 Hey, so we were talking out by when we were having coffee this morning about the sports you played as a kid. I didn't know you, you boxed, huh? Yeah. Yeah, I did some boxing. Um, I did track and field. Um, I did a bunch of stuff, but yeah, boxing. I, I went to the Catskills and trained with Kevin Rooney. Oh, wow. Uh, that's Mike Tyson, former trainer. So I learned how to throw some, throw some bombs and learn how to dodge some punches and stuff. Uh, mainly probably the first five, six months that I was there. He didn't even really show me how to throw a punch. And I was like, man, this is, this is a drag. This is pretty boring. Like all footwork. Yeah. It was all footwork and all just a head movement the way you saw like Mike Tyson. Obviously I wasn't able to mimic what Mike Tyson was able to do, but a lot of that, you know, um, just kind of like windshield wiper back and forth. Just head movement constantly was, uh, what they reinforced there. Do you have a lot of amateur matches? No, no. And I think a lot of that has to do, a lot of that had to do with the fact that just, I was a big kid and whenever I went to into somebody else's camp or whenever he went to, uh, another person's gym, there just wasn't people, uh, in my weight class. So I'd still box them, but it was like more like sparring because I was, uh, I've been over 200 pounds probably since I was about 13. Oh, wow. And at that time I was probably 15, 16, between two, 20, two, 40. What the fuck were you doing in track? Were you happy with it? Yeah, I was just saying, was it shot put? Yeah, I was trying to get away with just throwing the shot put. Okay, so you ain't running. And just throwing the discus, but, uh, my track coach wasn't having it. The first day she's like, uh, you know, no one on this track team is just going to throw, throw stuff. You got to, you got to run as well. And I was like, oh my God, I'm the fat kid. I'm just like trembling in my shoes. You know, so I had to run and I, I did a hundred meter four by 100 meter. I could actually run back in the day. Now I, you know, if I tried to run, I don't think I could stop. You got to do the hardest or I might just blow something out, you know, blow out a hammy or something. Legit. When's the last time you run? I can, I can, I can identify. He runs on the treadmill. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll run here and there. He's not like you. Sal's allergic to running. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't even know, I don't even know if Sal knows that turn on the treadmill. No, yeah, I'm pretty sure he does it. Uh, an actual sprint. We had a speed golfer on our podcast, uh, not too long ago. What's a speed golfer? Yeah, I know. Right. Is that a real thing? Hey, listen, he's a world record holder. Okay. All right. In speed golf. How does that, how does that work? Guinness Book of World Records or what? That's what my wife said the same thing. My wife's like, come on, you could be a world record holder in anything. Yeah. Yeah. Like you make, you make up something and you could be a world record in it. Right. So they have to run from hole to hole. Yeah. You got to sprint from hole to hole. Apparently it's hard. No, seems to be difficult enough as it is. It sounds way more fun. You know, running in between. Yeah. No carts. Is that the idea? Yeah, no carts. And you got people trying to tackle you. Shut up. I mean, I made that part of it. I made that part of it. Maybe we could start our own. Exciting. Start our own sport. Yeah. Powerlifting golf or something like that. You probably exist in Russia. You got to hit the ball and then you got a deadlift, double your body weight. And then you got to go to the next one. That wouldn't be bad. You know what I'm saying? So I saw you, you post something the other day that I thought was really cool. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit about it because, you know, I know that once you, once you reach a certain point of success, I think one of the things that's probably got to be really difficult for a father is to know how much of that you give to your kids. And I saw that you bought your son a new truck. Yeah. And actually what I was most impressed by it was that I know what you could have bought him. Right. But you bought him kind of like an old seat. Which is a cool truck, by the way. It's a very cool truck to have for a young man, no matter what. But I know you could buy him a brand new whatever. And you chose to buy an old kind of beat up C10. Why is that? My son aspires to be like the exact opposite of me. He despises being well off. And, you know, I recognize maybe a couple of years ago that, you know, maybe being wealthy is just as embarrassing as being poor. And, you know, so like when he's when he's had friends over the house and things like that, they're like, you guys live in a castle, you know? And he like, I don't know. It's just as a kid, especially as a young boy, I think it doesn't feel great for people just to think that you have no resistance because as a teenager, like you're just you're flooded with all the same problems as every other teenager, whether you're white, black or otherwise, or whether you're rich or you're poor. Like we can all identify being a teenage kid is tough, you know, so he wants to kind of like identify with like things being a little bit harder. Oh, wow. Interesting. You know, we bought him, you know, basically a piece of shit, you know, on purpose because he wants to work for it. He wants to like fix it up. He wants to, I mean, he'll wear a cowboy hat. He, we have a, my wife and I recently bought a new house. We haven't moved into it just yet, but he goes over there and he's always doing like yard work. He goes over there with my dad and they like mow the lawn and they, you know, weed whack and do all that shit over there. And it's all stuff I would never do in a million years because I just pay people to do it. That's hilarious. So it's like he's, well, teenagers rebel. So it's his way. That's a cool way to rebel. I had some clients who were like hard. This is a long time ago. They were hardcore atheists and their kid to rebel became like super religious. Oh, they were like, what the fuck do we do? And I'm like, kids will just do the opposite. That's so interesting because I assume that was kind of you. I thought that was you kind of putting that on him. Like, Hey, just because dad has all these things. Yeah, maybe you should have challenged him by getting him like a really nice expensive car. Yeah, I get him a new Tesla or something. Yeah, I thought it was like a warm Buffett thing, like how he's with his kids. I was just like, you got to work for it. It is a little bit because my dad is there with him a lot doing, you know, doing this manual labor type of stuff. Because my dad always liked doing that stuff. My grandfather had like a used car lot and he was really good with his hands. He built his own home. He built a car. He, you know, rebuilt these cars and sold them and stuff like that. And so my dad is very familiar with, you know, using his hands and that just skipped me. I never, I never wanted to, my dad would show me stuff as a kid. He would like paint the wall and he'd be like, here's how you do this. You know, these kind of like long strokes and I would do it and I would like mess it up. And then he'd be like, no, no, no, it's more like this. And then like half of the garage would be painted already. And then I would kind of just lose interest, you know, cause I probably had some ADHD along with probably a million other problems. And I'd be off just throwing around my football or something and he painted the whole garage. So a lot of that stuff I just, I would never found really a lot of interest in. My dad was also like a nine to five blue collar IBM employee for many, many years. And I always saw that and was like, whatever the hell that is, I don't, I know I don't want to do that. Like you got to wear a suit and tie every day. And then he took me to work with him one day and like he was just at his desk and he's like, I don't know, he answered like a couple calls. He like wrote some shit down and then he like took some balls out of his desk and started like juggling them. And I'm like, this seems pretty boring. Like obviously that's not what he did every day, but I was like, this seems kind of boring, whatever the hell it is that he does, you know? And so I always wanted to be kind of the opposite of him. And now that I'm older and I have a much better understanding of like who he is as a person, there's nobody that I aspire to be more so than my dad. So that's strange. So you wanted to be the opposite of your dad and your son wants to be the opposite of you. It takes right after you. Now, did you have any challenge with that? Was there a moment when he was starting to grow up? Cause I would assume you worked really hard to get to the place that you're at now. And I feel like I have only a 10 week old right now. And I imagine that, and I've busted my ass, I waited a very long time till I even had a child because I wanted to be in a place financially. And so I imagine if he was coming up and I had nice things, which I would have when he's growing up, if he almost kind of resents me for it, I think I would struggle with that a little bit. Yeah, I don't worry about it too much. I mean, I know what you're talking about though. I just try to be there for my kids. And I think, you know, if I have a weakness, it's maybe that I don't push them enough because it's hard to figure that part out. Like how hard do I push them on something? Like some parents push their kids so hard on stuff that the parents hate them, but it still ends up being like in the kid's best interest and the kid still ends up being like a doctor or a lawyer, or at least acquire some form of success that we would all agree upon that looks like success in today's culture. So I don't know what that line is. I don't know how hard to push. My son played baseball and he played some other sports for a little while. And when he was playing baseball, we were just like driving to a practice. And he was like, you know what? I don't really like baseball. And I was like, oh, am I okay? You don't have to play baseball. He's like, we don't have to go to practice today. I said, no, well, you gotta go to practice today and you gotta finish out the season because you agreed to be on this team. And it's kind of part of, you know, part of the way. Part of the way. Yeah, it's part of the commitment of it. You know, so he played out the rest of the year and then he never played baseball again. You know, so it's like, I don't know that line. I don't know if anybody does. No, I think some kids push themselves so hard that that's why it's an individual thing. They push themselves so hard that if you add more pressure onto them, it could be a disaster. And then other kids I think need it. How would you divine success for your kids? Like if you could, you know, pick out their futures and consider them successful, what would that look like for you? I'll start by saying success for me as a parent, it's just to not have my kids be an asshole. I just don't want my kids to grow up to be like disrespectful of other people. And so far, they've been pretty good with that. They've been handling that pretty good. Success for them. I hope that they find something that they really enjoy. I hope they find something that excites them. I hope they find something that makes them happy, something that makes them feel complete. And that's all I'm really looking for. You know, hopefully by seeing, you know, what my wife and I do on a daily basis, hopefully they kind of get that vibe of that's what my wife and I are working for and working towards. And the reason why we love working so much is the fact that we take great pleasure and we take great pride in it. So hopefully they're seeing that. I think, you know, I think it's having an impact on them. You're such a driven person. And for me, one of the biggest challenges was figuring out how to balance being an involved father and work. I did a terrible job of it early on and I'm learning now how to do a better job of it. How do you balance those things out? Are you very involved in your kids' lives? I know you successfully got multiple businesses. What does that look like for you? Yeah, I'm very involved in their lives. I see, you know, I get to spend time with them every single day. One thing I think maybe people are, I think people are always trying to have like quality time with their kids or quality time with their relationships they have. And it doesn't have to be anything fancy. It doesn't have to be anything. You don't have to take them to Disneyland or I think even taking them to Disneyland, I think is a little bit fake in a way because it's like you spend so much time away from them. Now you're taking them to Disneyland and now you get the picture of you and them and you post about how much you love your family on Instagram. And I think that that could maybe come off the wrong way but I'm always there for my kids a lot. And when I'm not there for my kids, I share with them. I communicate with them a lot. I talk to them as if they're adults and I say, I'm not always gonna be here for you because I might be working. I might be doing something. And I was like, it would be a disservice to you if I was there all the time. You gotta get yourself out of shit sometimes. You gotta figure out stuff on your own sometimes. So I think the way that we spell love in my family is T-I-M-E. We try to spend a lot of time with each other. Sometimes it is quality time. Sometimes it's great. Sometimes all of us will go for a walk at the same time and other times we're just like all in the same house. But no one's doing anything with each other. Like we're all individually on a phone or something like that. Those are all things that we try to manage as well. My kids put their phones away at 7 p.m. every night. We all put them on a charger. My wife and I gotta shut our shit down too because we found that like it wasn't working to say these rules only exist for you but they don't exist for us. And so we try, we try, we really do. We try to make an effort. And I'm fortunate in the fact that my kids, they love the family aspect of it. They love when we go somewhere as a family. They love when we go to Thanksgiving and we're there with their cousins and nephews or my nieces and nephews and stuff like that. They really look forward to it. They talk about it a lot. When we're at the dinner table or if we go out to dinner, we're only allowed to have one phone. And we just think like one phone just in case some sort of communication. Sometimes my wife and I might go out with my son Jake and we might leave my daughter behind. Maybe she's tired from volleyball practice or whatever. And so that's the reason for like the one phone. But we normally phones are away when we're eating phones are away. Like just these small things that have helped us to be able to spend better time together and more time together. Speaking of phones and technology, I mean you grew up similar time to us where we grew up without such ease of access to technology and the ease of distractibility. And now we live obviously and we conduct our business through all this stuff. How do you foresee that challenge just from a health perspective? I mean, you're in the health and fitness space. I mean, do you see that being the next? We predict that being the next big. The next big challenge is figuring out how to manage digital wellness. Shit. I think people are dying on social media. I think most of the big players in social media are feeling incomplete. They're depressed, they have a lot of anxiety. They're not getting out of social media what they originally thought they would get from it. And I do think that you'll see more movements of people saying, hey, put your phone away for a day or put your phone away for the week. Like there might be like a week dedicated to it or something like that or a month, I don't know. But it's hard because there's just so much going on on social media all the time. It's hard for people to detach or to get away from social media. But if you go back to the original reason why all of us have decided to try to take our own path, it was to have like our own business and to not have to be on the hook for anything. But as you guys see, it doesn't work that way. I don't really work for myself. I work for every customer that I have. I work for, you know, I do work for social media. I work for anything that I have to do work for. I have to produce that amount of work. And as soon as you don't produce that amount of work anymore, then you don't produce that amount of work anymore. And your worth, it's possible that you'll feel that your worth has decreased because you have less likes or less views or less people. And it can be a really horrible trap. I feel fortunate that I have an amazing team of people around me. I have an amazing family. And so, you know, just like anybody else, bad comment or not as many likes doesn't make me feel great, but it also doesn't put me on a downward trend of really worrying about, you know, man, I bet I'd better come with something really good to post tomorrow. You know, I'd better bench 500 again or otherwise people aren't gonna care. Well, I think about this stuff a lot. I have kids too. My son is 14 year, how old are your kids? Six, or 15 and 12. Yeah, so my boy's 14 years old and I have these conversations with him because it was so different. I mean, I couldn't imagine having a camera around because there's cameras all over the place, right? Cause the phones, I couldn't, well not just in here but I mean everywhere, I couldn't imagine doing some of the stupid shit that I did as a kid. I mean, when I was a kid, you know, you get your ass kicked, it was over. That's it, nobody knows. Now you get your ass kicked, you could be a video of it. Your friends have to watch it. Yeah, next thing you know, you're 38 years old, you had a bar trying to talk to some girl and they're like, hey, that's the dude. Remember you guys, ass kicked at the, you know, whatever. So it's very different. I can also imagine what I would have done with a phone with video capacity with my girlfriend when I was 15 years old. Some other shit. Do you have these conversations with your kids? Yeah, so my kids aren't supposed to have social media whether they have it or not, I don't know. I don't snoop through their phones. I try not to get, I try not to, I try not to helicopter too much. I try my best with that. But as you know, that can be really difficult. I have had a lot of conversations with them about a lot of different things. I mean, I mainly would like for them to interact with people in person. That's, you know, that's the hope, you know, whether they follow through on that, I'm not really sure. It is all very complicated. It's very hard to make sense of it. Cause like, well you develop this business via the internet and via social media. And then now you're telling me that I can't, you know, I can't have social media. I can't use some of these things. I am very cautious with how much stuff I post of my kids. I was just going to ask you, do you post pictures and stuff? Yeah, here and there, here and there. And I asked them, you know, I just flat out ask them like, hey, it's okay to take a picture. And they know like, if it's okay to take a picture, that probably means that I'm going to post it somewhere. But I try to be cautious of that. I mean, even what you just said, like what about, you know, you're four years old and you come down for Christmas and you open up, you know, open up your presence and stuff and you're crying cause you didn't get the thing that you wanted. I mean, we all have these like things that have happened to us as kids. We don't really want to amplify it. And then there's the parent, you know, showing, oh, Timmy struck out and baseball or what, you know what I mean? Like, and here he is like throwing this fit and they think it's funny. And maybe it is kind of funny, like it's comical to everybody, but at the expense of what, you know, and so. You know what I'm more worried about is I'm worried less about that kind of stuff and more about, cause you see like big celebrities, right? Their kids have huge social media pages simply because they're the child of, you know, whoever. And I feel like when you get that kind of admiration and fame at a young age, that can be very damaging. Oh, you get all this attention. Everybody thinks you're so cool. And you did nothing. Maybe you blow up your ego, blow up your, you know, how awesome you think you are. And then, you know, one day you're gonna realize you're not that cool and that will all come crashing down. That's my big worry. That's why I don't post too much of them. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. They see me like with like fans and stuff. And I just don't know where their minds are at with that kind of stuff. I don't know what they, I don't really know how they truly feel about some of that stuff. Whether they want that life or whether they don't want that life at all. I'm not sure, I know that they have a lot of admiration for my dad. My parents live right next door and probably the coolest thing that ever happened, you know, out of, you know, building slingshot and building a business was being able to buy a house for my parents. They're right next door to us and we get to see them every single day. My kids, my kids know that my dad is real. You know, my dad's a dude that just, he just goes to church. He's really good to people. And as a result, a lot of good things happen to him. He's had a lot of shitty things happen to him from a health perspective, but he's always just plowed through him. He's always just kind of kept his head down. So I think, I don't know what, I don't know what influence I'm having or impact I'm having. I can't really say like, that's like to be determined. I'm trying to try my best. But I know for sure that like, I got somebody really good with my mom and dad, you know, being right next door. They get to see that as an example. And then even further, my wife is one of the few people in the world who's never taken a selfie before. She doesn't even know where to look on the phone to even try to take a selfie. So I think my daughter sees that, like my wife, not that there's anything wrong with like sexualizing stuff or feeling sexy about yourself, but my wife just, she doesn't go down that road ever. You know? And so my daughter is in like a 3x baggy hoodie that's mine, you know? She's like, that's, she's 12, you know? So who knows what, you know, two years from now, you probably do wearing something totally different. And she's getting into volleyball. So they got the short shorts going and stuff already, which I'm not too pumped about. But I think she has some good role models around her, I guess is my point. And I hope that my kids are identifying with that. I'm gonna change gears with you a little bit. Did you watch Game Changers? I didn't know. You haven't seen it yet? That's the documentary on plant based. Oh, I haven't seen it yet. No. What do you think about this Arnold Schwarzenegger thing? Yeah, I mean, you've been in the, you've been in the space as long as, as long as I have or if not longer, I've seen diets come and go. And, you know, at one point it was low fat and then it was low carb. And then it was keto and paleo and, but this new vegan plant based push seems a little different to me. Are you, are you feeling the same thing? Yeah, you know, I would just say like, I've never tried a vegan diet. So I, because of that, I don't know anything about it, you know. Well, they don't eat meat. Yeah, yeah, right. I do understand that side of it. I just think about my own experiences. So like, you know, I did powerlifting for a long time. And while doing powerlifting, you know, CrossFit came around and people made fun of CrossFit. And I was like, well, wait a second, have you ever tried CrossFit? Have you ever been to a CrossFit gym? Have you ever done a CrossFit workout? Do you know a good CrossFit coach? Cause maybe CrossFit's not that bad. So I've always been a little bit more open to it. Did you do a CrossFit? Have you done CrossFit? I have done many CrossFit workouts before. They suck, right? And now you know. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say, CrossFit's stupid. No, I was gonna say, I actually enjoy CrossFit. I think it has a lot to offer. I don't think it's everything, but I do think it has a lot to offer. There's a lot of great things in there. And then when it comes to like bodybuilding, powerlifters and bodybuilders are always kind of going back and forth. Powerlifters are super jealous of bodybuilders cause bodybuilders are jacked in tan, they look great. And they're usually pretty strong too, but powerlifters are always like, that guy ain't that strong. But they probably don't realize the guy can turn the 500 for five, six reps on a squat. He could probably turn into 600 or 650 if he worked on stimulating his central nervous system rather than just building muscle all the time. And so I think there's a lot of great things that come from other things that were so quick to shut off. So I don't know anything about veganism cause I've never really tried it. I don't know if it's something I would try. I've tried many, many styles of diet, but to cut out meat just doesn't seem like it would be anything that would fit my needs. I think also too, I think people are just trying to do the best they can in this world and they're trying to just like figure out what are some ways they can contribute? What are some ways that they can feel good about them? So if you feel good about yourself, then you can contribute. And I think people are also figuring out ways of like not destroying the planet and stuff like that. So some people that do, some people that are vegan believe that in the slaughtering of animals can affect our, affect our climate. Climate, there we go, affect our climate. Which I don't know, like there's science that shows both ways. So it's like whatever, but there's some people that just don't wanna harm animals. And I don't know by you saying like I'm not gonna eat meat and you're gonna only eat vegetables, maybe that's a different harm for animals cause maybe you're eating some of their fucking food. I don't know, but I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that I know anything about veganism when I've never tried it before. But have you ever seen a movement, a diet movement become- Super political. Politicized and shrouded in morality. I've never heard anybody say, I eat keto because it's moral or I eat paleo because I'm a better human than you. This is if I never heard it be been done this way before. And I know you eat mostly carnivore, right? You eat mostly meat. Yep. You getting any shit for that? Yeah, here and there. People are, people are, they always wanna see your blood work. They're like, let me see your blood work. And it's like- Cause I carry that around everywhere. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I didn't get- Show me your blood work. That's my point all the time is like, show me your blood work off of your Burger King diet or whatever it is that you're normally eating. So I think there's, again, I think that people are just, they're trying to do the best job that they can with the information that they have. And so somebody, somebody asking about cholesterol on a post that I make, you know, talking about meat. I think they're just, the cholesterol thing is a blockage for them to not try the diet. Yeah, no pun intended. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's a reason out for them, you know, or the finances. I hear that a lot. Oh, that diet's way too expensive. And so like for a week, I did like a fast food fitness challenge and I went to McDonald's every day or McDonald's or just wherever for fast food in and out burger, that kind of stuff and got some patties. And it wasn't, you know, it wasn't expensive. It was easy to do and I lost weight doing it. And it's like, you know, you can try these things and you can, or you can sit there and bitch about them and try to figure out reasons on why you're not giving it a shot, you know. What were some of the effects that you noticed for your body when you started to reduce, like how, first off, how was your diet before different than it was after you started going carnivore? Cause you weren't, it's not like you were vegan. You just ate more starches and carbohydrates from plant sources and you pretty much eliminated those, right? What were the differences that you noticed in yourself? So I've always been a fan of low carb diets. I wrote a book called The War on Carbs and like I firmly believe that most people should probably eat less carbohydrates. I mean, if you're already only eating 20 then you probably don't need less than that. But most people will find that they can actually be, they can run pretty efficiently without eating a lot of carbohydrates. And maybe that's not true for every single person but it's true from what I've seen from the people I've worked with. Well, it's a pretty good general rule considering how sedentary we are today. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people can probably come down from 400 grams to 300 grams and probably feel better without even changing their like protein or their fat, you know. And then if you wanna start to come down lower and lower then you might have to equate for that and you might have to change your protein and your fat calories. But I've always done like kind of a, almost like a ketogenic diet. I've been doing them since like the mid 90s. And more. This was when Dave Palumbo was really, he was really, you know, promoting those I think. Yeah, Dave Palumbo was probably even more into like early 2000s. My stuff came from like Dan Duchain. Oh, right. You know, he wrote body opus diet and stuff like that. Oh yeah, he's the classic, yeah. And so I got into it, you know, I got into it pretty early and always liked it and it always worked well for me. What I discovered was, you know, through going through a ketogenic style diet and through messing around with like bodybuilding style diets, the easiest thing for me to do is to just not eat. So fasting works really well. Sometimes it's a quote unquote bulletproof fast, AKA like a liquid fast, where I fast for 14 or 16 hours on a day, sometimes a little bit longer, sometimes a little bit shorter depending on the day. And then I usually eat twice. And kind of how I ended up landing on the carnivore diet, feeling really good for me is the two meals that I ate to try to get the most amount of nutrients in and to try to get the most amount of calories in was a carnivore diet, you know? So just eating meat like twice a day. I think there's a lot of people listening to this podcast right now that are probably heavier than they wanna be. And they probably wanna try to make some changes and it might sound crazy to not eat, but the option to not eat is a lot better than having options. When you have too many options, sometimes you don't know what to do with yourself. Now I'd also say that fasting can be dangerous and you might not wanna fast every day. Like if you fast on a Monday and you're binging on Wednesday, then your fast didn't work very well. So you have to kind of, you gotta learn it and you gotta make sure that it's something that's manageable because we want stuff, we want stuff in our life to be easy. We want stuff in our life to be simple. And if stuff in our life is simple, then it can be repeatable. And I know that we do wanna challenge and we wanna like throw down here and there and have things be hard and like fight through stuff. I get that side of it too, but we're not even gonna get anyone to get there if we don't keep things simple. So I feel that it's very, very simple to try some intermittent fasting. And maybe for somebody else who's never done it before, maybe they do eight or 10 hour fast. I mean, maybe it's just literally just a little bit longer than their sleep duration. Maybe they just skip breakfast or something like that. And then again, for me, having those two meals mainly be meat, I was still able to train really hard. I was still able to get in some good workouts. And then from there, I can audible it depending on how I feel, depending on how I look, depending on how lean I am or depending on how lean I'm not, I can shift into saying, okay, well, I should probably add in some potatoes. I should probably add in some fruit or I should add in a cheat day here and there, something like that. So you do throw in those foods occasionally. What are the foods that you allow into your diet for the most part? I would say that probably like, so other than meat, I eat cheese. I eat eggs. I'll eat fruit here and there. I have yogurt. So sometimes some dairy, sometimes there's some heavy cream in there too. If I feel like throwing in my coffee or something like that. And then occasionally I just eat whatever I want. Occasionally I just go out and have a couple of drinks with my wife. Wine is like my other carbohydrate, I would say. Alcohol. The wine diet. Yeah, the wine diet. I could see a few million dollars for me. Yeah, well, I would actually be stealing it from John Cena. He's the creator of the wine diet, I think. Really? Yeah. For a while there, it was the only carbohydrate source was wine. So I'll sometimes just, just because I like to enjoy a glass of wine here and there, sometimes that's my carbohydrate source. And then usually with wine comes me being like, ah, fuck it, and I'll have some ice cream or something like that. But I usually try to get back on the plant. So some people are like, how do you deal without having any fiber? How do you deal without having any sugar? And it's like, well, there's some, some of it creeps in there here and there. And I'm not afraid of vegetables. I don't think vegetables are making people fat. I know people talk about anti-nutrients, but I think with any anti, there's a plus to it too. Everything that has a plus has a minus, almost always as far as I've seen. And so like you could make a case and say, oh, I think meat has a lot of positive or a lot of negative side effects. Well, yeah, I'm sure that we probably can sit here and maybe agree upon a few of those, but we could also agree and say, yeah, it probably has a couple of positives. Some people might say the same thing about broccoli or kale and say, oh, it's really rough on your system and it could give you gas. And maybe some of the stuff that those things do and maybe some of those fibers, maybe it pulls out stuff that's damaging our body. I don't know. And as far as I've seen, and all the people I've communicated with, which is some of the best minds in the world when it comes to nutrition, they don't fucking know either. As you guys have probably found out yourself, right? For sure. How's mind bullet going? It's going great, man, that cratum. Yeah, talk to me a little bit about that. I got a little cratum in my blood right now. Do you? Some cratum and some caffeine. What's, so how much do you normally, when you take it, how much do you take and then how often are you taking it right? I take all of it. I put it in a blender. No, I take, you know, with the pills that we have, they're 750 milligrams per capsule. I usually take about three at a time. And I'll do that sometimes, you know, three times a day and some days, none. It just kind of really depends on the day, depends on what I'm doing. I do like taking it before we do like a podcast or something like that. What I've noticed from cratum specifically is that it just puts you in a better mood. You know, and it tends to just make everything kind of, because you're in a better mood and because you're in less pain, it makes everything feel a little easier back to what I was saying earlier. That's the whole invention of the slingshot, just trying to make shit a little easier. Oh, my shoulder hurts every time I bench. All right, well, let's figure out a way around that. Let's figure out a way to get some pain out of your elbow. Maybe you'll still like bench pressing. Maybe you'll still like doing push-ups. And so I think the same thing goes for cratum. It just, for me, it puts me in a little bit better mood. And you guys know, like when you wake up in the morning, you hop in your car and boom, all of a sudden your favorite song is on. Your best friend that you haven't talked to in 10 years calls. Just for some reason, things are stacking up. It's like, how much energy does that give you? Because now all of a sudden you're feeling good. And there's really nothing different about the day. It's just that things happen to land just right on that particular day and you have a lot more energy. So I notice a huge energy surge from it as well, but I think it's just because it's putting me in a better mood. Now, where's crated mat currently in terms of the legalities behind it and how do you source it? Is it like basically over the counter anywhere? Those are great questions, man. I think I'm about head to jail. The way some of the stuff is going here and there. It's kind of gray market right now, right? Yeah, it's banned in some states. It's banned in some cities even. Like in San Diego, if you're in San Diego, you can't order it off my website. Oh wow. It's just, it's kind of just in a weird spot. But I think that people are so accepting of certain things, you know? Of people are so accepting of like CBD and you're seeing a lot of stuff being made out of like vaping and they're like nine people died. It's like, I feel horrible about those nine people. However, there's lots of things that are killing people really, really rapidly and to only have nine deaths really isn't that much when you consider how much shit kills so many other people, how many people die of a heart attack, how many people die of diabetes, how many people die of just taking a fucking aspirin. You know what I mean? So I think some of these things get a bad reputation and maybe it's justifiable in a sense that like maybe everyone should have some caution with what they're taking, whether it be MCT oil or whether it be some other type of supplement or whether it's cratum. Like maybe we should all just pump the brakes and ask ourselves like, what's this for? Why am I taking it? And am I gonna be utilizing this for the next 10 years, five years, three years? Do I really like it that much? Is it worth it? As I said, there's gonna be a positive and negative to everything, right? We take creatine and we utilize that for long periods of time. We can all agree and say, look, there's been a lot of great science behind creatine, it looks like it works pretty good but I'm sure there's a lot of negative behind it as well. I think everyone should be cautious with everything they put in their body. Are there any studies that you reference constantly about cratum that people can do more research on? There's some stuff on my website where we have information, there's a couple videos. It's just one of those things, it's one of those areas where you can have 100 studies say that it's bad and you can have 100 studies that say that it's good. I just try to go off of my own life experiences with it and I try to go off of the data that we're gathering from people that are taking it. Now, there's a good amount of people that are taking way too much of it and I feel like a moderate dosage of it feels great and maybe these people are becoming addicted to it. It's definitely possible. What's a moderate dose? I think a moderate dose would be like around six to nine capsules a day, I think would be, that sounds totally reasonable. I feel good with that. Now, do you caution people against taking it every day? No, no, and it can be addictive, but so is caffeine. I mean, a lot of things that are addictive. So I don't want to sit here and try to make excuses for cratum, I think it's just a great product and I think that it's a product that a lot of people could utilize, could help with creativity, could help put them in a better mood, could help with pain management. It does alter consciousness. So it's one of those things. Now, you said addictive and one of the definitions of addictive is that there's a withdrawal when you go off of something. What are the withdrawals of going off cratum like? I don't know, because I haven't gotten off it. I've been utilizing it. Well, it's so straight, you've just been on it the whole time. I've been utilizing it for probably about two years. I have come off of it for like a week and stuff, but I personally never noticed anything and maybe that's because the dosages that I was using, like maybe they weren't high enough. Yeah, you have to be quite a bit higher to feel. You have to be up like 12, 16 pills that are 750 for you to feel any sort of like withdrawal symptoms. And I've pushed it that high before and came off. And it's a similar feeling as coming off of like any other opiate like Vicodin or Percocet or one of those, just a lot milder. I remember when I went through my Vicodin addiction and when I came off of that, I was up to like what, like nine pills in a day. I came off of that and that was like a fucking nightmare. I mean, cold sweats and shaking and for like a week I felt that way. With the cradome, but similar, right? I'll have like a runny nose. I'll feel those same symptoms that you'll get from like a Percocet or Vicodin addiction, but gone in a day. Gone in a day. So that like the first night of coming off of like that high of a dosage, probably feel restlessness that night, anxious the next day a little bit, but I've found like within a day or two, it's pretty much gone and it's nowhere near the same feeling that I ever felt from, but it's also what they equate about, you know, eight or so 750 milligram pills to like what one Vicodin would be. So in order for me, imagine how many of those cradoms I'd have to take to get the same feeling as I was getting from seven or nine Vicodin. I mean, you would have to be chewing the whole bottle down to get a similar type of effect, but because it does, it works with the same receptors. Yeah, it works on the opiate receptors from what I've read. What are the opponents? What are the legislators saying? Why are they trying to ban it? Is it because of the potential withdrawal off of coming off or like what are they, how are they selling that they need to make it illegal in other words? Yeah, some of the theory on it is that people are concerned that it could replace, it could replace pharmaceuticals because it is powerful because it does actually work. So, I mean, that's usually what you see. You see that in the supplement world too, sometimes something works really well. Look at SARMs, you know, SARMs seem like people were growing, seem like people were getting a little bigger off of it. And for whatever particular reason, they want to try to restrict that. I don't know the exact reasons why, but it appears that when anything is powerful or anything works, then they're like, hold on, we should patent that, we should try to figure out a way to make money off it. Cratom is just a plant and I don't think they could figure out, maybe they can't figure out the same way to patent it and make money off it the way they can with making a bike and stuff. Did you watch his brother's documentary? No, no, I've seen a lot of... Is that when you really got into it, Mark? Yeah, around that time. Did you know about it before Chris did the documentary? No, no, I didn't know anything. My brother introduced me to it. My brother I think would be dead without Cratom because I think he would have killed himself. Got him off of opiates? Well, I got him off of opiates, but I think he would have killed himself because he'd be in too much pain every day. Oh, wow. Because coming off the opiates, he's still in a lot of pain. He's still in a lot of pain to this day and it causes a lot of problems for him, but Cratom at least blocks the pain enough to where he's able to get out of bed and able to do a lot of the things that he still loves. What really sucks is that, and I think you and I talked a little bit off air one time about this, is like you can't market it that way, right? But it's unfortunate because in my opinion that's the best application of it. Coming from somebody who has several family members who have been addicted to opiates, experiencing it myself, I wish I knew of it when I went through that whole thing. Yeah, my oldest brother could possibly still be here if he knew about Cratom. I mean, if I just had some of the knowledge that I have now in terms of nutrition, there could have been a possibility there. He was bipolar and he was very reckless with drug abuse, so who knows? He always kind of said that he wasn't meant to be here for very long and so that may have been the case other way. Well, I'm always a huge proponent of personal responsibility and I think if you wanna do something to yourself, I think it's strange that we have laws that will, it's like, hey, don't hurt yourself. Hey, if you try and hurt yourself, we're gonna throw you in jail, what? That makes no sense to me whatsoever. So I'm a huge proponent of personal responsibility and against laws that don't have a victim. But in terms of Cratom, I know it's based out of, like was it Thailand or where is it? Malaysia or some shit. Yeah, where's the tradition of Cratom use from, because I know it goes back quite a bit and what are their, because I would be curious to see what their attitudes are towards it since they've been using it for so long. That's the documentary. Yeah, it's been utilized for many, many years. You guys can check out my brother's movie, Leaf of Faith. I'm not a Cratom historian by any means. I just love the product and my brother and I decided to come together and start a business off of it. But I just like it, I like utilizing it. And that's stuff I've been doing since the beginning with Slingshot and the other products. Anytime I find something that I like, I'm like, shit, maybe other people will enjoy this too. And I try to just bring it to market and bring it to people. Yeah, switching gears a lot. I noticed that you're leaning jacked pretty much all the time. I'm trying, man, I'm trying. Is, I mean, you went from powerlifting and very intensely folks love that. Powerlifting, AKA being fat. Right. Then switching gears and it goes to that. But now, I mean, this wasn't just the one and done kind of a thing. It's not like you're getting up on stage to prove a point and all this. Is this something that you could see yourself doing continuously? Yeah, I'd like to stay in shape, you know? It feels good. I would say, you know, the Carnivore diet has allowed things to feel a little bit easier. Where I did a bodybuilding style diet, you know what a bodybuilding diet is like, where you're not really eating hardly any fat and you're feeding yourself about six times a day and you're eating, you know, protein carbs and fat, but the fat calories are really low. That was just really difficult. It was difficult to like prep the meals all the time. There's a pain in the ass to like walk around with Tupperware. I don't like doing any of that. I don't meal prep. I only, I only cook when I'm at like home base when I get back to my house because I get home at like four or five o'clock and I cook. And then if I still feel like eating again, I'll eat again at like seven and I cook the meals again. But the diet that I've landed on now, it just feels pretty easy to maintain this way. This is not a fight or a struggle. I would still like to be lighter, but I'm not really trying to, I'm not really trying to force that because I don't want to like lose the weight just to gain it back again. And so I've been kind of consistently at 240 and I mentioned to you guys earlier, I was 240 when I was 16. So my body's just like, hey, this is a good weight to hang out at. It looks different though. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you look better now than even when you were competing. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, no, I think you, I think you look, I think you, yeah, yeah, no home home. I just, I think you look, I think you look better. I think you look healthier. I think you look fuller. You could see, I felt like I could see the stress on your body when you, when you went through the bodybuilding thing. No, it was hard. It was really, really difficult. And that's what I like to share with people is like I found something for myself that feels good, that feels right. It doesn't feel complicated. It doesn't feel like a struggle. Deprived, I feel deprived once in a while because I'm a fat kid at heart and I love cookies and I love peanut butter cups and I love ice cream and I love pizza, all the same things that most people really like. And so I think sometimes in the fitness industry, I think people might look at some of us and say, oh man, like they got it easy because they figured it out or they all started training when they were young. So it must come easier to them. Well, it's still really hard, you know, and I don't know how hard it is for you guys, but it feels really hard to me in terms of, you know, kind of shutting off that side. It's gotten easier over a period of time. And again, the carnivore diet, because I think because of the fact that I get to kind of stuff myself, I think that helps. I kind of, I like to like overeat, you know? And I get to do that like twice a day. So I look forward to it every day. I look forward to eating a steak, which might sound weird to someone. So I was like, how could you like eating steak that much? Well, it's easy to say that when you're eating other options often, when you're eating a burrito and you're eating pizza, how many of us have had food left over in the fridge? That's a much better option for us than what we ordered. You know, we ordered Chinese food, we ordered pizza or something like that. And there's the chicken just sitting in there, all lonely by itself. It's not gonna get eaten. You're not gonna get around to it because you're filled yourself up with something that you probably shouldn't have. So I just ended up landing on something that while I'm talking about, you know, sometimes the, sometimes there's still cravings there. I will follow through on those cravings, but I push them off. I try to say, okay, well like, what have you done? You know, like have you strung together for five days? You know, if we strung together five days or 10 days, then maybe I'd kind of look at a certain date and be like, oh yeah, that's my brother-in-law's birthday. And we're going to the 49er game that day. And maybe I should just go and eat whatever I want. You know, so it just kind of depends, but I try to have the ability to audible and to do something different. I think you just make friends with the uncomfortable feelings of being hungry or having a craving. It's not like you don't have cravings. You just make friends with it. It's a different experience, I would say. Is there anything that you picked up that you've kept permanently in your repertoire from your bodybuilding training? Because bodybuilding training and powerlifting training, there's some similarities, but there's a lot of differences. Is there anything that you learned from that that you've kept now in your training, I guess, long-term? Yeah, I loved in the bodybuilding training just trying to move through stuff quickly, trying to have quicker transitions. In powerlifting, it might take you 60 minutes or 90 minutes to get through a- A squat session. Yeah, a squat session or a deadlift session. I mean, think of somebody that squats, say like 700 pounds or something. They might use 550 to 585 for some working sets and they might do five sets of it. And it's like, well, there was 15 or 20 minutes of warm-up before you even touched a barbell. And then that warm-up time, especially when you start to think about, you might have people in a group, that's gonna take pretty long time. And then to get through your top sets, that's gonna take a long time. So you could be on an exercise for about an hour. In bodybuilding, it's like, let's try to get the most out of this. Not necessarily in the shortest period of time, but let's get the most out of this. Let's get everything that we can squeeze out of it and let's get out of it. So you might do like bent over rows and you might, as soon as you're warmed up, as soon as you feel good, you might stack on a good amount of weight, maybe try two or three more sets that way and boom, you're done, you're on to the next thing. So trying to keep a good pace in my workouts and trying to, once you get into like a circuit or once you get into like a super set, trying to really stay true to like, trying to be poignant with just every minute on the minute type stuff. How about the pumps and stuff like that, were those just totally different for you? I still feel like I'm learning them. Really? Yeah, I suck at it really, to be honest with you. I'm like, I can get them here and there, but they're tricky to like sustain them and to hold on to them. They can sometimes be a little elusive for me. Well, it's hard, you're low-carb. Yeah, that's true. That was one of the biggest differences that I noticed when I went keto, because I did it right around bodybuilding time, was my pumps sucked. They were nowhere near the same as when I went in with 400 grams of carbs. 400 grams of carbs, half a gallon of water. I fucking blew it up. Looks like I had 30 pounds in my workout. When you're keto or carnivore, you just, you don't get a lot of the carbohydrates getting shuttled in there, which also pairs and holds the water too. So just the pumps kind of suck in comparison. Yeah, it's not as good. And then like I said, to try to hold a pump for a period of time is a little bit more difficult. And in my opinion, it's important to try to, once you get the pump, it's important to try to maintain it really for as long as you can. I mean, you're not trying just to totally kill yourself with it, but you are trying to make it difficult and you're trying to sustain that for a period of time. And it starts to, that was, that's what I had to learn. That was probably the hardest thing for me to learn was how to get a pump, you know, in my biceps or in my triceps or in my shoulders. Like I've experienced some of it before, but not to that level. And in bodybuilding, it's really important to make the muscles grow and to make the muscles kind of look 3D. Yeah, totally. What about the anabolic use differences in powerlifting and bodybuilding? Is it just, is it super similar or are there different favorite anabolics for powerlifting versus, because I know in bodybuilding, you don't necessarily want to hold a lot of water unless you're in the off-season or whatever. And for powerlifting, it's like, I don't care. I just want to be as strong as possible. Are there big differences in the anabolic usage? In powerlifting, you know, many powerlifters don't really care about the estrogen buildup as much. Because it makes your joints feel better, right? Yeah, and it can help keep you strong too. And then also by taking an anti-estrogen, you're plummeting down your good cholesterol as well. And so that could be problematic because now your red blood cell count is high, your blood is sludging through your system, your heart is working harder, and you're starting to create some issues. So the anti-estrogens, a lot of times, aren't really used as much in powerlifting. I would say it's interesting. When do they use it, just if they get like really bad side effects? Yeah, if they get like gyno, they start growing some boobs, they might throw it in there. Although that can lower, they can shorten the range of motion. Yeah, getting some titties might be beneficial. You know, yeah, there's different steroids for all kinds of different things. You know, even like growth hormone and even like SARMS and insulin, they all do such different things. Do powerlifters take those? Do they take growth hormones and insulin and stuff, or they mainly just do? The good ones do. Really? Okay. The good ones just do whatever it takes. You know, they take any and everything they can. I mean, why not, right? You're already injecting yourself with a bunch of other shits. I wanna double down and get a little bit bigger, even though it is dangerous, but you know, the prize is that you get to, you know, get to your goal, right? And it's the same prize that anyone else has, whether they're natural or are not natural. The difference between bodybuilding and powerlifting, I would say that most of the time in bodybuilding you're taking stuff that maybe is a little faster acting and it doesn't turn and convert to estrogen as much, so you wouldn't look as bloated. That's why like trend-belone is extremely popular because it makes you insanely strong and it helps keep you lean. It's not gonna like make you lean if you don't have a good diet, but it helps keep you tight, helps keep you lean even while you're able to lift a lot or, you know, be strong. And testosterone is going to be something that is gonna come with, it's gonna aromatize and turn into estrogen as well, which can make you strong, but you'll be strong and bloated. Interesting. What about dose-wise? Cause I know that bodybuilders get a lot of flak for taking the most, like, oh, they're on tons and tons of gear. Do powerlifters play with similar doses or is it fair to say that bodybuilders are the ones that take the highest amounts? I always had a saying when it came to syringes that if it's not full, it's empty. So you just, you load it up and it doesn't matter what sport you're playing, you load it up no matter what. I think people are gonna point the finger at each other. I've never heard that before. Yeah, people are gonna point, well, there's no, I mean, you're already shooting yourself with shit, right? Yeah. You may as well, you may as well go all out and get- You can't even out with a new 6CC, you know? Yeah, and then you're really struggling. But people are gonna point fingers at each other and be like, oh, they're on tons of shit. I mean, people do it with CrossFit all the time. Yeah, but you're a great person to talk to because you've openly talked about that. You've power lifted and you've body-building. Personally, which one did you use more in? Body-building. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I think Sal was trying to get to that. Sal was trying to get to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, thank you. More frequent too, you know? So it's like, I'll go back and look at some of the videos and stuff and I'm like, fuck man, I'm still pretty strong, especially coming down to those like last two weeks. And I'm like, oh yeah, well I was sticking myself four times, you know, four times 12 or four times three is 12, right? So 12 CCs of whatever the hell shit it was. I don't ever really, like I don't count anything. I'm really weird that way. I don't look at any numbers that we have from Slingshot and I don't count calories. I don't count grams of testosterone. I just utilize them, you know what I mean? They go off how I feel. Yeah. I feel pretty fucking good. We're all right, yeah. What do you think about this? Because we get a lot of questions on SARMS. And the way we answer it is always like, all right, SARMS haven't been around that long. We know what testosterone does. If you're gonna go that route, you might as well go testosterone. So it's SARMS and I broke my cup. What are your views on it? Cause that's kind of new. That's newer on the scene, you know? What are your thoughts on SARMS and those types of peptides and all that stuff? Man, I think that they're working for people, you know? From what I've seen there, it seems like they're working for people. It seems like they're helping people add some muscle mass. It seems like they're helping people with strength. There are a bunch of things that are called SARMS that aren't always even directly SARMS because they fall into a very specific category. But it seems like it's effective for what people are trying to do. And anytime anything's effective for what something, you know, something that someone's trying to do, people are gonna go for it and people are gonna do it. So I hope that more information continues to come out because whether they're like, whether they're like, whether they're more dangerous than steroids, I don't really, I don't have a good understanding of. Well, that's just it. We just don't know a lot. Yeah, I'm not sure. And I guess the reason to take them, it seems like there's a lot of compelling reasons to take them because, you know, a steroid, there are steroids that you don't have to inject, but with steroids, it seems like it's just more involved. It seems like you're gonna be really messing with your testosterone levels a lot. It's also black market versus gray market. Yeah, right, right. And yeah, you don't know where to get it from and it's like kind of, you gotta, you know, meet some dude in front of a Safeway or something to get him. It's a really weird thing or you can buy him on the internet, right? And you can- It's way too accurate. I know. I was very safe way on a Tuesday at like six o'clock, you know, and- The deli section or in the sandwich. Mark, always how it goes. Mark, do you get a lot of people ask you business questions? Yeah, here and there, yep. What do you think is the number one mistake that people make that are trying to build something similar to you? When you see a lot of these up and coming kids or up and coming people that are, they look up or they aspire to be like you or build something like you've built, what do you think there's some of the most common mistakes you see made? Don't try to compete with me, I will kill you. Yeah, it's a big mistake. Man, there's, I think people need to just move slow and have, and maybe lower their expectations a little bit to try to think that you're gonna like land this like multi-million dollar thing and that it's gonna be this crazy thing. I still think even if you did think that about something, let's say you had an idea for an app or you had an invention, those are all cool things, but you still wanna kind of take it slow. And I know that everyone else is kind of the other, everyone else wants to kind of think the other way. The reason why I advise that is, it's easy to spend other people's money. It's easy for me to come into this room, give, hit you guys with a really cool concept and be like, all right, you're in for 50, you're in for 20, you're in for like, whatever you guys can do, right? And I go and do that to a bunch of other people too. It's easy to like fundraise, you know, and it's easy to like blow people's money, but the best thing that you can do in business is be, try to be in business for yourself as much as possible and try not to go involve other people. People are always so quick to try to involve somebody else. And even like, even within my own business, my father-in-law who was a good businessman as well, you know, he told me, he's like, hey, don't ever forget the fact that people are hopping on this train that you started when you were 12. You know, like, if they've been with you for three or four years or like, that's really cool. That's awesome that you have people that have been with you for a while, but they weren't with you when you were 12, when you first started powerlifting, you first started it. So in a sense, it's like, you know, be careful how much shit you try to share with other people. If you want someone to like, you know, be in on a business with you, maybe you can do it on your own. Maybe you can do it like more by yourself or maybe you can just have people that are part of it, but they're more like employees rather than like investors. I see a lot of people making that mistake. They'll bring on a bunch of investors and you're like, man, you got six or eight people involved in that shit. Like it's sound, it's just sound, it gets watered down quick. And then like, I don't know, like what if, what if your ideas change over the court? Like the mission and the drive and the goal changes. It's cool if it changes for one or two people, but if it changes for one person a lot and doesn't change for everybody else, now you're kind of stuck. What was your first business? First business was Slingshot. Wow. Wow, so you hit it out of the park first time. Yeah, but how many years though in the making? I mean, to your dad's point, right? Yeah, it all took a long time. I think probably my first introduction to like learning business was probably more through like pro wrestling than anything else. Pro wrestling, you're selling yourself and you have to figure out a way to, you gotta figure out a way to like captivate people. You gotta figure out a way to stand out and you gotta figure out a way to stand out amongst 50 or 60 people. And they all look pretty much the same. Like everyone's got a great body. Everyone's super athletic. Everyone's insanely aggressive. Everyone seems to be pretty sharp on their feet. Everyone seems to be pretty good on the microphone. So you're like, what the fuck am I gonna do to stand out in front of these animals? This guy's six, eight, and this girl can do a back flip off the top rope. And this guy's got purple hair and wraps on command or whatever, you're like, I don't even know. So like I'd learned a lot through that. I've learned a lot of like, almost I guess you'd say like marketing type stuff. What was your shtick? My shtick, I just used my own thing that I had since the time I was a kid and that's smelly, the nickname smelly. It's always stuck with me. And so when I was wrestling, I was the kid that was picked on that couldn't take it anymore type of thing. Oh, very cool. Do you remember Mark, the single best business advice anyone ever gave you? I would guess I'd have to say no, I don't remember. I've run into a lot of great people when it comes to business. I guess more like life advice stuff has come from my dad and that's always helped me in business as well. My dad's always said, part of knowing who you are is knowing who you're not. And that's always really helped me because in business it's easy to kind of like look at what someone else has and go, oh my God, that's really cool, like we should do that. I was like, well, no, maybe you shouldn't because maybe you're not them. Maybe you should kind of continue on your own path. But yeah, we have a lot of good people that we communicate with on business. Ron Pena is somebody I look up to a lot. They recently sold Quest Nutrition. I know there's several people involved in Quest Nutrition. They recently sold Quest Nutrition for like a billion dollars. That's it, yeah. And he was just like, you're not gonna go anywhere without a good team. And you need to have some good people around you. Do you remember the first time that advice helps that your dad gave you about knowing who you're not? Oh, it helped me more so in powerlifting than anything. I was driving myself crazy with the numbers, trying to be as strong as I possibly could, trying to squat 1100 pounds and bench 900 pounds and deadlift 800 pounds. I always tell people, you know, be very, very cautious, you know, in your pursuit to try to reach some of your goals because it can be a real pit. And it can, it's, you're not gonna be any happier when you get there than you are right now. And so I think a lot of people think, oh, when I do this, this is gonna happen. A huge one. When I move into that new house, this is gonna happen. When I get that new car, this is gonna happen. It's like, no, man, if you're a miserable bastard, you're gonna probably stay that way, regardless of like what watch you have or what car or what house you have. What were some of your biggest mistakes along the way? I've always moved pretty slow. So if there's been any mistakes, maybe I've moved a little too slow in certain spots. But I haven't really had anything where it was like something completely, you know, blew up, I haven't gotten there yet. Nothing's completely blown up in my face. But that's because I always test the waters. You know, I know it's not a sexy thing to say, but I always stick my toe in the water first, check the temperature of it. If it feels right, then I might start to get in slowly, but I'm not gonna like jump off the diving board. I just never had that mentality with really anything. So I always wanna like, I always wanna try something and like learn, like learn more about it. Even something as simple as an Instagram post of, you know, a new product being in the background or something. Like if I don't really hear anybody asking a question about it, then maybe I'm kind of like, oh man, maybe I shouldn't order as many of those as I thought. Like maybe that's not as cool of an idea as I thought. So I'm always trying to proceed slowly, much like you would do in powerlifting and much like I had, I was forced to do that in school because I felt like I wasn't smart. You know, I was put into special classes and stuff like that. So that slowness and that, you know, drawing things out and taking a long time, taking my time with stuff was actually something that ended up being a strength later on, especially when it came to powerlifting because I just didn't care how long a powerlifting workout took. It could take four hours or five hours. I'm just gonna sit in there and figure it out so I get stronger. What about employees or partners? I mean, you strike me as someone, you have such a big heart. I feel like and sometimes your greatest strength is your greatest weakness. You know, have you ran into a situation where you gave too much to an employee or someone that's in a partnership and it's kind of been a hassle later on or something you had to deal with in the business? Yeah, like I did say, you know, you need to build a good team, but that doesn't mean you need to have a bunch of partners. The only partner in this and the only partner that I think anyone should ever have in a business setting, maybe not ever have because there's certain circumstances where you just need more finances to really make it work is just your significant other, you know? And so like I haven't had stuff. I've had employees that I put a lot of time into and then, you know, they moved on to do other things, but I don't regret any of that. I think that was all still worth it. Like they got a lot out of it. I got a lot out of it. Good learning experience to be able to move forward from. But yeah, I'm a pretty big believer in the fact that I think that people are trying to involve other people when they maybe just, they probably shouldn't. What about, what are you learning with like leadership? I mean, obviously to run something your size and to have a team that you have and you're the owner, you have all these employees, what are you learning about yourself and leadership over this whole process? What I'm really proud of is we have a team that when people come in, we try to make them feel like they're part of the team. We try to make them feel very welcome. We try to make them feel like family in a way. And we had Charlie Rocket, I'm sure you guys have seen him on Instagram before. We had him come in just yesterday and he was like praising every, you know, he was like, man, it really feels like family here. This is really cool. He got kind of bombarded with people once soon as he walked in the door. And you know, that's something that I'm really proud of and it's something that we try to work hard at. Like I want people, you know, we're not like, you know, trying to be like overly happy or whatever, but we're trying to make people feel good. A lot of times, I think everybody thinks that everyone's like looking for money and that everyone's looking to be like famous and stuff. But really what people want is a fucking hug and a pat on the back and they want recognition. And so when you have someone come in and you got people saying, oh man, I know you from Instagram. I liked that post you did the other day. People are like, huh? Like you're paying attention to me and maybe we're just paying attention to them for that week because we know that they're coming in but it doesn't make any difference that makes person feel good, you know, at the moment. And so from a leadership perspective, I think it's important to try to showcase what you feel is important. You know, the things that are, you know, the dollars and cents, those things are great. It's great to try to move the needle on those things, but we don't have a business unless we have a team, you know, working in an effort that makes sense, having everybody on the same page all the time. So it's like we can sit here and like fight or argue or be mad about this didn't get done on time or that could have been done better. But really in the grand scheme of things, people need to feel good in order to be able to move forward at all. Single greatest challenge as a CEO of a company. And I, is that fucking easy? Yeah, I really, I feel like I feel like every day is just fucking awesome. Like I have a lot of fun every single day. I wake up early, I train and I try to be at peace with stuff the best that I can. I try to not overthink or over complicate things. I guess it maybe is not like quote unquote hard for me to be like an owner because I don't think about it that way and I don't even look at myself as an owner or a boss. Like I work for slingshot just the same way as everybody else does. And I would challenge anybody that works for me like work as hard as I'm working. You know what I mean? Like I'm not leaving the building. I'm gonna be there early every day. I'm gonna work my face off and obviously there's more reward for it because I own the damn thing, right? But I think that the other employees see that and I'm like, fuck man. I know that he's waking up at like 4 a.m. I know he's getting into the gym and he's getting after it. And I just saw him going to a podcast and I just saw him going to a meeting. And so it's not like I have it easy. You know, it's not like I'm calling the shots from a beach house or something like that. Have you had to fire anybody? Yeah, yeah, we've had to let people go before. Do you do that or does someone else? I'm trying to think if I ever actually fire. Yeah, yeah, I've had to do it before myself. Yeah, it's great. It's great. Well, that's tough, right? That's a hard thing to do. Yeah, yeah, firing people or even just telling people just how you truly feel sometimes is difficult. You know, my wife and I talk a lot about the business. I talk a lot about the business to my general manager over there, Smokey. And we all try to just communicate as much as possible in that way. That way things don't get too weird, you know? And if you do need to be released, we're hoping that it's not a huge surprise to you, but we're always a little bit surprised that it is a surprise to them. But it's all stuff that we agree upon, you know? We'll talk about it a lot because I don't wanna just have like a revolving door. You know, I don't want my business to be that way. All the people that have come to me, most of the people that have come to me, it's all been just very organic. They've come in, they trained in the gym, they saw the gym, they came to a seminar. They maybe even did something for me. Andrew over there who does our photos and who does our podcast as well. You know, he came to a seminar, he snapped some pictures and then he was like asking, hey, like can I do some more stuff for you? You know, I'm a photographer and he gave me his card and boom, you know, now he's working for me. So we have a lot of situations like that where there hasn't been like a resume, there hasn't been these probably normal procedures. I don't even know like if these guys have formal educations or a prison background or something. I don't know, you know, I don't know what they've done or what has happened in their past, but I just know that they feel right, you know, at the moment and so that's what we react to. Now we're trying to, you know, make it harder so that way we're not just like hiring our buddies off the street because that's happened before too and then that gets to be really awkward. But just like in any relationship, you know, there needs to be a lot of communication and for some reason we're also hung up on, man, like, how is this guy's gonna really react if I tell him like that the garbage bin is full all the time but that's his job and you're like, I should probably just tell him, maybe he doesn't even know, you know, and you have this fear that like the guy is gonna think you're an asshole or whatever. And it's like, I may as well just say something, you know what I mean? It's never as bad as you think. It's usually fine. Or like Adam doesn't care, you know? If he's an asshole. Right away says it. You think he doesn't care? No, not at all. I'm a direct guy, you know? Your job is to take the trash out. You don't take the trash out. Take the fucking trash out, guy. You know what I'm saying? It's that simple. Get that shit done. What's on the horizon for the business? I don't know, man. We got a lot of stuff coming at us from a lot of different angles and I have to, you know, sit back and try to think, you know, what makes sense. See, that's a hard thing as a CEO. Why the fuck do you not say that? Yeah, yeah. You know, that's, I tell you what, one of the hardest things in this business, and I tell people this all the time, is that when you get to the kind of level where you're at, there's always fucking opportunity. Yeah. It's learning what to say no to, right? Right, right. I mean, I got to think the same thing for you. That would have been a better answer. I know I, can we start, can we start the whole, start from the top? Right, isn't it though? Like, isn't that fucking hard? That is the hard thing to do is try to figure out and figure out like who has good intentions and who's trying to just get your profit. Yeah, who's kind of just trying to wiggle their way in. Who knows why, you know, who knows why someone's trying to like wiggle their way in or whatever, but, you know, I've learned some good things over the years, you know, just even going to some seminars and things like that. And, you know, one of the things I learned is they said, you know, you can't win the Kentucky Derby with a donkey. And so you have to make sure you don't have a bunch of donkeys around you. You want to make sure, you know, there's the saying, you know, that Eagles, you know, they only, they only fly with each other when they're at their highest altitude. You're not going to see another bird up there. And that's what you want to have. You want to have an office full of Eagles. And every once in a while, you might go somewhere or do something and out of nowhere, you hear, ee-haw! And you're like, fuck, I thought we went through it with this guy enough. But apparently we have a donkey in the office, you know? And so sometimes, sometimes you got to go back and clear things out. But yeah, that is a really difficult thing is to figure out like what's in our best interest in the past that's always just been like, what's in my best interest? Like, I like these compression cuffs because they help get rid of elbow pain. I'm going to sell these. This slingshot seems kind of neat. Like I think other people will enjoy it too. Now it's like, I need to think about wearing shit that maybe I wouldn't normally wear, you know? I got to think about, because it's going to drive in more customers for us. It will help us retain more emails. It will help us, it will help us in a lot of ways which can help everyone in the business. And that's really the goal is to, not to try to grow the business. So I can say, oh, I'm worth a hundred million dollars or whatever, trying to grow the business so I can make more people that work for us more money. What role does in your business, when you look at it from the top, what role does the podcast play? Is it more of a way to use new media to kind of build the brand and authority? Or do you view it as like a separate business itself? She, you know what? We probably have to think about our podcast a little bit more than we do. The podcast gets just a huge response. We have so many people that we run into and usually it's people like, man, I watch your podcast. I have people that come up to me and they tell me they listen to everyone. I'm like, how is that even possible? Like we put out a lot of content. We do like two or three every single week, maybe even more and each one's like over an hour. I'm like, how do you even, what a waste of time? You're killing yourself over there. What are you doing, you know? But yeah, we probably do need to put a little bit more business action behind the podcast. We really don't put hardly anything into it when it comes to that. We don't really truly like sit around and think about it much. The money comes from Slingshot and Slingshot's already going. And so that's why, you know, from a CEO perspective or an owner's perspective, it seems like it's all moving along pretty seamlessly, but a lot of it's just because a lot of things have come together and a lot of things have been put into place over the last two or three years. So there was some periods of time where it got a little harder. But I also like, I don't have it in my, it's not in my vocabulary to try to like, be like, oh man, I was really in there grinding it out. You know, I'd rather try to keep things more simple because it's like for the health of my brain, I need to feel that everything's fucking easy. Well, I think that's part of your secret sauce right now too, is that, I mean, you built Slingshot and I think one of the things that made it really successful aside from being a brilliant idea is the model that you built with the gym. I mean, you offer this free access, you're giving, you're giving to all these people. And I try and explain this a lot when I do interviews that, you know, if you give people so much value, it's not a hard sell to sell them a 30 to a $70 item that may help them again, because you've already provided so much value. And it seems like you've done the same thing now with the podcast, you're less worried about how am I monetizing it or making a bunch of money off of it. Let's just provide a ton of value for people and the money will come. So I actually think that's probably part of your success is that you've led that way, whether it be by accident, dumb luck or not, but I definitely think that's a big reason why you have. How do you pick the guests for your podcast or just people you're interested in or? Pretty much, yeah, pretty much just people I'm interested in and people that I feel I can grow from. I wanna have people in there that I really feel like, that not just me, but my employees can grow from as well. Like really learn stuff from, like having someone come in that maybe has been in the industry for 10 or 15 years. We just had John Berardi on the podcast more recently and the guy sold his business for like, I don't know, a hundred million or something ridiculous, precision nutrition, having somebody on the podcast, he didn't come into the actual facility, but just what we learned from him in that two hour timeframe, those are things that sometimes can last a lifetime. Again, having someone like Ron Pena come in, Jake Cutler, like rubbing elbows with these people, like you have no choice. You have absolutely no choice, but to be better. You got no choice, but to be motivated and inspired and fired up from these people. Jake Cutler was, I don't know if you guys ever had him on your show, but we're working on actually having more of him. Oh man, he's smart business guy, isn't he? It's gonna drive you guys nuts. How much you're gonna dig the stuff that he says, man. He's super smart and really, really nice guy. Do you stay just in the fitness space with your guests or do you ever venture out for people that are interesting but outside of health and fitness? Yeah, we try to get into some nerds here and there. People who've written books about keto or something like that, but they don't maybe look the part or we've had people come on and talk about mental health or heart health or kind of a wide variety of things, but usually it's in the fitness or health domain of some sort. I kind of think that, I kind of think that if you don't lift, I don't really want to hear what you have to say. I want people around that that are, I mean, at least exercising in some way. I just think that exercise, it does so much for your brain. A lot of people are thinking about what it does for their body and it does stuff for your body. Well, your brain is part of your body. Yeah, yeah, it's the driver of everything, right? That's right, that's right. And so I think maybe we should be thinking a little bit more about how exercise can benefit our brain and if we're trying to make big improvements to our body in the way that we look, that's more through what we eat. Is there something about you that isn't so well known that people tend to be surprised? Like, is there something that, you know, people are like, oh wow, you're into that? You're talking about like weird fetishes and cosplay or anything? I don't know, is there something about you that would be surprising? Sal always likes to ask these dress-up questions. We don't have to air this part. Sometimes I'm a unicorn. This is for personal use for him. Yeah, I don't think there's anything. Like, are you into any hobbies or anything that's not fitness, health-related? I know that you just don't talk about our show on Instagram when people don't know about. No, I'm pretty much a meathead. I love weights. I love talking about nutrition. I do find something that's pretty interesting. You know, the guy that taught a lot of people how to bench squat and deadlift is now teaching a lot of people how to lose 100 pounds. You know, I get a lot of people that hit me up and they're like, I lost 50 pounds, 80 pounds, 100 pounds. I mean, I get that constantly and so I find that that's kind of an interesting thing. I was teaching people to get like big and fat and as strong as possible. And then now I'm teaching a lot of people on how to lose weight. And that actually feels, it actually feels better to me than just the, just, you know, here's how you brace on a squat or here's what you do when you, when you do a bench press or something like that. I've always loved cartoons. I still like cartoons a lot. So like if Bugs Bunny's on, like I'm gonna watch that shit and laugh my ass off, which I don't really, like, I like to laugh. I like to have fun, but I don't, you know, I don't like laugh all day and I try, I try not to spend too much time, like, I don't know, just in fucking around too much because I like to kind of keep going and keep pushing. So I guess that would be like kind of a one side thing. My brother-in-law was like creeped out by it one day. He was like, He said, you're watching, you're watching. Yeah, he thought, he thought Jake was in there with me. He's like, I walk in the room and there you are laughing your ass off to Bugs Bunny. I'm like, Bugs Bunny's amazing. Well, the old one, especially the old one, Tom and Jerry, the old Tom and Jerry, which is super violent. Super violent offensive nowadays, but hilarious. I got some serious meat sweats going on over here from the, that omelet cafe that we went to, the, what's it called, scrambles? You went to that shithole? Yeah. We got like, we got like double meat and yeah. I think I'm gonna blow it out. Yeah, I was pretty bummed that they opened up and I was excited at first. And then we tried eating there for a couple of weeks and said, nah. That's not good. All right, biggest in security. Wow, that's a tough one. I don't know, I think I probably worry about what people think of me, maybe too much here and there. Really? You know, I probably put a little too much stock in that. I really don't give a fuck about a lot of things, but when I boil things down, I think it's almost impossible to not care about, care about how people think of you. So like, for me, it's like, I don't know, like some of the stuff I do is like for fun. You know, like the meat head millionaire stuff and like some of that stuff is for fun. And then some people get, you know, like butt hurt about it. Some people get offended to buy it. Some people are thinking that I'm a certain way and I'm just like, ah, it kind of sucks. That kind of sucks that they think I'm that way. That kind of sucks that they think that I'm all about money. I love making money and making money is awesome. And it gives you a lot of great freedoms and it's great to be able to travel like first class everywhere, it's great to be able to afford, you know, all kinds of things that end up being, you know, convenient, end up being entertaining, end up being a lot of fun. But it's annoying when somebody kind of thinks that's like your main mission and you're like, no man, like I've been doing all this before there was ever like a way for me to monetize it. You know, for basically decades, I was doing it before there was social media. Before I had a product to sell, I was still, you know, going to the gym and killing myself, still randomly recording stuff on YouTube for no reason since 2007, just because I thought it was cool, just because I wanted to share it with people. So sometimes I guess that would be something that I think about and something that I'm very concerned with as well as just even the whole social media thing. Like I don't want to, you know, I see some of my friends are depressed or have anxiety and stuff. I don't have any of that. I've only been depressed like one or two days in my entire life and didn't even know what it was because it's so foreign to me and I don't really have anxiety but I just see that that could creep in. And it's like, well, what about like, I don't know, what if something kind of shitty happened and I was down a little bit and I had that shit going on kind of simultaneously. So I'm trying to figure out ways of like exiting the social media game but I don't know how to do it. Well, about a year, I don't know if it was a year or two ago, you did a post and I thought, uh-oh, let's see what happens here. And this was right in the middle of the everybody hates Donald Trump period. You posted a picture of yourself in a MAGA hat and I was like, okay, let's see what happens. How was the blowback with that? Did you lose followers? Was it a bunch of shit? It was great, I lost and gained people and I think in the end, it's for the better. If someone's gonna get that hurt over it and they leave you for it, then maybe that's someone you don't really even want, listening to your information anyway. Agreed. I think that it gets to be really hard to make sense of it all. You look at how many followers you have and you think that having more followers is gonna somehow do more for you but I don't think it really does. It doesn't do what you think it's gonna do. Like I mentioned earlier, it's not gonna make you any happier. You know, where you are, your mind is as happy as you make it up to be, right? Like you can be as happy or you can look at stuff as mad or pissed off or sad or happy as you'd like. And so I think that the perception is that like, oh, when I get more followers, like shit's gonna be. That's like, how many more followers do you wanna have? You know, some people are in the millions. They have a crazy amount of followers. It's just frustrating to me sometimes. I don't know, I've been in this for a long time and I sometimes, maybe it's like an arrogant side of me but sometimes I'm like, I don't wanna be compared to those motherfuckers over there. Like I want my own slot, I want my own space but then I'm like, well, I'm competing with them because I'm posting the same shit they're posting. And so maybe I should just drop the mic and fucking move on my way. Yeah, I don't think it's so much about the number of followers but the right kind of followers. It just makes sense that you'd want people following you who kind of know who you really are. Otherwise it's all bullshit. I have left social media before I deleted it off my phone probably for a good six or eight months and that felt pretty good. Oh, that was probably about a year ago. Really? Yeah. Why'd you do that? Just for the exact reason I was talking about, you know, I just- Did something set it off? Did something happen? No, no, it wasn't like an incident but I'm like foreseeing that there could be potential damage from it. So I'm like, I don't, it's not so much like a comment. You know, I'm not worried about like one person saying like, hey, how come you're not as ripped as you were for the bodybuilding show? You know, or something like that. I'm not, that's not really the concern. The concern is putting too much value and putting too much self-worth in social media. Like it really, it should not matter at all but like what person on this earth has the ability to not care how other people feel about them. Like if, you know, the people that have committed the most heinous crimes, what do they do? They put them by themselves. You know, we're not designed to be like an isolation. We're not designed to be by ourselves. It makes us, it makes us fucking crazy. So I think that we need a pat on the back. We sometimes need those likes. We sometimes need those comments but as I'm kind of examining that, I'm like, how much a part of that do I wanna feed into? Cause I have a tendency just like anybody else to sit there and start scrolling and start looking at what other people are doing or what other people have or whatever. And it's just like, I just don't think, I think it's more damaging than it is healthy for me. Agreed. So I need to figure out something to do with it. Agreed, man. Well, thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, thank you guys. Appreciate it. Always good time, brother. Thank you.