging this has to be because I know what I went through with my girl, we're seven years deep into a relationship. We're pretty much married. I'm just not a big marriage guy, but so we got the two dogs that lived together for a long time. So pretty much we are, right? And, you know, and she's a very sexual person and for her to go through that, that was really challenging for me, you know, because I mean, I could tell that it was starting to in it. The hard part for me was that it was affecting her, you know, so that it forced a lot of communication and a lot of work between her and I. Is that something you guys are still trying to work through or did you have you found like are you guys communicate a lot about it like? No, we are still trying to work through it. Yeah, we're like, we need to do something different. And it's capital and it's to the stage now where it's like, okay, like we could turn this into a lifestyle business. And not grow it, but if we're doing this to do what we want to do and really create a revolution because it is spreading, you know, and it's working, you need capital, like we need to hire people, you know, like you need people helping you because we just, and I believe that will solve a majority of the issues. Problem with that is that, you know, and I had some more thought process because I'm very driven. When we were first already building this, you know, I walked away from everything else that I was doing to start and for me, security and money, that's why I was. I was so stressed. My mind was somewhere else. I wasn't present. Something I'll tell you that was a game changer for us. And I've shared, so my audience has heard this plenty of times, so it's not a big deal to them, but this may be the first time you've ever tried this and it wonders for me. Somebody get me a pen. So, Getting recorded. Katrina and I started doing once a month. We get through one audible book a month. And the way I figured that out was like an audible book is anywhere from like eight to 12 hours. Okay, I broke that up and that means that we're only committing to one to two hours a week that we just agree that we're gonna sit down and we're gonna listen to this book together. What I got from it, sure it's great. We were growing together. We're reading together. We're learning. Sure, that's all fine. But really what it did was it forced me to be hyper-present. And then what I noticed is like when we'd read these, we'd read really cool challenging topics or things we were learning about. And then it created this dialogue between the two of us. And man, the sex, that's the key is talking about something other than your work. Right, which her and I, she's an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur. She helps with the business. Like that's all we talk about, you know? So it just perpetuated this problem that I was already having. And so this was like a game changer for me was to tap into that. That's been a hack for sure. And we've said, all right, we're gonna do, we're gonna watch one video a day or, and it's just, it's difficult to get into the habit. And then plus we travel and I'm coming and going. And yeah, so, but that's a, that's a great, that's a great resource. That's a tough, it's very tough. And why I talk about and share and why I want it when I'm digging in on you is just because when we went to LA FIVA expo, actually, after one of the talks, we had a bunch of people that were waiting to talk to us. And the most common thing I got was men and couples, like shaking and crying and talking to me about how much it's helped their relationship, the advice that I've given about ours. And I didn't realize that I was making that, we were just, we just bullshitting talk. You know what I'm saying? And we're very raw and open. You asked me a question about anything I'll openly discuss it or whatever. And so, you know, I've openly discussed challenges that I go through in my life and I share that. I didn't realize how many people really, really struggle with this, you know, especially when you've been in a relationship for a long time too. 100%. And that's the other thing too is I find like, we'll be apart from my partner for a month and a half. You know what, I was just talking about this again with my grandma last night. I remember my other grandparents, they had separate beds in the same room. And I remember I thought that was so weird. And I was like, why do they have separate beds? That's bizarre. But you think about it, like after the first year or two, it's not like you cuddle every night. One of you farts, one of you rolls, sleeps on your side, steals the covers, kicks the other one, you know, or like you get up and you wanna, getting up, part of my recovery, I connect with the power greater than myself. I just think, okay, there's a God and I am not it. I don't know who the fuck I'm praying to or what it she, he looks like, whatever. But, you know, get up and connect and I'm sitting and I know how important meditation is. And I've been working on incorporating that for literally the past seven years, a habit. Like I do go into the gym every day and have not found that piece yet. I don't get up and he's snoring. And I'm like, just block it out. And then I go and I'll go somewhere else. But then the dogs need to go out and pee. And then by the time that's off and I'm like, oh, nope, got this, this, this, this, this, and this, and this, and this, and this. And being in another time zone and 80% of our market is here in the U.S. And you know, it just, but again, it's another excuse. It's another excuse. So. It's just, you have to like plan it, schedule it, prioritize it like everything else. Well, I think there's also an area too where you allow yourself to be okay with, like there's different types of meditation, right? And this was something that I had to figure out too, because I can't go turn the switch off dark room and do for that just doesn't work for me. But what I can do is I can go off in my neighborhood and you know, put maybe like my brain FM in my ears or listen to something that's really peaceful to me and just walk. Yeah, that's right. And that's a form of meditation and just, and being just hyper present with the moment now, you know, and I think, and I'll take my walk barefoot and I'll just pay attention to way my feet are gripping the grass and the ground and. Grounding. Yeah. I mean, you don't necessarily have to do it in the room. I think a lot of people mistake that I did. I always thought like, oh no, I'll never be in a meditation. I learned a meditation called slow walk. And what you do is you walk from one end of the room to another and you do it so slowly that you have to pay attention to every like inch of movement of your foot as you're walking. And so you do it as slow as you possibly can from one end to the other and because you're so aware of your movement positioning. It's totally a form of present mindfulness. Yeah. That's good one too. Works pretty well as a neighbor's trip out. Yeah. What's wrong with that guy? So what's in the future for you guys right now? You have that big event that you got scheduled? Yes. When is that? It's the end of April. So it's April 28th and 29th and it's at the Golden Nugget. It's not at the Artisan this year. It's all underneath one roof and it's gonna be wild. So we gotta pull party Friday night so everybody can come. Because of this closed group, we have had, for example, we're having a girl-girl wedding. We had two customers who met in this group and then some other customers raised funds to fly one from New Zealand to Chicago. They met, fell in love. And now we're gonna marry them Sunday night. Oh no way. Yeah, it's amazing. So we've got keynote speakers, anything from freedom from food addiction, effective communication, body confidence. Wow, this is great. And then workshops. So Rose Namahumis is gonna do MMA. Meg Squats is gonna do the deadlift. Almana is gonna do Strongman. Then we've got self-defense. Nurtured, hard approach. Do you have kids? I do. Yeah, we both do actually. Nurtured, hard approaches. Are any of them on the spectrum, like ADHD or autistic? No, I'm probably ADHD. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. What'd you say? Squirrel. But then it can be applied to any relationship. But you know, twerking, lap dancing, you know, all these different things and these women gets to choose and then we're gonna have like a powerlifting and a strong girl comp. So an opportunity for women to compete who have never touched a barbell before but not be in a judgmental environment. And that's just- That's great. Now do people, so obviously they pay to attend to this event? Yeah, it's $279 for the whole weekend. Does that include the room too? It doesn't include the room. Okay, say damn. The room's 30% off. Yeah, it's a, the bargain's ridiculous. It's a swag bag and includes everything. How many people do you have coming? We're aiming for 400 plus. Awesome. So we've, I've got about a hundred women that are in desperate need of going who can't afford that I've granted a ticket to. So as a company this year, if we can break even I'll be really excited but we did just launch literally last night in Indiegogo campaign. And instead, and I'm like, look, I do not wanna go down the route of venture capitalism as I mentioned. And this is an opportunity, it's almost like a basically presale. You know, so we've got all these dope things that you can buy on this campaign. You're just not gonna get them for a little while but at least that will give us the flexibility to have cash flow because then it's beyond the clothing. The clothing is just the flag we fly. This is just the jumping off point. Clothing is boring as shit. It's so boring. Oh my God. And some of our stuff is great and some of it sucks. You know what I'm like, what the fuck is this? This is horrible. And do you guys know we don't use sizes? No, what? We use athletes' names. So we're gonna try to- Oh, that's a cool, what a cool thing. Women's sizing was developed- Does anybody else do this? No. That's so brilliant. That is fucking, I already know what you do. That's brilliant. That's great. And here's why, because of the stigma, right? Yeah, yeah, that's great. And you know, it's ridiculous. The last stat I read is 95% of women's workout gear is made for a size large and below and yet 50% of women getting active or a size large and above. We were the only brand at that expo with the Arnold that had any kind of body representation. You know, you walk around and you see all these fit, tiny women and their little booty shorts and sports bras handing out shit and weird. I mean, I had women, you know, our size Sam, Sam Coleman, Guinness Book of World Record, the squat holder, like she's a massive power lifter. She copped so much shit on social media too and she just fucking laughs. It's so cool. But she is our, quote unquote, biggest athlete. And then we go all the way down to Ava, which is for eight to 10 year olds. And so instead of being like, oh, I'm a extra small, you know, it's like, yeah, you're a Cassie who's this awesome judo badass. Or, you know, I'm a size Heidi. Heidi is Canada's arm wrestling champion. Do she'll fuck any one of you up? Probably. It's so cool. And so women just having that freedom from the size stigma just go next level. So here they are seeing a brand that is celebrating. Do you have like a picture of all of them so people can kind of see, like, if you don't know who? We've got the measurements because look, I'm a, quote unquote, size Courtney. And when we did the measurements, it was, you know, 2015, it was doing my last show. I was a bit smaller. And so people, you know, could get a little confused to feel like, oh, but that doesn't. So we just go by the measurements, but we're running an athlete search right now for two women who have essentially retired out of their sport or what have you. So it's more or less the measurements. And then the women can, you know, be their true measurement. Because if you shop online, and I hate shopping online, so really fucking cool of me to start an online brand. But, you know, they get to, they have to take a measure tape out and measure themselves and get their true size as opposed to, because if you shop at Nike versus Under Armour versus Reebok, you're going to get something completely different, right? And so it's really revolutionized, yeah. And then so our rate of return is like less than 1%. Oh wow. Yeah. That's cool because if people, it fits. Yeah, yeah. And granted we get, you know, we still have issues just like any other company would in that area. But generally speaking, most online retailers are anywhere from 25 to 30%. So that was a real big game changer for us. And then of course the no Photoshop and everything. But then we, all of our clothing has this hang tag where women take a pledge and they solemnly swear to the best of their ability to refrain from talking negatively about themselves as well as other females. I am an equal amongst my peers and understand and embrace that I'm neither better than nor less than through this pledge of non-judgment. Wait, I understand and embrace that I'm either equal or less than. I've said it so many God damn times. I embrace my body and I'm furthering the global revolution of body acceptance. And when they say that out loud, you know, like you had people coming up to you crying and saying, thank you, you transform my life. You know, and you're like, yeah, that fills your cup up, that fills your soul, you're helping people, you're being of service. And that's what we're missing. And now whether women get to take that and they can write a compliment on it and give it to another woman. And now we're starting this thing of sisterhood and that's what the revolution is. Is women empowering other women? And I'll tell you what, I got so butt hurt because Dana Lynn Bailey, you know, Dana Lynn Bailey. Yeah, so I met her at the, the FedExpo in Melbourne. You know, this was like years ago when I was doing camp confidence and I caught her off to the side. I was like, hey, let me tell you, what's up girl? You know, great job, dah, dah, dah. Cause people would always tell me, oh, you look like Dana Lynn Bailey. I'm like, I think I'm older. I think she looks like me. And cause I, you know, kind of stopped competing around the time that she was coming up. And I told her about camp confidence. And I said, how to do the, cause we used to do the pledge at camp confidence except for they got, you know, camp confidence pledge. And then so when another teenager would see another teenager on the street, they knew that they weren't each other's competition and that they were sisters, right? So I explained that to her and all this stuff. And we did the pledge and I put a little band on. I'm like, can you give us a shout out on social media? And she was like, yeah. And now that I've done an expo now just doing the Arnold, I know how tiring it is. They didn't give us the socials, but it didn't say anything. But then a month later, she had ran a confidence camp and it was with a C, but I was like, oh no, you didn't. Oh, I'm coming for you. I'm fine. I'm going to compete. And that was my inspiration to go out and get back into competing. And then she retired. She announced that she wasn't going to do the Olympia that year. And I was just like, oh hell. But I'm sure she was already, you know what I mean? But my ego, because that's how we're programmed. I'm just like, that was my idea. I was like, no, motherfucker. What's that Ecclesiast? I don't know the verse in the Bible, but there's nothing new under the sun. We're not reinventing the wheel here. We're just putting our own perspective on it. So God bless her. You're doing your thing. You're empowering women as opposed to saying like, oh, that was my idea. I did that first. Or now that I've talked about sizing and all your thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers, somebody might go out and do this now. And it's like, there's enough out there for everybody to fucking profit, just chill out. Yeah, so it's about women collectively working together and opening up and sharing in a community because that's what we're missing is being a part of a community. And you mentioned earlier, Sal, something about, you know, we're on social media, but we're more isolated now than we are ever. We have all these thousands of friends and followers. But it's not real. You can go back and edit what you say. You can edit your pictures. You don't interpret things. There's no energy connection, you know? You can't look into someone's eyes. And that's what the events are for, right? Yeah, 100%. I have hope though in humanity because I feel like that's why voices like ours resonate so much with people is because I feel like the pendulum is starting to swing really far that way. It's time to fucking come back where you appreciate people that are raw, that are real. They may not say the appropriate things all the time. They may offend somebody, this or that, but I'd rather have that person than somebody who's fake in editing and photoshopping their whole life. I'll tell you what though, there's sometimes I have to, it doesn't piss me off, but I was like, I told you I went down the rabbit hole. We're quite deep. I saw you, you know, Eddie Bravo and... Oh God. Yeah. Ooh, flat earth, what are we talking about here? Hey, I'm so open-minded. Like even David Ike, I remember when I first, this committee, and it was probably time to wrap it up. But this conspiracy of people being, like the lizards and shapeshifting and all this kind of stuff six years ago. And I was just like, oh my God, six years down the track, I went and sat in a room for eight hours and listened to him lecture. And I'm like, holy shit. But you don't talk about that stuff because people just think you're crazy. You know, like, whoa, you're nuts. But we're all now starting to talk about fluoride. Okay, why can't we drink out of the tap? Dude, sometimes I'm telling you, sometimes reality is fucking crazier than any conspiracy. Exactly. And like, where's the easiest place to hide something right in front of you? That's right, that's right. Well shit, man, this has been a very entertaining interview. I'm really glad you guys had me on. And if anybody wants to get involved, like our campaign has, it's called the self-love rebellion tour. So we're looking to do a tour. There's heaps of perks on there. We've got digital products that will teach self-love. And a lot of the stuff was from the teenage program that I started. So they're actual tangible tools to start working on yourself. Cause you gotta put a pin to paper. You can't, you're not gonna find self-love flipping through a people magazine or watching dancing with the stars. You know, you gotta sit down and look at, what are your values? Like you said, what do you stand for? You know, and where are you going? How are you getting there? Who's going with you? You know, be ready, like know yourself. And then of course, bad ass clothing and then we've got our live event and we've got a documentary that is coming out. Rose is in it. She's got a pretty incredible story. We've got a woman that, we're just looking at challenging women who are doing different stuff that are changing the game. How did you and Rose get connected? One of our customers had brought her up and it was the same thing. Did you guys get connected before she became the champ and everything too? Yeah. Oh, you did? Oh, that's even cooler. And that's why I know this is kind of like a universal thing. Are you shaking your head? You gotta see what I'm squeezing and I'm a hot mess. Oh, babe, take your bean off. Take your bean off. It's keeping me warm. Oh, you want some of my antibiotics? Maybe. I'm codependent as well. So yeah, that's what I think. It's a universal thing. Like what are the odds, you know, of Holly home beating Ronda Rousey. Come on. That was epic. Yeah, every Australian was like, why didn't you bet? Why don't you take it to a Pokey Mate? And I'm like, okay, whatever. So I truly think that this is a higher mission and I'm just here doing God's work. And I know that's a loaded word, but I mean, I just, every day I wake up, I'm like, can you guide me and direct me? Please just show me what to do and how to do it. And I will do it cause it's not the Courtney show. Even though I want it to be the Courtney show. Like I think I should have been on Oprah already or Ellen and I'm pissed off about it. But ideally it's not that. It's just, I just need to show up and ask. And if you ask, the universe will guide you. Might not always guide you properly to shave your armpits correctly. But you know, if you just do the next right thing, have good intentions, be a good fucking person and have faith and belief, you know? And we'll see what happens. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes Maps Anabolic, Maps Performance and Maps Aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is Mind Pump.