 All right. Today's episode is number 2000. I think that represents something like 3000 hours. Wow. That means we're all trumpet hordes. We're almost halfway to being good. Yeah. Well, what we're going to talk about in today's episode is so close. All the stuff we've learned podcasting for eight years, 2,000 episodes, over 3,000 hours of podcasting. What have we learned? What's made us successful? And why are we the number one fitness podcast in the world? So if you're getting ready to start a podcast, this would or know somebody who wants to start a podcast or ever thought about starting a podcast, this will be informative. That's right. Is that the goal? That's, I think so. Yeah, I think so. It'll be helpful. Yeah. You know, we first started, I think, before we get into some of the stuff we've learned. It's important to, it's important to convey. We had zero experience in media. All media. No, it's very surprising, but you're right. I had no zero, nothing. We were trainers. We had lots of experience in fitness and health and business. We're all entrepreneurs, but none of us had any experience doing this. So we learned along the way and a lot of it was trial and error. So, you know, this is us in hindsight, telling you kind of what worked and when didn't work. So, you know, it's valuable information because eight years is a long time. Yeah, well, I mean, we've done live events and, you know, we've met a lot of people in person and they have had a lot of questions regarding podcasts and became something that people are interested in and creating for themselves, seeing if there's opportunity for them. So I think that, you know, we've definitely, you know, found some lessons along the way here that we hope not to repeat. So I'll kick it off with the first one that you have to credit Doug for this. And to be honest, when we first started, this almost annoyed me about Doug because I didn't believe this. Because there are, and remember, as we go through this list, by the way, there's always exceptions to the rule and that's you gotta be careful of. Like, there's always like a podcast that you could draw to be like, well, yeah, but this doesn't do that or they do this. Like, okay, a lot of this, some of these are general truths that we have found over the last eight years of podcasting. And the first one was the sound. That sound is very, very important. Very important. And Doug was crazy when we first started. I mean, he would just- He would put blankets up on the wall and over the furniture. And this is back when we started the podcast in his house. And then we moved to a small studio. But, you know, a podcast, nowadays, I think people assume this, by the way, this eight years ago, there were a lot of podcasts with crappy sound, which is I think why we thought it was not a big deal. I thought for sure we're gonna be auto-tuned. You know, just to make sure the level of, you know, like he was going in terms of like details and all the background noise and any kind of like fuzz from our electronics or anything was like accounted for. So since we credit you, Doug, on this, are there any tools that you use to make the sound or any things that you would say are extremely important in- Or, because I know the next thing that people are gonna ask us is, okay, well then, what are some of the things you did to have great quality sound? Yeah, so the number one thing is the room treatment, the sound treatment inside the room. So if you have reflective surfaces, this is what causes your audio to sound like you're recording in a bathroom. And that's the last thing you really want. So when we started recording in my living room, it had hardwood floors. It was actually a horrible place to record. And so I did all of these different things that you mentioned, like put up the blankets, that type of thing, to make it sound better. But if you go back to those early episodes, the sound was actually not that great. No, no. Would you say that that is far more important than even the equipment and the microphones that you have? Yeah, so yeah, so you can have the best microphones, the best equipment, and you have a crappy environment with reflective surfaces and that type of thing, you're gonna have crappy sound. You can have kind of marginal equipment, but very good sound treatment on the walls, you're gonna have okay sound. Now, I'm not gonna suggest you go out and buy some crappy equipment, but you can get microphones, recorders, and everything else for a very reasonable price. Yeah, they're not expensive anymore. And you look at our walls here, we have these foam kind of, they block sound or they make sound so it doesn't reverberate. The floor, we have carpet. You can do this with blankets, you can do this with thick blankets as well. I know people who record podcasts, they'll take a closet and they'll change it into a recording studio and then they'll put blankets everywhere and then the sound is just as good as this one. Unless you're making it visual, of course, then you have to have a studio like we do, but if it's just a podcast, that'll do a lot. Yeah, but those little things, I mean like eating on the podcast, like ruffling papers, like you gotta think of what the audience is actually experiencing in this and that's really obnoxious. You know, when it was really confirmed for me was years later, after we had already been recording for some time and the feedback from people, you would, and I heard this, I've heard this many times now, of people that said I used to listen to other podcasts and once I listened to the show, Mind Pump, it was, the rest of them were ruined for me because of the sound quality. And so even if I liked the content, it was, the sound quality was so clean and sharp coming from our show that it ruined the show for the other shows that they were listening to prior to that. Well, you gotta think a lot of podcasts are consumed with headphones or earbuds. So the ear, excuse me, the sound is in your head and you can hear every little off sound and if it makes it, it's gotta be palatable. It has to be very palatable because you're gonna have headphones on or earbuds. So the sound should be clean. It should not be offensive anyway, where it's like too much treble or too much mouth noise. It's gotta sound warm, comfortable and palatable. And that makes a huge difference, especially if you want an audience that's gonna come back. All right, today's giveaway, Maps Split Advanced Bodybuilding Style Maps Program. Here's how you can win. Leave a comment below. This video in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode, subscribe to this channel. If you win, we'll let you know in the comments section. Also, there's only two days left for our big January promotion. These three workout bundles right here, which are massively discounted, $300 or more off, each one gives you up to nine months of planned programming, planned workouts. All of them are gonna be gone in 48 hours. So if you wanna take advantage of this promotion, just click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, here comes the show. All right, the next one, this one's a big one. And luckily for us, we figured this one out early because of our training experience. So there's a lot of things we learned as trainers that none of us realized would carry over to podcasting. And that's to communicate to your audience and not your peers. So there's a lot of, for example, in our space, in the fitness space, there's a lot of these science experts and fitness experts that seem to be communicating to other scientists and other experts. And so they talk at a very high level. And I can appreciate that. But, and if that's what your podcast is, that's a small market, but if that's what your podcast is, that's fine. But if you're trying to attract a general audience or a large audience, you don't need to communicate at such a high level. And I know some people do that because it makes them feel like I'm gonna convey that I'm smart. With an authority, yeah. But you're not gonna get your point across. Now we learned this as trainers because as a trainer, I could communicate external abduction of the humorous or external rotation or whatever. The problem is my client has no idea what I'm saying. So we had to learn how to speak in ways that they understood. And luckily we learned that through personal training and we were able to apply it on the podcast. And it makes a big difference. This was a difficult learning curve, I remember. Even then, by the way, this carries over into all mediums, right? So whether you're talking on social media, whether you're on YouTube, I remember when we first started doing the YouTube channel where we're putting out content and information with this thought process, the same way I communicate to my clients. And inevitably what I got was this, the hate from our peers, from other coaches and trainers that wants you. Yeah, same trainers, right? Yeah, that want to argue the point you're making or make, oh, you're dumb, you're an idiot, or why would you say that? And that is challenging when you're first building something like that. It's easy to get caught up and insecure about that and then allow that to steer your content. Like, oh, I mean, next episode I do or the next YouTube video, I got to show these trainers, I know my shit. So I'm gonna step it up a notch and really drop some real knowledge. And really what you're doing is you're coming from a place of insecurity because you're listening to a handful of people that are hating because you're doing something they didn't or can't. And so you're allowing them to steer your message. Focus on your consumers, focus and not on your peers. Can you get them to understand what you're trying to say? I'll give two examples outside of our space. Carl Sagan was an astrophysicist and he was brilliant, but there's other astrophysicists that are brilliant, probably even more so than him, but he communicated so well to the average person that he literally motivated an entire generation of kids to wanna learn about space, Milton Friedman, an economist. Like, economy's boring, but he communicated in a way where the average person understood and he also motivated a generation of people to be interested in economics. So if you wanna make an impact to the average person, remember you're talking to them and not your peers. If you talk to your peers, you lose the average person. All right, next, this one's a big one. And I see today, I still see this today, a new podcast, screw this up. Whatever time, whatever day, and however many episodes you drop, whatever you start with, be consistent as hell. I think because podcasting is digital and I can drop an episode whenever I want, that people don't, they don't think that being on a schedule is as important as it was when there was broadcast TV. Like, back in the day when you'd watch TV, you would expect your show to come on on Thursday at 3 p.m. or Friday at 6 p.m. And you'd show up and it's at 6 p.m. I'm gonna watch the show. Well, imagine if you showed up at 6 p.m. and it wasn't on and you couldn't figure out what the hell's going on. Yes, it's true, people get your podcast on the phone, they can listen whenever, but there's a chunk, if you do a good job, you will build an audience that's gonna look forward to when you drop your episode. And if you drop it inconsistently, sometimes on Tuesday, sometimes on Wednesday, sometimes at five, sometimes at eight or whatever, especially the amount of episodes per week, some weeks, two episodes, some weeks, one episode, you'll actually lose an audience that way. So whatever you decide to go with, stick with and be consistent as hell. Keep stoking that fire. And really this just points back to, well, I didn't know if this was gonna be on the list or not, but like just to be professional, a level of professionalism. And this is one of those factors of being able to drop consistently, same time, like they can rely on you to continuously do that. And it's something that they end up like building anticipation towards and excitement towards, which is what you want from your audience. You want them to really start digging into your stuff further and know that like they can count for the fact that you're gonna come back next week. You know, I don't know if this is gonna be one that will remain important forever, but it's for sure that your average listener has already been conditioned because of network television. And so I think that's why this becomes so important. I mean, we are moving in a time now where people follow you on Instagram and they see your day-to-day stuff. And so maybe potentially in the future you can tell your audience that day, hey, tonight at five o'clock I'm dropping and it'll be there and you might be okay. But we're coming out of an era of television and schedules of when just to your point I was gonna be dropped. And so I think it's really important right now will it remain that way? I don't know. I think it will like look at HBO Max, Disney Plus and other streaming services that will drop an episode once a week. Like Netflix drops all the episodes, right? But you're like HBO Max, I know Sundays at six I'm waiting for the next episode of The Last of Us. For example, I'm watching that right now. Could you imagine if you went HBO Max at six o'clock and it's not there? You're like, where is it? What's going on, right? How many viewers they would lose? So this is important. And you might not think it's important because you're small or you're just getting started. But if you're lucky enough to build an audience that is fervorous, that is consuming your stuff that loves following you, you better be consistent because you'll lose them. You'll lose them with your inconsistency. So this is sounds silly, but it's a big deal. Now, part of this means whatever you start with you stick with. So don't start with something you don't think you can continue. So don't start off with like I'm dropping four episodes a week if you don't know if you can maintain for it starts better to start low and then add than it is to add and to start big and then have to take away because that conveys something totally different. All right, next up, this one's a big one because I think people think the way that you make money with podcasting is sponsorships. You don't make money on a podcast or at least good money with sponsorships until you're big. Like until you're already pretty big you ain't gonna make no money with sponsorships. So if you wanna make money through your podcast you're probably gonna have to sell your own products. And then when you get big that's when you start, it's like YouTube, right? Like people think, oh, you make millions of dollars on YouTube. No, by the time you make millions of dollars on YouTube, you're massive. You're having huge money. Every successful podcaster I know that makes really good advertising money made really good money well before that and doesn't even need the advertising money. So it's such a great point. And one of the, I think things that really shocked me as we got in this space and I remember when we were first building that side of the house and doing the math on what they pay for CPMs and stuff and going like, oh my God, like we're gonna make like 20 bucks for every thousand people that are listening. Like that's crazy. Like that's terrible. We have a huge audience before it even makes any sort and if you actually have a business with multiple people like in our case, you divide that by, it's like, oh my God, it's hardly anything. Not to mention what you get when you're small as far as the potential people that will advertise with you. A lot of times are not brands that you may align with. So then you get desperate for money and so you take on these partnerships or advertisements that you don't even really necessarily align with just because you're so desperate to get money going and then the money that's coming in isn't even that good for you. And so you really hurt yourself in multiple ways because if you end up partnering up or advertising for a brand that other people don't think that aligns with your message or that brand does something shady or something like that, then it's this huge black eye on you and you lose the trust of your audience going forward and that the trust of your audience is far more valuable. That is very valuable. Than what any advertiser could ever pay you. So building trust is more important than building an advertising portfolio. Yeah, look, if you were getting 3,000 downloads an episode on a podcast, which is good, you're getting thousands of downloads. You're not gonna make any money with sponsorships but you could turn that into six figures. You could make six figures off a few thousand downloads by selling your own products and services. So the point with this is that if you wanna monetize your podcast, think of a service or a product that you could sell and don't wait for sponsorships. A headed time, you know, have a business, a viable business strategy going into it. And I do think what's great, it's a huge see now, right? There's millions of podcasts actually out there. And is there any room for new ones? And yes, there's room. And there's actually a lot of room in the smaller space in terms of going real niche with your podcast. And to your point of only having like 1,000 people listening but they're fervorous people that, you know, are really interested in that one very specific subject, you're gonna get very specific sponsors that are gonna find and attract you eventually but you provide that kind of level of service that really like feeds, you know, that group of people well. You know, you're gonna do just fine off of a small group. Totally. Now this next one is another thing that we learned as personal trainers. Again, if you train people for a long time, you start to figure out what works in terms of keeping people, getting them to show up, getting them good results. And this actually translated very well to the podcast space. And that is that the best combination for a podcast was entertainment and information. This is also what made us successful as trainers. You gotta provide the value with the information but you also have to be fun and likable so they wanna show up and be around you. Same thing with your podcast. If it's too information heavy, then people will get value but then they'll get bored or if they lose motivation, they're out of there. If it's just entertainment, they're having fun but there's no value, there's no authority. How can you sell that unless you're a comedian or this professional entertainer? It's gonna be really hard to build a business off of just entertainment. Also, don't overestimate how entertaining you are. I can't tell you how many times people are like, oh, I'm gonna start a podcast with my buddies because we're so funny when we hang around. It's like, you're not that funny when you report a podcast. You're not as entertaining as you think you are. There's professional entertainers out there that have podcasts. Well, and entertainment doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be a comedian either, right? Like, I think that covering current events, talking sports, doing other things that you're passionate about and you love could be a form. The same things that you communicate with clients, like you referenced what we used to do with our clients when we were trainers. I mean, that was the key was like, I knew that it was so important that my client liked me first. Like, I could have all the knowledge in the world but if they didn't like me, they didn't know that I cared about them. They weren't gonna care about what I had to say and so I first had to accomplish that and then I could slide in a little bit of science, a little bit of information around their behaviors and so being able to win them over as a client slash friend relationship first, then be able to provide the science, the information, the value, that's kind of the second, that's second to building the relationship first and so I think leading with that, this is an area where we call it luck or whatever or that we had this experience. This is something that I think fed into the success of the show that maybe we didn't sit down and go, this is what we need to do but I think that it came out naturally because of our experience. You train your clients, half of the time you want them to just be there and enjoy being there, the other half of the time you're teaching them stuff. If it was just one or the other, it was stressful. You gotta have an expertise to keep people around. I mean, even to the point of the entertainer, they have an expertise in that coming in so don't skip that step. That's why I use comedian as an example. It's like people are like, oh, I'm gonna be so entertaining. There's professional entertainers that start podcasts but if you have a skill set and you can combine some entertainment with it, you have a winning formula because there's people that listen to our show for the fitness information, some people that listen to it because they like listening to us and they don't always have to work out. So one of the best compliments I've ever gotten from listeners was, yeah, you know, I listen to you guys even when I'm not working out. I'm like, okay, cool, because we're keeping you on and for us, our goal, of course, this is specific to us is to get people to improve their lives for health and fitness. So if I could just keep you listening, then I'm at least getting you to do that and I'm gonna have more influence. I don't think that our, I don't think that our original conversations were, I mean, they were entertaining to a small group of people, right? I thought that they were interesting. Our saving grace was that we made sure to also always provide value. So kind of what Justin was alluding to is that I think we would have been crazy to think that we were gonna come out and one of the podcasts we used to listen to a lot back then early on and admire their conversation they'd have was the fighter and the kid. And I think that if we thought we were going to be a fighter and a kid comedy type of routine and think that we were gonna rival a podcast like that, we were silly. Yeah, I mean, Brian Callan is unbelievably talented and even Brendan is a great communicator. So they make an incredible team and that was not gonna be our strong point. Our strong point was that we had lots of information that we had acquired over decades of training clients. So we knew that we had an endless amount of trainer knowledge and value we could provide for free to the audience. And we leaned on that. It was like, okay, can we win them over through conversation slash entertainment? But at the very least they'll never walk away from an episode not saying, oh, that was interesting or I didn't know that or I learned something new. And so if you're starting a podcast and just think that you're funny or think that people are gonna listen to you because you're entertaining or your friends all think you're the life of the party. And so you're gonna be a great podcaster. I think it's important that you have something to give if you're gonna create a loyal audience that wants to come back time and time again to listen to you. That's what creates the value 100%. All right, next up, and this has more to do with just communicating effectively. And that is to learn how to use analogies and also learn how to do storytelling. In fact, going back to comedians, I use comedians as an example because I feel like comedy is one of the most challenging forms of entertainment. You're standing on a stage, people are expecting you to try to make them laugh. And you'll notice that some of the best comedians tell stories. This is how they tell their jokes. They'll tell stories. Stories draw us in. It's the original ways that we passed on information as humans. This is what we did around the fire. When we were cave people, before we learned how to write and record information is we would tell stories and stories draw us in. In fact, what's the story? Is it the warrior's journey? That's known as a common- Hero's journey. Sorry, hero's journey. Thank you. It's a common way to tell a story. You see it present in many, many different movies and stuff and it pulls to us in a particular way. And that just kind of shows you the power of storytelling. So when you're trying to convey a message, you're trying to talk about information and teach someone something, think of ways to convey it with analogies and think of stories you could tell. Like one example of an analogy that we've used many, many times is to communicate the relationship between the central nervous system and muscles. Your muscles are like speakers. Your central nervous system is like an amplifier and without a strong amplifier, the biggest strongest speakers produce hardly any sound. So right away, you don't need to understand human physiology to understand now the relationship between your central nervous system and your muscles. That analogy is very effective. Storytelling is another way, right? Storytelling, I can tell somebody, hey, look, if you eat protein at the beginning of your meals, you're less likely to overeat. And then I'll say, you know, I used to have this client and I'll tell a story about a client who had trouble overeating, who did this and then found that they lost, you know, seven pounds doing so or whatever, right? So storytelling analogy is very, very potent, time-tested ways of communicating effectively. Well, this is one of the key ways to make sure that you continue to communicate to your audience and not your peers. So if you're very educated in your field and you have this desire to start a podcast and then, because you know, you've acquired all this knowledge. I went to school for eight years. I've been in the industry for 10, 15 years. I've got this wealth of knowledge around this topic or space. Probably the biggest mistake that that person makes when they get into the podcasting space is this desire. And again, coming from a place of insecurity, they want to prove to the people listening how smart and credible they are. And so they speak at such a high level that they only attract a very small amount of people that went when they should be trying to grow their audience through normal people and help them understand all this complex information that you went to school and have all the experience for. This is very much so. The thing that, and by the way, people always want to see us get challenged by some doctor or some new fitness nerd kid that comes up. And a lot of times we don't entertain it not because we can't go round for round with somebody like that. It's because we don't think it's doing much for our audience. It'll confuse the audience more times than not. That's right. It's like there's, and we're far better off because most of all those studies we've all read multiple times and we understand them and we understand how to communicate that to the average person. So they can now take that information and apply it to the lives. So keep that in mind if you're someone starting a podcast and you consider yourself an expert in a field, that's great that you have acquired all this knowledge and that you're considered one of the best at what you do. But remember when you are going out in the podcast space and you're just the general population is searching for your podcast, one of the things that will keep them coming back is your ability to storytell and create analogies to be able to disseminate that all that knowledge you have down to layman's terms or something that's applicable to their life. Yeah, next one. This one actually took us a while to learn because when you're on a podcast if you've never done media before like us it can be uncomfortable. Like you know you're being recorded. You know that there's someone potentially listening to what you're saying. And so dead air is very uncomfortable. Now this was something that I understood in sales. So I remember when I first learned how to present and sell products and services I remember getting taught by one of my mentors and my mentor taught me when you ask your closing question, right? The final question, which you know option do you prefer or would you want to get this one or this one? He said pause and wait, wait for the consumer or the customer to make a choice. And sometimes I'd have to sit there and wait 15 seconds. Doesn't sound like a long time but when you're doing a presentation and you're drawing the person in and then you ask that closing question and then you stop for 15 seconds it's really uncomfortable, right? But I learned that in sales and he would hit me under the desk if I tried to talk and he'd say don't say anything. First person to talk loses, he would tell me. And I learned how to do it and it worked, people would make a choice. Now why should I not talk? Because I ask the closing question if I keep talking then I lose the momentum. Well, in podcasting, if you know people are listening, we're talking to each other, we're being recorded, pausing can feel super uncomfortable too. Like I better fill this with butts or repeat myself 10, 15 different times. Dead air is totally fine. That's how real people have conversations. People don't just blah, blah, blah, blah real fast. In fact, in real conversation if someone just rapid fires you you kind of feel uncomfortable. This is like that, it's okay to pause. I think too, so I used an um right there. But that's a lot of times you'll get in that predicament where you're trying to think of exactly how to articulate something and you just have to pause a second and then regain it and then deliver it. Sounds way better on the other end of that rather than just sitting there and having those ticks that normally happen. Totally. This was the hardest thing for me to grasp and the most powerful thing that I've learned in the eight years helped me out so much. And I'm notorious for making words up and blending sentences together. So we've teased me about that for years. No worse than my analogies. And I'll tell you for the audience so they can have a little insight on that. I remember when you, this was a big deal for you. It was like maybe five, six years ago. This is really good. This was, and when I look back and I unpack like why and the challenge that isn't happening to me in normal conversation and I'm very comfortable in big groups or talking to someone, people, I'm outgoing personality. But on here I feel more like a presenter which is not my comfortable space. And if I'm presenting like that, it doesn't flow the same way for me as it like a natural conversation. And so I had to train myself to do those pauses. And still to this day, like almost every episode I'll intentionally do that to just keep, I have to practice it like a muscle working out. Like I have to constantly tell myself it's okay to stop, catch your breath, gather your thoughts. And what I've found when I go back and I listen to it, I'm like, oh my God, it comes off so much more professional. Totally. By allowing yourself that freedom to have those long pauses. And by the way, as a podcaster, if it was, you could pause for two minutes and go back and edit that shit down to 10 seconds. That's true. So you know, so if you know that in the back of your head it's better for me to stop and really take the time to gather my thoughts than it is to ramble and throw something else in there. Cause then it sounds really unprofessional. And so this was, you know, Sal didn't give the credit to somebody who I know that I remember when he pointed this out, I think first, and it was Jordan Peterson listening to him. And there was, this was early on when we first all kind of found him and started listening to him speak a lot. And he's notorious for this. He'll be on stage talking and they'll be like a 30 second silence. He'll say something and then you'll see him. He's just thinking. What's funny too is people on the edge of their chairs. Yes. They want to listen. Yes. This is especially important when you're interviewing someone because you'll ask someone a question or they'll be telling a story. They'll pause and you as the host will feel uncomfortable and feel like you need to fill this. Yes. And this made me personally so much better at interviewing because I would let the person pause. I didn't feel like I had to feel every bit of air with sound and it made so much more of a better podcast. Huge difference and for sure one of the things that I can always tell when I hear somebody communicating on a podcast like how good their skills are or how long they have been doing this for because they have that. And I can always tell when someone's even if you're already kind of naturally gifted like I have friends that are starting podcasts that are great communicators, have a great vocabulary but still break that rule of like the dead silence thing because it makes you kind of feel nervous and you don't know what to do and so they just keep inserting and talking or they make inappropriate jokes to fill the dead air which is what we were kind of notorious for, right? There'd be dead air and so we'd slide these random dick jokes in there or something. So that to me of all these things we're covering that for personally that was such a game changer to learn to do that and gather my thoughts and not be afraid of those long policies. All right, so next this one we figured out probably halfway through our careers here on the podcast which is that we realized that some episodes were good at getting new listeners and other episodes were great for listeners who are coming back, old listeners if you will returning listeners. So for us, this is just full transparency this episode right now is more of a new listener episode, right? It's informative, it's got a single topic for old listeners, people who've been listening for a while especially when you're covering a topic like health and fitness or actually any topic for that matter you do 2,000 episodes, you're going to cover the same stuff over and over again you might communicate it differently each time but we've talked about fat loss, muscle gain speeding up your metabolism improving your health thousands of times. So our old listeners have heard us and probably get a lot of it what do they come back for? Personality, they come back for stories they come back for what's happening with us in our lives, maybe opinions on certain things new listeners don't care about that they don't know us they don't care about Justin's family life or opinions or Adam what he thinks about what's going on with the warriors or whatever they want to hear the fitness stuff how do I burn body fat in five easy steps or how do I build muscle with the best body part split routine? So when you're creating your episodes think to yourself is this a magnet for new listeners or is this an episode where my old listeners or my returning listeners are going to appreciate and then organize them as such well we should share how we learn this so I totally remember when this all came together for us was when we would do these quads our questions and answers and then the front half where we talked about all these random topics that a lot of our long time listeners love because we address so many different things and we enjoy those conversations but what we didn't realize is that iTunes and Spotify and these platforms work very similar to like how Google does in search and Google doesn't reward you like let's say if you're a blogger or you create a website they do not reward you if you have tons of random information and lots of it in a single place you get rewarded for going very deep on one or two things and so the single topic episodes that we create are very focused they have a title and a topic and we stay right in that lane and go as deep as we can and answer as much as we can to that specific topic and because of that we're rewarded for random people that are searching iTunes for a topic that's closely related or exactly that topic whereas that same topic could have been covered in a two hour quaw episode along with politics and the economy and sports and all of that and gets watered down on the search engine because we have so many other topics and so having very focused topics will serve you in the searchability for your show and so no matter what kind of show you have making sure that you have dedicated episodes like that that are very searchable another thing to add to that that we learned was kind of a hack that we figured out years ago to create topics is we use Google to help drive some of our content ideas so let's say we come in and we're like hey, we haven't talked about building muscle in a while let's do an episode around building muscle so then we go to Google and we search some of the most search topics related to that, look at some of the top blogs that are written, read them, unpack them, agree or disagree and then we can build content around similar points. Yeah, so a lot of that and all those strategies are perfect for maintaining and keeping a new influx of listeners to come in the reason why we still kept the personality side of it coming in in the beginning was to be able to keep these old listeners engaged they like we need to make sure that they have something to look forward to that we're also invigorated by and this is something that you know we always wanna make sure that we're having fun and that comes across in terms of like our energy levels and all of that so that's we initially were like about to get rid of it but this is actually something that there was a bit of a split between people when they'd come and listen whether or not they listened for just our take on a lot of different subjects or whether or not they're just getting that valuable information at the end. Yep, that's right. All right, this next one Doug actually put this quite well he said this before which is have something good to say and say it often so I'm gonna give you a few and now look if you listen to every single episode 100% you've heard us repeat a few lines over and over again, right? Like Adam, you know, his famous, yeah, yeah do the least amount of work to elicit the most amount of change, right? Or, you know, I've said things like chase health and you'll get a great deal of aesthetics or the man who loves walking will walk further than the man who loves a destination that's the more latest one. If you have something good to say and it's powerful and it resonates say it often and find different ways to convey it and communicate it because those messages travel far. Those messages and the ways you say them go out and bring you new people and people recognize you for these things. So if you say something that resonates don't be afraid to say it again and again and again do so just make sure you do it in kind of slightly different ways. It's an old saying, but it's totally true. They've said in sales presentation it's very true with podcasting as well. Yeah, and when I teach other people how to do this within their field it's actually pretty easy. If you have some level of expertise in any field during that time that you learned all this information there's been things that were massive epiphanies for you or paradigm shattering moments. Things that you believed to be true and then because you got educated and it found out oh, shit, that's not true. It's really like this. Like that's one of those good things to say often. Yes. If it's your field, you were wrong about it. You were proved right and you now have this newfound knowledge. Like that's podcast gold right there. That's really what this show is sprinkled with over 2,000 episodes. It's just all those moments for us. We've just come collectively, we've got so many years of being wrong that we've learned a lot of these great epiphany moments that we have been able to share with our audience and we lead from that. We lead from a place of vulnerability and understanding that we were wrong and we did it the wrong way for a long time and hey, here's what we found. And so whatever your expertise is, whatever your field is, glom onto those things that have happened in your life and share that and share it a lot because I don't know how many times we've done an episode that is and said something like what Sal was referencing and the 30th time I said it, someone goes, man, that was powerful. What you said? What? That's a 30th time I said it on that show but it resonated because the way it was delivered on that show because maybe the story that we shared it with right before that or maybe the conversation was so engaging right before that that it pulled them in. And so that same piece of information that I've said a bunch of times actually hit home with and we learned that as trainers, right? You say the same thing over and over again to your clients different ways and sometimes there's that one time that it finally works, you know? Yeah, and you find something within that conversation that pops up that you hadn't really considered before. And then also a point I was gonna make to proceeding this point was that you can revisit something that you think you missed, right? So as we're talking and discussing and I was like kind of like going off on a different thing that I was trying to bring up for the last point but I forgot to mention vulnerability which is what I wanted to get to which was another real valuable thing that I thought that we hit out of the beginning just something we learned as trainers was to be able to relate with your client better is to be more vulnerable in terms of you really describing things that you're not great at or struggles you've had personally and being comfortable with portraying that out there. Totally glad you brought that back. All right, here's the next one. This one we learned relatively recently. This is one of the latest lessons we learned and that was to hook your listeners early in the episode. So your returning listeners will stick around past your intro, past the beginning cause they like you already, they're already there to listen to you. But like us, we're a fitness podcast but we also put in entertainment. If we open with just current events and entertainment and somebody's never heard of us before and they come to listen to the show and they wanna listen to fat loss or muscle building and the first 15 minutes we're talking about current events and our kids and stuff like that, they're gonna turn it off. So now we open our Q and A episodes, our quiet episodes with a fit tip because it opens with fitness right out the gate. Right away you get a takeaway. And that alone, that one small thing alone resulted in a dramatic increase in downloads and stick. Oh, this was, this last year was our greatest growth year in eight years. Podcasts, revenue, all line items. It was the greatest growth year this last year. And I attribute that to this thing that we switched up because it was this last year that we traded this, we switched this out. And I'll never forget how this all came together because a couple, a little over a year ago, I think it was Jackie who knows me really well, referenced this podcast called All In, which you've obviously, if you've heard this show you've heard us reference this podcast several times. It's one of my favorite shows. Sal listens to it too all the time. And Jackie knows me so well. She's like, oh Adam, they talk about this, this and this, you're gonna love it. I'm like, oh yeah, those are all the things I like. And oh, and they're also kind of like buddies like you guys. They're very mind pump-esque. And so I'm like, okay, okay, I'm listening. I'm gonna listen and I listen to this show. And that happened to be an episode where they were teasing David Freberg for losing weight and like how he did it and stuff like that. And they were just joshing each other back and forth. And they went on for like 20-something minutes and they never touched on any of the four things she told me I would love about the show. And I recall going over to stop it and then I stopped myself like, wow, man, Jackie really knows me. Let me sit all the way through and see what happens. And then eventually towards the end of the show, they touched on a couple of those things that was just enough to give me the like, let me go, okay, I'll watch or listen one more episode and see if they have what I want in this podcast. And remember coming back to the studio the next day and telling the guys my experience, I thought, man, we are now at a size now where there's potentially one to 5,000 new people every day hearing Mind Pump for the first time ever that were probably referred by somebody who we probably changed their life one way or another, whether that was advice on the show or the programs or something. And they probably were raving about, oh my God, these Mind Pump guys, they know their fitness, they know their nutrition, you gotta listen to them. And I was like, oh shit, how many times do we naturally just let the conversation flow and 30 minutes in and we haven't said a single thing about fitness. And I thought, man, how many people are we losing that are first time listeners that never come back? Cause they go, oh, this isn't for me, especially if we say something that's a little edgy or that you don't necessarily agree with, because you really gotta build a relationship like that before you can open somebody's mind. And so forcing people to open their mind up before you build the credibility with them is a really rough way to start a lot of relationships. And so I think this was another one of those when I think of all these tips, a massive one for us is to remember. And I see other people trying to build podcasts similar to ours with this kind of conversational style or in Joe Rogan style, whoever you wanna call it, I'm claiming it as our style, but they try and have this conversation and then they're a lawyer, you know, or they're a banker or they have this expertise and then they're having this bullshit conversation. I thought, oh man, like you gotta get to your expertise. Unless they already know you and like you. Right, right, you gotta get the hook. You gotta get that hook first. And it can be as easy as a statement. That's right, that's right. Something that is related to your expertise. So they're like, okay, give them that quick value, then you can give them the entertainment and then you can circle back with value again. All right, this next one we learned through working out because this is a lesson you learn in fitness. And that's to be okay with sucking, to be okay with not being good at something. When you first start working out and you do an exercise, you're not gonna be good at it, just the way it is. But the way you get good at it is you suck at it for a while until you become less sucky at it and then you're okay at it and then you become great at it through practice and through failure and just try again and again and again. Podcasting's no different. Had we stopped when we sucked, we would have never made it past episode 10, right? But we did, we kept going. And one thing that we did, and we learned this in fitness as well, was the more you practice, the better you get and the faster you get better. This was originally why we decided to do so many episodes per week. It was actually a strategy primarily to get us better faster. We knew that if we did five episodes a week, and this might not be true for you, you don't have to dedicate yourself this way, but we knew we do five episodes a week. We'll get there, we'll get good five times faster than if we did one episode a week. So let's just do five a week and let's be shitty for as little as possible so we could just keep practicing. And that's what you have to be okay with. This I think is a lesson for life, by the way, but when you first start a podcast, however good you think you are, you're gonna suck compared to how good you can be or will be, you gotta be okay with that. Yeah, and that whole paralysis by analysis. I mean, it cripples a lot of people when they're embarking on something new like this. This is a big step in terms of a project, a business opportunity that they're kind of stepping into. And you have to know you're not gonna be good out of the gates and that's totally okay. It's all a matter of how much effort and will you put in towards getting better continuously? Well, I made the comment when this conversation started that we're almost halfway to being good. Because it takes 10,000 hours, they say to be a master at any craft and yet here we are even with 2,000 episodes under our belt and I still wouldn't even consider us halfway to being masters at our craft. But I do, to Sal's point, this is one of the ones, like some of these things we learned, this is something we came in, I totally recall before we even did the first part, we knew this, we were like, we know we're gonna suck. Like nobody had any like, oh, we're gonna be good at this, we all knew like, okay, we don't know what the fuck we're doing. I mean, we thought we were awesome people. Yeah. So that helped. Yeah, we had confidence. We were confident about the suck. Well, we had confidence and this is something for sure a common thread among all of us is our work ethic. We all, and we had all experienced success in other places in our life and we all got it in similar ways, which was hard ass work, getting our ass kicked, being crappy for a long time and then becoming good at something. And so that was one of the common threads of the relationship when we first met was like everyone agreeing, like yeah, we're not gonna be good. We're gonna be about this, but our secret power is we have so much good free information that we're just gonna get so many reps and eventually we will get good. I do really believe that this played in our favor a lot because sometimes I think if we were to have started this podcast today with our inexperience that we had, I don't know if the market would have allowed us that many reps to get this good because of how competitive it seems compared to. I don't think it would have kicked us off, but what I think the key here is knowing that, here's the key, how can this help you? You're not gonna adjust and set a paralysis by analysis. You're not gonna sit there and try and make it so perfect for your first five episodes. You're gonna do your best, but then you're gonna put them out there. And you're gonna know I just gotta practice. I just gotta practice because doing 20 episodes is gonna get you better than doing one and spending so much time on it that it takes a time of 20 episodes. You just gotta go. You just gotta go. You gotta have those conversations. You gotta put out your information. You gotta listen to your episodes, listen to your audience, look at the response. What's the market saying? How effective am I? Change it, modify it, get better, get more comfortable and over time you do. For us, it's like every hundred or so episodes we tend to get better. That's what we've always noticed. We notice every hundred episodes or so we tend to level up and it's exciting. It's exciting to see that we're gonna do that. So it's almost like how can I get there faster? Just do more, right? Just practice more. All right, last is always seek ways to improve your craft. Well, how have we done that here? Well, we've hired improv coaches who've come in and done improv exercises with us. We've done work with other podcasters that we think are really good. We listen to other shows, maybe not so much because we like the content but rather we admire the way they present their content and we come here and we try things out and we practice them. So always seek ways to improve your craft and when it comes to podcasting and presenting there's a few different ways you could do this. You could look at how to give a good speech, how to do good presentations, how to organize podcasts and episodes really well. You can get that from other podcasters, how to work with people who do presentations and stuff on stage, comedians, improv coaches, that kind of stuff. And all of that I think will contribute to making you better at the craft of podcasting. This is also another thing that I have so much appreciation for you guys as partners because I remember that. And by the way, it doesn't happen quite as much as it used to be. This used to happen a lot. And what I love about you guys is that nobody has got these massive egos that are afraid to take criticism from the other partners. Early on, we'd hang up a podcast and one guy would be like, that sounded really bad when you said that or don't do that. We would get into it. We would get into it about, and no one ever took it as a personal jab at me or it was about the show, about the content. It was always like, we're trying to create really good content. So if I came at Justin or I came at Sal or vice versa, they came at me. I never took it like it was like attacking me personally. It was, they wanted the show to be better. We wanted to present better information or whatever it may be. And I would, and nobody else was like that. I felt like we were able to do that. It was always constructive. It was, yeah. And sometimes it was harsh with each other. So it wasn't easy. Yeah, it was taken real, and that's the important piece was that everybody was open to grow and to learn and to mold and to change. And this thing has really, has molded over eight years. It didn't sound the way it is. I mean, at one point we didn't even take notes before. You know, we never even had a monitor of bullet points so that we didn't discuss the show before or after as much. And so there's a lot of things that have come together that over time, I think we've done it. But the most important thing was the fact that we were okay with that, that we were okay to critique each other or embrace that, like, tell me, did I sound, did that sound terrible or what do you guys think? And, you know, I like to, so I intentionally do this, right, still today. I don't listen to the show hardly ever, but I'll check back in maybe every 100 episodes or so. And what I'm listening for, it's not the narcissistic side of me that wants to hear my voice. It's to pick out and to critique all of us to hear how Justin's flowing, how Sal's flowing, how am I communicating? How's the show flowing together? Like, how's it organized? And if I'm listening, what I found early days when I would listen a lot, it would be hard to measure and see that where when I remove myself, just do the work, do the work, do the work, and then come back and revisit. It's kind of like before and after type pictures, right? If I'm taking pictures every day or looking at myself in the mirror every single day, it's really hard to see that progress. If I put away the scale, put away the mirror, do the work, do the work, hard and consistent, make sure I have that beginning photos. And then I take another photo six months from later and then I compare it like, oh, shit, I didn't feel like I was changing that much. But when I look now at six months ago and today, I really see a difference. I feel the same way with the podcasting of, when we podcast, I step away from it. I don't really listen. And then I come back 100 episodes down the road and then I'm like, oh, okay, wow, we are getting better with those things. Well, look, it's been a pleasure. And I look forward to doing the next 2000 episodes with you guys. It's been a blast. Look, if you like Bind Pump, head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out our guides. We have guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal. You can also find all of us on social media. So Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump. Justin, Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump Atom and you can find me on Twitter at Mind Pump Sal. Today we're gonna teach you everything you need to know to build a strong, well-developed chest. When I think of weak points and areas that I struggled with developing for a really long time, chest was up there with the weak part. Yeah, it was for me. It was for me for sure. I got more caught up in the weight I could lift versus how I was developing my body. I think it's one of the most challenging muscles to develop for most people because the form and technique.