Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Dustin Diefenderfer - Beyond the Summit and Shaping Lives through MTNTOUGH

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Dustin Diefenderfer is the founder of MTNTOUGH.com. Born from a deep connection with the wilderness and a desire to merge physical fitness with the raw challenges of nature, Dustin shares his journey from the confines of Corporate America to the liberating peaks of Montana's rugged landscape. Dustin reveals how his college days, initially marked by routine workouts, evolved into a profound exploration of goal-specific training alongside a future wildland firefighter. This experience laid the groundwork for a lifelong passion for hardcore training, ultramarathon running, and, most importantly, the development of mental toughness. Dustin recounts the moments that led to the birth of MTNTOUGH — the first fitness regimen designed specifically for backcountry hunters. Over time he transitioned from a promising career in business management to impactful humanitarian work in Uganda, and eventually, to revolutionizing the way hunters and outdoor enthusiasts prepare for the challenges of the wilderness. MTNTOUGH is a comprehensive online platform offering physical training programs, and guidance on nutrition, mental health, and spiritual wellbeing. Dustin's approach to fitness goes beyond the physical, emphasizing the importance of mental toughness and the role of special operations veterans in forging a resilient community. Wolf 21- Check out what they have to offer for the best sleep of your life: https://www.thewolf21.com Use Code: "clearedhot" for 30% off of your 1st order The Speed of War Comic Series: https://www.thespeedofwar.com/ Check out the newest Cleared Hot Gear here: https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/  

All right, everybody, welcome back. It is Monday. Everybody knows who this podcast is brought to you by. It's Black Rifle Coffee. So I'm starting to think about some ways that I can change the intro. One of the things I'm going to do is one of these days, I'm just going to film my favorite way to make coffee in hopes that you could also try something new. We are going to head to their website right now, and they have a rotating banner. But let's do this. One of the things is the Spring Collection. So I'm going to click on that. Let's see what pops up. A lot of cool shit does. It's their new sweatshirts and their new t-shirts. These coffee mugs, I have one of these grenade ones that I'm highlighting right now. I do want to get some of these diner ones. The metal ones, I don't do very good with that. I find that they don't fit well into cup holders. But let's kind of keep going here and see what else they have that pops up. They have some new hats. Ooh, I'm liking this company logo trucker hat. That's kind of my jam. Yeah. So that's their spring collection. Let's go back to the main page here just briefly and see if they have anything else that's new. That's the slider, light to dark, apparel gear, coffee bundles and the coffee samplers with the bestsellers at the bottom. It's a cool brand. I'm stoked to be working with them. And I want to figure out a way to do a little bit of a deeper or richer intro to everybody who's a fan of the podcast. And we'll figure that out as we go.

My guest today, Dustin Diefen Dever. Yes, that is a mouthful, powerfully German. He's the founder of a company called Mountain Tough. And I'm going to click on their website right now. It's the number one fitness and mental toughness training for hunters. That's what it says on the website. I'm going to take it much beyond that. And I know that Dustin would agree.

It's not specifically just for hunters. It's for athletes of any kind. I think for a long time, hunters probably didn't think of themselves as athletes. Much like people in the military, I don't think they did either. The app is not only great because of the. breadth and depth and volume of things that it has and shows, you know, programs that you could follow, a community that you could be a part of. My favorite part about it is actually the fact that they focus on mental toughness. And I know that everybody listening to this has an example of someone

in their life who's a physical specimen, male or female. They look like Odonis chiseled out of marble and they're a bitch between the ears. Physical toughness is not hard. Mental toughness can be extremely difficult to achieve. Dustin, Montana, born and bread, kind of. We get into that at the beginning and kind of walk our way through the entire journey of where Mountain Tuff came from, how he got into it, where he came up with it, the whole nine yards. So let me be quiet and let Dustin speak for himself. Episode number 328 with Dustin, Dief and Derfer. Enjoy.

I'm looking at danger close now. Dustin, how do you say your last name? Diefendurfer. Diefendurfer. I was going to say defenderfer. That's common. Diefendurfer. Diefendurfer.

German. I was going to guess Nordic. It's like a German black village forest name. I'm going to guess that once or twice in your life people have just murdered that name. Just butcher it. What's the most common mispronunciation? of that. Defender.

That's actually, you know, when you're a kid and you still had a landline at your house and telemarketers called all the time, you could always tell because they would ask for my mom, her name was Renee, but then they would just freeze and panic. So they would be like, is Renee? They hadn't gotten that far on the call sheet. Yeah, they were like, I should have read that. They'd just lock up. That's when you just say, is Renee there?

Yeah. They're generally not great at that job. I mean, you think they would just go with Renee. I mean, Stumpf is also powerfully German last name. Not as powerful as Diefen Derfer, but it gets murdered. Stumpfah. Stump is the most common one. It's like, all right.

They just drop half. Yeah. Or they want to spell it with an H on the end. Huh. And it's not phone book. I understand the phonetic of why they potentially would want to do that. But it's nice to be another fellow who has the same German issues with their last name. I'm sorry, yours are way worse than I know.

Just German stubbornness. Yeah. How'd you end up in Montana? So I was born in Rays. I was born in Casper, Wyoming, but I lived there like six months. You just lied. In Montana, you know this. Yeah.

If you're not a 17th. generation, you're not local. Yeah. You just said you live for your first six months in another state. You're a piece of shit out of town or ruining the state. Wyoming and Montana are on good terms, though. I'm just talking about how

dogmatic some Montanans are. They're like, oh, really, you're local? How many generations? How long have you lived here? Yeah. What was your uncle's ranch's name? What was your grandpa's ranch? Where is it at? Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. Has it always been like that? I mean, since you were kind of born and raised?

I think it's changed a little bit just because more and more people are pushing out west. Unless they're coming from California. Then they're coming east. Then they're going east. Which is a lot of them. Which is a major, major part. So you drove here today from Bozeman, right? Yep.

Every time I drive through the state. I think back of to, because what you just said about, you know, people moving west, the push from the East Coast states to the west. I think of, one, trying to navigate this terrain without well-paved roads. And let's be really clear, the Montana roads are not that well-paved. They can get a little spicy from time to time, but they also have a four-season swing, so I can get that. But we're talking that road from Bozeman to Missoula. at the Lewis and Clark River, probably. Yeah, pushing east.

Yeah. Okay, so you're in a wagon. You have no suspension whatsoever. You have your whole family, all of the supplies. And you, you know, you're out in the out east of Beauxman, you know, Billings. It's a little bit flat. You start making it. And then you just see as far as the eye can see mountains.

Insane. How do you even, how did they even do that? Things have changed, like so, things have changed so much. Because back then you'd be like, hey, we're going to Missoula. It's going to take a couple months and two of you might die along the way. A fortnight. Yeah. At a minimum.

Yeah. Unreal. Yeah. Every time I drive through the state, I try to think, or even when I'm walking around hunting. How? I mean, what would be a good day? Two miles. I know.

Yeah. I appreciate great suspension on a car. I cannot even imagine a wooden wheel with maybe an outside metal. ring to that straight into an axle that your ass is directly above. Oh, that thing ought to be just breaking all the time, too. Yeah. I mean, so many issues. I would have stopped, if I had to move from the East Coast to the West Coast via wagon,

I would have stopped on the beach on the East Coast. Like, nope, this is where I live now. Have you read Undaunted Courage? No. It's Lewis and Clark's journal rewritten by Stephen Ambrose. Okay. So he takes the journal in essentially just, puts it in a language that's easier to understand nowadays.

And it is nuts the stuff that they went through to go up through the Missouri, Mississippi, hit Portland. But there was so many times that they almost died. I mean, the things that happened, like they were eating roots in the low, low, national forest, just trying to survive a winter. and it was either eat the horses they were riding or eat roots to survive. So they went with roots and bark because they didn't want to give up on the horses just to get over the low, low pass. Man, that is, I feel like that's a rough journey on the tail end of that, if you know what I mean. They talk about that.

Yeah. I mean, that's what almost killed them actually. Yeah. I mean, that's a wood chipper coming out of your asshole. That is a journey that few could understand, let alone, survive. Oh, nuts. Crazy. Yeah. It was a hard, I think it was a harder, maybe a harder person, but then I think the life expectancy was also in the 40s. So I don't know, pros and cons. I think you would live a full life in that 40 years. Maybe we're better off now that it's, actually, Michael,

what is the current life expectancy in the U.S? I'm going to guess 74. I heard it, it's like stayed at 70, even though we have all these scientific advancements, it's not moving much. It says 77 as of 2020. Can you, do you have a chart, actually? I'd be curious. There has to have been some major advances. My son, Tyler was telling me the other day. Well, it's growing a little bit.

Yeah. That's not crazy, though. That's the, that's from. Yeah, 1960. That's still, so it's just below 70 to call it. Ooh, what's that downtake? COVID. We're all going to die.

Would it, but no, not that many people died from COVID to make that much of a impact. That's got to be COVID. 2020. All right. So it's 1960. That basically what we can see, 2020. It started just below 70 and it's a hair underneath. I'll call it 74 and just trended down.

I'm going to call that 72. And a half. So two and a half years and 60 years of scientific advancements. You know one of the number one things they did to increase child mortality? What is it? They washed their hands. Doctors began washing their hands. We think we're so smart as humans.

We're not that far from being really fucking dumb. Yeah. We're right on the edge at all time. That's what my son was telling me last night, that just that impact alone drastically increased the viability when children were born. So one guy at one point was like, you know what we should do? you guys after we deliver these babies? After we're covered in blood.

We should wash our hand. Yeah. Yeah. He was also telling me, and I don't know if this is true. Maybe you can look this up, Michael, that the old school vaccinations, what they would do is when people had like blisters, they would slice some of that off and put it on somebody else's skin. That exposure to it. I may have been mishearing or misunderstanding the way that that was recanted, but that was in the same conversation. It got a little off the rails last night.

Yeah. Then we went deep into day trading, Michael, which Tyler is heavily involved in for a whole two weeks now. He's been telling me all about it. Yeah, I can't get him to stop telling me about it. From blisters to day trading. Yeah. Have you, did you find any validity to that if that's true? I'm trying to look it up.

I'll, if I find something, I'll let you know. I'm not liking the new nasal voice you have that you debuted today. Yeah, I mean, I'm sick, so. Do you have cough due to cold? I have what cold. Do you have cough due to cold? Cough due to cold. I don't have a cough, no. Okay.

Just a compaction of your signal area? Yep. Yeah. If you could pick a time to live in, though, would you go now or like, hey, you have a slot in the Louis? and Clark Canoe. I feel... Absent, like, pull the family and all that stuff out of it. Like, it's just you as a younger man.

And you kind of knew the outcome of both. Which one would you go with? I'd go back in time. I feel like I was born 100 years too late on most days. Even with the family, I feel that. Until you need a medical intervention like I did when I survived my tummy ache. You would have been toast. We talked about this on the show I did with you.

I think 100 years. ago I'd have been, maybe 150. I would have been toast. Even a hundred depending on where you were at, though. That's very true. That transportation. Well, let's be honest. Modern day, depending on where I was at when that happened, it might have been fatal

too, depending on if I could have even tolerated a flight with that change and pressure to get to a high level of care. Yeah, if you were on a hunt or something. Or in January of 23, I was in Antarctica. I mean just tell you what they don't have there. Surgical suite that I'm aware of. I guess they could have taken me down to the South Pole station, but I don't think, man, let's just leave it. I'm glad I didn't have to find out.

Yeah. No need to hypothesize. So you would time travel. I would time travel. I think the wild wilderness, the wild wilderness, open landscapes, the being outside all the time, manual physical labor, and just the adventure of it. I think is hard to replicate in today's age. Would you tell them about the things you would see? You couldn't, right?

You'd be like, we have these things in our pockets that are computers. They'd be like, this guy's nuts. I mean, you couldn't even describe what we have today. I feel like this has played itself out in the documentary Back to the Future of what happens when you go back in time like that. Have you watched that movie, Michael? Oh, yeah. That's the first one he said yes, too. I swear in like a dozen podcasts.

I mean, there are some things probably too early to bet on the stock market, but I bet you could get a little bit ahead of the power curve. It would be hard not to game that system a little bit. It would be. The railroad. Oh, for sure. Buy some stock there. Yeah. Yeah, you could get in.

I mean, you could kind of get into the trades a little bit early. I don't know. I think I would go back too. With an asterix. I would like an iPod probably or something. Listen to some good music. I feel like the music back then sucked. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. There was not many options back then. No, not really. Probably just people just hammered on whiskey around a campfire with a banjo. Yeah. So. I wonder when you think about were the people harder, tougher back then, or they just didn't know any better?

Like if we were dropped. into that environment. I mean, isn't that always the way? In 10 years, we're going to look back at what we're doing today and say we didn't know any better. How old are you? 41. So I've got five years on you, but you probably remember the advent of the internet. 10 years before that, we would have never hypothesized that.

10 years past the ad ban of the internet, we look back and like, man, we were idiots. Yeah. I feel like that's always going to be the case. I wonder, though, if they were a more fulfilled person, a happier person. I tend to think they were. I think, I mean, your world would be what you could physically see with your eyes. The horizon, literally the horizon, not an unbounded, you know, where do you want to go? Bali, Tahiti, right?

You could just kind of view the world through other people's lenses. That was your whole world. Yeah. You know, and no knowledge of anything else that was happening until it got to you. by pigeon. So you're more content, you have to be more content because you don't see all these other things that are calling for your attention. Well, your world is smaller.

Right? Like the world is still, you know, obviously the same size from a circumference perspective, unless it's shrinking or growing that I'm not aware of that, which is totally possible. Or unless you think it's flat, we'll leave that for somebody else. Oh, boy. Thanks for interrupting me, Dick, yeah. We're talking, we're postulating. This is all I found.

Okay. In Asia, practitioners developed the technique of variolation, the deliberate infection with smallpox. Dried smallpox, scabs were blown into the nose of an individual. Oh, my God, we're so dumb. Who then contracted a mild form of the disease. Scabs. Okay. The three of us in this room, I'm going to say, we're pretty smart, right?

We, I'll rephrase. reasonable. We're reasonable. And again, I'm not a doctor. I'm not so sure they were a doctor either. We'll just throw that out there. Can you fathom ever the three of us having a conversation where the idea that we land on is, Michael, pick that scab off. Let's grind it up. Dustin, I'm going to get a straw and blow it up your nose. Scabs are nasty enough anyways. Now I'm going to just snort that thing. Let alone, so there's the iteration or the ideation process. Somebody has to be the first across the line. You know? We're going to find things like that we're doing now, though. 30 years.

I honestly think that's the, I think that's every generation's issue. Again, two nights ago, I'm watching, I love murder shows on Netflix, like this series of a serial killer. and I don't know why I'm fascinated by him. Did you know that the vast majority of people that watch those are women? They sit there and they are just like, how am I going to die? This might be the way.

So we're watching one on the night crawler. No, God damn it, that's a Marvel character. Michael, who was the serial killer in the 1970s or 80s? Nightstocker. Nightstocker. California. Ramirez was his last name. And you're watching.

the people who worked the case talking about it through the lens of the tools that they had available at that time. They were manually, and I mean one person, camera one camera two, comparing fingerprint data. Only if it was on like the index card, if the person had been printed before. Because they were able to lift some latent prints. One was off of a vehicle, and I forget what the other one was. and he had touched the legal system previously in life. I believe it was for a theft charge. This dude was murdering motherfuckers.

I think it was 15 total people. He would execute people in their bed with a bizarre caliber pistol with old ammunition. The forensic tools that they did not have manually looking at fingerprints. They had this footprint of a shoe that they did the same thing. I mean, there's no internet to queue. There's no like Google images to reverse engineer. And then the news got a hold of the shoe and then released it. They're like, son of a bitch, there goes that piece of data.

The next segment in the series is, and then we never saw that shoe again. Because he also watched the news. But, you know, there was all sorts of blood. They were getting sexually assaulted. I don't think they had the ability to even tie the crimes together from a DNA perspective. It was all just kind of the same ammo. and sketches, you know, which they were actually not too bad. You can kind of see it a little bit, but, yeah, four-part series.

Tyler, Michael, fascinated by it. He goes, I can't believe I haven't heard of this. I just can't believe it. Like, you can't believe you didn't hear of a murder spree that happened 45 years before you were born. So weird that you're not up to speed on this. Unreal. Because he caught it in the last episode. That son of a bitch stayed up to like 2 a.m.

And restarted it and watched the whole thing. Just binged them. Yeah. He's just, I mean, I appreciate it. I get on the case, I have to solve it, even though it was solved in 1978, I think. But those type of shows are so popular. It's like number one series, number one, like top three podcasts. If you look at like after time, it's always the crime ones.

And people, they either want to know how to get away with murder. Yeah. Or they just, after they watch too many of those, they think they're going to die every day. The number one way to get away with murder. is to not murder someone. You have a 100% chance of not being convicted of murder by not murdering.

You just don't do it. Well, and then my son goes down the ballot of... So he watches that. And for the first time, he tells my wife and I, we should lock the doors at night. This dude doesn't lock shit. I mean, Michael knows. He comes over the house all the time.

Doors never locked. It's, for the first time, the door is locked, I'm like, oh, this is interesting. The show got him. This one, because he was, a lot of the entry was through the back doors. It wasn't really, what he wasn't doing was coming to the front door and kicking it in. He was just taking advantage of the fact that people were living what they thought to be a more peaceful time. And then the conversation starts, you don't think that there's anybody still like that out there.

This is a stat we need to pull up, Michael. How many active serial killers are there at any given time in the U.S.? The stat, I believe I've heard is somewhere between 12 to 18 or active. any one given time. That's freaky. Yeah. Serial killers. Yes. I'm going to rely on the internet.

I might be completely wrong. What do we got here? Everyone's going to be locking their doors. Oh my God. I was low. Michael, what are you doing to me? Why are you pulling this halfway across the screen? Well, is that how committed you are to your job?

You're going to do a half-ass job? Jesus. According to the World Atlas, the FBI estimates that there are between 25 and 15. 50 active serial killers in the United States at any given time. However, most of these serial killers have never been caught. Let's define what a serial killer is real quick. I bet you it's, I feel like there's a, it has to be a sequence of killings. Yeah, how many is it?

Yeah. A person who commits a series of murders often with no apparent motive and typically following a characteristic predictable behavior pattern. Huh. All right. Most authorities set a threshold of three murders. Others extend it to four or lessen it to two. Okay, so it deviates a little bit, but the characteristic and predictable behavior pattern. All right.

Geography test, Michael. How many states are there in the United States? 50. That means one of these fuckers in every state. One per state. Montana has like 1.1 million people in it now. Are any of you a serial killer? Well, I'm not going to get caught.

Okay. So three of us out of that are not serial killers. That's not a lot of people, though. That bottom stat was freaky. It said three or more per month. What? With a cooling down period. Oh, God.

On this page? Yeah. Three or more people in a period of, Oh, over a month with a cooling downtime between murders. Man, psychological thrill. What does that mean about humanity? I feel like that's actually probably the normal edge case of any species. I wonder if, like, Silverback gorillas have serial killers.

I was just going to look that up. 50 active serial killers. For anybody listening, just lock your doors. Cool. Everyone's going to be locking. their doors now. I feel like, and I am not positive of this, I feel like every victim, if not nearly every one of them, it was not forced entry. Don't be a soft target.

Just, you know, don't even have an alarm, but put an ADT sticker up in your window. You know, they sell those absent the alarm system. Yeah. Because, and I look at it from the other side, not that I'm a serial killer, right? because 100% of people who don't murder people don't go to, well, fuck, that stats aren't even true. Yeah. Because people do get convicted of murder and they didn't do it.

Okay. There's just no absolutes in the world. That's what we can agree upon. But if you talk to a buddy of mine that I know through Jiu-Jitsu, Paul Sharp, I don't know if he was directly involved in this study, but he has referenced many times a study where criminologists will go talk to people who have been convicted of violent crimes or what, to be considered being a predator. And they talk to them.

What is it that you're looking for? And I tell you what they're not looking for, a hard target. They are not looking for somebody who carries themselves well, who is upright, you know, kind of alert. Not that they're putting out this, don't fuck with me vibe, but they're kind of putting out the don't fuck with me vibe. Yeah. They're looking for the person that has the poorer posture that seems less sure of themselves. It doesn't really move the way that somebody would have with a lot of confidence. And what he has said multiple times, and this has been surprising, is how fast those people can make that assessment.

Yeah. Have you felt like in times in your life where potentially someone was eyeing you as a target? God, I wish that would happen. I hope. Yeah. I wonder just how many times with like your situational awareness, your presence. How many times, you know, like when you're hunting, how many times has a mountain lion watched you and not done anything? I feel like every time I'm out there.

It's got to be the same in like in town where someone, someone's looking for targets, but they're looking right past you. Going over the stats that we've already pulled up, if you are a well-traveled person, there is a chance that you have shared space with somebody who is a serial killer and they just passed right by you. For sure. They passed right by you to get home so they could wear somebody's skin like a leotaur. You know? They could have been in the same restaurant. But it's a wild thought process, right? Did they look at me through that lens?

And if they did, what did they see? Yeah. How much do you enjoy sleep? I mean, we can go down the rabbit hole on this. Oh, man. I think that that's more than I think. thought for sure. I thought like that was higher than I thought to. Yeah. Active serial killers because you don't hear about him very often. Well I well who was the guy they just arrested on

the East Coast? They caught him with a pizza box and it was way, way, way in the past that he was killing people. I swear they pulled him out of a house. He had a family. He had a job. You know what I'm talking about? Michael? Did you hear about this at all? It was on the East Coast and they just connected this guy through a fingerprint. Rex Hewerman? Pull it up. Let me take a look. So you don't hear about it a lot.

Yeah, this is him. Architect. So in 2023, Rex Hewerman. Yeah, Hugherman? Yeah, that's correct. He's an architect from, oh my God, Massapequa, Long Island, was arrested in connection with the Gilgo.

I feel like that's an incorrect pronunciation, beach killings. They were a series of unsolved murders of women found along the New York Beach Highway. Three counts of first-degree murder all to see all the way back to 2007. Crazy. So that just got solved. But I bet you the people living in that area in 2007 knew that those, you know what I mean?

Yeah. So I think a lot of times unless it really touches you from a geographic specificity point of view that you don't hear about it that much. DNA from an energy drink can discarded by his daughter helped link him to the murders. See, it was not a pizza box. Sometimes I just make shit up. Those things are not even closely related. But again, it's the energy drinks. To go back to the Nightstocker, you drink all the energy drinks you want to.

Leave all, I guess, leave all the blood samples that you want to. You know? They didn't have the tech. No. This dude, oh, fuck. So he would kill everybody in the room. And then he would take a break and eat a snack out of the food in their fridge. They would find like half-eaten cantaloupes.

And that's how the detectives started kind of piecing it together. Not only like the viciousness of the murder, then he started carving shit into the walls. But they'd go in there and they're like, there's a half-eaten candle open a dead lady. Or he used to also like to stand there in the living room and he would just jerk off on the carpet, Michael. I thought you would enjoy that. Just Jackson Pollocking everywhere, you know, just like, fuck the fuck. So he would kill, snack. rack and jack and then bail you know in that order you're welcome lock your fucking

lock all doors and windows with all that evidence behind their forensic tools were so limited i feel like in today's era they may not have a shit in the system but they'd be able to connect all of those things at least and hopefully do something with it so yeah there's a lot of good things from the tech for sure lock your doors get the 80T stickers why not Trim your hedges back. Have a light on outside your house. The difference in a house, again, going back to the study of people who are looking at things from the perspective of a target, a lit house, which is well maintained on the outside, doesn't really present the ability for somebody to move with any concealment to approach the house versus three doors down, totally darked out, disheveled yard, trees and bushes. Which one are you going to pick?

Yeah. You know? Yeah. It's not rocket surgery. Crazy. It is crazy. Man. I don't know how we got where we are right now, Dustin.

That's been my last 24 hours on Netflix. We just had that conversation about all these shows in the shop. Like two days ago, we were talking about all the murder mysteries. And Sarah, our head trainer, is super into them. What did I tell you? The number one demographic is women. Yeah. And then, Nate, our content,

director's like, my wife, she's obsessed with these shows. Some statistics are true. And it is, it is wild how, because Sarah is so into them, how everything freaks her out, she thinks she's going to get murdered every day, which is probably, it's probably better to lean on that side than the other side. What you consume informs your perspective on the world, I think it can be taken too far. Mm-hmm. I think for the most part, most people are not serial killers or anywhere near that.

I don't think they are trying to hurt other people. But that doesn't mean you should ignore the statistical, even though it's unlikely probability that that may happen to you. Stay sharp. And train your ass off. And if you never have to use it, that's awesome. Because you're still going to be a badass. Yeah. Unless you're doing I keto.

You know, but that's just me. So born or raised, Wyoming. Where'd you land in Montana first? So Billings, Montana. Eastern Montana. Flat as fuck. I loved it, though. Billings has, it's very much more blue collar than Bozeman.

Is it oil and gas out there? Oil and gas. There's a couple of refineries there. You can smell them, actually. when you pass through. There's three refineries in Billings, so lots of fumes going into the air. But I didn't, you know, as a kid,

you didn't know any better about where else you should be living. And Billings offered so much diversity in terms of the hunting and fishing that I was super into. Because it's kind of on the rocky mountain front, Red Lodge was our closest mountain range, which is the Bear-tooth plateau. You get all the back country that you would get in western Montana with the Beartooth Plateau. But you get extreme diversity of like world class hunting and fishing because you get amazing bird hunting, waterfowl, upland.

And then you get white tail. And then we have all the eastern Montana elk, which are different than the western like deep forest elk that like bugle all the time. but there's just big bowls out in the prairie running around. Really? Yeah. Just out in the open. Some of the, yeah, the biggest bowls in the state are just out in the brush country of eastern Montana. I feel like that would be challenging.

Yeah, a lot of spot in stock. And they're very non-vocal, so it's just different. Yeah, that's tough. But I liked it. I mean, I didn't know any better. Growing up in Billings for me was awesome. How long did you live there? So I lived there all the way up until college.

college I went to bosman to MSU and I went there specifically to kind of do more archery al-cunning and that was that was the place to be and I was still doing a lot of fly fishing and I was a fly-fishing guide to pay for college so I would guide about 90 days a summer on the big horn river which is outside of fort smith montana and then I'd come back up to bosman for school and our family was kind of big on, like, helping us find ways to pay some of our own tuition or most of our own tuition. And I'm really glad that it went that way. Like, our parents were super helpful, but I would do a bunch of guiding, come up to MSU, cut them a check, go to school, and do as much elk-cunning as I could. Sounds like you left school without debt.

I did, yeah. Which is pretty atypical. Yeah, it is atypical for sure. The education lending system is fascinating to me. They will give you more money than anybody at that age could ever be responsible for outside of any responsible lending limits for anything else. It's nuts. Yeah, just blank checks. Yeah.

And here it is lump sum. Maybe spend it on food. maybe spend it on school. Maybe, I don't know. And then, of course, it cannot be forgiven if you thought for bankruptcy, which is not an approach that I would recommend that people take. But it's a system that will give you, it's predatory. That's just the only way I can describe it. To a very young kid, too, or a younger kid.

And no other, that I'm aware of, no other sector of lending is that loose in their ability. to provide money. Man. I try to go buy a car under that same criteria. Never. No. A house. Never.

Education, take as much as you want. That's wild. Yeah. And then the tuition just keeps going up, so they'll just cut bigger and bigger checks. What did you graduate with your degree? I graduated with marketing management and entrepreneurship. So it was kind of a double major with a minor. And I enjoyed it a lot.

I enjoyed business. I enjoyed entrepreneurship a ton. It was a good experience, a good degree. What did you think you were going to do with it when you got out? It's interesting because I felt a little bit like when I graduated, I felt a little seduced that I'd followed the wrong path in a way. So the world is kind of always telling you these things from these different points of view, whether it's your family, friends, society, or like what you're into and watching. And there's even now, I think it's gotten better now, but even now there's a big part of the world telling youth to go to college, get a degree, get a good job. and that's kind of what I did and graduated, landed a phenomenal job in Bozeman at the time.

In Bozeman, at that time, that was 2006-ish. There wasn't a lot of great jobs in Bozeman yet. It was still very much a western town, and it was still very much a town where kids left after graduation, and they worked somewhere else for a while and then tried to find a way to come back. It's changed a ton in the last 20 years compared to what it was like then. But to graduate then and land an excellent high-paying job was difficult to do. So I got that management marketing and entrepreneurship degree, and I landed this awesome job.

And it was interviewing C-level executive. They were Fortune 100 executives. You would interview them, and then you would get them into groups of like 12 from non-competing industries to solve problems and share ideas. Really? Yeah. It's a phenomenal business idea. They're still around. It's a company called Pi Profitable Ideas Exchange.

How do they monetize that? So a management consulting firm usually pays the business. for that group to exist. So that's like your Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey. Their dream is to build a relationship with those executives. But if they call, the executives will just brush them off. It's like, I don't want to talk to a consultant. But if we were to call and say,

hey, do you want to chat with five of your peers in non-competing roles and brainstorm on how to solve your problems for free, They were like, heck yeah. It's a hell of a networking opportunity for them. Yeah, and it was before Zoom and Google Meet, so we were doing it all off conference call.com. Is that actually a thing? That was a thing. It was free conference call.com.

And we would just patch them together. And it was an amazing learning experience. I had a group of COOs from like Nike, Starbucks, American Express. American Airlines, UPS. And I was just this young kid stuck in an office. And they really had no idea like who I was or where I was at. They just thought it was an awesome opportunity to connect. But that's when I really felt like I probably had followed the wrong path

based on what the world was telling me to do. Because it was a high-paying corporate job with my business degree in Bozeman, but it definitely wasn't cup filling at all for me. And so cup filling for me had always been outside, adventure, wilderness, hunting, and being physically active too. And then all of a sudden, you know, I'm stuck in this office on the phone all the time calling these executives. And my wife was in a really similar boat. She graduated with a marketing degree. She got a excellent job at a marketing agency in Bozeman. And so we both recently after graduation had these great jobs. She had all that college debt and because she didn't she didn't pay her

tuition in that same manner that I did. She went down the student loan route. And so we're kind of stuck in these jobs that were not really super stoked on. But at the same time, it's kind of what everyone kind of told us we were supposed to do. So it was a weird time because it's like we did what the world is telling us to do, but there's no satisfaction in it. And I think about that a lot now with my own kids. We have two young daughters. They're 11 and 9.

And just thinking about how to not make that same mistake. And we're doing homeschool now. So we're in our fourth year of homeschool. and like college it just isn't that important for me to push down on them like it was for my parents when they did that to me. And I think it's because so much has changed and so much has changed on like if you're just really passionate and good at what you do now in 2024, you can be extremely successful. And most of that has very little to do with if you have a college degree or not. And so I think kind of like figuring out how to get that a little bit better with our own daughters has been something we talk about a lot. I wonder if the degree was ever actually the linchpin or if it just was the standard that the people who were hired before you were held to.

So therefore you were held to the same standard. I mean, I understand from like an engineering perspective, you're going to build a bridge. Please have a fucking degree in engineering. Yeah. Or a skyscraper. You know, Michael just got back from New York. I don't want to go to the top of the Empire State Building if it was made by people who have political science degrees. You know, I would prefer it to be engineering.

But I wonder things have changed. But I just, I didn't go to college at all. I have zero seconds of higher education. My middle son is in junior college right now more because he likes learning and he's picking the classes he wants to go to him. He's taking chemistry and engineering and math and all shit that I would have failed. what he does with it, I think he's going to end up in sales. And I say that because that's what he says he wants to do. But I'm not going to talk him out of going and spending his time and continuing to learn and challenge his brain in those ways.

My oldest son did not go to college has gone down a different path. My daughter's sophomore in high school, so yet to be determined. But I would agree with you. It no longer seems to be this requirement. But I wonder if it ever really was that requirement outside. of the specialized fields or if that is just the way that it had been done before. I think there's a lot. He didn't have the evidence to show us that it doesn't need to continue to be done that way.

Yeah. I think that's accurate because even historically, no one really ever asked you for your degree or to look at your degree. They just made sure you had one. Yeah. Which I get it, you know. Yeah. Kind of. I think the sweet spot is,

pouring gas on what our kids are really interested in, showing that they're naturally gifted in and passionate about. And once, like exposing them to a lot of different things and then identifying those things that kind of light them up and finding all the possible ways we can do to accelerate that and feed that a little bit more and see where it goes from there. How did you land on the decision to homeschool? This is a conversation I hear a lot more people talking about right now. Yeah, that was fascinating for us because I never thought we'd be a homeschool family.

And now that we've done it, I'm so glad that we did. And we became a homeschool family because of COVID. And so my oldest was in first grade when COVID hit. and my youngest was about to enter kindergarten for the very first time. And COVID hit, and there was that season of like no school. Then there was that season of the hybrid learning and the online curriculum. Which should be defined as ineffective in a waste of time. Yeah.

It was pretty pathetic. But really what got me was the mask thing. with my daughter going to kindergarten. For me personally, it was, it was, that's kind of where I drew that line in the sand. I was like, I'm not sending like my precious little six-year-old girl to kindergarten for the very first time in a mask. I just couldn't do it. And we, we never really thought about homeschool up until that moment. And we even had the, I even had a lot of.

of the negative stereotypes kind of in my mind around homeschool kids being socially awkward and homeschool kids in my previous experience from growing up were a lot of them that I knew as a kid kind of met that stereotype so I wasn't really stoked on the idea necessarily at first but things got so weird during COVID that that's when we pulled the trigger on it. And it's been awesome. It's been I think I'm extremely blessed from the fact that

my wife really enjoys it. And she is really passionate about it. And we definitely went through a honeymoon phase at first where at first it was awesome and then there was a season where it was

really, really hard. First, when it began, it was awesome. And then it was not. Then there was a... Which is the way of all things. Yeah. Or not even that it's not awesome.

The reality just sets in. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Anything new you can expect to be awesome, especially if you're passionate about it and it's the first time. You're like, this is amazing. There's a reason why they call things the honeymoon phase. Yeah. It's pretty real.

Yeah. We hit that for sure with some emotional breakdowns at home. What was the issue around the mask? Was it because they were telling you that it had to be worn? Um, do you think that it was a charade? Like what was it about particular? And I'm only, I don't believe there's a right or wrong answer to this because I'm fascinated by people. The mask is for a lot of people, a go, no go.

Yeah. I think for me it was I did, I did feel a little of the charade thing. But I think the thing that was heaviest on my mind. was that's for my daughter that was going to be her first season of interacting with this new group of friends her kindergarten class and I didn't want her to go through that experience under this this veil of conformity with like you can't you can't see what people are saying you can't read their face you can't read their facial language And I thought that in my perspective, that would have more negative impacts on her than positive with her social skills later in life, her thought process on engaging with people later in life.

I thought that that was going to have more negative than positive than getting her in that school. I think the data actually supports that too. that what it certainly supports is that the no school followed by virtual school was not awesome for the educational system for our children for the teachers. The teachers weren't prepared for it either. I mean, it's hard to hold their feet to the fire on that because not necessarily exactly overnight, but pretty damn close to overnight. They said, okay, this is how you teach now. You've never done this before. And school starts on Monday.

Yeah. So I can't hold their feet too much to the fire. I think looking back at it, it's tough to objectively say it's serve the needs of our kids. It remains to be seen the impact it will have on their life because I watch my children teach themselves. They already know more than I did leaving high school. Because they can go into the computer and specifically YouTube seems to be where a lot of the information is gathered and they just type in, how do you fill in the blank? Yeah. My son, who's 18 and out of his fucking mind, is trying to teach himself to day trade from YouTube. Yeah. Do not ask him about it. I'm not going to even introduce you to him because if I did, you would not get home tonight.

Because he's going to try to talk to you about the resistance and the stock that he found in this invidia ancillary system. And there's going to be, I'm just sitting there. I'm trying to go to bed. I'm like, Tyler, get the fuck out of my room. I don't want to hear any more about this. At the same time, it's amazing. It's amazing. He never learned it in school. He has a whiteboard up in his room that could have been used as a prop in the movie A Perfect Mind with just plans and stuff and just squiggly lines. I'll go in there once a week and he'll have a business plan up there for a business he has. He's just ideating on businesses. He'll erase it.

That's cool though. Day trading. Like, dude, this week he was going to, I'm going to, he's like, I'm going to dominate YouTube, I think is what I'm going to do. I'm going to start doing content. He's in there analyzing and figuring out how to make shorts. And all of this stuff that I kind of know how to do it. But in the course of an afternoon, he is orders of magnitude beyond my understanding of it. Because he is self-seeking that knowledge.

So I don't think he is the only one in that generation doing that. So even though that time period, I really don't think served our educational system well from top to bottom, I think they're going to be okay. Yeah. Because, God damn, they can figure some stuff out. That's awesome. And I think that like that's the key to success. Our content director, he's been with Mountain Tough since day one. His name is Nate.

But he's the same way. And he's 10 years younger than me. But he got a mechanical engineering degree. And he did awesome at it, decided mechanical engineering really wasn't for him, started self-teaching himself videography and photography. And that's when I found him in 2016 and hired him for Mountain Tough. But he can, with that same skill set, he can literally teach himself anything. And a lot of it is off of YouTube.

But he taught himself all, everything he's doing to be the Mountain Tough content director. He self taught himself. There's been times where he wanted to use FPV drones for Mountain Tough stuff. stuff, that's where you fly the drone with the goggles. Yeah. Instead of just going and buying one, he built it from the ground up. And then... That's taking it a little too far.

But that's how he's wired. He's like, if I'm going to do this... I deeply appreciate it. Yeah. He's like, well, I know I'm going to wreck it, so I need to know how to put it back together. So I'm going to teach myself it from the ground up. And that's a skill where I think that skill is what our kids need because you can do anything. if you're willing to dig in and learn anything to be successful.

Oh, yeah. They're going to put us to shame. My 18-year-old is going to be okay. I don't know what he's going to be okay at, but he is going to be just fine. Yeah. I have my worries, though. So when he teaches himself, he bought these blue light glasses that look like these tortoise shell. And so he turns all the lights off in his room, sits in front of this computer.

I don't know where he found this keyboard, but it is designed to have. bigger keys. And it sounds like there's a giant just smashing the key. And so at night, all I hear is just, and then it market open, because of course, he's tracking all of the stock trades that he put in. He's awake. And I go in there and I'll open the door and he just pushes back from his seat and just turns around with his nerdy glasses on. Can I help you? Like, you know, I don't know what's going on in here. But you know, you know, you know, do you. It's amazing. Yeah. You're going to be all right. I couldn't have done any of that show when I was 18.

I could barely eat meals. I was a wreck at 18. Yeah. I would be lucky to remember to eat. Yeah. Like my paycheck was $1,400. I have 72 hours to spend that. You know, I'm going to... What about, what about social skills and physical

toughness? He trained Jiu-Jitsu. He likes to describe it as a fourth degree white belt, which is not a thing. And his belt is currently hanging from the ceiling. of the gym because he left it at class the last time we were there. I mean, Michael, would you describe Tyler as social? Yeah. He could talk the fabric off of his curtains. Pete from Origin was just in town today. We went out to dinner last night. And Tyler's just grilling him. He's like, yeah, you know, for, oh, God, it was hilarious. He says to Pete, he goes, you know,

I think I've heard of origin. It's Jocco's company, right? Mind you, Pete is the founder of Origin. Pete dies laughing. He goes, yep, he's like, I work for Jocko. And Tyler just starts scrolling him. He's like, you know, I like to ask everybody this. You know, who's your favorite actor? No way. Yeah.

And so they start talking about movies. And again, this is how fucking crazy my son is. The other night we were talking about his favorite actors. He listed out 10. One of them was Optimus Prime from the Transformers, which is clearly a CGI robot. Not an actor. Not an actor, which I had to explain to him. But he's got, you know, Brad Pitt on there.

He loves Matt Damon. The guy who played Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. A great list of actors. He likes Mel Gibson, Pacino fan, all of these things. So they were talking about movies. He was talking about business ideas. Then he started talking to him about stocks. By the end of it, Pete's asking him, like, hey, do you need any seed investment money?

Can I day trade with you? That is a good skill. He'll talk to anybody. He started a window cleaning business, and he just goes and knocks on doors. doesn't care about being told no. It doesn't bother him. And that's how I know he's going to be just fine. Oh, yeah.

Just door to door to door. Hello, sir, or madame. Would you like your windows cleaned? So how much of this did you pass down intentionally and how much is just wired? I don't, I have no idea the impact I have had on him as a parent. I feel like it's my way to not fuck this up. Like that is my role is to not get in this kid's way because he's obviously more capable. than I am. He had his own window cleaning business last summer, peeping Tom windows. He was making

500 bucks a day cash, swindled his grandfather into purchasing all of the equipment needed for his business. Oh, grandpa, my birthday is just around the corner. You know, my dad's, you know, freshly in town and happy to see his grandkids. He's like, come with me to Home Depot. And he leaves with two ladders and squeegees. Stocks him up. Yeah. So then he borrowed my truck, never filled the damn thing up with diesel a single thing I'm like gorg dirt knocking on doors but he would he would average I think there was a day where he made like 12 150 bucks cash cleaning windows working for himself setting up the business out there and enjoying he's like listening to the eagles yeah boombox out on a on a ladder son yeah shirt off it's great just frames yeah then he goes so another thing he looks at he goes to

the thrift store he figures this shit out on his own he goes this shirt shouldn't cost this much So he switches tags out at the fucking thrift store. So he'll get like a bag of clothes for $6. And I'm looking. I'm like, how was a pair of jeans 99 cents? Well, it wasn't, but I felt like it should have been. I'm like, this, that, dude. So the creativity goes a little bit too far sometimes.

He's going to do something big for sure. Yeah. I mean, I literally look at my job as to not fuck this kid up. Yeah. Like, don't get in his way. Man. I was the exact. I was not like that at 18.

I was very driven and I knew what I wanted to do. But his brain works in a way that I don't understand, but I'm fascinated by. So based on that, do you think we overthink this parenting thing sometimes? I think we might have less control over the outcome than we'd like to think. We want to think that these are my kids, right? Like I'm going to put you in the vice of what my values are, which I bet to tie into the serial killers, Ted Bundy's parents probably did that too. Yeah.

And I actually don't know much about that case. Maybe they were whipping the shit out of him at night with dead cats. I'm not sure. Some of them probably had pretty normal parents, though. And some of them I think were probably had horrendous ones. Yeah. The point being, if it's all about the parenting, then anybody who had a horrendous parent that became a serial killer,

that would be much more likely for that to be the case, but it's not. You know? Yeah. Just like you can see wildly successful people who come from a horrific background, and absolute failures who come from a silver spoon. But not always. That's not always the case. I think we have a gross job, and I don't mean that by like disgusting, but like size and scope and scale as a parent to do the best we can to hopefully help set their moral compass and orient it.

But I don't know if we have as much impact as we think we do. Man, that's probably accurate. I mean, with... It's scary, right? Yeah. Because you don't have your hands on the wheel as much as you think you do. Not much control. I mean, I honestly, I don't think I could have taught my son to be the way he is.

But I do think I do think I could extinguish that fire if I fucked with it too much. That's what I was just thinking. The way that you've embraced it has probably been so awesome and supportive for him to take it further and further rather than trying to squash any of those things. If you would have squashed any of those things. early on. I mean, don't get me wrong. We have a problem. He steals my boxers. Have I told you about the revenge I've had on him, Michael? Cissors. Yeah. So he keeps stealing my boxers and he'll say it's an emergency to which I can't get an answer from him yet as to what a boxer emergency is. He left a little laundry in the dryer the other day. So I got a pair of scissors and cut the

dick hole out of all of his boxers. Just carved it right out. And he for the life of him, can't figure he's looking he's like does the laundry does the dryer generally do this to things first he accused his sister this is fantastic he was telling this lea and i were sitting on the couch last night after dinner with pete when he basically convinced pete to invest in his company that he doesn't even have he comes out and he was talking about his boxers he goes at first i thought it was my sister julia i thought she made an impromptu crop top and then i thought so lea was drinking a protein shake at the time, it almost came out of her nose. She was laughing so hard because what I realized what he meant was is that she was going to

squeeze her head through that dick hole that I had cut and put her arms out through the legs of the boxers. And he actually thought that. Yes, because of course I had follow-up questions. I said, do you mean you actually think your sister is going to take your used underwear and put her head through the dick and asshole section and arms through the sleeves to which he with a stone cold face said, yeah. Man.

So he's still 18, right? And I haven't, he's like, I just don't get it. And of course I'm fucking like, oh, did you have your keys in the laundry with you and you washed it? You know, sometimes it's like a high abrasive. He's like, to me, it looks like scissors when I accused Julia. And she laughed. It's very suspicious.

And he hasn't accused me yet. And Leah, my wife is fucking dying laughing. Oh, man. Yeah. So you have to, you know, there's, he's amazing at some things, and he's just a kid at others. We're all just human. Yeah. I'm just, I'm a character in his story.

Yeah. It's basically what I think it has come down to. I mean, he plays like, all mine chess with Michael. Yeah. And then he went and did a Christmas light hanging business in the wintertime. I'm like, kid. That's awesome. Just.

Dude, the world is your oyster. Yeah. Go get it. Yeah. That's awesome. You just never know. Yeah. And maybe he'll be 10 buddy.

I don't know. Hopefully no one we know is one of these 50 active serial killers. Would you know? Would you know? You would just find out someday. Looking at that Richard Ramirez guy. He was pretty, fucked up. That guy was a little bit crazy.

What's the dude who carved the swastika in his head? He was a California guy too. The once upon a time in L.A. was Manson. Oh, Marilyn Manson. That's his singer. Different Manson. What the hell was his first name, though? Charles.

Charles, yeah. Marilyn Manson. Do you actually know who Marilyn Manson is? Yeah. Yeah, because you just typed it into Google. Yeah, he could have been a serial killer too. Yeah, you don't need to pull that image up because I have seen it. And so is Dustin, but you should educate yourself to the difference between Marilyn Manson and Charles Manson. Yeah, I definitely thought they were the same person for a second.

Yeah. Well, Marilyn could have been a serial killer. Still could be that never got caught. He's a touch off for sure. A lot of that, I think, is theater, though. Yeah. But Charles Manson, I think that one, you might have had some indications. He was a little bit off as rocker.

Yeah, with just the whole, the... whole nine, you know. I think the good ones, though, I think you might pass them in the grocery store and ask them where the milk is. I bet there, I bet, you know that, because there was that show on for a long time where they hunt in arrest serial killers,

like a CBS show. I don't know if I saw this one. It's good. And like half the team. Like nonfiction? Yeah. No fiction. Okay.

So it's a made-up show. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like, The NCIS type vibe, like a SWAT NCIS type CBS show. And half the team is cops. And then half the team is cops, but also psychologists.

And they look across the whole country and track these guys down and hunt them. And that's probably pretty fun. Pretty fun or you'll never sleep normally again. Yeah. You'd see how you'd get into all the details. The detectives who were working that night soccer case, I don't know. They all had families, too. You know, we're just talking about people.

They have a really abnormal job. They're not doing investigations on birthday parties that went the way that they're supposed to. You know, anniversaries and celebrations and all that stuff. It seems to be quite heavy. Yeah. It's got to leave a mark on you for sure. Tough to at least separate what you had just. done looking at a horrible murder and crime scene that involves sexual assault to go home to your 15-minute car ride in L.A. to wherever your family is with young kids.

Yeah. I don't think I could do that. It's similar with all the folks now that are chasing child traffickers. The ICAC crew, internet crimes against children. The Intel guys on that side? I mean, I don't know how you do it. I've heard they have some software that helps a little bit. it shields the investigators to a degree.

You're still swimming in that pool. And I think at some point your fingers get a little pruny. You know, it starts to seep in. I could not do that job for the sole reason that if I ever got into a room with one of those people, I would also be in prison. Yeah. I actually don't think I would be able to stop myself from doing something about that. Yeah, that would be it.

The people that are doing that, I don't know how they do it. I mean, I think kicking down the door and grabbing one of those guys, but on the Intel side, I don't know how they're doing that. Yeah. I don't either. We're down some deep rabbit holes. Yeah. We are down some deep rabbit holes. God, that's why I love about having a podcast. So you can talk about whatever the fuck you want to.

That's amazing. Yeah. These are all things that need to be talked about. Yeah. I'm not so sure how much, but they should be out there. They should be out there. When did you get the idea for Mountain Tough? So Mountain Tough, we'll go back to, we're grad, I graduated now.

I'm working for that corporate America job. Did you ever get to listen in on the calls that they would do? We did, yeah. You had to have been able to gleam some awesome business insights from that. Yeah, we, we were on the calls, helped facilitate the calls. It was excellent learning opportunity for sure. It was big. I mean, those were some of the, I mean,

biggest executives in the country at the time leading huge organizations. You would kill to get all those people into one room. Although virtually, you still have all of those minds looking at it from a different level of experience trying to solve those problems. Yeah. That's huge. You want to talk about an education you didn't have to pay for. Yeah.

Yeah. For sure. So what happened then was because we were a little dissatisfied with our career choices, myself and my wife, at the same time. In a little more detail there, we were really into running, marathon running and ultra running at that time. And I was also a gym rat. When I got to Bozeman, I started hitting the gym hard, but I was specifically training

for the backcountry because I was still doing so much archery elk hunting. So I was doing a lot of training, a lot of lifting. When I met my wife, she was a passionate runner. I hated running. She loved to run. And so that took us down a road of running a lot of marathons. And we went really deep into that road. One year we ran 12 marathons in a year, one per month for each month.

And then that led us into doing the ultras in Montana. which were a lot of 50Ks in the mountains. Would you run with her or you guys just entered and finished when you finished? We would enter and finish when we finished. And sometimes I would win and sometimes she would win, just depending on the race and the situation. So these things had kind of been, these foundational principles for Mountain Tough had been building for some time.

So I had the foundational principle of, El Cunning and doing a lot of time in the backcountry. And then we had, I had the experience with doing some specific training, weightlifting, and programming for the back country and the gym and then the running and the ultra-marathon season of our life. But what ended up happening is because we were pretty dissatisfied with those jobs, and we didn't have any kids at the time and life. was fairly simple.

We had both... I think you mean better. Better. Let's just tell the truth between you and I. All those were good days for sure. We actually quit our jobs together, and we went and worked in Africa for a while. So we started in Ethiopia, and then we wound up in Uganda. and in Uganda we worked for a campus of 240 kids that was focused on teaching those kids entrepreneurship.

So what had happened is we found a Bozeman guy that had been doing work in Uganda since 2001. And it was all related to Joseph Coney coming through Uganda. So Joseph Coney is an infamous warlord that is portrayed in movies sometimes because he was well known for using child soldiers and most of what he was up to. And he was the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army. He came through Uganda and killed like 600,000. Fuck. Mostly with these like child soldier armies. And so a Bozeman guy went over there to.

help and then when we decided that's where we were headed we linked up with him and he had been doing it for a while and he would rescue kids and then he would get like a rescue shelter up and running and then he would hand it off to local Ugandans to maintain it and keep it running and every time he did that it would fall apart and crumble so he'd check on it a year later and then and it would be gone or all the resources would be destroyed. And so after doing that for about 10 years, he decided he was going to build a full, kind of like top to bottom campus to try in some way to build future leaders of Uganda. So the campus we worked at had 240 kids,

but there was a primary school, a secondary school. we had a church, we had our full kitchen operation, and then a big part of it was the micro-businesses because his theory was that the kids shouldn't be stuck in this orphanage welfare system, their entire lives. They have to know how to get out of this, and they have to know how to, in some way, start transforming Uganda on their own. And so it was kind of like an entrepreneurship center slash orphanage. And about 80% of the kids there were orphans because of the LRA, the Lord's Resistance Army. But then about 20 or 15% of the kids had actually been child soldiers themselves and had been rescued.

And the micro businesses were really cool. it was like a tilapia pond so we dug a pond and then sold tilapia we built a big chicken operation where we had um an egg business coming out of the chicken operation there was a dairy cow side where we sold milk and then there was a pineapple grove where we were raising and selling pineapples So it scratched kind of all my itches in terms of life satisfaction. We were outside all day. It was physical, manual labor. The entrepreneurship side was really cool.

Super interesting to try to help kids grow and raise tilapia and figure out a way to sell them in town and actually be profitable on it and not lose everything and then take that money and try to help them set it aside for school fees. Most of that was for trade schools after high school. And then there's adrenaline every day because over there that you just never knew what was going to happen. We were relatively in a safe spot by then, but just Africa, there's just something weird is going to go down every day that you got a problem solve around. And we loved it. And we ended up building a guest house there, and that was our plan was to be there for the foreseeable future.

It was highly rewarding job satisfaction was great, hanging out with the kids all the time was amazing. And so our kind of strategy was we were going to build that guest house and stay there for five or ten years and just keep running that operation. and my wife got pregnant over there with our oldest daughter. And we were really naive. We had no idea what being parents was really going to look like. We had no idea what having a daughter of our own was going to look and feel like. We were naive enough that our strategy was, this is awesome.

We're going to fly home to Bozeman and have her delivered in Bozeman. And we'll probably stay with friends and family for six weeks or so. And then we'll just fly back over with her and go back to work. And we were naive enough that we didn't have a backup plan. That was our plan. I like it. Yeah. And when my daughter came out as a real human in the Bozeman Hospital,

that's kind of when I knew right away that I couldn't go back right away. we couldn't go back right away. There was enough, it's certainly doable, but for us it was like there was enough safety and security and health concerns that I knew for the foreseeable future we weren't going back. And so then we were in Bozeman with a newborn with no plan B, no jobs, no backup jobs or anything. And so that was kind of our burn the ship's moment. but we didn't burn the ships on purpose necessarily. But I'm really glad it worked out that way for the Mountain Tough side because I'd been thinking of the Mountain Tough concept for a while.

But that moment of being back home without a plan and having a baby and wanting to protect and provide for this baby and this family. it was it was awesome how that went down because it was kind of like now's the time let's let's go all in on mountain tough now rather than me just going back and getting some random job and it kind of presented that season in life where that was the opportunity to do that rather than because i knew if i went and worked for someone else being back home without that plan be that the mountain tough thing probably would never happen because i would once once you're working for someone else it's hard to to get some of these ideas off the ground so where'd you start it's pretty cool

out started i actually i drew the i drew the logo on a napkin because i knew that this was in 2016 i knew that no one no one at that time and even still now very little is done except what Mountain Tuff is doing. No one was treating the back country, do it yourself, Hunter as an athlete. No one was providing them with mission-specific training for the back country. And I knew that that was the huge kind of blue ocean opportunity was to train them just like the military would train folks or any other professional sporting agency, would train people based on critical skills for success. Yeah, reverse engineering what you're going to use the fitness for.

Exactly. And no one was doing that for a backcountry hunter that's going to be at high elevation and rugged terrain for multiple days. And then their worst physical day is going to be if they're successful. And that's going to be later in the hunt. So the mountains already beat them down for a few days. And then they have to get those heavy packs off the mountain. But it started like straight up kind of American Dream bootstrap. I took that napkin.

My buddy is a graphic designer. He turned it into a logo. And then I actually took that logo and I made a flyer just with the logo. It was really simple. Pull up the Mountain Tough logo, Michael, if you would. So I had the logo and then it said, looking to train backcountry hunters. and then I had my phone number at the bottom with like the tear off phone numbers.

So it actually started off as like an advertisement. It was like it's usually puppies for sale or firewood has like just call me. Do you need a babysitter? Yeah. So I. There it is. The old sheep's head. The Ibex.

So I hung that flyer and I actually hung it at Big Sky Archery in Bozeman, which is our local bow shop. And about a week later, three guys called. And they're like, what's this all about? Funny you should have to? And we started training in the park behind my house. So we started in the park doing lunges across the soccer field and pull-ups on the monkey bars. It was awesome. Those were good days.

It was fun. How did you scale it and build it from there? Well, it's pretty cool because I, I think because of the entrepreneurship degree, and I dabbled in starting some other companies, I started a fly fishing report website so you could get like a report on any Montana river. Like this is where the fish are at? It was like this is what the fish are biting on. I feel like there are some Montanans out there that want to open hand and slap you. That's why it did work.

For that concept. Yeah. That's why it crashed and burn. but then we I also with a buddy we started a Montana mobile wild game processing company in college and it was awesome mobile wild game okay okay so like if you kill an elk we had a 20 foot essentially like snowmobile trailer cargo trailer that on the inside was all a stainless steel processing butcher shop so if you killed an elk rather than taking your meat in or doing it yourself. Yeah, we come to you.

We just back in, and we could process like a deer in an hour, an elk in two and a half hours. You would have like chorizo in your freezer two and a half hours later from your elk, and then we'd drive off to the next house. Whoa. Okay. And it was cool. It was an awesome business.

The customers loved it so much because if you're elk's hanging in your garage and a mobile butcher shop, pulls up and then two hours later your meats in your freezer that's a lot different than taking it into a processor and maybe seeing your same meat back six weeks later it's an interesting sentence you just how many people do you think don't realize that you may not be getting back the same animal you turned in the weights are going to match yeah it just depends it's kind of fucked up i know i am very careful with my a game. There are others that are not. I don't want their game. Some people just don't know,

but once you know, you know. Yeah. And then you take it to a processor and, you know, it is a couple weeks. Like, man, this tastes gamey. I was really careful with my bowl. I don't know why it would be like this. The freshest elk I've ever had was the bull that I killed in Wyoming last year. It was early season. We had it to the butcher the following morning. We had quartered it in the field, butchered the following morning, cut, processed, flash frozen the next day in the back of the cooler. It is the best tasting elk I've ever had. That's awesome. Yeah.

And we just happened to be early. So they were just... That's perfect. Good to go. Yeah. Yeah. Same elk. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But what that business taught me was that that business was amazing, but it was not scalable. So only like in a mobile wild game processing company, only the owner is going to work that hard to make that business work. Yeah. And so ultimately we ended up selling it. It got sold because you just couldn't scale that business.

It's also a very narrow operating window. Yep. The true peak sales. Yeah, you have hunting season. You can't hunt. All you're doing is processing. But it did teach me that big lesson. of having something you could scale.

And so with Mountain Tough, even though it started in the park, I knew from day one that it was going to go digital. So a lot of gyms, like brick and mortar gyms, operate for eight, nine, ten years, and then decide they want to have a digital product. But for us, I knew on day one that I wanted the Mountain Tough philosophy to get laid out and go into a digital product. What year was this?

So we went live with like the first digital offering of Mountain Tough in 2017. Okay. And that has been so like substantial and huge for us because because we knew that on day one, essentially that first year we spent a lot of time on building the Mountain Tough preseason prep program for the back. country hunter and that's all we that was kind of like our flagship program that put us on the map and that essentially is saying if you if you're going to hunt Colorado elk or Alaska sheep this is the 16 week program that we're going to train you on step by step day by day to make sure you thrive in the back country that's the product that kind of got mountain tough off the

ground and we put that online in 2017 which really it was kind of like the market was sitting there waiting for a product like that to exist which was really cool because like as a young entrepreneur you just you don't know if anyone's going to buy this thing or if it's going to flop but it it has always felt like the market was waiting for it and I think enough enough guys had been in the back country and got crushed and enough there's a lot of people like in the east

or the Midwest that are intimidated by the back country and they should be for clarity if they're not going to take the time to prepare for sure the Mother Nature doesn't give a shit and it will eat your lunch

for sure but no one until kind of that moment basically said like here's a step by step plan and so we put it on back in that day it was just on a It was like on a Mountain Tough website.

It's all an app now. But it just kind of took off from there. How did you scale it? So it scaled after going on that first website. What we noticed was most of our community dove into that preseason program. And then we started scaling it in a couple different ways. Basically, looking at it now in 2024, it's super, interesting because people now train differently than ever before. And COVID poured some gas on that.

But like it was always kind of happening, but COVID really exposed it. And so through COVID, about 70% of people started training at home and left their gym. And then probably not by choice, too. Not by choice. Yeah. So they, the gyms got shut down. they all came home and now they are putting stuff in their basement in their garage. They're building all these little home jims and they're training on minimal gear because they're not bringing a lot of the machines or the full gear into their garage gyms. And then a lot of people realize that they actually prefer that and they started liking it more than going to like a big local gym.

They like the schedule. They don't have to kill as much time in the truck and burn gas. It's more convenient. Maybe their kids are upstairs. And so the concept like stayed around to stick. So really how Mountain Tough has scaled is we've always definitely focused on that backcountry hunter and military athlete. But we realize that the market is definitely segmented out in between beginners, intermediates, in elites.

So everyone is at these different fitness levels. And in those early days, we kind of only had an elite level product. So we've really scaled in the recent years over making sure we're taking care of anyone regardless of their fitness level. But we're making sure, like, if they're a beginner, we're going to get them to intermediate. And if they're an intermediate, we're going to get them to elite. But then also through that COVID shift of how and when. in and where people train.

The big thing that's allowed us to scale is programming regardless of what kind of equipment they have. So the minimal gear, body weight, kettlebell, sandbag training has really allowed us to scale in addition to regardless of where their fitness level is at. What's the biggest mistake you've made since you started? Oh, man. Entrepreneurship. is hard.

I think What are you talking about? That's not what they say on Instagram. Instagram's full of shit. Just wake up at 4.30. Journal. No, first, meditate.

No. Journal, then meditate. Cold plunged in sauna. Journal, post about that. Go to bed. I think it would be awesome if more, I think,

business owners talked about how hard it could be at times. Yeah. It is. How about opening a coffee shop that was millions of dollars over budget and months behind time. Try navigating that cash flow issue. Yeah.

And timing issue when construction companies are sitting there waiting for you. And they say, we can either start on this job or we're putting you at the bottom of the list because this is, you know, like navigating all of those things. Yeah. It's fucking hard. It's hard. Yeah. It's a hard journey full of a lot of ups and downs for sure.

Mountain tough I think the the hardest thing for me has been the people side of the business. I am very passionate and fired up about what we're doing, but the really difficult things for me are like interpersonal conflicts in like growing out the team. I think that is a special skill set for sure that. some people are extremely talented at. And as a founder, I think that those have been the hardest things for sure that I've gone through. Have you had to fire people? Yep.

Yeah, we've definitely had a... It's fun, right? It's brutal. Yeah? Yeah. It's brutal. Do you think the person getting fired realizes that? Like, maybe not in the moment.

It's tough. Mm-hmm. to let people go. It's not a light, well, maybe for some people it is a very light decision. It has never been for me. I think a lot about the person in their life. And in the moment when the person's getting fired, I'm sure they're not thinking about, I wonder if this was hard on my boss to get rid of me.

I don't blame them for not thinking that. But if you've never been in a place where people work for you, you may never understand how hard it can be to sit on the other side of that table and know that you have to let that person go. And it might be for their own best interest, but definitely for the best interest of the company. Not easy. It's not easy at all.

I think the hard thing, too, is as your team grows, I think there's a side of business ownership where no matter how good things are going, you always still think that you're going to run out of money any day and that things may fail any day. And as the team grows and the business grows, that pressure gets larger and larger because you go from one person to take care of from a payroll standpoint to five to 10 to 15.

And so that pressure of can I really take care of these 15 people in their families, that boulder just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think that navigating through that and just that responsibility has been, definitely tough. You allow people to come and work out at your facility too, right? We did for a long time. We actually, that was kind of the foundation of Mountain Tough is that all of our programs in training is lab tested and that has been since day one.

What that turned into was those park sessions went from like one group in the morning to a morning crew and a noon crew and an afternoon crew. and an afternoon crew. And those park sessions took off before we went into our first facility. When we went into our first facility, we were still running three Mountain Tough classes a day. In addition to all of the online programming we were built. That's what I'm talking about. It was busy time.

You're just going to grind yourself to dust. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's... So what I saw the day I came down to do your show, that was your internal staff. workout. That was staff.

Okay. That's cool. That's a cool bonding thing as well, too. Yeah. The staff workouts are awesome. Yeah. But I ran Mountain Tough class three times a day. Like I had 5 a.m.

A. noon and 4 p.m. for six years. And it was kind of my baby. I actually loved it so much because just pushing people mentally and physically beyond what they think they're capable of, especially in like a small group of like eight to 10 to 12 is awesome it was so much fun you learn a lot about humanity you learn a lot lessons and people yeah through you get an insight into their mental

almost everything decision making problem solving morality integrity yeah by pushing them physically you learn a ton yeah yeah yeah Yeah, the amount of stuff that we saw was so cool. I mean, positives and negatives, but taking people towards that breaking point, all these character traits just come out on the table through a physical experience, which is really awesome. I owned a gym for a bit. It was a CrossFit gym, an affiliate in Coronado.

It reaffirmed my belief that anything can be taken too far. You know, you can drink yourself to death with water, too. But I would watch people, for some people, exercise was their church, to use a common term. Not that they were there celebrating a religion of any kind, but it was their sacred place. Maybe that would be a better way to put it. And for some people, it was just their escape from their day, their way to mentally link the gears up at the end of the day, or delink the gears at the end of the day. And then I also saw people who lost themselves in the process. And the rest of their life started falling apart.

But damn, their deadlift was good. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. It goes too far. Yeah. They literally lost themselves in the process. Everything became about the process.

They no longer had an end state. And actually a lot of other areas in their life were suffering because of the amount of energy that they were putting into something that most people would think would benefit every other area of your life. But because of that laser-like all-encompassing focus, almost everything else crumbled. Yeah. It's wild. It's wild. We're, as humans, we're pretty terrible about idolizing things and putting things on pedestals.

And even when we eliminate an idol, something else can sneak in there and become an idol. And fitness definitely tends to do that for some people. if they're not watching that. When we ultimately, the app started growing and growing and growing, and I was still running all of those classes. And it wasn't until our team started to grow, and they kind of saw behind the veil of Mountain Tough that they were like, you can't keep running these classes all the time as we grow this company.

And I was like, man, that's my, it was kind of my baby. And I was like, I don't, like, I loved that community so much. And it's how I started all the way back from those three guys in the park. But it was the right decision. I'm really glad that we navigated things that way. And it was in kind of black and white, it was in a way, do you want to serve these 150 people right here locally? or do you want to transform 100,000 lives? And you can't do both.

You would need two businesses. It was two competing businesses. Yeah. They were competing for time, energy, resources. And we still have a lab now. We still have test athletes testing things every single day, but it's different from class. And by making that pivot,

were able to be on that pathway to actually impact 100,000 lives. But that was one of the harder decisions I ever went through because of what you just mentioned. It was so important to a lot of people. Those classes were so important that, and I didn't realize it until I pulled the trigger on that decision, how important it was to some people. but it

it was like wrapped into their identity and it was like I ripped a piece of their identity off when it was like you can't you can't train here anymore and there's a book on change called Who Moved My Cheese that talks about

That's the actual title? Yeah it's a It's like a really short leadership book called Who Moved My Cheese? And it's It's how humans process change. And we can all process change these three ways.

And depending on how we're feeling or what it actually is or the day you catch me on, I'm going to fall in one of these three buckets. But one of the buckets is, so you're in a mouse cage like a maze. And the scientists are putting the cheese in the same corner every single day. and we're running over, we eat that cheese, and then we go hang out. One day the scientists pull it the cheese out and it's gone. So me and you run over, it's been there the last hundred days, and now it's not there. So one way to react to that change is the way that we should all strive for most of the time.

And that is cheese is gone, not sure what happened. happen. Let's get out of here and go figure out what's going on. Let's look for clues. Let's look for more cheese. So that that is one way that humans react to change. The other way is kind of laying in that same spot that cheese used to be and being like, who the heck moved my cheese? Just lamenting over the fact that there is no cheese. And lamenting. And then feeling entitled, like, that was my cheese. why isn't my cheese here? And in the story, the mice will actually lay there

waiting for the cheese to return to that spot and die because it never does. But the mice who run and look for new cheese, they end up being fine and they find things that are actually better than the cheese they have. They find like six versions of cheese. Maybe they find some good at it.

If they're into that shit. Yeah. So it's like things happen and we got to just look for the action steps immediately to create the scenario we want to create. But changing those classes for sure, I did not realize how big of the identity thing. And I moved a lot of people's cheese going through that experience, which was tough on me just because it was kind of like my community in a way.

But now you have access to a lot of. lot more data, user data. Yep. What are you seeing that makes the difference for people in either achieving their fitness goals or not? Consistency, for sure. I think consistency seems to be the number one game changer. There's so many different ways to train.

There's so many different avenues to train whether that is. like running, hiking, crossfit, mountain tough, full gear, minimal gear, martial arts. But the people that are rising above the rest are very consistent. And so they are not skipping many sessions. They're making most sessions, even if they're traveling, they're finding a way to train. They're not going through these kind of like training roller coasters. of training really hard for three months and then going off the wagon for three months

and then I've tried that. It's fun as shit. You will not achieve your fitness goals. Yeah, it's that role, that training roller coaster is brutal on people just in. It takes so long to make progress. Yeah. And it will disappear at a rate

that is substantially faster than the rate it takes to gain it. Mm-hmm. One step forward, four steps back. Especially as we get older too. I mean, maybe like bouncing back in your 20s is pretty easy. Yeah, I don't know if it's possible in your 40s. 40s, it's going to hurt. You might be able to bounce.

I don't know if you're bouncing back to where you were. You're not going to bounce back. No. Yeah. No, you might bounce into a nursing home. Consistency is king. for sure, though. I think that's true of everything in life.

It's everything. Like, look at, let's go as far, well, maybe not as far as we could go, but let's go to, like, relationship with a significant other. The people that I know who are the happiest and something that I strive to implement in my own life is consistency. Not just spending time with the person, but interacting with the person, talking with the person, engaging with the person, growing with the person. Same thing. You can't have three months on and three months off in a relationship. I mean, you can. Yeah.

That is a different roller coaster than the people who are day in and day out. It's like that with everything. I think it is. I mean, business, consistency. Drinking alcohol, every day you need to stay on the wagon. Just like anything else can be taken too far. For sure. Yeah, but the most successful people, there are, what is it called, a white elephant or a black elephant or the anomalous case of somebody who,

who thought the Steve Jobs, right? I'm sorry. There's not going to be 5,000 Steve Jobs. Elon Musk is another example. Love the guy. I hate the guy. I'm talking about his meteoric rise to where he is at. He was also, though, very consistent in a lot of things

that he was doing. But let's just say he found an accelerant that allowed him to get to a level beyond what most people think are possible. That's not how most people find that. It is through slow, consistent, methodical, continued work. Yeah. Which is tough. Yeah.

It's hard to do. I mean, we all go through seasons of life. I don't know about you. Some days I'm like, I don't give a shit about anything physical today. In other days, you wake up, you know, a great night of sleep. I'm unstoppable. Like, let's just go. I'm going to do six months worth of workouts today.

You know? It's neither of those are a good strategy. Yeah. I know. Do you see that at Jiu-Jitsu? Oh, yeah. Yeah. The consistent guys. I would say that you do for sure. Wouldn't you, Michael?

The people that you, I've rolled with Michael a lot. How long have you been trained now? Four years? Five years? Four and a half, yeah. Four and a half years. Super uncommon that he misses a class. Yeah. He has a cough due to cold right now. Of course he wouldn't go because he wouldn't want to infect others.

And he's also jacked up his knee two times doing exactly the same thing I would like put on the record. It was the exact same throw, right? Not the exact same throw. It was the exact same throw. I am telling you. It was the exact same throw. Yeah, Andy, it was the exact same throw. I've already told you this solution to this.

Just pull guard, except the fact that you like being on the bottom, all right? Not only do you like being on the bottom, you pull yourself to the bottom. And pull somebody else on top of me. But he's a purple belt. He's very good at jiu-jitsu, but he's there every day. And do you ever feel like your jiu-jitsu gets any better? No. Yeah.

Exactly. I'm in the exact same belt. I go as many days as possible and I leave. I'm like, I fucking suck today. I sucked yesterday. But then if you talk to people who don't see you for six months or you go somewhere and you roll with them and you haven't seen them for, they're like, damn, dude. Like your game has changed. It doesn't have to necessarily be better, but like that was a different experience.

You don't see it in the moment. And you only can recognize that at certain times. But I can tell you how to not get good at Jiu-Jitsu. We do what's called Nelsoning it, which is not showing up the train. which is a guy that used to train Jiu-Jitsu. Name Nelson. Name Nelson, hypothetically, maybe. Apparently he made an appearance at the gym the other day where a white belt, third-degree white belt that works at the coffee shop apparently, allegedly might have had his way with him.

You know? That third-degree white belt, very consistent. Consistency. I think it makes the biggest difference. There is a chance that you'll be. be statistically anomalous and rocket into space, but more than likely, you're going to have to put in the work. Yeah. I think it becomes apparent if you look at like a 10-year life history. Oh, the overnight 10-year success? Yeah. It must be nice. If you look at it from a 10-year

perspective rather than a six-month or one year, and you can see that with so many things. But if someone works on their business for 10 years or if someone works on their fitness consistently for 10 years versus the person who doesn't, that trajectory is night and day difference. And the day to day, you just, in the day to day, you can't see it. And, you know, the physical training is exactly like jujitsu from the perspective of, every day it hurts the same. or the workouts feel like they suck the same. You don't feel like you're getting better.

Yeah, the more in shape you get, the more it hurts. Yeah. Because you can do more. Yeah. And your threshold moves. And then you still go past you're like, this sucks again. Yeah. You're just doing twice the cows or reps or whatever.

I worked for CrossFit for years and I would be at the games watching these athletes. And people, I would hear them say, man, I just want to be in shape like that person because it'll be easy and like that person can't walk right now they just worked so hard their body is physiologically shutting down it's never going to hurt less it's not going to be easy they just can do more than any other human being but it's at the same cost it's never going to be easy i mean what's crazy too is how few people know the recipe and won't commit to it or we'll just give up. I've been guilty of that in my life,

going down a path where, looking back now at the moment, I told myself, and that's the only true way to say it is that I convinced myself that it was a dead end street. And if I look back on it now and I do a proper post-mortem on it,

no. I just was tired of doing what I was doing. Yeah. And I talked myself into a place, like, okay, this isn't successful. I was wrong in thinking I should go down this path. So let's do the right thing, in course, correct.

And maybe it was the right thing too, course correct, but that doesn't mean the path that was on was destined for failure. Yeah. I've seen that too. And I think maybe the second most important thing is, is like self-awareness and knowing thyself. Because I've seen a lot of the same over the last couple years to the point you just mentioned where there is a tremendous amount of the population. maybe the bulk, maybe the masses, that they know exactly what they should be doing. I actually think almost everybody, not meaning this is what I should be doing for a living, but I think inherently we know what we should be doing and what we should avoid.

Whether you listen to that voice is the difference. Yeah, that's a really interesting one because from physical training and nutrition, you see it a lot where individuals will ask you about training or nutrition. And as they're asking you, you know they already know the answer. And you know that you're giving them the answer they're still not going to ignore. They're not, but they're asking you like your answer is the secret soft. to their life transformation. But you know, as you're answering them, they already know the answer. But it's something about the self-awareness in them knowing themselves enough

that that is not the missing component for them consistently taking action. It's really fascinating because predominantly, I think that that's what you see the most. I think is people knowing they should be eating a little better. They should be training more consistently and a little bit differently. They know what to do. For some reason, they're not doing it. And they're delaying it even further by asking questions that they already know. That is like a, that's a major theme right now that's happening for sure.

It's a recipe to being really, really unhappy. I'm sure you've worked with people. who are substantially overweight. I've talked with everybody, and I had people come into the gym, and I'm not trying to judge anybody for whatever weight or body composition they may have. The point is I talked with quite a few people who had over 100 pounds to lose. Not a single one of them was happy with where they are in life from a body composition perspective. And we would sit and talk and talk about food logs,

or however you would want to approach it, macro nutrients, portion control, timing of eating, whatever it may be. They already understood the things they probably should be doing and the things that they should be avoiding. And they would actively pursue the things they know they should be avoiding and feel terrible about it in the moment. It just this vicious cycle of almost self-torture from a physical and emotional, perspective. Yeah. It's very difficult. Yeah. And you and I talked a little bit about that on the Mountain Tough Show is certainly one solution to that is the why and then finding that why. Yeah. So the how becomes more possible or probable for them, yeah. But them finding that why doesn't always happen overnight. And there's no real secret code to that because sometimes

sometimes some sort of rock bottom type moment does need to happen for that Y to reveal itself, whether that's a health crisis or something else. But for all people, I think, like, artificially, and it's not really artificially, but creating a case for a Y strong enough in your head that is powerful enough to lead to consistent action. isn't like a black and white light switch for all people. It's because you have to convince yourself that that Y is strong enough. Well, when you're in your darkest moments, which more than likely you're going to be by yourself, having to make a choice between something that is perceived to be easier and perhaps more comfortable,

that doesn't align with the consistent action you know you need to take versus a choice that's a little bit more difficult, I was about to say more harder. Don't know where that came from. Excellent grasp of the English language today. More difficult, but would keep in line with the consistency and the goals that you want to go towards. If the Y isn't powerful enough, you're about to have the most dangerous type of argument. And that is the one with yourself. Yeah.

And then you're screwed. Really? I mean, that's what it comes down to. Yeah. If that Y isn't solidified enough, if it's not a powerful enough anchor to more that vessel in place regardless of the type of storm that's coming at it, it'll snap and away we go. I have found that anyone who's struggling with that, why, if they register for something hard and scary, it's kind of like jump starting a truck.

It's a level of accountability as well. Yeah. Instead of it being a target that you're going to throw something at as it drives by, you're like, this is on a calendar now, and that calendar sits on the wall. wall. Yeah. It's like it's like jump starting a truck because I always know that's probably not going to give them fuel for that's not the 10 year why.

But if you think about jujitsu and someone who's inconsistent, if you sit like a Nelson. Like Nelson. Yeah. If you register Nelson for a big comp. He just wouldn't go. No, you're taking him and you're, you're going to register him. I feel like he would hide, don't you?

When you think, Michael? He would go into the bathroom and just not come out. It's possible. Actually, you know what's funny about him? Is he like, fuck it, let's go. He'd get his ass handed to him and not give a shit. He'd have the greatest time. He would have the greatest time.

He would compliment the person that just, that was awesome. Like, excellent technique. And he would go into the crowd and somehow recruit eight other fucking people to start without training himself. Let's talk about a normal person. Yeah. A normal person. If you registered them for, if they registered for a comp, they would immediately start taking it more seriously.

Consistency. Not only in jujitsu. They would start looking at sleep. Well, yeah. I was like, ah, man, I'm training a little harder. So my body is, I'm a little bit more sore. Am I getting enough protein? Let's talk about the fuel that I'm putting into the race car.

Yeah. Then I'm like, oh, man, I'm just, I'm not feeling recovered. It's optimized sleep. Back off the booze a little bit. Yeah. It has these cascout. Cascading, I guess it would be upstream impacts that would terminate in a better performance in that downstream at the tournament. For sure.

Yeah. And it all starts stacking. And I think all of a sudden you're sleeping better. You're waking up early. You're training. So now I'm not going to drink a bunch of beers because I know I have to wake up early. And then because I trained in the morning, I don't want to ruin my whole day of training with a bunch of terrible food. And because I trained.

and ate good and I'm not drinking as much. Now I'm way more engaged with my kids. I have energy for my kids. I'm focused on my kids. And then I'm having better conversations with my wife because I'm not crushing those beers because I know I have to train. Now she wants to bang me again.

It's like that they just start stacking. And that's usually... Well, then you get to the tournament and you realize, like say, who gives a shit at your performance? But you realize I feel so much better as a person than I did before, and I don't ever want to go back to that. Now you have your why.

That's when the big why shows up. Yeah. It's kind of like if someone doesn't have that why, it's like use the jump start trick. And then because the big why usually starts locking in after that positive snowball starts rolling a little bit. So the jump start trick is such an awesome way to start that. And it works for. everything. I mean, sign up for a half marathon, sign up for an Iron Man, sign up for a

CrossFit competition. It doesn't really matter what it is. It just matters that it's a little bit scary to you. I was just going to say the same thing. As long as it scares you a bit. Yeah. And I would actually say by a bit, I mean a lot. Yeah. To clarify, a pinch of salt, I mean, dump the whole fucking thing out. It should scare you a lot. It's got to scare you. And you need to, You need to swipe your card because you can't say like, well, I'm going to do a half marathon in June. But no, you need a register like right now. And that's when it all like starts kicking in. That'll help to do that accountability of the money already spent.

Yeah. Unless you were like Nelson, he'd figure out a way to refund or he'd get payback. And I don't know. What do you think, Michael? Flannels. Michael yesterday is just handing out flannels to people. It was two days ago. Just paying with flannels.

Cars are driving by and he's bawling him up and trying to throw him in windows. That's not true. It's not true, but not that far from force. You need that T-shirt gun. Oh, God. He will probably get one of those. Just launching him to the flannel gun? I digress.

Sweet. Poor sweet Nelson. He's a zero-degree blue belt. I was there the day he got his blue belt. I was a white belt with one stripe. He is still a blue belt. I am not still a white belt with one stripe. It's been a journey of exploration.

And he's a cop. He's consistently inconsistent. God, he is that. Wouldn't you agree, Michael? He is consistently not consistent at juditsu. Yeah. I would agree with that statement. Yeah.

If there was a student of the month for somebody who'd never showed up, he would nail it 11 months out of the year. But then he just randomly shows up sometimes. He does. Like he doesn't just bail all together. It's interesting. He claims that he still trains. I can't find any evidence of it.

And it's certainly not evident in his ability. But no one sees him. No. You know, it's funny that he'll come and throw down. And I wasn't there to roll with him. But Michael, I bet he had the best attitude. I'm sure he did. Yeah, he's just like the most jovial dude ever.

Man. He's the kind of cop you would want to have pull you over. You're very unlikely to get a ticket because I think he's forgotten and how to do the paperwork, like the radar portion of his car that's supposed to like auto spit out the speeds. He figured out a way to unplug that. You know, he is the cop actually the type of cop where I would want my young kids who hate to tell you this at some point, your kids are going to play around with drug, sex, and alcohol. If they were having a low moment, he's the type of cop I would want to have show up because the best tool that Nelson has is his disarming ability to talk with people.

Yeah. Yeah. He's not looking for a reason to escalate. Yeah. It's actually looking for a reason not to because he has no ability to defend himself whatsoever. He's going to de-escalate at all the cost. He's got his mouth and firearm. Those are the two stats in between the two, even though he claims to have been doing jujitsu for like eight years.

Oh, man. Yeah. It's fantastic, though. Tell me about your podcast because you guys are a little bit earlier into the podcasting journey. We are, yeah. So the Mountain Tough podcast, when we looked at it, we, knew in our space that there was a thousand good hunting podcasts. And we also knew that in our space there was a plethora of great fitness and training podcasts.

And we didn't want to get into either of those competitive landscapes necessarily from a podcast perspective. But since day one, one of Mountain Tuff's ethos had. been the mind in mental toughness and mental fitness and what mental toughness can do and consistently like the best of the best are extremely mentally tough and mental toughness shows up in different ways and and there's different tools that are more helpful on some days versus others depending on the situation so our podcast is very much focused on on inspiring guests and what's going on from their perspective with how they use mental toughness, how they view mental toughness, how they think about their mindset and sharpening their mindset

and how that has helped them like accomplish their goals. Who is the most mentally tough or resilient person that you've ever come across? Can you think of one? man the one that just popped to my mind from our podcast that was the most fascinating i've ever heard was bodie miller's story the downhill skier yeah so america's most winningest skier olympian but he grew up in the mountains of vermont kind of in a hippie family off the grid and he actually had a hike about a half mile to his house off the main road through the woods. So at like six, seven, eight, nine years old, he would he would just be stomping through the woods.

You'd get arrested for that in the modern era. I know. It's so awesome, though. But a lot of times when he was doing that as a kid, he would run into black bears. That's not awesome. I think your appetizer size at that age for a BlackBerry, yeah. Yeah. Depending on when you catch him in the season.

Yeah. His story is wild. But he created this tool because of that experience early on in life from his mindset perspective that I've never heard before that was super interesting that he applied later on in life. but when he encountered scary moments hiking to his home as a kid, whether that was a bear or just hiking through the woods at night in the dark, he used extreme versions of visualization. So he would visualize, like, as a kid, it was like I'm a superhero, I have a shield, I have a sword.

This bear's scared of me. I'm going to take this bear down. but he kept like expanding on that visualization deeper and deeper and deeper as he became an adult and then he applied it to his skiing. So when he was skiing in the Olympics at the top of those shoots when he is about to go like in that grand slalom, he would use his visualization at an extreme level where he actually has some negative effects from it now because it was so impactful to him then. But he would, in a ski race, he would look at the bottom and he's trying to get down that mountain as fast as possible. And he would visualize like his sister's been kidnapped.

She's at the bottom. She just got, she just got thrown in a van. And I have to get down there as quickly as possible. she's going to be gone forever. And he would visualize that like so strongly in his mind that he was like shaking. And then when he would ski, he would have like an out of body experience where he felt like he was actually watching himself ski from like a thousand feet up. Holy shit.

Human brain is an amazing thing. Insane. Yeah. And he this was like his coaches never told him to do this. This was just something that he did. And he did it for years and it kept getting like deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. But that was his tactic. Wow.

It was wild. Okay. So there's some cool stories like that. There are. I mean, those are thoughts he's creating for himself that you could make so powerful you could lose control of them and the impact that they have on you. Yeah. fucking wild is that. That is wild, right?

We can visualize something that we created. Yeah. It is insane. Yeah. But like he leveraged it to win in some way. At what cost, though? I know. It's crazy.

Hopefully he can find a way to not be worried about like van fuckers for the rest of his life. I mean. Yeah. It's wild. Wow. Who's the most mentally tough person you've ever encountered? As I was asking you that question, I realized I don't have a good answer for it. I mean, I have seen people work through physically painful situations that I thought would be beyond human capacity.

Like I thought I had actually hoped, like, the body would go into shock to some degree. And this is clearly not what I would hope I would be suffering through if I ever had to deal with that. but I don't know if that, is that mental toughness or is that you're being forced to deal with a situation presented to you, you know? I think when you're talking about mental toughness, it has to be more than a situation, which is where I think yours is a great example because he, a history of doing those things. Yeah. You know, you can sometimes come outside of yourself and do and exceed what you think is possible of you. I don't know if that necessarily makes you a mentally tough person. Um

Fuck I don't know if I have a good Single example I would say some of I would say probably though From a resilient perspective Some of the people that I used to work with Just because the selection process In a way is

Selecting for that Yeah it does it is refined over time Because there's people's inherent ability To be resilient and then there's some tools you can throw in there that can kind of polish it off and not make you a superhuman, but it can take whatever you have and increase it to a degree. We talked a little bit about it on your show, and I'm talking about keeping your world small

and controlling your thoughts and not allowing yourself to become overwhelmed. It's not going to make you a superhero, but if you're already resilient, that's definitely going to help. And if you need to work on your resilience, it's going to help as well. It's not going to just take you from one end of the spectrum to the other. Yeah. I think it would be a combination of characters, people that I used to have worked with.

I've never heard anybody talk about it in the manner that you did, though. That's wild. It's wild. Yeah, that tactic he used is wild. I also think that when we started talking about mindset and mental toughness at Mountain Tough in the early days, mostly like your mind goes to a physical experience or a sport figure or a selection-type story. or a selection type story. And we're in our eighth year now,

and I definitely think about it a little bit differently, and I think it is related to your point that it has to be more than just one event or one thing. And so now a lot of times when I think about who's the most mentally tough individuals I know, it's more than like those guys that can handle, crazy stuff on the mountain are in the gym. It's so much more than that.

It's like the most mentally tough people I know are people that really won't let life bring them down no matter what kind of punch it throws at them, which that is, I think, a whole other level and much harder than just being like mentally tough in the gym. Let's be honest. That's pretty easy. Yeah. Like, we're talking 60 minutes of your day. Yeah.

Mental toughness in the gym compared to like, can you handle bankruptcy? Can you handle losing a child? Can you handle divorce? Yeah. Can you handle crazy things that life is going to throw at you and keep plugging away? Those are extremely mentally tough folks where you look at them and you're like, man, nothing in life really can bring you. down. I know you've been knocked down, but you got back up in a remained positive. Yeah. That's a whole other level. I also don't think that those people are always positive,

but they find their way back to it. I really don't think that there is a challenge that life can throw at you that is insurmountable unless you make decisions that make them permanent. Suicide being one of those decisions. And for whatever reason, it has its hooks into the military community. I have my own questions though about whether or not it's the military experience or the person that came into the military that that is manifesting its way through and I don't even know if it's possible to parse the two out but I would agree with you on that and I also would always caution people against selecting one data point and making a decision about a person based off of that yeah data points are important but I think trends are much more telling than one particular

point. I would hate to be judged by the lowest point in my life, and I also wouldn't want to be judged by the highest point of my life either. I would want a trend line across that to get a better version of an assessment of who I am as a person. Yeah, I agree. Because we've all done things that we regret, and we've all done things that if someone, I mean, if someone pinpointed for the majority of us an event 10, 20 years ago where we were an asshole, it's very unfortunate that they would use that to put a stamp on who we are 20 years later, but it happens. It's equally unfair to do it on the high point as well. Yeah.

That's a tough. It's a good point. Because people will idolize the high point, especially in a world where you can view people's high points only on curated social media feeds. where nowhere in there are the valleys in between those. That's a good point. Yeah. Neither of them are a single data point.

They each, I think, high and low are equally irrelevant as far as their importance. I'll take 12 measurements over one. If I have 12 in a row that are kind of sucking, fuck you, buddy. 12 in a row that are trending in the right direction, oh, see what this guy's got going on. Yeah, trends are big. Yeah, then I'd still have to take 100, you know, or 300 or a year's worth of data points or a couple years worth of data points. I agree because it takes a while to know someone. Yeah.

And then the question is, do you ever really know them? No. Well, I don't know. I don't think you can. Yeah. I think the only person you could hope to know really well is yourself. Sometimes I do shit that surprises myself. Even that.

Yeah. Even knowing yourself. Yeah. There's that. It starts with being honest with yourself. Well, there's that old quote of, you can't ever cross the same river twice. And then the guy asks,

yeah, you can. What do you mean? And then the response is, well, you changed and the river changed. And that's pretty accurate with ourselves and people, where we're changing. every month, day, year, week. And so is everything around us and the people around us. Yep.

So you don't really ever know anyone. I'm not smart enough to continue this conversation. We're at the end of my understanding of human psyche. Yeah, I mean, I struggle fucking managing myself, you know, let alone not even attempting to manage other people. Yeah. Are you at a phase in your life yet where your social circle is getting smaller? Yeah. Isn't it funny how that happens?

Yeah. Yeah. I am, I think I'm done with friends. You're just going solo? Not solo, but just not with anybody else, you know? That's tough, man. The older I get, the fewer people I want to surround myself with. I don't know why that is either.

It's not that I would say I'm probably more introverted. not more than anybody else but if I had to be put myself on the spectrum probably a little bit more introverted but at the same time I don't like people don't bug me and I think when I was younger in life I appreciated larger social circles but for whatever reason and wherever I'm at in my life

I love the people that are in my life very deeply but I'm not looking necessarily to try to add anybody to that and I think subtraction is more powerful than addition anyway so yeah yeah the people around you are so important too I mean, impacting you Yeah, for sure. I mean,

anyone who's around you positive or negative, that close circle is going to make a big impact. I wonder what it's going to change for you, though, when you kind of go empty nest.

With no kids? Yeah. I mean, I'll have more underwear. You'll have better boxers without... That motherfucker. It was an emergency. define emergency I think your emergency is you didn't do laundry for two weeks

and just like And then there's my dad You're a little pussy, why are you wearing underwear in the first place? Like first off, do not go to Jiu-Jitsu Without wearing boxers of some kind under your ghee pants Yeah Because nobody needs to see your butt snorkel up in there With your pants halfway down

No one needs that Oh, that's awesome Yeah, he's a He's a treat for sure. He was in the coffee shop yesterday and I look at his drink, which is a hot chocolate. What did he try to tell me? It's a, God.

He's tired to tell me he has not type 2 diabetes because that's a real thing. What did he say? Stage 2 diabetes. Stage 2. These are the arguments I have. So he's not supposed to eat sweets and he walks into the shop and he just, the young ladies there just bring him hot chocolate. The name said Santa on it because he's our Santa Claus.

And you know, that's stage two diabetes. I'm like, you were pre-diabetic with your blood work, not stage two diabetes. Stage two. He doesn't listen. Just like the fourth degree white belt. He just doesn't listen. But we'll probably exceed all of us in what he's able to accomplish. I mean, just from hearing about him from you today, it's like he could be the next Elon Musk or something.

Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. or interpretive dancer. I don't fucking know with that one. Are you driving back today to Bozeman? Yep, driving back. Oh, dude.

We met at this for damn near two and a half hours anyway. What do you want to close that with, man? I think in closing it is, I think it's really important for that point that we talked about earlier around people should really. register today for something a little scary and hard for them. Because that jumpstart for so many people, it works so well. And there are so many, there are just a lot of, just culturally right now, I think there's just a lot of dudes that are kind of struggling a little bit with complacency and being passive.

And we just got off. kind of the big heat of trade show season and we were on the road for a while at a lot of events so you one of them was that you know western hunt expo and in salt lake and sheep show and reno so that every winter that gives us the chance to hear from a lot of folks in person face to face and this year more than any year before it was the theme of what we talked about were there's there's some complacency and some passivity and in guys not doing what they should be doing from a physical spiritual mental nutritional perspective they know exactly what they should be doing but they're they're still asking you thinking that there is some sort of magic bullet out there magic pill

and there's not a magic pill and they know that but I think we should even if you are even if you're like protocols in your regimen is dialed there's still so much value in signing up and doing something a little bit scary and we should all be doing that and scary is different for every person yep but talk about like one of the quickest ways to change your whole year is just pulling the trigger on some Give me the 30-second elevator pitch on what Mountain Tough is so people can decide whether or not they want to sign up, which they should. For sure. By the way. Yeah. We're in an elevator. You're with Steve Jobs wearing the Applevision Pro. So you're not actually looking at him.

You're talking to him in augmented reality. How do you explain to him what it is? So Mountain Tough is physical training for the backcountry hunter and military athlete. And the training is holistic. So that is physical, mental, spiritual, and nutritional training, whether you're a beginner, intermediate, or elite athlete, or you're training at home with no gear or minimal gear all the way up to a robust home gym or a full gym.

We have programs to cover getting you ready for the backcountry. So we want all of our customers to thrive in the backcountry, not just survive the backcountry. But because backcountry hunting is our DNA, that is where a lot of our customers started from. But now it's an extreme version of functional fitness. So even if you're not a hunter, Mountain Tough allows you to be always ready

for anything that life is going to bring your way. And then all the training streamed directly from the Mountain Tough app, which is native on all the app stores so you can stream it straight to your smart TV, iOS, Android phone. Cool. Perfect, man. And the social platforms. What's the best way for people to find you? So social at Mountain Tough Fitness, YouTube at Mountain Tough Fitness Lab.

Cool. Right on. Awesome, man. Let's get you back on your five hour drive.