Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 870: The Business of Mind Pump- Behind the Scenes with Professor Dominic Morais

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

This episode was originally an interview conducted by Professor Dominic Morais of Trinity University as part of a research project on online fitness businesses. Professor Morais' questions highlighted many aspects of Mind Pump's origins, growth and business philosophy and practices. This episode provides the most in-depth behind the scenes look at the business of Mind Pump released to date. The State of Mind Pump. (2:03) How does podcasting fit into their revenue stream? (6:05) What lead them to getting a marketing team? (7:10) The importance of “lead magnets” for their business growth. (12:24) The super hero origin story of Mind Pump. (14:50) Wisdom vs. knowledge: Its significance in the rise of the podcast. (19:25) How do they convey the art of credibility to their audience? (22:52) A melting pot of health and fitness people in one spot. The Mind Pump Private Forum and how they curated a “tribe.” (28:19) The watershed moments in their business. (33:00) What markers did they pay attention to early on and do they tailor to their audience? (44:30) The order of operations behind how they package their MAPS Fitness Programs. (48:25) How do they vent sponsors and ultimately choose which ones to work with? (1:01:05) Featured Guest/People Mentioned: Dominic G. Morais (@MoraisDG)  Twitter Craig Capurso (@craigcapurso)  Instagram Dr. Justin Brink (@premiere_spine_sport)  Instagram Dr. Jordan Shallow D.C (@the_muscle_doc)  Instagram Ben Greenfield (@bengreenfieldfitness)  Instagram Robert Oberst (@robertoberst)  Instagram Links/Products Mentioned: Four Sigmatic **Code “mindpump” for 15% off** Vuori Clothing Felix Gray ** FREE Shipping & FREE Returns** Thrive Market ** Free 1 month membership, $20 off first 3 orders of $49 or more Plus free shipping** Smart Drug Smarts: #125: EXERCISE AND COGNITION Mind Pump Ep. 538: What the Health Review & MORE MAPS Fitness Products Mind Pump FREE Resources – Everything You Need to Know to Reach Your Fitness Goals Would you like to be coached by Sal, Adam & Justin? You can get 30 days of virtual coaching from them for FREE at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Get our newest program, MAPS Strong, an expertly programmed and phased strongman inspired training program designed in collaboration with World’s Strongest Man competitor Robert Oberst to trigger new muscle building adaptations and get you STRONG. Get it at www.mapsstrong.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com   Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get Organifi, certified organic greens, protein, probiotics, etc at www.organifi.com/mindpump Use the code “mindpump” for 20% off.   Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts! Have questions for Mind Pump? Each Monday on Instagram (@mindpumpmedia) look for the QUAH post and input your question there. (Sal, Adam & Justin will answer as many questions as they can)

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, hop, mind, hop with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Sal and I just did an interview and you know, it was a lot of behind the scenes of the origin stories of Mind Pump. We talk a little bit about the business. I think those of you that are really interested in the behind the scenes. We'd really appreciate this interview. So we decided to share it with you guys as a bonus episode. Yeah, it's cool.

It's Dominic Morez. He's a teacher. He teaches sports management programs at Trinity University. And he wanted to talk to us about the business of what we're doing and how we started. And so we got into it. And after we were done, we're like,

wow, that's a great, it kind of breaks down how mind pumps started and what we're doing and how we started. And so we got into it and after we were done, we're like, wow, that's a great, it's kind of breaks down how mind pumps started and what we're doing. Well, we don't really share that with our audience notes because we've shared our story along the way, but if you're not somebody who's been around since day one, you may have not, and you don't listen to the interviews

that we do on other podcasts, you only listen to mind pump, which I know there's a lot of people that only listen to mind pump. You know, this one was really cool because we did. We dove into the business of mine pump, how it got started, how we made decisions, some of the mistakes that we made. How we make money and how we grow, all that stuff. Right. And I do also, before we get into that interview, I do want to also mention this month, we have launched Maps Strong, one of the one of my most

this one's very exciting for me. We worked with a strong man competitor, one of the world's strongest man competitors, Robert Obers to put together a program that you can do in your gym, but that works on the things and the attributes that you find in strong men. So stamina, strength, lots of posterior chain type training. So, you're just going to build your hips and your glutes and your back. And it's just a lot of fun. It's a great program. It's our newest program, MAP Strong. You can find it at mapsstrong.com. And that's it. Without any further ado, here we are talking to Dominic Morez about how Mind Pump got started and how we do what we do. So, this actually isn't a podcast at all.

This is for research for like, I'm a professor at Trinity University. I'm actually, I graduated about a year ahead of Ben Pollock, who really kind of told me about y'all. We're just trying to do this for an academic study. We've looked at fitness entrepreneurs in person, but we haven't really looked at social media fitness entrepreneurs. So that's the next step in this kind of research strand.

Oh, I see. Awesome. I'd like to kind of start this way. Would you all tell me kind of where all your revenue streams come from now, how you see kind of the state of MindPomp, and then can we talk about how you got started? Can we do that? Yeah, yeah. We can start. The largest source of revenues are baby seal for jackets that we sell to people. I love it. When we first started, we didn't monetize for about a year and a half

before we did. We knew that we had to, first of all, gain trust, grow the audience, do that first before we turned on monetization. So luckily, all of four of us had other jobs or businesses that we're running, so we didn't have to rely on mind pumps income. So we did have that luxury when we first started. And then when we turned on the monetization, the very first thing we did was started selling programs and the theory was that we would give so much value for free so much information between the podcasts and the YouTube and the blogs and the just constant communication that we provide on Instagram and Facebook and then we have

a private forum that we help people out and our theory was if we could touch and reach Enough people and give so much value that when we finally decided to ask for money by selling programs that a lot of people would buy just out of support and that's exactly what happened We had a huge flux of people that came through that you know had already been listening to the show for well over a year and Fell and they had already been trying to give show for well over a year and fell. And they had already been trying to give us money and Patreon stuff, and we all agreed that we wouldn't do something like that. And so that was the first driving force of revenue came from the programs, but then

we also had our apparel line, which for us is kind of more like advertising. We really don't profit a lot of money when you look at what it costs for us to pay the employees to do it and to ship it. And we give away shirts every week. And so that business isn't really profitable. It probably makes about 30, 40 grand a year. And then when you look at everything else that's into it, it's pretty much a wash for us. And then advertising came around about two years after we started monetizing.

And the first year was pretty minimal. We didn't make very much money in that. And then it started to really increase a year later after we turned it on and started actually doing ads for companies that we wanted to partner with. And so that now contributes about 30 to 40% of our revenue comes from advertising money now. And then just not even a year ago, so it's been about eight months,

we finally hired a marketing team which handles all of our back-end stuff. So we don't have to deal with any of our email marketing or Facebook marketing or Instagram marketing. All that's done by a marketing team. We just provide the content and direction that we want to go. They handle all the back-end support and have a team and then we have a customer service side

that handles all that stuff. And so now that's actually now started to really catch up. And so I'd say, you say, 50% of the revenue now is coming from a lot of the email marketing and stuff that we do. Another big portion is still always the foundation, which is the program sales, and then advertising, which are probably our major money makers

as far as how this business monetizes. That's awesome. So how does the podcast fit into that? major money makers as far as how this business monetizes. That's awesome. So how does the podcast fit into that? Well, the podcast is how we, that's how we first got on. It's top of the funnel. Yeah, social, that's how we first really got ourselves

out there. Right. The podcasting is an interesting medium because it really, you know, the thing about social media is a lot of people get caught up in the size of their influence, how many people follow them, rather than the depth of their influence,

how strongly they're impacting people. And podcasting is an interesting medium in the sense that, you don't get, I mean, a very large podcast, we'll get a fraction of the viewers or listeners that let's say a large YouTube channel well. But the influence of a podcast is much, much, much deeper and stronger. So the conversion rates are much higher.

And so we started with our podcast. That's how we built our authority. And it's the best converting social media thing that we do. Wow. Wow. That's fantastic. So what? So I'll ask one more question and then kind of ask about how y'all really, really started and all that stuff. But what made you decide to get the marketing team? Was it, you know, did it would just became too busy? Like, was there a marker that you saw? Was it a metric? Like what led you all to that decision? Yeah, there was I think

We always knew we would go there eventually. I mean when Doug and when Doug and Sal actually first started writing the maps and a Bolic program Doug actually dabbled in a lot of this stuff and he was kind of he's been like the jack of all trades for us when we first started When we first started we leaned heavily on on Doug's expertise and ability to kind of do everything. And, you know, when he, when we started really taking off and running the production and editing and that side of the business and the numbers on the backside, like that became most of his job.

And so he really didn't have a lot of time and energy to put into the marketing side. So we knew that eventually we would need to hire out and actually contract someone out to do the marketing side of So we knew that eventually we would need to hire out and actually contract someone out to do the marketing side of the business. And you know, for the most part, the first few years, it was a very steady increase in revenue and traffic in the business. And then we probably hit about a five month plateau. And if you look at it from a bird's eye view, you could tell it's kind of a plateau.

It was still growing. The podcast was still adding people, but revenue, we started to see kind of this, I think we peaked and kind of leveled off a little bit. And we never really saw a decrease or a drop, but we were leveled for about five months there. And I think that's when a lot of the conversation was really starting to happen a lot between all of us where we said, okay, is it time that we take some of this money

and we invested into a marketing team? Because one of the things, luckily we're all in our late 30s and Doug 75 that we're all at a point in our lives where we have been in business for a really long time. We were very smart with the revenue that we were making a lot of it. We didn't pay ourselves very much at all, still to today, considering what the business

does. We're all, I think, very conservatively paid. So we had the funds to do it. We just weren't sure if that's where we wanted to put our funds yet. It was like, are we ready to really start building out that side of the business? And we did. We all agreed that, okay, let's do this. And we took a chunk of change. And I think it cost us about 20, 30 grand

to really build it all out at the very beginning. And then it took about another six months after that of getting all the systems in place, I know how familiar you are with all that or not, but there's a lot of email campaigns and graphic design and building the website out and lead magnets and they all need to speak to each other. And so there was this six month period where we were just kind of pumping money into it going like, okay, I hope this is the right decision.

I hope this was the right time for us to do it. And probably about four months, four or five months ago, it really started to turn. It really started to get cranking, and then we were really, we're starting to generate a significant amount of leads, because up into that point, the main thing that really controlled our revenue, and this was something that I kind of watched closely

for the business a lot for us was, the amount of revenue we would make was dictated by how many shows that we could get on. Like so if, you know So if we were getting on eight to 12 different podcasts that were relatively our size or larger, that would generate X amount of revenue every month for us, which covered all bills, kept the business running really nice. And so there was this hustle to make sure that we're always getting on shows, which we have a position, Breonna does that for our company,

that's all she's doing is constantly contacting other people and trying to get link us up together, because that's how we would drive more revenue. And so until the email marketing side of the business really started to get cranking, we relied heavily on the ability to cross, pollinate with other podcasters and other businesses. And so it was really nice and refreshing once that started to

actually take off and carry most of those. So we could kind of sit back a little bit. We didn't have to hustle like that to get on people. So it's not that we don't still do that. Of course. But there's not that pressure of I got to get on, you know, 10 or 12 shows this month or we're gonna see a dip in revenue. Yeah, interesting. So like, it wasn't totally passive. As much as maybe we're pushing for that, there was still that little bit that you're like, okay, there's still a proportion of our energy

to the revenue that's coming in. And so in a sense, you've like reduced that correlation in a way. Oh yeah, I don't know if I ever believe in full passive income. I think there's always something that has to be done. Like we passively are not going out and having to aggressively sell and do that. But there's still things that need to be done in order for that passive income to happen. Right. We've got to get people, new people listening to the show in order for them to enter

in the top of the funnel and then eventually find the things that we do sell and make money off of. And so I think that never really ends. It's just now the email marketing side of it is flooding in as many people if not more than what we were able to get out and generate ourselves by getting on shows. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining that a little bit more. You mentioned, did you say lead magnets?

Yes. I know all the other stuff that you talked about, but I haven't heard that phrase yet. Will you explain that a little bit? Yeah, so a lead magnet for us right now is an ad that you'll see pop up on Instagram or Facebook. And it's a lead magnet is driving to a free offer that we have. So what we do is we have a ton of free guides and free information and this is a lot of south side of the business. He writes all of our content. He's a brilliant brilliant brilliant and he has the ability to

put this out put this content out at a speed that I've never seen anybody do before and so he sits down and he'll rip out these incredible papers that are just loaded full of great information for people. And then we, he sends that over to our marketing team. Our marketing team does what they call a wrap. They wrap it all up. They clean it. They edit it.

They make sure they're all the spelling errors or whatever, put graphics on it. And then they, and then they build a funnel all the way around it. So then there becomes, it becomes a lead magnet that we pay out to get onto Facebook and Instagram. And then when people opt into it, they're basically trading their email for this free great guide. And there's a lot of money and time that's put in to make it good value. So it seems like a very fair, good exchange. Okay, I'm giving you my email, but I'm getting this incredible report or whatever

it is that I'm searching for. Then from there, there is a sequence that's built out that actually will nurture that person afterwards. So we've now segmented, like we just did a golf one recently, right? So we go all over the place. So we had a improve your golf swing and we wrote a whole guide along the lines of that that goes out there. Well, now we know that these guys and girls that are opting in this guide, they're interested in golf and rotational strength.

And that's the things that they're into. So now our sequencing that goes to them, the email campaign that we'll be speaking to, that type of person, which is more likely to drive revenue because we can actually target them the way we want to. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks for explaining that.

It seems like, y'all are in, and we'll get into this a lot more, but I'm really impressed already by just how it's figured out, it's logical. There's a step by step versus, hey, this is great, it's going well, let's just do one more thing. You have a little bit more of a method to your madness than some of the other folks I've spoken to, which is super duper impressive. So just tell me how y'all started.

I've seen, you know, I've read y'all's a bowed in everything, but, you know, from the horses' mouths, right? Like how did y'all start this thing? Where did it come from? And can you throw in some years as well so that I can kind of think about chronological? We've all been in the fitness industry for a very long time. So I've been doing it for over 20 years. Adam, I believe over 17 and Justin, something like over 15. And so we all

worked for the same fitness organization for a long time. So we all worked for 24, our fitness, we were all top performers. I had actually never really known or maybe even met Adam or Justin at all during that period. We worked in different regions, but we knew of each other. And so that's kind of the first time, you know, I heard Adam's name, for example, was just through that, you know, through that medium. Then, you know, we all did our own thing, and I owned my own, I had a wellness and fitness facility that I owned with personal training and massage and a lot of stuff. And a client hired me to train him, and that was Doug,

that's our producer. And I started training Doug, and after about maybe six months or so, he told me that, you know that he had some experience with internet marketing and wanted to know if I wanted to work with him and create a program or something that we could sell online. I created the first maps program and we started to market that. And once we finished the promotional material for that,

we had made this like 25 minute info-merchal. During this period of time, I had been in contact with Adam through social media and it was just a message here or there. It wasn't like we were talking a lot, but one of the things that he would tell me and communicate that I needed to get on Instagram and I needed to start using that type of social media.

And so we would talk a little bit back and forth. Once we had this info-omercial ready for our first program with the one that Doug and I had done, I thought, you know, Adam would be the perfect person to send this to to get an opinion because I had seen that, you know, he had built at the time, I think he had something like 19 or 20,000 followers on Instagram

and I knew of his performance at 24 fitness. And he's in my space and I thought this guy would have a good opinion. And so I sent him our promotional material and he gets on the phone with me, he loves it. And we talk and we decide, let's do a podcast. Now up at this point, you know, Doug and I had thrown around some ideas of how we're gonna Build authority and podcasting was one of the air one of the ways the potential ways We thought about writing a book and doing some other stuff I got on the phone with Adam and we were just it was great chemistry right off the bat and we both were like

let's all sit down and meet and We met at his house. It was me Adam Justin and at the time there was another another individual who's involved with Mind Pump, Craig Caperso, good friend of ours. And we all sat down and we all had a four-hour conversation. And it just felt, it was just, you could feel the electricity in the chemistry. We all agreed on the direction we would wanna go.

We all agreed on what needs to happen in the fitness industry. We all had kind of this higher purpose with that. Doug had, you know, recording equipment. And so he, it was just perfect, perfect combination. And that was it. We started the podcast. And we initially had recorded about 10 episodes. We were gonna drop them all at the same time.

And Craig dropped out at the last minute. He sent some of the recordings to his sponsors and because he was the only, he was really a, he was a sponsored social media athlete, if you will. And his sponsors were a little bit apprehensive because our show can be quite raw. So he dropped out and we had to start all over,

but everybody still wanted to do it and we did and we, and that was it, it took off from there. And our show has just been, we've been as trying to, we've been as honest as possible the entire time. We've run the show. In the beginning, we're definitely nervous and whatnot, but our goal was always to be as honest as possible

and with our combined experience, be able to communicate goal was always to be as honest as possible with our combined experience, to be able to communicate what we know to be true when it comes to things like fitness and health and in a space like ours and fitness, honesty is kind of novelty. It's like, oh, these guys are telling the truth, that's weird. And it seemed to work. Yeah, crazy. So you've mentioned, so you've mentioned you said higher order. You wanted to be as honest as possible. And you even mentioned, if I was interesting,

you said this, what we know to be true versus what is true, meaning that maybe you don't think that anything else could be an exception or anything. And so I'm wondering, is this part of y'all's mission, this idea of we want wanna spit, right, the things that we think are not the BS, et cetera. So did that, was that kind of the mission or the values that encompass what y'all are doing?

And you talked a bit more about that. From day one, that was it from day one. I mean, here's a deal, we have knowledge, we've all done lots of learning and taken lots of classes and all that stuff But then we also have a lot of experience. I mean you consider you know if I've been doing this for 20 years, right That's thousands of clients that I've worked with and Adam and Justin, you know Almost quite as long right so we have a lot of experience and knowledge and that's that comes out as wisdom and part of that wisdom is

Understanding that there are some general truths when it comes to fitness and health but there's also a massive individual variance and and the individual psychology plays a major role in how successful a particular application of nutrition for example or exercise is going to be and so we communicate it from that standpoint whereas you might get a scientist that will communicate something and say, well, this study shows that, you know, if you wake up in the morning and you do, and you swim in a cold lake, first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, you're going to burn 10% more fat, there's going to be 10% more fat oxidation.

We're going to be, from our standpoint, we're going to say, well, here's what the study says, but we're trainers. We know what's actually going to be the most effective is the one that you're going to do the most consistently. And so, you know, we communicate it a little bit differently. And then on the other end of the scale, you also have the, you know, the bros, you know, the insta models who really only have experienced training themselves and are anything but average, they don't really connect with the average person. And so the kind of stuff that they tend to communicate is hammer yourself

in the gym and beast mode and the more the merrier. And we know just again, we've trained thousands of everyday ordinary people who want to build muscle, lose fat, get in better shape, feel better about themselves. And I'll tell you one of the things you learn is when you've done this for as long as we have, is you learn how to communicate what you know and you learn how to communicate it very well. Because that's actually as important,

if not more important than what you're actually communicating. Because if I know for example that, we need to eliminate something out of your diet Because if I know, for example, that we need to eliminate something out of your diet, and I know that to be true, how I sell that to you and how I communicate that to you, and how I'm able to get you to buy that, what I'm trying to say to you, is just as important as what I'm trying to say.

And it lends itself very well to a medium-like podcasting where that's what we're doing for an hour and a half or communicating. Yeah, wow, man, I feel like I'm about to be in church It lends itself very well to a medium like podcasting where that's what we're doing for an hour and a half for communicating Yeah, wow, man I feel like I'm about to be in church over here having a test of five You all because you're speaking the same language that I do I I Train you know a few people here and there but everything you're saying I feel like is is totally totally accurate and again Right like yeah, you can tell everyone to do the what to do but man

I'm how you do it and this can lead to them being successful or totally terrible or whatever, so man, yeah, that means a lot just hearing that stuff, so thanks. So what about this idea of credibility, right? You've talked about experience, you know, that you've gone to school for this stuff. There's a lot of other folks out there, right?

That like you said, the bros, maybe they just train themselves, they look fantastic, and then boom, people want their stuff. How have y'all conveyed the idea that you're credible and that you can be trusted? Because I think it seems that that's a very cornerstone of what you do. So how did you communicate that to your market? That's a great question about that. Here's a deal. A PhD or education does not equal integrity.

So that's an important thing to say because there are a lot of people in our space who have all the credentials you could imagine who are selling bullshit supplements or programs that we know that will probably hurt people are not be quite effective. Adam and I actually don't have very much

formal education at all. It's all experience and learning on our own. Justin's really the only one who has formal education. I think the credibility comes from people listening to our show and they can hear that we're honest, and then people apply what we say, and then it works, and a lot of what we say makes sense. You know, it's, I think sometimes when you hear the truth,

or you hear someone that's telling the truth or speaking with integrity, you can kind of hear it a little bit. It starts to make sense, so it's taken us a second to build that authority, but now we're at the point now. I'll tell you what, we're one of the highest converting podcasts for our sponsors.

We're not the biggest, some of our sponsors, our sponsor through mega podcasts, like the Joe Rogan podcast, for example. But we convert at an extremely high rate, and it's because our audience believes what we say, and there's nothing that'll get us to compromise that. So we're going to, you know, as much as we valued integrity before, you know, we go back on that now to destroy everything we believed. We've created. Well, I think we also

help enlighten a lot of people too with the way the industry markets to you. And because we all fell for the same thing too. So a lot of the stuff that we, when we explain that, we don't explain it like, look at us over here, they're wrong, we're right. It's more like I too fell for the same bullshit. I too was preaching this garbage information. I too thought this was right also. So I think when we come from that angle, I think people respect it more versus how a lot of people in this space do it, which is they tend to segment all of us and create camps and then mark it to that camp.

My camps better. I'm a cross-fitter. This is the best way to get in shape. I'm a bodybuilder. This is the best way to get in shape. I'm a power lifter. This is the best way to do things. Or I'm this unconventional guy that pushes sleds and swings mace bells and kettlebells,

and so that's what's better. And then we all get in these little camps, and we defend our camps, and we talk shit about everybody else's modality, and or their way of eating. And so nutrition and training become very much so like religion for people. And what we've come in to tell people

is that there's something to take from all of these modalities. They've lasted for hundreds of years, and not CrossFit, but most of the other ones have been around for a very long time for a reason, because there are some good things to take from that. And instead of trying to sell you on why it's the best, let us help you unpack that and share with you the strengths of this way of training, and the strengths of this way of eating and the strengths of this way of eating and teach you really the nuts and bolts of it. And then from there, you can make the decision

for yourself of, is this right for you? And so I think the reason that I think we've had a lot of success is we've present information like that versus, and a lot of people thought we were crazy to begin. I think we're gonna make any money doing this because there's no money in that. The money is in attaching yourself to a modality,

attaching yourself to a di, I mean, my pump will be much bigger on iTunes just simply if we would have named it the keto podcast. You know, because, you know, when we are first starting, that was on the fucking rise. I mean, everybody was jumping on the keto diet, and, you know, if we were to name it something like that, we would be trending much higher just because of searches. But,

you know, that's just we have integrity. We are not trying to do that. We talk about those things. We go through them ourselves. And then when we experience, you know, the stuff that happens to us individually, we try to communicate that to our audience so they can relate to, but we don't, I don't think we tell people this is right or this is wrong, we present the information in a very non-biased way. I think it's the difference between telling people what to think and telling people, in helping people to think themselves. That's really the underlying difference. And again, having experience working with so many everyday people, at the end of the day, there is no better coach and there is no better guide, there is no better guru than you inside your own body. And we're just helping you figure this out on your own,

and we're providing you with information and tools, and we're speaking based on our experience. And then you can decide for yourself and learn for yourself. And it's funny because I think the fitness industry assumes everybody's an idiot for a long time and we're assuming everybody's intelligent and they just need to be given the tools. And that's about it.

Wow. So it's really interesting because one of the questions that I have listed is this idea of community. And when I hear you talk about modalities, I'm thinking, okay, it's really interesting because one of the questions that I have listed is this idea of community. And when I hear you talk about modalities, I'm thinking, okay, that's essentially why community crossfit, you know, it's very much culty, or maybe you do strong man, and you kind of boom, there that, though, you get on those Facebook groups, et cetera. And so I'm wondering, especially because I did some research, I did my dissertation on this idea of brand community and fitness historically, but I'm wondering then, do you have aspects of community around your own brand or around Mindpop while continuing to use the approach that you just explained?

No, that's a great question, really, really good question. And we do what in fact are most probably powerful part of the business, we really didn't talk about this, is the private forum. We have a private forum that you have to pay to get into. It's a community of a little over 3,000 people. These are our most loyal people. This is our tribe, right?

And I do believe it. The difference is, our tribe is not tribal. And it's like, that's part of the, and it's kind of, it's kind of cool to watch the conversations that happen inside the forum. Because we've taught our audience to challenge everything, they challenge us.

I mean, we say something on the show that they disagree. We encourage them to get on that forum and call us out or point it out and let's have discussion about it. And so, I think that, and we have a ton of people in our forum that do CrossFit. We have a ton of people that run, and we're guys that talk that we never run, and there's guys that do Spartan race,

and girls that do Spartan race. So, we have, and strong man, power lifters, we have it all inside of our community. We have all diets in our community. So I think that we have this melting pot of health and fitness people, that the major thing that we all have in common is growth. We have put this message out of radical honesty and personal growth since day one of this podcast.

And I really think the community reflects that. It's not about, you know, segmenting you guys into modalities or way of, everybody eats differently in our form, everybody trains differently in our form. Sure, we have our programs and most people have gone, but even our programs, like we teach this, we do not claim that our program is the best program for you.

It's that we, we have teach people how to program. That was the magic behind all the maps programs was we're gonna give you guys a great program to follow for three months, but then we're also gonna teach you the science behind it and how we put it together. So you can then take those tools and create programs yourself or modify the ones

that we already currently have. So even our own stuff we're not dogmatic about it. And because we've talked about that so much, we have created this tribe, this community that I think is very important to having a very successful business, especially if you're going to scale to the size that we are. I think that's, I mean, these are the people that are doing your real marketing and advertising because, you know, I could pay a marketing guy all day long to go out and push stuff But nothing's as powerful as those three thousand people those three thousand people They every time they talk to somebody

Mind pump comes out of their out of their mouth and we've changed a lot of their lives and they become Very very tribal, but at the same time too, not dogmatic about nutrition or exercise. And so I think that's kind of special what we've created inside that forum. And to this day, we like, and we've been very self-depreciating like ourselves. So we razzied to other and talked shit to each other. And so we encourage this, you know, they can say whatever they want to say on that forum. And it's kind of neat. It really polices itself because we've built it up since day one.

I remember when there was only three people in there and we spent a lot of time and that was really Sal's baby too. He's put a lot of time in their answer to this day. He still goes in there and answers every question that gets posted up there. And now we've got all these brilliant minds. So we've got lots of doctors and gut health specialists and guys that have incredible experience and body mechanics. And you got your doctor brings, doctor showers, doctor russios. I mean, you name it.

We have all these brilliant minds in there that a lot of us, we don't even have to answer because there's a guy on there that's smarter than I am that can answer that question. And so it's pretty neat to watch people post stuff and then to see the community respond and help each other out. And because I think it was built on that foundation, I think it's what makes it really unique.

That's wonderful. Man, that sounds great. Yeah, that's really great. So then what about, as y'all were starting off, the next question I have is, were there say like watershed moments or times in which something happened that you said, okay, we're on the right track, we're doing this thing right, things are happening for us. Were there any moments just a long y'all's path that you could talk about from that perspective? There's a ton of those moments.

The very first moment, I think that something happened like that was very early on, and I think it was maybe episode four or five. We did an episode titled Why Mind Pump Doesn't Crossfit. In that episode, we were very honest and raw in our critique of the way CrossFit programs, their workouts, and the injuries that we witnessed as a result of some of those, some of that programming. And so we were very honest and we posted that episode along with others when we first launched.

And there's like two days later, the official CrossFit, you know, Instagram page or social media, you know, people contacted us and basically told us to take it down because, you know, we were saying bad things about them or whatever. And we, right away, we were like,

oh shit, we got, because remember, we were nobody at this point. We were just a brand new podcast. And CrossFit is a behemoth monster in the fitness space. And they came after us and so we were like, oh shit, this is crazy. And so we recorded a part two why we don't CrossFit and we went after him again.

And those episodes really took off and gave us our first initial, I would say, boost with the podcast. I think how we did it too was really important because if you go back and you listen to those episodes too, it's, again, it wasn't like we came out and we were just hammering CrossFit. We actually, I think, spoke half the time

on all the great things that it's brought to you. We were honest. Yeah, we talked about all the positive things that it's brought to the industry. I mean, shit, before CrossFit, you know, we were all in the gym, we'd been working already for five, 10 years already. So we'd been in this for a long time before CrossFit came around. And shit, I don't remember anybody squatting

or deadlifting. I mean, you, you could walk to the squat rack and there would be dust on it because the one that you had in the gym, nobody used. Nobody was using it. It wasn't popular. And so to see people squatting and deadlifting and overhead pressing and doing these movements that we know are incredible movements that everybody should learn to do because of their benefits, I think that was incredible. And I think CrossFit is literally the reason why we see that now. So, you know, we shared a lot of that, but then we also talked about on the same token, you know, if I get 10 people that walk through the door that hire me to be their trainer, at least nine of them, I

wouldn't even consider putting them through some sort of a CrossFit routine. It lived out. And so that's the way we spoke about it. It wasn't that, oh, and so if you're that super athlete, you've got incredible mechanics, you can move explosively like that. You're smart, you know, you won't push yourself to injury. Like, okay, this could be a great sport for you, just like football or basketball or anything else.

So I think the way we articulated that was so important, even though we were early on, I don't think we were as polished as we are now. I still think the general message that we were giving, I think was really powerful. It resonated. That was a very pivotal point. Yeah, definitely resonated with a lot of people.

I guess I think the second thing that comes to mind was when we, right around episode 100, we are the way we podcasted, started to get a lot better. We started to feel a lot smoother. It's just from reps of doing this. And you could hear it in the show, like right around a hundred, we started to get much, much better. And we podcast a lot. We know at the time we were doing three episodes a week, now we do five episodes a week. And it just improved our skills dramatically. I mean, you could hear, you could hear,

and again, because we're podcasting every single day, we got better, faster and faster. And I think the next time was when we started to learn to intro the show separately or differently. And so what Doug would do, early on the pod, when we would do our podcast, what would happen is, Doug would hit record, and it was like, you were walking into a conversation. But then at some point, I would intro the show and say, and say oh by the way you're listening to mine pump or whatever and

you know We it would change the energy for a second the show so we figured out I remember I think it was around a hundred Well, it's a lot of the member was the interviews that really pointed that really because we would we would let We would get an interview because at the beginning we carried this thing by ourselves We didn't have nobody won't the flux would come on a show that they don't know, right? You're not gonna fly some great guest in that's never heard of mind pumps.

So we didn't really have guests, it was just us. And then we started like even getting bring like some of our close friends or people that we knew that had some sort of credibility, we bring them on the show. And it would fuck the dynamic up. I mean, we just, we had gotten really good at the three of us

having conversation. And then we get the fourth person in the in the conversation and then the flow just wasn't there. And we're like, we know we're better than this. Why can't we figure this out? And one of the things that we realized was this like formal soon as the interview starts, hey, you know, tell them who your name is this whole basic, it like turns it into this, we could have you having this great conversation off air, knowing each other, talking bullshit and this and that, laughing. And then the mics go on, then we could also informal interview question style and it just would kill that dynamic. And so we put it together like, okay, you know what, let's not change the dynamic of how we have Doug just switch it on and we'll just go.

And then at the end of the whole show, we'll go back, we'll recap it and then we'll formally introduce that person on air by ourselves. And that was a very pivotal point for us also because now we would get, we get gas, we'd sit them down, Doug flits the switch on, they don't even know half the time. And then I look at us and be like, are we recording? Oh yeah, we've been recording for 10 minutes. And we just keep going and,

because yeah, then you get this really good organic conversation that I think that's a lot of what people appreciate about the show too, is that it doesn't feel scripted, it feels like you're a fly on the wall, and you get to hear these two or three intelligent guys in, you know, interview this two or three intelligent guys in inner you know interview This person in your true interest and I think that was a very Pivotal point for us. Oh, I took the show to a whole new whole new level and yeah, and then we started to figure out that

You know, we would experiment with ways to get our show out there and so you know Instagram We would have people post for us and stuff like that. And we wouldn't really get a return. And I don't remember when this happened. This was early on. I got interviewed on a podcast that it's called Smart Drug Smart. So it's a pretty popular podcast. Great. You know, I know the the host pretty well now.

And I got on that podcast and we saw an immediate surge of exposure, downloads, all of a sudden went up significantly from that. And then we started to piece together, oh, that's got to be the best way for us to grow our podcast. We got to stay on the same platform. And then we got on the Ben Greenfield shows, now a good friend of ours. And that was another huge boost for us. And then we started to put it together like, okay,

we need to work with other podcasters because people like, they don't like to leave, they don't like to leave a medium. It's like people from Instagram don't necessarily go listen to podcasts from there or whatever. We need to go down to the podcast. And that was a big strategy for us for a long time. I think Adam talked about it earlier in this interview

that for a while there. Oh, that carried the business for the first probably two years was that strategy of getting on A to 12 podcast. And then another probably really pivotal moment was when we decided to kind of divide the show in half. And it kind of naturally happened because we was we were as we got more and more Comfortable and we started going all over the place with topics and we started kind of touching on current events that we're going on Yeah, people wanted to hear we started to get like the show started to extend to 90 minutes to two hours and we had the first half of it

Which was this very locker room bullshitting three guys talking about what's going on in the world right now. And it was very raw, unapologetic, and we went everywhere and anywhere in there. And then there's this back half of the show where we get very scientific and get into or put our trainer hats on and we answer fitness questions and we talk about a topic or something, right? And so we had a division, maybe a 50-50 split. It was really crazy of people that didn't even work out.

People that didn't exercise, didn't care about fitness, but loved the first hour of banter that we did because they respected us as individuals liked our listening to our opinions. The fact that all three of us don't agree a lot and we openly discuss and debate. I think people really appreciated that. And so we had an audience that weren't even really hardcore

fitness workout people, but enjoyed that banter. And then we had the other half that absolutely hated that piece and they were here for the science, for the education, for the information relating pertaining to fitness. So it was actually, there was probably a little lull there too of us trying to figure this out. Like, do we cut that out?

Do we start another channel? Do we have just certain days that are just bullshitting and then other days we do this and we're like, fuck, we were really torn on that. And the way we came up, we came up with the idea of, okay, let's not change the format really, but let's now, since we introduced the show anyways at the end, we were already doing that. Why don't we recap people on what's coming ahead so they can fast forward if they want to hear that?

So now when you listen to the show, and this has been going on for about two, three hundred episodes now, maybe a little more. Sal will say, you know, in today's episode, we get into this, this, and this, and he'll list off all the crazy stuff, because we will, we'll talk about sex dolls, and we'll talk about what's going on with Capri-Nic right now, and Nike,

and we'll talk about all these polarizing type topics at the beginning of the show, and then he'll say, and then 42 minutes in, we get into the questions, and here's what we ask, and then we, and so, now if you're somebody who listens, you can't stand here in our opinions on that stuff, and you can fast forward right to the science and get to the meat, and if you're somebody

who likes to banter, you know you can stop listening at 42 minutes in. Nice, nice. Man, that's so legit. It's okay, so quick question. So approximately, like what year was episode four? Because you said four, one hundred and then when you did the safe drug podcast. Oh, so can you all mind putting just a couple of you talking kind of see?

Yeah, that's a good question. Doug, when would you say what we aired the first CrossFit episode? That was at 2015. Nice. And then what, 100 episodes, when would you say, how long did it take to get 100, maybe like a year? Yeah, okay, cool, cool. Yeah, thank you all, I appreciate it, you know, with that in mind.

And when did you, like, when did you all officially, so you officially started January 5th, 2015, like you launched your first podcast, and this is when Mind Pump began. Yes, I think so. Okay, awesome, awesome. Fantastic. So, what about, and you'll have talked about this a little bit, but when you did not have

a marketing team, where there are certain metrics that you paid attention to, I know you said that the podcast went more downloads, meant more revenue, ultimately, where there are certain metrics that you paid attention to. I know you said that the podcast went more downloads, meant more revenue, ultimately. Were there more things that you paid attention to and did those differ? Yeah, downloads was a big one. Our own social media following was another big one. So how fast our Instagram pages were growing.

Also the interaction and the you know the influence of our social media. So how many comments are we getting? How many questions are we answering? The size of our forum and then of course our our program sales being the you know our main source of revenue. Awesome. So what about then like the subjects that you talk about, right? Are the market and your subjects? Was that, was the market intentional and have you, do you play your subjects to the market,

or is that just, look, this is who we are, and they respect us as people now, so we don't have to necessarily tailor as much? You know, there's a little bit of looking at the market and you know, but a lot of it is just what we want to talk about, especially early on. I mean, we literally, you know, we wouldn't even know what the topic would be until we would start the conversation

and then it would just go where it would go. In fact, we still do that every once in a while. We'll have an episode where we don't know what we're going to talk about. Let's just turn on the mics and see what happens. And those turn out to be some of our best episodes. A lot of the direction, you know, three days a week we do these Q&A episodes where we answer questions. And these are fan questions in the Laskas on our social media page. And that'll direct those episodes in the in the back half

of the episode. The beginning half is really just the conversation between Justin, Adam and I. And that there's usually no structure. We just kind of go and it can be anything from what happened yesterday. My workout, what's going on in politics today. We will discuss things though. I remember when what the health came out on Netflix, we had to address. There's certain topics that I think people expect us to address. If it was a major thing that came out in the news

or a big documentary that's going viral and everybody's talking about, it's pretty obvious that they wanna hear our opinion on all that stuff. But I mean, we like Sal saying, we can be guided by the audience because we have such great engagement and we do communicate with them so much You know, it's really easy to see that I mean when you get we every every Sunday we do this post and it's an image on our Instagram

our mind put media Instagram and it's an image of our logo and all we have to do is post that logo and that that that tells our audience that This is where you put the questions and so I so you know we get 200 plus Questions that are written in a lot of them written real detail and I can see you know shit with 30 of those questions are Something that's going on right now that they want to hear us talk about we absolutely will address it So it's you know, it's pretty easy to guide us on What topics to kind of make sure that we cover now. At the beginning, we were very random. At the beginning, we probably did a lot of shock and awe. Probably too much. We got traction from that. People love that there was no

topic that was too taboo that we would not address or go over. And so we went all over the place. And now that we have the audience that we have it's I think it's it's directed and guided easier because of that because we have this you know litmus test on social media we can look back and go okay this is what everyone's talking about this is what they're asking about this is a good place for us to be discussing and I think that this will help nice nice so so my next question, we kind of talked about packaging the actual content of the podcasts. What about the products?

How did y'all really conceive of, OK, this is going to be our first product? We're going to package this program this way because of blank. And so how did that start and how has that evolved? That's a really good question. Well, the first program was the first program we sold So, how did that start and how has that evolved? That's a really good question. Well, the first program was, the first program we sold was Maps and Obolic, which was a program that I had created

before we started Mind Pump. And the mentality behind that, at that time, and it's still quite popular to this day, but at that time, especially, there was this, what I like to call common knowledge in the fitness industry and how you built muscle, for example, and common knowledge oftentimes is incorrect, by the way. That's what a lot of people believe, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's true. And one of the things that a lot of people believed was that in order to really sculpt and

build the body, your best bet was to train one body part a day, let that body part rest for a full week, and then hit it again. Now as a trainer, training lots and lots of people, and also being a little bit of a science nerd myself, I knew that that method really didn't work for most people. It worked well if you're on anabolic steroids, but it really didn't work for most people. It worked well if you're on anabolic steroids, but it really didn't work for most people and training the body more frequently with a little bit less intensity was more effective for most people. And there was more that went into that. I saw that the different rep ranges all had their own value. I know when it comes to building muscle, everybody says, oh, eight to 12 reps is the, that's the rep range to build muscle. Well, I knew that if I took someone who always trained eight to 12 and I brought them through

a cycle of one to five reps, that they would build muscle, or I took someone who was one to five all the time and had them do 15 to 20, they would build muscle. So I saw that there was a lot of utility in different rep ranges and in phasing or changing or trade, you know, your workout. And then I also, you I also had created a concept, known as trigger sessions, which was for my own observation of people in my family who work blue collar jobs.

I noticed that the plumbers in my family, for example, had these really muscular forearms, and the male carriers in my family had these really muscular calves. And now we've been taught and fitness that in order to get a muscle to respond, you have to tear it down. You have to tear it down, cause damage

so that the body can repair and rebuild and then adapt and get stronger. But I also realize that, the plumbers of my family, I mean, they might have gotten sore in their forearms for the first six months of their job, but they've been doing it for 30 years now. They're not tearing anything down anymore. And these guys have forearms that will rival a bodybuilders. And so I knew that there was something to that. And so I experimented with something called trigger

sessions. And I implemented that in the routine. And so I put together this program that was on one hand very effective. but on the other hand, also very opposite of what everybody else was saying. And if you can ever find the combination of opposite of what everyone's saying, but also effective, I don't care what market you're in, you have a huge potential to explore. Well, I also think this was really what connected sound,

because I remember when he sent it over to me and he sent the whole video that him and Doug did, I was like like this is brilliant and this there's not enough people that are saying this message And what I knew at that time and I don't remember what the Exact percentages when I read this but I know that we know that Women are the ones that typically buy Women's are the women are the ones that are purchasing a lot of things out there. And what do I know about training a lot of women? Well, I know that a lot of women tend to stray away from heavy lifting because they don't want to get big and bulky.

They want to get toned and lean. But what I know also know from training a really long time is that, like Sal said, I could take a woman like that who's never seen less than six reps in her life before, trainer on a five by five type of strength program, and it will blow her mind. I mean, she will build, she will build and shape the body. She always wanted that she was working so hard at doing 15 to 20 reps, super setting and doing all this

high intensity shit. And so when I saw the way he laid out maps, I was like, okay, this is brilliant. Because, and nobody wanted to do that. Everybody wants to feed into what everybody's already doing. It's like, I'm gonna mark it to a girl. I'm gonna put a pink label on it, say it's for women, and then it's gonna be all this high repetition shit.

It's like, why? That's what they're all doing. They're all doing that already. That's not what they need. What they need is someone to teach them how to deadlift, how to squat. Don't be afraid of putting some weight on there and doing one to five reps.

It's not gonna make you bulky and look like a man. It's not gonna work that way. And because I knew that, I know he knew that when I saw that, the programming, I thought, oh wow, this is gonna be, this is gonna, if we can market this and we can get it into their hands, I knew that it would change their lives.

And that was really the secret sauce behind what he did and then the frequency at that same time I remember going through my own like changing up my routine and we've talked about this on the show many times So you know we train our clients better than we train ourselves So I would be training my clients a full-body routine because I knew that was working the best But then I was still training myself in this this routine, you know what I'm saying? So funny. But you know, I was still caught in that bro mentality. I was still caught in all the body building stuff, the magazines, but yet I was applying

what I knew worked best to my clients. And so I was starting to piece this together for myself and really start to realize, wow, this intensity message is really exaggerated. And a lot of people are overdoing it more often than not. And they should be bringing back the intensity and pretty more emphasis on frequency and frequency is going to make a bigger difference.

So I'm kind of piecing this to myself and I see Sal's program really addresses these two things. And in my opinion at that time, these are two of the biggest things that were changing my clients' lives was when I could get them to understand the importance of frequency, get them to understand how to manage intensity, and to get my women to do strength training. Like that was the key to a lot of my success in my later career. And here, South comes, and he builds this this program and he wants to sell it online and

I'm like I have yet to see an online program like this. Everything I see is the gimmicky shit that's feeding into all the bullshit that's been going around for the last 20 plus years. Yeah, you know, it reminds me of too because I've been doing this long enough to see trends come and go and I remember when Atkins first came out, you the time, we were told that fat was bad for you, avoid it at all costs, and low fat was the way that you got leaner, and then outcomes this diet that tells you the opposite and says,

don't eat carbs and just eat lots of fat. Now, I'm not an advocate of Atkins. I know there's a lot of different ways of skin to cat, but the reason why it exploded, let's get it straight here. The reason why ad kids exploded was because it worked. If you do cut your carbs, you are cutting your calories and you're gonna lose some weight.

But mainly it's because it was the opposite, right? So we had been sold so hard that fat was bad for you. Here comes this guy that says, eat all the fat you want, just cut your carbs. Because the message was so opposite, it gained a lot of traction. And so I knew, I knew if I came out and said, training each body part once a week and doing a body part split and going to failure all the time, is not effective, is this kind of a program, which is kind of the opposite, but has a lot of science supporting it and is

also extremely effective, if not more effective. I knew that it would get some traction. And so that's, that was the reasoning behind that. And then after that, I mean, we have now many, many, many other programs. And Adam, Justin and I get together and we create these programs. And it is an absolute great time.

And we went and we created an athletic-based program. We created one for bodybuilders. We've created programs that are correctional for personal trainer. And just continuing on that theme and it's cool because we don't, we could definitely write programs in ways that will sell more programs, but we want to stay true to what we know to be effective and we want to maintain our integrity. And it's taking us longer to get traction with our programs because of it. I remember initially two people would buy the Maps program, and then they'd return it for a refund, and we'd say, well, why don't you, why do you want to refund?

Oh, because, you know, I've seen all these exercises before. And it's like, well, you know, I could create a flashy, crazy looking program like everyone else, but it's not gonna work. We want to make stuff that works. And it's working. People are getting results. We're starting to see it trend on social media. The order is very methodical too though. If you actually look at, because we recommend in order of going through our programs,

and we wrote them in an order too, and they were all chronological except for prime. And I remember we held prime because we knew it was going to be a lot for the average consumer to digest. And maps prime is our assessment program. It's really where everybody should start. It comes with, it comes with, and it's like literally the process that you would take a client who just came off the street and they hired you like What would you do? I would not put them in a pro any program?

I would assess them I would assess them and figure out all their imbalances and point them out to them and then teach them the moves They need to do to address their poor mechanics That's a hundred percent every single person that ever walked in my door no matter how athletic or how decondition they were That is where you start. So we have Maps Prime, which is this living, breathing document that allows you to flow in and out of it because we also know too that it's ever changing, right, based off what you're doing.

So you have this assessment that is broken up in three zones of the body. So we try to take something very complicated and we simplified it for the average person. So they can die just so they can digest. So they can do a, they do the zone one, which is your upper body, so it's your, you do this wall test and it's either pass or fail. And what we know is that a majority of these people are going to fail this because majority of people

suffer from upper cross syndrome, especially nowadays with the computer and stuff. And then from there, it points you in a direction of mobility moves and correctional stretches for you to fix that specific area that you have breakdown. And so we broke the body up like that. And this is the foundation. This is where it really starts is there

and it complements each one of the programs. And then Maps and Obolic is our strength foundational program. The first one that's all created, really where most all people should start, no matter what your pursuit is, because it's the basic principles you're learning in there. And then you get into like performance, which even though it's athletically driven,

we still highly recommend it to the average gym goer, because it's not a bunch of crazy explosive movements that we put in there, we're doing jump boxes and weird shit like that. It's just a lot of mobility movement, a lot of dynamic movement, multi-plainier movements that people don't tend to do that you probably need to do for overall joint health. So we encourage you to go that direction. And then the last piece, which was the third program that we created, which was the

map's aesthetic, which is, you know, let's be honest, a lot of people want to shape and sculpt the body. And if that's your primary focus, there are ways to focus on smaller muscles to give you this illusion that you're shaped a certain way. And so that was the final program. And we ordered them like that for that reason. Even somebody who wants to be a bodybuilder, we still believe that you should still go through that process of the foundational programs because of how much it's gonna benefit you

on overall movement, overall strength, and we know that will still feed into how you wanna look. So those are really the core of the programs, and then we've now advanced it, and there's that home programs, and we have right in the tomorrow, we release our strong man programs, we wrote a program that's geared towards that. So yeah we're I mean the goal now too for the business so we

We release a program every quarter and then a lot of what we do going forward is you know We partner up with somebody who is a a specialist in that so like we do used Strong man Robert Oberst who we partnered up with and we created that program So we take his combined knowledge of all his years of experience and training and strong man We take our combined knowledge of program design and training normal average James and Joe's and we take that and we give them a taste of You know training like a strong man, but we do in a very safe and intelligent way Nice nice the next question I have would be,

your product affiliations, I know that you said Breonna kind of does that, but when y'all were in control, how did you screen and vet those? The how we choose sponsors, we were very, very picky about that. That's something that we all agreed that we didn't need them. First of all, we agreed, we built this thing without them. The first year when the business made 600,000,

I think we made a whole, I think $1,000 or something that year off of Amazon. We hadn't done any of that. We knew we didn't need it. We didn't want to pollute our show with a bunch of random sponsors of products that we didn't care about. We had a lot of offers.

A lot of people don't know this, but as soon as we started to take off and anybody had heard about Mind Pump and the growth, instantly we started getting all these emails and people shipping us free stuff to try all this. And then we got it all, everything from all the gimmick tools to all kinds of different supplements. And all of them throwing money at us.

And it really wasn't that hard for us to say no. So I don't wanna act like it was like, oh, we were so, we totally, it was so tough, and we struggled, and we needed that money. It's like, no, we agreed early on, you know, that we weren't, I mean, a lot of our messages against that. And so we knew we couldn't go out and, you know, talk a bunch of shit about these gimmick supplements,

and also, we're selling BCAAs the next day. Like it just wouldn't make sense. And then it would kill our brand. So there was never question about taking on any of these companies. And so really the way we look at it is, any company that you see us partner with, if it has anything to do with nutrition or supplements

or anything like that, it has to be something that one of us loves and uses all the time. You know, it's got to be a product that we see a lot of value in that we're taking it in ourselves So we're giving it to somebody else because we we've seen the great results and even so when we if you listen to the way We advertise people think it's crazy because you know what for, for a cinematic is a company that we work with. And Sal was the one that, I mean, he takes shrooms on a pretty much daily basis and he uses all the different types of them for different reasons. And he loves it. It's a all natural product that you can use that, you know, but he doesn't make any crazy outlandish claims. Like it's going to do anything amazing for

you. And I fucking hate the taste of it. So on the show, we'll talk like that. Show, we'll talk about four-sigmatic and the benefits and why he likes to use it and how he uses a racially at night to kind of calm him down and go to sleep or whatever. And I'll be like, man, I tried that shit, it tastes like shit, I can't stomach it. It's just, and so it's, you know,

it sounds crazy that I would talk that way about a sponsor, but a people appreciate us being real about the companies that we're using. And so if there's something that one of us is not a big fan of, like we're not afraid to speak our mind about it because I know there's a ton of people that are gonna do everything that Sal does because they look up to him that way.

I know there's a lot of people that do the same thing for me and a lot of people that do for Justin. So we have this flexibility of working with brands that maybe one of us are in love with, the other two guys are like, whatever about. And so we make sure that one of us can stand behind a product that we really, really like. And now we have somebody like Taylor,

who this is what he does for the business, is partnering with brands. Now, he has been a very intricate piece to this business that's behind the scenes that a lot of people don't see, and he's responsible for a lot of the look of our brand and who we are partnering with for long-term future gains. And so when you look at companies like Viori, Felix Gray, Meer, these companies are a thrive market. These are all companies that,

and they've came from nowhere in the last three to five years like us, so they're still considered an infancy, but they're growing, and they're all multi-million dollar companies. And so they also, their imagery matches our imagery, their message matches our message. And so his job, and that's all he does all day long, is research companies like this and negotiate and talk

with the CMOs and meet with them and find out how this partnership could work. And we attach ourselves to these brands that we hope to not only help them grow, but they also help us grow. Man, that's fantastic. That's fantastic. Well, y'all, I don't want to take any more of your time. Y'all have answered all the questions that I had. This is fantastic. I admittedly and slightly shame idly, I haven't listened to y'all stuff, but you have now, you've sold me. I know that wasn't your goal, but I'm going to take a listen to all of this stuff.

This is something I feel like I can hang with you all, which is something that I can't always say to the people in the gym that I'm at. I really, really appreciate this. This is really, really wonderful from an academic standpoint and just personally hearing y'all and talking with other like-minded individuals. So thank you. Awesome. Excellent. thank you. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump.

If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbumble at Mind Pump Media dot com. The RGB Superbumble includes maps on a bullet, maps to performance, and maps to static. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically

transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout bloopers and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a 430-day money-back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a fine-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing Mindbump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is Mindbump.