Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - My Weird But Wonderful Journey in the Fitness Space (feat. Josiah Novak)

Episode Date: October 26, 2017

This episode is a change of pace because instead of me babbling about something by myself, I’m babbling with Josiah Novak from The Fitman Project. Seriously though, Josiah was kind enough to interview me for his podcast and I thought all of ya’ll might like it and so I’m reposting it for your listening pleasure. Our discussion kind of wanders all over the place, but if you want to hear the rather unusual story of how I got into the fitness industry in the first place and then found a niche that I could excel in--writing--and moved into supplements and the rest of it, then you want to listen to this episode. We also discuss some of what has worked well for me in terms of maintaining at least a semblance of work/life balance. 5:40 - Where did you begin the fitness journey?22:52 - What made you get into the supplement business?29:47 - How do you keep multiple ventures and family life in balance?38:12 - How do you choose which ideas to move forward with? 47:55 - What are your most valuable habits and routines? 53:53 - What are your favorite books? Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

probably probably spent between me and jeremy it was probably eight months like from the decision to do it where i remember talking with jeremy i was like we can do this i think there's an opportunity again like what i was saying to just kind of scratch your own itch and make really good products that we ourselves wish somebody else would make Hey there, it is Mike Matthews back with another episode of the podcast. And this time doing something a little bit different because instead of me just babbling about something about myself, I am going to be babbling with Josiah Novak from the Fit Man Project. Seriously though, Josiah was kind enough to interview me for his podcast, and I thought all of you all out there might like it, so I'm reposting it for your listening

pleasure. As you will see, our discussion kind of wanders all over the place, but if you want to hear the rather unusual story of how I got into the fitness industry in the first place, and then found a niche that I could excel in, which is writing in particular, and then moved into supplements and all the rest of it, then you should give this episode a listen. I think you will find it interesting. We also discuss some of what has worked well for me in terms of maintaining at least a semblance of a work-life balance, managing priorities, and other things work-related. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my fitness book for women, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger. Now, this book has sold over

150,000 copies in the last several years, and it has helped thousands of women build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 1,200 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average. So if you want to know the biggest lies and myths that keep women from ever achieving the lean, sexy, strong, and healthy bodies they truly desire, and if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate female body, then you want to read Thinner, Leaner, Stronger today, which you can find on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. Now, speaking of Audible, I should also mention that you can actually get the audiobook 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend that you do if you're not

currently listening to audiobooks. I myself love them because they let me make the time that I spend doing things like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog, and so forth into more valuable and productive activities. So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my book for free, simply go to www.bitly.com slash free TLS book. And that will take you to Audible. And then you just have to click the sign up today and save button, create your account. And voila, you get to listen to Thinner, Leaner, Stronger for free. I actually wanted to have you on the show for a while. I have to give props where props are due because back in my younger, I call it my crazy days in my 20s, I read Bigger, Leaner, Stronger. Actually, you probably were the first person to really convince me that

I could eat a little bit more flexible of a diet. Yeah, it was like one of those like aha kind of watershed moments. You're like, I can eat three spoons of ice cream a day and not get fat? Yeah, a tablespoon actually. No, but yeah, I actually distinctively remember – I don't know if it was the exact wording or not, but it was something about how you ate like chocolate gelato or something like that every night. Yeah. And I was like, holy shit, man.

Like I might actually, this might actually be real. There's hope. Yeah. There's hope. It's funny. I don't know if you've had that experience, but I definitely had. Especially, I mean, I guess I've never really been, I've never had trouble with food I've never really had a weird relationship with food even growing up like I played a lot of sports and I ate the

stuff my mom would cook and otherwise would have some shit at my friend's house here and there or whatever but especially now I guess my focus personally now is more on longevity and like I want to be able to continue doing what I'm doing now and continue to look and perform the way that I look can look perform now, 10 years from now, like if you actually look at my diet, it looks like your typical quote unquote clean eater, uh, as opposed to, you know, I just don't get into the macro gymnastics of trying to basically look good, but have a shitty diet. You know what I mean? Yeah, no, totally. In other words, we're just getting old.

Yeah, basically. We're dads now. We actually have to be responsible. Yeah. No, yeah, totally, totally. I've gone from – I had a brief period, like you mentioned, the macro gymnastics. I kind of said, okay, how creative can I get? How insane can I make my meals?

But then I was like, you know what? This shit's making me feel like crap anyway. Exactly. So let me just stick to the, yeah, it's funny. We kind of come full circle, but yeah. So you've done a lot of things, man. I mean, I feel like you're one of those people that can do a lot of things really well, but I want to kind of talk about where this whole thing started. I mean, where did you begin the fitness journey and how did you realize, hey, like I'm actually going to create something here that's going to change the world in a sense? Yeah. So, I mean, it was just one of those, I really have to say that luck with anything like luck

always plays, plays a role. And this was a kind of a, just a, one of those strange stories of serendipity, I guess, because like I had mentioned, I grew up playing sports, played baseball, and then got into hockey and then really liked hockey and just kind of stuck with that and played a lot of roller hockey, a lot of ice hockey. That was up until I was like 17-ish and I never intended on trying to go all the way with sports just because I felt like while I enjoyed it, I wasn't willing to dedicate my life to it. And I knew that, I mean, that's what it takes. It takes absolute obsession. Even if you look at it

from the perspective of, if you're trying to become a professional athlete or a high level athlete, you can push yourself to the point of burnout. And that's one type of obsession that that's more of the harmful obsession. But if you look at examples of how top performers have been able to stay at the top of their game for a long time, their lives still revolve around maximizing their performance in their respective sports. It's just they've been smart about factoring in recovery. And that can be physical recovery, mental recovery, emotional recovery. So that might entail making sure, let's say they sleep, sleeping 10 hours a night, right? Which there was some research. It's most

people that follow this kind of stuff have heard about this. It was, I think it was done with college basketball players, remember correctly and extending their sleep to 10 hours a night, like markedly improved their accuracy and just made them better basketball players. Right. So still, yeah. And that means like you're taking less time. You're not sleeping five hours so you can wake up at the crack of dawn and get and start your six hours of workouts for the day. You're sleeping more, but you're still doing it because you want to get better at your sport.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And so it still requires a pretty, I think, singular obsessive type of mindset where you're optimizing your life and you're aligning everything toward that sport. So I didn't see myself really wanting to do that. And, and I figured if that, if I wasn't going to be like that, what's the point? Because that's really

what it takes. So I wanted to continue doing stuff with my body. Uh, so I got into weightlifting and also girls like muscles. So I was like, that works too. I like girls. So I'm going to, I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to get some muscle. Right. So I started recruiting a couple of friends and, you know, we picked up some bodybuilding magazines and just started doing, you know, what, what now I look back at are kind of just nonsensical workouts where you're sitting in the gym for two, two and a half hours a day. And that might be like, you know, that might be an arms day, like two hours of arms, arms and abs, right? Just crushing it. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like that makes any sense. Um, or, or maybe, maybe it's just pecs and it's not even a, it's mostly, you know,

yeah. Cause you call it pecs. Like that's when you know, it's totally fucked up. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, uh, and of course, you know it's totally fucked up yeah yeah exactly and uh and of course you know that was my first in playing sports i hadn't really done any resistance training especially hockey it's not really a thing you don't do i mean i remember seeing recently there was a there was some guy he was drafted first round nhl and he couldn't do a pull-up like you couldn't do one pull-up i'm pretty i'm pretty sure my nine-month pregnant wife can do a pull-up. I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure my nine month pregnant wife can do a pull-up. I'm pretty sure. Pretty sure. Yeah. So, and then she's not a weightlifter, you know, she does like, she does yoga, she does Pilates. So that was my, my, my real, you know, introduction to weight

lifting and newbie gains being what the, you know, they're, that's a real thing. And when you, when you start doing any sort of resistance training, your body is hyper responsive to it. So I made some progress in that first year of basically just kind of putting in a lot of work. I mean, I didn't, if you look at how much time, like if I would have known what I was doing, I probably could have spent probably a third of the time that I spent in the gym to get ultimately get better results. But you know, it was something that was fun to do. It was time with my friends. And I also just really came to like, not the results in terms of how my body was changing. I mean, I liked that, but also I came to enjoy working out and it was

something new and I liked how I felt after and whatever, right? That was the first year. Maybe I gained, I don't know, 10 or 15 pounds of muscle in that first year, which again, isn't very good, especially not considering how much time I put in. And I kind of stuck with it over the years. And I knew that I didn't really know all that much. It was, it was more just, I didn't care all that much about it. It was something that I was, I did cause I enjoyed it and I knew it was good for my body. And at the time I was happy with, I didn't look at my body and be like, I wish I were leaner. I wish I were bigger or stronger. And I was, I was fine. I was, I was, I was fine. And I was just kind of, you know, had my attention on other things, whatever. And, um, but then along the way I had, I try to remember exactly what the turning point was. There were, I remember clearly one of, one of the kind of

light bulb moments was I had met this, uh, bodybuilder and power lifter. And I didn't really know that world. I also didn't know how prevalent steroids were. And I didn't also know how to spot steroid use. Because again, I just, these are things I never looked into. I never cared. And yeah, I wasn't exposed to it much either. Because I don't know if it was just because of the gyms that I always would work out in these like small kind of boutique private gyms. And at weird hours, like for a long time, I'd work out at 11.m and so there was i remember one dude in particular who was super drugged up but on the whole i wasn't i wasn't really exposed to it so anyway so i'm so i meet this uh bodybuilder and and he was prepping for a show super fucking lean obviously and i and

i was just talking to him so like how do you how do you look like that you know i mean what are you doing and and he was he was the first person to turn me on to flexible dieting, actually. And then just heavy compound weightlifting. That's basically what I should be looking at. And I was like, oh, interesting. So then from there, I decided that I wanted to educate myself, which I've always been a good student. I think it's one of my strengths is that I'm good at learning things.

I want to learn more about what this guy was talking about. And so I kind of then, I didn't go to magazines or random websites just because I knew that those are just not very reliable, not very good sources of information. In terms of training, I went to Starting Strength was one of the first places I looked because I had heard of this and I knew that it had been around you know for 30 years and that Ripto is a respected dude and blah blah blah So I started reading a bit in the you know on strength training and then from there also went into scientific literature And on the diet side of things I really just went to scientific literature because at the time I mean I didn't know of any book that I could read that really broke it down and did a good job explaining the fundamentals book that I could read that really broke it down and did a good job explaining the fundamentals.

So I just kind of applied myself to learning. Really, we're just talking about the basics of diet and resistance training and muscle hypertrophy and strength progression, blah, blah, blah. And then just applied to myself in the gym and saw great, great results. And other people started seeing it and started asking about it. And I continued to educate myself just because now I was more interested. And so I bring people, bring friends to the gym with me and kind of just run them through. These are my workouts. You know, welcome to a squat. Welcome to a deadlift.

See that shit? Pick it up. Yeah, it's hard, right? And explaining, you know, the goal, really my goal is to progress on these lifts. And then I have some accessory work around. And the reason here is why I'm doing this, the accessory work. And as I got more educated, it was more looking at, you know, frequency intensity volume, which is something that I don't really spend all that much time talking about, especially in like bigger than you're stronger, thinner than you're stronger,

because quite frankly, those books are really how bigger than you're stronger came about was that was the book that I wish I had back when I started lifting weights. You don't need to know any of that shit in the beginning. You just don't. I mean, I would say in one of my next passes, one of my next additions of both of those books, I'm going to see if I can shorten them. It's not really a complaint that I get, but I just know that they're a bit on the longer side right now. So that just creates more friction for a reader. I have some feedback from readers on something. There are some areas that might be able to just cut down on the words. But the first edition was like quite short. I don't remember the exact word count, but I want to say maybe 60, 50, 60,000 words, whereas the current edition is actually twice that. I didn't really try to go into it

as a marketer, which I had at the time. I had some marketing experience, copywriting experience, whatever. I really just wanted to, okay, in the beginning of the book, get the person hyped up, promise of benefits. Imagine this is what your life could be like. Yes, it's possible. And then let's just get right down to it and let's dispel some myths. And then let's just learn how to like, here's some stuff you probably believe right now that's not true. And then let's get down to how to do it right. Here's how you do it. Right.

Yeah. If you're skeptical, I understand. Just go do it for a month. That's all you have to do. And then from there you'll know. So anyways, that, that book came about because throughout just with helping people,

funny enough, one of my friends at the time, this is when I had gotten really lean for the first time and I looked good, but I felt like I was kind of small just because that's what happens. You know, you start getting below 10% and you're like, geez, I'm small natural shredding days. Yeah, exactly. And where people, I remember, yeah, I remember, I remember one time, uh, some of a couple of things, not that I cared. I thought it was funny. Um, so I was pretty lean. I was probably about 7% and I was wearing like a long sleeve shirt that was kind of

loose. You know, it wasn't, I'm not, I wasn't, it wasn't like, you know, you know how some people, they try to like shrink wrap themselves in their clothes or everybody knows that they lift. I don't really care about that. So, uh, so I remember one person, he was like, they hadn't seen me in a while. He's like, so you stopped working out? Like what's like, yeah, what happened? Did you get hurt or something? And then, and then I was like, bitch, look at my abs. That's what are you talking about? Uh, yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, and then somebody else was like, wow, like the same type of thing wearing that type of clothes.

Like, are you a swimmer? You have like a swimmer. That's been a, now a joke, like an inside joke with my friends ever since. I thought that's good. And so at that time, though, again, I mean, objectively speaking, take my shirt off and do a few push-ups and I look pretty good. So a friend of mine was like, you should just go on YouTube and take your shirt off and sell shit. And I was like, yeah, nah, that doesn't sound very interesting. And so he kept on kind of harping on this point of like, you need to take your physique and sell something, right? And so I was thinking, all right, I think there probably is an opportunity here, but what do I actually want to do? What would I be interested in? I'm not interested in just shilling. I mean, at the time, social media shilling wasn't new. I mean, I don't know.

I wasn't really on social media much, so maybe it was kind of a thing, but it was definitely not as much of a thing as it is now. I mean, I always liked to read and I was, I think at that time, a decent writer. I was, in my previous life, I was building employee training programs for companies. There's a lot, there's quite a bit of carryover actually in terms of skills and just experience having to take complex jobs in that case and break them down into training that can take someone that really knows nothing to like being able to do the job, depending on what it is. It could be in a couple of weeks or it might take as much as a couple of months, but regardless, you know, there needs to be a, you need to be able to break something down so it can be learned on an easy gradient.

You're not making huge jumps in terms of like, now they're just completely confused. I don't know what to do. Um, so I was like, all right, what I'll do is I'll write a book because I also, at the time, Amazon's KDP platform was gaining a lot of traction in the news because there's this dude, there's this guy named John Locke, who was like the first self-published author on their platform to sell a million books. He had a cool story. He was like, he made a bunch of money in the insurance business. He had like one business, built it up, sold it and did it again and sold that for, I don't know, 30, 40, $50 million or something. And he was like, all right, I'm done with money. What do I actually want to do? And this is what he decided. He always had wanted to write novels. So he started doing that and he

priced them at 99 cents because he didn't care about the money. He just wanted to see if anybody would care about his work and it blew up for him. And now, now he's like, he was their golden boy. his work and it blew up for him. And now, now he's like, he was their golden boy. Uh, and they use that to attract other writers and saying, Hey, if you can write good shit, we have a platform here and we have a lot of readers and here it is. Right. So, so that's why I wrote the book initially and did it as a book and put it up on Amazon as opposed to trying to have it as a PDF and doing the whole, you know, yeah, yeah, exactly. I was like, I'm just curious to see how Amazon plays out. So that was the beginning. And I published it in 2012. And I think the first month, maybe 20 copies were sold. I was just like, Oh, cool. Somebody

bought my book. And then it kind of grew exponentially from there. And I put my email address in the book, just in case people want to set up a domain, like build healthy muscle, which was just a domain and there's not even any website and, you know, encourage people to reach out and let me know what they thought of the book, if they have any questions or whatever. And, um, so I would just answer emails and take down notes on people if they had good ideas and how the book can be improved. And also where, based on the questions that I was getting, where I could beef up the book. And I was And also where, based on the questions that I was getting, where I could beef up the book. And I was like, eh, that's a good point. I should probably like, it would be better if that information were in there. Yeah. So by the end of the year,

it was selling a few thousand copies a month. And that's when I was looking at it going, okay, this is a real opportunity. You know, I have this other business and it does well and I make money, but it doesn't have like, I was kind of ambivalent about it. There were things I liked about it, things I didn't like about it. And it didn't have the anywhere near the upside in terms of potential reach and potential impact and also potential revenue as the health and fitness space. I mean, there, I don't know if there aren't very many industries that you can just jump into, um, that, that, that do, you know what I mean? Yeah. So at that time, though, I actually didn't want to become like a health and fitness

expert or guru, so to speak. Not that I consider myself either. Honestly, I'm not a scientist. I don't play one on the internet. Again, I think my strength is I'm good at learning things. I like to study, interpreting them and making them understandable to the layman basically. And that's really how that really has been my focus. I guess I would maybe consider myself a researcher and educator, I guess. But at that time I was like, I don't like the fitness space. I don't like fitness people in like a lot of what I would honestly, I'm with you on that. I've had that discussion with, with people and they're a little bit taken aback. Have you been to the Arnold Classic?

Yeah, no shit. Walked around these expos? Yeah, good luck. Exactly. Exactly. I was at a family wedding over the weekend, and there were a few people. I don't like to talk about myself at all, honestly. People ask.

It's just a standard thing. What do you do? Oh, health and fitness things. Oh, so what do you mean like a personal trainer yeah not like not yeah like not exactly usually my thing is like i have some books that are popular and have some websites and supplements and shit and that's that's it right um but but in having that discussion with people a few people were kind of like they thought that that was funny where they knew about me because they, they like Legion and shit. So, cause they're in the family. And so my cousins have talked, I think it's kind of cool. That's always funny to them where I'm like, yeah, you know, they're

like kind of, they think fitness people, they think it's just kind of, there's a lot of neurosis and it's just a weird space. And I'm like, yeah, absolutely. I'm, I'm not very well networked in the space. Cause I don't like a lot of the people in the space legitimately just don't like them. Yeah. Um, so I didn't, I didn't want to really go into it. And I was thinking initially that, uh, what I would do is start a publishing company and just apply what I had learned, you know, with selling my own books to selling other people's books. And it wouldn't just have to be health and fitness stuff. That opportunity is actually still there because traditional publishers have distribution on their side, absolutely. But they're pretty weak on the marketing side of things. They move very slowly and they can't take as many gambles anymore

on unknown authors or they just don't want to. They want people like me. I mean, now, for example, I've sold close to a million books just online. I'm not even in bookstores since 2012. My websites get about 2 million visits a month. Between the two of them, 400,000 people on my email lists, whatever, on social media, blah, blah, blah. So I'm working on a new book and I'm going to go traditional because I want to do New York Times campaign. And that's the safest way to – because there's like politics involved with NYT. Oh, for sure. If there's a book that's self-published, even if it sells very, very well,

they may not admit it to the list. And I just don't want to take that risk. So I'd rather just go traditional. That's kind of like how I was looking at it at that time. And I was going to publish other people's stuff and build up this publishing company. So I started, I recruited a friend of mine to work with me and we started putting it together. But then we looked at it and said, okay, the real opportunity here is in health and fitness. So I guess I'll do it. But I'm just going to kind of do it in my own way. Fast forward.

And again, I've sold a bunch of books. And I've written, obviously, a number more. And I'm continuing. That's always going to be a thing because I just enjoy it. And supplements and an app and blah, blah, blah. So the app description is health and fitness things. So you kind of skipped over the supplement stuff. But I was curious to know. So you, I mean, you kind of skipped over the supplement stuff, but I was curious to know. So you wrote a book, you've written a few books now,

you know, you're selling a ton of copies. What made you get into the supplement space? I'm just curious. I mean, before you answer, I will say that you were one of the first brands, Legion was one of the first brands that I at least came across. I'm not a big supplement guy at all, but I came across and I was interested in it because of the health aspect, right? Because of some of the direction you took when it came to actually creating quality products versus just, hey, I got another creatine or here's another pre-workout. Like, all right, dude, like we've seen this story a hundred times, but with you, it was more of like, hey, I just want to make products that are actually quality and that are going to make you healthier. But why did you

decide to do that? Was it just, hey, this is the next step in the business? Or was it something you had self-interest in? Basically, I'm just really greedy. So no. Just want to make cash. Yeah, it's just fucking cash, bro. Like Lambos and Rolexes. Gonna make it rain over here. Yeah. And bitches. No. So I've taken a bunch of supplements over the years because I'd go to GNC. That was part of supplements over the years because you i'd go to gnc that was like part of the thing when you especially when you're in the magazine world and you know if i kind of rewind to the to the first couple years of my exploits in the weightlifting space um where yeah you try all different kinds of supplements so i'd go to gnc and try you know

test boosters and gh boosters and pre-workout and post-workouts, everything. I'd spend like, I don't know, probably $300 or $400 a month on crap. And then obviously throughout the process of getting educated, I kind of learned that like, oh, so like basically all that stuff does nothing. All right, well, I'll stop wasting money on that. And but still would use protein powder. And I did like a pre-workout if for nothing else than just like by that time I was working out early in the morning. So it was nice. It was nice

to feel fully awake and like have, I mean, if it's just caffeine, you know what I mean? It just, before a workout, it does make a difference if you have enough. And so I saw an opportunity. I guess it was kind of twofold. One, it was kind of selfish and that I wanted to scratch my own itch and make products that I myself wished someone else was making essentially. And that's how it kind of started. Like, okay. So once I understood a bit more about supplement industry and how shitty most of these products are, the question was why, why doesn't someone just make a good product? What's the problem? Is it just pure greed? Is that, is that really what it is? And where, you know, basically you have all the, all the big players players almost like it's a cartel

to say all right guys let's just make let's just keep all of our all of our costs collectively let's keep our cost of goods as low as possible so we can have lambos rolexes and bitches right and it's kind of that but it's it's unfortunately, for the supplement companies that are reliant on retail is that just how the hierarchy is set up, it pretty much precludes quality products. You can't. Because when you take into account the margins that the supplement companies themselves need, mainly because of how much marketing money they have to spend, I mean, it's not uncommon. I mean, I know for various supplement companies that are, you know, eight figure companies

that have to spend 30 ish percent of revenue on marketing, even as high as 40 or 50 with some of these direct to consumer kind of e-commerce supplement companies. So they have to spend all that money just to keep their revenue where it needs to be. And they also churn through customers at an alarming rate. So they have to constantly be acquiring new customers, which is very expensive to do because, you know, just anyone in business knows that. It's tremendously... Yeah. It's the hardest thing to do. Exactly. That's like the never-ending headache is how to acquire more customers, you know,

less expensively. And they're not equipped, especially the supplement companies, many of them are not equipped or they're not focusing on retaining their existing customers. So it's just that churn game. And then you have like the wholesalers and distributors, they need their cuts. And then you have the retailers need their cuts. And in some cases, the retailers, they want big cuts, like GNC had reached out a couple of years ago and they wanted a 70% margin themselves, meaning they wanted to more than double markup. And it was just like, yeah, that doesn't work. Yeah, exactly. So that's where I was kind of looking at it going, okay, so I have a platform here. I've sold a lot of books at this point by the time Legion, we started, let's see, when did, this is Legion's fourth year. So we had launched in, I believe it was like we did a pre-order in

November of 2013. And then it went officially live in, yeah, 40, exactly. And then it went, like we started shipping product in 2014. And a lot of 2013 was, I mean, probably spent between me and Jeremy, it was probably eight months, like from the decision to do it where I remember talking with Jeremy, I was like, we can do this. I think there's an opportunity again, like what I was saying to just kind of scratch your own itch and make really good products that we ourselves wish somebody else would make. And then also take advantage of, I think there's a gap in the marketplace. I think there is a legit opportunity to do like naturally sweetened, naturally flavored products, transparent formulations backed by sound science that

we also will be, you know, fully transparent with, you know, we, I had recruited a couple of people, one person in particular, who is very smart with this stuff and on the same wavelength in terms of what is actually a good product and what products are worth making and what products aren't like, I don't have a hormone product whatsoever. Not because, I mean, if I just liked money, I would absolutely just make one. We get asked about it all the time, especially testosterone in men. It's just more and more of a, you know, it's a growing concern. And just because, I mean, I understand testosterone

levels on a population basis have been declining for decades now to a point where it just really impacts quality of life. But we have not made one and I don't see us, I mean, the only way we'd ever make one is there have to be some advances in terms of research, because we just don't see how we can make a product worth selling essentially. And so we, you know, that, that was the, the genesis of Legion was just that, like, I want to, I want to make things that I just want to like, stop having to take inferior supplements myself, which are probably, they're better than nothing, but they're not very good. And, you know, I want to take my own. I just want to make like what products I wish I had. And then hopefully other people like the idea too and want to,

and want to buy them. And so that's, that's how it started. And, um, yeah, it's gone very well. I mean, again, this is Legion's fourth year and it's gonna, it's gonna do eight figures in revenue this year. It's pretty cool. And so you do a lot of things. I mean, outside of the fitness stuff, right? I mean, you're a dad. Now you're expecting baby number two. You're married. I'm curious because I talk to different people in different walks of life. Some people are kind of past the whole, I call it the grind phase of like, okay, I have a million things going on. I'm trying to be great at all of them. And then some people are just starting. And then some people are kind of in the midst of it. I feel like we're kind of in the midst of those working years, right? So how do you balance it all? I mean, you seem to be

really, really good at so many things. But it's like for someone like me, I have a podcast. I have a coaching business. I have another business unrelated to fitness. I also have two little boys under the age of three. And so it's like sometimes I feel like my brain's going to explode, right? So how do you do it? I mean, what are some of the best practices you have with keeping everything in balance, keeping what's important at the forefront of what you do as well? Well, I mean, I guess if I'm on a, if you kind of zoom in, I mean, you're probably the same way, routine and habit are big for sure. And that means for me, you know, I wake up fairly early, I get my workouts done early and get to the office and just work, work, work. And, you know,

I would say that if I look back over the last, let's say five years or whatever, my life has been pretty imbalanced, but I'm okay with that where my focus has obviously been on work. And then really any time away from work has been spent with my family. And I haven't spent much time. Like I don't really hang out with friends or at least I haven't all that much. Yeah. I've had a few hobbies where I'd go out on Sunday afternoons and play some golf or go play hockey. I started playing hockey again when I was here in Florida just for fun. But I think that's fine. I think the idea that you should try to keep everything balanced, especially in the beginning of any sort of entrepreneurial endeavor is bad advice, actually, especially if there's an opportunity there. Because speed,

I mean, this is something that I've come across actually more just in reading historical stuff and biographies and stuff and more from a military context, right? Speed is everything. That was Napoleon's whole thing, right? What careful and deliberation, swift and execution or whatever. And one of the reasons why he was such a great military commander is he moved so quickly. Like his army was able to move so quickly and they were able to get in positions that made no sense and they would throw their opponents off, whatever, right? So in business though, that there's also a lot to be said for speed of execution and going too slow. Can it just, one, it's psychologically, it's just demoralizing, but two, the more time you add, the more chances there that something can go wrong. And that can, that could be, there's so many things that, you know, I think if you look

at in terms of a medicine success is not just about making things go right. Yes, it is. There are plenty of things that you have to do and have to go well, but it's also not having a lot of bad things happen that could happen. In some cases seem very much out of your control. The mistake can simply be adding too much time. You could be doing the right things. You're just doing them too slowly. And then just like that, it could be that the opportunity evaporates because, you know, someone else has been working on it as well. And they come to their first to market, they have more money, they have some huge competitive advantages that now just kind of make you irrelevant. Or it could be internally with personnel, something goes wrong and some key person that has been working on some project is out of commission for one reason or another or gone or whatever. So that's been something that I just, that's why I kind of have worked, you know, probably on average. It's a little bit less now than it was back then, but then it was, I don't know, maybe on average 70 or ish hours a week or something, just because I wanted to, I knew the opportunity was there

and I wanted to do everything that I could to capitalize on it and not miss out due to this idea that I, my life has to be quote unquote balanced. And also what the idea of balance someone else's idea on, you know, what's important and what's not important. So that, that was intentional. And now things are a little bit different. I mean, I still, I still work a lot and it's still a major focus of mine, but I have, I mean, I guess I also had to kind of experience it personally to wanting to change that operating basis and not, not just spend more time like with, with my family. And because, I mean, my relationship with my wife has always been good, but of course it suffers a little bit if I'm working so much, it's different when previously if we have more time together and whatever.

She's always been great in that regard and very supportive and very almost stoic in a sense. But just what I would tend to push it, you know what I mean? Because again, I'm kind of just going and I'm thinking with – I'm putting something here. It's not just about making money. It's more, especially with having a family, putting something there that is going to allow me to provide for my family and give them a good life and good education. And, you know, so I was very much driven also from that perspective. But now again, like I look at it and go, okay, so there's really an endless number of things that can be done. And I do have big plans for Legion in terms of, I mean, you can boil it down to revenue because that's just an easy proxy for

the influence of that, of what, and the impact that I think it can have. And also with muscle for life, we're doing a whole overhaul. We're going to do a whole bunch of digital courses. So I have a lot of things that I want to do. It's just, I kind of had to experience that the real pay that you get in life is, yeah, I mean, money is good. And we all know the research on terms of what is it about $80,000 a year is when you start, most people start experiencing the diminishing returns of, of, uh, you know what I mean? Where like, for most people, that's the point where they know they don't really have financial pressures anymore. And then the money that they make beyond that is, is great, but it doesn't, it doesn't mean as much, you know, as, as it does getting, you know, it doesn't going from, let's say $40,000 a year to

$80,000 a year for most people, it doesn't mean as much, or sorry, that means a lot more than going from 80 to 160, for example, or 160 to 320 and so forth. Just because unless you have some compulsion to just live very extravagantly, there's a point where I would say, I mean, you take pretty much anybody and you give them a few hundred thousand dollars a year. And now they're just like, I'm good financially. What else do I need? I can have a nice house. I can drive a nice car. If I'm with someone, I can travel. Exactly. I've experienced that, which has been a good experience, but also had to kind of experience just that the real pay that you get in life, what makes life worth living. Yes, enthusiasm over goals. Yes, activity. Yes,

forward motion. Yes, cooperative endeavor. But then there's also something we said for connections with other people and relationships and sensation and things that, you know, I intentionally neglected to build businesses. So now I would say my life is, has more balance in that, in that way. But even still, I mean, I'm very much, like I said, I'm very much a routine person. I wake up early, do the same stuff every day in terms of like my schedule. And I, and I stick very much to that. Otherwise it's just giving as much importance to some other, these other aspects of my life. As I, as I do my work, which previously I, again, I didn't really do. It was kind of just like,

yeah, intellectually I knew that sure, you know, we're social creatures and, you know, there's a lot of pleasure to be had and joy and satisfaction to be had outside of it. For me, it's not about making money. I kind of don't care so much about that, especially now. It's more just about, I like doing things. I like coming up with ideas and making them a reality and like seeing them work. And just that's, that's really what I like. Yes. I think that is one of, if we're coming back to this pay of life metaphor, I think that is one of the, for sure. I mean, that's enthusiasm. That's what makes you feel alive and energetic and whatever. But, you know, I had to experience the actual, like emotionally had to experience the absence of, I think, really what are probably the more important types of pay in life where in the end, a bank account doesn't really measure much in terms of how much they're really living. And I had to experience that. Again, not so much from a financial perspective because I've never been like a very money motivated person. And I don't have, sure, I have nice things and I have

a nice house. And as I continue to go, you know, if everything continues to go well and we just continue on the trajectory that we're on, that's not going to change. It'll only improve, but I don't care that much about it. You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say

thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. How do you choose which things to say yes to, right? Because you have a lot of ideas and you have a lot of things that probably come onto your desk and people are probably hounding you for ideas and opportunities, but how do you choose what to say yes to? That's a good question. That's something I've had to learn because in the beginning it was yes to everything, right? I mean, it was yes to let me just write a book. No one knows who the fuck I am. I have no network, no connections, no website, literally nothing.

I'm just going to write a book and see if it can do well on its own merits basically. And so that's just from there to, okay, let's say yes to, I'm going to try a different book, just trial balloons, different ideas. Let's see how this one does. Let's see how that one does, whatever. And then now, you know, I've had to kind of flip that around where I say no to a lot more things than yes. And that's also to myself. I mean, I am approach. I don't have any trouble saying no to a lot of the random ideas that are floated my way from other people. It's harder for me to say no to my own ideas, especially where I know they're good ideas. Like that's something I,

you know what I mean? Where similar, similar to Legion in the beginning, I knew that was a good idea. I mean, I was able to, I was willing to stake a lot of time and effort. And at that time, a lot of money on the belief that this is a good idea. This is going to work. And there are other things now, especially given the kind of the ecosystem that my team and I have put together and we have this like growing conglomerate, there are other product lines and services and stuff that would work guaranteed. But I've had to kind of step back from that ledge several times because I don't have, I can only myself do so much. I mean, the solution for me is not, well, I'll just, I'll just not do those things. It's actually now I'm just like, I'm doing a whole round of hiring again and bringing on more people. And that's really going to be, that's kind of the

bottleneck at that point in the business where the bottleneck is actually getting enough really good people, people that are smart, hardworking, that have initiative and can take things and just own them and figure them out and make shit happen and really don't need their hands to be held all that much. And that might sound bad, but anyone that is in business and if you have more than 15 or 20 employees, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I mean, on the whole, yes, people are great and they're well-intentioned, but when it comes down to like brass tacks, execution, doing things well, that's hard to find. So that's more what I'm looking at now is like what I'm saying yes to are the things that like, you know, there's an opportunity cost

is what you're getting at, of course, to anything. So any time or money that I put into project A is time and money that I can't put into project B or C or whatever. So what I have, and this is something that I've spoken quite a bit with my team and my business partner, and I've offloaded various tasks and things that I've been doing to free up time for what I think is the highest and best use of me. And that is content creation and type of content that only I can do. So that means books. That means to some degree articles, I'm bringing on some writers and I'll have like a team of people and the stuff that is going to be published under my name is always going to be either going through me. Like I'm, I'm fine getting initial research or first drafts, but I just, I'm not willing to compromise on the quality of my stuff just because I've, I mean, I've written,

I've probably published over a million words of just blog articles like myself. You have a ton of blogs. I see them all over the place. Yeah. And that's not, that's not including books and whatever else, right? So high quality written content still does very, very well. Yes, it's very competitive. And if anybody out there is considering getting into that, into the health and fitness blog space, yes, you can do well, but just know that you're up against, there's always room for someone that can produce stuff that is very different or very high quality. Like Greg Knuckles is a great example of that. His stuff is very dense. It's very scientific. It's very technical. It's not for the layman. It's not for everybody, but I don't know of anybody else. I mean, I think there are a few

people that could do what he's doing. Like Lyle used to be more in the blogging space and he can produce content of that caliber, but he just doesn't. So, you know, if you can bring something truly unique, like Greg has done, then that's a huge competitive advantage. But if you're going to just kind of jump into the gen fit space, you're up against some very good writers. You're up against people with very large budgets in terms of some, you know, behind the scenes, SEO stuff. And it's just not the same as when I, you know, I started muscle for life in 2013 and it grew very, very quickly, but it wouldn't have grown as quickly if I would have launched it a year or two later

because by that time, the space already was very saturated. Fortunately, I'd already kind of staked out my ground. Yeah, so writing content is still gonna be something that I think is a great use of my time. Writing books, definitely a great use of my time and something that I'm gonna be doing a lot more of. I have some simple plans and ideas that I know are going to do very, very well to just dramatically increase reach through book channels.

Because that was intentional from the beginning. Because I've done several revisions of my books and spent quite a bit of time and money actually taking Bigger, Leaner, Stronger from where it started to where it is now. And the reason why I did that is because, one, I like it. I just have a natural, I just have an affinity for books and for reading. So I know it's just, I guess it's fulfilling in that regard, but also it's invariably are my best customers. You could say, or my, my most loyal or, or enthusiastic followers tribe, right? Yeah. Has have read at least one of my books. It's pretty much always. And, and that's for obvious reasons. And then there's also, I think some non-obvious reasons that people don't

necessarily consider. And that's one that most people don't read. If, if somebody reads, let's just say it's just one book a month, that just means they chip away at a book. That's, that's far above average in terms of, I mean, I think it says something about who they are as a person, right? So you have people out there that are, they're regularly trying to better themselves. You know, they've been called like transformational consumers is one, you know, little marketing term that's been applied to them. But these are people that they're not, yes, like they're interested in health and fitness, but also they're interested in just improving themselves in general. And, and I think that those people are a cut above the average person

in that the average person, and it sounds bad, but I mean, they look at it by their actions. The average person doesn't, it seems like, you know, they kind of just shamble their way through life and without much thought of anything and where, you know, they don't have much in the way of like goals and visions and of where they want their lives to be and how they're going to get there. And they don't work very hard to make those things a reality. And so, and again, it's not really a, I don't say that from a place of, Oh, cause I think I'm so superior. I'm just kind of really just speaking from statistics, honestly. Right. Right. It's reality. It's just reality, right? I mean, that's the average person's very overweight. They spend what, four hours a day watching TV. They have a rather low IQ. They don't read at all. Um, they spend a lot

of time on video games and social media and stuff. And that just, unfortunately it just is what it is. That's not a, that's not a good place to be. I think, you know, we all have our little vices and of course nobody's perfect, but too many vices make for a rather unhappy existence, I think. So we've gotten, I think, a very high caliber following by putting so much attention on writing good content. Because, again, the average person that's willing to read a 130,000-page book and go do something with it, well, the person that will do that is not the average person. And you'll see that in our demographics. If you check, I don't know if they're public, but we have our quant cast demographics from FL and Legion. And we have, it's, you know, mainly it's about 60, 40 men to women. It's 25 to 35 are overrepresented college educated, largely overrepresented a hundred K plus year,

150 K plus year, largely overrepresented diversity in terms of race as well. A lot of Asians, a lot of African-Americans, a lot of Latino. That is not your typical health and fitness crowd. Your average YouTuber, the demographics are very different. I was going to say, yeah. Some of the big names that I know in the YouTube space, I mean, their demographic, I mean, there's no customers there for me, right? Exactly. That's exactly. I'm a 32, 32 year old guy with two kids who tells people how to balance their health and fitness routine. That's not the YouTube crowd. Like that's just, that's not who they are. And that's one of the reasons why I haven't, you know, just speaking to your original question, why I haven't put very much time into YouTube because now I'm going to be

bringing on like a full-time videographer and bring on some more people to work in marketing and social media and stuff. So I probably will get more active on YouTube, but it's just not going to take much of my time. It's going to take a lot of, a lot of other people's time. And, but I myself have not put much time into it because again, when I look at the pillars of the, my businesses, books and long form content, you can just sum it up as that. Long-form content, whether it's podcasts like this, long-form articles, books, are a huge part of why I've gotten to where I am. And so that's going to be an on.

That's pretty much, I think, that. Plus, as things continue to grow, maybe getting more involved in outward-facing stuff, publicity, possibly speaking tours, things that just get me more out there and introduce more and more people to me and my work on larger and larger scales will also make sense. Otherwise it's kind of like no to most everything else. And I don't really see that changing because again, I mean, I think my role in that regard, pretty much that's kind of the pinnacle in terms of how I can most accelerate growth, right? It's just like create more and more good stuff that gets out there more and more and just get my face out there and my voice out there more and more. Makes a ton of sense. What about,

so habits and routines, I mean, you know, you got to have a couple strong habits and routines each day that just kind of keep things in line, keep things moving forward. What are yours? I mean, what are your most valuable habits and routines? So I would say waking up early because – and I go to the gym first thing in the morning, get my workouts out. How early do you wake up? My alarm is 6.15, but I usually wake up before. So, you know, it could – depending on when I go to bed, it could be anywhere from, I don't know, five 30 to six. I want, I just like it. I mean, I don't,

when I was younger, I used to stay up late and do hang out friends. And I was in, I had a phase where I was really into poker. So I'd play poker for many, many hours online. I read every book I was getting coaching. I was serious about it. I's a great game. I actually kind of miss it, to be honest. It's such a great game. Oh, me too. Dude, I played it professionally for my entire college existence. Yeah, that's how I paid my way through college. You played Limit or No Limit?

I played No Limit online for 10 hours a day pretty much every day. Just crushing it on. I'd do multi-tables. Of coursetables. I'd have like 30 tables going at once. It was insane, man. Oh, yeah. Because I played under, I think it was Pocket Fives had a coaching program or something like that. And the guy who coached me was like this extreme multi-table guy. He had this whole strategy. And you know what? To be honest, I made really good money. I'm not going to lie. I made really good money i'm not gonna lie like i made really good money but it became so unhealthy and after i was done with my sessions it would just dude like the feeling of being after a bad day was like so bad right like you

just wanted to just i just wanted to sprint through my window man i was just like i'm out of here like this shit sucks but yeah so i i played for a long time i played in ve Um, I actually had a fake ID and lucked my way into a couple of big tournaments out there and, uh, yeah, it's crazy, but yeah, the good, the good old days. Yeah. The good old days. Exactly. But, but now, now, especially having kids, I have one kid, another kid on the way, uh, you know, it's just, there's a complete change and I enjoy waking up early. So, but I think there's also going to be said for the momentum that you show you're up early. And this is, I don't know how valuable this habit is in the grand scheme of things, but I do the cold shower thing just because it wakes me up. Uh, I like that where I don't really necessarily have trouble waking up, but I definitely feel like

fully awake after it. And also I know, we know that it improves circulation for sure, which is just good, right? That's going to help with,ally just giving all of your tissues in your body all, you know, getting more nutrients to them, which can also possibly help a little bit with recovery. And it may also improve immune function, which is cool. I hate getting sick. So anything that, you know, may help with that, that is no cost like that, where it's just sure, take a cold shower, I'm in. And we'll see what comes out of, you know as they continue to do more research on this thanks to obviously wim hof has hugely popularized cold exposure and some of the stuff that he's been able to do with his body and also teach other

people to do is absurd and so so there's that and then you know going to the gym getting a workout done right away is one i think it's a great start to the day where no matter what happens from there, like you have some, it just gives you forward motion. I think it's low hanging fruit, right? It's like quick. It's like the, it's like the little exact where even, even the, even what is the lowest hanging fruit is what, right? Make your bed. You know, that's like a Navy seal guy or whatever. Yeah. That that's, that's, I don't know. I don't, I don't get any satisfaction from making my bed, but I do get some satisfaction from, some satisfaction from going in and getting my workout done. And then also, functionally, it's just better. I feel more mentally alert throughout the day when I do it that way and just more energetic throughout

the day, especially if I didn't sleep enough the night before. It helps a lot. And then there's nothing that can get in the way of it later. So if I was planning on going at 6 p.m., who knows, something can get in the way of that. If I get it done first thing it's done. So, so there's that. And then there's just, just in terms of work habits, I'm not big on like Pomodoro or anything in particular, just because I don't know, I don't, I just don't feel the need for it. I don't get mentally depleted very easily. If ever really it's the only times I really feel it as if I really didn't sleep enough and come the end of the night, I'm just tired. Like it's the only times i really feel it is if i really didn't sleep enough and come the end of the night i'm just tired like it's not mental depletion it's just whole body

depletion and so i it's not never something i've been strong i've really struggled with even if even if that means that i you know i can go through a few hours of deep work that requires a lot of concentration wrap it up and then like go to the bathroom and come back. And I feel like ready to go. Like I'm not, you know, I don't feel like I need to take some downtime, which I understand. I know that's not normal and many people do. So I think that is definitely, you know, the idea of working in sprints and then just backing off for five or 10 minutes and letting yourself recover basically makes a lot of sense. I've not really had to do that, but I do the standard stuff of prioritizing my tasks, spend the beginning of my day. What do I need to get done today?

What are the high priority things? And then if I have more time, what are the things I can do after? If not, those can get bumped to the next day. The stuff, I mean, if people listening, if they haven't read the book, The One Thing, the simple tools that are kind of just laid out in that book, short, simple book, I recommend it a lot. I really liked it because it was better than i was expecting i thought it was going to be similar like when i read the art of war i thought it was going to be uh no no the war of art i thought yeah exactly i thought it was going to be just kind of like self-help junk food but actually it was a lot more profound than i expected and i and i had the same experience with the one thing as well have you read the one thing you know i haven't, I don't know why I haven't, but yeah, I just took

a note to, to read that. You'll like it. You'll like it. War of art's my favorite book. Uh, it's actually inspired me to write a book, uh, about being a young dad. Uh, but yeah, it's, it's, it's solid, man. It's so simple. And which is, I think the mark of genius, right? I mean, it's like you take something and you so simple to understand, but also so powerful. It's so simple and which is, I think, the mark of genius, right? I mean, it's like you take something and you – so simple to understand but also so powerful. It's like – Exactly. That's like the damn moment. Like it's just – it's really dope.

But – Well, I mean – What other books do you like? There's so many. And I read – so I kind of like work through a rotation of marketing and business books to biographies or historical books. Here, let me pull up my – I'll pull up my little spreadsheet and I'm like kind of OCD about it. I take one of the highlights and notes and then I pull them all out and I put them into Google Docs and because then I can actually easily review any book that I've read. Basically,

I have a Google Doc with all of my highlights, all of my notes. And also I know that helps with just like just retention of the information. So you're reading it once, my highlights, all of my notes. And also I know that helps with just retention of the information. So you're reading it once, doing highlights, marginalia, and then going through them again, reading them again, pulling them out. It really helps a lot. So let's see. I recently read – I'm in the middle of a book called Peak right now, which I'm liking.

Well written, very easy to read, and we'll see. I'm only maybe 40 pages in, so they haven't gotten to, I've maybe made like one or two highlights, but I'm expecting, you know, the information, the good information is coming. They've usually the first 50 pages, 30 to 50 is they're just trying to hook you. Right. Um, so yeah, I'm in the middle of peak. Uh, I like that. Um, band of brothers was one of the last ones I really liked. I mean, big fan of the show, but hadn't read the book. Uh, the E-Myth, I recommend that book for just general business, like entrepreneurship. It's very much about kind of the core of the message is systematizing your business and codifying

the individual jobs in your business so it can scale, which is also just very relevant to where I'm at right now. Like I was saying earlier, there's like seven, what do we have 17 or 18 of us now? I think to get things to like where I want them to be, I'll probably need a total of 50 to 70 people would be my guess. And that requires a lot of working on the business instead of in the business. So it was just also relevant to me and my team and where we're at right now and where we need to go from there. Getting things done. I read again recently, I'd read it a while ago. Pretty good. I like on the whole, I do use, I use my own version of, of some of his ideas, I guess, or he probably just took the ideas from someone else, to be honest. But like, for example, getting everything out of your head, I keep lists on all kinds of things. Like I really don't, I use my calendar for, I don't want to,

I want to use my mental energy and my cognitive capacities for figuring things out and creating things and, you know, doing a valuable work, not trying to remember trivial shit that I can just put into a system. You know what I mean? Yep. That was big. big let's see you can just edit this also by the way i'm looking through if you want to just like yeah yeah um going through here let's see i'm pretty much gonna cut out everything you said no perfect perfect i'm not i'm not gonna publish this episode actually because this is never gonna see the light of day. I've basically been asleep the whole time. Wait, who is this again? Yeah, yeah. All right, cool, man.

Got to go. I'll just say, also, if people are just generally starting out in business, Lean Startup is, I think, a great book. Oh, that's a great book, yeah. Particularly, obviously, the concept of a minimum viable product, which is something that like I did well with the books. That's very much what bigger, leaner, stronger was that first edition was very much an MVP. And I did well with Legion kind of, I probably could have launched, we launched with four products, probably could have done with less, but that's not too bad. And I didn't do well with my

workout app. So like quick story there, as I went into that thinking, how hard can this really be? Right. I mean, it's not, uh, it's not a fucking rocket. It's a workout app. And, you know, I had some ideas. And so the initial quote I got was like $50,000 for months of development. And I was like, sure, why not? Even if it goes nowhere, I don't know. I think there's an opportunity, right? That's how I was thinking about it. Essentially that turned into a year plus of development. I had to switch companies and I don't know, I probably put in $250,000 by now, which was just a misestimation of effort on my part. And I was, again, that was me being stupid and not, you know, I hadn't, unfortunately I read Lean Startup after I started that whole project or I would have gone about it very differently, you know, but so I recommend that people interested in business read that book. From a marketing perspective, I mean, you have to

read, I would say scientific advertising, the classics, right? Scientific advertising, read Eugene Schwartz's breakthrough advertising, read Cialdini's influence, read persuasion as well as new book. It's not as groundbreaking as influence was, but still a very good book. I liked a lot of the ideas in persuasion. Have you read oversubscribed? No. No. You got to read that one. You have to read that one. Yeah. That one, that one along with The War of Art, those two, I'd say probably had two of the biggest influences on me. I think, I think from where you're headed with some of the things that you're thinking about just with personal brand and just some of the things you want to do outside of the company, I think that would be a great book. Just because it does talk about a lot of things in regards to, I guess, filling up things that

you decide to do, right? So you say, hey, I'm going to put on a speaking event or I'm going to start doing more work in the community or whatever it is, right? You want to fill those things up in a way that it creates scarcity right up front um but also creates a loyal following in different avenues right so like you might have a loyal following that reads all your books right but nobody thinks of you as a speaker right yet yeah it's like how how that might you know your what's worked with the book may not work for the speaker but it might right um but it's this the book itself is phenomenal i mean it just talks about having uh a tribe that just jumps at basically anything you put out there. Right.

So it's like, hey, I'm doing a world tour. Right. I'm going to go speak in all different countries and you're going to sell it out like just right away. Right. Because you have this group of people. But it's a it's a phenomenal book. If you like the books, I mean, you talked about so far, you would love oversubscribed. It's a phenomenal, I just pulled it up on Amazon after working into my, I'm going to die. I'm going to die with a long to be read list, but what I'm looking for now, like it's kind of, it's also similar as an opportunity cost to reading books, right? Cause they take time, especially, I mean, I like to, I don't just read, I would say it's more along, maybe along the lines of study. Like for example, I look up in a dictionary, any words that I don't know. And I've done been doing this since I was 12 years old. So I guess that has contributed to my vocabulary, but it's also has contributed to my understanding of the subtleties of words.

Cause you know, the English language is massive. It's what a million plus words and words have explicit and implicit meanings and connotations. This is one of the things that was just in persuasion that I already knew myself, but it was just a good point of that. A lot of people, they underestimate the power of the right words. There are many different ways to say things. And especially in the English language, you can communicate a single concept in many different ways, but certain ways are far more persuasive and interesting than others. And a lot of that comes down to what words not just mean, you know, in the simple sense, but what they connote and what associations people have with words. I mean, I've, I've experienced that quite a bit

in naming products actually. So with Legion, we don't just choose product names, throw shit out there. We survey. And so, you know, what I do is I go through word lists and thesauruses and just kind of rack my brain and come up with a number of options for a product, for the name of product. And then we email to our customer list and ask them to rate the options on a scale of one to five with one being, I hate it. Five being, I love it. And we give them an option to also like any suggestions or whatever. So for example, for my joint product, which is called Fortify, I didn't really like that name. I thought it's, it's too,

it's too obvious, right? It's too top of mind. And also the, it kind of, for me, it brings up an image of a fortress, right? Or like stone. And I don't, I don't want my joints to be stone. So I kind of wanted, I kind of want it to be the opposite. Right. So for me, but just cause I didn't like the name doesn't really, I still put it on the survey and the name I, if I were just choosing myself, the name I really liked was halo. And cause it's a short word, it's simple, it's two syllables. And it has, for me, the connotation was protective, right? And also, it just sounds cool. And I just like the word, right?

As a writer, there are some words. I'm just like, that's a cool word. Like I keep a spreadsheet of, it's called great words, phrases, sayings, etc. So when I'm reading books, I'll highlight in a different color words that I like and I'll add them to my little spreadsheets like my own personal thesaurus or dictionary basically. So but we survey and Halo surveys terribly. I think it averaged like two out of five, right? Average. And I was like, what the fuck?

Why? Why? And so I'm reading. I'm reading the comments and it's because of the religious connotation. That's why people didn't like it i wouldn't have thought of that i of course i know but yeah that to me that wasn't i that's not one it's not a negative thing to me i'm not anti religion not that those people are even necessarily anti-religion i don't think i have as many for as many bad votes as that god i don't it's not like I have a bunch of raging atheists that are, you know, in my customers for some reason though, actually I think I have on the flip side, I think I have

a fair amount of religious people. Um, so maybe they thought it was a little bit blasphemous or something. I don't know, but that was why, right? So halo loses fortify wins. Fortify does very well. People like it. And so we go with fortify, even though I was like, well, I don't really like it, but Hey, who cares what I like? And then, so it comes around to the green supplement, you know, uh, surveying names and Genesis is in there. I think it's a great, right? It's a little bit long, three, three syllables. It's religious stuff.

I know, I know, but, but it sounds, it's, it's a good word. The connotation is perfect. Right. Uh, I think for the product and it just sounds it's one of those interesting sounding words yeah and it all in its flows well it's easy to say it surveys really well one of our best surveying that and probably pulse were the two best surveyed names is a great word yeah so there's another example where pulse i was like that's a great name surveyed well that's the name and uh we've we've also you have to work around trademarks and shit which is annoying because sometimes great stuff is taken obviously but genesis surveys amazingly well why with the

same crowd of people why that one didn't have the for some reason halo negative like surveyed very poorly and there were a lot of people that didn't like the religious connotation genesis they loved what does that mean i don't know but you you just don't know that. You just don't know that stuff unless you survey. So anyways, that's just kind of from this persuasion concept of the right words make such a big difference in terms of how communication is received. Anyways, I don't even know how we got on that tangent, but here we are. I mean, at the end of the day, that's the beauty of what we do, right? People talk about science, and there is exact science with certain things, but then there's not exact science with a lot of things. You'd think the same person who'd say, oh, I don't like Halo because of the religious connotations. Well, you'd think that same person would say the exact same thing about Genesis. Absolutely.

Right? But then they're like, no, that name's phenomenal. You're like, what the fuck is wrong with you? It makes no sense. But our brains, we're such a complicated race, man. At the end of the day, it's like, you can try to simplify and talk about exact sciences and process. But at the end of the day, sometimes things are just random, dude. I mean, really. And I think also you don't want to, you don't want to discount your own ability to, to generate, you could say, I mean, working truths, I guess you could say, um, where you just cause something,

just cause there's no science available on something, or you can't find any scientific evidence of something that you've observed. It doesn't mean you should discount what you've observed. Uh, I mean, the, the, the greatest advances in, in any area of science that we've had or started as someone's observation, or in some cases, you know, we don't even know where, how, how did did it's almost like a divinely inspired hypothesis it just came out of nowhere we were like how did this person even come up with this idea let alone have it pan out you know what i mean so you know that's one of those things absolutely where we shouldn't be so deferential to science where we we get to the

point where we think we can't really know anything we have to wait for the authority to give it down to us you know what i mean yeah no it makes perfect sense yeah i mean it's like take some initiative right like yeah yeah i mean willing to try things and see how things go and i mean again that's that's at the heart of course the scientific method right is yeah is reproducing findings and observing you know observing effects and trying to control for variables and blah blah blah, blah. It's incredible. Another book I will say, by the way, I recommend to anyone listening for marketing is the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.

Very good book. Simple, short, very, very actionable. And I'd say it lays out a lot of the big levers that you need to be able to pull if you're going to be successful. Perfect. Yeah. I'm going to put these in the show notes for those listening to... We have a lot of business people who listen to the show. A lot of people who are interested in starting business too. I mean, people who are just taking a dab at the online business. I know it's a sexy thing right now, but there's a lot of work and a

lot of study that goes into it. If you see successful businesses, it wasn't by chance. a lot of work and a lot of study that goes into it. If you see successful businesses, it wasn't by chance. It was a lot of research, a lot of work, and obviously you're proof of that. Dude, thanks so much for coming on the show, man. I know your time is super valuable. You have a baby on the way. You got business to handle and you're all over the place, man, but your time is valuable. Thanks for taking some with us. Absolutely. Thanks a lot for having me. with us. Absolutely. Thanks a lot for having me. a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and

you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously, though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my fitness book for women, thinner, leaner, stronger. Now this book has sold over 150,000 copies in the last several years, and it has helped thousands of women build their best bodies ever, which is

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